Note: This story contains spoilers from “Lanterns” Episode 5.
“Lanterns” burned it all down in Episode 5, and there are still three hours left on the HBO show’s clock.
Sunday’s installment brought Hal (Kyle Chandler) and John’s (Aaron Pierre) 2016 investigation into the Manhunter’s dealings in Rushville to an explosive head – all while things reached a point of no return for the Green Lantern and his trainee. Hal abandoned John to take on Zoe/Manhunter (Poorna Jagannathan) and Macon (Garrett Dillahunt) himself, all while Antaan (Paul Ben-Victor) arrived in town to throw a wrench in everything.
Episode 5 director Geeta Vasant Patel told TheWrap that the fun from being a “semi-finale where there’s a lot of doors closed, and then a lot of doors opened” was in finding the character moments in the chaos, as Rushville was turned into a smoking ruin.
“The marching orders are always to make sure that amid the action, there are emotional arcs happening,” Patel said. “The action is a given. However, to create action that really is no different than a dramatic scene is always a challenge in these situations when there is so much physicality, and there are explosions and things like that. So my marching order was to execute character, and on some level, character is fate in this episode.”
She added: “It’s tricky when you have so much happening. I think it’s also tricky because you can’t just stop and have a deep conversation about how someone’s feeling. Episode 5 is a litmus test of all the episodes before it, making sure that something so small and quick actually speaks to a lifetime of experience and pain or discovery.”
Amid the Manhunter using airborne lasers to decimate Rushville’s main street, Antaan raiding Macon’s farm compound — and ripping out the man’s heart — and then Hal and Antaan fighting it out themselves, was the equally explosive confrontation between Hal and John. After the dust settled, John — who was burned and healed by the Manhunter while Hal rampaged through town — showed up at the motel and finally confronted the Green Lantern.
The duo didn’t fight with powers, but as regular people. Hal took quite a beating that ended with John finally taking the ring and lantern for himself. Patel considered the scene her favorite of the entire explosive episode, because it cut to the core of the two central characters and the larger story they were telling.
“I looked at it with Kyle, and we started thinking, wait a minute, let’s think about ‘Cool Hand Luke,’” Patel said. “Let’s think about what this means exactly? Who is Hal? Hal is someone who never gives up, and that is his number one blessing and curse. So we talked about how, as the fight goes on, that’s what is going on with Hal. He’d rather die with his arms swinging than go down, and he provokes John, so those last moments where Hal keeps getting up — and then John has his own history there — it’s like two countries fighting. They both press the buttons, because John is tired of being lied to. John is tired of being told what to do, and I think at that moment when Hal doesn’t sit down and stop, he triggers John, and now it’s not about Hal versus John. It’s Hal versus his pain and John versus his pain, and that’s what those last hits are about.”
She added: “It was an awesome fight, but I stood there and I was like, ‘There’s something missing,’ and I remember thinking Hal can’t fight like this. Hal is not 50-50 with John. But do we just lean into it? I remember calling Kyle and being like, ‘Hey, don’t hate me, I don’t know you that well, but what do you think of this?’ And immediately he was like, ‘I was thinking the same thing. He should kick my ass.’ We want the fans to feel like it’s real. It shouldn’t feel like fantasy. It shouldn’t feel like a superhero. He should feel like a man.”
John took the ring and lantern for himself and won the fight — at least physically. The days in Rushville, from the pestering from Hal to his time spent with Zoe before her betrayal, have clearly taken a toll. Zoe arrived at the motel to find Hal in the wreckage of his old room before realizing John laid a trap. She turned in time to see him set up with a rifle and after a moment’s hesitation put one between her eyes and ended the Manhunter threat.
John then took a long walk through the destroyed town to report to the Guardian (Laura Linney). It’s in that walk where Patel said Hal’s last words to him — “was it worth it?” — rattle in his head. Which leads him to make the shocking choice that brings a close to the 2016 storyline: he gives the Guardian Hal’s ring and says he doesn’t want any part of the Corps.
“I think that rings in John’s ears the entire way, and that’s why wanted to have that long walk,” Patel said. “We decided that the long walk was going to be through the rubble through the wreckage as a metaphor for John taking survey of everything in his life. So when he’s walking through the wreckage, and then he has this moment where he turns around and looks back, and there’s only half of his face there. That is the moment where we were thinking, he is a broken man. This is all that’s left of him. He’s looking back – ‘No, I’m not going back. I’m not becoming the person I’ve been. I’m going to be someone else.’”
“Lanterns” airs Sundays on HBO and HBO Max.
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