Entertainment
HBO’s ‘Lanterns’ Officially Travels to 2026 With a Bonkers Resurrection
Editor’s note: The below contains spoilers for Lanterns Episode 6.
However you have felt about Lanterns thus far, here is where the rubber meets the road — or, perhaps more appropriately, the power ring meets the stars. Finally jumping forward to present-day, the HBO drama puts John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) on the case to discover what happened to Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler), who was murdered in Rushville years after being stripped of his status as Green Lantern. Additionally, Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion) now has the ring, but that doesn’t do Hal or John any good, as this small Nebraskan town remains the sole focus of their opposite life paths. Will Lanterns stick the landing? That remains to be seen, but if it does, it will be despite the way it has propped up John Stewart at the expense of Hal Jordan, a creative decision that fans will likely have trouble forgiving long-term.
‘Lanterns’ Episode 6 Pushes the Story Into the Present
Jumping forward to 2026, John Stewart is now a successful architect trying to build a new military compound with his brother Marcus. The pair own “Stewart Brothers,” an architectural firm that specializes in large-scale panic rooms designed for entire cities for when aliens or supervillains attack. This comes after what happened a year prior in Metropolis (as seen in Superman) and was largely inspired by John’s previous experience in Rushville. But his time in Nebraska still haunts the almost-Green Lantern, as John gets a call from his mother (Nicole Ari Parker) — whom he now refers to coldly as “Bernadette” — who has received a call from Hal Jordan, who evidently wants to apologize.
As it turns out, Hal was imprisoned for the better part of the last decade after John stripped him of the ring, but now that he’s out, he has relocated to Rushville. Apparently, Bernadette and Hal are now friends, something that rubs John the wrong way. But curiosity gets the better of the former Marine, who returns to Nebraska to meet with Hal at the diner. When John asks for his apology, Hal basically laughs in his face. Hal has no intention of apologizing; that had been a ruse by his mother in order to get the two of them in the same room. “I took the fall; I spent the time, we’re square,” Hal tells him. “No, you fell, and a lot of people got killed,” John retorts, refusing to take any responsibility for his own part in what happened in Rushville. After an aside where Hal tells his would-be protégé that Guy Gardner put a Green Lantern beacon in the middle of Rushville (ripping off Batman in the process), he wonders if the reason John doesn’t talk to his mother is because she was okay with the killing. Hal begins to tell John why he’s afraid, but John doesn’t want to hear it and smacks him instead. “Don’t tell anyone you were here,” Hal tells him, but John leaves the diner angrily.
Upon returning home, John gets a call from Kerry (Kelly Macdonald), still sheriff all these years later. She informs him that Hal is dead, prompting him to return to Rushville once more. “I never thought that he’d actually die,” John says — and the way he says it almost makes him sound sorry that he missed watching it happen himself. Kerry says everyone else in town hated Hal, but she wanted someone else there who cared about him. (That may not really describe John, but it’s not like there was hardly anyone else to call.) It turns out Hal returned to Rushville for her after Kerry and Billy (Jason Ritter) split up years earlier. As they reminisce about Hal’s life post-incarceration, Kerry tells John that Hal would walk around town and knock on doors asking how he could help, wanting to atone for his sins. She offers her couch, but John decides to crash at the motel — only it was never rebuilt. Instead, Kerry sends him to the place that Hal rented in town. John arrives and finds a rifle posted at the front door. When he hears something inside, he finds Earl, the carnivorous plant. While feeding the alien plant, Marcus calls with exciting news about their architectural plans — but that news will have to wait.
‘Lanterns’ Episode 6 Ups the Tension Between John Stewart and Rushville
The next morning, Kerry and John meet at the diner. Maggie (Hannah Christine Shetler), the waitress, answers Kerry’s questions about Hal’s night at the diner the night before, though she says nothing about John having been there. Kerry deputizes John to help with the investigation, and they attend the autopsy. The ME — who takes every chance she can get to tell the pair how much she hates Hal and John — says that whoever did it was close, with the shooter looking at him head-on. Getting his personal effects, they find a key to the “Fortress of Storage,” where they encounter a voice-command safe, which they unsuccessfully crack with an old voicemail of Hal’s to Kerry, since it requires a live voice rather than a recording.
On his way to Kerry’s for dinner, John picks up some beer from a local store and gets a call from ComfortCo, an assisted living center where his father resides. Apparently, he is having a problem, but John refuses to speak to his father at all. Walking past the Green Lantern beacon, John decides to turn it on, which, naturally, gets him into serious trouble with the locals. When Billy shows up and gets a bit testy, he threatens John, but it does no good. John takes all the guys out anyway, keeping the beacon on. At Kerry’s house, she, John, and Noah (Shea Pritchard) — who is now all grown up — are discussing the boy’s future. Kerry tells John that Noah wants to be a senator, and he evidently wrote to FEMA several times before they showed up in Rushville to rebuild the school. But when Kerry gets a call about John’s earlier activities, the tables turn, and she’s forced to lock him up for assaulting her ex-husband. “I’m keeping you safe,” she tells him.
The next morning, Guy Gardner, the new Green Lantern, arrives in Rushville. Guy tells John that the first time he met Hal, it was also in jail. Apparently, Hal told Guy to go “climb a rope,” but when John informs his successor that their predecessor has been murdered (and that he ought to be buried in his uniform and ring), Guy isn’t so sure. “Guy, everything you have is because I didn’t take it,” John tells him. With that, Guy begins to turn around, but not before first informing John that someone busted Sinestro (Ulrich Thomsen) out of the Guardians’ space prison — something John didn’t know. When the ex-Marine is released on bail, he finds that he has several missed messages from Bernadette, Marcus, and his father’s home (where he shot out a window with his handgun). Instead, John calls his estranged brother Aaron (Romeo Brown) to deal with their father.
‘Lanterns’ Episode 6 Resurrects a Different Version of Hal Jordan
Soon after, John arrives at Hal’s place to find that Maggie, the waitress from the diner, has been waiting for him. When John asks what she wants, it turns out that she’s the young girl he gave the watch to in the motel parking lot after Rushville was decimated by the Manhunter (Poorna Jagannathan). She demands $313,000 in reparations for what he and Hal did to her back in the day, and if she doesn’t get it, she’ll tell the sheriff about his confrontation with Hal on the eve of his murder. Later, Noah knocks on Hal’s door and offers John a suit for the funeral, though he personally doesn’t plan to attend, even to support his mother.
At the funeral, Guy has come through and got Hal his suit and ring back. However, he doesn’t feel the need to stick around for the funeral (“bad optics”), which consists only of John and Kerry. Well, at first. Hal’s once-upon-a-time love interest, Carol Ferris (Ami Mackenzie), also shows up, having been called by Kerry after the former Green Lantern was murdered. Unable to do so herself, she asks John to deliver the eulogy that Hal had previously (and jokingly) written some time ago. As John stands over Hal’s grave, he reads Hal’s ironic and troubled words — it’s a sorry scene, one that feels at least a little farfetched, given how long Hal was the official Green Lantern of Earth. This is the furthest cry from something like Superman’s funeral in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice or even Iron Man’s memorial at the end of Avengers: Endgame.
Afterward, John tells Kerry he’s going to stick around for a few days, presumably to help her catch Hal’s killer. But once she leaves the grave site, in the dark of night, John digs up Hal’s grave and completely botches the phone pitch he and his brother planned for the colonel in the process. Once he opens the casket, John removes the ring from Hal’s finger and puts it on. With only a 5% charge, he activates the “Halogram,” who is ticked to discover that he’s dead. We’re ticked too, Halogram, but at least you’re still around to keep Kyle Chandler on board this rocky ship as it heads for the finish line. Who knows? Maybe Lanterns will finish out more like Lethal Weapon than True Detective, after all.
New episodes of Lanterns air Sundays on HBO and HBO Max.
- Release Date
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August 16, 2026
- Network
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HBO
- Directors
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Alik Sakharov, James Hawes, Stephen Williams, Geeta Patel
- Writers
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Damon Lindelof, Chris Mundy, Tom King, Vanessa Baden Kelly, Justin Britt-Gibson, Breannah Gibson
- Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner is always a hoot.
- John has finally found some personal agency all these years later, though he remains drawn to the ring.
- Even with Hal dead, it’s comforting to know that his presence isn’t lost.
- No matter how great the Halogram is, killing off Hal Jordan was a dumb move.
- This episode may have been more compelling by inter-splicing John’s 2026 present with Hal’s previous few years, be it in prison or trying to make a life in Rushville, thus making his death a bit more impactful.
- This “reparations” thing from the waitress feels in really poor taste.
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