This post contains SPOILERS for Lanterns Episode 4The first season of Lanterns, HBO’s new series about the Green Lantern Corps, is now halfway over. The third episode, “OutKast,” was a slow-burning hour focused on building out the backstory for Green Lantern-in-training John Stewart (Aaron Pierre). The newest episode, “The Weenie,” moves much faster and ends with a scene that may have surprised viewers at home.
Both John and his supervisor Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) have been under pressure to turn on each other. The Guardians of the Universe, the alien beings who created the Green Lantern Corps, want John to replace Hal Jordan and are pushing him to seize Hal’s Power Ring for himself. Meanwhile, the scheming Sinestro (Ulrich Thomsen) encourages Hal Jordan to either kill John Stewart or, barring that, to disgrace him in the eyes of the Guardians.
John and Hal are still in Rushville, Nebraska looking for a Manhunter, a highly dangerous android that can take the form of anyone it wants. Things come to a head in the final scene. Hal knows that the Guardians want John to replace him, but also knows that John isn’t acting on their advice; he can forgive John whatever scheming he did on that score. However, he can’t forgive John for concealing the identity of the Manhunter from him: it’s Zoe Macon (Poorna Jagannathan), John’s love interest and the wife of the influential Will Macon (Garret Dillahunt). At the end of the episode, Hal jumps out of the car he’s driving and lets it plow into a telephone pole, with John still buckled into the passenger seat.
Episode writer Breannah Gibson talked through Hal’s actions on a new episode of Lanterns: The Official Podcast, saying what Hal does at the end shows him at his “most selfish.”
He knows that John knows it’s Zoe. And then John lies. That’s it for him. I think that’s the final straw. And he’s like, ‘Sinestro was right,’ which is a crazy thing for him to ever say.
Of course, Sinestro isn’t giving Hal advice out of the goodness of his heart; Sinestro is in prison after he failed to take over the Green Lantern Corps, and his former protégé Hal helped put him behind bars. He has a bigger plan.
“Sinestro is his teacher, and it doesn’t matter how much older you get, somebody that you used to look up to, that mentored you, has the power to manipulate you and trick you into doing things for their bidding,” Gibson said. “Where Sinestro tells Hal, ‘Use John, be vulnerable in front of him to get him close to you, and then you can betray him and find out who the Manhunter is and use that Manhunter as leverage to get on the Guardians’ good side. Obviously, Sinestro’s saying that to him because he’s like, ‘I can’t have you not be the Green Lantern anymore. Who’s gonna break me out of this jail eventually?’ He’s setting up the dominoes.”
He doesn’t give a s**t about Hal Jordan or John Stewart, really. He wants to get out of jail. And he’s saying that transparently. John wholly underestimates Hal in this moment, and he pays for it because he’s hurt Hal so much that Hal reverts to this super-selfish nature, feels immediately hurt, and John’s doing the same thing to him that he did to Sinestro.
In DC Comics, there’s a storyline where Hal Jordan becomes the villain Parallax, and it feels like Lanterns could be setting up that kind of turn for the character. “So he’s got to wrap this car around a tree and jump out, fly away, and he’s going to now implement Sinestro’s plan,” Gibson teased.
Will Hal follow through on this transformation? New episodes of Lanterns air Sunday nights at 9:00 p.m. EST on HBO and HBO Max.
- Release Date
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August 16, 2026
- Network
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HBO
- Showrunner
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Chris Mundy
- Directors
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Alik Sakharov, James Hawes, Stephen Williams, Geeta Patel
- Writers
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Damon Lindelof, Chris Mundy, Tom King, Vanessa Baden Kelly, Justin Britt-Gibson, Breannah Gibson
