‘Lanterns’ Episode 7 explained: The sci-fi superhero show finally leaves Earth as Hal murder suspects surface
Warning: This story contains major spoilers for Episode 7 of Lanterns.
Over the course of this Lanterns season, we’ve already seen several flashbacks to the childhood of John Stewart (played by Cairo Cash Lee as a child). Now, the penultimate episode kicks off with our first flashback to young Hal Jordan (Henry Samiri) in 1975, who is in trouble with his baseball coach (Billy Griffin). The first line of the episode is the coach telling him, "I thought you were a team player."
Apparently not, because Hal’s actions have resulted in his team forfeiting their most recent game. Why? According to the coach, it’s because Hal wouldn’t give up the ball, even when instructed to let one of his teammates throw the final few pitches. But according to Hal, it’s because he was two outs away from pitching a no-hitter and didn’t trust his teammate "Danny Bochner" to finish the job. But it seems like Danny isn’t the only one Hal talked down to, because the entire rest of the team ended up beating on him.
Hal’s dad, Martin Jordan, arrives, but doesn’t exactly help the situation. He actually takes his son’s side, and ends up fighting the coach in front of the boy! Gee, wonder where Hal got it from. We see father and son bonding a little after that, both caring for the bruises on their respective faces, before we transition into the funeral for Hal’s dad, where little Hal’s suit makes him look like John F. Kennedy Jr.
Back to the present, the grown John (Aaron Pierre) explains to the lifelike hologram of Hal (Kyle Chandler) why he went to the trouble of digging up Hal’s corpse and persuading Guy Gardner to bring back Hal’s ring. He needs to open Hal’s lockbox, and the only way to do that is with Hal’s voice.
"Wouldn't it be interesting if the first construct John wants to conjure is Hal himself?" Co-showrunner Damon Lindelof muses in the episode's behind-the-scenes featurette. This is why what he calls the "Hal-ogram" was seeded in the very first episode, so that this post-death use of the character wouldn't be a total surprise to viewers.
Well, they need some help from Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald) too, so John introduces her to the hologram. Macdonald’s performance here is very moving. We know now that Kerry and Hal had an intense affair, but it all happened offscreen. So in the same way that Lanterns has previously conveyed sci-fi concepts entirely through writing and performance, so Macdonald now has to play all the emotions of that affair just on her face and in her voice, in just this one scene.
But she's not meeting the Hal she knew, not exactly. Since he hadn't upgraded his backup in awhile, the "Hal-ogram" is actually a younger, less cynical version of the man she loved.
"Kyle plays him as pissed off with his future self," Macdonald says in the featurette.
Hal-ogram emerges from the meeting convinced that Kerry is his killer, but John doesn't seem swayed. The duo then head to the storage facility where they succeed in opening the late Lantern’s lockbox, which mainly includes a dimensional portal! Going through that portal, John and Hal find themselves on a dead, yellow world.
Hal says all the alien planets he’s seen blend together, but John recognizes it — which seems weird, since he never actually served as a Green Lantern or used the ring to visit other planets. Eventually, he figures it out: It’s the world Antaan showed him, where Zoe the Manhunter previously committed genocide before hiding out on Earth.
Back at the beginning of the season, all the stylistic homage to True Detective suggested the possibility that this Green Lantern show might never leave Earth. Lindelof says they seriously considered doing that, but "the more we talked about that, the more it felt like we were imposing a rule on ourselves for no good reason."
Once the writers decided to go to the world Zoe had ruined, it was up to the production team to figure out how to depict it.
"Because it's supposed to be poisoned, we were thinking of a place like the Salton Sea: The landscape's barren, everything's calcified," production designer John Paino says. The show actually did film these scenes in the desert city of Barstow, Calif.
John and the Hal hologram look around, but still don’t find anyone else. They end up on a boat in a storm. In order to film this part of the interplanetary adventure, the show's team flooded a parking lot with enough water to float the canoe.
The gift of working with a crew like this is that they really accurately create environments that are conducive to the individuals portraying the characters," Pierre says.
The boat ride becomes very emotional and vulnerable when Hal reveals that his father died by suicide — he may have been killed in a plane crash as a test pilot, but Hal knows it was intentional, because his dad had told him where to find his own lockbox, which contained a note. Apparently Martin suffered from depression, just as his father did, and just as Hal himself did — the so-called "Jordan boys' legacy." "I’m not fearless because I’m brave, I’m fearless because I’m broken," Hal admits.
But there are problems outside of our heads, too. Shortly after this, Hal is grabbed by a mysterious cloaked figure who demands their boat. John gives the figure a good punch, revealing it as none other than Sinestro (Ulrich Thomsen). Is this Hal’s killer?
"Great arm, kid," Hal tells him, fully bringing the episode full circle.
