There is something oddly magnetic about Kyle Chandler’s eyebrows. They’re disarmingly expressive, and Chandler’s grouchy-yet-charming Hal Jordan, Earth’s one and only Green Lantern, uses them to great effect in the season premiere of HBO’s latest superhero drama. If I were to critique Lanterns solely on eyebrow charisma, I’d give the show five out of five alien-powered super-rings.
Alas, after watching just the first episode, I’m really not sure what to make of it at all. Like most critics, I was given seven episodes as screeners, but I decided to only watch the premiere before penning my recap. This is what audiences will see on Sunday night, after all, and it’s all they’ll have to go on. I might as well have the same experience. It can be fun to watch along with the audience as a reviewer rather than skip ahead. That way you can come up with theories and be part of the discussion. That’s especially true when it’s a mystery.
In any case, there will be spoilers here since this is both a recap and review of the first episode, but I want to talk about expectations before we get into the story itself. I think my reaction to this season premiere has a lot to do with the expectations that were set leading up to the show’s release.
You’ll notice in the headline up above I say that Lanterns is “No True Detective.” Maybe I’ll change my mind about that once I’ve seen more of the season, but it only took one episode of True Detective Season 1 for me to know that this was something special. It was dark and eerie and terrifying and, more than anything, it instantly immersed us in the Southern Gothic swamps and bayous of rural Louisiana. The sense of place, whether or not it was at all realistic, was palpable and felt at once authentic and grounded, but also disturbingly surreal. We were lost in that fever dream from start to finish.
And the two detectives – Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle and Woody Harrelson’s Marty Hart – were the perfect pair, totally incompatible in almost every way, yet somehow perfect for each other. Was this a deconstruction of the buddy cop genre or a full-throated embrace of its conventions? Whatever it was, it set the bar high. Too high for subsequent seasons and too high for most shows in the detective genre writ large. “What are some detective shows like True Detective?” has to be an incredibly common Google search. Certainly forum threads and listicles aplenty have been written pointing hungry fans of that perfect season of television toward other contenders. We are often disappointed.
So it was a rather ballsy move to market Lanterns as a superhero detective story inspired by True Detective Season 1. And perhaps not altogether wise. The season premiere has plenty going for it, but Lanterns is nothing like True Detective so far. Yes, it has two major timelines that the story will unfold across, similar to Rust and Marty’s investigation (which took place across several timelines). It has two detectives whose personalities mix like water and vinegar. It’s a mystery, though the nature of the mystery is not made particularly clear in the pilot beyond having to do with aliens and the origin of the Green Lantern powers. It has all these components present but it lacks the hook. I’m not sure, 57 minutes in, why I’m supposed to care.
True Detective opens to a field of fire. It opens to a horrific crime scene . A young woman’s body discovered amidst the charred sugarcane next to a tree, antlers attached to her like some grotesque crown, her kneeling corpse in a prayerful pose. There’s something haunting and ritualistic about all of it. You can’t look away. You don’t want to look, but you can’t look away. I’ll never forget those opening moments, when I first met Dora Lange.
Lanterns opens to a group of kids watching a news program about Hal Jordan. We meet our young protagonist, John Stewart (Aaron Pierre as an adult) who is clearly fascinated by this ex test-pilot turned superhero. His brothers are worried because their dad is coming home soon and apparently they’re not supposed to be watching TV. When their father comes home, in military fatigues, he takes the boy outside and plays William Tell with an apple and his military issue sidearm. John doesn’t even flinch. It’s certainly a bizarre way to introduce these characters.
The rest of the episode is similarly odd. We skip forward twenty years, from 1996 to 2016. John is now a trainee under Hal Jordan. The two men don’t like one another very much, which is common enough in the buddy cop genre. There isn’t much banter, however, because while Hal is very chatty and funny and a bit of a rake, John is very much the strong and silent type. He says “Yes sir,” a lot and Hal asks sarcastically why each time he says “Yes sir” it sounds more like “bleep you”.
Hal is training John as a backup in case anything ever happens to him, though he insists he will never retire and John will never become a Green Lantern, since only one Green Lantern is assigned to earth. We know that by the time Superman takes place, Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner has the ring, but in 2016 it’s Hal Jordan and he’s training John and has a very . . . peculiar style of mentorship, including placing his ring on the dashboard and leaping out of the car as it careens off a cliff. John puts on the ring as the car heads toward impact and, we learn later but don’t see, conjures bubble wrap all around him to save himself.
A Green Lantern ring works like this: Whoever wears it can simply conjure into being whatever they can imagine, it’s just always a bright green color, like Nickelodeon slime green. You can use them to fly and do other neat stuff, but Hal doesn’t really care to teach John much, and John resents him for it. On his walk to the taco stand where Hal told him to meet back up, a “backup copy” of Hal pops out of the ring and relays a message to give to himself: It’s hailing in Rushville, Nebraska.
When Hal hears this, he flies off, leaving John to fend for himself. He ends up flying to Nebraska where he meets up with Hal and finds a grim scene. A football game ended in tragedy, several people shot dead. The local sheriff, Kerry Kane (played by Kelly Macdonald, but also my mom’s name is Kerry Kain so . . . that was a bit surprising) – in any case, the sheriff seems to have history with Hal and doesn’t want him anywhere near the crime scene. He thinks the whole thing has to do with aliens and she seems exasperated by his presence. When they apprehend a suspect, Kerry won’t let Hal interview him, so he gets in a fight at a local bar with some local yokels (enraging them by playing the song Brand New Key over and over and over again on the jukebox) so that he can take a trip to the local jail and have a word with the “alien” in custody.
One thing leads to another and Kerry doesn’t put him in the cells but rather in a closet for the night and the next morning he goes in front of a judge to get bail, which all seems a bit much for a bar fight in a redneck Nebraska town like Rushville where he was clearly the victim, but whatever. The point is, he’s bailed out by a mysterious benefactor who happens to be Kerry’s father-in-law, William Macon (played by the always charming Garret Dillahunt). The Green Lantern and his trainee go to visit Macon for lunch and learn that he’s running a pretty major militia out in the Nebraska backcountry, though he’s just the steward of the operation. An NDA, he tells Hal, prevents him from revealing his benefactor.
A few things happen quite quickly: John sleeps with a mysterious woman who, it turns out, is Zoe Macon (Poorna Jagannathan), William’s wife. William pulls strings with his daughter-in-law and Hal gets to question the man in custody, and the man in custody turns out to be an alien, after all, and tries to blow everyone up to get “revenge” over something we don’t know about yet. Hal saves the day with his ring and then we jump ahead to 2026, where John Stewart returns to Rushville in a snowstorm and the whole thing feels very Fargo-like.
He meets up with Kerry and the two of them head back to the football stadium where they find Hal Jordan’s frozen corpse sitting in the stands.
It’s a bit of a messy opener for this new DC show. Not bad, necessarily, but not super great either. Not something I’m going to go around telling everyone to watch, but not something I’ll warn you away from.
The inspirations creators Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof and Tom King and other producers and writers on the show have listed go beyond True Detective to Slow Horses, Fargo, The Right Stuff, No Country For Old Men and the buddy-cop genre more broadly. But these are all pretty outstanding, critically acclaimed shows and movies, and at least judging by this opening salvo, Lanterns isn’t that. Not yet, anyways, no matter how charming Kyle Chandler’s eyebrows might be (he honestly reminds me of a younger Kurt Russell a lot of the time) or how piercing Aaron Pierre’s eyes are. The cast is solid, the show is interesting enough, but this season premiere needed to wow, and it did not wow. Maybe it’s just silly to think a show about “magic” rings could ever live up to True Detective (hey, just ask Rings Of Power!)
My curiosity is piqued, but nothing more. Hopefully the rest of the season is better and my doubts are ill-founded. We shall see. I’ll keep watching and reviewing each week’s episode here on this blog as well as on my YouTube channel.
What did you think of the Lanterns series premiere? Let me know on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
Read all about the show and its full release schedule right here.
