“I wanna be an architect.”
A Life Beyond the Ring
The end of Lanterns Episode 6, “Bad Optics,” has me asking myself the same question as I did in Episode 1:
What the hell is going on?
Just when you think you know the direction the series will take, it snatches you back from your machinations and grounds you into its reality—reminding us that we, in fact, do not know what’s going to happen.
This is precisely what makes Episode 6 both incredible and infuriating.
“Bad Optics” begins in 2026 with John, along with his brother Marcus, making a pitch with the Midway City Comptroller department for an underground city panic room.
The moment shows us a somewhat repaired brotherly relationship and a John that constructed a life outside of becoming the next Green Lantern.
But a phone call destroys ten years of avoidance, pulling John back into Rushville, the place he abandoned but never abandoned him.
Rushville’s hold on John runs deeper than he’s willing to admit. Even with his panic room, he’s still building something to protect the lives of everyone around him—a decision that may carry guilt from the destruction he left behind.
And his mother knows John’s protective instincts and guilt still live within him, which is why her call is the only call capable of sending him back.
She speaks of a friendship she forged with Hal, offering John a display of understanding and forgiveness in order to get him to at least hear Hal out and do the same.
John isn’t keen on revisiting the past, but his curiosity takes him back anyway.
But just as soon as John sits with Hal, he comes to realize that Bernadette lied about a friendship.
Or maybe Hal is too proud to admit he missed John’s companionship and looked for it through whatever means were afforded to him.
Either way, John scrambles to gain control of the conversation, releasing pent-up anger and frustration at Hal with zero sympathy for Hal being in jail for the past ten years.
“You didn’t take the fall. You fell.”
Though the statement stings, Hal doesn’t let John sit in his self-righteousness for too long before calling out the fact that John is a murderer too.
John arrives having convinced himself that he’s settled the question of who Hal became.
But in a single conversation, Hal destabilizes John’s sense of morality once again.
The Life Hal Left Behind
That the events in 2016 altered them both as Lanterns.
As men.
But just as the evidence laid before us in the previous five episodes suggests, Hal instructs John not to tell anyone he was there to visit—further solidifying that Hal may be on a mission to uncover the truth about the Guardians and Lianna.
Frustrated and fed up, John leaves Hal alone.
And it’s a decision that may hold great regret when Kerry calls and tells him Hal has passed, taking us back to the end of Episode 1 and unloading a myriad of questions ahead.
At the end of Episode 1, audiences saw that John looked for the ring on Hal’s frozen hand, but there wasn’t one.
But in Episode 6, the perception of this scene shifts as John looks for defensive wounds on Hal’s hand.
How did he die, and, more importantly, why didn’t he fight back?
“He came back for me.”
After Hal’s release, he moved to Rushville to make amends to the people of the town—attempting to right a wrong that could never, in their eyes, be fixed.
Kerry gives John the key to the place Hal lived as he tries to figure out what happened and why.
It’s a somber moment but indicative of the respect John held for him since he was a boy.
But Marcus calls, reminding him of yet another responsibility, another expectation from someone who isn’t himself—binding himself to what’s comfortable rather than exploring a life of the unknown of who he could be on his own.
As much as John wants to ignore Hal’s death, he insists on being deputized to investigate alongside Kerry, making choices that are of his own volition even though he has every reason to return home.
In his belongings lies a key to a storage unit that John and Kerry check out, though Kerry’s reluctance belies a relationship she wishes to keep secret.
For now.
As John heads to Kerry’s house for a quiet evening at dinner with her and her son, Noah, he’s confronted by Billy and his goons, leading to a fist fight that lands him in jail.
But not before he activates the Green Lantern signal.
A Truth That Refuses to Stay Buried
In jail, Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion) answers John’s distress call, finally showing just who took up the mantle that John left empty.
“Everything you have is because I didn’t take it.”
There is an arrogance that enters John as Episode 6 progresses, one that sows seeds into viewers’ minds as his civilian identity collides with the one he walked away from—the Lantern the Guardians begged for, not the other way around.
And Guy knows this.
John asks Guy to assist with Hal’s burial by getting his suit and decommissioned ring, but he’s also dealing with his parents as well as Maggie (Hannah Christine Shetler)—the little girl from 2016 who was crying in the carnage—who’s now blackmailing him (with an oddly specific dollar amount, which makes us wonder if she’s an alien, but I digress).
Weighed down by everyone and everything, John finds the walls of his past closing in around him.
At the funeral, Guy comes through with the lantern suit and the ring at John’s request—the last thing keeping John around before heading back to his new life at Stewart Brothers.
The eulogy, written by Hal, echoes Episode 1 and the tragic cost of being a hero and the loneliness it entails when those who depend on you for survival turn their backs on you when you no longer serve them.
Hal came to Rushville to save them.
The people of the town blamed him for the wreckage, locked him up, and discarded him.
The loneliness alone gives added weight to John, telling him, “you fell.”
Not just from being a Lantern, but from the pedestal on which John placed him.
It also embodies the feelings of a man who, while well-intended, made many mistakes in the name of saving those around him. What Hal once bore proudly eventually became a burden placed upon him without his will.
This parallels Marcus turning his back on John when John’s decision to return and stay in Rushville impacts their company, digging up old wounds of John as the “Chosen One” while he reaps the benefits afforded to him through John’s very upbringing.
But as John lets the call end, he averts his attention back to his task—digging up Hal’s grave.
It turns out getting Guy to bring a ring wasn’t just to honor Hal but to settle a gut feeling.
As John boots up the last 5% charge of the ring, clone Hal appears.
“Goddamnit” is right.
What in the hell did Hal get himself into?
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Kivonshe—founder of So There’s That—is a film & TV critic who explores compelling storytelling, fandom relationships, character psychology, and the impact of entertainment media through film reviews, episodic recaps, and in-depth theme analysis.