Warning: Spoilers ahead! Do not proceed unless you’ve watched the series premiere of “Lanterns.”
Light a lantern.
HBO’s superhero show “Lanterns” is a gritty, “True Detective”-flavored take on the same DC Comics source material as the terrible 2011 Ryan Reynolds movie, “The Green Lantern.”
On Sunday’s series premiere, the show kicked off with a bang.
The first episode ended by shockingly killing off its leading man, Kyle Chandler’s Hal Jordan.
The story is a superhero crime drama about Lanterns, which are essentially “space cops,” as the show explains.
Earth only has one “space cop” to protect everyone from intergalactic threats — Hal — but he also has a trainee, Aaron Pierre’s John Stewart.
Most of the series premiere follows Hal and John in 2016, as they investigate a case in Nebraska. At the end of the episode, text onscreen says that the year is now 2026.
In the present day, John finds Hal’s dead body sitting on bleachers in that same Nebraska town where they had their case a decade earlier. His cause of death is unclear.
Did “Lanterns” put Chandler on the posters and pretend he’s the star when he’s only in one episode — similar to what ABC did with Ryan Phillippe on the Season 1 premiere of “Big Sky” in 2020?
The bulk of the first episode is set in 2016, when Hal and John are conducting their initial probe into the case in Nebraska. There’s no reason to think the 2016 story is wrapped up by the end of the first episode.
In that timeline, the two men had more to investigate. Hal is alive and well until 2026.
So, with multiple timelines at play, odds are that Chandler isn’t only in one episode.
“Lanterns” is also a superhero show, where death isn’t always final. In the comics it’s based on, the character of Hal Jordan was originally created in 1959.
In a 1996 crossover event in DC Comics known as “The Final Night,” Hal dies. He was later brought back to life in 2004’s “Green Lantern: Rebirth.” (Hal has also been a villain in comics, but that’s another story.)
So, even in the show’s source material he has many evolutions — including death — and that hasn’t stopped his story from continuing, so there’s no real reason to suspect the same isn’t true for “Lanterns.”
“Lanterns” airs on HBO on Sundays at 9 p.m. ET and streams on HBO Max.
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