The Lanterns Episode 3 backlash has reached YouTube’s biggest fandom channels.
Nerdrotic‘s Gary Buechler took on “OutKast” in a livestream review, and he didn’t dance around the verdict: “I’m not going to bury the lead here. It went full Watchmen.”
“The show was progressing like the HBO Watchmen show,” Buechler said. “And it’s more despicable because at least Watchmen was subversive source material to begin with.”
Which lands even harder considering the episode’s writer literally studied the Watchmen backlash to prepare herself for this one.
‘They’re really trying to catch up with Lanterns‘
“Now HBO’s Watchmen is still the single most hateful thing ever written. HBO’s Watchmen is peak woke,” Buechler said. “It hits everything on the woke test, but damn, they’re really trying to catch up with Lanterns.
“This last episode was a racist episode and a time capsule from 2016 to 2018,” Buechler said, landing in the same place as the fan reactions that erupted Sunday night. “I don’t know where the morals of the writers come from on this.”
He also went after the structure, calling Lanterns “Mystery Box TV” — a shortcut that let Lost coast across 22-episode seasons but that stops an eight-episode season dead. By his count, the show is nearly halfway done and only just got around to “kind of” introducing its protagonist.
The True Detective sell doesn’t fly with him either: “It is not True Detective. It is HBO Watchmen. 100%.”
As for the DCU boss: “James Gunn had nothing to do with this other than signing off on it. Of course, James Gunn loved it. He loved The Flash.”
His verdict: at best, Lanterns is “a mid show that is creatively bankrupt.” At worst, it’s a time capsule “filled with race-baiting identity politics.”
‘Thanos has more moral integrity than Mama Stewart’
The harshest fire is saved for John’s parents, whose conditioning regimen — broken down in our review — Buechler flat-out calls “horrific abuse” and “a villain origin story.”
So much so that his pick for Parallax after this episode is John Stewart, not Hal Jordan, and he compares it to Marvel’s Ironheart: “Why does this keep happening to black characters? I mean, that’s pretty much what happened in Ironheart, too.”
John’s mother gets it worst: “She’s got to be top three loathsome character put into a superhero franchise of any kind. She is worse than any villain.”
Buechler continued, “I understand Sinestro more than I understand Mama Stewart. Thanos has more moral integrity than Mama Stewart.”
He also flagged what he sees as the episode’s most baffling writing choice: the parents’ ultimate fearlessness test is dropping young John off in a black neighborhood.
“And they call us racist,” Buechler laughed.
His bottom line on the character: “one of the worst things you can do with a John Stewart story is make it about race” — adding that if Hollywood actually wants normalization, it should stop making every story prominently featuring Black characters about race.
And when Buechler got to the writer’s now-infamous line that it’s OK “even if a million people hate” the show because Watchmen “still was what it was,” he zeroed in on one word: was.
“Does it have any cultural footprint? No,” he said. “Does it have any staying power other than the politically ideologically captured, stating they love it, without giving any reason why they love it?”
Buechler says a full HBO Watchmen review is now coming as his “moral imperative.”
