'Lanterns' Releases New Trailer Following Premiere's Major Cliffhanger

This post contains SPOILERS for the series premiere of LanternsLanterns, the first live-action TV show set in the new DC Universe created by James Gunn and Peter Safran, has premiered on HBO. The show follows long-time Green Lantern Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler), who can use his power ring to create anything he wants. He’s training prospective Green Lantern John Stewart (Aaron Pierre), but as we saw in the series premiere, the two are often at odds.

Things come to a surprising head at the end of the episode, the bulk of which is set in 2016 as Hal and John investigate a mass shooting that may be a front for extraterrestrial activity. In the closing minutes, we jump forward to 2026, where John returns to the small town of Rushville, Nebraska in the dead of winter to find Hal’s frozen body in the bleachers overlooking the high school football field. Hal’s ring is gone.

That said, we’ll still see plenty of Hal in the remaining seven episodes of the season; like the HBO series True Detective, it looks like Lanterns will skip back and forth between different timelines. Hal is all over a new trailer that gives us a taste of what’s in store in the weeks ahead:

The trailer also gives us glimpses of important guest stars and plot turns. Nathan Fillion shows up as the Green Lantern Guy Gardner, a role he first played in 2025’s Superman. Laura Linney appears as one of the Guardians, the beings who created the Green Lantern Corps in the first place. “What do you think of Hal Jordan?” she asks John. His reply foreshadows more tension between them: “I don’t think about him.”

We also get a brief look at the Green Lantern villain Sinestro (Ulrich Thomsen), although we saw more of him in the full season trailer. The “Weeks Ahead” trailer also mentions the Manhunters, a group of villainous androids who are being set up as one of the main threats for the season.

The trailer reveals little about who or what could be behind Hal’s death. For that, we’ll have to watch. “Whether it’s the right cliffhanger or not is basically in the hands of the audience now,” Lanterns co-creator Damon Lindelof told Variety. “But one of the very first things that was part of the premise was that this is a murder mystery with Green Lantern solving it, and then you sort of start at, ‘Well, who gets murdered and why are we supposed to care about them?’ The more that we talked about it, the more that it kept coming back to the idea of, ‘What if it was one of them?'”

For his part, Kyle Chandler “cheered” when he read the twist in the script. “Not just for the storyline and all that, but what a way great way to end the first episode of this show,” he said. And Pierre teased more tantalizing cliffhangers to come:

“They leave you — ‘want’ doesn’t even feel like a strong enough word. It’s needing to know what happens next. I imagine there are going to be a few weeks where audiences are, in the healthiest, most excitable way, furious that they don’t know what is coming next.”

New episodes of Lanterns air on HBO and stream on HBO Max on Sunday nights. The first season has eight episodes in all. HBO hasn’t officially renewed the show for a second season yet, but there are encouraging signs.