by Charles Kirkland Jr.
Lanterns Season 1 Episode 7 Recap: The Jordan Boys Legacy Opens the Door to Hal’s Past
Lanterns Season 1 Episode 7 Recap reaches into Hal Jordan’s past before returning to the mystery surrounding his death. In 1977, a young Hal sits bruised in his baseball coach’s office after refusing to leave a game. When his father, Martin, learns Hal was pulled in the bottom of the ninth with one out and nobody on base, he responds in distinctly Jordan fashion by getting into a fight with the coach.
Later, Martin gives Hal his grandfather’s dog tags and tells him about the way Jordan men prepare for failure. Hal’s grandfather kept a safe. Martin has built a box for his son, something he describes as part of the Jordan boys’ legacy. He also convinces Hal to throw away the baseball he has been carrying, telling him how exhausting it can be to keep holding onto something.
The memory eventually moves to Martin’s funeral, where jets fly overhead in the missing-man formation as Hal stands above his father’s grave. Nearly five decades later, Hal is standing over that same grave again. Only now, he is the avatar created through his Green Lantern ring, and John Stewart is trying to use what remains of his mentor to answer the question that has haunted him since returning to Rushville: Who killed Hal Jordan?
John is running out of time. The ring is nearly depleted, the Hal avatar isn’t particularly cooperative and the waitress threatening John still wants $315,000. John calls his brothers for the money before turning his attention back to the mysterious box Hal left behind. Hal refuses to open it unless John takes him to Sheriff Kerry Kane.
Read our recap of “Bad Optics.”
Explore the complete Lanterns Series Hub.
Read Beyond the Episode for “Bad Optics.”
Lanterns Season 1 airs on HBO and streams on HBO Max.
John Stewart Discovers What Hal Jordan Left Behind
The trip back to Rushville gives the Lanterns Season 1 Episode 7 Recap an unexpected development in the connection between John and Hal. The avatar reappears without John consciously summoning him and remains even after John removes the ring. Hal is amazed that John has accomplished something he never could, but John soon discovers another way to make the “Halvatar” disappear. He starts rapping a song, and Hal vanishes.
That trick becomes important later, but first John brings Hal to Kerry.
Kerry is at the high school for the hat ceremony when John arrives. Mandy takes his watch as collateral while Noah decides to play in that night’s game and postpone his college decision. John eventually gets Kerry alone and introduces her to the impossible: Hal Jordan standing in front of her again.
Kerry touches his face, stunned by how real he seems. Hal reminds her that he isn’t her Hal, but she immediately understands why John brought him back. John needs Hal to open the box.
Inside, they discover a backpack containing food, a gun and an Einstein bridge capable of creating a tunnel between two locations anywhere in the universe. John and Hal take the device to the fallen water tower and step through, turning the murder investigation into something much larger than anything waiting for them in Rushville.
They emerge on a deserted planet. John cannot simply fly across it because Hal never taught him how, so they begin walking. As they move deeper into the landscape, Hal remembers where they are. He once witnessed the destruction of the civilization that lived there after being abducted and injected with the memory of its final moments. A gas caused the inhabitants to turn against one another until they killed one another and themselves.
The abandoned world expands the mystery at the center of the Lanterns Season 1 Episode 7 Recap. Whatever Hal was doing before his death wasn’t confined to Rushville, and whatever he placed inside the Jordan family box was important enough to preserve a path back to this place.
John and Hal eventually find a boat and begin crossing the water, but a storm rolls in and John starts hallucinating. His father appears and asks him to shoot an apple off his head before disappearing and being replaced by a younger version of John. When John falls from the boat, Hal saves him.
Their journey has brought both men back to their fathers.
John Finally Starts Seeing the Avatar as Hal
The hallucinations force John and Hal into a conversation about the secrets both men have carried. John wonders whether Hal killed himself and asked Kerry to cover it up, just as Hal concealed the truth surrounding the death of John’s father. The suspicion gives way to an apology and, in the process, the Lanterns Season 1 Episode 7 Recap reaches one of its smallest but most meaningful moments: John finally calls the avatar Hal.
Until now, John has largely treated the figure beside him as information stored inside the ring, a reconstruction of the mentor whose murder he is trying to solve. Somewhere during their journey, that distinction has begun to disappear. John may understand intellectually that this isn’t the Hal Jordan he knew, but emotionally he has started responding to him as if he were. Their investigation has unexpectedly given John another opportunity to talk to the man with whom he still has so much unfinished business.
That changing relationship follows them to the opposite shore, where a mysterious figure wearing a shroud attacks from behind and grabs Hal, threatening to slit his throat. John appears trapped until Hal tells him that he’s playing their song. It’s the clue John needs. Just as he discovered earlier in Rushville, the song allows him to make the avatar disappear, instantly removing the attacker’s hostage and giving John an opening to fight back.
John knocks the stranger to the ground and looks at the man beneath the shroud. The face waiting there immediately expands the mystery surrounding Hal Jordan’s final days: Sinestro.
His presence raises another question before John has time to process the answer to the first. Sinestro isn’t surprised to see the Green Lantern standing over him, nor does John appear to be some stranger who accidentally stumbled onto this deserted world. Sinestro looks at him as someone he already knows by reputation, setting up the episode’s final revelation.
Lanterns Season 1 Episode 7 Ending: Sinestro Knows John Stewart
“You must be John Stewart.”
Sinestro’s arrival gives the Lanterns Season 1 Episode 7 Recap its biggest turn, connecting Hal’s hidden journey to someone who was apparently waiting at the other end. John entered the episode trying to learn what Hal Jordan left behind and ends it face-to-face with someone who already knows exactly who he is.
The reveal also gives new meaning to the episode’s title. Martin Jordan believed the Jordan boys’ legacy was about preparing for failure and leaving something behind for the people who came after them. Hal inherited that lesson and created his own version of the box, filling it with the things someone might need when he was no longer there to explain himself.
John is now the person opening it.
That makes the Lanterns Season 1 Episode 7 Recap as much about inheritance as investigation. John has inherited Hal’s ring, his unfinished case, his secrets and increasingly the consequences of whatever Hal was doing before his death. Even the avatar becomes part of that inheritance, giving John an opportunity to understand the man he lost while simultaneously discovering how much of Hal remained hidden from him.
The episode’s most important shift may therefore happen before Sinestro ever removes the shroud. John finally calls the avatar Hal. For a relationship defined by suspicion, resentment and unfinished business, the name signals that John has begun seeing the man behind the Green Lantern legend.
Then Sinestro changes the equation.
John Stewart started this investigation trying to answer one question: Who killed Hal Jordan? The Jordan family box has now carried him across the universe to a destroyed civilization and directly into the path of someone who was apparently expecting him.
With the season finale approaching, “The Jordan Boys Legacy” leaves John with a mystery much larger than the one he started with.
Whatever Hal Jordan was hiding, Sinestro knows something about it.
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