Lanterns episode 6 put Carol Ferris at Hal Jordan's funeral, 15 years after Blake Lively played her
Three people came to Hal Jordan's funeral in Lanterns episode 6: two old girlfriends and a colleague who could not stand him. One of those girlfriends has been part of Green Lantern comics since 1959, and what she becomes there would make her the most powerful person at the graveside.
The episode is called "Bad Optics," and it is the first hour since the pilot to sit fully in 2026. John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) comes back to Rushville a decade after the town was almost destroyed, to work out who killed the man who trained him. The funeral is where he meets Carol Ferris, played by Amie MacKenzie.
To anyone who has not read a Green Lantern comic she is a woman at a graveside; to anyone who has, she is the other half of Hal Jordan's life. Created by John Broome and Gil Kane, Carol turned up in Showcase #22 in late 1959 — the same issue that made Hal a Green Lantern. She was vice president of her father's company, Ferris Aircraft, and the one who hired Hal as a test pilot.
Then the comics took her somewhere stranger. Carol is abducted and rewritten by the Zamarons, an alien order that split from the Guardians of the Universe, and returns as Star Sapphire — Green Lantern vol. 2 #16, October 1962 — with a violet gem that lets her fight a Green Lantern to a standstill. Since 2007 she has led the Star Sapphire Corps, the Violet Lanterns, whose rings run on love the way Hal's runs on willpower.
The last actor to play her married Ryan Reynolds
Carol has been on screen once before. Blake Lively played her in 2011's Green Lantern opposite Ryan Reynolds, a film that critics and comic readers agreed to bury. Fourteen years passed before another Green Lantern appeared in live action anywhere — Nathan Fillion's Guy Gardner in 2025's Superman. The one thing that survived the 2011 film was the marriage: Reynolds and Lively met on it.
MacKenzie inherits the part off a different résumé: Better Call Saul, Yellowstone prequel 1923, Dexter: Original Sin, Mountainhead, Pulse. What she gets in Lanterns is a short scene at a funeral almost nobody attended.
"Hal assumed his funeral would be attended by dignitaries and celebrities both terrestrial and alien, and yet the only people who show up are two old girlfriends and one ex-colleague who hated his guts." — Jesse Schedeen, IGN
Carol is not the only piece of Green Lantern furniture the episode moves in. Fillion's Guy Gardner finally shows up, and the hour uses him to answer a question left hanging since Superman: why Guy carried the ring in 2025 when Hal and John were both alive. His scenes with Stewart also lay track for Man of Tomorrow next year.
- The timeline — first full return to 2026 since the pilot
- Hal Jordan — dead in the present, with one diner scene in the whole episode
- Carol Ferris — first appearance in this universe, at the funeral
- Guy Gardner — Nathan Fillion's first appearance in the series
- Sinestro — still missing, while the title card keeps sliding from green to yellow
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Three colours down, four to go
DC Comics runs seven Lantern Corps off an emotional spectrum: green for willpower, yellow for fear, violet for love, red for rage, blue for hope, indigo for compassion, orange for greed. Before Sunday this universe had touched two. Carol makes three — and she arrives in the same stretch of season in which the show's title card keeps shading from green toward yellow, which is Sinestro's colour. Sinestro (Ulrich Thomsen) is still unaccounted for.
None of that is a promise. Nothing in the episode says Carol returns, and nothing suggests the show means to put MacKenzie in violet. The scene is a signal to readers rather than a plot thread — roughly the trade the whole hour makes.
That trade has a price. The thing Lanterns sold itself on was Pierre and Chandler in a car together, and the ten-year jump removes it: episode 6 gives them a single conversation in a diner, hours before Hal dies. IGN's Schedeen scored the episode a 6 after giving the previous one, "Lights Out," a 9.
"Lanterns takes a fairly substantial hit in Episode 6, as the series struggles to move forward from the high water mark that was 'Lights Out.'" — IGN
Two episodes are left in the eight-episode season, HBO has not confirmed a second, and the killer is still unnamed. Episode 7 lands next Sunday on HBO Max.
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