(Be warned: This article discusses details from the Lanterns season finale.)
Superhero action fans waiting for a sprawling, special effects-laden fight scene to cap the percolating drama of HBO's Lanterns will likely be disappointed by the hit show's brooding, measured season finale.
Instead, what producers delivered Sunday night was a simmering meditation on parents and children, fear and love, ruthlessness versus kindness. And in the process, they wrapped up a season that revitalized and reinvented what a modern superhero story can do on the small screen.
Lanterns has become an unlikely hit for HBO, centered on the Green Lantern — a character with many iterations in comics books and animated features, but a somewhat more checkered history in live action. Famously, the Green Lantern film starring a pre-superstardom Ryan Reynolds tanked so hard he joked about it in the superhero franchise he finally got right, Deadpool.
From the beginning, Lanterns producers had a challenge: How to take a concept that sounds cartoonish on its face — space cops given one of the greatest weapons in the universe, a power ring capable of conjuring anything, by blue-skinned immortal Guardians — and make it feel real, with human stakes. And they had to do it while also showcasing several different characters who have worn the mantle of Green Lantern on Earth.
The solution was aping one of HBO's other unlikely hits: True Detective. So Friday Night Lights icon Kyle Chandler was tapped to play Hal Jordan, the most famous Lantern — depicted in this story as the first human to join the galactic Green Lantern Corps. He starts as a square-jawed hero, but as the meat of Lanterns' story unfolds in 2016, Jordan is a grizzled adventurer near burnout — forced to work with an aspiring backup Lantern he fears has been recruited to replace him, Aaron Pierre's John Stewart.
HBO's series has soared by digging into the personalities of the men behind the mythos, mostly ditching eye-catching costumes and special effects — the only Lantern who wears a costume is walking joke Guy Gardner, a lunkhead also featured in last year's Superman film. These are characters struggling with a galactic-level mystery imported from outer space, but somehow the more complicated foe is their own personal stuff — they're confronting issues of race, coping with the legacy of self-destructively obsessive parents and handling flawed, all-powerful bosses.
The result is a show relatable and compelling for people who aren't comic book fans — real drama, unfolding over eight episodes of high-quality television.
Stewart is an iconic figure for comics nerds. One of the first Black superheroes created in the early 1970s, Stewart emerges in Lanterns as the son of parents who literally raised him for the job. But between his borderline abusive upbringing — in which his parents would make him endure bizarre tests to prove he was fearless — and his experience as a military sniper, Stewart struggles to reconcile his deep desire to serve an important duty with a deep distrust of authority figures. Especially, the Guardians.
Indeed, Lanterns captures the unique duality Black folks face in society and especially in the superhero world: a love and deep hunger for the ideals of justice and fairness, balanced by a rueful understanding that institutions tasked with delivering those things are often exploitative and hypocritical. Especially for non-white people.
Throughout Lanterns, Stewart faces the question people of color often confront while working inside white-dominated institutions: How can I serve the greater good without letting this dubious enterprise co-opt me?
In the show's season finale, Stewart finds a complicated but ultimately satisfying solution to that question, allowing him to become a superhero on his own terms. Which is — speaking as a Black comics nerd with fifty years in the game — something of the ultimate fantasy for many of us. (This resolution also may help explain reports that Pierre's Stewart will appear in next year's Superman movie, Man of Tomorrow.)
What I've liked most about Lanterns is the way it has presented Stewart as a man for whom Blackness is a key part of his history and reality, but not the only element in his relationship to the world. One of the toughest challenges in creating an authentic, compelling Black superhero is finding a way to show how race affects them in key moments at certain times without totally defining their lives in a way that feels patronizing.
Lanterns positions Jordan and Stewart as an odd couple of sorts, digging into a situation where a deadly alien called a Manhunter is living in a rural Nebraska town, disguised as a human. Producers hit on an ingenious way of building a rapport between Jordan and Stewart — rather than manufacturing some awkward moment where they admit they eventually like each other, they stay prickly antagonists until Jordan is murdered mysteriously, and Stewart reconnects with Jordan's consciousness stored inside his power ring.
But, as thrilling as it is to watch these characters face those circumstances, the real drama in Lanterns is mostly internal.
Lanterns is, of course, an important stage in the reinvention of the DCU — the TV and film franchise featuring DC Comics characters like Superman and Batman. Renowned director James Gunn, who assumed control of the franchise with partner Peter Safran years ago, has overseen projects in this reimagined franchise like the Superman and Supergirl films and the Peacemaker series on HBO Max.
But Lanterns feels like the first major DC project under Gunn's creative auspices that features an entirely different sensibility and tone. That may be because the trio who created Lanterns have their own bona fides in quality TV and superhero stuff: Chris Mundy, former showrunner of Netflix's Ozark; Damon Lindelof, creator of one of HBO's other hit DC Comics adaptations, Watchmen, and Tom King, a CIA officer-turned-comic book writer who has penned Batman, Mister Miracle and Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow.
So far, it seems to have worked. The show's first episode debuted with 9.3 million viewers across HBO and HBO Max for its first three days and recently was ranked seventh on the list of acquired streaming series tabulated by Nielsen. Let's hope this convinces Gunn, Safran and the powers that be at DC to give this show a second season.
Of course, there have been some fans who can't accept how Lanterns tells its story. They're horrified by the downgraded depiction of Jordan, often seen as a brash-but-noble good guy in the comics. Others can't accept the way race surfaces in the narrative, reacting with an intensity that may reveal more about what they think about race and racism than anything the show is actually doing.
Fans can be a double-edged sword for a show like Lanterns. On one hand, they are loyal and passionate supporters who get every inside joke and buy every collectible. But their expectations for storytelling can be rigid and dogmatic, hobbling adventurous writers with a straitjacket of requirements — lashing out in Rotten Tomatoes scores and social media posts if their sensibilities are violated.
I expect there may be a fair amount of disappointment from conventional comics fans over the resolution this eighth episode presents. But the season finale offers some powerful messages on the nature of forgiveness, the dangers of assumptions, the power of sacrifice and the thrill of finally becoming your own person.
In the end, landing a story that says all that — and offers thrilling moments of guys flying around with green glowing power rings on their fingers — is an achievement that still leaves me astounded and gratified.
And I'm more convinced than ever that the best superhero stories are centered on flawed people with super-sized problems, rather than heroes with oversized special effects budgets.
Copyright 2026 NPR
