There's a moment a few minutes into the first episode of the new HBO superhero series Lanterns that neatly carves out a corner of the DC universe and stakes a claim on it.
John (Aaron Pierre) is angry. His would-be mentor Hal (Kyle Chandler) has just endangered his life while refusing to actually train him — and not in the classic Mr. Miyagi "wax on, wax off, I'm-training-you-without-you-realizing-I'm-training-you" way. No, Hal's just a surly jerk who should really step aside and let someone younger and more dedicated take over, but he's stubborn and resentful and refuses to do anything but antagonize his younger charge.
So walking along a dusty desert road, John calls his father to complain. And gets quickly shut down. This opportunity means too much, his father says, so you can't afford to be seen getting angry. "They can throw tantrums," he says, "we can't."
"They" and "we," he says. Not "Hal" and "you." Which is the moment Lanterns finds its voice, its purpose, its singular reason for being, in a culture thronged with less distinguished — and less distinguishable — superhero fare.
Because John is Black, and Hal is white. John is a Marine vet whose life of discipline, rigor and focus has earned him the rank of Green Lantern-in-training. Hal, meanwhile, is a retired test pilot, a bluff, impulsive, self-styled rebel who stumbled into the role he now refuses to relinquish.
About that role: There's these space cops, see. They're intergalactic peacekeepers who are issued rings that allow their wearers to manifest objects — anything they can imagine — out of green energy. These cops are called Green Lanterns. Their bosses are aliens who call themselves the Guardians of the Universe.
So that's the lore, the high-concept superhero stuff undergirding the show, which keys into the main plot, involving a small town in Nebraska that's basically one big municipal X-File. There's a weird local town patriarch (Garret Dillahunt), his sharp-tongued wife (Poorna Jagannathan), and a put-upon sheriff (Kelly Macdonald), who all seem to know more about aliens than they let on.
But the heart of the show is — or should be, anyway — that fractious John-Hal dynamic, and the way it's firmly situated in the real world. One one level, sure: John's a trainee space-cop, and Hal's his frustrating space-cop mentor, pew pew pew. But John's also a Black man in America who sees in Hal yet another white guy squandering the power he wields — power he didn't earn, power he didn't have to work for, power that he takes for granted.
The show owns that chewy, intriguing conflict — and at least in the early going, it lets the world of fun, superhero childhood-wish-fulfillment chime against reality. (Aliens grant you the ability to make anything you want! Those same aliens don't appreciate that doling out rings to different humans has repercussions, because they cannot grasp the very human concept of race.)
And if Lanterns permitted itself to live inside that tension, it would earn its place alongside Watchmen, which used the notion of superheroes to interrogate American life in a way that felt bracingly new.
But Lanterns splits up the team of John and Hal early and often, and while it explores how differently their disparate criminal investigations proceed, later episodes pivot so far away from that intriguing central dynamic that it starts to feel like an entirely different show.
Which is not to say the series it eventually becomes is bad — on the contrary, it remains lean, efficient, cleverly written and ingeniously constructed throughout. Even as the aliens-among-us plot subsumes everything else and flattens out its spikier attributes, the show neatly avoids the tropes and narrative pitfalls that have dogged lesser series.
It hits a lot of the story beats you expect it to, but remains admirably committed to sneaking up on them. It doesn't waste our time having characters explain things when the show itself can imply them. Seeds are planted in the early going that pay off in satisfying ways later on. (That bird John somehow manages to manifest, even when he's not wearing the ring? Yeah, that's setting up a whole thing.)
Again and again, you get the sense of a story that has been painstakingly shaped, wrought, honed into what we see onscreen. The audience's reactions and presumptions have been taken into account and compensated for, ensuring that we figure out aspects of the central mystery alongside the characters, not two episodes before them.
Even that most dreaded bugaboo of contemporary television — the flashback episode — is handled well. It imparts new information that colors everything that came before and everything that comes after, deepening and complicating relationships and characters we thought we knew.
And whenever Pierre and Chandler share the screen, they feed off each other. They're allowed to be funny in different ways, and to show us the loneliness that each man has couched behind a facade; puffed-up bravado in Hal's case, straight-backed severity in John's.
The fact that they don't share the screen as much as you want them to is disappointing, because it means the show can never dig as deeply as those early episodes promise to. But if Watchmen taught us that you can use superheroes to excavate the cracked foundations of the American experience, Lanterns seems content to linger in the shadow of another HBO Sunday night prestige genre series, True Detective. And while you might wish for it to aim higher, you can't deny that it delivers on that more modest ambition. Which I guess makes sense: Time may be a flat circle, but then — so's a power ring.
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