Nerd-franchise writers who want to hash out their daddy issues on screen: Please don’t. Just, please, don’t do it anymore. Seriously, how many times has Damon Lindelof, co-creator of HBO’s Lanterns and co-writer of this episode with fellow co-creator Tom King, gone down this road alone? Lost did it. The Leftovers did it. Didn’t he give Captain Kirk daddy issues in Star Trek, too? Star Wars, Superman, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade are the key texts of this movement, endemic across movies, television, and comics. Daddy-issue plots are especially common in superhero media, a 90-year-old beast that keeps churning out stories in part by emphasizing LEGACY and passing heroism from one generation to the next. 

In short, men would rather write dull-as-dishwater cold-open flashback sequences about cool but unapproachably remote dads with mustaches who get in fights with Little League coaches and make you want to please them more than anything but are hurting deep down inside than go to therapy. 

And what a heavy-handed bit of business it is, even aside from the Daddy stuff. Hal gets kicked off his baseball team for refusing to relinquish the ball when he’s pitching a no-hitter, apparently clinging to it even while fighting the whole team. After his dad, rough-around-the-edges test pilot Martin Jordan (Jake B. Miller), dies, young Hal (Henry Samiri) tracks the ball down in the field his father made him throw it into and picks it up again. It’s like adult Hal and the power ring, get it? Get it??? 

What’s more, Hal’s dad gives him a little speech about how he has a failsafe in case anything goes wrong, the key to which he entrusts to young Hal. It’s just like adult Hal and his cosmic-cube vault in that storage shed, get it? Get it??? 

Jeez. This kind of writing was fresh and clever 20 years ago, when Lost more or less introduced it to the pop-cultural lexicon. In the context of a series like Lanterns, which derives so much of its power and quality from the likeable main characters lived-in and naturalistic performances, dumping some ham-fisted overdetermined origin story on top of their heads is like cutting them off at the knees.

So Lanterns is now officially 0 for 2 when it comes to flashbacks revealing the secret histories of Hal Jordan and John Stewart. Fortunately, its track record in the present remains largely unblemished. Once the emphasis shifts from past to the present, it locks in on exactly what you’d want it to lock in on: Aaron Pierre’s John, Kyle Chandler’s Hal, and Kelly Macdonald’s Sheriff Kerry, hashing out a uneasy new relationship.

The variable here is that this Hal is not Kerry’s Hal or John’s Hal, it’s the ring’s Hal, the Hal last backed up in 2006 or so. (The constantly shifting time frames and a lack of distinctive costuming or age makeup, other than John’s 2026 goatee, can make it tough to tell when a given character’s supposed to be from.) He’s nicer and more cooperative, but he’s also (obviously) distraught to learn he’s been murdered. Hearing how he ruined his reputation does a number on him, too.

But he’s also capable of sincerely praising John’s accomplishments, something the old Hal literally never did. This disarms John to the point where even though they often argue, he calls the construct “Hal” by the end of the episode, something he never did when Jordan was alive. You feel these moments hit when they happen, because Pierre and Chandler have a knack for underplaying their reactions while simultaneously making it clear that it’s John and Hal, not Aaron and Kyle, who are really doing the underplaying here. They don’t want to let on how moved they are, and that itself is moving.

So is the scene between Hal’s duplicate and Kerry, whom he surprises with characteristic Hal brashness. It’s a fascinating little scene — this Hal has clearly never been in love before and wants to meet the woman he was finally able to open up to, even about his father; Kerry is seeing a dead man, but at the same time she’s meeting a version of him she’s never gotten to know, which is like magic happening before her eyes. In lesser hands this is a short vaguely mind-bending time-travel story in a forgettable comic; with Chandler, Macdonald, and Pierre in control, it transcends its shopworn sci-fi ideas and leans on the human (or in Hal’s case, human-ish) emotion that really matters.

Sheriff Kerry is busy throwing a party for her son Noah, whose big decision about which college to play quarterback for is…not to decide until he wins the final high school game of the season. But it sidelines her while John and Hal get into the vault. Inside they find a gun, a poncho, and a big ball of black goop that turns out to be a wormhole/portal thing, directly connected to another one somewhere else in the universe. 

When our heroes step through, they find themselves on the planet Zoe the Manhunter devastated, leading survivor Antaan to seek revenge. Though the washed-out color is a disappointment — this is a superhero sci-fi space opera, you can make things as colorful as you want! — it does at least make sense with the scale of the devastation. A shattered city floats in the sky above them; the baked desert ground is littered with corpses of the people who jumped to their deaths when the Manhunter set loose a fear gas that drove them all insane. The gas remains in the atmosphere, particularly when it rains, leading John to nearly kill himself at one point while hallucinating his father and his younger self; this, duplicate Hal notes grumpily, is why older Hal wanted them to bring the damn poncho.

The two find a boat left behind by older Hall and use it to row across a lake to a distant island of debris, atop which flashes some kind of blue-green firelight. In the process, Hal opens up about his family. His father’s fatal crash was suicide, which Hal knows because that failsafe Martin told him about contained the suicide note, which he spent his own life covering up. Martin’s father killed himself as well, a legacy of lethal depression that stretches back far enough to be called the Jordan Boys Legacy. (See what I mean? See???) This opens up the possibility that Hal killed himself, and Kerry is covering that up to protect his legacy. 

But the star attraction of the garbage island they finally reach is none other than Sinestro. The escaped convict tries to jack the two quasi-Lanterns before John decks him with one punch and uncovers his identity. 

“Great arm, kid,” Hal says to John, just as his own father said to him. (Come on, man. Come on!!!)

Flashbacks and Father’s Day Hallmark-card shit aside, I’ll risk sounding like a broken record and say once again how much this show benefits from its leads. All three are beautiful and charismatic, but all three, even the legitimately godlike John, feel like people it’s probably interesting to have a beer with — not fun necessarily, but it’ll be a conversation you’ll remember, and glad to have. They’re endearing despite being, let’s face it, three very weird and compromised people. They’re the gold amid the green.

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.