Now what? If you have your audience asking that question right in the middle of the inaugural season of your show, I’m not sure if you’re doing something good or bad, but you’re certainly doing something unusual. 

That’s the point we reached at the end of episode five of HBO’s Lanterns. The three-way war between aliens, Lanterns, and Zoe the Manhunter, with the fate of Rushville, Nebraska hanging in the balance, reached its bloody conclusion. So did the struggle for control of the Green Lantern power ring: John Stewart pried it from Hal Jordan’s still living hand, then delivered it straight to Lianna the Guardian, refusing to take this extremely shitty job after all. Sheriff Kerry Kane calls off a mob of angry villagers when they surround John, and that’s that.

Leaving the fate of your show so wide open so early in the proceedings is, by far I think, the boldest thing series co-creators Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof, and Tom King have done during the show’s shaky but promising run so far. In a way, of course, they’re just mimicking the structure of, you guessed it, True Detective Season 1, with its mid-season time jump from being primarily flashbacks to primarily present-day material, and its concurrent shift in the personalities and fortunes of the two main characters. But in both cases, the big mid-season climax only gets you so far. You still have to come up with something interesting for everyone to do afterwards.

So far, at least, Lanterns has done it.

The episode picks up just before the flash forward that ended the series premiere, where John and Kerry discover Hal Jordan’s dead body frozen in the Rushville, Nebraska football stadium. Just hours before, John was lured to Rushville by his mother Bernadette, who remains the absolute dirt worst person in his life; she claimed Hal Jordan told her he wanted to apologize. The apology turns out to be bullshit, but Hal informs John that the friendship between himself and John’s mother is real, which is basically the worst possible outcome for John. 

They argue, John breaks his nose, John leaves. Hours later, Hal’s dead of a 9mm gunshot at point-blank range in that football stadium. To quote Robert Pattinson quoting Chris Hansen, you see how this looks, right? Of course we know John was nowhere near town anymore when Hal got popped, but it would look a type of way to Kerry if he were found to have broken Hal’s nose.

John already lands himself in enough trouble when he gets in a fistfight with her now ex-husband Billy Macon and a gaggle of other goons when he activates, get this, a Lantern-Signal left behind by Hal and John’s replacement. That would be Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion, having a ball), the blond, bowl-cut gym teacher — excuse me, athletic director — who was chosen to be this sector’s Green Lantern after Hal burned out and John turned them down. No one in the town is particularly happy the thing is there, and they’re double mad to see an ex-GL (even if only for five minutes) activate it.

Of course, you don’t pick a fight with John Stewart if you value having all your teeth. And even though John plays it cool with Kerry and her now-teenaged son Noah (Shea Pritchard) at dinner at her house that night, word eventually catches up to him, and he spends the night in the clink before his brother Marcus (Jared Grimes) bails him out.

Marcus has good reason to do so, and even better reason to be mad he has to. At this stage in his life there are two major changes about John to note. First, he has a full goatee, a bold choice. Second, he works as an architect, designing panic rooms for both individuals and entire municipalities in a firm he co-founded with his brother Marcus. He funds the recording career of his other brother Andre (Romeo Brown) with the proceeds. Both brothers insist on calling him “Chosen,” a reference to his green past and his parents’ preferential treatment of him. Not that this last bit amounts to much by now: His mom remains a weirdo, and his dad is shooting up his retirement home to get John’s attention.

Anyway, John is supposed to be pitching an underground bunker system capable of housing tens of thousands to Midway City, a fake DC Universe town. But he’s stuck in Rushville, and not only because he’s in prison. He feels obligated to provide Hal with a proper burial and funeral service, complete with a uniform and ring Guy has to go to outer space to get for him. John even delivers the eulogy that Hal wrote and gave to his ex-girlfriend Carol Ferris (Amie Mackenzie). The speech is a mixture of delusions of grandeur (he assumes his funeral would be a major world event) and sad grappling with the fact of his own mortality. “I hope I mattered,” it concludes.

But John is determined to find out who killed his predecessor, even if it means sticking around in a town that hates him and potentially alienating his friend Kerry, the only person in town who gave a shit about Hal. (They were, in fact, an item, which is hard to wrap my mind around.) He digs up the body, pries off Hal’s decommissioned ring, and unlocks his digitized doppelganger, who reacts to the news of his real self’s demise with profane dismay, as you might expect.

A few other plot threads bear examination. While going through Hal’s personal effects, Kerry and John find a key to a storage locker containing some kind of cosmic-cube vault they can’t access without Hal himself. (Maybe the decoy Hal will work where a voice recording failed.) 

There’s also a teenager named Maggie (Hannah Christine Shetler) who’s shaking John down for Lantern/alien/Manhunter battle reparations — the word feels pointed right after she dismisses his fears that their rural Nebraska town is racist — or she’ll tell the sheriff she saw him with Hal the night of his death. He’s got nothing to hide so he, of all people, should have nothing to fear, right?

Also, John has to feed Hal’s sentient, carnivorous plant, Earl. It’s pretty cute, actually.

There are elements of the episode that don’t sit right. Rushville is a town full of fully armed, highly trained civilian warriors who’ve been taught to fight Green Lanterns on sight. You’re telling me Hal Jordan, the Green Lantern responsible for the death of a sizeable percentage of the town is walking around unarmed and no one just put one in his head prior to that frozen football stadium? You’re telling me the worst that Kerry Kane, Sheriff of Rushville, has gotten from the townsfolk for dating this man is the occasional shit-talking? It doesn’t compute. 

Nor does the show’s repeated need to make Harry Potter references. “Spazkaban” space prison? Read another goddamn book, Green Lanterns, especially one that doesn’t fund the world’s richest transphobe! (Unless, of course, the show is making the point that only morons and assholes like Hal and Guy are Harry Potter adults, in which case, carry on.)

But overall, the show answered the question Now what? with a pretty solid This, that’s what. Hal Jordan is no Laura Palmer, but the hunt for his killer has me on board. So does the show’s continued exploration of just what kind of person makes a good space cop. So far, our candidates have been three different flavors of egomaniacal asshole, although John managed to break free of his parents’ programming at last and decide for himself that this gig is not for him. What do the respective personalities and professions of our three Lanterns say about the Guardians’ view of justice, even before we learn the Manhunters were their creation too? Is it anything good?

Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.