Spoilers for the HBO series Lanterns follow.
Following the season finale of DCU’s Lanterns, fans are hungry for more. This season explained Guy Gardner’s role as Green Lantern, the fate of Hal Jordan, and introduced famed Green Lantern villain Sinestro. The finale set up John Stewart as a boots-on-the-ground Green Lantern, dedicated to the Corps’ wider mission but not obedient to the Guardians, and it gave him a new power battery. The new power battery came from Sinestro of all people, but it sets Stewart up for future adventures, including his confirmed appearance in Superman: Man of Tomorrow and future seasons of Lanterns.
Audiences are already speculating what future seasons of Lanterns will entail and what storylines they’d like to see adapted. The focus on Manhunters — albeit in a different form than comic audiences are used to seeing them — and the show’s focus on autonomy would be an easy fit for a storyline regarding Alpha Lanterns.
Alpha Lanterns were Green Lanterns turned into Manhunters by the Guardians. Once again, the Guardians wanted to achieve a peacekeeping force with minimal kickback from those serving in it. While the season finale left the door open on the Manhunters — John Stewart didn’t take action against Noah Macon, the Manhunter son of Sheriff Kane — it seems unlikely that the writers would stay with them for another season without exploring other foes of the Green Lanterns.
The same author who came up with the Alpha Lanterns also wrote two major DC Comics events, The Sinestro Corps War and Blackest Night. Written by prolific DC Comics writer Geoff Johns, these stories, if done well, would be excellent for the DCU. Fans want to see both of them, and given the breadth of these stories, they could easily include characters from outside Lanterns’ small cast.
With the mysterious alien planet and the inclusion of Sinestro, Lanterns season one already planted multiple seeds for a Sinestro Corps War arc. In Green Lantern, yellow has always been a weakness for the Green Lantern Corps, and Geoff Johns’ Sinestro Corps War solidified the weakness not only to the color but to the grander emotion of fear.
The Sinestro Corps, during the Sinestro Corps War, aimed to create a universal order through “absolute obedience and abject terror”. Sinestro not only intended to destroy Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps during this arc but also planned to rule the multiverse. While a multiversal scope would be unlikely, Lanterns season two could easily follow a Sinestro building up his own Lantern Corps.
At the season’s end, Sinestro was still susceptible to the fear of the alien planet, but he has plenty of time going forward to learn how to embrace that fear. Once that fear is embraced, he would be able to channel it and recruit others to his cause. Hal Jordan may be his focus in the comics, but the Lanterns television show gave Sinestro an animosity towards Stewart that can certainly be followed up on if the writers don’t plan on resurrecting Jordan.
The comic relies on a larger Green Lantern cast, so it would be interesting to see what characters Lanterns would introduce for a storyline, and how it would likely be scaled down for a season of television.
If done right, Blackest Night has the potential to be a DCU movie event on par with Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. It has a large cast, a serious threat, and considerable fallout. Teases for the storyline were already made with Lanterns season one, but it would be best if it were built out gradually instead of trying to rush it for Lanterns season two or even season three.
In Lanterns season one, Sinestro teases the Halogram with the prospect of bringing Hal back to life for real. This could be either as a host for Parallax — a parasite that is the literal entity of fear in the DC Universe and thus a part of the Sinestro Corps — or via a black ring. Building on Geoff Johns’ color spectrum mythos for Green Lantern, black lanterns represent death and the void that existed before all life. Unlike the other Lantern Corps, Black Lanterns aren’t composed of the living, but rather the dead.
The Blackest Night comic derives much of its stakes from the recent deaths of significant Justice League members such as Aquaman, Batman, and Martian Manhunter. Batman and Aquaman are later brought back as Black Lanterns, and the surviving members of the League realize that while they resemble their loved ones, they aren’t them. Black Lantern rings are later described as “wearing the dead” as opposed to the “dead wearing the rings”.
Because of the large cast, Blackest Night shouldn’t be adapted until a Justice League has been established and audiences have had time to care about these characters. Batman’s death won’t mean anything unless Batman, as a character within the story, has meant something. Lanterns introduced audiences to Sinestro, Hal Jordan, and John Stewart, along with further characterizing Guy Gardner, but there is a plethora of characters working in Blackest Night that audiences don’t know yet, and that would be overwhelming to meet at the start of a Blackest Night adaptation.
We want to hear from you in the comments! What Green Lantern arcs do you want to see adapted on the big screen?
