What’s Next For John Stewart After Lanterns Season 1?
After surviving Rushville and solving his mentor's murder, John has become a new kind of Green Lantern.
After eight weeks and eight episodes, the first live-action show in James Gunn’s new DCU has ended. Lanterns was the second attempt to bring the Green Lantern mythos to life after the disastrous Ryan Reynolds vehicle in 2011, and the two projects could not be more different. While the film opted to jump straight into cosmic superhero shenanigans, Lanterns instead took a much more grounded approach, explicitly modeling itself after HBO’s True Detective — an approach that may have disappointed fans looking for the procedural space opera of the comics, but mostly resonated with critics and general audiences.
That’s certainly not to say that Lanterns didn’t engage with the more heightened aspects of the source material. On the contrary, the entire first season used the mystery of the Manhunters’ presence on Earth and the modern-day demise of Hal Jordan as a launchpad to introduce the world of the Green Lantern Corps, which will surely be expanded upon when Aaron Pierre’s John Stewart shows up in next year’s Man of Tomorrow. But the show’s season finale drastically changed the status quo with several major reveals and defining character turns, meaning the DCU’s version of the Green Lantern Corps will be tumultuous in its own particular way.
The Season 1 finale keeps John on his hero’s journey and allows Hal to properly pass the torch.
What Happens In The Season Finale Of Lanterns?
After John and Hal’s hologram enter the portal to Antaan’s long-dead homeworld and discover Sinestro in Episode 7, the pair waste no time interrogating him to find out why he’s there and how he escaped imprisonment. After John waterboards him, Hal's villainous former mentor delivers the episode’s first major twist: Noah, Sheriff Kerry’s son, is actually the last Manhunter on Earth, and he helped Sinestro escape so he could forge a power battery for him. It becomes clear that Noah’s human conditioning is conflicting with his android programming, and John becomes determined to prove that Noah can choose to avoid violence.
During his confrontation with him, Noah confesses to the murder of Hal Jordan, explaining that he killed Hal because he wouldn’t keep quiet about his true nature, but also revealing that he struggles with his identity and dreams of simply living a normal life. Noah begs John to mercy-kill him, as John claims to have done the same for Noah’s grandma Zoe, but John refuses, because he knows the truth — Hal’s murderer is actually Sheriff Kerry, having killed him in a moment of desperate impulse after Hal revealed he knew the truth about her son. While Kerry offers to turn herself in, John urges her not to, insisting that it’s not what Hal would’ve wanted. She’s left to watch Noah’s final high school football game, wracked with grief over killing the man she loved but hopeful that Noah’s lie for her safety indicates that he’s capable of overriding his programming.
The entire season builds to the reveal that Kerry has been protecting not just one Manhunter in Rushville, but two.
The finale ends with an unexpected new direction for John’s future. He uses the Lantern signal in the middle of Rushville to call Guy Gardner, who immediately recognizes that John is wearing Hal’s ring. When Guy threatens to report him to the Guardians, John tells him to do exactly that, because he’s taking over patrol of Earth as an “independent contractor” of sorts, using the flawed lantern created by Sinestro (which is infected by the residual “fear” left behind on Antaan’s world) to become a Green Lantern unburdened by the restraints of the Guardians of the Universe. John recites his own, brand-new oath, affirming his decision to finally embrace and conquer his fears, before flying off towards an uncertain future.
What’s Next For John Stewart?
After the conclusion of Lanterns, the character of John Stewart is flying into uncharted territory. While he’s had his fair share of conflicts with the Guardians of the Universe, he’s never operated as a Green Lantern independent of them, and in fact, in the 1992-1993 storyline Green Lantern: Mosaic, John even becomes the first human Guardian. In an ironic twist, John’s current trajectory most strongly resembles 1992’s Guy Gardner: Reborn, a series in which Guy loses his Green Lantern ring and steals the yellow power ring from a (then dead) Sinestro to operate as his own vigilante, an era which took place before Geoff Johns took over Green Lantern in the early 2000s and retconned the yellow ring as being powered by the fear entity Parallax.
If one thing’s for certain, it’s that Guy Gardner won’t respond kindly to having his position compromised.
While it seems like John will still operate as a Green Lantern (despite the power of fear locked in his new battery), it’s hard to imagine he won’t come to blows with other members of the Corps. An unsanctioned Lantern patrolling Earth doesn’t seem like something the Guardians of Oa would take lightly, and the realization that he’d been tricked only worsens the growing rivalry between John and Guy. With Lanterns Season 2 already in development, it may follow the aftermath of John’s decision and the Guardians’ response... and we may even meet one of the many Earth-based Lanterns who come after Hal, John, and Guy.
We already know that Aaron Pierre will be in the sequel to last year’s Superman, and at this point, it’s a safe bet that he’ll replace Guy as Earth’s Green Lantern — but does that mean he’ll be taking over his spot on the Justice Gang as well? And if so, knowing that the group is obviously being set up as a precursor to the Justice League, will we see John Stewart become a founding member of DC’s premier superhero team? Lanterns may not have been the high-concept cosmic superhero epic fans expected, but it still functioned as an origin story for one of the most beloved Green Lanterns, and it’s all but certain we’ll see John in those types of adventures in the future.
Lanterns is streaming on HBO.
