It all falls apart in “Lights Out”, a balls-to-the-wall episode of Lanterns that spares neither spectacle nor Lindelof weirdness, as it burns down Rushville (literally) and quietly sets the stage for the season’s final act. It’s an impressive hour, nimbly balancing the diverging emotional paths of Hal and John as the center of the much bigger, louder story of alien subterfuge happening around them, properly grounding itself in John’s ascension to the proverbial throne of Green Lantern – only for him to look upon the ruins around him and rightfully question whether it was all worth it.
Before that, “Lights Out” begins with a much bloodier examination of how far people will go in the interest of their own survival, beginning the hour with a 2007 flashback detailing Kerry’s introduction to both Rushville and Zoe, when the latter kills a couple of Gotham thugs who’ve cornered Kerry in a local diner. It’s a shared sense of desperation and purpose that bind Zoe and Kerry; there’s more than a little bit of religious fanaticism in Zoe’s approach to building Rushville, manipulating everyone into exposing their fears and weaknesses (knowing she has satellites across the city literally lording over the flock of exactly 1,000 people she’s build for herself), which sets the tone for the chaotic mind-fuck that ensues in 2016 when the Manhunter stages a final attempt to save her own life.
Before Zoe’s last stand can begin in 2016, though, there’s still the resolution of Hal’s choice at the end of “The Weenie”; and once Hal’s gone and the car blows up while Zoe watches closely, it’s pretty clear the buddy cop dynamic of the first few episodes is out the window. For all intents and purposes, Hal “compromising” John essentially kills him, saved from death only by his alien cyborg lover, who has been trading medical favors and protection for the constituents of Rushville for decades (including for her husband, who thanks her for the “extra time” he gave her, while he prepares for his impending death at the hands of Antaan and his people).
What I like about this scene is how it pulls at the underlying thread of humans vs. Manhunter, of the tension between two creatures defined by their fight to survive. After all, a Manhunter is but a program whose baseline instruction is “not die” (like if that Bryan Johnson guy who measures his semen output and injects his son’s blood invented a robot); how that manifests in Zoe, whose decades-long attempt to hide herself from her slightly genocidal creators, is one of the most interesting elements of the episode’s tension-building first half, especially when she reveals that to keep her survival secret, she killed the one person, Abin Sur, who was willing to save her from the wrath of the Guardians.
Zoe is certainly someone capable of compartmentalizing her emotions in ways the other characters of Lanterns aren’t (some might argue she doesn’t have any – I think that’s a bit unfair), sending her husband and much of the town to its death in what she’s almost accepted will be failed mission. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, in a way: though the exploding aliens certainly do their share of damage to Macon’s compound, it’s Zoe’s lasers firing on the people of Rushville that really accelerate the civilian body count of the hour (nothing demands fealty like shared sacrifice, amirite?), just like she’s willing to be John’s savior (with a drop of alien blood and some different space lasers), but only after she basically watches him die. Sex and violence are nothing but tools to a Manhunter, a brutal honesty built into their own programming we se beautifully realized through Zoe’s character, whose ability to twist and bend anything to suit her will remains her most impressive trait, right up to her final moment with Hal and John at the now-iconic (and now-flattened) Rushville motel.
Though this episode spends a lot of time following Hal as he tries to contain the chaos and send Antaan and Macon’s men after each other, it’s Zoe and John’s journeys to find their own path that form the foundation of “Lights Out”. Though they only share a pair of scenes together, Zoe and John’s (sometimes wordless) interactions speak volumes about two people trying to find themselves on their ‘destined’ path. We’ve spent all season watching John ascend to his “righteous” place as Earth’s Green Lantern – but as he sees in Zoe (and even Hal, to a degree), what happens to the good soldier when they are pushed off the path set for them? Those fundamental questions of purpose and destiny are built into the oath and path of the Lanterns, and rightfully questioned by John and Zoe, two creatures guided and molded by the Lanterns only to be used like pawns by them – something Hal certainly has experience with, being given his purpose by the Lanterns only to see it twisted by the Guardians and Sinestro all throughout his tenure.
“Lights Out” (written by Justin Britt-Gibson, whose credits include a few episodes of Banshee) explores this idea through its central trio, and lets it echo through its ensemble; characters like Kerry and her husband get a little bit less definition than Zoe and Macon, for example, but its real-world parallels to religious fanaticism, which end up with literal destruction from the heavens raining down on Rushville, are a strong sociopolitical current running underneath the stories of manipulative aliens, powerful cosmic rings, and emotional subterfuge that has defined the first five episodes of the series. And once it has torn it all down, and John finally walks over Zoe’s lifeless (and heartless) body and taken the ring he’s waited for decades to call his own, he realizes that he doesn’t feel pride or happiness or even anger at how it all played out; he just feels empty, eventually handing the ring back to Lianna in the closing moments of “Lights Out”.
Though an abundantly familiar ending, it is the next logical step of the hero’s journey, after all: with the journey behind him, John looks around and sees nothing but compromises and violence, begging the question of what he’s spent his entire life preparing himself for (the path of the modern athlete becomes a neat parallel here). John’s journey has defined him, but it has never really been about himself, whether it be his father’s hubris, Lianna’s manipulations, or Hal’s “leadership”, John’s journey has only had fleeting moments of authorship, which we see him find in his brief moments of artistry, the only time John gets to reflect on the world as he sees it, not through the lens of others and their own experiences. Getting the ring, which only comes after a knockdown fight with Hal the Relentless Punching Bag and putting a bullet into someone he truly cared for, is a clarifying “top of the mountain” moment for John – and when he weighs the actions and decisions he took to fulfill the promises and dreams of others, John quickly realizes what a dead man’s gambit he’s placed himself into.
So what does this mean for the rest of the series? Well, with neither John nor Hal having a visible ring in the brief flashes of 2026 we’ve seen, we know that the Guardians did not take well to this choice – and given Sinestro’s brief but powerful appearances, I’m willing to bet him and the concept of fear to factor heavily in the final hours of Lanterns as well. With three episodes left in the season (series?), it will be interesting to see how Lanterns performs its WandaVision-like shift away from a contained, small town story, into the intergalactic, operatic functions of the larger DCU (or if it will somehow manage to resist the forces of IP franchising as it explores the circumstances of Hal’s death); regardless of how it ends, however, “Lights Out” stands sturdily on its own two feet with its story of
Other thoughts/observations:
- bunch of weird shit going on in a Lindelof show? You just knew there was going to be a random shot of a dog just going about their day in the middle of it all. Love it.
- I see a lot of people talking online about how this “felt like a season finale”, which makes no sense to me. Yes, the Rushville story comes to an end; but at no point did Lanterns declare the 2016 storyline as the central narrative thrust of the series. So, is it just because it had a larger VFX budget than other episodes? Because while our brains have been trained that TV shows can only have explosions in season premieres or the last two episodes of the season, that’s not a requirement, and Lanterns has done nothing to suggest Zoe’s death was a resolving moment for the entire series.
- So many great notes with Hal in this episode, especially when he talks to his 2006 Hal-ogram; there’s such a chasm between the two versions of himself – and even though John isn’t there to see it, speaks to his decision later to reject the supposed destiny of acquiring the ring.
- The Hal/John fight scene is great, and again, gives so much texture to who Hal Jordan is in this world.
- “Let’s grow you a new pinky.” Poorna Jagannathan’s abundantly cool presence will be missed.
- Speaking of Zoe… is Lanterns setting up William’s son to kill Hal in 2026?
- Hal tries to convince Antaan that Macon is the Manhunter: “we were very coitus.”
- The sequence of Hal trying to see through the black mist-nullifying glasses was a slightly less effective version of what we see saw in A Knight of the Seven Kingdom‘s “In the Name of the Mother”.
- A great use of Bon Iver’s “Things Behind Things Behind Things” in the episode’s final minutes.
- The costuming for Laura Linney has been so great this season.
- The reveal that Antaan and Zoe had children together is… the kind of Lindelof-flavored nonsense I can get on board with. Weird and inexorably unnecessary, but gives their relationship such unique texture without needing an entire flashback episode to do it.
- William Macon might be a racist shitheel, but his Wife Guy energy is unmatched.
- “Everything that happens next is on you… are you willing to accept those consequences, Hal Jordan?”