UPDATE 9/4: She’s talking again â Baden Kelly tells THR the fight over Episode 3 went to plan and begs fans to keep watching.
The Lanterns Episode 3 writer is back in the headlines, and this time it’s about the ring itself.
Vanessa Baden Kelly, who wrote “OutKast” and serves as a co-executive producer on the series, sat down with Collider for an interview published the day after the episode aired.
In it, she revealed what she repeatedly argued during the show’s development.
“If the ring wasn’t sexist, Bernadette would have been chosen,” Baden Kelly told Collider, calling John Stewart’s mother the most fearless character of everybody.
That wasn’t a one-off line after the episode aired. She described it as something she would always say in the writers’ room, meaning the argument came up over and over while the show was being built.
The quote started circulating this week, and the reaction has been about what you’d expect.
The quote kills the show’s best defense
The main defense of “OutKast” has been that Bernadette is written as a damaged, obsessive mother, and that her claims about Hal Jordan and the ring are her broken perspective, not the show’s position.
In the episode, Bernadette tells Laura Linney’s Guardian that Hal gets to live without fear because he’s a white man, and asks how fair it is to ask a Black man in America if he’s afraid.
She also spends John’s entire childhood conditioning him to feel no fear, right down to lying that birds are watching him for the Guardians.
The writer’s own words cut that defense off at the knees. She doesn’t view Bernadette as wrong. She views her as the most fearless person in the story, passed over by a biased ring.
Fans noticed immediately. “The person who created her is taking her seriously,” posted The Popcast Brothers, adding that the writer thinks John’s mom is right, not crazy.
The cast is defending the character too, with Jasmine Cephas Jones, who plays Bernadette, calling her an “unsung hero.”
What she says the ring is actually measuring
Baden Kelly also explained what she thinks the ring tests for, and it isn’t the absence of fear.
She told Collider that overcoming fear looks different depending on what a person lives with. Someone who walks through a dangerous neighborhood every day while afraid is overcoming something real. Someone who has never set foot in that neighborhood has nothing to overcome.
That’s the argument the episode runs on. John Stewart Sr. answered the ring honestly, said he was afraid, and the ring moved on to Hal Jordan.
The ring picks women constantly in the comics
Here’s the problem with calling the ring sexist: the Green Lantern Corps is packed with female Lanterns.
Katma Tui. Arisia. Boodikka. Soranik Natu. Jade. Jessica Cruz.
The Corps spans thousands of members across every species and sex in the universe. And in the comics, Katma Tui isn’t just a Green Lantern, she’s John Stewart’s wife.
The ring tests one thing: the ability to overcome great fear. Baden Kelly described it that way herself in the same interview, saying candidates don’t have to be without fear, they have to be able to overcome it.
Some writers came in knowing nothing about Green Lantern
The interview contains one more admission.
Baden Kelly said many in the room were casual Green Lantern fans, and some didn’t know anything about Green Lantern at all, with Tom King bringing in stacks of Green Lantern books and giving live reactions on what would or wouldn’t break the mythology.
That’s the room that rewrote John Stewart’s origin.
She’s also firing back at the woke criticism
Baden Kelly has answered the fans calling the episode woke, and she points at the comics to do it.
John Stewart, she notes, has been written confronting racism, criticizing war, and challenging authority for decades. None of that started with the show.
On how the room approached it, she said they dug into what it means for a Black man to receive the ring when other characters held it first, and “how much more a Black superhero has to do to be accepted.”
She also compared John’s upbringing to Tiger Woods and the Williams sisters, athletes trained from childhood to compete at an elite level.
The story has spread past the comic sites
The ring quote is no longer just a fandom story.
Breitbart’s John Nolte wrote it up Wednesday, calling Baden Kelly “someone who hates a franchise aimed at males” and put in charge of it anyway.
Nolte went after the kitchen scene too, arguing the problem isn’t that it’s political. It’s that he doesn’t believe anybody talks that way.
The writer’s week
This is the third time Baden Kelly has made news in a week.
The night “OutKast” aired, she revealed she’d spent the morning reading old Watchmen hate threads and said “even if a million people hate” the show, that’s OK.
Then the episode aired, our review scored it 0/10, and the fan backlash erupted while James Gunn called it “one of the best.”
That’s the same week DC’s own podcast host told fans Hal Jordan is “canonically” racist.
Now she’s telling fans the ring itself is the problem.
And the audience is starting to answer. Samba TV’s household chart just dropped Lanterns from No. 2 to No. 4 in America while Reacher held at No. 1.
Lanterns continues Sundays at 9pm on HBO and HBO Max.
