Lanterns ‘Bad Optics’ Spoiler Review – ScreenHub Entertainment

Sorry for the delay on this one!

Lanterns launches itself into its 2026 of events, more or less picking up from the moment Hal was killed off. I was worried that the lack of Hal would be a detriment to the show, but Aaron Pierre continues to shine as the show jumps ten years ahead from last week’s violent showdown.

After one final meetup between John and Hal, the latter is unceremoniously killed off-screen. He did ten years in prison for the mayhem that befell the town, and tried to make amends to the townsfolk by doing odd jobs, like mowing the lawn, etc, but his popularity in town was basically non-existent save for starting a relationship with Kerry of all people, after her split with Billy. So no one is particularly broken about his loss; even John is a bit whatever about it, save for the mystery itself.

He ends up burying himself in the mystery of the murder, to the point of abandoning his brother and father in order to “tie up some loose ends” over in town. It was rough to watch John abandon his brother Aaron; the two started a very successful architecture firm and they were doing pretty well with their latest pitch; the city was on board with John’s safehouse designs, but they needed military approval, something John likely could’ve gotten due to his time in the military. But he elects to do that meeting over the phone, and the Colonel, on the other hand, thought that was pretty damn disrespectful, hanging up almost immediately. Hal was awful to John, so John sticking around to clean up the mess and eventually dig up Hal’s body to unearth the ring does feel like his priorities may be out of order.

Speaking of the ring, John recruits Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion, reprising his role from 2025’s Superman), Hal’s ultimate replacement. He’s quite different than his big-screen version, more grumpy and a bit resentful, but still sporting that terrible haircut. He agrees to fly back and claim Hal’s ring to bury it with Hal, only for John to deceive everyone and unearth Hal’s corpse and ring in the middle of the night. At least by doing this, we’ll get more of Kyle Chandler, thanks to the ring containing the memory backup of Hal.

John also has a ticking clock in the form of a waitress at the cafe, who blackmails him for well over $300 grand due to damages done to the city. John elected not to tell Kerry he met with John the night he died, fearing suspicion, but this detail didn’t go unnoticed by Maggie. But we don’t know if John will just elect to ignore this, or use the ring to conjure fake money like Hal did in the bar.

So the episode was missing a lot of that spark, as we had another lack of Hal, but thankfully, Aaron Pierre is great as John. He’s empathetic, professional, stoic, and a bit cagey, and most certainly in-to-deep. But with two episodes left, I feel we do need to dive more into the mystery that was set up in the pilot episode: who killed Hal, and why. This episode focused heavily on John and his hang-ups, but there wasn’t much in the way of detective work going on to figure out the answers to those questions.