Lanterns has concluded, and with Season 2 still not officially confirmed, fans are left with a long list of unanswered questions about the DCU TV series. Is Hal Jordan really dead? What does it mean for John Stewart to be Earth's unofficial Green Lantern? And will Sinestro return as the show's big bad?
Fortunately, we're a little closer to getting answers thanks to various post-finale interviews. While it doesn't sound like the creative team has anything specific mapped out—or that they necessarily planned ahead while developing Season 1—there are some very intriguing clues here.
CBR caught up with showrunner Chris Mundy and asked whether Sinestro's claim that he can bring Hal back from the dead is accurate. "I think that's the question, right?" he teased. "Is he literally just saying anything and bluffing to try to save himself or not?"
The site also wondered why, in episode 5, Hal uses a knife to chip off a piece of his ring. "It was for him to create a sentry, to have a little piece so that the Halogram could go [explore], so that there was a little piece of it watching that thing," Mundy revealed.
"That's why when the Halogram shows up in the first place and says, 'There's hail in Rushville, Nebraska,' it's because Hal has done that at some place there. Because the Halogram is not scanning the globe at all times."
While the Lanterns finale doesn't do much to set up Season 2, Mundy confirmed that John using a Lantern forged by Sinestro could be significant down the line. "I think it is conceivably, like… there's a lot to play with. And I think that we as writers, and also John as a character, have a lot to figure out about that thing. So yeah, it is significant, because it's different."
Collider, meanwhile, sat down with co-creator Damon Lindelof to finally get to the bottom of why Lanterns' title card has a hint of yellow (contrary to popular belief, it was not getting more yellow and less green each week).
Admitting that neither he nor Mundy were experts in Green Lantern lore, Lindelof credited Tom King with "[educating] us on what were the essential critical parts of the storytelling."
He added, "Yellow came up very early, particularly because yellow is a Lantern's weakness. And then kind of got into the Sinestro Corps and some of the deeper cuts, etc., etc. But I think that the idea of: how are we going to use yellow in the show, both as motif, as signal of fear, of vulnerability for Hal and John, just kind of was in the groundwater, as it were."
Back to the question of Hal potentially returning, many fans are pinning their hopes on the Halogram potentially leading to the resurrection of the hero (especially as he referred to John as "Junior" when they said goodbye, which is how the 2026 Hal referred to his trainee).
For what it's worth, Lindelof isn't keen on the idea of bringing Hal back in any form, but acknowledged, "Knowing what the comics have done with Parallax and Hal, I think, has died at least 3 or 4 times over the course of the canon, and celebrating everything that Kyle did in his performance to get the audience to fall in love with Hal."
"I think that honoring the emotional impact and making Season 1 feel felt. The question that you're asking would be the equivalent of, 'Would I want to see a movie called Ghost 2 where Patrick Swayze was alive again?'" he continued. "And the answer is, I would not, because it would degrade the emotional impact of Ghost. But where there's a will, there's a way. Where there's will, there's a way."
As for how the Halogram was able to stick around for so long, even with the ring's battery running low, that was nothing to do with Hal and everything to do with some big changes that have been made to the DCU's John.
"There's also almost a supernatural component of John's willpower in that he can use the ring without wearing it," Lindelof stated. "That, again, potentially crosses and/or at least puts a toe across the line of what we understand from the established canon."
As for the Sinestro of it all—he's last seen chained up and left alone on the planet infected by fear—the writer weighed in on how he's supposed to indefinitely survive there.
"Oh, he's very resourceful. Well, A. Sinestro is very resourceful, but I'll say, 'How long was he alone without Hal? What supplies and/or sundries did Noah leave him with?"
"So some combination of species and how long they can go without food and traditional water, and also what did Hal and/or Noah bring that is now run out?' is the short answer to your excellent query and something I'm sure that the fans will be nitpicking about, as I would expect them to," Lindelof noted, seemingly unhappy that fans would zero in on such a glaring plot hole.
Later describing Sinestro as "the Alpha and the Omega of villains in the Green Lantern-verse," he also suggested that the Sinestro-created Lantern John uses to charge Hal's ring could prove "dangerous" down the line.
Lanterns is now streaming in its entirety on HBO Max.