UPDATE 10/4: The finale has aired: check out my Lanterns finale review and the best and worst fan reactions.
UPDATE 10/1: Episode 7 drew 7 million U.S. viewers in three days, tying the series high, while the season average sits way below The Penguin, which never got a Season 2.
UPDATE 9/29: The writer reveals she made Hal Jordan a 60-year-old racist dude.
UPDATE 9/28: James Gunn says he’s seen Lanterns 500 times and even he’s excited for the finale.
The penultimate episode of Lanterns is out, and the message from the woke crowd behind this show is louder than ever: white dudes are losers.
It’s not just the entire town of Rushville. It’s not just Hal Jordan. It’s Hal’s dad and his grandfather too. It’s the whole Jordan legacy.
Here’s the shame of it: Episode 7 is probably the best episode of the series. Which only makes what they do with it worse.
Full spoilers follow, with the finale arriving October 4.
What Happens In Lanterns Episode 7
The episode opens in 1975 with a young Hal playing baseball, and his dad backing up his son against the coach without an ounce of fear.
Then comes a great father-and-son scene at the airfield, where Hal’s dad talks about fear and about keeping things too close, how it can eat away at you. Hal throws the baseball away.
In the present, John summons the Hal construct from the ring, and the two talk through Hal’s death and everything going on in Rushville.
Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre have real chemistry together, which again makes it a shame the creators had to shove their divisive woke messaging right back in your face.
The Hal construct then has a talk with the sheriff, and something is off. Something seems off with her kid too. The construct concludes she killed Hal.
Long story short, the construct uses Hal’s voice to open the cube in the locker, which contains a portal to another world.
Cool. Some actual cosmic stuff.
It turns out this is the home planet of Paul Ben-Victor’s Antaan (Atrocitus), where everybody is dead because of the Manhunter. It’s the planet Antaan showed John in the vision.
Construct Hal and John set off to investigate a boat and an island in the distance. John reveals the Manhunter wiped everyone out by releasing fear gas, which caused the population to attack each other and jump from their sky city to their deaths.
The fear gas gets to John. He flashes back to his dad and to himself as a kid, and the construct pulls him back before John turns his gun on himself.
Now here’s the kicker.
The construct comes clean about what really happened to Hal’s own father: he took his own life. The vaults and messages the Jordan men left behind point to Hal’s grandfather having done the same before him.
So the construct now believes Hal killed himself just like his father and grandfather, that he may have left a note, and that the sheriff likely got rid of the gun so Hal wouldn’t look as bad.
Wow.
The episode ends with a surprise: Sinestro is revealed to be on the planet. Remember, he escaped his imprisonment on Oa.
Hal Jordan Gets The Luke Skywalker Treatment
So the message from these clowns is that Hal Jordan gave up and killed himself, just like his dad before him, and his grandfather before that. That’s the Jordan family legacy.
They go further.
The construct says Hal was never really a hero, that he only had no fear because his just like his father and grandfather, his whole family, were messed up.
That is exactly what the series already did to John Stewart. John’s ma and pa were messed up, so John has no fear, so he was never a true hero either.
These are the same themes this crowd has been pushing for ten years, and all of it failed. Lanterns is no exception, with HBO’s own boss on record that no Season 2 is in development.
It’s Luke Skywalker throwing away the lightsaber. It’s The Last Jedi all over again: the hero gave up, and the legend never meant anything.
Jeremy Slater, the writer James Gunn brought into his DCU writers room, just did the same thing to Karl Urban’s Johnny Cage in Mortal Kombat II, another massive flop, where Cage is a washed-up loser white dude.
The exact same thing was just done with Optimus Prime.
It’s also the same DCU writers room that included Tom King.
Tom King Has Been Writing This Story For Years
This is more Tom King garbage, and King has a long history with exactly this material in his comics.
His Mister Miracle series opens with Scott Free on the bathroom floor after a suicide attempt. That is the very first page.
Heroes in Crisis is built around Sanctuary, a secret therapy center for traumatized superheroes, where the patients wind up dead in a mass killing.
Superhero trauma is King’s specialty, and now it’s the Jordan family inheritance.
King’s fingerprints are already on the DCU’s biggest bomb. Supergirl, based on his Woman of Tomorrow comic, exited theaters as the lowest-grossing DC movie ever.
And as our insiders reported, King was just booted off Wonder Woman and is out at DC. It wasn’t his decision. Adios.
It’s also more from Damon Lindelof, who co-created Lanterns with King and has moved on from DC as well. You won’t be missed, dude.
Much like James Gunn.
If you or someone you know is struggling, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 in the U.S. by call or text at 988.
Episode rating: 3/10
