Is ‘Lanterns’ setting up an alien threat? Episode 7 ending explained
‘Lanterns’ spent its first six episodes almost entirely on Earth, with Rushville, Nebraska, the site of Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler)’s murder. Apart from a brief appearance on Oa, where Sinestro (Ulrich Thomsen) sits in a space prison, the show’s aliens masquerade as humans. The Manhunters, the Guardians’ first police force, were the only extraterrestrials in the series not disguised as humans. Antaan (Paul Ben-Victor) tracked one of them, Zoe Macon (Poorna Jagannathan), to kill her in revenge for murdering his people. Now, Episode 7, for the first time, looks outside Earth’s system.
In the episode titled ‘The Jordan Boys Legacy,’ John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) and the Halogram, the manifestation of Hal’s memory in his ring, gain access to a voice-protected vault in Hal’s storage unit. They discover a dimensional portal sphere and a bag of equipment, including a canteen and a pistol. The sphere transports them to Antaan’s homeworld, which has an upside-down ghost town hovering over a desolate landscape. John recognizes the location, which his mind was imprinted with by Antaan’s henchmen in Episode 2, but the episode never mentions the planet’s name.
The gas Zoe released made the people of the planet commit violence and die by suicide by leaping out of the windows, and it lingered in the air and the water. While crossing the lake during a storm, John hallucinates his father and his younger self, but the hologram pulls him back into the boat. On an island, the duo finds a building that seems to be pumping the poison gas into the air. Inside, a hooded person grabs the hologram, and John knocks him out, revealing his identity as Sinestro. So does the episode set up an alien threat? Episode 7 does not reveal who released Sinestro from the Spacekaban prison, the escape Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion) told John about in Episode 6, or how he reached the planet. Instead, the Episode reveals that Hal kept a secret portal to the location where Sinestro was supposedly hiding. Furthermore, in the episode, Jordan’s killer remains unidentified.
The show’s creator, Chris Mundy, told EW in August that they did not have a big bad in the season. He noted that it allowed them to use Sinestro, one of the most prominent villains in the DC universe, more sparingly. “But by nature of the fact that we were telling a mystery more than we were telling a thriller, we don’t really have a big bad in the season. We have mysteries [where] there might be something malevolent behind them or not, and there’s a mystery of people’s identities or who did what, but it’s not ‘we’re fighting this bad guy, and he’s gonna destroy the world.’ So in this weird way, it freed us up. We could use him sparingly,” he said.
Sinestro was Hal’s mentor before the yellow power of fear consumed him, driving him to assist the villains of the universe in conquering the Guardians and waging a horrific war of conquest, resulting in his banishment from the Corps. Still, the new trailer focuses on the emotion of fear, which fuels the ‘Yellow Lantern Corps’ in the DC Comics universe. The finale was written by Mundy, Damon Lindelof, and Tom King, the trio who wrote the pilot episode. Episode 8, titled ‘Dirt and Stars,’ will premiere on Sunday, October 4, at 9 p.m. ET, on HBO and HBO Max.
