The first season of Lanterns ended not with a bang, but with a whisper. Characters said what needed to be said, revealed what needed to be revealed, and, ultimately, set the stage for some very intriguing new stories. Some of those choices, however, are sure to make DC Comics fans scratch their heads a bit, and so the show’s creators did their best to explain. Major spoilers follow.
The most shocking choice was to have John Stewart, played by Aaron Pierre, not just take Hal Jordan’s ring, giving him the powers of the Green Lantern, but to do it outside of the jurisdiction of the Green Lantern Corps at large. He calls himself an “independent contractor” in the episode, and cites an Oath wholly unique to himself: “In brightest day, in darkest night, I’ll embrace my fear. I’ll do what’s right. I choose this ring. I choose this fight. In service to this lantern’s light.”
The decision to separate John from the larger collective was not made lightly.
“What we see at the end is that John is not 100% a Green Lantern anymore,” series co-creator Tom King said at a press conference. “He has a lantern that has a bit of yellow in it, has a bit of fear in it. It’s an unsanctioned lantern, as Guy says. He’s not saying the same oath as every other Green Lantern because he’s not like every other Green Lantern.”
“John’s path was not the normal path,” co-creator Chris Mundy added. “The ring didn’t choose him. He was interviewed. He was raised for it. He was having to choose this thing, then he decided not to do it, and then decided that he needed to do it on his own terms … We wanted [the oath] to be true to the original and respectful of the original … but we also wanted to tweak it to talk about the themes that we talked about, and fear.”
Mundy also revealed that it wasn’t just one person in the writers’ room who came up with the oath. “We wrote it as everyone threw out various lines,” he said. “I don’t know whose are whose at this point when we kind of put them all back together. I know Justin [Britt-Gibson], one of the writers, was like, ‘Well, we’re not re-writing, we’re remixing it,’ but I think the idea was we were taking a look back at what we had done with the season. John’s path was not the normal path.”
No, it was not. And we’ll have to wait and see what that path holds for him in the future, both in the movies (he’ll appear in Man of Tomorrow next summer) and, maybe, back on TV.
The whole first, but hopefully not last, season of Lanterns is now on HBO Max.
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