Warning: This post contains spoilers for Episode 3 of Lanterns
Tiger Woods. Serena Williams. Stephen Curry. Jalen Brunson… John Stewart.
Sunday’s stellar episode of Lanterns provided the origin story for Aaron Pierre‘s would-be superhero, focusing on how John’s parents, Bernadette (Jasmine Cephas Jones) and John Sr. (J. Alphonse Nicholson), began training their son to be a Green Lantern from infancy, teaching him to be fearless, and deliberately borrowing a page from the athlete parent playbook. We also get an explanation for the shocking William Tell-esque scene in the pilot, where Senior shoots an apple off Junior’s head, as well as the reason why the younger John has such a connection to birds that he can keep his manifestation alive long after removing the ring in last week’s chapter.
“This episode is special,” Pierre said in a taped message to mid-week screening event attended by Gold Derby, “the chapter where we really start to understand who he is and what shapes him into the hero he becomes. John Stewart holds a meaningful place in comic book history as one of the first Black superheroes, and that legacy is at the heart of this show.”
Below, the cast and writer-producer Vanessa Baden Kelly break down Episode 3, titled “OutKast,” explaining how they tackled race, family sacrifice, and true heroism.
Are you afraid?
The episode opens with John Jr. falling from the ceiling onto a pile of mattresses in an abandoned building. He follows some signs to a small office, where he’s greeted by one of the Guardians of the Universe, whose human form looks just like Laura Linney. We quickly learn this is his Lantern Corps interview. She asks him questions about his past, which leads to flashbacks in two timelines: his childhood and his career as a Marine sniper.
In the distant past, we see John Sr. and Bernadette asleep in bed and baby John in a crib nearby. Then comes a mysterious green glow. A voice intones, “Are you afraid?” To which a rattled John Sr. replies, “Yes!”
The incident leaves John Sr. traumatized. After watching a news report on the Earth’s first Green Lantern, Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) — and subsequently shooting the TV set — John Sr. becomes convinced that the Guardians came to him first and he failed their test, allowing Jordan to take the mantle. Unfortunately, no one believes the elder John, sending him spiraling to the bottom of a bottle. Bernadette boots him from the house, afraid of what he might do to their family.
While Senior is away, Bernadette receives a visit from Linney’s Guardian, ostensibly there to apologize for how the ring’s problematic selection process, which has left a few would-be Lanterns “experiencing emotional turmoil.” To make amends, she presents Bernadette with a ginormous gemstone.
That prompts the brash Bernadette to school the clueless Guardian on racial politics. “Do you understand how unfair it is to ask a Black man in America if he’s afraid?” Bernadette asks before delivering a devastating line. “Even in space y’all don’t consider us.”
It’s one of many mic-drop nuggets in the brilliant script by Kelly, a former child star of Nickelodeon’s Gullah Gullah Island who honed her writing chops on Ozark alongside Lanterns showrunner Chris Mundy.
“I chuckled a little when I read that line for the first time — not because it was funny, but because I felt it so deeply,” says Jones. “I remember loads of conversations with my father [the late Emmy-winning actor Ron Cephas Jones] coming into this business, saying, ‘You’re going to have to jump. Not only are you Black, but you’re a Black woman, so you’re going to have to jump through so many hoops and be overqualified sometimes.’ So that sentence held a lot of weight for me.”
The essence of Lady Macbeth
Before Linney’s Guardian departs, she observes that Bernadette is fierce in her own right and because the ring recognized potential in John Sr., their baby could have the mettle for the Lantern Corps. That triggers Bernadette, who convinces John Sr. to help her engineer their child to be superhero-worthy. As Kelly explains, there were plenty of real-world examples to draw from.
“When we were conceiving the fact that John Stewart was created to be a Green Lantern, it did start off [in the writers room] thinking it was going to be John Sr. leading that charge. We talked a lot about Earl Woods. We talked a lot about Richard Williams. And [Rick Brunson], Jalen Brunson’s dad, taping his hand to his back so he could play left-handed. We talked a lot about that. And the more we talked about those types of families and that level of parenting, I would keep bringing up — because, Black woman — I’m like, ‘So where’s John’s mom? Because she’s either dead or she’s on board, because there’s no way you’re doing this to my baby and I’m his mom.’
“You hear Steph Curry’s mom, Sonya Curry, say Steph wanted to give up, and she told him, ‘Look, if you want to play, you’re going to do what your daddy tells you to do.’ While Venus is training in Florida [with Richard], her mom’s training Serena. … The moms really are the driving force.
“If the ring was smart, it would have chosen Bernadette, because she was the most fearless of everybody,” Kelly continues. “Once we started unfolding that part of the story, it just made total sense to us. I think some people are going to have really strong reactions to it — and how great that we can have Black characters who are not monoliths, who we’re not protecting from being flawed, or from maybe not being the perfect mom or dad with the perfect family, but who are characters that you love and are redeemable.”
Jones says she and episode director Stephen Williams (a veteran of Lanterns co-creator Damon Lindelof‘s previous DC Comics adaptation, the Emmy-winning Watchmen) workshopped how to approach Bernadette. “I was just so ready and so excited to play all of the complexity and the nuance, and I wanted to take it there. When she goes for the really militant side, it was a little influenced by the essence of Lady Macbeth — me and Stephen talked about that all the time. Like, this is the Lady Macbeth moment, where she’s sitting on the couch, she’s in [John Sr.]’s ear and makes up the idea. But also, it’s so really important that she explains to her son why she’s doing this.”
“As a Black woman, you’re always like, ‘Damn, am I pushing it too far? Are people going to dislike her?’ Kelly explains. “I want the conversations to be had. I want us to talk about what it means to be a Black woman — a woman of color — in any family unit, and knowing when you have to sit back and let everybody else get the credit, when you were the one doing all the things.”
This decision impacts their entire family — the parents realize how much they are sacrificing and the inevitable toll — but they believe it will literally make him super. They put young John Jr. through a series of intense tests, including the apple-shooting and abandoning him in a dangerous part of town, leaving him to his own devices to get back home; Bernadette also tells her son that birds are the messengers of the Guardians and will always be watching his progress. (For those budding ornithologists at home, the bird that serendipitously appears at a key moment is a black-throated magpie jay, a species native to Mexico; DC Comics fans will no doubt recall that the villain Magpie played a minor role in the classic Green Lantern crossover Blackest Night.)
“I’m a father, so I start there,” says Nicholson. “I know what it is to be a flawed parent. I know what it is to feel like a failure. I know what it is to feel like you’re not enough. I’ve never shot an apple off my son’s head — I’ve never done that, bro. That’s fiction. But I do know what it’s like to try to get your son on a path of greatness and really want that for him.”
“Courage is fear that said its prayers”
Over the course of Episode 3 we also discover that Hal Jordan is the reason the younger Stewart was dishonorably discharged from the Marines. Hal-as-Green Lantern goes full cowboy and captures a Russian criminal kingpin that John had been tracking for nine months, blowing John’s mission and creating an international crisis. The military decides to scapegoat the blameless John, ending his career and sending him into a tailspin. He’s on the cusp of giving up the pursuit of the ring, but Bernadette brings him back.
“Courage is fear that said its prayers, son,” she tells him, explaining this is a detour, not the end of his journey. At her urging, he decides to pursue his true passion, art.
After classes one day, Stewart is met by a professor who asks him to complete some tasks for a special opportunity… which leads to him falling into the building and meeting Linney’s Guardian. She keeps pressing him on his family: Does he love them? Does he understand that being a Lantern will mean less time with them? Stewart answers in the affirmative; but at this point, viewers know there’s real emotion under his stoic exterior.
Stewart aces the interview. He learns that the Guardians aren’t too keen on Jordan and they want to recruit Stewart not to be Jordan’s backup, but to replace him. The episode ends with the first meeting of Stewart and the instantly prickly Jordan (who refers to the Stewart family as “the midwest Huxtables”), teeing up their odd-couple detective work sniffing out the aliens in Nebraska.
“That’s what I like about these episodes — it causes conversations for people to understand, for generations, what’s been going on,” says Nicholson. “F–k superheroes, right? We’re talking about real-life stuff.”
“When I first read it, it felt like such a love letter to Black mothers, that they are the real superheroes without the capes, making the possible out of the impossible,” adds Jones. “That’s what I got from that episode.”
“I hope this episode gives [fans] a deeper connection to who John is,” says Pierre, “because this really is just the beginning.”
