UPDATE 9/7: Episode 4 shows more nudity and is getting backlash.
UPDATE 8/27: Episode 2 beat the premiere’s chart peak and passed House of the Dragon on HBO Max.
Spoilers follow for Lanterns Episode 2.
HBO wanted “True Detective with power rings.”
Episode 2 delivers the True Detective part: full-frontal male nudity in a DC Green Lantern show.
Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler), ring out of juice and John Stewart shipped off to fetch his battery, breaks into the Rushville morgue and steals the bodies of the four human-looking aliens gunned down at the football game.
He pulls one out of the drawer, and the camera gives you the whole dead alien. All of him.
Not a glimpse. Full frontal.
There’s no story reason for it. Hal could have wheeled the bodies out in bags.
But the show wanted the shot, because that’s what HBO thinks prestige looks like.
The Metal Detectors Are Alien Detectors
The corpse-hauling at least has a point.
Hal drags the bodies back to the stadium and walks them through the metal detectors at the gates. The alarms go off.
They were never metal detectors. They’re alien detectors, which is how Macon’s men picked four aliens out of a high school football crowd and shot them.
Hal, being Hal, drives out to the Macon ranch to confront him about it and takes a bullet in the shoulder for his trouble.
He wakes up in the hospital with Sheriff Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald) at his bedside, and she’s already ahead of him.
She knows exactly what the detectors are.
The veteran Green Lantern got shot proving something the small-town sheriff had figured out on her own.
That’s HBO’s note in action: the space cop does the grunt work with naked corpses, and the local female cop solves it.
From The Morgue To Sinestro
The detector reveal is what sends the episode off-planet.
John returns with the power battery and Hal’s old suit. Hal charges up, puts on the uniform he swore he’d never wear again, and flies to Oa to see Sinestro (Ulrich Thomsen), locked in a cell, about the Manhunters.
Sinestro tells him the Manhunter is the second most important thing he should be worried about, then asks about John Stewart. The credits hit.
So the road to the franchise’s biggest villain runs through a stolen naked corpse, a stadium alarm, and a hospital bed.
Same stadium, by the way, where John finds Hal frozen on the bleachers with a bullet in his head in 2026. The show keeps coming back to that field.
The episode is credited to showrunner Chris Mundy and Vanessa Baden Kelly, directed by James Hawes.
Add it to the pile we’ve been tracking: F-bombs standing in for emotion, an affair standing in for character development, “white men” as the episode’s favorite phrase, and now nudity standing in for spectacle.
Green Lantern has been a Justice League cartoon, a toy line, and a PG-13 movie.
On HBO under James Gunn, he’s the guy dragging a naked dead alien through a metal detector.
