The DCU may have hit a bit of a stumbling block earlier this year when the Supergirl movie failed to impress audiences, but the next piece of the franchise puzzle has arrived in the form of Lanterns, which already has fans buzzing. HBO Max debuted the first episode of the new series, billed as a True Detective-like series on Earth featuring two of the titular heroes, with Kyle Chandler as Hal Jordan and Aaron Pierre as John Stewart. Though Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner appeared in 2025’s Superman, meaning DC fans have gotten a taste of a DCU Green Lantern, the arrival of these two characters is huge for comic fans, as Jordan has been absent from live-action since the 2011 movie and John Stewart has never shown up beyond animation.
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To that end, Lanterns putting both of these characters into the DCU is a big move for the franchise and one that readers have been waiting on for a long time. The series has already answered some questions about how the characters fit into the larger franchise, including fresh details about where the characters fit into the DCU timeline itself, but the ending of the first episode revealed that fans can’t make assumptions. Lanterns has plenty of surprises up its sleeve, including in the last minute of the premiere…Spoilers follow.
Lanterns First Episode Ends With Massive DC Death
For the majority of Lanterns‘ first episode, save the opening sequence, the story is set in 2016, with John Stewart in the throes of his training with Hal to become the next Green Lantern. That training takes a turn, though, when the pair are forced to the town of Rushville, Nebraska, where a shooting at a sporting event has drawn the attention of Hal, convinced there’s something alien happening. At the end of the episode, though, there are two surprises.
The first is that the series leaps ahead another ten years to 2026, revealing that John Stewart has returned to Rushville and reunited with the local Sheriff (Kelly Macdonald), who has something to show him. As the pair return to the scene of the crime from ten years prior, they walk up the stairs at the football stadium, covered in snow, where Hal Jordan is seated. Frozen still, Jordan isn’t enjoying the view; he’s gone. Stewart brushes away Jordan’s knuckle to find it absent. The episode ends with one of the biggest DC heroes already dead right after making his DCU debut.
And that’s it. The episode ends with the discovery of Hal Jordan’s body and the absence of a Green Lantern ring on his finger. Naturally, with seven more episodes in Season 1 of Lanterns, there’s clearly more to the story than we can surmise from this moment, but Jordan’s death is a major shock, especially for comic readers waiting on him to get his proper due in live-action. That said, there’s got to be more to this story, right?
Is Lanterns Hiding a Twist With That Death? James Gunn Says No
The death of Hal Jordan presents two questions, of course, the first being: Who killed him? And the second: What happened to his ring? That second question also begs a third: Why doesn’t John Stewart have a ring? To wit, this makes it clear that we cannot just stop watching now, as the mystery of what happened is clearly something the show will explore over the first episode.
However, there’s a reason I’m not convinced that this Hal Jordan death is real, though, and it has everything to do with the absence of the ring. In the canon of DC Comics, when a Green Lantern dies, assuming they still have the ring, it immediately begins to seek out a new host worthy of wielding it. The fact that this appears not to have happened brings up a lot of questions about the status of Earth-bound Green Lanterns in 2026 in the DCU.
Someone killing Hal and taking his ring would mark a major departure from canon, because they simply would be unable to do it. The other potential here is that this may not even really be Hal; perhaps it’s some kind of alien copy created and positioned here as a statement to Stewart and the Sheriff that ties back into whatever happened back in 2016. That said, the DCU has clear rules about dead characters.
“In the DCU if you die, you’re dead,” James Gunn said last year. “I wouldn’t mind using the Lazarus Pit (and/or resurrection) in a story. But it would have to be a part of the story itself. I won’t be killing major characters just to pop them in the old LP to be alive again.”
To that end…maybe this is real and Hal Jordan is gone. Even if that’s true, though, comic book readers know that Hal Jordan has died and come back in the pages of DC Comics before. As a result, even with James Gunn’s insistence that death means dead, I can’t let go of the idea that this is real. Maybe it’s cope, considering the surprise ending and the fifteen-year wait for Hal Jordan in live-action, or maybe it’s over as soon as it started.
