Fans were expecting Lanterns to take a completely new turn after the massive Hal Jordan cliffhanger at the end of its sophomore episode. Contrary to how everything unfolded in episode 1, episode 2 begins right where things left off in 2016 and is set entirely in this timeline. The show doesn’t seem to be leaning too much towards discussing the Green Lantern’s death in the last episode
Lanterns episode 2 is all about uncovering a threat that may be above even Hal Jordan’s pay grade. The episode opens with Hal trying to train John to fly, but he only ends up conjuring a small bird. Hal then hands John a plane ticket to his home to retrieve his lantern since the ring is running out of battery.
John seems disappointed because Hal had already booked the ticket, which meant he didn’t believe that John could fly. What’s weirder is the fact that even when Hal takes the ring, the bird doesn’t disappear, and he doesn’t find it remotely outlandish. With John out of the way, Hal continues his investigation and uncovers something big in the quaint little town.
Hal is convinced there’s something bigger going on
After John leaves, Hal goes back to the football field to study the scene of the crime. He notices that the metal detectors set at the entrance aren’t going off when metal passes through them. He then makes his way through the town hall, where Sheriff Kerry is leading a meeting with the townspeople. There, he notices that the metal detector at the entrance also doesn’t go off.
At the meeting, it seems obvious that no one in the town wants Hal Jordan to stick around, which he finds odd. He tries to talk to Kerry, but he gets shut down, and that’s when her husband arrives. He informs Hal that the charges against him were dropped, but Hal is the least bit interested in the law.
He questions Tommy about how he’s not curious that his father’s men shot four aliens, and one that got away blew himself up. He also finds it strange that they have metal detectors that don’t work and expects Hal to think that nothing is out of the ordinary.
When Hal doesn’t get his answers, he decides to look for them on his own. He breaks into the morgue and steals the bodies of the dead aliens. He drives them all the way to the stadium and drags the corpses through the metal detectors. Seeing the detectors react to the bodies, Hal confirms his doubts, but his success doesn’t last long. As he’s driving around town with four bodies sitting in his car, he is stopped by Sheriff Kerry, who seems flabbergasted over Hal’s dismissing her authority.
John learns the truth about Rushville
Back at Hal’s home, John is blown away by the fact that Hal owns a luxury mansion. Hal explains that some rich guy bought him the house as a way to repay him for saving his son. He asks John to look through the closet for the lantern, but he finds something else there as well. John grabs one of Hal’s Green Lantern uniforms from the closet and asks if he should bring one along.
Hal refuses, and it confuses both John and the audience about why he has been so reluctant to wear his superhero identity with pride. John looks at the uniform in the mirror and instantly imagines himself wearing one. However, he jolts himself back to reality and grabs the lantern from a vault as per Hal’s instruction.
John also feeds Hal’s alien-like plant some bison meat and laughs about his choice in pets. As he’s about to leave, someone grabs him from behind and knocks him out. The next time John wakes up, he finds himself at the back of a van with a bunch of strangers. As he comes to, John’s bird helps him escape the men, but he gets knocked out by another oncoming car and blacks out.
John later wakes up in an empty building, tied to a chair. He sees a man sitting in front of him who apologizes for all the violence. However, instead of explaining why he kidnapped John, the man seems more interested in the bird. He inquires how Hal Jordan continues to project the bird from such a great distance.
John replies that it’s he who is projecting the bird, and that amazes the man since John isn’t wearing the ring. When the man sees that John isn’t too thrilled to answer questions about the bird, he straight out asks him what he knows about the Manhunters.
The question makes John annoyed because he understands that his kidnappers think he knows something about Manhunters when he has no idea what’s going on. He gets even more on edge when the man implies that he’s supposed to know about them given he’s “close” to Hal Jordan. Of course, John brushes off the close part, and the man finally understands that John has indeed no idea about Manhunters or what’s going on in Rushville.
What’s more, John also discovers that his captors aren’t human and that they wasted all their efforts in capturing him when he has no information to offer. That’s when the man reveals that he actually wants to recruit John to help them against one of the most dangerous beings ever to exist, and he is also aware that its cover has been blown and it’s preparing for a response.
John assumes that he’s talking about the Manhunter, and it has something to do with what went down in Rushville. The man explains that Manhunters are synthetic beings that came way before the Green Lantern Corps. These beings can take the form of any species, making them virtually undetectable. They have the unique ability to construct that allows them to build technology beyond the limits of the planet they occupy.
The Manhunters were supposed to carry out justice, but they became brutal and ended up wiping out entire species, including his own. The man explains that the Manhunters soon disappeared as mysteriously as they arrived, but unfortunately, one remained on their planet. It disguised itself as one of them and embedded itself in society, all the while planning a holocaust.
The man uses a device of some kind to project the memories of the devastation caused on his plant in John’s brain. He tells John to experience the jab of deceit caused by someone you love, and he instantly winces in pain. The device causes him to see what the Manhunter did to his captor's people, and he warns John that he’ll do the same to theirs if it continues to exist.
He continues to explain that the Manhunter’s atrocities caught the attention of the Guardians, and a Green Lantern was sent to deal with the monster. It was taken into custody, and the Lantern guaranteed that the being would be executed. However, they didn’t believe that the Manhunter was gone and continued to search for it.
It turns out that after years of searching, they found that the Manhunter was in Rushville. That’s when it all starts to come into place for John as the man tells him that there’s radiation unique to the Manunter, but they’d have to get close enough to make out where it comes from, since it can be disguised as any human.
However, his team was exposed, and they were the aliens killed at the football game. He further adds that it seemed odd that Hal Jordan would arrive an hour later at the scene. The man lays it out for John that they cannot enter Rushville undetected, but they wouldn’t blink twice before blowing up Rushville if it meant the end of the Manhunter.
He simply wants John to go back to Rushville and identify the Manhunter within 48 hours because the monster can be killed in the form it has taken, and in this case, it can be killed as a human. John questions how he’s supposed to do all that without any powers, to which the man responds that he should look at his bird and how he has achieved the impossible.
He doesn’t give John more than that and informs him that he is supposed to contact them once he has located the Manhunter, or else they’ll blow up the town regardless of the losses.
Hal’s instinct lands him in trouble
Back in the town, Hal is busted as Kerry caught him red-handed with the alien bodies. However, Hal insists that he has a bad feeling about the town and that something is happening here. He accuses Kerry of knowing about the alien detectors despite saying otherwise.
Kerry tells Hal that it’s not against the law to be paranoid, and she can’t do anything about her father-in-law’s obsession with aliens. Unfortunately, when she fails to convince Hal to stay away from Macon, she suggests that she’ll take Hal, but he must let her do the talking. He agrees, but as soon as they arrive at the ranch, he starts running his mouth.
Hal accuses Macon of hiding something on his property, and that’s why he wants him gone. He also points out that the alien detectors he has set up all over town are too sophisticated to be human technology. Macon replies by stating that his paranoia is justified because if they are unprepared for invasions, they’ll be colonized like the settlers before them.
Macon tries to end the conversation by stating the obvious — he got the technology and the property from his benefactor. He can’t tell anything more than that because of the NDAs, but that’s not enough for Hal. He tries to aggravate the situation and ends up getting shot in the arm by one of Macon’s men.
Hal later wakes up at the hospital with Sheriff Kerry at his side. She explains to him that he’s fine but ends up asking about Sinestro. Hal’s face changes instantly upon hearing the name, and he asks Kerry why she wanted to know about Sinestro. She says Hal was saying the name in his sleep, but he shoots her down by claiming he’s not authorized to speak about it.
However, Kerry cheekily pulls information about Sinestro from the web, saying he was one of the Lanterns who staged a coup against the Corps and even killed one of the bosses. It was eventually Hal who took him down, but he dismisses her, claiming he doesn’t talk about it.
But one thing he does realize is that he has been handcuffed to the bed. He looks at Kerry with annoyance, but in her defense, Hal has been nothing more than a menace to her and her authority as a sheriff. He trampled all over her, and she doesn’t appreciate him running around rogue.
She explains that undermining her only gives Macon more power, and that’s something she doesn’t want for her town. She eventually releases him but asks for his word that he will not go behind her back and obstruct her from doing her work. She confesses that she knows there are aliens involved, but she doesn’t want to fuel the narrative of a full-fledged invasion.
Hal explains that he’s still in town because he can feel that something is wrong but does question why Kerry wants him gone. She tells him that she also feels something bad is going to happen, but Hal’s behavior isn’t helping the situation.
The two eventually make up, and as Hal is signing off from the hospital, he notices there’s only his name on the sheet. He looks around and finds no other patients in the hospital except for himself. As the two walk through the corridors, Hal asks Kerry where she's from, and she replies Gotham. She moved to town on a whim but doesn’t dive into the details of her story.
However, Hal can’t shake the feeling that there’s something off about this town. He notices all the equipment in the hospital is brand new and hasn’t been unpacked, which is extremely unusual. He asks the sheriff about it, and she brushes it off, saying people here aren’t as stupid as Hal to get shot, but the answer doesn’t seem to satisfy him.
John arrives back at town by nightfall, and as he’s grabbing coffee, he comes across William Macon’s wife. Although he is reluctant at first, John asks her about her story and what led her to marry a man as weird and obsessed as William. She simply replies that she loves him, and he can give her the life most men can’t. Their relationship is complicated, but it works, but their conversation leads John to question his.
Hal is sitting outside the motel when John arrives with the lantern. The two talk about Hal getting shot as he charges the ring by speaking the Green Lantern oath. When he’s done, he insists that they stick around to uncover what William Macon is hiding, and for a second, John is tempted to walk away, but he decides to lay it all out for Hal.
He straight out asks Hal about the Manhunters, and his expressions turn grim instantly. John tells him the rest of the story about how he was abducted and asked to identify the Manhunter before the aliens blow up Nebraska. Hal inquires why the aliens want to know about Manhunters, to which John replies that they think the Guardians hid one on Earth.
Hal doesn’t agree, saying that it was impossible, but thinks that it could be possible that Abin Sur brought the Manhunter here, but he was later killed by it. John still thinks Hal knows more than he’s letting on, but his inquiries annoy Hal, who thinks it’s above John’s pay grade to discuss such matters. But John insists that if the aliens trusted him to fulfill this mission, then there must be something about him.
He mentions how the man said that creating and sustaining a living thing without a ring is so advanced that it’s almost impossible. However, if that were the case, Hal would have at least appreciated him a bit. At this point, things get awkward between them, and Hal refrains from commenting further. However, he’s curious about the intention behind creating the bird, but John affirms it’s just a bird, and nothing more.
John retires for the day, but Hal has other plans. He wears the suit John brought despite his protests and blasts into outer space. He travels to another world and flies into a large icy crevice that seems like a prison of sorts. He gains access to a cell and walks into it, and inside sits a familiar figure.
Hal calls the iconic pink-skinned villain Sinestro and demands information about Manhunters. Sinestro seems unfazed at the mention of the Manhunter and goes as far as ranking it the second biggest threat he may currently be facing. Shockingly, the next person Sinestro mentions is John Stewart, implying that he might be the greatest threat Hal has to face.
Lanterns episode 3 airs Sunday, Aug. 30, on HBO and HBO Max.
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