Lanterns Episode 5: There Can Only Be One

The newest episode of Lanterns feels more akin to a penultimate episode rather than the fifth out of eight. Episode 5 had a lot of work to do wrapping up the 2016 plot threads and character arcs, especially confronting the disconnect between Hal and John that has been heating up until reaching its boiling point at the end of Episode 4.

Warning: Spoilers for Lanterns’ fifth episode included in this review.

A confrontation with Zoe, who was revealed to be the disguised manhunter last episode, is long overdue. The episode doesn’t pull its punches with the action, sending both Hal and Antaan’s team on a path of destruction against the local militia. The action is strong throughout the episode, but something about it feels very domestic.

Antaan’s teams are vengeful aliens with technology advanced enough to traverse worlds, yet their only tool is self-detonation (not hard to see the source of that idea), while Zoe is a powerful shape-shifting android who remains in human form and uses a human pistol rather than any of the advanced sci-fi weaponry the show could have introduced here. Zoe’s laser firing satellites serve as an excellent tool to blow up the show’s set and enhance the action, but it’s also a reminder that a generic gun would probably be one of the least effective weapons she could’ve come up with.

Aside from the action, the episode’s focus is much more centered on its characters and the culmination of their journeys up to this point. Hal is a broken man by the end of episode 5, and if John puts on the ring, he’ll break himself too. He sees what Hal has brutally been forced to see, that the Guardians are users plain and simple. They used Hal, and now they want to toss him away. John Stewart has spent his whole life being used, first by his parents, then by the military, and finally by the guardians who have been the source of the internalized trauma that has been his entire life.

Further, John’s rejection of the ring is him narratively overcoming the fear of not being chosen to reject something that would’ve cost him his sense of self and his own values. The ring going to neither Hal nor John is the icing on the cake. Both of them do and don’t deserve the power ring by the end of the first five episodes. The only way to give the viewer any closure at all is to give neither of them the ring.

The episode’s production budget seems nearly twice that of the previous 4. Hal is throwing around constructs to save people, Zoe is launching orbital strikes, and alien tech is used to restore John’s body. All of the special effects look flawless on the screen, clearly showing a marriage of the editing and set production departments, in which the characters act out flawlessly.