In brightest day, in blackest night, nospoilersfor “Lanterns” Episode 4 shall escape my sight. Beware!
It’s sometimes hard to grasp how widely accepted comic books have become in the popular culture lexicon, how concepts and tropes that were ridiculed not very long ago are now embraced and even common. M. Night Shyamalan’s “Unbreakable” remains a gem of the genre, but seeing the movie have to explain rudimentary concepts about superheroes plays out very differently in a post-Marvel Cinematic Universe era.
This is to say, audiences are much more used to comic book shenanigans in their media than they were 20 years ago, to the point where now fans get mad if an adaptation doesn’t embrace colorful costumes or sillier aspects of the source material. And yet, there are limits. There are some ideas and concepts that are just too silly to work, especially in adaptations as grounded and serious as, say, HBO’s “Lanterns,” DC’s riskiest bet yet. So far, the show has mostly avoided the more fantastical elements of the “Green Lantern” universe, referring to rather than showing other Lanterns, poking a bit of fun at the impracticality of Hal Jordan’s suit, and more. Episode 4 goes further, by showing us a weakness to the Green Lanterns that’s way, way better than their traditional one.
It’s become a bit of a punchline in comics that a Green Lantern’s biggest weakness is, canonically, the color yellow. Just the color, in any way, shape, or form. “Lanterns” Episode 4 decides to kind of just ignore this, and instead go with a different big weakness — darkness. Turns out, bullets imbued with “darkness” nullify the ring’s powers. Though still relatively silly, this works better than just a different color, and it’s a weakness straight out of the comics.
What’s willpower next to absolute darkness?
In Episode 4 of “Lanterns,” John Stewart and Hal Jordan infiltrate Will Macon’s compound and uncover an entire weapons cache of highly-advanced tech. This includes guns that shoot darkness at them, which turns out to nullify the ring’s power and were designed specifically to counter Green Lanterns. While it just looks like a cool weapon in the show, it actually comes directly from the comics, as an arguably much better weakness to the Green Lanterns than just the color yellow.
First, a brief history lesson. Though the “yellow is a weakness to green” thing has been around for decades, it wasn’t really explained until Geoff Johns’ “Green Lantern” run in the mid-’00s. In that time, DC introduced the Emotional Electromagnetic Spectrum, composed of many colors each with their own rules, limitations, and corps. These range from the Yellow Lantern Corps that weaponize fear, to the Indigo Lanterns using compassion to rehabilitate villains.
But they were, all of them, deceived, for another Ring was made. In 2008’s “Green Lantern” #25, Johns and Ethan Van Sciver introduced the Black Lantern Corps. They use black Lantern Rings, with black being the absence of color and therefore falling outside the Emotional Electromagnetic Spectrum, to nullify every other power ring, rendering them useless. They also can raise the dead and create zombies, but that’s another story.
Does this mean we’ll see other-colored rings in “Lanterns?” Probably not. This is a show that’s so far leaned way more into “True Detective” than “Green Lantern,” so it’s unlikely we’ll see such a deep lore introduced. That being said, the show is unafraid to include deep cut references. And if nothing else, it’s a clever way to introduce a weakness to the ring’s power that’s not just yellow.
