Lanterns Quietly Establishes Its Most Interesting Dynamic in One Scene

There’s a moment in the Lanterns premiere where Sheriff Kerry looks at Hal Jordan and essentially tells him she can see straight through him. The more interesting part? Hal can see through her, too.

There are considerably louder things happening in the premiere of Lanterns.

There are Green Lantern rings. There’s a murder investigation. There are aliens. And, without getting into the episode’s biggest spoiler here, there is plenty happening with Hal Jordan that gives viewers something substantially more urgent to talk about.

But one of the scenes I keep coming back to is much smaller.

It’s Hal Jordan and Sheriff Kerry sizing each other up.

And neither one particularly likes what the other sees.

Kerry Doesn’t Buy the Hal Jordan Act

Kyle Chandler’s Hal Jordan walks through much of the Lanterns premiere like a man who has gotten very comfortable deciding how much of himself everyone else gets to see.

He jokes. He needles people. He can be dismissive. He carries himself with the confidence of someone who has spent a very long time being the most experienced person in the room.

Kerry isn’t impressed.

Played by Kelly Macdonald, Kerry is the local sheriff in Rushville, Nebraska, where Hal and John Stewart arrive as part of their investigation. She is protective of the town and immediately wary of the two outsiders walking into it with considerably more authority than she asked for.

What makes her interaction with Hal work, though, is that her resistance doesn’t feel like simple territorial friction.

She reads him.

Kerry recognizes that the version of Hal standing in front of her isn’t necessarily the whole man.

For someone who spends a lot of the premiere testing everyone around him, that is an interesting position for Hal to suddenly find himself in.

Because then he does exactly the same thing to her.

Hal Sees What Kerry Is Doing, Too

The scene could have stopped at Kerry being the tough local sheriff who isn’t intimidated by the legendary Green Lantern.

Instead, Lanterns makes the dynamic reciprocal.

Hal realizes Kerry has defenses of her own.

That’s what gives the exchange its spark.

These aren’t two characters where one possesses all the information and the other gets slowly figured out. They seem to recognize something familiar in each other almost immediately: two people who are very good at controlling what everyone else gets to see.

Kerry can call Hal on his performance because, on some level, she understands the instinct.

And Hal recognizes hers for exactly the same reason.

Suddenly, what could have been another procedural scene becomes something considerably more personal.

They’re not just investigating each other.

They’re clocking each other.

That Matters for the Hal Jordan We’re Meeting

The premiere introduces a version of Hal who is older, more cynical and already carrying considerably more history than John Stewart knows about.

That contrast is central to the series. Hal is the veteran Lantern approaching the end of his tenure while John is the new recruit being trained to replace him, creating friction between a man who has spent years doing the job and someone still deciding what kind of Lantern he intends to become.

Kerry gives the show another way into Hal.

John challenges him professionally and morally.

Kerry challenges the person underneath all of that.

And that could become especially important because Lanterns is much more interested in its characters’ interior lives than simply watching them use their rings.

The series has deliberately framed its Green Lantern story as a grounded crime mystery, following Hal and John through an investigation in rural Nebraska rather than building the show entirely around cosmic spectacle.

A scene like this is where that approach starts paying off.

You don’t need a construct or an intergalactic threat to tell us something about Hal Jordan.

Sometimes you just need to put him across from someone who knows when he’s full of shit.

Kerry and Hal Could Be One of Lanterns’ Best Pairings

There is obviously more underneath Kerry, too.

She’s deeply tied to Rushville, fiercely protective of it, and positioned as someone whose own relationships and history in the town are going to matter as Hal and John dig further into the case.

That makes the fact that Hal sees through her just as quickly even more interesting.

Whatever develops between them — romantic, adversarial or some uncomfortable combination of the two — the premiere has already established the part that matters most.

Neither one gets to bullshit the other.

And in a show filled with people keeping secrets, investigating mysteries and deciding exactly how much truth they’re willing to reveal, that may make Hal Jordan and Sheriff Kerry one of the most interesting dynamics Lanterns has.

Because Kerry sees straight through Hal Jordan.

Unfortunately for her, he sees her too.