Prior to James Gunn’s Superman, I’d had almost no exposure to Green Lantern. The Ryan Reynolds movie came out when I was six, and I’d been warned off it for most of my life, so I never engaged. I kept up with adaptation news, but never further than that. I knew nothing about the plot, barely the basics. I knew there were multiple Green Lanterns, but I didn’t realize the Lanterns were an agency, much less an intergalactic one. So I went into this completely blind. What surprised me was how little that mattered.
Lanterns on HBO Max is built for viewers with minimal Green Lantern knowledge, and the first episode lays out its worldbuilding cleanly. The mentor-mentee relationship becomes the delivery system: older, seasoned Green Lantern Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) and his eventual successor and trainee John Stewart (Aaron Pierre), with Jordan’s lessons to Stewart doubling as the show’s lessons to us. It characterizes them fast, too. Within the opening scene you get a sharp sense of who these two are, just from how they interact. How they respond to each other tells you who they are, both together and apart.
Some things do get hammered in. Characters keep asking John what he really thinks of Hal. But he answers before he speaks; it’s the quiet moments that tell you, the flashes of annoyance, admiration, and amusement crossing Pierre’s face as he reacts to the chaos Chandler brings. The character is all stoic intensity, but Pierre doesn’t play him as a blank. Chandler’s Jordan is a joy too, brash and arrogant, with a deep-rooted place of care underneath.
Stewart is guarded because he’s biding his time and wants to prove himself. Jordan is reckless because of how long he’s been doing this. He’s paid his dues, he knows the ropes, and he’s teetering on burnout. We’ve seen the reckless mentor and the tight-strung mentee before. What makes this one land is the energy both actors bring. For a newcomer, the two performances are the anchor. You don’t need to know the lore to understand who these two are.
The ensemble around them carries the show’s core sense of mystery. When the duo heads to Rushville, Nebraska to investigate possible alien activity, they land in a town full of secretive figures, especially the Macon family, who the two keep getting entangled with. The dynamics raise question after question. Who does William Macon work for? What’s the deal with Zoe? The Macons are going out of their way to insert themselves with the Lanterns, and their motive is one of the biggest mysteries the show plants.
The standout moment of the pilot, however, has little to do with them. It’s Hal Jordan’s interrogation of alien suspect Waylon Sanders, the scene the whole episode has been building toward. Chris McCoy is excellent as Sanders in the hot seat, and it’s the audience’s first look at Hal in his element, at how he handles extraterrestrial life. This one scene sets the stakes and shows the forces at play as Hal exposes and contains an alien threat.
It also pays off a choice the show makes all the way through. The ring mostly appears in small, trivial ways, and full use is saved for the moments that matter most: the open, the interrogation, the close. Holding that power back gives it weight when it lands, and it keeps you on edge waiting for it. The final scene jumps ahead rather than resolving, so you don’t get closure yet. The nonlinear structure is the smartest thing about the episode. It raises several mysteries at once while sketching the bigger picture, and it’s what will bring you back each week.
This is a slow bake. The pilot leaves you itching for more, and it drags in the middle, but the drag is the cost of being thorough for a new audience. It never babies you. It wants to be careful with characters and lore it knows are lesser known, and every piece of that lore arrives through a framing device that feels native to the story. Lanterns takes its time. Going in blind, I never once felt locked out.
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