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There’s no doubt that Lanterns has been a big success for DC and HBO. The series successfully restored faith in James Gunn’s DCU after the misfire that was Supergirl. It also established a pivotal new hero in Aaron Pierre’s John Stewart, paving the way for the newly minted Green Lantern to appear in Gunn’s Man of Tomorrow.
While HBO has yet to formally greenlight Lanterns Season 2, it sounds like work is already well underway on writing the next season. That said, the prospect of more Lanterns has us feeling mixed emotions. As much as we want more of the series, we also recognize that it needs to profoundly change in Season 2. Here’s why Lanterns can’t simply deliver more of the same when it returns.
Can Lanterns Work Without Kyle Chandler’s Hal Jordan?
Most Lanterns fans would probably agree that the show’s biggest selling point throughout Season 1 was the dynamic between Pierre’s John and Kyle Chandler’s Hal Jordan. Seeing the idealistic young John butt heads with the cantankerous, grizzled Hal never gets old. The DCU’s casting game has really been on-point so far, and nowhere is that more true than with the two Lanterns leads.
There’s just one problem - the show killed off half of that all-important equation. The series premiere closed with the reveal that Hal had been murdered in 2026. Thanks to the frequent flashbacks and the presence of Hal’s holographic backup (or “Halogram”), Season 1 still managed to feature the character prominently in most episodes.
But that likely won’t be the case for Season 2. The season finale delivers a final death for Hal when John finally claims the ring for himself and recharges it. The act of becoming a Green Lantern purges all traces of Hal’s consciousness from the ring. John has now embraced his heroic destiny, but that leaves him without his grumpy mentor going forward.
That’s a major issue for the series. Again, the central conflict between Hal and John was a huge driving force of Season 1 and the biggest reason to tune in each and every week. As it stands, the series lagged a bit in Episode 6 when Chandler stepped out of the spotlight. How can Lanterns hope to move forward when Chandler will presumably be out of the picture entirely? How can it fill that void?
Given how stoic and composed John is, he really needs a partner who can serve as a foil and fill those quiet spaces with emotion. If Hal Jordan can’t be that foil any longer, then someone else needs to rise to the challenge. Maybe that involves making Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner a more active member of the cast. I’d certainly like to see that dysfunctional relationship explored now that John has effectively muscled his way into taking over jurisdiction of Earth.
Or maybe the series needs to flip the script and turn John into the mentor to another aspiring Lantern. The comics certainly have no shortage of potential candidates, from Kyle Rayner to Jo Mullein to Simon Baz. Given John’s status as a Lantern who embraces fear rather than suppresses it, I’d be particularly interested in seeing him shepherd Jessica Cruz, a Lantern struggling to overcome her crippling anxiety disorder.
It’s also worth pointing out that the series did leave itself a couple of outs when it comes to bringing back Hal. For one thing, a lot has been made of John’s ability to create constructs that persist even when he’s not wearing the ring. Is it possible that the Halogram could continue to exist even after the ring itself is purged?
For another, Sinestro (Ulrich Thomsen) specifically tells John in Episode 8 that he knows a way to resurrect Hal. That revelation is never followed up, but it could be a seed for Season 2. Some fans have speculated that Sinestro is working to establish his corps of Yellow Lanterns and intends to resurrect Hal as the host for the fear entity Parallax. It would certainly be interesting to see Hal return not as the grumpy elder statesman, but as a full-blown villain waging war on the Green Lantern Corps (a thing that actually happened in the comics).
One thing is clear. However the revamped writers’ room opts to move forward in Season 2, they can’t simply coast by with the same formula that made Season 1 such a hit. Either a new character needs to step up to fill the hole left by Hal, or Hal himself needs to return in a very different form. As great as the Hal/John dynamic in Season 1 was, the series can’t simply move forward with more of the same.
From Murder Mystery to Superhero Adventure
On that note, the original Lanterns announcement turned a lot of heads when it was revealed that the series wouldn’t be a traditional Green Lantern adaptation, but a murder mystery set on Earth. Not everyone was thrilled at the prospect of a Green Lantern show that shares more in common with the likes of True Detective than the sci-fi-infused source material. And while Season 1 made a pretty strong case for that approach in the end, there are still those yearning for a more faithful Green Lantern adventure.
Season 2 needs to throw a bone to those fans. It’s not enough to simply replicate the formula of Season 1. Lanterns can’t settle simply for pairing John with a new trainee and forcing them to unravel a conspiracy in another small town. Doing so will only make the series feel stale and force Season 2 to exist in the shadow of its predecessor.
And ultimately, Season 1’s murder mystery wasn’t really where the show found its appeal. It only worked because that mystery provided the perfect vehicle for John to chafe against his upbringing and learn how to be a hero who embraces fear rather than ignores it. That arc is done. Now it’s time to see what happens when John becomes the hero he was always meant to be.
Ultimately, Season 1’s murder mystery wasn’t really where the show found its appeal.
That means the series needs to lean more into the larger-than-life Green Lantern elements that Season 1 downplayed so much. Yes, we suspect the ethos of the show will always reflect Hal’s line, “Knowing when to use [the ring] is the whole ballgame, Junior.” But the time has come to let that ring shine a little more. We need to see the Green Lantern in action and exploring his amazing new powers.
Granted, that’s going to present some steep challenges for the show to overcome. As much as the grounded, Earth-centric approach of Season 1 was a dramatic and stylistic choice, it was also one borne of practicality. It’s not cheap to build a show around a cosmic superhero who can literally create anything his mind can envision. There’s a reason the show’s various alien characters almost invariably opted to disguise themselves as humans.
It’s enough to make you wonder if the path forward for this franchise shouldn’t be more television, but a pivot to a big-budget film. We will get a taste of that when Pierre reprises his role in 2027’s Man of Tomorrow. But for better or worse, John’s path in the DCU seems to involve more small-screen adventures.
This means there’s a delicate balance the writers of Season 2 will have to strike. They need to find ways of capturing the scope of John’s new lot in life. He’s a Green Lantern in the prime of his career, not an embittered, aging old kook turning over rocks in a remote Nebraskan town. At the same time, the show has to build a storyline that’s feasible and doable on an HBO budget. Not an easy task.
Focusing on Ulrich Thomsen’s Sinestro
I suspect the path forward for Lanterns is going to involve elevating a minor figure from Season 1. The time has come for Sinestro to abandon his role as the show’s Hannibal Lecter-esque figure and step fully into the forefront. As it is, I found Season 1’s lack of focus on Sinestro a little frustrating, but there’s certainly room to make up for lost time in Season 2.
As it is, a lot of Season 1’s loose ends seem to revolve around Sinestro in one way or another. He formed an alliance of sorts with Noah (Shea Pritchard), a character whom we now know is the universe’s last surviving Manhunter. Noah now seems trapped on a precipice, unsure of whether he should give in to his programming and wage war on the Guardians or become the force for good John believes he can be. There’s also the aforementioned tease that Sinestro knows how to resurrect Hal.
Right now, the character is trapped in a very literal form of limbo, still marooned on the dead alien world where John and the Halogram found him. But that can easily change. Season 2 can and should explore what happens when Sinestro is finally freed and resumes his own campaign against the Guardians.
Season 1 alluded to a rich history between Sinestro and Hal. We know the two were very close, right up until the day Sinestro launched an uprising against the Guardians and Hal was forced to rein in his old mentor. That act seemingly broke Hal in a profound way, and he was never the same afterward.
But for all that Sinestro is the most pivotal Green Lantern villain in the comics, there’s a lot that the DCU has yet to delve into. This version of Sinestro is only beginning to appreciate the power of fear. We don’t know if he’s managed to forge a Yellow Lantern ring yet, much less spearhead the creation of an entire Corps. It’s high time we see the Sinestro Corps in live-action.
Ultimately, if Lanterns is in need of a character to fill the void left by Hal, maybe Sinestro is the right man for the job. We have a sense of the powerful bond that linked Sinestro and Hal, but what about Sinestro and John? Are they destined to be enemies, or is there a sort of kinship that exists, given that John himself is willing to embrace fear? And how does Noah fit into this growing rivalry? If there’s a path forward for Lanterns, Sinestro may be the one to light the way.
What do you want to see out of Lanterns Season 2? Let us know in the comments below.
For more on Lanterns, see IGN's interview with Pierre, Chandler, and the executive producers.
Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on BlueSky.
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