THE CURIOUS CASE OF JOHN STEWART

There is absolutely no universe in which Hal Jordan and John Stewart should have the same job.

One of them has spent most of his adult life treating authority like an optional subscription service. He’s impulsive, secretive, regularly hungover, and so uninterested in properly training his own replacement that his teaching methods occasionally amount to creating a life-threatening situation and seeing what happens.

The other is John Stewart.

The reason has less to do with John than with what happened years before either man became part of an intergalactic law enforcement agency. Because while Lanterns is a DC universe show about cosmic power harnessed through some very cool jewelry, it’s also about two men whose lives were shaped by the same moment, the same failure, except one inherited opportunity, and the other inherited pressure.

SPOILERS FOR "LANTERNS" FROM THIS POINT.

Trust fall.

Lanterns, the latest addition to James Gunn’s promising DCU rebirth, brings one of DC Comics’ most recognizable superhero mantles back to the screen. Instead of sending its heroes off to battle aliens on some distant planet, though, the HBO series drops them into a murder investigation in small-town Nebraska.

There are these space cops, see. They’re intergalactic peacekeepers issued rings that allow their wearers to manifest anything they can imagine out of green energy. These cops are called Green Lanterns. Their bosses are aliens who call themselves the Guardians of the Universe.

Kyle Chandler’s Hal Jordan, Earth’s resident Lantern, has held the role for years when the Guardians decide it’s time to start preparing his replacement, John Stewart, played by Aaron Pierre with the rigid self-possession of a man who takes the assignment much more seriously than the man training him.

John’s also a Black man in America who sees Hal as yet another white guy squandering the power he wields, power he didn’t earn, power he didn’t have to work for, power he takes for granted.

That imbalance follows them straight into their first real case together.

In response to a cryptic message, Hal rockets to Rushville, Nebraska—literally, because the ring gives him the power of flight—arriving at a murder scene and leaving a confused John to follow by plane. The case eventually opens into a much larger conspiracy involving the Manhunters, an earlier generation of robotic peacekeepers created by the Guardians before the Green Lantern Corps.

What follows is basically one big municipal X-File. There’s a strange local patriarch (Garret Dillahunt), his sharp-tongued wife (Poorna Jagannathan), and a put-upon sheriff (Kelly Macdonald), all of whom seem to know considerably more about aliens than they’re letting on.

After two months of investigating and supposed training, Hal's done nothing but prove he's the worst. He withholds information, ignores orders whenever they become inconvenient, and at one point jumps out of a moving car, leaving John to either figure out this cosmic weapon on his finger or become extremely familiar with the bottom of a cliff.

Honestly, the more pressing mystery may be how John's managed not to strangle Hal.

But the heart of the show is that fractious John-Hal dynamic. How both of them came to be Lanterns is the show’s meat and cheese.

Turns out, before Hal was selected by the ring, the glowing green trinket first made its way to John’s father.

While John Sr. (Sherman Augustus) is asleep, a green light yanks him out of bed in the middle of the night. Already not an ideal start to a job interview. Then a Guardian asks him the question that will apparently determine whether he’s worthy of unimaginable power: “Are you afraid?”

Of course he’s afraid. There's an alien floating outside his bedroom.

So Hal Jordan gets the ring. And John Stewart’s family is left to cope with the fallout of coming so close.

And trust, being passed over for the service of a lifetime does a real number on Mr. Stewart. He starts drinking. He grows increasingly consumed by the fact that Hal Jordan is out there living the life that almost belonged to him. And years later, when a Guardian turns up at the Stewart house to explain that fear is what cost John Sr. the ring, Bernadette (Jasmine Cephas Jones), his wife, is less than impressed with the hiring process.

“Do you understand how unfair it is to ask a Black man in America if he’s afraid?” she says.

The Guardian, who's presumably crossed galaxies but hasn't given much thought to this particular wrinkle, listens as Bernadette explains exactly why fear and cowardice are not interchangeable.

Then the Guardian offers a consolation prize. (Reparations?) It tells Bernadette that John Jr. has the same genes as his father and therefore is also worthy of future membership. Bernadette and her husband resolve that he’ll sober up and they’ll make their son too exceptional for the Guardians to overlook.

From there, John’s childhood starts looking less like childhood and more like Lantern boot camp. It was fear that disqualified John’s father from becoming a superhero, so his parents work to drive every ounce of apprehension out of him.

As an adult, he joins the Marines (where a months long mission in the Russian wilderness ends with a drunken Hal swooping in and kidnapping his oligarch target with a destructive flash of green.) He learns discipline, control, and how to follow orders. And by the time the Guardians finally come calling, John has spent his life becoming exactly the kind of man they said they wanted.

The Jordan boys' legacy.

The first few episodes of Lanterns center on the delicious rivalry between Jordan and Stewart, each of whom believes himself to be more deserving of the ring than the other.

But deserving according to whom?

The Green Lanterns are chosen, sure, but by whom, and under what authority? Laura Linney’s unnamed Guardian approaches her recruitment duties with the placid assurance of a benevolent dog trainer, even as the show keeps poking at what being chosen does to the people who receive that little green ring. And, maybe more importantly, what it does to the people who just miss it.

When the angels of heaven came before awestruck shepherds in the Bible, they were told to have no fear. But the dictionary definition of “awestruck” doesn’t just mean wonder and admiration. It also means dread.

So it makes sense that a man might piss his pajamas when he’s suddenly woken up one night by aliens and asked if he’s afraid. And it's a little frustrating (for John Sr. and us) that admitting yes, he is afraid haunts his family for the rest of their lives.

In a flashback episode, we see how Hal’s emergence as Earth’s first Green Lantern eats away at John's dad, his upright pride crumbling into drunken obsession until he shoots out the family TV when Hal makes his public debut. And we watch as John’s mother, Bernadette, not only talks her unstable husband down, but sets out the terms under which she’ll continue living with him and their three children.

Bernadette’s steely determination is the backbone of John Stewart’s origin story. While taking out the trash, she’s confronted by Linney’s Guardian with an apology for John Sr.’s rejection and a consolation diamond as big as a doorknob. She then sits this all-powerful alien down at her kitchen table and explains the flaw in the Guardians’ entire plan. (Because these Guardians aren’t nearly as infallible as they like to imagine.) And just as she had with the man she loves, Bernadette refuses to allow outside forces to question the excellence she knows her family embodies.

“We’re terrified daily of persecution and still show up, sometimes better than everyone else around us,” she schools the puzzled alien.

And so John Stewart is raised to be a Green Lantern, his childhood marked by the sort of tough love any outside observer would just call abuse. Apart from John Sr. shooting apples William Tell-style off the growing John’s head, the trail of bullet holes on the garage a horrifying parody of the pencil marks tracing a child’s growth, the Stewarts leave their youngest son in a rough part of town in the middle of the night and tell him to make his way home. The adult John tells his version plainly: “It’s human. We love the people that raised us. Even if they’re crazy.”

And this is Lanterns’ John Stewart. Not merely an eager but patient superhero trainee, enduring his mentor’s old-school cowboy antics. But a vehicle for other people’s obsessions, guided and groomed to replace the cocksure holder of a magic ring. When the Guardian asks him pointedly if he’s comfortable knowing that his job is to take the ring from Hal Jordan, the ex-Marine responds simply, “Are those my orders? Then it doesn’t matter if I’m comfortable with it.”

And for most of the show’s eight episodes, we see just how seriously John takes that mindset.

It’s honestly a bold move, showing that Hal and John’s destinies are more entwined than we thought. It also allows Aaron Pierre to lay down some of the cards he’s been holding so close. John’s stoic willingness to put up with Hal’s dismissive bullshit isn’t just John the Marine following protocol. He’s a man taking what he’s earned.

Meanwhile, by the time we meet Hal, nobody seems especially concerned that his personality occasionally makes him a questionable steward of unimaginable cosmic power. His flaws don’t disqualify him. Half the time, they’re treated as proof that he knows what he’s doing.

Hal gets the luxury of growing into power after it’s already been handed to him.

And John’s belief that power must be earned through exceptional preparation keeps running into men who were trusted first and allowed to become worthy of that trust later. Just look at Guy, John’s successor, who audiences first meet in the 2025 Superman.

Guy is a former gym teacher—excuse me, athletic director—who doesn't exactly scream elite ... anything. He’s schlubby. He’s got that bowl cut. Nothing about him suggests a man who spent his entire life preparing for the enormous responsibility bestowed upon him.

And somehow the universe keeps handing these men rings.

At a certain point, the question stops being whether John has done enough to deserve one and becomes why he’s the only person here who seems to think power requires perfection.

For the show, (and the real world) the answer is: it doesn’t, actually.

“For a long time, I couldn’t tell where I started and where my programming ended,” John tells the sheriff’s son Noah, a Manhunter who’s having his own nature-versus-nurture, absolute-power side thing going on.

By the finale, John doesn’t become a better Lantern by becoming more. He becomes one by loosening his grip on the version of the job other people designed for him. He takes what Hal taught him, rejects the Guardians’ expectations, and essentially renegotiates the position.

“Think of me as an independent contractor.”

Dirt and stars.

Whenever Pierre and Chandler share the screen, they beautifully feed off each other. They’re funny in completely different ways, often by leaning into the irony of their apprenticeship: John already possesses basically every skill a Lantern could conceivably need, down to the artistic chops required to shape the ring’s green beams into whatever the moment calls for. Hal uses his to counterfeit a dollar for a bar jukebox.

But as much as Lanterns centers on the culmination of John’s Green Lantern origin story, it ends on something surprisingly tender. Lanterns ends not in a massive showdown of magic pews, your standard superhero schtick, but with Stewart having a pointed programming-vs.-free-will conversation with the “big bad,” then taking flight for the first time, soaring across a night sky illuminated by Rushville’s unwanted Green Lantern signal.

The creators of Lanterns chose to end their story exactly how they wanted: by maintaining their focus on its human elements even if it meant sacrificing some of its extraterrestrial source material. Hmm. I guess even a superhero show can go against its own programming.

9/10 ★ A dense, emotional series that focuses on characters over spectacle and shows love in all its messy glory.