We Finally Know Why Guy Gardner Is The DCU’s Green Lantern
Lanterns Episode 5 gives us more answers, but still keeps the future murky.
The phrase “all will be revealed in time” has never applied to any story half as well as it does to Lanterns. The latest addition to the new DC Universe is the poster child of obfuscation: its head-scratching changes to the origins of John Stewart (Aaron Pierre), for example, have unfurled bit by bit, episode by episode. It wasn’t until Episode 3 that we learned why John’s father (J. Alphonse Nicholson) was shooting apples off his head in Lanterns’ first episode. As for the question that audiences have been asking since we met Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion) in Superman — why isn’t John Stewart Earth’s Green Lantern? — well, Lanterns has taken its sweet time answering it.
This week’s episode finally addresses John’s GL status (and more) with a doozy of a lore drop. Not only does it acknowledge John’s privilege as a light-skinned Black man in America; it also delivers one more twist in his journey to inherit the GL ring. We finally know why Guy Gardner is Earth’s one-and-only Green Lantern by the time Superman takes place, but it only brings up more questions about John’s post-Lanterns fate.
Spoilers ahead for Lanterns Episode 5.
Was any of it worth it?
John gets closer than ever to becoming Earth’s Green Lantern in Episode 5.
John’s fraught dynamic with Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) reached uncomfortable new levels in Episode 4, when Hal once again jumped out of a moving car, leaving John to fend for himself. By the time John escapes this time around — his entire body covered in burns from a fire — it’s safe to say he’s finally (!) had enough of playing nice with his unrelenting tutor.
Fortunately, he’s healed by Zoe’s (Poorna Jagannathan) mysterious alien tech, and from that moment on, John’s on the warpath. It takes every ounce of resolve to complete his many unfinished missions, which include disabling Zoe (who, we learned in Episode 4, is a dangerous Manhunter hiding in the town of Rushville) and decommissioning Hal as Green Lantern. Back at Rushville’s motel, John confronts Hal and sets an elaborate trap for Zoe, taking her out with his sniper skills. He even manages to snag Hal’s ring — but not before half the town is destroyed by Zoe’s satellites.
John makes the smart choice by turning down the Guardians and rejecting the GL Corps.
Standing in the midst of so much collateral damage, John is forced to reckon with the futility of his big life’s purpose. Hal’s final warning — “They replaced me; they’ll replace you too” — is undoubtedly ringing in his head when he reunites with the same Guardian (Laura Linney) who selected him as Hal’s successor. As he delivers the ring and its lantern to her, he admits that his accomplishments have left him feeling pretty hollow.
“Hal betrayed everything to keep this ring,” John tells the Guardian. “Probably doesn’t even remember why he wanted the damn thing.” John finds that he feels much the same way about his GL status, so he surrenders it then and there. At the end of Episode 5, the Lantern Corps is without a protector on Earth — which inevitably paves the way for Guy Gardner to step into the responsibility John abandoned.
When one door closes...
Lanterns Episode 5 takes Hal out of comission, but John has a ways to go before he comes Green Lantern.
Given what we already know about this version of John, it does make sense that he would eventually walk away from the Corps. He spent his entire life molding himself (at his parents’ behest) into the perfect soldier, only to see what years serving as the Green Lantern could do to a person. Shadowing Hal put John’s own priorities into perspective; ditto for the destruction wrought in Rushville. John deciding he doesn’t want any part of this life is a surprisingly gratifying payoff for episodes of very strange character building. We almost breathe a sigh of relief when he turns the Guardians down... if it didn’t also make us question his future.
John might not have become Earth’s Lantern in 2016, but we do know that he does eventually become Green Lantern in Man of Tomorrow, the upcoming sequel to Superman. With Hal effectively out of the picture in the present-day, only Guy stands between John and finally achieving his destiny. But the road back to the Corps will likely be long and fraught: John will have to unlearn everything he knows about responsibility and willpower, but on the other side of that growth might lie the version of John that fans have been waiting to see in the DCU since Lanterns dropped its first episode.
