‘Lanterns’ Season 1, Episode 2: ‘Trust Fall’
How much do you have to know about the Green Lantern comics to enjoy “Lanterns” properly? The answer is not “nothing.” In the series premiere last week and in this week’s episode, characters drop references to the Guardians of the Universe, the Manhunters, the Green Lantern power ring battery and the supervillain Sinestro. None of these are given a formal introduction or explanation. The attitude of the show’s writers is mostly: If you know, you know.
Then again, at one point this week Hal makes a joke about how Nebraskans worship Tom Osborne, and he does not bother to explain who Osborne is. (He is a former Cornhuskers football coach and Republican congressman.) The Green Lantern ephemera, the Nebraska lore … a lot of this is just backdrop for “Lanterns.” You can just vibe with it without knowing what it all means. You definitely should not have to do homework.
This week’s episode is pretty evenly split between the two main elements of this show: the superhero strangeness and the gritty Midwestern murder mystery. It is also split between Hal Jordan and John Stewart, who head off on separate missions. Hal sends John to Coast City to retrieve the literal green lantern: the battery that gives the power ring a 24-hour charge. Hal stays behind in Rushville to have fun playing the part of the wisecracking hard-boiled detective, without his clean former Marine trainee shadowing him and shaking his head disapprovingly.
John’s expedition gives us a better look at what the life of a world famous superhero is like. Hal lives in a huge mansion, which was a gift from a rich man whose child Hal saved. But he has never really bothered to decorate, aside from having an unmade bed in the bedroom and a meat-eating alien plant named Earl in the greenhouse.
John has to push past a closet full of the Green Lantern costumes Hal rarely wears to get to a safe that leads to an alternate dimension, where Hal stores his lantern. The device looks incredibly cool, at once futuristic and old-fashioned — like a 1950s conception of alien technology.
But before John can hop on a plane back to Nebraska, he gets tased and abducted, leading to the first big “Lanterns” action sequence of the series — and it is a doozy. When he wakes up in the back of a van, John forces his way out the back of the vehicle and starts running through speeding traffic. He has no power ring to protect him, just the physical strength and skills that he has honed since his very unusual boyhood. (Letting your father shoot apples off your head without flinching does tend to make you unflappable.)
John is eventually recaptured because for the purposes of the plot, he needs to hear what his kidnappers have to say. It turns out that they are part of the same group of aliens who were killed at the Rushville football field — the same race as “Waylon Sanders,” who exploded in last week’s episode.
These aliens were in Rushville looking for a Manhunter: one of the powerful, synthetic, shape-shifting beings that used to patrol the universe before the Green Lanterns. The Manhunters went rogue and carved a path of interplanetary destruction before they were stopped; but some of them survived, and John’s abductors believe that one is alive in Rushville. They have given him 48 hours to find it, before they blow up the whole town.
While all this is going on, Hal is learning more about some of Rushville’s peculiarities. After inspecting what look like metal detectors at the football field — where a shooting just happened, despite those detectors — a suspicious Hal steals one of the alien corpses from the morgue and takes it to the field, where it makes that detector beep. It’s an alien detector! Why does Rushville have super-advanced alien detectors at the high school?
Remembering Will Macon’s obsession with aliens, Hal heads back to the Macon compound, where Will admits that his mysterious benefactor is also responsible for the advanced alien-detecting tech — and for the state-of-the-art hospital Hal will later visit after one of Will’s snipers shoots him.
As was the case last week, much of the humor and energy in this second “Lanterns” episode comes from watching Hal stumble into problems of his own making. Kyle Chandler is once again equal parts likable and maddening, as his cocky Green Lantern tries to order around people in Rushville who are not wowed by him. (Perhaps because they’re already used to Manhunters?)
In one of the funniest scenes — among many — Hal shows up at a Rushville town meeting to share what he has learned about the aliens. But he gets impatient when Sheriff Kerry Kane makes him wait while the citizens debate whether or not to go ahead with the next football game. Hal is not used to being ignored. He is used to people thinking he’s amazing and following his whims. As Will’s wife, Zoe, later says, “White men have the privilege of being eccentric.”
Even though there are not a lot of scenes between Hal and John this week, the dynamic between these two continues to illustrate how burned out Hal has become. John is dismayed to hear that his mentor has not checked in with the Guardians about what is happening in Rushville. When John brings Hal his battery, Hal rushes through a perfunctory reading of the oath he is required to speak to recharge the ring. (Hal also explains that if you bang the ring flush against something solid, you can usually squeeze a few more minutes out of it … which is something he should probably not be doing with a magic ring?)
And after John mentions the possibility of Manhunters in Rushville, Hal gets suited up and flies through space to another planet to consult with Sinestro (Ulrich Thomsen), a villain to whom he is definitely not supposed to be talking.
None of this shows a lot of respect for the position of Green Lantern or for John, who has not yet been given much of a chance to show what he can do. Hal does try to give John a flying lesson with the ring, but his instruction is so useless — “It’s supposed to be instinctual,” he says — that he almost seems to be trying to humiliate his trainee.
John does better when he conjures up a little bird with the ring, which Hal tells him to try to keep alive for a full day, during John’s travels back and forth to Coast City. The bird is a visual motif through the episode, fluttering and pecking in the background through John’s mission. Even without a ring, John maintains the concentration required to animate the bird.
That is a sign of how ready he is to be a Green Lantern. Not only does he have incredible willpower; he is also comfortable with having something odd hovering around him, unexplained.
Brightest day, blackest night …
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The sheriff mentions that she moved to Rushville from Gotham City, which even non-comics readers probably know is the home of Batman. But did you know that a 1956 issue of Detective Comics introduced the Gotham-based character Batwoman, whose alter-ego is Kathy Kane? Or that in 2006, DC Comics introduced a reimagined version of the character named Kate Kane? It can’t be a coincidence that the Gothamite Kerry Kane shares their last name, can it? (Also notable: Batman was cocreated by the writer and artist Bob Kane.)
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An even deeper cut reference for comics fans: The voice-code to Hal’s safe is “Mogo Doesn’t Socialize,” which is the title of a beloved 1985 Green Lantern story from the “Watchmen” team of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. It’s the tale of a sentient planet that is also a member of the Green Lantern Corps. “Lanterns” may be keeping its superhero trappings to a minimum, but the high-fantasy weirdness is still there if you know where to look.
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Sinestro, ending the episode on an ominous note: “If a Manhunter existed, it’d be the second greatest threat you’re facing. So why don’t you tell me about John Stewart?”
