Lanterns episode 6 ending explained: yes, Hal Jordan is dead — and Nathan Fillion's Guy Gardner delivers even worse news
HBO's Lanterns has been dangling the "is Hal actually dead" question like a cat toy for weeks, and episode 6, "Bad Optics," finally stops playing. He's dead. Extremely dead. Autopsy-confirmed dead.
The episode jumps from 2016 to 2026 and lays it all out: Hal did ten years for the Rushville destruction, came back to a town that hated him, found something like peace with Sheriff Kerry, and then took a single 9mm round to the head — execution-style, no witnesses, no footage — mere hours after reuniting with John Stewart. His funeral was attended by Kerry and a houseplant named Earl. Kyle Chandler deserves an Emmy for a corpse.
Enter Guy Gardner, human HR violation
The morning after John's arrest, Nathan Fillion's Guy Gardner rolls into Rushville with the energy of a man who has never once been told no. He informs John that Hal's ring is "decommissioned and locked up at the Guardians' headquarters on Oa," refuses to let Hal be buried in his uniform because of — say it with him — "bad optics," and then drops the actual bomb: "someone busted out Sinestro" from what Guy charmingly calls "Space Azkaban." While Hal was rotting in a human prison. Great system, guys.
Fillion, for his part, knows exactly what he's playing here.
"Yeah, finally. I deserve this. What took you so long?" is how he describes Guy's entire worldview, telling TheWrap that his niche is "both playing characters that are likable and characters that you like to hate."
The ending, and the swearing hologram
So where does that leave us? With John doing the most John Stewart thing imaginable:
- He tanks his own military pitch meeting to keep digging into the murder, to Marcus's despair.
- He finds a locked storage unit with a memory cube keyed to Hal's voiceprint.
- He exhumes Hal's coffin in the middle of the night and takes the ring off the corpse.
- The ring boots up a holographic Hal — a Halogram, and no, I will not be taking questions — whose first recorded word is "Goddamnit."
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Same, Hal. Two episodes left, a loose Sinestro, and a dead man narrating his own murder investigation. This show understood the assignment.
Previously we wrote: NBC's Line of Fire premieres tonight with two reviews that praise and condemn the same scenes
