pervert alert: This story contains details of the season 1 finale Of lantern on hbo.
“are you afraid?”
In Sunday night’s Season 1 finale lantern, John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) finally got answers and his destiny as he spoke the words viewers have been waiting to hear all season. By the end of the episode Stewart not only accepts his role as Earth’s protector, but it also becomes clear why and for what reason Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) was murdered.
The finale begins with a flashback of Sheriff Kerry Kane (Kelly MacDonald) breaking Jordan out of prison after a 10-year sentence after pleading guilty to the fatal attack on Rushfield. This is also the beginning of their relationship, with Jordan worried about how the town will accept his return.
His instincts are correct as his house is set on fire, leaving Jordan for dead, who is rescued by Kane’s son Noah (Shea Pritchard), who is not only able to revive Jordan’s burnt skin, but reveals his secret that he, like his grandmother, is a Man Hunter.
Jump forward to the present day, where Stewart and Jordan’s hologram has captured Sinestro (Ulrich Thomson) on a desolate planet and reveals that he has created Noah a very powerful Lantern that could be very deadly in the wrong hands.
Back on Earth with the New Lantern in hand, Stewart is captured by Noah but is eventually released before Noah’s big football game, with the boy admitting that he killed the real Jordan after discovering his plans for the New Lantern. While watching the game, Stewart confronts Kerry about Jordan, eventually admitting that she panicked and killed Jordan when he asked her to go away with Noah to protect him from the Guardians.
Kerry asks to see the end of the game before turning herself in and Stewart suggests that Jordan would not want that before going their separate ways. In the final moments, Stewart tells Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion) that he is taking over as Earth’s protector and takes the oath of office, which, while rooted in the original, is a new twist for the show before he takes off.
The series’ creators and stars recently spoke about the show’s finale and future during a press conference.
When it came to the Jordan hologram, Chandler had an interesting perspective when it came to playing the real version of Jordan and the artificial version, and felt there was a patriarchal feeling in the way he handled the material.
Chandler said, “I saw the hologram as a young Hal looking at himself or a version of himself and subconsciously at that time how he was placed in that world.” “It’s almost like a father watching his son grow up. He’s watching himself, making these decisions, and yet he’s also having a conversation with himself at the same time. So it’s a little complicated and I communicated and did what I could to make it more complicated. So no one understood what I was doing and I thought maybe this could work.”
The running theme of not only the episode but the season is the idea of fear and how the characters handle it, and writer and co-creator Chris Mundy explained how as a writing team they approached that idea when writing the season finale.
“If you’re going to do this story, you’re going to talk about fear and is it a good thing? As Sinestro says in the finale, fear is just emotional intelligence,” Mundy says. “Show me a species without fear, and I’ll show you something on the extinction list. We wanted it to be a really human story, we wanted to talk about these people, who are very real, flawed or complex, who get to do these heroic things, and what would that really mean? And so it was important for us to embrace that and take that question really, really seriously.”
The final moments between Stewart and Jordan clearly hinted that this may be the last time the two share a scene together, and Pierre talked about how the scene came together after filming for so long, about how the characters feel about each other.
“We had filmed a lot by that time,” Pierre said. “Kyle and I are thinking that day about all the months that we filmed before that — it’s all going into this moment. It’s all so loaded and it feels earned and it feels deserved. And hopefully the audience is open and receptive to it and allows it to resonate in a different way.”
Fans of the original comics have certainly noticed the change to the famous Lantern slogan, and Mundy said the idea of changing or “remixing” it was related to the writer’s journey throughout the season and how it was meaningful to move in this direction by the end of the season.
Mundy said, “I know Justin, one of the writers, was like, OK, we’re not rewriting it, we’re remixing it.” “I think the idea was that we were kind of looking back at what we had done with the season and so John’s path was not the normal path. Ring didn’t choose him. He was interviewed. He was groomed for this. He had to choose this thing. Then he decided not to do it, and then decided he needed to do it on his own terms. And so, it felt like, we wanted to stay true to the original, and respect the original, as his version is implied. The OG version of it. We also wanted to modify it to talk about the topics we talked about, and the fear, and make it a choice that he was choosing this thing, not something that he was like, Oh, I’m doing this because my parents wanted me to do this, or I’m doing this because of these things.
As for everyone’s favorite pet plant Earl, not only are there signs that we’ll be seeing more of him next season, it seems like when it comes to toughness, he’s far more resilient than the man who feeds him.
“I think Earl is beautiful. Earl is quite resilient,” said co-creator and writer Damon Lindelof. “I imagine the galaxy’s plant life could grow its own skin.”