Lanterns Recap: Episode 1 - Pilot

Ash Walker • 18 Aug 2026 Features

“There's hail in Rushville, Nebraska.”

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SPOILERS AHEAD!

In brightest day, in blackest night - welcome back to the DCU!

This is (technically) the fifth entry in James Gunn’s burgeoning superhero universe, following Superman, Supergirl, Creature Commandos and Season 2 of Peacemaker (don’t ask), but it feels like a crucial early step that DC really needs to get right. Especially after the disastrous response to Supergirl this summer.

Thankfully, if this season premiere is anything to go by, it’ll be a step in the right direction.

So let’s get into it: we open in 1996, in a very interesting scene in which a bunch of young boys are sneakily watching a 60 Minutes special on the new superhero Green Lantern. We get some useful exposition, but the scene takes a dark turn when the boys’ dad comes home and proceeds to take one of them outside to shoot an apple off his head. With a gun.

What a brilliantly shocking, tantalising introduction to one of our main characters - John Stewart, played with stony, stoic charm by the excellent Aaron Pierre.

We then smash to 2016, when John, now grown up, is somehow being trained by that same Green Lantern - a delightfully grumpy, rumpled Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler). It’s obvious right away that there’s some tension between the veteran and the rookie, and this uneasy chemistry will be the heart of the show going forward.

After some hijinks with a car going off a cliff, our heroes receive a message from Hal’s ring (in the holographic form of Hal himself) that draws them to the small Nebraska town of Rushville, where we’ll apparently be spending the majority of the season.

Hal reveals that this backwater town is where he originally got his ring, from a dying, crashlanded alien called Abin Sur, and that he’d always suspected that there was more to the crash than meets the eye. Now, several bodies have turned up on a football field, and Hal suspects they are alien.

He receives some pushback from the local authorities, in the form of Sheriff Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald), but thanks to the assistance of a highly suspicious local family, the Macons, headed by guntoting patriarch Will (Garret Dillahunt), eventually gets to interview the sole suspect.

Through some clever questioning, Hal gets the suspect to admit that he is indeed not of this world, and the suspect blows himself up in the interrogation room. It seems Hal was right on the money, and there are aliens walking among us.

In the episode’s shocking coda we then flash forward to 2026, where John (now a bit older, as denoted by the goatee and sleek black coat) returns to a snow-covered Rushville to find the body of - gasp - Hal Jordan, sitting dead and frozen on the bleachers of the same football field they were investigating ten years ago.

And, most intriguingly, his ring is missing…

A bit of a slow episode, all in all, with a lot of setup and not much action. But what a great setup for a pair of central mysteries - especially the fact that one of our pair of heroes will wind up dead by the end of the story. 

Random Thoughts:

• The show’s creators have cited True Detective as a creative touchstone, and you can definitely see that, especially with the time-hopping structure, but I’d say it feels more like a cross between Training Day and Men in Black. Which is a pretty fun combo.
• I’m desperate to know more about John’s childhood. It seems his dad was raising him specifically to become a Green Lantern - did the Guardians have something to do with that? John did say that they selected him personally.
• Is it just me, or do the elder Macons look roughly the same age as their son and his wife? I guess they just had him very young.
• Hal and John repeatedly state that Earth only has one Green Lantern… so how does Guy Gardner - that blowhard with the bad hair from the Superman movie - fit into all of this? We know he’ll turn up at some point this season, but how did he manage to get his grubby little mitts on a power ring?

Verdict: A slow(ish) but very solid start to what promises to be a pretty interesting superhero show. I can’t wait to see where this mystery goes.

Lanterns is available to stream every Monday from 2am on HBO MAX, available now as part of Sky Ultimate TV.