If you’ve been waiting for Lanterns to slow down and actually explain who John Stewart is, Episode 3 hands you the whole story in one sitting. It’s the most John-centric hour the show has given us so far, tracing him from infancy to his first day training under Hal Jordan. It’s also, I’ll be honest, the episode where the show’s pacing problems become impossible to ignore. Let’s get into it.
How Episode 3 Opens: John Waits in an Abandoned Mall
Lanterns Season 1 Episode 3 pick up in 2016, with John Stewart walking into what looks like a long-dead shopping mall for a job interview of sorts. Nobody explains anything to him. He’s simply told to wait, and wait he does, through the rest of the day and straight into the night, until a Guardian finally shows back up the next morning, visibly caught off guard that he never left.
For anyone who needed a refresher, the Guardians are essentially the cosmic ruling council behind the entire Green Lantern Corps, and they’re also the ones who founded it in the first place. There used to be twelve of them. One recently died, which is exactly why they’re now sitting down and personally interviewing candidates instead of just letting a ring make the call on its own, the way it usually does.
John Stewart’s Father Was Rejected by a Green Lantern Ring, Here’s Why That Matters
The episode jumps back to show baby John watching his father, John Stewart Sr. (Johnny), get tested by a ring. It lifts him right out of bed and asks him one question: are you afraid? Johnny tells the truth. He is. And because of that honesty, the ring rejects him on the spot. It ends up choosing Hal Jordan instead.
That single moment wrecks Johnny. Later, when he catches Green Lantern on television calmly declaring that he’s fearless, something in him snaps and he shoots the TV screen. This is the moment that quietly explains everything that comes after it.
Things spiral badly enough at home that Bernadette eventually throws Johnny out of the house. But not long after, the same Guardian who tested him shows up at their door. She offers the family compensation, including a genuinely massive diamond, and explains, almost apologetically, that being passed over for the ring can trigger real emotional damage in the people it rejects. Then she does something bigger: she reveals her true form to Bernadette and tells her that whatever quality the ring detected in Johnny might be genetic. In other words, one of their own children could inherit it.
That’s the turning point. Bernadette and Johnny reconcile, and together they make a decision that will define the rest of the episode: they’re going to raise John to be fearless, no matter what it costs, and no matter whether he ends up hating them for it.
The “Fearless” Training Begins: Guns, Birds, and a Very Dark Fifth Birthday
On John’s fifth birthday, his parents skip the crayons entirely and hand him a Green Lantern costume and a gun instead. They sit him down and tell him about his “destiny,” and to really sell it, they convince him that the birds circling the house are secretly spying on him and reporting his every move back to the Guardians.
This is the payoff for that strange gun scene from the very start of Episode 1, and it also explains why John has always had this odd, lingering connection to birds. It turns out the infamous apple-on-the-head test was Bern’s idea from the start. Johnny hesitates to actually pull the trigger, but Bernadette pushes him through it, insisting this is simply what the moment demands of both of them.
From there, John’s training only gets more extreme. His parents drop him off in a dangerous part of town and force him to find his own way back home. Bernadette, in particular, becomes increasingly obsessive about making sure her son is ready for whatever’s coming.
Eventually, she flips the entire test around and tells John to shoot an apple off his own father’s head. He can’t do it. At first, Bern reads this as another failure. But she stops herself, and admits, for maybe the first time in the whole episode, that loving his father, and refusing to hurt him, is actually a completely normal, healthy response. She also comes clean about the birds. None of it was real. She made the whole thing up.
Once he hears that, John says he wants to try the shot again, except this time, he wants Bernadette standing under the apple instead of his father. He takes the shot. He makes it. It’s the moment that finally proves, at least to his parents, that he’s learned to control his fear.
From the Marines to a Green Lantern Ring: John’s Path to Becoming a Hero
That childhood pushes John straight into the Marines, where he climbs all the way to Sergeant Major and becomes an exceptional sniper. One of his biggest assignments puts him on the trail of a target known only as Gray Wolf. John spends months waiting patiently for the perfect shot, and right as he finally gets it, Hal Jordan swoops in and takes Gray Wolf down himself.
This turns into a genuine diplomatic disaster, since the U.S. isn’t supposed to have any presence in that region at all. Someone has to take the fall, and that someone ends up being John. He accepts a dishonorable discharge, and just like that, his military career is over.
Back in 2016, the Guardian presses John about the mission, but since it’s still classified, she pivots and asks him about Sinestro instead. John gives her the public version: Sinestro turned rogue, killed a Guardian, and was eventually taken down and brought in by Hal. What he doesn’t know is the part the Guardian reveals next, Sinestro wasn’t just Hal’s mentor, he was something closer to a father figure to him. And that’s exactly what worries the Guardians: they’re not convinced Hal has fully let go of that affection, despite everything Sinestro has done.
After his discharge, John comes home completely adrift. It’s Bernadette who redirects him, encouraging him to lean into his artistic side, and revealing she’s already gone ahead and applied to art school for him. During his evaluation there, an examiner tests his remarkably sharp visual memory before handing him something unexpected: a Green Lantern ring. He’s asked to construct his father’s watch from memory alone, and he nails it perfectly.
It’s clear at this point that someone has been quietly watching John’s whole life. A portal opens beneath him mid-test and drops him straight into the abandoned mall, which is exactly how he ends up sitting through that long, silent interview from the top of the episode. Everything finally connects.
The Guardian’s Decision, and Hal Jordan’s Reaction
Sitting across from him, the Guardian asks John point-blank whether he’d be willing to step in as Hal Jordan’s replacement. Hal himself, for the record, still believes he’s simply getting a backup. After some back-and-forth, John accepts, and just like that, John Stewart officially becomes a Green Lantern.
He rushes home to share the news with his parents, only to find that Hal has already beaten him there and broken it to them first. Hal is all smiles in front of Johnny and Bernadette, but the second the two men step outside alone, his whole demeanor flips. He makes it brutally clear he has no interest in a sidekick, and he’s certainly not interested in being backed up by anyone. If John wants his ring, Hal tells him, he’ll have to pry it off his cold, dead body.
With that pleasant threat hanging in the air, Hal tells him training starts Monday morning and takes off. John notices a bird perched nearby, and after everything birds have meant to him across his entire life, he just smiles and says, “I think he likes me.”
Episode 3 Review: A Necessary Origin Story That Overstays Its Welcome
Here’s where I have to be honest: Episode 3 is trying very hard to do something artistic with its structure, and it mostly doesn’t land. The show borrows the Christopher Nolan trick of scrambling the order of events, but the problem is we’re told upfront, during John’s 2016 interview, that his big mission ended in a dishonorable discharge and failure, and then we sit through that exact mission anyway, already knowing exactly how it ends. Sure, Hal’s involvement adds a wrinkle, but a lot of these scenes end up feeling like they’re just going through the motions rather than building tension.
The flashbacks themselves are a rough watch, and not always in the way the show intends. Johnny and Bernadette set out to make their son fearless, and the “tests” they put him through would, under literally any other circumstances, look a lot like abuse. I get what the show is going for here, this is meant to illustrate exactly how John got toughened up into the man he became, but the episode drags this idea out well past the point of impact. Between the overlapping timelines and the repeated beats, we spend a full hour essentially being told, over and over, that John had a lonely, painful childhood with parents who trained him relentlessly. Honestly, we didn’t need the entire runtime to get that message across, and at this stage, John Stewart simply hasn’t earned enough investment from me as a character to justify a full solo episode like this.
Then there’s the racial commentary, which the episode leans into heavily. Johnny’s rejection by the ring is explicitly tied to his experience as a Black man in America, and by contrast, Hal’s ease with fearlessness gets reframed as a kind of privilege he never had to fight for. There’s absolutely a worthwhile conversation buried in there. But the episode presents it with such a heavy hand that it actually flattens the contrast between the two men instead of sharpening it. Instead of letting the difference between Johnny’s fear and Hal’s confidence speak for itself, the show insists on filtering it entirely through race and privilege, and it steers the whole hour into a divisive topic it didn’t necessarily need to wade into this deeply. This isn’t a one-off, either, last episode’s diner scene with Zoe was already leaning into politically charged territory, so this feels like a pattern forming rather than a one-time swing.
So far, Lanterns remains a genuinely hit-and-miss show for me. There are stretches that work really well, and as I’ve said in both of my previous episode reviews, Hal Jordan continues to be the glue holding this whole thing together. Take him out of the equation, even for one flashback-heavy hour like this, and the show noticeably sags.
