Lanterns Episode 4 Finally Admits Its Main Character Is Just a Flashlight With Trust Issues
Well, folks, we are four episodes deep into HBO’s $200 million dollar exercise in atmospheric dread, and I have finally figured out what this show is about. It’s not about the Green Lantern Corps. It’s not about cosmic justice. It’s not even about the tragic, soul-crushing weight of legacy.
It’s about a guy who owns a very expensive Maglite and refuses to go to therapy.
Episode 4, titled "The Long Dark," dropped last night, and for a solid 45 minutes, I was convinced the writers had just copy-pasted a script from a depressed lighthouse keeper's diary. We got rain. We got brooding. We got close-ups of Kyle Chandler’s face doing that thing where he squints like he’s trying to read the fine print on a contract he regrets signing. But then, right at the halfway mark, the show decided to remember it’s supposed to be a superhero saga and threw us a bone. And by "bone," I mean a massive, galaxy-sized plot twist that made me choke on my overpriced seltzer.
Here’s the deal, for those of you who don't have the attention span for prestige TV unless a dragon shows up: Hal Jordan (Chandler) and John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) are on Earth, investigating a murder that is somehow connected to an ancient alien power source. The show has been drip-feeding us lore like it’s an IV bag of lukewarm chicken broth. But this week, the IV got ripped out, and we got a firehose of cosmic nonsense to the face.
The episode starts with our dynamic duo stuck in a small town that makes Twin Peaks look like Las Vegas. There’s a diner. There’s a creepy sheriff. There’s a local who knows more than he’s letting on, and he delivers his exposition in that slow, gravelly whisper that only exists in HBO dramas. You know the type. He’s the guy who says things like, "The darkness ain't just outside, boy. It's in the soil." I half-expected him to start talking about the oil reserves.
But then, the twist. And I’m not going to spoil the entire thing because I’m not a monster, but I will say this: the titular Lanterns aren’t just picking up a magic ring and shooting green lasers. Oh no. That’s for the Marvel kids. This is about the emotional baggage that comes with the ring. It turns out, the ring isn’t just powered by willpower; it’s powered by trauma. Specifically, the unresolved, festering kind of trauma that you bury so deep you need a backhoe to find it.
Hal Jordan, it is revealed, isn't just haunted by his past. He’s literally carrying a piece of it inside the ring. The Entity, or whatever the hell they’re calling the big bad this week, has been feeding on his guilt. Every time he uses the ring to create a giant green fist to punch a drone, he’s actually just projecting his daddy issues onto the physical plane. The show basically turned the Green Lantern’s power source into a timeshare timeshare timeshare.
The internet, as you can imagine, is having a field day. Twitter (I refuse to call it X, it’s a stupid name) is currently a warzone of hot takes. You’ve got the DC purists screaming that this is a betrayal of the source material, that Hal Jordan is a cocky test pilot, not a weepy millennial with a podcast. Meanwhile, the critics are eating it up, calling it "a profound meditation on masculinity and failure." And then you have the rest of us, the unwashed masses, just sitting there wondering why the ring doesn't have a low-battery warning.
Look, I’m not saying the reveal is bad. In a post-*The Batman* world, we’ve all been conditioned to accept that our heroes need to be emotionally constipated to be interesting. But there’s a difference between "complex" and "I need to see a man in his 50s cry into his chili because his space flashlight is sad." The show is leaning so hard into the psychological horror that it’s starting to feel less like a superhero epic and more like an A24 film about a guy who inherits a haunted RV.
The real MVP of the episode, though, is Aaron Pierre. His John Stewart is the only person on screen who seems to understand that they are in a cosmic adventure. He’s the straight man to Chandler’s existential crisis. He’s the one asking the practical questions, like "Why are we standing in the rain for 20 minutes?" and "Can we maybe use the alien ring to call an Uber?" He’s the audience surrogate, the guy who is just as confused as we are but is too polite to say it out loud. If the show kills him off, I’m rioting.
The pacing is still glacial. We spent a solid ten minutes watching Hal stare at a wall. Not a metaphorical wall, an actual wall. I get it, the show is trying to build atmosphere. But there’s a fine line between "slow burn" and "wet campfire," and this episode was tiptoeing across it. The dialogue is also getting a little too Joss Whedon-adjacent in its attempts to be quippy. At one point, Hal says, "Well, that’s not great," after a building explodes. Sir, a building just exploded. We need more than a mild inconvenience.
But I’ll be damned if the last 15 minutes didn’t hook me. The revelation that the murder they’re investigating is somehow connected to a rogue Guardian and a secret prison on Mars? That’s the good stuff. That’s the cosmic peanut butter to my emotional jelly. It finally feels like the show is zooming out from the intimate character study and remembering that there’s a whole universe at stake.
And let's be real, the visual effects are absolutely stunning. The way the light bends and
Final Thoughts
Having now seen four hours of *Lanterns*, it's clear the show is less interested in cosmic spectacle than in the grinding, bureaucratic loneliness of law enforcement in the far reaches of space—a choice that feels refreshingly adult but risks alienating viewers expecting the bombast of the DCU. The deliberate pacing and the simmering, unspoken tension between Hal and John are building a genuinely compelling character study, yet the plot’s glacial drip-feed of clues demands a patience that modern serialized television rarely affords. For now, I’m more intrigued by the psychological weight these two men are carrying than by the mystery itself, but the series needs to start cashing in on that emotional investment soon if it wants to be more than a beautifully shot, melancholic mood piece.