Well, that certainly felt like a season finale. It was also definitely my favorite episode of the season so far.
It really was a kind of season finale since it wrapped up the 2016 storylines. The Manhunter is dead. Neither John nor Hal have the ring. Rushville is decimated. All in all, it was a very bleak episode.
I really wish that we had gotten more of this version of Zoe. She was simultaneously fascinating and alien. We got more information about her and how she operated in this episode than we did the entire season. And now she’s gone.
She was very clearly manipulative. She definitely wasn’t an innocent victim unfairly slandered by the Guardians. She watched John burn. She turned the satellites against the town without blinking. But there was still something almost tragic about her. She really was just quietly living without drawing any attention to herself. She kept everyone in town safe and healthy. Would it have been so bad if she had just been left alone?
I had a feeling that Kerry knew who the Manhunter was, but I didn’t expect her to be indebted to Zoe like that. It’s a big jump from the runaway daughter of a Gotham crook to the sheriff of a Midwestern town that low key doubled as a cult. She seemed to have a bit of buyer’s remorse, but how could Kerry not still feel indebted to her?
She wasn’t just welcomed into town. She married into the family. She had Zoe’s grandson (whether he was biologically hers or not). I do think that Zoe genuinely saw something in Kerry that she liked and respected. Not everyone would cut off their own pinky.
I don’t know how she felt about her husband, though. She very clearly had a pattern that she followed: find the “alpha” of the community and seduce them. She did that with Antaan, she did that with Macon, and she did that with John. And she had told Macon that Antaan’s language was “hers” which we know is a lie. Macon was useful, but I doubt she actually loved him, if she’s even capable of such a thing.
She can be intrigued by people, though, and John was one of them. Maybe she was smart enough to know that Hal would never fall for any kind of seduction, but John was a little bit outside of her usual target. Their conversation while she fixed his skin just highlighted the themes that the series had been exploring all season (the quip about making sure that he didn’t come out white almost made the top of the review).
They understood each other, and instead of that resulting in loyalty, it led to Zoe’s downfall. It wasn’t an impulsive killing. John had not only used Hal as bait, but he made sure to bait her somewhere that he could reach with his sniper’s perch. He acted very deliberately, even if it still brought him to tears.
Zoe brought up an interesting point in that she had to follow her nature. Her programming. Even if she wanted to, she could not let Abin Sur live. She had to kill him for her own protection. (Which was almost certainly when John decided for sure that he had to kill her.) But John, after spending his entire life being specifically groomed to follow orders and become the next Green Lantern, chose otherwise. He contradicted his “programming.”
It’s hard to blame him, though. John has always felt like a very clear-headed man. Even when he’s angry, he takes the time necessary to analyze and figure out what motives the people around him have. The Guardians wanted John to just steal the ring from Hal as opposed to having an actual succession or transition. Like Hal said, if they were willing to do that to him, they were almost certainly willing to do that to John in the future.
Who would ever want to join up with someone like that? Especially when John saw firsthand just how much the power that came with being a Green Lantern could hollow someone out. How it could destroy a town and get innocent people killed. Hal crossed several lines this episode.
He told John that the cardinal rule was that they didn’t kill people, and yet he had no issues with bringing Antaan into Rushville and using him and everyone in town as collateral damage. He had no problems with leaving John trapped in the car. Sure, he almost certainly didn’t expect it to burst into flames and roast John alive, but he still deliberately left John in a dangerous situation with no way to protect himself if things went south.
Hal was so desperate to hold on to the ring that he lost track of what it meant, but when push came to shove, he still used the ring to protect innocent people. The very last thing that he did was to create a bubble to protect himself and John. Both of them. He could have just used it to protect himself, but he included John even though they were in the middle of a brawl.
The camaraderie that they had found last episode made the sheer distaste that they had for each other that much sharper. They could have been friends. Good friends. Hal could have been a really good mentor if circumstances had been different and that it was something that he had actually chosen. Instead, it turned into a fistfight.
And it got a lot of Rushville destroyed. Not just the ranch, but the motel and the water tower too. The water tower reveal was such a fun one. It had been a consistent set location, and I hadn’t expected it to be anything more than that. For it to be holding that weird darkness cloud instead of water was a good twist.
Antaan and his fellows felt incredibly wasted. It was actually a huge let down. After all of his plotting, he just slowly walked towards the darkness cloud, only to get thrown into the air by Hal’s tornado and blew up? He couldn’t have stopped the biological bomb? Like, sure, his scene with Macon was great. I was on the edge of my seat the entire time. But everything else just left me sitting there confused over what had just happened.
I guess he wasn’t Atrocitus after all.
I was satisfied with Macon’s death, though. I like this much better than if he had gotten blown up. He went out knowingly as a sacrificial lamb, and he did so happily. It made his shock when he got his heart torn out feel more potent. There is a difference between knowing that you’re going to die and seeing your heart beat in someone else’s hand as you actively die.
I’m going to miss him moving forward, and I didn’t expect that. He brought a fun, off-kilter energy to all of his scenes.
So where do we go from here? Hal is (theoretically) dead. Rushville still has massive craters in the ground. And now John is back. Does the season end with him suiting up as a Green Lantern for real? Guy Gardner is out there; will John replace him or will he get his own ring?
Either way, I’m excited to delve into that particular murder mystery. I can’t imagine that John will find many allies once people realize around.
Random Thoughts
I wonder how John Sr. and Bernadette took the news that John not only got the ring but turned it down. I can’t imagine that conversation going well.
So, Noah definitely killed Hal, right? If we assume that it really was Hal? There’s no other option with how heavy handed Zoe’s conversation with him was.
I haven’t talked about the use of color in the show at all, but when and where the show slips in both green and yellow is very cool.
The heart removals were surprisingly bloody and graphic. They were cool.
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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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