Lanterns episode 2, "Trust Fall," ended with Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) suiting up and taking flight to pay a visit to his old mentor Sinestro (Ulrich Thomsen), who is now imprisoned in an intergalactic cell after betraying the Guardians of the Universe.
Jordan was looking for answers about the alien threat in Rushville and the presence of a Manhunter, but the manipulative villain winds up sowing the seeds of doubt in Hal's mind about his trainee John Stewart (Aaron Pierre).
“We didn’t really go into great detail with each other, but we did it by running it and running it and finding new things,” Chandler tells Entertainment Weekly. “The more and more that we did it, I found myself feeling more of a respect in that mentor-student thing because he gave me what I have, like him or not. There was almost like a father figure sitting in front of me.”
Showrunner Chris Mundy explains the decision to utilize Sinestro as the Hannibal Lecter to Jordan's Clarice, as it were, while revealing that this first season of Lanterns really doesn't have a "big bad."
We will definitely be seeing Sinestro again, and a flashback to the events that led to his villainous turn is possible, but those hoping for a jail break and a major climactic battle might be disappointed.
“We wanted him in the show just because of his place in the mythology. But by nature of the fact that we were telling a mystery more than we were telling a thriller, we don’t really have a big bad in the season. We have mysteries [where] there might be something malevolent behind them or not, and there’s a mystery of people’s identities or who did what, but it’s not ‘we’re fighting this bad guy, and he’s gonna destroy the world.’ So in this weird way, it freed us up. We could use him sparingly.”
EP Damon Lindelof felt it was important to include the GL Corps' most infamous and recognizable foe, but admits that they did consider leaving him out of this first season.
“You start from, ‘What if Sinestro isn’t in the show at all?’ And you just go, ‘Well, that feels wrong.’ Sometimes you can just let your guide be, ‘If I were watching the show and I wasn’t working on it, what’s the thing that would drive me the most nuts?’ and ‘What are the things that I expect? So once we fundamentally understood what the big emotional idea of the show was —which was that Hal was being expected to coach and train John in that kind of Training Day Denzel [Washington]-Ethan Hawke way, but he didn’t want to do it and he was being very curmudgeonly about it —it felt like there’s a very organic space for the person who trained Hal in this story.”
HBO in association with Warner Bros. Television and DC Studios. The pilot episode is co-written by Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof, and Tom King, who are co-creators for the series. Mundy serves as showrunner. The first two episodes are directed by James Hawes, with Stephen Williams, Geeta Vasant Patel, and Alik Sakharov also tapped to direct. The series is executive produced by Mundy, Lindelof, James Gunn, Peter Safran, King, Ron Schmidt, and Hawes. Based on the DC comic characters from Green Lantern.
The series stars Kyle Chandler, Aaron Pierre, Kelly Macdonald, Garret Dillahunt, Poorna Jagannathan, Laura Linney, Jason Ritter, Ulrich Thomsen, Nathan Fillion, J. Alphonse Nicholson, and Jasmine Cephas Jones.
The series follows new recruit John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) and Lantern legend Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler), two intergalactic cops drawn into a dark, earth-based mystery as they investigate a murder in the American heartland.