This article contains spoilers for Lanterns season 1 episode 5
From episode one, Lanterns has made it clear that Hal Jordan and John Stewart don’t trust each other. But we really thought that when the chips are down and things get bad, these guys would pull it together and figure out how to work with one another. After all, these guys are heroes, right? Yet, when Antaan finally gets confirmation that Zoe is the Manhunter he has been looking for and starts their attack, and as Zoe and her husband Will Macon launch their counter-offensive and tear Rushville apart, Hal and John spend just as much time sniping at each other as they do fighting the bad guys.
Episode five, “Lights Out,” is the lowest point for this version of Hal and John, a problem made worse by the fact that the episode is a marked step down in quality for a season that has been great otherwise. But it is not, in fact, the worst point in either character’s life, at least not when you take into account the comics. We talked a bit about John’s worst moment a few weeks back, when his arrogance led to the destruction of the planet Xanshi. But “Lights Out” isn’t the worst moment for Hal Jordan, not while Emerald Twilight still exists.
Lights Out for Hal Jordan
Go to any comic book forum supporting or decrying the treatment of Hal Jordan in Lanterns, and you’ll quickly find a series of well-documented offenses against Earth’s most famous Green Lantern. Like all GL’s, Hal is a cop, and the beloved Green Lantern/Green Arrow series of the 1970s never missed an opportunity to call out his bootlicking. Throughout that period, and even before, Hal would regularly get bummed out about the whole superheroing thing and would wander around the United States, trying his hand at various jobs such as truck driving, insurance selling, and even toy selling. And, yes, most infamously, he dated Arisia, who was 13 when he met her and then used her ring to give herself an adult body.
Yet, Hal Jordan’s blackest night came with the Emerald Twilight storyline from 1994 Emerald Twilight spins out of the Reign of the Superman storyline happening in Superman comics, in which a cyborg who looks like Superman attacks the Earth, destroying Hal’s hometown of Coast City, killing everyone he loves, including on and off romantic interest Carol Ferris and his best friend Tom Kalmaku
As a Green Lantern, Hal has the most powerful weapon in the universe on his finger. And he has more willpower than perhaps any other GL, especially when stricken with grief. So he initially uses his ring to rebuild the city. But when one ring proves insufficient to recreate a major metropolis full of people, Hal entreats the Guardians to either increase his power or send other GLs to help. The Guardians, as made abundantly clear in Lanterns, are capricious, untrustworthy jerks, so they refuse.
So Hal snaps. Most of Green Lantern #48–50 follows Hal as he attacks his fellow members of the Green Lantern Corps, stealing their rings and sapping the power from the Guardians. Hal even goes so far as to murder Kilowog, his friend and a respected Corps member. In a final desperate move, the Guardians resurrect Sinestro, the renegade Green Lantern, whose soul had been held in the Central Power Battery, the source of all GL power, since his execution years ago. But even he cannot stop Hal, who snaps Sinestro’s neck and, knowing that he’s gone too far, enters the Central Power Battery to claim as much power as he can.
The Rise of Parallax
When Hal emerges, he’s no longer Green Lantern. He now calls himself Parallax, and spends the next several years terrorizing the DC Universe and, for some readers, finally being interesting. It’s not just that Hal sometimes suffered from the same flat personality that many Silver Age heroes had; it’s also that the attempt to rewrite him as a more flawed, Marvel-style character in the ’70s sent him down a flawed path that could only end in villainy. Those readers found Hal’s replacement, Kyle Rayner—who becomes the last Green Lantern after the surviving Guardian Ganthet gathers enough power to make one more ring—far more compelling. Furthermore, Parallax was an interesting villain because he thought he was doing the right thing, constantly trying to remake reality to fit his vision of a better world, even if his former friends opposed him.
While those are all fine arguments for keeping Hal a villain, there’s one, undeniable point: Emerald Twilight was a terrible story. It stemmed from DC’s attempt to repeat the success of the Death of Superman storyline by ending an established hero and replacing them with a new, hip version. Batman gets his back broken in Knightfall and gets replaced by Jean-Paul Valley, the cool Batman with razor hands. Wonder Woman loses her title to Artemis, the angry hunter. Green Arrow blows up and gets replaced by his long-lost son Connor who… is actually a pretty cool guy, far more even-keeled than his dad.
Whatever the merits for or against forcing a legacy, Emerald Twilight not only rushed Hal’s heel turn, it also required a massive suspension of disbelief. Hal had proven himself an exemplary GL, for sure. But nothing in previous stories suggested that he could best legions of Lanterns working together, especially not elites like Kilowog. Moreover, Sinestro has always been a master manipulator and trickster. Why would he try to engage in hand-to-hand combat with Hal, which could only end with him getting his butt kicked?
A New Emerald Dawn
Given how shoddy the Emerald Twilight storyline was, it’s easy to forgive the retcons that Geoff Johns put in place when he made Hal Jordan the main Green Lantern again in the 2000s. In Green Lantern: Rebirth (2004-2005), Johns reveals that Sinestro had long been manipulating Hal from inside the Central Power Battery. Moreover, Sinestro discovered that the Yellow Impurity that prevented Green Lantern rings from working on anything yellow (the arbitrary Kryptonite-esque weakness assigned to Green Lanterns in the Silver Age) came from the fact that the Guardians had trapped an evil symbiote called Parallax inside of the battery.
The retcon let Hal off the hook, making him the victim of an evil entity that possessed him, not a hero who made bad decisions. While the change hurt fans of Kyle Rayner, who has never again been prioritized by DC Comics as he was in the ’90s, and while it did return Hal to his more obviously heroic (and, for some, less interesting) status, it did make for a more consistent story.
And so, no matter how bleak things might look for Kyle Chandler’s Hal Jordan and Aaron Pierre’s John Stewart, Emerald Night reminds us that it could be so much worse, in terms of character development and storytelling.
Lanterns airs new episodes every Sunday at 9pm EST on HBO and HBO Max.
