Lanterns Ending Explained: Who Killed Hal Jordan? Is John A Yellow Lantern? And Other Questions, Answered

If there’s one show I would recommend to every Esquire India reader this season, it would undoubtedly be DC’s Lanterns, now streaming on JioHotstar. Besides being a superhero show made for people who aren’t into all that superhero gizmo, it’s also a profound study of what it is to be a father, a mentor, and more than anything, a man in today’s world.

But all this rumination is food for a different article. Here we break down the absolute nuts of an ending that was Lanterns episode eight. Read on.

Created by Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof and Tom King, Lanterns is a Midwestern buddy-cop murder mystery set in the DC universe. 

The story runs on two timelines. In 2016, a grizzled Hal Jordan (played by a charismatic Kyle Chandler) reluctantly trains John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) to replace him. Now, John is an ex-Marine who was practically raised to be a machine to inherit the ring (his mother was promised the role by the Guardians of the ring when John’s father didn’t make the cut; turns out, aliens are not as fluent in racism as humans are). The main criteria to be a Green Lantern: be fearless. We’ll come back to this later.

So Jordan and Stewart are solving a case in Rushville, Nebraska, when it spirals into an alien problem. An alien figure called the Manhunter hides in plain sight, and the Guardians' hired muscle comes looking for her. As this case spirals out of control, Sheriff Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald) can only watch as the two big-shot Lanterns and their alien target trample her town like grass on a sidewalk.

Then we jump to 2026. Being a Lantern is such a controversial idea now that the Guardians have appointed the affable Guy Gardner to improve the hero’s image. Hal has spent at least four years in prison. John has given up on his dreams of being a Lantern (or so we think). 

Anyway, John returns to Rushville one day and finds Hal dead in the snowy stands, shot in the forehead, his ring missing. John secretly takes the ring for himself. He summons a hologram (a Halogram, if you please) of his old mentor’s consciousness from 2008 and works the case with a dead man as his partner. 

Episode 7 ends with John and the Halogram stepping through a portal hidden in Hal's storage vault, and the finale spends a long stretch on the other side. If you've read the Green Lantern comics, you'd know yellow is the colour of fear (as opposed to Hal’s green, the colour of will). 

The planet is the wrecked homeworld of Antaan, the Guardians' hired hitman who chased Manhunters all season. Zoe is the reason it looks like this. She had caused a gas-induced mass panic that made everyone kill each other. This gas still hangs in the clouds and the water. An island holds a building that appears to keep pumping the poison into the air.

So why does Hal own a portal to a place like this? According to Hal’s mentor, the fugitive Sinestro (Ulrich Thomsen), Zoe had built this portal. Noah, being – surprise!– a manhunter, had inherited access from her. After Noah saved Hal's life, Hal followed him, found the portal and decided it needed to be locked away. 

When John finally meets Sinestro on the yellow planet, the alien admits that Noah freed him from jail and had asked him to forge a lantern and ring for himself. The fear gas was supposed to be the raw material for this new ring, made to run on terror.

At this point, John's ring is almost out of charge, and if he charges it with the fear lantern, he would be infected by it, too. Also, it'll be the end of Halogram.

Before you dismiss it as ridiculous, remember: the previous Manhunter (Zoe) had saved Kane when she came from Gotham City, but why, we were never clearly told. Being the only one of her species, Zoe had wanted to ensure her kind survived, which led to Noah’s birth. 

Except that Noah does not have the impulse to plunder and loot like a typical Manhunter. In fact, he wants nothing to do with the race. He attacks John when he and Halogram return to Earth, but all this is only to make him think that he killed Hal. 

The truth is, Noah saved Hal’s life when a firebomb gutted his new home. John points out that saving a life is the opposite of Manhunter programming, but even then, Noah requests John to kill him as a precaution. John, being John, refuses to do it.

Sheriff Kerry Kane did it.

Wait, didn’t Kane love Hal? Yes, but there’s more to the story here. Hal had learned that Kerry's son, Noah, is a Manhunter. In stead of killing the young man, he approached her at the stadium with a plan for the two to escape. However, the Sheriff killed Hal out of panic, and she regretted it instantly. When John finds out, Noah takes the blame, telling him he is the killer. John works out the truth and confronts Kerry about it.

Yes. Here's how. John's ring is nearly drained by the end of the episode. The only available battery is the lantern Sinestro built from fear energy (the legitimate Green Lantern, Guy, doesn’t know about any of this, okay?). After some hesitation and a very pointed objection from Hal's Halogram, John charges up anyway. 

So now, John is an independent, unsanctioned Earth Lantern. But more than anything, he is finally free of the fear of killing innocents and losing his loved ones, which till now had stopped him from claiming Hal’s ring as his own. 

And in cruel twist of fate, John Stewart, the ex-Marine who had been raised to be the fearless Lantern, writes his own version of the Green Lantern oath, replacing will with fear. In fact, fear and terror are what power him now. Say hi to the first Yellow Lantern of this universe. 

Plot twist: they’re the bad guys in the comics.