Lanterns: Trust Fall

“May I ask you a question about the bird, John Stewart?”

You have no idea how stressed I was about this bird. I love the bird. Hearing it chirp was my favorite thing.

After the cliffhanger at the end of the last episode, I expected us to spend at least some time in 2026, but no. We were solely in 2016 this time around. And our leads were separated for most of it too.

That we got absolutely zero about Hal’s (potential; I’m still not convinced it was really him) death is one of the more surprising things. I can understand wanting to avoid spoiling too much. Obviously, anyone who dies in 2016 isn’t going to show up later, for example, but it still feels like a massive thing to just completely ignore for a whole week. It makes me wonder what the point of including it even was beyond creating something that would get buzz online.

Maybe we’ll split things more evenly in future episodes. We will see. For now, we have John and Hal having two very different days.

But first: the bird and the scene surrounding its creation.

I genuinely don’t know if Hal expected John to be able to fly or not. It completely makes sense that he views flight as instinctual. He was a fighter pilot. Even if he was in a plane, he still intimately knows the sensation of flight in a way that very few people do. That is a huge advantage when your powers are based on your imagination and willpower.

That he bought a ticket to take John to Coast City means nothing. The ring did not have enough power to make the trip, and even if it did, there’s no way he would have let John take it for an extended period of time and leave himself with nothing. And even if we set the logistics of it aside, the errand was very clearly meant to get John out of the way. They both knew it. They both acknowledged that. John followed orders anyway.

Hal absolutely did not expect the bird. His reaction to its continued existence after John took the ring off wasn’t subtle, but it made it very clear to the audience that this was something unique without fully needing to spell it out.

He also mentioned that sustaining it required concentration, though, and John was knocked unconscious a couple of times. You’d think that that would destroy the bird if that was the case, but it persisted.

Also, I love that it actively attacked people whenever John was threatened or in pain.

Let’s talk about those people. Or, well, those aliens. Antaan and the rest of his goons are the same species as Waylon and our football victims. He never said what his species was, just that they were completely massacred by the Manhunters, a kind of synthetic being that can seamlessly blend into a population and destroy it from within.

Supposedly.

I don’t trust Antaan. John made a jab about how he must not be used to speaking “human” yet, but the specific words that he does use to explain his intent towards John are interesting because they mean very different things.

Stamp and imprint are similar enough, but they’re also aggressive. They are not words to use if you actually want to recruit someone or if you plan on telling them something that reasonable people will quickly get on board with. You use those if you want to force a specific viewpoint.

Enlighten is much, much softer. More civilized, even. It’s revealing a self-evident truth, correcting a falsehood.

We don’t get to see what John sees. We don’t even get to hear the distant screams that usually accompany something like this. We just see John convulse as something is forcibly uploaded into his brain.

I don’t trust it.

I do like the addition of a ticking clock, though, where now John and Hal only have 48 hours to find the Manhunter hidden somewhere in the town of Rushville before everything explodes. Macon’s benefactor is the obvious suspect, as is Zoe.

I still can’t get a read on her, even if I have to admire her for living a life that she deeply enjoys. Money, power, a husband that she loves and that loves her, and the ability to sleep with the hot superhero-in-training who just rolled into town? Where’s the drawback?

It feels way too obvious for her to be the Manhunter, and yet she’s such an outlier that I can’t believe that there’s nothing else going on either.

I did really enjoy her conversation with John, though. I didn’t really see any chemistry last time around, but I saw it here.

I also saw it with Hal and Kerry, which caught me off guard. I didn’t see that at all in the first episode, but it felt like Hal was flirting with her every other sentence. Kerry mostly seemed exasperated by it, but there were moments of softness there too where Hal slipped past her guard just a little.

Kerry is in a tough spot. She’s married to the Macons, yet clearly not fully a part of them. In fact, she’s very intent on carving out her own independence and power away from her father-in-law. She’s obviously keeping a lot of things close to her chest, but I don’t think she’s doing so out of a sense of possessiveness or maliciousness. I think she’s genuinely just trying to do the best that she can to balance everything and keep people calm and safe. Allowing Hal to do whatever he wants would jeopardize that.

If there’s anyone in town who already knows who the Manhunter is, I bet it’s her.

Outside of flirting with Kerry, we also got to see how Hal tackles things when he doesn’t have a powered up ring as a support. Turns out: it doesn’t change things at all. He still goes forward, full steam ahead, even if it means stealing bodies and challenging someone who has a sniper aimed at your shoulder. He isn’t subtle, that’s for sure.

He also discovered that Rushville is a town that is incredibly vigilant for any kind of alien invasion. Macon off on his ranch was one thing. Alien-specific metal detectors at high school football games are another one entirely. This isn’t isolated. It’s cultural.

And it also seems to be tied to the incredibly new and empty hospital that Hal was treated at. (Is anyone else expecting them to have taken some blood samples or something like that while he was unconscious?) Forget the rooms full of barely open equipment. The sign out pad was completely fresh. Either they gave him a brand new one, or he’s the first patient. Kerry said that people in Rushville didn’t really get hurt or sick enough to go to the hospital, but there’s a difference between that and literally no one going to the hospital. Seriously, no one has ever gotten into a car accident? Had to get their appendix taken out? Given birth? Nothing?

Is everyone secretly an alien or something? Is that going to be the big twist? At this point, it wouldn’t necessarily surprise me.

What did surprise me was that we left Earth! I thought that we would be earthbound the whole time and that we would only see the suit in either flashbacks or at the very end when John fully steps into his role as the Green Lantern, but no. Despite his grumblings, Hal put on the suit when he went to visit Sinestro in prison.

Now, I know who Sinestro is. I know the role that he plays in the comics and some of the things that he’s done. But he really wasn’t intimidating here. He just looked… old. Tired. It might have just been the lighting, but he also looked incredibly washed out. His skin tone wasn’t nearly as vivid as I had expected. He looked like a grandpa with a bad sunburn.

I was a little disappointed, although I do still reserve the right to change my mind once we get to actually see him for more than two minutes. Sinestro is clearly a trigger point for Hal. He’s saying his name in his sleep, after all. There’s no way he just provides helpful information without there being some kind of catch.

As the episode’s name implies, this episode was all about trust. John doesn’t know if he can trust Hal, but he still follows the chain of command and tells him everything that happened to him on his errand. Hal doesn’t trust John, and he tells him nothing. He doesn’t even tell him that his pet is a carnivorous, alien plant.

Sinestro mentioned that the Manhunters were the second greatest threat that Hal was currently facing. Not the second greatest that he had ever faced. Currently facing. Present tense. And John was heavily implied to be the greatest threat.

Which does make sense considering that John is his replacement. Who is Hal if he is no longer a Green Lantern? He’s been doing this for 30 years now, which is exactly half his life if we assume that Hal is the same age as his actor. He has no one. He lives in a massive, stark white house that was given to him as a gift and that holds basically zero furniture. He doesn’t even have a couch. There was only a single chair in front of the TV.

That’s an incredibly lonely life, and not one that I would want to be forced back into either. Not when the alternative is to be a superhero, to be able to fly across the galaxy and do all of these wondrous things. And John isn’t just his replacement, but someone who is able to keep a constructed bird alive for 24 hours without breaking a sweat even without a ring.

So it makes sense why Hal isn’t openly embracing John or eagerly jumping at the chance to train him. But there is a difference between not doing those things and being outright rude or disrespectful.

Hal didn’t have to ruin John’s car. He had a crowbar. He could have used that to test the metal detectors instead of completely tearing out the entire front panel. Transporting the three bodies had fewer options (I doubt they would all fit in the trunk), but he still left alien goo stains on all of the seats. And he was incredibly dismissive and flippant when John confronted him about it.

It made me wonder if Hal wasn’t deliberately trying to anger John and get him to snap. To dig in and find the emotional core that exists underneath the stoic Marine who always follows the chain of command. The way that Hal watched him certainly felt like he was waiting for something to happen.

Maybe something to keep an eye on going forward.

Random Thoughts

I loved all of the photos of Hal with various world leaders. It helped to drive home the fact that he’s been doing this for a long time.

Alright, so we’re definitely seeing the “hit the ring for an extra 5%” trick show up later, right?

Kerry is from Gotham. I wonder if there’s any relation to Kate Kane, aka Batwoman.

Similarly, I wonder if there will be any mention of the Martian Manhunter, J’onn J’onzz. How connected he is to the robotic Manhunters is something that seems to have varied a lot in the comics. As it stands, I’m going to be forcibly reminding myself that they are two different things every time I hear the name.

The gate to the ranch has the words “Study the Past” on it. That feels thematically appropriate.

The lantern itself looked really, really good. Great prop.

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An Honest Fangirl loves video games, horror movies, and superheroes, and occasionally manages to put words together in a coherent and pleasing manner.

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