New Things #7: Lanterns

The 500 New Things challenge is back and in full swing! For TV shows to count as a New Thing, I have to watch at least five episodes.

No spoilers ahead for Lanterns.

To just get straight to it, I found Lanterns to be two shows. For six episodes, Lanterns was good-to-great. It took a serious, grounded approach to a Green Lantern story, which is impressive since I had always found him to be one of the more difficult characters to translate onto the screen. Aaron Pierre and Kyle Chandler’s characters/performances were great and as I’m a superhero movie fan who doesn’t read comics, I didn’t bump on changes to Hal Jordan that I saw some comic fans struggled with.

For the last two episodes, DC seemed to succumb to the Marvel problem of undercutting the standalone story in order to set-up a longer term narrative. In a perfect world, I think Lanterns would have wrapped up with episode 6. Instead, the next two episodes seem to be written with the sole purpose of finding a way to keep the series going for another season. New information emerges, new challenges are faced, and, quite frankly, I was underwhelmed by almost all of it. The final episode also includes one of the unintentionally goofiest moments in a serious show and I think everyone who has seen it knows what I’m talking about. The last two episodes aren’t terrible but they didn’t live up to the standard that the previous episodes had set and they just felt like a waste of time to me.

In the end, I still enjoyed Lanterns and would recommend that people try it out.