LANTERNS Stars Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre Break Down Hal Jordan’s Painful Family Legacy

HBO’s Lanterns delivered one of its best episodes yet with its penultimate chapter, digging into the damaged psyche of Hal Jordan while finally giving John Stewart a clearer picture of the man he’s spent much of the series trying to understand.

The episode also brought Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre back together in an unexpected way, pushed the mystery into some wild cosmic territory, and ended with Sinestro waiting in the wings. There’s a lot happening here, but the emotional material between Hal and John is what makes the episode hit.

Things kick off in 1975 with young Hal getting into trouble with his baseball coach because he refuses to give up the ball. It’s a small moment that immediately feels familiar. Hal has always had trouble letting go, trusting others, and accepting that he doesn’t have to carry everything himself.

Back in the present, John exhumes Hal’s body to recover his decommissioned power ring. The ring activates the Halogram, giving John a version of his dead partner who can help him open the lockbox hidden inside the storage unit.

What they find is considerably stranger than whatever John probably expected with a dark matter manhole leading to another planet.

Even after Hal’s death, these two somehow end up working together again. Pierre explained the strange bond between Hal and John with a pretty great analogy:

“We used to describe each other as these characters, like two dogs who lived in the same household, who, at home, they would maybe fight and tear each other apart, but when they were going for maybe a walk, and another dog entered the equation, bam, they were a unit, and there was nothing you could do to to to disrupt or destroy that unit.

“They become dangerous when they’re together. The dynamic is unbreakable, and as soon as they’re on their own, they’re tearing each other down and apart.”

That relationship has been one of the strongest parts of Lanterns. Chandler and Pierre play Hal and John as two guys who can irritate the hell out of each other, yet when things go sideways, there’s a level of trust between them that doesn’t require either man to admit it.

Their trip through the dark matter passage takes them to a deserted world that has already been destroyed. John figures out they’ve landed on Anton’s planet, where the Manhunter systematically wiped out the population.

There’s a problem with having Hal back, though. The Halogram is missing roughly a decade of memories. John originally returned to Rushville after his mother told him Hal was ready to apologize for everything he’d done. Instead, John found him dead. Now he’s talking to a version of Hal who doesn’t even know what he’s supposed to be sorry for.

Pierre says John’s understanding of Hal has constantly shifted as he learns more about him: “I think his understanding of who Hal is certainly evolves over the course of the series.

“It’s almost like throughout these episodes, John is putting together a puzzle, but the puzzle is 1000 pieces, and sometimes elements of that puzzle form before others, and he thinks he has an understanding of exactly who Hal is, and then he formulates another part of the puzzle, and that conflicts with what he thought he understood, and it’s an ongoing thing.”

That process becomes much more personal when John is exposed to the same gas that drove Anton’s people to kill themselves. The Halogram ultimately saves him, but the experience also opens the door to the most revealing conversation we’ve had about Hal all season.

The 1975 flashback isn’t simply there to show us that Hal was a stubborn kid. We learn about his difficult relationship with his father and discover that his father died by suicide. Because he had been a test pilot, people accepted his death without questioning it.

Hal was left with a note from his father telling him that he’d be better off without him. What followed was years of pain that Hal carried into adulthood, part of a destructive pattern that had run through generations of his family, something he describes as the Jordan boys’ legacy.

The Halogram tells John: “I’m not fearless because I’m brave. I’m fearless because I’m broken.”

It’s a powerful piece of character development because it changes the context around so much of Hal’s behavior. His fearlessness isn’t presented as the uncomplicated superhero trait it might initially appear to be. It comes from something painful that Hal has never really escaped.

This is where the latest episode of Lanterns really shines. The series has its cosmic mysteries, Green Lantern mythology, strange planets and looming threats, but it’s willing to spend time examining the people carrying those rings. Chandler has been terrific at giving Hal an abrasive edge while allowing glimpses of everything the character keeps buried.

Earlier in the episode, Kerry, played by Kelly Macdonald, also gives John another piece of the Hal puzzle. She reveals that Hal once compared his trainee to someone’s favorite football team: impossible to root against, but incredibly frustrating to stay loyal to.

Chandler says details like that gave him important material to build Hal around: “That’s not information that someone just throws in there. That’s a detailed storyline that is also meant to manipulate an audience’s emotions and bring them that much closer into the whole story,” Chandler said.

“That’s another great thing about this whole show is that there are those fence posts along the way, and they’re pretty detailed. You don’t miss them in scripts, and you can build around those things as an actor too.”

The episode does a great job connecting those character details without overexplaining them. Hal remains a complicated guy, but John finally has enough pieces to understand what has been driving him.

Then Lanterns reminds us that there’s still a finale coming. Hal and John discover that they aren’t alone on the ruined planet. Sinestro has been hiding there, bringing the episode to a killer ending and putting another major piece on the board before the final chapter.

Pierre isn’t giving away what happens next, but he does tease where John’s relationship with Hal eventually lands:

“I won’t reveal the end, but once we get very near to the end, at least, he has this immense respect and appreciation for Hal, and if if nothing else, I think even Hal knows that he could trust John with his life, and John knows that he could trust Hal with his.”

Pierre continued: “You don’t always need to love each other for that to be a truth, and I think that’s something that this series explores. But interestingly enough, speaking on that love element, I think that there is a very there’s a very sincere respect and and a mutual brotherly love there between the two of them,” Pierre continued.

“I think a truth that John understood at a certain point in the series [is that] he’s never gonna fully know Hal, but what he can do is understand who Hal is fundamentally at his core, at least. He may never understand all of the nuances of who this individual is, but he can discover who this man is at his core.

“And once that curiosity was satisfied, I think he was very at peace with everything that the two of them had been through — the highs, the lows, the inbetweens, the moments that felt like purgatory. I think he just he just finds peace with it, because he knows who this individual is at his core, no matter what decoration or nuances surround it.”

That complicated brotherhood has become the heart of Lanterns. Hal and John don’t need to suddenly become best friends or erase everything that happened between them. Their connection works because it’s messy, frustrating and earned.

After spending much of the season asking John to figure out what Hal did, this episode finally asks him to understand who Hal was. That makes the mystery more personal heading into the finale, especially now that Sinestro has entered the picture.

If Lanterns can carry the character work and tension of this excellent penultimate episode into its final chapter, we should be in for one hell of a finale.