After a time-hopping pilot episode, Lanterns‘ second episode “Trust Fall”, on the surface, appears to be a bit more streamlined, splitting up Hal and John physically, rather than temporally. Despite that, “Trust Fall” is as dense and allusive as its first hour, an episode that spends a whole lot of time setting up another string of plot threads and core Green Lantern stories, in a way that feels less like typical layered, obtuse Lindelof fare, and more like the enthusiastically overstuffed Gunn-iverse material (like last year’s Superman). Regardless, it’s another moody hour of impeccably-scored, undersaturated vibes, anchored just enough to its lead pair of performances to keep the entire hour from feeling like an unnecessarily disjointed lore dump.
Set solely in 2016, “Trust Fall” splits up Hal and John for most of the episode, seemingly only to give itself a bit more room to introduce some of the larger arcs and characters sitting on the fringes of Lanterns‘ supposedly-grounded setting (though this episode does end with a costumed Hal Jordan taking off into space to visit Sinestro in an intergalactic prison, so the cat’s a bit out of the bag already there). After arguing over the nature of Hal’s “training” methods, he sends John back to his home (which is a massive mansion “given” to him) to retrieve his lantern – in turn freeing himself from the grasps of straight-edged Stewart, allowing him to both steal the dead alien bodies from the football game shooting, and subsequently get himself shot by Macon’s men while “trespassing” on their property.
Working on two separate tracks, “Trust Fall” has to rely less on the chemistry between its two leads (as it did so effectively in “Pilot”), and more on establishing some of the external energies bearing down on Jordan and Stewart at two different times in history. And where the first episode went to great lengths to explore the human dangers lying in the world of Lanterns past and present, “Trust Fall” takes a much more fantastical approach, as we get our first look at not one, not two, but three major antagonists of the Green Lantern universe.
How “Trust Fall” decides to split up the introductions of Sinestro and Atrocitus is perhaps the most interesting, allusive choice of the episode. After finding Jordan’s lantern (hidden in his pocket dimension safe, an insanely concept), Stewart is jumped by a group of ‘men’ (who turn out to be aliens of the “we can blow ourselves up” variety) who implant their memories into his brain as they pursue information about the presumed ‘manhunters’ lurking around Earth. Though he doesn’t introduce himself as such, the man’s hatred for the manhunters and Guardians is apparent, making him an obvious parallel to Atrocitus – the leader of the Red Corps, whose lanterns are powered, of course, by anger.
This makes perfect sense for Stewart’s character, someone who clearly bottles up so many emotions and traumas (and also gets a little prickly when Jordan doesn’t recognize his efforts); as we see with his barely contained rage when Jordan is “teaching” him to fly or not telling him what’s really going on in Rushville, Stewart is certainly someone who could be tempted by the consuming power of anger – which makes perfect sense why Atrocitus is introduced through him, while Jordan, the man afraid to retire or age significantly, pays a visit to Sinestro in his jail cell at the episode’s end.
Sinestro, leader of the Yellow Corps (powered by fear), represents everything Hal said with his eyes in “Pilot”; though a fighter pilot who is a beacon of unfettered confidence, Hal Jordan is still human, still someone capable of feeling fear about potentially leaving life with unresolved tensions or emotions – and as someone beginning to feel his age and the accumulation of conflicts and decisions on his shoulders, he’s clearly starting to notice the existential weight of his decades in the suit (which he outright refuses to wear to John, before utilizing it to go visit the man he himself imprisoned).
It’s also an interesting litmus test of Jordan’s moral compass; even though he’s defeated Sinestro, he’s still willing to go for him about information about these “manhunters”; a sign that possibly, at some point in time, Jordan even looked to Sinestro for guidance – possibly only to be led astray (either in the past or potentially in one of the show’s developing timelines) before realizing what he’d been an accomplice to. Either way, the brief tease of Jordan visiting Sinestro, which is about 30 seconds at the end of the episode, is a titulating concept (and not just because Sinestro is being played by Banshee‘s Ulrich Thomsen).
Unfortunately, introducing those elements – along with more complications like Hal and John both getting themselves tied up with the women immediately in William Macon’s orbit, a bit of narrative redundancy that feels unnecessary – is done a bit too slowly, which turns “Trust Fall” into a bit of a drag. It’s never for a lack of stimulus and interesting ideas; in fact, “Trust Fall” goes a bit hard in searching for those moments, letting scenes like Zoey and Hal’s interaction or John’s interrogation carry on longer than necessary to establish the concepts of trust, aggression, and response. It leads to some decreasing dramatic returns; there’s just a bit too much heavy-handed, allusive lore-dumping in the middle of these scenes without any dramatic release – which amounts to a lot of buildup for a show that is already through a quarter of its first season.
Although it is a bit languid in the moment, what Lanterns appears to be setting the tracks for is incredibly interesting, as the powers of fear and anger descend upon Rushville, where a paranoid population (fear of both the aliens and Hal’s presence remains palpable in the few scenes Rushville-ians are shown) is more than susceptible to the alluring, self-serving nature of both fear and anger. The parallels Lanterns are drawing to immigrants and right-wing enthusiasts are quite obvious, and prescient in the way that Lindelof loves and always makes incredibly tricky for himself to navigate – but it’s still an interesting, if somewhat superficial, way to weave together the dense, incredibly fantastical backstories of the Green Lantern universe with the equally (and increasingly) paranoid white nationalists sitting like a powder keg within the heart of Rushville, labeling everything that doesn’t look like them as a threat and a target. It’s clearly setting Lanterns on a crash course with mythical space-based, superpowered antagonists – and much more tactile, real dangers of those already on Hal and John’s Earth, who don’t need to be an alien to have their humanity stripped by the corruptive nature of fear, anger, and power.
Other thoughts/observations:
- “Jesus Christy Almighty. Unclench.”
- Ok, so Earl was the kind of Green Lantern weirdness I’m fully on board with seeing more of.
- How is this show going to do justice to everything it has introduced in two hours, with only six hours to go? I am genunely fascinated to see how.
- Interesting to see Hal take a bullet in 2016, after the reveal at the end of “Pilot”.
- So… obviously the green canary John constructs is important to understanding his character… are they saying he doesn’t need a ring to build constructs? Would that be an… extraterrestrial talent?
- Also, was that an actual Green Canary reference?
- Lanterns is… not doing a very convincing job of making Kerry seem like she actually loves her husband and family.
- Very interested to see how the Manhunters are depicted on Lanterns, if the series ever goes so far as to show them in their “true” form.