SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from the premiere of HBO‘s Lanterns.
The series premiered Sunday night, introducing audiences to Kyle Chandler as the legendary Lantern Hal Jordan and his trainee John Stewart (played by Aaron Pierre). Whatever plans Hal has for John’s training regimen are quickly interrupted by murder in Rushville, Nebraska, that Hal suspects has something to do with aliens.
Much of the first episode sets up the mystery that the Green Lantern and his protege are aiming to solve before ending with a twist. The final moments flash forward from 2016 (when Hal is training John) to 2026. Hal Jordan is dead — and John is ostensibly not the Green Lantern. The pair largely haven’t spoken in a decade, and Rushville’s sheriff has only summoned John after finding Hal’s body at the football stadium, where their intergalactic murder investigation began all those years ago.
This, Chandler explains, is what “opens up the whole mystery of the show.”
“The whole search is to find out what happened to him,” he told Deadline. “I like the fact that the show is non-linear and they’ve layered it like that.”
The reveal introduces audiences to the fact that there is not one murder mystery being solved throughout this series, there are two, and the events in 2016 clearly have some sort of influence on what’s to come.
Chandler likened the experience of telling a non-linear story to “three-dimensional chess” because of the layers involved in playing the characters’ emotional truth at any given moment in the series.
“Once you get all your pages taped on the wall and you know where all your scenes are, then you can take this page in the script and this page in the script, and figure out how to play with the material to reveal things differently, or to lay Easter eggs as the actor,” he said. “So, maybe later on, if not anyone else, I remember I did that. You can have fun doing things, but it’s complicated.”
Lanterns is from co-creators Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof and Tom King. New episodes air Sunday nights at 6 p.m. PT/9 p.m. ET on HBO and are available at the same time on HBO Max.
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