Lanterns finale has torture and applause

Warning: this text tells the end of the season.

In the last episode of Lanterns, the hero chains the villain and dunks his head in water until he speaks. It’s John Stewart, the Green Lantern of the series, getting the truth out of Sinestro. And American critics left the episode applauding.

Lanterns is the HBO series in the James Gunn universe, with Aaron Pierre as John Stewart and Kyle Chandler as Hal Jordan, and closed the season on Sunday, October 4th. Last week the channel showed that she had already done almost everything that Snyder heard for ten years that the hero doesn’t do, in Lanterns did everything that condemned Snyder.

The ending went further. After the drowning, which Collider describes as waterboarding and Nerdist calls a long session of torture, John discovers who killed Hal: Sheriff Kerry, played by Kelly Macdonald. And let her free, because that’s what Hal would want. He then breaks with the Guardians, the leaders of the Corps, and declares himself the Earth Lantern on his own. Chris Mundy, who runs the series, told Entertainment Weekly that John is, more or less, blackmailing the Guardians. Uniform, nothing. And the ring, according to IndieWire, is almost like an ornament.

And the criticism? Den of Geek summed it up as a lot of drama, little superheroes, and for the best. The AV Club chose the expression heroic grace. Nerdist thought the series hit the landing and noted that the drowning scene leaves John much more morally gray than usual.

In the audience, the series is doing well. According to Variety, until the seventh episode the average was over 12 million viewers per episode in the United States and reached close to 19 million worldwide, at the level of It: Welcome to Derry, which was renewed. It is below The Penguin, the last DC series on HBO, which closed above 27 million.

But the renewal didn’t come. Gunn called the episode a season finale, and the decision now falls into the lap of Skydance, the company that was born from the purchase of Warner. Mundy spoke like someone who has already made peace with any answer.

If there’s more, great. And if there’s not, we had our day.

Chris Mundy, showrunner of Lanterns, at Entertainment Weekly, 04/10/2026

Why the ending didn’t convince us

First, what we won’t do: complain that the hero went too far. Anyone who defends the Batman who branded a criminal in Batman v Superman has no moral standing to turn up their nose at a John Stewart who crosses the line. A dirty hero is fine, and sometimes it’s what makes the story good. The problem with the end of Lanterns is different.

The entire season was built around one question: who killed Hal Jordan. And then, in the same episode, the answer appears and leaves. The killer is revealed and walks free, without a reckoning, without the confrontation that eight episodes promised. The justification is that it was what Hal would want. It may even be beautiful on paper, but on screen it looks like the series discovered its own climax and gave up on it.

Then comes the ring. In a series called Lanterns, John ends up declaring himself a Lantern by force, blackmailing the Guardians, without a uniform, with the ring almost as an ornament, as IndieWire itself noted. Den of Geek praised the show for being heavy on drama and light on superhero. For us, that’s exactly where it hurts. Green Lantern is the Corps, it is the cosmos, it is willpower becoming light. The series spent eight episodes keeping this in a drawer and closed it with the drawer still closed.

And there is the comparison that matters, without hypocrisy. When Superman kills Zod in Man of Steel, the film stops. He screams, collapses, and this choice becomes the weight he carries until Batman v Superman, with the entire world questioning who he is. Darkness in Snyder costs the hero dearly. At the end of Lanterns, Sinestro’s drowning becomes a stepping stone to the next scene, and what this costs John is left for a second season that no one guaranteed. Darkness without consequence is just aesthetic.

None of this erases what the series did well. The ratings are good, Aaron Pierre holds the role, and if the renewal comes, we will watch. But that remains the question that Snyder fans have been asking since 2013, now with more force. If drowning the villain without paying any price became heroic grace, why was Superman breaking Zod’s neck, paying the full price in front of us, treated as the end of the world?