Assorted thoughts written after Lanterns episode 6, “Bad Optics,” and before episode 7, “The Jordan Boys Legacy.” Spoilers from here on out.
- Who killed Hal Jordan? Who killed Hal Jordan?
- High on my list of suspects are Sheriff Kane and/or her son Noah. Noah might make some sense in the “the way kids are influenced by their parents” theme of the show. I won’t spoil an entirely different but tonally similar HBO drama, but we’ve seen that kind of thing before. For the sheriff, she about well told John that she’s acting precisely how the person who did it would act, so there’s that.
- Also just about anyone could be a Manhunter at this point.
- Also DC publishing a Millennium omnibus makes a lot more sense now.
- Also they just casually dropped “Sinestro broke free” like there’s nothing to it, but hard to believe that won’t come into play in the next two episodes. Which begs the question, what story are we telling here? Hal’s old and crotchety, he’s on the outs with the Guardians, Sinestro’s around the edges … Parallax? Is that what we’re doing here, Green Lantern: Rebirth?
- Has it even been Hal this whole time? What’s the deal with this doppelgänger Hal who can appear out of his ring? Why hadn’t Hal backed up his ring in 10 years? Is the corpse a construct? Did Hal already know someone was coming to kill him that night? Is Hal really dead? If Hal is dead, can the construct Hal reanimate him?
- Further, in the 2026 time, I think we were meant to believe John no longer wanted the ring; then it seemed like he was manipulating Hal’s funeral to get himself a ring, selfishly; then it seemed like maybe he wanted to get the ring so he could access backup Hal so he had help solving Hal’s murder. Do I have that right?
- If, in Lanterns, Green Lanterns don’t usually have partners, and there’s never been a Lantern trainee before, and the Guardians don’t usually replace a Lantern, and yet Lianna has specifically assigned Hal a trainee and orders John to replace Hal, is Lianna a bad guy? What’s the backstory that we haven’t been told about? Why are so many “this never happens” things happening?
- Did Bernadette do it?
- I’ve got a lot of faith in Damon Lindelof (Watchmen, for one, and look, you may not like it, but Lost knew what threads it had out there and tied them up), but while I do love me some Tom King writing, we could be looking at Rorschach or we could be looking at The Human Target, and I’m concerned it’s the latter. That is, I’ve got a lot of ideas here, but it’s possible I’m overthinking it, there’s no grand conspiracy, Lianna’s a good guy, Sinestro’s just hanging out somewhere, and this is all going to end very simply. Human Target burned me that way; I’m hoping Lanterns doesn’t as well.
All right, have at it. Two more episodes to go.
Surely there are people looking for how to “get into” the Green Lantern books, and surely there are others out there who are saying “Geoff Johns run” because that is all they know, even as I would bet my own life that the people who love “Lanterns” on TV would not long want much of anything to do with Geoff Johns’s Green Lantern run.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if other readers would be as interested as I would be, here in the wake of the massive spike in interest in Green Lantern, to see you revisit all your Green Lantern reviews to synthesize some grand big picture overview of the character(s) (franchise(s)?) in collected editions. What have been the highs and lows for you in your own Green Lantern reading journey? What books do you think readers sadly overlook while they are hyper-fixated on others?
You’re under no such obligation, of course, but your blog is unique, to my knowledge, for how far back your reviews go, how thorough and how thoughtful your reviews are, and in the shear breadth of DC books you’ve covered. You’re more qualified than most to offer a more comprehensive sense of what all is out there.