How in Lanterns Damon Lindelof is Still Asking Questions About Destiny & Free Will And Whether Superheroes Deal With The Same Thing (Lost 20th Anniversary Series Adjacent)

 

 

"They come. They fight. They corrupt. They destroy. And it always ends the same."

Any fan of Lost remembers the first time they heard those words spoken by Titus Welliver in 'The Incident'. This nameless man will eventually become the Smoke Monster, who will be known as the force of all evil on the show, who has been menacing  the survivors of Oceanic 815 since the Pilot, who has been manipulating them and countless others on the Island for millennia, and who seems to be the ultimate force of darkness on all of Earth.

I've rewatched this series quite a few times in all the years since and will continue to do so. But one of the questions that I keep thinking now is: Did the Man in Black ever really believe what he said? Or was this just something he remembered his mother saying when he was a boy and despite everything she did to him, he still believed it?

The question of free will and destiny is at the center of Lost and its really been at the center of every show Damon Lindelof has done in all the years since. And it's very much at the center of Lanterns, the much-anticipated, highly rated, critically acclaimed and hated by all comic book fans who don't want a moral grey area in anything, least of all comic books.

There are many reason to enjoy Lanterns but as a Lost fan I find myself thinking that this is Lindelof returning to one of those great philosophical questions that not nearly enough great television actually tries to deal with: Do we have any power over the choices we actually make? Or is our path set in stone by decisions that were made by greater forces long before we were ever born? Considering that Lanterns is all about superheroes, aliens and beings that are pretty much gods by our standards it makes the discussion all the more interesting. If it ends up polarizing the fan base as it unfolds, well, we all know that Damon Lindelof has no problem doing that and has to have got a skin so thick that he wouldn't need a magic ring to protect him from the slings and arrows of the internet.

In an earlier review I've said that a great franchise show is ideally one that is made for people who might never watch anything based on a franchise. Comic book based series have less room for this than almost any other series and I think it's significant that Lindelof is associated with one of the all-time classics of the genre 2019's Watchmen. That series was about a lot of things and very few of them had to do with Alan Moore's classic comic book which is why he took his name off the series and I suspect is one of the reasons it works so well.  He's done another classic limited series since then (Mrs. Davis) and now he's back doing the same thing with Lanterns.  It deals with a cop drama, alien invasion, supernatural beings, forces beyond our control and fear. Very little of it has to do with the ring, the lantern and the suit which has causes DC fans to hate this and is one of the most appealing things about the show to me.

And at the center of it are two men who are the parallels of destiny and free will. Hal Jordan seemed to be handed the ring and didn't earn it; John Stewart was driven through it from the moment he was a child. Both men dealt with forces that were larger than them, both of them have major parent issues (this is a Lindelof show, after all) and both of them have no trust in the other. The only difference between this and Jack and Locke is that it took three seasons for Jack to try and kill Locke and in Lanterns it only took four episodes.

Some have made the argument that in 'Outkast' the writers leaned in too hard about why it's so difficult to be a black man in America when it came to why John Stewart was driven towards the ring. There's truth to that but there's also clearly a parallel to how figures such as Daniel Faraday and Desmond Hume (among others) were driven towards a destiny they had no control over by dominant females such as John's mother, Bernadette and the Guardian (Laura Linney). Both Bernadette and the Guardian are clearly pushing him to something that's more in their interest then John's, stripping his free will away day by day until John doesn't question his path one bit. Every bit of John's life was pre-determined before he began, even his choice to join the military instead of art school. His regimen is being trained to follow orders to the point he no longer recognizes it when he finally achieves it.

There's a clear argument that in the first half of Season 1 John (Aaron Pierre) is pursuing the ring not so much for himself but to please his parents and then the Guardian. He says over and over that Hal didn't do a thing to earn, it was handed to him. But Jon has clearly never had a chance to ask if he actually wants it. The decision was made by his parents who were clearly being manipulated by the Guardians who never trusted Hal in the first place. (Whether that was justifiable based on Hal's actions is moot: the Guardians had started the vetting process for his replacement even then.) They were trying to push on the idea what it meant to be special for some higher purpose and if they had any regrets about it we don't really see it.

 Even as the climactic events in Rushville unfolded they seemed less interested in what was happening to anyone else or even their son; all they wanted to know was whether he'd gotten the ring. This is mirrored when John brings the Crystal Heart of Zoe to the Guardian and shows it to her. She looks at it and pushes it aside. All she says, in a neutral tone,  is: "We all make mistakes." And considering we've just seen the body count of humans and aliens as a result of their 'mistake' it shows how little they truly care about humanity, only their own interests.

(As a Lost viewer I should add that scene between Hal and the Guardian really reminded me of the confrontation between Ben and Jacob at the end of Season 5 when Ben reminds Jacob of all his years of service and Jacob's response is a dismissive: "What about you?" The Guardian's lucky John just walked away; in my opinion he would have been justified in putting on the ring, manifesting a knife and stabbing her in the chest.)

This is mirrored in Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler). In 2016 Hal seems arrogant not just to John but to basically everybody in Rushville. He's had the ring for twenty years and he thinks that gives him certainty that he must be 'the chosen one',  a theme that comes up a little bit in Lost.  There's an egomaniacal brazenness to him that makes him feel he's invincible and he treats everyone he meets in person with barely veiled contempt.  This certainty leads to the horrible consequences of his determination to get Zoe and prove to the Guardians that he alone should be the Green Lantern. As a result the horrible events of Rushville are very much on him. Even before this its become clear he has very little respect for orders, the chain of command or even right or wrong.

But – and this is the genius of Lindelof and his writers – there is a reason for why Hal is who he is. He makes it clear to Jon that this is a lonely life and that you have to get used to losing people and not having human connections. He tells John that being the only Lantern for Earth, there's no one else he can talk to about the burden placed on him and none of the other Lanterns even speak English. There are no perks about the job anymore; he probably doesn't know who Hal Jordan was before he got the ring.

And in a very real sense many, if not most,  of his actions are justifiable. The Guardians were lying to him about why John was there and John was willing to maintain the lie to Hal's face. He has no doubt that the Guardians wanted John to kill Hal after he took the ring from him (that they never say so directly doesn't mean it any less probable). He was right about an alien menace in Rushville and that everybody in town was lying to him about what was going on.  He was right that Zoe was the Manhunter and that John had been compromised like everyone else in her orbit. Hal was right about practically everything – including his last words to John. "They replaced me. They'll replace you."

By the time we move to 2026, we know Hal was right. When Jon refuses the ring the Guardians chose to pass it on to Guy Gardener, who makes his first appearance in the sixth episode. Interestingly this is one of the rare occasion where Gardener's previous appearance in the DCU (Superman in 2025) actually is a buttress for one of Lindelof's key themes in Lost.  Nathan Fillion made it clear Gardener was just as arrogant in his own way as Hal or John. ("Supes couldn't be here, but you got on an upgrade," he says to a young boy at the climax of the film) but there's a certain good-naturedness and humility to him that we don't see in Hal or John.  The Justice Gang ("Not Our Name," Hawkgirl tiredly reminds him) is essentially the DC version of 'Live Together, Die Alone' that was the thesis of Lost.  And for all his self-confidence Gardener clearly gets the importance of teamwork in  a way that Hal never did and John never got.  There's a good argument that by the time we meet him he's still around because he understands that fact – and as if to drive the point home, Hal has died alone and Jon very much is when the action resumes.

There's a larger argument that Guy, even at his most foul-mouthed in his encounter with Jon in the jail, has a better eye on the big picture than Hal or John ever did. He makes it clear that he's spent much of the last decade doing damage control in part because of what happened in Rushville and the stain it left on the Lantern. Tellingly neither Hal nor Jon seem to give much a damn for the new Lantern and even a decade after the fact still refuse to acknowledge who's responsible. John says that Guy owes him because 'what you have is because of me.' This indicates that despite everything that pursuit of the ring cost him there's a part of him that still wants it.

In 2026 Jon has broken off ties with both his parents who clearly don't feel any remorse for their actions. In their mind the events in Rushville and all the lives lost pale to  what they did. And John seems to have engaged in the compartmentalization Hal did. When the waitress of the café lies for him and demands reparations Jon pretends not to recognize the nine-year old girl who was horribly scarred. (At the end of Season 1 he atones in more ways than just the money) As he walks through Rushville in a town that hates his guts he doesn't seem to care how traumatizing his presence is. And everything he does is in a sense manipulative: he doesn't care about proper respect being paid to Hal, all he cares about is getting the ring so he can figure out who killed him.

In the penultimate episode we get the clearest parallels yet between Lanterns and Lost.   Hal Jordan is a hologram of himself and has no idea of what the last decade was like and what his relationship with John was. He has a fair amount of his cunning still in play and is capable of manipulating John to get what he wants, first to talk to Carol and then to go to the safe.

During this period secrets about John's life are becoming clear, including just how bad his relations with his family is. Ironically now that Hal actually wants to know about John's life, John has no desire to share it and now that's he dead Hal is capable of telling John everything he wanted to hear as a trainee.

By the time they end up traveling to the wreckage of the planet John learned about ten years ago John is forced to confront some of the true horrors of his life. He faces what is his greatest fear, which is the truth about himself: he never really wanted to be the Lantern and everything he's done has been to please his parents, something he still can't do. When Hal ends up saving him John doesn't want that.

Hal then confides his real secret: his father committed suicide. We saw him talk about it during the flashback in 1975 when he gives him a 'fail-safe key' and it is everything he has and a note. We learn that this is the trauma passed down from the Jordan's. "I wasn't fearless because I'm brave," he tells John. "I'm fearless because I'm broken."

We can't help but remember how the Man in Black in Locke's body described him "as weak and pathetic and irrevocably broken…just like all the people Jacob brought here." And given everything we've seen about John Stewart to this point, it's clear that he's just as broken as Hal was long before he ended up being the trainee. One is reminded that Jacob said he didn't bring anyone to the island out of a happy existence, that "you needed this place as much as it needed you."  But that leaves out the fact that Jacob, much like the Lantern Corps, may have been manipulating its members their entire lives to serve their end. And as we've seen over and over the ring doesn't make you whole.

What's clear is that by the time John and Hal reach Sinestro that they've finally figured out how to work as a team in a way they couldn't when the two were alive. And the relationship that John has really been searching for his whole life becomes real after John manages to take Sinestro down. Hal says: "Nice arm, kid" and the parallel to Hal in the aftermath of his father's death is made clear.

The clearest parallel in the Season 1 finale to Lost deals with some of the revelations in the final two episodes. In What They Died For Jacob tells Kate that the reason her name was crossed off the list of being the guardian of the island is because she became a mother. We know from Across the Sea that every happened because Jacob and the Man in Black were raised by an insane woman, who killed the real mother of the twins when they were infants and essentially took away all their choices in favor of purposes they never truly understood.

Kate Austen parallels Kerrey because neither had the choice of becoming a mother but they both proved that wasn't a qualification to be a great mother. Everything we've seen about Kerrey parallels what we see Kate when it comes to Aaron: she raised her son well and did everything possible to protect him from the world. And when the truth was revealed about her son's parentage everything she did was to protect him.  She admits it wasn't premeditated and while she doesn't acknowledge she doesn't deny that she called John because he might be the only person who can figure out what she did and that he may be the only person who can be objective about doing the right thing.

And that's where John's action in the season finale most parallel the idea of free well versus destiny. John talks about 'programming' with Noah in a way that parallels everything he's gone through but he also argues that he had free will. This was true when he decided not to take the ring back in 2016 and it guides his actions here. He chooses not to follow Noah's wishes and kill him. He chooses not to turn Kerrey into the authorities. When he confronts Guy he says he's choosing to take a different path then the Guardians. And the oath he says in the final moments involves the word choose as well. That of course is the clearest parallel between the climax of Lost. Jack chooses to take Jacob's place for the final battle and Hurley makes the decision to take over the burden, even if he believes its only temporary.

Those who are fans of how the Green Lantern is portrayed in DC will have many reasons to loathe what Lanterns was in the first season. As someone who had no real attachment to the comic but who deeply admires both great television and the work of Damon Lindelof, Lanterns comes across as a triumph both on its own merits (like all Lindelof shows it is superbly written, directed and acted at every level) and as it explores the same philosophical arguments that have always made each and every one of his TV shows a joy for two decades.  That's more interesting to me than whatever Easter eggs comic book fans look for and its why I hope its renewed for a second season even if they choose to review bomb it on various websites.  I might not swear an oath to it, but it's definitely a light shining out in the often blackest day and darkest night  of television.