Three days after the Episode 3 writer begged fans to stick it out with John Stewart, Lanterns handed the backlash a fresh list.
Episode 4, “The Weenie,” streamed Sunday night on HBO and HBO Max.
By Monday morning, the reaction posts were stacking up six-figure view counts.
What’s actually in the episode
Spoilers follow.
The Lanterns get captured inside William Macon’s compound when black smoke blinds them both and neutralizes the ring. Humans with smoke guns are taking down the most powerful weapon in the universe.
Then Macon, played by Garret Dillahunt, learns John is an artist. So he strips naked and has John sketch him in charcoal. All in front of his “wife” and daughter-in-law.
Hector Hammond is in it too. One of Green Lantern’s most famous comic villains, the giant-headed telepath, appears here as a meatpacking boss in Rushville whom Hal shakes down for information.
The episode also drops the season’s big twist that nobody saw coming (right?): Zoe, John’s love interest all season, is actually the Manhunter.
And there’s the slaughterhouse. A cow walks through a portal and gets lasered apart into precise cuts of meat, blood splattering everything including the green bubble Hal throws up around them.
John’s line: “That’s why I’m vegan.”
On a show where Oa is an abandoned mall, the cow is one of the biggest and most expensive visual effects sequences of the season so far. That’s where the money went.
‘The series might even be kinda cool on its own’
Peter Jordan, the account with over a million followers whose posts helped define the Episode 3 cycle, ran down Episode 4’s additions in a post translated from Portuguese: John sketching a naked man, John having slept with the Manhunter, Hammond reduced to a nobody, the ring beaten by smoke guns.
“The series might even be kinda cool on its own,” he wrote, but what the show keeps doing to Green Lantern lore terrifies him.
The post pulled 94,000 views and 1,600 likes in its first three hours.
Nerdrotic, who went “full Watchmen” on Episode 3, summed the sketch scene up as a Black man drawing a naked white man, “or the writer’s barely disguised fetish.”
That’s the complaint running through the reactions. Not that the show is unwatchable. That it keeps spending its runtime and its budget on scenes like these, and none of them move the story.
Halfway home, and the scoreboard is moving
“The Weenie” marks the halfway point. Four episodes remain through the October 4 finale.
The timing puts the writer’s plea in a tough spot. The ask to keep watching came Friday. The first ratings crack showed Thursday, with Lanterns falling from No. 2 to No. 4 on Samba TV’s chart of the most-watched streaming shows in America while Reacher held at No. 1.
Samba’s next chart covers August 31 through September 6, the first full week after the Episode 3 blowup, ending on Episode 4’s premiere night. It lands Thursday.
Episode 5 streams Sunday, September 13 at 9 p.m. on HBO and HBO Max.
