The cast and crew dig into the big twist and what it means for the show moving forward.

Kyle Chandler and Lanterns crew explain that shocking premiere cliffhanger: ‘They’re never gonna let us do that’

The cast and crew dig into the big twist and what it means for the show moving forward.

By Nick Romano

Nick Romano

Nick Romano is a senior editor at ** with 15 years of journalism experience covering entertainment. His work previously appeared in Vanity Fair, Vulture, IGN, and more.

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August 16, 2026 10:00 p.m. ET

Kyle Chandler as Hal Jordan on ‘Lanterns’. Credit:

John Johnson/HBO Max

- Kyle Chandler reacts to the big Hal Jordan reveal at the end of the *Lanterns* premiere.

- The creative team explains how they landed on such a massive twist.

- Showrunner Chris Mundy shares the alternate version of the ending that they toyed with.

**Warning: This article contains spoilers from the *Lanterns* premiere.**

The writers behind HBO’s *Lanterns* are all still a bit surprised that the gatekeepers at DC Studios gave them the green light to pull off such a stunning twist right in the first episode. “They’re never gonna let us do that,” Damon Lindelof, an executive producer on the series, remembers thinking when the idea came up in early development.

But the pilot is now out in the world and Hal Jordan — the most famous Green Lantern of DC Comics, played by one of the more beloved TV dads of our time, *Friday Night Lights* alum Kyle Chandler — is dead.

The series establishes two central mysteries. One takes place in 2016 when Hal reluctantly takes his new trainee, John Stewart (Aaron Pierre), to rural Rushville, Neb., to investigate a mass shooting at a local football game that turns out to be alien-related. The final sequence of the episode then jumps forward 10 years to 2026.

John, a bit older and wiser, returns to Rushville at the behest of Sheriff Kerry (Kelly Macdonald), the local authority who assisted them in that 2016 case. She takes him back to the bleachers in the dead of winter. She shows him Hal’s dead body, frozen in a seated position with a bullet through his head and his power ring gone.

“I love the idea of it. The hook is right there in the get-go of the deal, and we’re off to the mystery. What is the thing we’ve gotta solve here? What’s the solution?” Chandler tells **. “Maybe I made it up in my mind, but Coach Taylor’s sitting in the stands with a bullet in his head. I thought that was kinda cool. There were all kinds of little things.”

Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) on ‘Lanterns’.

John Johnson/HBO Max

The creative team of showrunner Chris Mundy, comics scribe and executive producer Tom King, and Lindelof explain how they came to this big swing for the series.

“It focuses the show on John,” Lindelof, who previously delivered *Watchmen* for HBO and *LOST* for ABC, says. “And although the show is called *Lanterns* and it is a buddy-cop construct, when you leave these episodes you’re going to be leaving them with John Stewart. We want you to get your brains around that. We want you to know it coming in.”

The team needed something to pull the main characters back to Rushville in the 2026 setting. According to Mundy, the room initially toyed with the idea of killing off Sheriff Kerry. Ultimately, it felt too much like “fridging,” the outdated trope that sees a female character harmed or killed in order to motivate a male figure.

How ‘Lanterns’ delivered first live-action John Stewart: ‘It was really daunting’

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“You felt that it’s been done and it was gonna be a disservice to her,” the showrunner, also known for *Ozark*, explains. “I think just Damon basically said the most meaningful thing that could happen would be if Hal had died. What else do we care about more than that? And then it instantly felt like that would be incredible to get to try to write to, if the powers that be were willing to let us write to it.”

Lindelof’s suggestion came out of where the show landed in the larger DCU slate of films and TV shows, spearheaded by studio co-heads James Gunn and Peter Safran. From *Superman*, which takes place after the 2016 narrative of *Lanterns*, they knew Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion) was Green Lantern.

Aaron Pierre as John Stewart and Kyle Chandler as Hal Jordan on ‘Lanterns’.

John Johnson/HBO Max

There is sufficient precedent from the comics to have multiple Lanterns operating at the same time, but if Guy became the Guardians’ officially appointed protector of Sector 2814 (i.e. Earth) during the events that follow their show, how were they gonna solve for that?

“If [Hal] did die, there’d be huge, significant emotional stakes, especially if he died at a time when his relationship with John was unresolved,” Lindelof continues. “And then we started talking about the movie *Ghost* and how Patrick Swayze dies very early in act one, but you still get this incredible love story between him and Demi [Moore] that’s largely happening after, and you know that he’s not gonna come back to life.”

They didn’t want to end the entire season with Hal’s death. That felt too “clickbaity” and “exploitative,” Lindelof further remarks. But having the reveal fall at the end of the pilot, “We were immediately signaling to the audience this is where the show is willing to go, this is what we’re willing to do,” he adds.

Now, Hal has died in the canon of DC Comics. The stories even play with him coming back as a different kind of character. Mundy acknowledges this decision “wasn’t without precedent that we were messing with.” The Halogram, for instance — the backup consciousness of Hal Jordan stored in the power ring that Chandler also portrays — subtly plays off of some of that history.

Chandler talks about playing both of those roles.

Kyle Chandler on ‘Lanterns’.

“There were different conversations about wardrobe and what have you, and then they come from different time periods,” the actor says. “So I imagined an earlier Hal and what he was like...a little bit more naive, a little bit more kind, a little bit more trying to figure it out. He wasn’t quite as cynical and hardened and hadn’t gone through all the dark pathology that he finished with when you first see him. These characters are so dark. We brought a lot of fun and humor, and the writing offered fun and humor, but the thing is they’re so dark.”

Says King, who wrote many a hit comic run for DC, “I love Hal Jordan; he’s my favorite character to write. I did not want to lose him, but I love my mother and I lost her, I love my grandmother and I lost her. In real life, there are people you love that you lose. In creating the DC universe, we don’t wanna create a world that is just fantasy and gumballs. We wanna create a world that relates to us in our individual lives.”

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King further teases that Hal’s death both “raises the stakes” of *Lanterns* moving forward and “has consequences that reverberate throughout the rest of the universe for a long time.”

Macdonald is still in denial as she talks about the big reveal ahead of premiere time.

“I hated any mention of Hal being dead. I didn’t like it at all,” she says. “Especially working with Kyle, it’s like, ‘No!’ and it’s quite emotional seeing him frozen in the football stands. So, yeah, it was all just really sad, and I hated filming those scenes and seeing them that way.”

New episodes of *Lanterns* will drop weekly on HBO and HBO Max every Sunday at 9 p.m. ET/PT.

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Source: “EW Superhero”