Lanterns Episode 3 Reveals John Stewart Was Ring's First Choice, Not Hal Jordan

The third episode of Lanterns opens with a fall. John Stewart drops through what appears to be the ceiling of an abandoned shopping mall and lands on a stack of mattresses. Painted arrows guide him toward a manager's office, where a woman sits waiting. She is Lianna, one of the Guardians of the Universe wearing human form, and she has been expecting him. She leaves. She returns a full day later, satisfied that he waited. This patience, she explains, is only the first test.

But John already knows why he is there. The story he tells her begins in 1986, in a crib. A green light moved through the Stewart house that year and lifted his father from bed in a construct of pure will. A voice asked if he was afraid. John Sr. said yes. The ring left. The next time the family saw that light, it was on television, wrapped around Hal Jordan. The man who said no to fear had gotten the job. John Sr. never recovered from the rejection. Pride curdled into drink and a private shame that poisoned the house. At one point he shot the television when Hal's public debut appeared on screen.

Bernadette Stewart, John's mother, considered leaving. Then Lianna arrived in the driveway with an apology and a diamond the size of a fist. Bernadette demanded the Guardian drop her human disguise before she would listen. Once she had seen the blue face, she invited her inside for coffee. Lianna explained that the ring had detected something in John Sr.'s genetic makeup. If they raised the boy without fear, he might be useful to the Corps. Bernadette understood the assignment. She brought her husband back into the plan.

On John's fifth birthday, they sat him down and explained the job. He would be schooled separately. The birds around the house, they told him, reported to the Guardians. They gave him a homemade Lantern costume and a gun. It was John's idea to place an apple on his own head and have his father shoot it off in the backyard—the same scene that opened the series, now revealed in its full weight. John Sr. hesitated. Bernadette did not. "This is what it takes, for the both of you," she said. The shot landed. Everyone was still standing. Dad promised a cheeseburger.

The training did not stay in the garden. On a night drive, they made the boy get out of the car in a neighborhood he should not walk through alone. He came home unmarked and cried on his bed. Bernadette told him she had saved him a pork chop. Later, when she grew impatient with silence from Oa, she wanted the apple on her husband's head instead. John could not take the shot. "Guess the birds aren't liars, after all," she said. Then she walked it back. She came to his room and told him that loving his father was normal. She also admitted the birds were a lie. That was when he asked to hold the gun again—not at his father, but at her. Outside, he put the apple off his mother's head cleanly. They celebrated. He finally said he hated cheeseburgers. They let him stop eating them.

Years later, John became a Marine sergeant major and a sniper known for his patience. His last mission sent him after Arkady Ivanovich Petrov, a money launderer hiding on the Kamchatka Peninsula. John parachuted in injured and stayed in the woods for nine months, learning the house, the patterns, the windows. The night Petrov finally presented a shot, a green field wrapped the target and lifted him out. Hal Jordan had arrived. The official story afterwards was ugly in a smaller way. Hal had gotten the location from the Deputy Secretary of Defense, reportedly after a night that included a strip club. He took Petrov to Guantanamo. The extraction was loud enough to become a diplomatic problem. John's command could not admit an American superhero had just snatched a man off Russian soil. So John took the dishonorable discharge. The country kept its face. The sniper who waited nine months got neither the kill nor the career.

Back in the mall office, Lianna would not let the Russia story sit as a sad coincidence. Hal had been told not to use the ring on terrestrial disputes. He did it anyway. She asked whether John held it against him. He said no. She asked whether he would be comfortable replacing Hal while Hal believed John was only a protégé. John asked if those would be his orders. She said they would be. "Well then it doesn't matter if I'm comfortable with it," he replied. That line is the whole character in one breath—a man raised to treat discomfort as irrelevant once the order is clear. The Guardians were counting on it. When John went home to tell his parents himself, Hal was already at the kitchen table, charming them, calling them the Midwest Huxtables. None of the Stewarts looked like they were at a celebration. Outside, Hal asked if there was tension he needed to fix. John said he only wished he had been the one to tell them. Hal dropped the neighbor act. He did not want a sidekick. He did not want a backup. The only way John got that ring, Hal said, was over his dead body. Then he added that training starts Monday. "Looking forward to it, Junior." He flew off. John looked at a bird on the mailbox—the same lie his mother had used for years—and said, "I think he likes me."