Lanterns Pilot Episode Review: HBO’s Lanterns has finally arrived, and the pilot is much more interested in making you sit with a murder mystery than immediately throwing you into a heavy superhero universe. Spanning 1996, 2016 and 2026, the episode introduces us to John Stewart (Aaron Pierre), veteran Lantern Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) and a strange little corner of Nebraska where an investigation might become much bigger than anyone expects.
The series follows John, a trainee, as he is paired with Hal, a very experienced Green Lantern. What begins as a shooting in Rushville turns into something unsettling: aliens, local power games and the question of how much Hal actually knows.
Lanterns Pilot Review: Lanterns Episode 1 Has A Surprisingly Strong Mystery at Its Centre
The smartest thing about the Lanterns pilot episode is that it does not immediately scream “superhero show” in your face. It feels like someone dropped two very different detectives into the centre of rural America and forgot to really tell the town that one of them has a magical green ring.
The Lanterns pilot episode moves between timelines, with 1996 giving us a young John Stewart watching Hal Jordan on television, 2016 forming the meat of the story and finally 2026 quietly setting the ground for a larger mystery. The structure could have easily become confusing, but the episode keeps each timeline structured and purposeful.
The 2016 storyline is where things click. Hal and John reach Rushville after a bizarre shooting, and what initially feels like another assignment slowly starts connecting to the strange history of the town itself. Hal has reasons to be suspicious while John is still figuring out what it really means to be a Lantern.
The investigation becomes increasingly uncomfortable as Sheriff Kerry Kane enters, followed by a local power player, Will Macon. Then there is the alien. Without giving every single beat, the Lanterns pilot episode eventually makes it very clear that the extraterrestrial element is not just some background imagination that will be conveniently forgotten later. Something is happening here which is potentially large.
The question stops being “who committed the murder” and transforms into, “what has Earth stumbled into?”
Hal Jordan And John Stewart Are The Real Hook
If the mystery gets you through the door, the Hal-John duo is the reason you really want to stay. Hal Jordan is impatient, arrogant and occasionally reckless and clearly operating under the assumption that he is the most experienced person in a full room. Kyle Chandler plays him with a wonderfully casual kind of confidence that makes Hal incredibly irritating and watchable at the same time.
He is not trying to make Hal likeable in the conventional sense. There is something really fun about watching a superhero who has no interest in behaving like a perfect superhero.
Aaron Pierre plays John with almost the opposite energy. John is controlled, observant and less interested in performing confidence. He has a military background, a complicated relationship with his father, and a very different understanding of fear.
The 1996 sequence involving little John and his father is particularly important because it establishes that this story is not simply about John learning to use the green ring. It is about the boy who has been taught about fear long before the Green Lantern ever entered his life.
Aaron Pierre understands that, and every look, pause, and slight shift in his expression does the work for him.
The Hal-John Dynamic Is Already Doing The Heavy Lifting
The Lanterns pilot episode knows exactly what it has in the Hal-John duo. Hal sees John as a trainee who needs to toughen up, and John sees Hal as an experienced Lantern who might be slightly too comfortable with his own legend. There is an obvious clash, which is fun to watch. They argue and approach the same problem with two different approaches.
Hal is instinctive; he believes in his “gut”, while John is observant and watches. Hal thinks he already understands the world, while John is still only trying to figure out where he fits into it. The differences make the partnership much more interesting than the standard “old cop young cop” dynamic.
Lanterns has a rural setting, mystery, uneasy partnership and the sense that something deeply wrong is hiding behind an otherwise ordinary-looking American town. There is Green Lantern: a ring, Lantern technology, aliens and some genuinely weird comic book material. The Lanterns pilot episode understands that the weirdness is also part of the larger fun.
Grounded But Not Boring
The pilot episode of Lanterns spends a lot of time allowing the American heartland to become part of the story. It does not feel like a random location where the writers have parked their mystery.
Will Malcon is another interesting puzzle piece here. His fear of extraterrestrial beings and preparations for an alien invasion initially make him look like a paranoid local eccentric one would expect in such a show, but whether he is onto something is yet to be revealed.
The “2026” In The Episode Is Something Else Completely
After spending most of the pilot episode of Lanterns in 2016, the show jumps to 2026, and suddenly everything one watched has a new frame. The entire spectacle, especially around Hal, makes the viewer question everything they watched and what they are yet to watch.
It is a bold move because Lanterns is essentially telling us that the story we thought we were watching is perhaps only half the story or even less, and the real part is yet to happen. I am considerably interested in knowing what happened in that one decade.
The Pilot Episode Seems Controlled Somehow
If there is one thing that holds back the episode, it is the way Lanterns sits. There is a muted aesthetic, slow-burn mystery and grounded conversation that work for most parts, but there are moments when you can almost see the show reminding you, “Look, we are not like other superhero shows!” It does not really need to do that.
The premise is already strange enough, and the best part in the pilot episode of Lanterns lets itself be weird in the best possible way. The moments involving the ring, alien technology and the broader ideas are not interruptions to the story, but they make the story different from every other murder mystery on television.
Final Verdict
Lanterns has a good pilot on its hands. It is grounded without stripping away the comic-book kind of weirdness, and the central mystery is strong enough to make the slower stretches worth it. Hal-John duo have the kind of dynamic that gives the series an emotional centre that goes beyond the cops, aliens and ring.
The timelines also give the story an intriguing sense of history. There is perhaps something that happened between these characters or with these characters, and the pilot is keeping us just outside the answer.
Lanterns maintaining the balance is the big elephant in the room right now because at present the show works best when it is allowed to be multiple things at once: a buddy-cop story, a small-town mystery and an unapologetically strange Green Lantern adventure. The combination is a chef’s kiss.
In the United States, Lanterns airs on HBO and streams on Max with new episodes weekly. You can also watch Lanterns on JioHotstar.
Also Read:
Lanterns Pilot Episode Review: A Murder Mystery With a Green Lantern Problem
Lanterns Episode 3 Review (Coming Soon)