Lanterns Kills Off Kyle Chandler's Hal Jordan in Its Premiere — Then Asks Who Did It
HBO's Lanterns opens with a murder. The victim is Hal Jordan, the Green Lantern played by Kyle Chandler, and the series will spend its run finding out how he died.
The pilot, directed by James Hawes and co-written by showrunner Chris Mundy with Damon Lindelof and Tom King, lands its biggest swing in the final moments. The story flashes forward from 2016 — when Hal is training a young John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) — to 2026, where Hal is dead on a high-school football field in Rushville, Nebraska, and John is, as Deadline puts it, "ostensibly not the Green Lantern" (Deadline). Sheriff Kerry Kane, played by Kelly Macdonald, investigates alongside Stewart. The same field hosted another murder case a decade earlier (The Hollywood Reporter).
The pilot builds a multi-timeline structure: childhood flashbacks, a primary 2016 timeline, and that 2026 future. In the 2016 thread, Hal and John investigate what look like mass-shooting victims but are actually aliens (The Hollywood Reporter). Hal, a former U.S. Air Force test pilot, is the seasoned officer; John is the recruit (The Hollywood Reporter).
Pierre is the first actor to play John Stewart in live action. He landed the role during Lanterns' 2024 audition process while his lead performance in Jeremy Saulnier's Rebel Ridge was drawing strong reviews, and he has since reprised the character in James Gunn's upcoming DCU film Man of Tomorrow (The Hollywood Reporter).
Chandler, 60, had never worked in the comic-book genre. He told The Hollywood Reporter he was surprised to be cast as a superhero at that age. Block-shooting the nonlinear series posed its own challenge: the full storyline was not in front of the cast, and not all scripts were available at the start. "It required faith and trust in the storyline," Chandler said (The Hollywood Reporter).
The supporting cast includes Garret Dillahunt, Poorna Jagannathan, Jasmine Cephas Jones, Sherman Augustus, and J. Alphonse Nicholson (DC.com). The trailer, released earlier this year, teased Hal and John investigating a murder in Nebraska that leads them into darker territory (The Hollywood Reporter).
What the premiere twist means is straightforward: a show built around two Green Lanterns has already lost one. The question the series now asks is not whether Hal Jordan dies, but who killed him — and what that means for the ring.
