Lanterns has never been interested in easy mythmaking. Episode 6, “Bad Optics,” proves it again. After the fiery 2016 climax of last week’s installment, the series jumps a full decade and lands in 2026 with purpose. What could have felt like a reset instead becomes one of the season’s most grounded and emotionally precise hours: a story about what happens after the light goes out, who pays the price, and what a Green Lantern is worth when the ring is gone.
The hour opens with John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) in Midway City, now a successful architect pitching massive underground shelters with his brother. The world has Superheroes now. Metropolis has Superman. Midway does not. John’s proposal is practical, a little cynical, and entirely in character: cities without a flying savior still need somewhere to hide. Then the call comes from Sheriff Kerry Kane. Hal Jordan is dead.
That image—Hal’s body on the snow-covered bleachers, ring missing—has hung over the series since the pilot. “Bad Optics” finally sits with it. The autopsy is clinical and chilling: a single 9mm round, close range, the shooter looking him in the face. Hal did not fight back. John, who last saw him hours earlier in a diner conversation thick with old wounds and unfinished business, says almost nothing. Kyle Chandler makes those final living minutes count. Ten years of prison, failed atonement in Rushville, and a tentative romance with Kerry sit in his voice and posture. The scene is small. It is also the episode’s best piece of acting.
Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner arrives like a living punchline who still has to do the job. Former gym teacher… sorry, athletic director, turned Earth’s current Green Lantern, image-conscious, tactless, and already famous from James Gunn’s Superman, Guy refuses to investigate the murder because it would be “bad optics.” He is not wrong, and the show is smart enough not to make him a cartoon. His scenes with Pierre crackle. John wants Hal buried in the uniform with the ring. Guy can get the ring from Oa. The funeral that follows—tiny, awkward, attended by John, Kerry, and Carol Ferris—is bleakly funny and unexpectedly moving. John reading Hal’s self-written eulogy is the kind of specific, human detail this series does better than most superhero television.
Then John does what the show has been training him to do: he acts in the dark. After the mourners leave, he digs up the grave, takes the low-charge ring, and summons the holographic backup stored inside it. The Halogram’s first words—“God damn it”—are perfect. Chandler is not gone. The ring is not just jewelry. John needs Hal’s actual voice to open a vault, and the series has just given itself a new engine without cheapening the death.
“Bad Optics” works because it treats consequence as the story. Rushville still hates the Lanterns. The signal John lights next to the town memorial is not received as hope; it is received as insult. Maggie, the girl who watched John take the ring in 2016, is all grown up and ready to collect. Sinestro has escaped the space prison Guy nicknames “Spazkaban.” The wider DCU is suddenly in the room—Superman’s Metropolis, Batman’s signal, Midway City—without turning the hour into a trailer. Director Stephen Williams and writers Justin Britt-Gibson and Damon Lindelof keep the tone consistent: dusty, moral, a little mean, and strangely tender.
Pierre continues to carry the series. His John is no longer the eager recruit. He is a man who walked away from the ring, built a life, and is now being pulled back by grief, guilt, and unfinished business he will not name. Fillion’s Guy is a welcome injection of comic-book swagger that the show had earned the right to use. Chandler’s work, both living and holographic, remains the emotional center.
This is not a flashy episode. It is a necessary one. Lanterns has spent five hours showing how power arrives and how it destroys. Episode 6 asks what you do with the wreckage. The answer, so far, is messy, human, and worth following into the final two hours. The mystery of who killed Hal Jordan is still open. The more interesting question is what John Stewart is willing to become to find out.
Lanterns airs Sundays on HBO and streams on HBO Max. Episode 7 arrives September 27.
