The Lanterns Episode 3 writer has a message for the fans who hated her episode: don’t go anywhere.
“I just hope that people stick it out with John,” Vanessa Baden Kelly says in a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter published September 4, saying she’s “sad that there are comic book fans that feel like we ruined it” and cautioning anyone against judging where John Stewart’s story ends based on Episode 3.
Then comes the part that will land differently. The fight over “OutKast,” she says, went to plan — the argument over whether the Stewarts abused their son is “the exact debates we were hoping to have.”
As for everyone else, she describes an angry contingent that’s still out there, loud and saying mean things, and says that comes with the territory.
‘Heart palpitations’ over the woke commentary
The calm is new.
“I was having heart palpitations,” Baden Kelly says of the week before the episode aired.
Two days out, she started seeing the woke commentary and it turned her stomach. The night of, she tried to stay off social media, kept peeking anyway, and describes the result as an anxiety attack.
Her coach through it: Damon Lindelof, who lived the same cycle on Watchmen — down to sending her a TikTok account that helps him breathe.
It’s the second time in a week she’s pointed at Watchmen. The night “OutKast” aired, she revealed she’d spent that morning reading the old Watchmen hate threads and said a million haters would be OK.
Her stake in John Stewart
Baden Kelly’s ask is personal.
She says Aaron Pierre’s John Stewart is going to be “my kid’s and his friends’ Green Lantern” — the Black superhero of the next decade.
She also says John still has to make his own decisions about the life he’s been given, which is why she wants fans to make it through to the end of the season.
One tease for the back half: another OutKast track, “SpottieOttieDopaliscious,” shows up later this season.
The season runs Sundays through the October 4 finale, so five episodes remain.
The room compared the Stewarts to the Jacksons
The interview also lays out the research behind the parenting story.
The writers’ room spent months on real cases: Tiger Woods’ father, Richard Williams, Sonya Curry — whose quit-or-recommit talk with Steph became a source for Bernadette’s voice — and the Jacksons, whom Baden Kelly puts on the more abusive side of the ledger.
Baden Kelly is a former child actor herself, from Gullah Gullah Island and Kenan & Kel, and now a baseball mom.
Her verdict: “baseball and sports parents are worse than stage parents.”
She also stands by Bernadette being the harder parent. When dads push a kid that way it reads as tough love, she says, but when a mom does it, “people are like, ‘She’s terrible!'” — and her answer is to ask whether Bernadette actually is.
That’s the same corner she took when she told Collider the Green Lantern ring itself is sexist and Bernadette should have been chosen.
She does grant one thing: shooting apples off a child’s head pushes it in a different direction.
The week this lands in
This is the writer’s fourth headline in seven days: the Watchmen threads, the episode our review scored 0/10, the backlash James Gunn answered by calling it “one of the best”, and the ring quote that went viral this week.
And the plea to stick around arrives just as the audience starts to move — Lanterns fell 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.
Episode 4 streams Sunday, September 6 at 9 p.m. on HBO and HBO Max.
