Lanterns S01E06 — Bad Optics

After the chaos of last week’s Lights Out, things get a lot more quieter this week, perhaps a bit too quiet.

We’re now in 2026 and John Stewart is working at his dream job of being an architect. We join him and his brother Marcus as they’re pitching for a new job — massive underground panic rooms capable of protecting tens of thousands of people. Given what happened the previous year in Metropolis where Superman faced off against the Engineer and Ultraman which destroyed large parts of the city, interest in this type of facility is at an all-time high.

The pitch seems to have gone will with the Stewart boys asked to present their plans in front of a military colonel as he’ll be handling the financing. Things aren’t going so well with John’s personal life however. He has a fractured relationship with his mother, who he now calls “Bernadette” instead of “Mom” and his father has been placed in some kind of assisted living facility.

It seems that when John walked away from the Green Lantern programme after finding out that The Guardians had been lying to him and having to kill Zoe, who he had deep feelings for even though she was a genocidal mass murderer, his mother found it hard to forgive him, and John her.

We also find out that Hal has spent the last 10 years in prison and has recently been released. While it’s not explicitly stated that it’s because of all of the death and carnage caused in Rushville by Zoe’s murderous laser satellites, it would appear that Hal was blamed for what happened and faced the consequences alone, leaving John to live his life as a “normal” person for a change.

Bernadette finally gets through to John and tells him that he needs to meet with Hal as he wants to apologise so against his better judgement, but wanting closure, John returns once more to Rushville where Hal has made his post-prison, post-Lantern home.

The meeting doesn’t go well as it was a set-up by Bernadette and Hal had no intention of apologising. I’m not sure who she was trying to help here the most: John, Hal or herself. After realising he’s not going to get a “sorry” from Hal, John smacks him in the nose and heads home, but just as he arrives he gets a call and immediately heads back to Rushville.

We’re now in the scene that we saw at the end of the very first episode: A dead Hal is sitting on the Bleachers at the Rushville football ground, covered in a light dusting of snow contrasting with the ruby-red bullet hole in his head.

Sheriff Kerry Kane called John as she thought he would be the only one who might feel slightly sorry that Hal was dead. The whole town hated Hal’s guts, no matter how hard he tried to make amends for the events 10 years previously, but he gradually wore Kerry down and they began a relationship, which she had to keep hidden from the town.

With little to go on, Kerry suspects the person who broke Hal’s nose is the one who killed him. Not wanting to admit that he’d seen Hal so close to his death, John keeps quiet about his violent outburst towards Hal which led to the broken nose and starts to help Kerry figure out why Hal was killed and by whom.

With an entire town holding a grudge, John’s own father becoming more explosive, Sinestro on the loose and a new Lantern afraid of the bad optics Hal’s prior actions meant for the Green Lantern corps, there are no shortage of suspects in Hal’s murder.

Will it be a simple open-and-shut case, or is there deeper meaning to Hal’s demise?

Get The Swear Jar Out!

🟢Warning! Mild spoilers for  Bad Optics!🟢

The tone of this week’s episode is dark, very dark.

I know that they want to show that the events in 2016 Rushville had a profound impact on John Stewart Jr. and we can see he now drinks whisky and eats meat which he avoided before, but in order to firmly hammer home the fact he’s no longer a goody-lantern-two-shoes he swears.

A lot.

Like a lot a lot.

So do others.

51 F**ks and 24 s**ts in a 53 minute episode.

Now I’m not a prude but that is excessive by any measure.

I get it! John is now a hardened man who has a terrible weight on him, but you don’t need to average over one swear word a minute in order to get your point across.

So much for “show, don’t tell”, or should that be “show, don’t swear”?

Crude language aside, Kelly Macdonald shines once again as Sheriff Kerry Kane in this episode. She’s worn down by life’s events and you get the feeling that while she really cared deeply for Hal, she might have only been with him as he was as similarly worn down and tired with everything as she was and that gave them a connection, rather than it being a meeting of souls.

Missing Mayhem

We see a little of the consequences faced by Rushville following the events of 2016, but perhaps not as much as we could have in order for it to make as big of an impact as it deserved.

At the end of Lights Out the town is in ruins, the motel is a pile of rubble with Hal pinned underneath it (I guess that’s why he was so easy to arrest!) and people are wandering around shell-shocked. Apart from a few residents and an off-handed mention that the motel was never rebuilt — which is more of a plot device to get John to stay at Hal’s rented home — we don’t see any of this damage.

If you were John, wouldn’t you make an almost pilgrimage to the motel? After all this was the place where everything changed — the future that your parents had mapped out for you since you were a small child lays in ruins alongside the motel. It’s the site where you killed a woman you cared deeply about. If he’s visiting the town to get closure from Hal’s apology, wouldn’t he want closure here too?

It would have been more impactful if we had seen more of the devastation in the town itself too — maybe some ruined businesses that no one could, or wanted to, rebuild — and I was surprised that people tolerated John’s presence and he was allowed to step foot in the bar or diner with no repercussions.

Katy’s Side Note: Given this is rural Nebraska maybe the writer’s didn’t want to be too overt with this for fear of it appearing racist. There is an exchange between John and Maggie (we saw her younger version wandering the streets after the satellite attack at the end of last week’s episode):

John: Because this town hates me, because he told me not to say a word to anyone, but most of all, because I’m a Black man in f*****g rural Nebraska.
Maggie: Jesus, John. We’re not racist.

So while Maggie claims the town itself isn’t racist, maybe the writers were aware of the Bad Optics (get it!) of the implications of John being barred entry or service in the town.

That aside, I think it was a missed opportunity to not show what happens to a town in the wake of a superhero/foe fight. It’s alluded to at the start of the episode with the need for panic bunkers and yet when given the opportunity to actually show us, they ignore the chance completely.

So where do we go from here? We have an entire town with the means, motive and opportunity to kill Hal. We have a missing Evil Genius in the shape of Sinestro who must hold a grudge against Hal for locking him up. We have new Lantern Guy Gardener who has a chip on his shoulder and is more concerned about optics than the mission. Or is it some other force we have yet to be introduced to?

With just 3 episodes left, will this all be wrapped up in a neat little bow at the end of the season or will we be left with more questions than answers?

Where to Watch:

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