Ryan Kirksey
The following recap contains spoilers for Lanterns S1E7 “The Jordan Boys’ Legacy” (written by Damon Lindelof & Tom King and directed by Alik Sakharov)
Is the “Whodunit?” the most important mystery in Lanterns? After Episode 7, I would strongly argue that “why-they-dun-it” is a much larger and more important mystery than who pulled the trigger on the cold bleachers in Rushville.
For much of its first season, Lanterns has been a murder mystery built into a superhero show. Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) and John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) came to Nebraska based on a comment Halogram said to John, only to uncover something much larger lurking beneath the surface. Now, with only one episode remaining in the season, the show is still drowning in mysteries that don’t have Hal’s murderer at the end of the path. That seems more like the beginning of the road.
We know Hal Jordan dies in 2026. We know John Stewart is somehow connected to what happened. What we still do not know is who actually killed Hal, turning the final stretch of Lanterns into a cosmic whodunit.
“Who killed Hal Jordan?” is quickly becoming only a part of the mystery. There is an equally important question sitting right beside it. Why? Why does Hal die? Is John involved? Is Sheriff Kane (Kelly Macdonald)? Why has Sinestro suddenly become such an important piece of the story? And how do the Manhunters, the Guardians, and the destruction we witnessed in 2016 connect to a murder that is still 10 years away? Every answer Lanterns gives us seems to create two more questions, and what once looked like a relatively contained mystery in Nebraska is beginning to feel like the opening chapter of a much more complex book.
That may ultimately be the most interesting thing about where Lanterns finds itself heading into Episode 7. The show is still asking us to solve a murder, but Sinestro, the Manhunters, planetary death, the future of the Green Lantern Corps, Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion) and whatever fallout happens between Hal and John are beginning to collide.
1975
“The Jordan Boys’ Legacy” takes us all the way back to 1975, where young Hal is already showing the stubbornness that will eventually make him both a great Green Lantern and an incredibly difficult mentor for John. Hal apparently pitched a fantastic baseball game when his coach tried to take him out. Hal refuses to surrender the ball, his teammates turn on him, and the game eventually has to be forfeited. When Martin Jordan (Hal’s father, played by Jake B. Miller) arrives, he doesn’t exactly play the parenting role the coach was expecting. Once Martin hears how well Hal was pitching, he essentially sides with his son and winds up fighting the coach himself.
It is a funny scene, but it’s also important. Hal and his father do not just believe he can finish the job. They believe he is the ONLY person who can finish it. Martin believes that if Hal still had his stuff working, that’s all that mattered.
Sitting together at Martin’s military base afterward, he gives Hal a key to a safe containing the things he considers most important. It is a tradition passed down through the Jordan men, something Martin calls the “Jordan boys’ legacy.” But Martin also looks at the baseball Hal is still clutching and tells him to throw it away. You cannot hold onto everything forever. Eventually, carrying something like that becomes exhausting, no matter how good you are.
And it’s here we learn why Hal believes all those years later that he is the one who must hold the ring, and is so opposed to the idea of someone taking it away.
Next, we see Hal attending Martin’s military funeral, which transitions straight into the Halogram staring into a grave containing his own body, picking up where we left off in Episode 6.
2026
The Halogram is still the younger Hal John knew years ago, preserved from the last time Hal backed him up, which we learned in the pilot that might be around sometime in 2006. He initially assumes John became Earth’s Green Lantern, because he has the ring, only for John to explain that he did not take the ring and is instead trying to solve Hal’s murder.
First, John needs him to open the vault inside Hal’s storage unit, which we learned last week requires voice identification. Halogram refuses, insisting that he wants to speak with the sheriff. John knows that is a terrible idea, and has to spell it out for Halogram. The Hal who created this backup did not know Kerry Kane, much less know that his older self would eventually fall in love with her. Still, Halogram refuses to cooperate until he gets to meet her.
That brings John and Halogram back to Rushville, where basically the entire town has gathered for Noah Macon’s hat ceremony. Noah (Shea Pritchard) is supposed to announce where he will play quarterback in college, but instead delays his decision until after Rushville’s championship game that night against Chadron.* It is a brief detour from John’s investigation, although considering how important Noah and the Macon family have become to this story, it certainly does not feel accidental that Lanterns keeps putting him in our path.
(*Speaking as someone from Texas who has been involved in Friday night lights for decades, I just need a moment to state how preposterous this scene is. First, it is VERY unlikely a kid from an extremely small, rural high school is going to go play quarterback for Michigan, Nebraska, or even Navy. I know James Van Der Beek in Varsity Blues clouds our judgment, but quarterbacks for big programs come from big schools.
Just in some quick research, the current starting quarterbacks for Michigan, Navy, and Nebraska come from high schools with enrollment of roughly 1,700, 2,800, and 1,000. The latest available census for real-world Rushville, Nebraska is about 900 total people.
The second point. If this were to actually happen for Noah—like he is a true outlier talent (or a Manhunter)—this would be the biggest thing the town has even seen for a kid. The idea that Noah would cancel this event in the middle of it and wait until after the championship game is pretty absurd. Plus, the regular football signing period usually begins in February, so the season would have been over by then.
I’m sure Coach Eric Taylor would agree with me on all of this.)
The more relevant reunion comes afterward, when John introduces Kane to Halogram. Kane is looking at the face of the man she loved after burying him just the day before. Halogram is looking at a stranger. He has none of Hal’s memories of their relationship because those memories had not happened when this version of him was created. Kane can touch him and hear his voice, but she can’t get the Hal back who loved her.
Halogram does learn something important from the encounter, however. He immediately becomes suspicious of Kane. If she knew Hal better than almost anyone, perhaps she also knew what happened to him. That convinces Halogram to finally open the vault with John (but, probably importantly, not with Kane), where they find hiking equipment, a gun, and something much more interesting. Hal had hidden the means to create an Einstein-Rosen bridge, essentially a doorway connecting two distant points in the universe. Of course, they walk right through it.
For a show that spent so much of its first season making the Green Lantern mythology feel grounded, this is where Lanterns becomes much more cosmic. John emerges on another planet and eventually discovers an entire dead city. He recognizes it from the visions Antaan showed him after John’s kidnapping. This must be Antaan’s homeworld, and whatever happened here appears connected to the Manhunters. John concludes that someone searching for a Manhunter came to this planet, only for the Manhunter to unleash a weapon that caused the population to kill themselves.
John and Halogram take a boat across a lake, and John begins experiencing terrifying visions. Halogram disappears. A storm rolls in. John sees his father with an apple balanced on his head and eventually finds himself holding a gun. Reality begins distorting things until John is in danger of doing exactly what everyone else on this planet apparently did. Halogram reappears in time to save him, and he tells John he found him holding a gun to his head.
This discovery opens up the door for Halogram to tell John more of the story about his father and what caused his death. Martin Jordan did not die the way Hal allowed everyone to believe.
After his father’s death, Hal opened the safe Martin had entrusted to him. Inside were important things like money and photographs, but also a note explaining the pain Martin had been carrying for years. Worse, Martin had once opened his own father’s safe and found essentially the same thing. This was the real Jordan boys’ legacy. Not flying or fearlessness. But rather it’s pain that fathers hid from everyone except their sons, passing the burden from one generation to another and expecting the next Jordan boy to carry it.
All of a sudden we know a lot more about Hal. His obsession with appearing fearless was never necessarily proof that he did not experience fear. As Halogram puts it, “I’m not fearless ’cause I’m brave. I’m fearless cause I’m broken.”
Now Hal begins to put some other pieces together. What if Hal was not murdered at all? Halogram wonders whether the older Hal ultimately died by suicide and Kane covered up the truth, protecting Hal’s secret just as Hal protected Martin’s and Martin protected his own father’s. What Halogram was probably looking for in the vault was his version of the note Hal wrote.
But even after all of that discovery, and kicking open more doors to the mystery of Hal’s death, Lanterns drops has one more surprise.
John and Halogram reach a mysterious structure on the other side of the lake, only to be ambushed by a cloaked stranger who captures Halogram and demands John’s ring. John uses the Halogram’s temporary nature to his advantage, making him disappear long enough to attack this person. When they finally uncover the man’s face, it is Sinestro (Ulrich Thomsen).
Sinestro’s return ties another major thread directly into Hal’s final investigation. We already knew Sinestro escaped imprisonment, but finding him on this particular planet is more interesting than knowing he is free. Sinestro, Hal’s mysterious portal, Antaan’s destroyed homeworld, the Manhunters, and Hal’s death are now all connected. Whatever Hal discovered before he died appears to have taken him directly into something even much larger than Rushville.
1975
The closing scene takes us back to 1975 after Martin Jordan’s funeral. Earlier, Martin told Hal to throw the baseball away because nobody can carry something forever. Young Hal listened to him then. But after losing his father, he goes back and finds it.
This could be the most important thing we have ever learned about Hal Jordan. He can try to throw something away, or avoid it, or push it aside. He just cannot leave it there.
Hal spends his adult life picking the ball (or rather, the Green Lantern ring) back up. He believes that no matter how heavy or exhausting something becomes, he is still the person who has to carry it. The same quality that makes Hal Jordan heroic is also the thing that makes him despise John Stewart and his arrival as a potential replacement so much.
How will this stubbornness and never-quit attitude affect the Season 1 finale next week? It should be thrilling to see, so we will see you here next Sunday night!
