Our episode 5 piece used the phrase "character assassination" about what Lanterns has been doing to Hal Jordan. With more than ninety comments, that apparently struck a nerve, and the argument is still raging in our comment section.
This week a rumor started making the rounds saying DC Studios wants to fast-track a Green Lantern movie off the back of the show. It traces back to a single anonymous social media account, and nobody at DC or Warner Bros. has said a word about it, so it was reported, correctly, as a rumor.
Those two things aren't sitting quite right with me, so I've been trying to work out what DC Studios is up to, and I think I may be onto something.
Kyle Chandler's Hal Jordan has spent this season as the older, compromised half of the partnership, and the show keeps stacking things against him. Chandler was asked about the episode 5 shocker this week and we ran his answer: 'I could care less for [SPOILER]. I did my job.'
For a lot of readers, Hal IS Green Lantern. He's the one from the comic books and cartoons that they grew up with. The one who's already had a movie, and everybody agreed to forget that it ever existed. Watching the first live-action project since 2011 to put Hal back on screen turn him into the problem stings a bit, and KineticAce's comment on our piece summed up the mood: "Hal is still a better character than John. Real comic fans know."
I don't completely agree with the second half of their statement, but I get the feeling underneath!
Breaking Hal Jordan has been the character's whole modern story. Emerald Twilight turned him into Parallax and DC spent a decade living with it before Geoff Johns brought him back in Green Lantern: Rebirth by revealing Parallax had been a fear entity possessing him all along. Even the comics' fix was to say he never really fell. Either way, the character's modern story is a comeback after being broken.
As a rumor, it means the industry is reading this show as a win. And if that's true, DC is going all in while their most famous Lantern is at his lowest point on screen. Is that because they're confident, or are they making a mistake? I'm leaning towards confidence.
The show has been more careful than the weekly reaction gives it credit for. Episode 6's teaser has John investigating the death and the story leaving the 2016 timeline behind, so the Hal we've been judging thus far is the version from 2016. That's assuming that the teaser isn't pulling the wool over our eyes.
A story that goes back in time and shows you how somebody became broken is usually building towards something big, like showing not only how they get fixed, but how they were improved.
If the season ends with Hal still broken and no gesture toward a recovery, then the complaints in our comments turn out to have been early rather than wrong, and DC will have spent its first big Lantern outing in fifteen years with its most famous Lantern a pale showdown of what he could have been.
Lanterns is the only reason anyone is even talking about another Green Lantern movie. Whatever it has done to Hal in the short term, it made this corner of the DC Universe viable again after 2011's Green Lantern sent the property into a decade of false starts, with a Corps movie and a whole HBO Max series developed and dropped before this one made it to air. Aaron Pierre's John Stewart has carried a lot of it. DC gave the show over to him and made Hal the complication, and apparently that's the version of the property a new movie is being built upon.
If Hal walks out of this season damaged but standing, and a movie really does pick him up from there, do the last five episodes change anything for you? Which Lantern are you a fan of, Hal or John?
Sound off in the comments below!
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