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A review of this week's Lanterns, "The Jordan Boys Legacy" — with spoilers — coming up just as soon as I have a planet in a box in a storage unit in the middle of Nebraska...
Alan Sepinwall
For a few minutes, "The Jordan Boys Legacy" suggests that we're being set up for another episode-length flashback like "OutKast" — this time in the season's penultimate hour, which is where this particular trope has become extra-prevalent lately. But while we get a few scenes of young Hal and his pilot hero father Martin, the action soon jumps back to exactly where we left off in 2026, as the Halogram realizes what's happened to the real him. We return to young Hal at the episode's end, but for the most part, "The Jordan Boys Legacy" is content to use the characters' past to inform the story's present, rather than making another extended visit to the past.
It helps that Hal's origin is much more straightforward than John's, in pretty much every version we've gotten in comics(*), TV, or film. Hal's a hotshot test pilot, Abin Sur died, the ring chose Hal, bada bing, bada bang, bada boom. Easy-peasie. Nothing requires explanation to the degree that the creative team felt John's origin did. Instead, "The Jordan Boys Legacy" uses its brief glimpse of the past to provide some shading to the Hal we watched for the series' first five episodes, to explain exactly how he went from clean-cut hero to the reckless narcissist that John met, and also why.