‘Lanterns’ cast praise Aaron Pierre’s John Stewart portrayal
The cast of “Lanterns” praised Aaron Pierre’s portrayal of John Stewart in the HBO superhero series.
Video Team – USA TODAY Entertainment
Spoiler alert! The following post discusses important plot points and the ending of the pilot of “Lanterns” (now streaming on HBO Max), so beware if you haven’t seen it yet.
Leave it to HBO to kill off one of its main superheroes in the premiere episode of “Lanterns.”
The DC universe drama (now streaming on HBO Max) centers on two members of the cosmic Green Lantern Corps, Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) and his younger trainee John Stewart (Aaron Pierre), as they travel to small-town Rushville, Nebraska, to investigate a suspicious murder scene.
By the end of the Aug. 16 episode’s first hour, however, there’s a whole new mystery to solve: Hal’s death, 10 years in the future. But because of the dual timelines – and Hal having a hologram of himself programmed into his Green Lantern power ring (aka the “Halogram”) – there’ll still be plenty of Chandler’s character to come in the next seven episodes.
Most of the pilot episode takes place in 2016, with Kyle being a reluctant mentor to John and testing the increasingly frustrated John whenever he can. Hal flies off to Rushville when he’s supposed to be giving John a lesson with his ring, and John soon joins him there at a football stadium where a couple of visiting fans are mysteriously killed.
Hal’s convinced there are aliens involved, John and the local sheriff Kerry (Macdonald) are more skeptical, but it turns out Hal’s right: When he’s interrogating a suspicious third man in jail, the guy blows himself up, with Hal containing the blast with his ring.
During their investigation, Hal and John cause friction amongst themselves and the Rushville populace, including local rancher William Macon (Garret Dillahunt) and his mysterious wife Zoe (Poorna Jagannathan). Then at the end of the episode, there’s a time jump to 2026 and an older John drives in to a snowy Rushville to meet up with Kerry to go into the same football stadium from before. There, Hal’s corpse is sitting in the stands, with a bloody nose and a fatal wound.
“I like seeing myself dead,” Chandler quips about the ending. Also, “I like the non-linear storytelling. It’s a hook with good bait on it to get the audience in there and say, ‘OK, well, what is all this? What’s going on here?’ I liked it from the get-go.”
“Lanterns” co-creator/executive producer Chris Mundy says he wanted to make a story from the beginning “about asking the question, what happened between these two men between these two time periods? You’re just working that emotional math in your head all along. Obviously, it’s the most meaningful thing we could do.”
He just hoped the bosses would buy it.
“We didn’t know when we floated the idea if people at HBO and DC would be like, ‘Great idea. No way,’” Mundy says. “But they were open to it. The show is immediately centered around these 2 guys and allowed us to sort of examine it in all sorts of ways.”