I’ll be honest, I went into episode 6 of Lanterns expecting a slow build after that gut-punch of an episode 5. Instead, HBO handed me a murder mystery wrapped inside a family drama wrapped inside a superhero show that barely wants to be a superhero show anymore. And weirdly, that’s the best version of itself the series has found so far.
Show: Lanterns (HBO/HBO Max)
Episode: 6, “Untitled Investigation Chapter” (the murder-mystery half)
Creators: Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof, Tom King
Cast this episode: Aaron Pierre, Kyle Chandler, Nathan Fillion, Kelly Macdonald, Poorna Jagannathan, and more
Aired: September 20, 2026
Spoilers from here on, obviously. If you’re not caught up through episode 6, come back after.
Quick Catch-Up: Where Episode 5 Left Us
Before jumping in, here’s the short version of why this episode hits the way it does. By the end of episode 5, both Green Lanterns lost their rings — John walked away from his voluntarily, Hal had his taken by force. That’s the emotional wreckage this episode is built on top of. Neither man is a Lantern anymore, and somehow that’s exactly when Hal turns up dead.
John’s New Life Away From Rushville
The episode opens somewhere I didn’t expect — a boardroom. John and his business partner Marcus are pitching underground panic shelters to city officials in Midway City, using the kind of money that gets thrown around after disasters like the one in Metropolis or Corto Maltese. It’s a strange pivot for a guy who used to run headfirst into danger, and I think that’s the point. John isn’t fearless anymore. He’s monetizing fear instead.
What got me was how casually John answers the one question everyone in that room actually cares about — his time as a Green Lantern. Five minutes, he says, like it’s a line on a resume he’d rather skip past. Aaron Pierre plays that moment with almost no emotion on his face, and that flatness says more than a speech would have.
The Reunion Nobody Wanted
Word reaches John that Hal’s in Rushville asking around for him, wanting to apologize. John doesn’t buy it for a second, but he drives out anyway. Their scene together in that half-empty café is, for me, the best two-hander the show has done all season. Hal refuses to actually apologize — his logic is that going to prison already squared things between them. John doesn’t let him get away with that, and honestly, neither did I. Serving time for what happened to a town isn’t the same as owning what you did to one specific person who trusted you.
Hal, cornered, does what Hal always does — he goes for the throat. He brings up Zoe, brings up the fact that John pulled the trigger on her, and needles him about being too scared to become the next Lantern. It works. John breaks Hal’s nose right there in the café, which quietly answers a question the show had been sitting on since the premiere.
A Body, Again
Walking away from that fight is the last we see of Hal alive. Later that night, Kerry calls John with the news — Hal’s dead, shot once in the bleachers, same spot the whole show opened on. The show plays this like déjà vu on purpose, and it works. We’re watching the same crime scene from episode 1 again, except this time we know John was in town the whole time and told nobody.
That’s the thing that bugs me about John this episode. He’s not exactly hiding evidence, but he’s not being honest either, and every choice he makes afterward — asking to be deputized, going after the autopsy details, digging around Hal’s storage unit — reads less like grief and more like a man covering his tracks while pretending to investigate.
The Autopsy and the Suspect Pile-Up
Kerry brings John along (unofficially) to see the medical examiner, Bitsy, who lays out the facts plainly: single gunshot, close range, no struggle, no defensive movement. Whoever killed Hal, he looked them in the eye first. There’s also the small detail of a broken nose from hours earlier, which makes John visibly tense — because we, the audience, know exactly who threw that punch.
By the end of the episode, there’s a genuinely long list of people who had reason to want Hal gone: Billy, who’s despised him since Rushville; John Sr., who’s clearly slipping and was recently seen with a pistol; Bernadette, who might be angrier at both men than she lets on; Carol Ferris, who shows up at the funeral with an eulogy she can’t bring herself to read; even Noah, who lost his whole world because of what Hal set in motion.
My Theory On Who Actually Did It
Here’s where I’ll put my own read on things, for what it’s worth. I don’t think this is a whodunit with a clean answer sitting in the suspect pool the show just handed us. The camera lingers too long on John’s hands, on his silence, on the careful way he manages what Kerry knows and doesn’t know. I think the show wants us seriously entertaining the idea that John is protecting himself, not investigating a stranger’s murder. It doesn’t mean he pulled the trigger — but I wouldn’t rule out that he knows a lot more than he’s letting Kerry, or us, in on.
I’d also gently push back on any theory that Noah is secretly a Manhunter. Every clue the show has planted about Manhunters points to them attaching to people already in power, not raising future ones from scratch. Noah wanting to be a senator someday reads to me as a kid processing trauma by chasing control, not a programmed directive.
The Vault and the Ending
The last stretch of the episode is where things get properly strange. John convinces Kerry to bury Hal instead of cremating him, gets Guy Gardner to hand over Hal’s old ring and uniform for the burial (against Guy’s better judgment), and then, once everyone’s gone, digs the grave back open.
He takes the ring off Hal’s body and uses whatever charge is left in it to summon “Halogram” — a stored consciousness copy of Hal that the ring apparently keeps as backup. The final shot is Halogram opening his eyes over his own corpse, completely unaware of everything that’s happened since Rushville.
Ending Explained: What Was John Actually Planning?
Strip away the emotional stuff and John’s whole episode has been one long setup. He needed access to Hal’s body for the funeral route rather than cremation. He needed the ring back on Hal’s finger so there’d be enough residual charge to summon Halogram. He needed Guy out of the picture before doing any of it. Every “grieving friend” moment this episode was doubling as a logistics problem John was quietly solving.
Why go to all that trouble instead of just asking Guy or the Guardians for help? Because, as Guy makes clear, the Green Lantern Corps wants nothing to do with this mess — “bad optics” is basically their whole stance on Hal and John both right now. So John’s building his own workaround, using a version of Hal who remembers nothing that’s happened since he lost the ring. That’s either a genius move or a deeply selfish one, and I think the show wants both readings sitting there at once.
What Worked For Me
Aaron Pierre carries this episode. There’s a scene where he’s on the phone with Marcus, lying with total calm about everything being “under control,” and you can see exactly how much of John’s old recklessness never actually left — it just changed shape. Kelly Macdonald as Kerry also does a lot with very little dialogue; the scene where she hands John the keys to Hal’s place and warns him about the shotgun rigged to the front door says everything about how Hal lived without spelling it out.
What Didn’t Work For Me
My one real complaint is pacing. The middle stretch, with the Maggie blackmail subplot and the John Sr. detour, felt like the show reaching for extra runtime rather than building toward anything urgent. I get that it’s laying groundwork for later episodes, but in an eight-episode season, every scene needs to be pulling weight, and a couple of these didn’t feel like they were.
Final Verdict
This episode does what the best mystery shows do — it makes you suspicious of the person you’re rooting for. I went in wanting answers about who killed Hal and came out more interested in what John’s willing to do to control the story around his death.
Rating: 4/5
Two episodes left this season, and I genuinely don’t know where this lands. Do you think John’s hiding something, or is he just a guy in way over his head trying to do right by an old friend? Drop your theory in the comments — I want to hear who you’ve got on your suspect list.