Lanterns Season 1 Recap: What You Need to Know

Spoiler Alert: This article contains major spoilers for all eight episodes of Lanterns season one. Reader discretion is advised.

Season one of HBO’s Lanterns has come to an end and there is a lot of ground to cover. Between the flashback sequences, a murder mystery and that whole Manhunter mess, it’s easy to lose track of what’s going on.

But this article is here to fix that. Let’s dive right into everything you need to know before you watch the season finale “Dirt and Stars.”

There’s Hail in Rushville

In 1996, Air Force vet and test pilot Hal Jordan sits down for a 60 Minutes interview to reveal his identity as Earth’s first Green Lantern after stopping a meteor from hitting Victoria Falls. A young John Stewart is watching the interview at home, clearly in awe over this famous hero.

Fast forward to “Pilot” and the year 2016, where an adult John should be living the dream since the Guardians of the Universe has chosen him to be Hal’s backup Lantern. Unfortunately, Hal is at best, reluctant to the idea of having to train his own replacement. And he makes this very clear every time he’s around John.

As a result, John almost never gets to wear Hal’s power ring which means he learns absolutely nothing. The closest John gets to a real lesson is when Hal leaves his ring on the dashboard of his car. Then he JUMPS OUT of said car as it’s heading towards a cliff, forcing John to figure out how to save himself with the ring.

The ring releases a ten-year-old “backup consciousness” of Hal that’s recorded in case of Hal’s death, who’s far nicer and friendlier to John. Before the “Halogram” fades, he tells John to tell the real Hal “there’s hail in Rushville, Nebraska.” Once they’re in the small rural town, they discover the fallout from a mass shooting at a high school football game.

The local sheriff, Kerry Kane, tries to block them from investigating but that doesn’t stop Hal. He lets himself get arrested after starting a bar fight and while he fails to get close to the suspect, he gets the attention of William Macon once his son Billy (and Kerry’s husband) bails Hal out of jail. To make things complicated, John’s one night stand Zoe is William’s wife and he knows about the affair. Awkward.

William arranges for Hal to chat with the suspect Waylon Sanders. When Waylon outs himself as an alien during Hal’s interrogation, he blows himself up, officially throwing the investigation into chaos.

The Manhunter

In episode two “Trust Fall,” Hal tries to teach John a flying lesson, but John can’t fly at all… though he does manifest a living green bird construct that stays alive even without wearing Hal’s ring. Hal sends John off to Coast City to fetch his Lantern from a pocket-dimension vault (and feed his massive, meat-eating alien plant, Earl). Meanwhile, Hal sneaks into the morgue to steal the alien corpses from the football game. He figures out that the town’s stadium detectors are actually high-tech alien sensors. When Hal confronts Will Macon about it, Macon has a sniper put a bullet right through Hal’s shoulder.

While in Coast City, John gets jumped by a group of aliens led by their leader and thrown into a wild highway van chase. He’s captured and hauled in front of their leader Antaan. Antaan tells John those dead bodies were his men and they were hunting a synthetic, genocidal killer called a Manhunter hiding out in Rushville. They give John 48 hours to find the Manhunter or they’ll blow the town to bits.

John heads back to Rushville to give Hal the Lantern to recharge his ring. After John tells Hal about Antaan, Hal flies off-world to visit his former mentor and friend Thaal Sinestro in a maximum-security prison. Instead of telling Hal everything about the Manhunter, Sinestro warns him that a surviving Manhunter is only his second biggest problem, then he asks Hal about John.

John Stewart’s Origins

In episode three “OutKast,” we finally learn how John got on the Guardians radar. Turns out that before Hal was chosen to be Green Lantern, John’s father John Sr. was considered to be a possible successor for a dying Abin Sur but his fear made him unworthy of the ring. Once the Guardians learned how the ring’s selection process left several humans (including John Sr.) severely traumatized, a Guardian named Lianna offered to give the Stewart’s son John a chance of joining the Green Lantern Corps when he’s older.

To ensure their son will become the next Green Lantern, John Sr. and his wife Bernadette put a five year old John through some absolutely terrifying training to make him fearless like shooting an apple off his head. To keep John in line, Bernadette lies to him about the Guardians watching him through birds. When this causes John to feel pressured and question his worth, she reveals that she lied about the birds. She manages to manipulate John into thinking he still wants to be a Lantern on his terms.

John Stewart speaking with his mother — John Stewart with his mother Bernadette.

After John is dishonorably discharged from the Marines after Hal unknowingly interferes with his assassination mission, he goes to art school. A professor hands him a watch sketch test, which turns into a portal leading straight to Lianna. She accepts him as the new Green Lantern but only under Hal’s watch as his apprentice. John takes it, even though Hal warns him he’ll only get the ring when he’s dead.

Hunting the Manhunter

Episode 4 “The Weenie” picks up Hal’s conversation with Sinestro. Sinestro gets Hal to admit what he’s known all along: John isn’t his backup, but in actuality his replacement. Sinestro tells him that Manhunters are near extinct and if Hal delivers one to the Guardians, they may decide to keep him around.

Back on Earth, John and Hal infiltrate a local compound run by Will Macon, believing his mysterious benefactor is the Manhunter. They’re half right, but eventually John figures out that Zoe is actually the last surviving Manhunter. Zoe has been using alien tech to heal the townspeople in exchange for protection.

After Zoe’s truck is destroyed by a laser from space. Hal and John trace it to a man called Hector Hammond. Hector threatens to kill John’s parents with a satellite and says William is the Manhunter. But he’s really an engineer named Hector Gutierrez, hired to be a decoy. Picking up on the fact that John barely reacted to Zoe’s “death” but was very emotional when his parents were threatened, Hal figures out that Zoe is the Manhunter and that John suspected it. When John admits he kept his suspicions to himself since he doesn’t have any proof, Hal does his jump-out-of-the-car thing again. This time the car crashes into a pole with John trapped inside while Hal looks for Zoe.

But Hal didn’t stop to consider the car would explode while John was still inside, which is exactly what happened. Zoe rescues him and heals his burned body with her tech. She confirms she is the Manhunter, created by the Guardians to act as peacekeepers only to be destroyed after they went rogue. Meanwhile, Rushville is plunged into chaos when Antaan attacks the Macon compound with his gang and kills Will, followed by Zoe firing orbital strikes to deplete Hal’s ring of its power.

After a brutal fight between Hal and John for the ring, John shoots Zoe and takes her crystallized heart. He also takes Hal’s ring, believing his mentor is no longer worthy to be a Lantern. He hands everything over to Lianna, and states he has no desire to be the Green Lantern anymore.

Who Killed Hal Jordan?

In 2026, John is working as an architect in Midway City when Bernadette calls saying Hal wanted to apologize. John meets Hal in Rushville, only to find that Hal does not want to apologize for what happened ten years ago. They exchange some heated words until John punches him in the face and walks away. Soon after, Kerry calls John to inform him Hal is dead.

The coroner says Hal was shot at close range with a handgun. When Guy Gardner shows up refusing to help because it’s “bad optics” for the Corps, John takes matters into his own hands. He is able to convince Guy to retrieve Hal’s ring and suit for the funeral. Later that night, John digs up Hal’s body, takes his ring and boots up the Halogram to help solve the murder.

The Halogram is convinced Kerry is the killer, but puts his suspicions aside when they find a secret portable wormhole inside Hal’s vault. The wormhole takes the duo to an abandoned alien planet, Antaan’s homeworld, which is still polluted with fear-inducing gas that drove Antaan’s species to kill each other. During their journey, Halogram admits he fears that Hal might have killed himself. He reveals Hal’s father and grandfather took their own lives due to a family history of depression known as “the Jordan boys’ legacy.”

Once they reach a refinery-like complex, a hooded figure ambushes them by holding the Halogram hostage. John is able to subdue the attacker who is none other than Sinestro, who has somehow managed to break out of prison sometime after 2016. How did he escape his imprisonment? Kerry’s son Noah Macon broke him out. Noah is a Manhunter-human hybrid thanks to Zoe implanting Manhunter technology inside Kerry years ago. He sent Sinestro to Antaan’s world so he could forge a Lantern powered by fear.

John and the Halogram leave Sinestro behind, but John is ambushed by Noah. The teenager takes the ring and forces John to drive him to the high school football game. Noah confesses that he didn’t burn Hal’s house down. But he claims he killed Hal because Hal figured out his nature and tried to convince Kerry to run away with him. Noah admits his Manhunter programming pushes him to use football to get into politics and ascend to the presidency to exterminate humanity. The Lantern and Hal’s ring would give him the power to destroy anyone who would oppose him, but deep down that’s not what he wants. John sympathizes with Noah as he was also programmed by his family to be something he’s not. Noah ultimately decides he’d rather pursue his love of football and places the Lantern and Hal’s ring on the dashboard of John’s truck.

During Noah’s football game, Kerry admits to John that she was the one to kill Hal. When Hal confronted her about Noah and tried to pressure her to leave Rushville, she panicked and shot him without even thinking. Realizing the full scope of this tragedy, John decides to keep Noah’s Manhunter origins and the truth of Hal’s murder a secret. Knowing that Kerry will be haunted by what she did to Hal, John tells her to live her life while hinting he’ll be keeping an eye on Noah.

After Noah’s team wins the game, John summons Guy Gardner with the Lantern signal. He states that Guy can stick to the skies by patrolling the rest of Sector 2814 but he will serve as Earth’s sole Green Lantern, or an “independent contractor.” Guy warns the Guardians will seek retribution for this, yet John is confident they will back down…especially since he knows all of their dirty little secrets regarding the Manhunters.

Before John charges the ring (which may or may not cause the Halogram to fade away for good) he tells John he will do a much better job than him and urges him to “don’t be afraid to be afraid”.