DC Studios and HBO might have tipped their hand on Lanterns Episode 2 months before anyone noticed. The series, led by Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) and John Stewart (Aaron Pierre), has opened to major praise from critics and fans alike. It's mix of small-town mystery with galactic DCU lore has been a symphony this far, and that balance has only gotten stronger through the second episode, which aired on Sunday, August 23. Now, with fans revisiting a poster released earlier this summer, it looks like the clue was there all along, just waiting to be noticed.
Looking back, a Lanterns poster from June hides the clue in plain sight. The image is built around a reflection: John and Hal standing over still water, the Green Lantern ring resting at the center of the reflection, and the Green Lantern oath, "In brightest day, in blackest night," presented vertically.
Scattered through that murky water on the bottom right are small dark shapes, which appear to be small birds drifting past in the background. But zoom in, enhance, and one of them isn't black at all.
It's the same bright green as the ring itself, a tiny bird silhouette flying among the shadows months before anyone knew what it meant, or even cared enough to notice. As it turns out, this unrecognizable shape, at the time, is, in fact, a newly introduced character to the DCU.
The back story on this small bird, or at least the start of it, arrived at the beginning of Lanterns of Episode 2, "Trust Fall," when Hal takes John outside their motel to teach him to fly.
John can't get off the ground, but he does something Hal doesn't expect: he accidentally creates a small, green bird construct out of his ring's energy.
Constructs are supposed to be tethered to the ring and gone the moment it comes off a Lantern's finger. Hal takes the ring back and tells John to head to Coast City to retrieve his lantern so he can recharge his dying ring, which is at 5%.
He follows his boss's orders, and the bird survives the ring's removal, flying and acting on its own in a way that shouldn't be possible under the rules understood by Hal and other Lanterns in the DCU. Hal plays it coy, though, not wanting to act surprised or amazed by what's really happening.
Later in the episode, when John is abducted by aliens, the bird (still fluttering and alive) is taken with him, and his flying into the back of their van helps him fight his captors.
Antaan, played by Paul Ben-Victor, the alien holding him, notices the same thing Hal did: John kept a construct alive without a ring, something that clearly shouldn't be possible, especially now in California, while Hal and the ring are in Nebraska.
By the episode's end, that detail has even made its way to Sinestro, whom Hal is visiting in the closing moments at a galactic prison. The classic Green Lantern villain, who just got his own DCU poster, calls a surviving Manhunter (why Hal is visiting) merely "the second-greatest threat you're currently facing."
John, and his bird, which he finally makes vanish by the end of the episode, is the first. To think that the June Lanterns poster could have such a small secret in the background. Why John was able to create the bird and keep it alive must have something to do with his eventual rise in the DCU.
John Stewart's Future DCU Prospects
John's bird construct surviving without the ring is the real twist, the first steps towards his eventual promotion as the Green Lantern of Earth in the DCU.
Any Green Lantern's power has always run through the ring, but John's willpower alone kept that bird alive and flying on its own, seemingly unconsciously. That's not a training exercise. That's a sign he may not even need Hal's ring, or anyone's, to be a Lantern, or at least the type of Lantern that people are used to.
It also explains why the Guardians of the Universe may have picked him specifically instead of just handing a ring to whoever's next in line.
There's a fun detail here, too: John's established as a vegan on the show, an animal lover by nature, so it tracks that his first happy accident with the ring produces a living creature he protects, not a weapon.
Whatever the Guardians saw in him, it wasn't just raw power. That bird might be the whole preview of what kind of Lantern he becomes, and fans will see in 2027's Man of Tomorrow.
