Warning: Major spoilers ahead for Lanterns Episode 3, OutKast.

HBO’s Lanterns just made its most significant creative swing. The third episode, titled OutKast, centers entirely on John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) and delivers an origin story that has no precedent in the comics. Rather than framing John as a candidate selected by a Green Lantern ring for his innate fearlessness, the episode reveals something far more calculated and emotionally devastating: John Stewart was systematically conditioned from infancy to be fearless and earn the ring.

The episode is structured around an interview between John Stewart and a Guardian of the Universe, played by Laura Linney, who grills him on his most difficult life choices to determine whether he’s worthy of replacing Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler).

Through non-linear flashbacks, the episode unpacks the full weight of what John’s upbringing actually was. In the middle of the night, Abin Sur’s Green Lantern ring originally sought out John’s father, John Stewart Sr., played by J. Alphonse Nicholson. Encased in a green bubble and asked “Are you afraid?”, John Sr. shouted “Yes!”, failing to become a Green Lantern and setting off a chain of events that would define his son’s entire life.

What follows is one of the more quietly devastating portraits of Black parental ambition and sacrifice the superhero genre has produced. Determined to ensure their son would be the perfect candidate for the ring, John Sr. and Bernadette, played by Jasmine Cephas Jones, raised him through extreme tests: shooting an apple off his father’s head, being left stranded in a dangerous part of town, and being told that the Guardians were always watching over him through birds.

John followed a strict path that included joining the Marines and isolating himself from ordinary life, all engineered toward a single destination. The episode’s major turning point arrives when a young John takes matters into his own hands, shooting an apple off his mother’s head, proving he has stepped into his own lane and become exactly who his parents raised him to be.

Episode writer Vanessa Baden Kelly was deliberate about why the show went this direction. “One of the things that kept coming up for us was that there was so much lore surrounding Hal’s backstory, but John’s was a little thin,” she said to The Wrap. “We were really trying to get under the character and figure out who was the character that becomes the John Stewart that we’re trying to tell in the show.”

She also addressed what the storyline is really exploring underneath the superhero framework. “What (does it mean) to be a Black man and get that ring when other characters canonically had it? We really started discussing how much more a Black superhero has to do to be accepted in that world… That to us was where Black exceptionalism backfires. You’re doing everything right in all those spaces, and that’s exactly what they use against you.”

On the pressure John’s parents carry: “They’re having to make the really hard decision that I think a lot of Black people have to make, a lot of Black athletes have to make, a lot of Black parents have to make, which is, if I keep trying to play the game by the rules, or the way you set it, they will always have an opportunity to take it away from us. So we’re just going to have to sacrifice what others deem as normal because we’re really trying to hit exceptionalism.”

For Jasmine Cephas Jones, playing Bernadette meant finding the love underneath the severity. “I really wanted to show that militant side of her, and that she made that decision at a very young age for him, and that is his destiny,” she said to Variety. “The importance of having no fear in a society, and also being a person of color in this country, fear is instilled in our ancestry as well. That was also an important piece to talk about. How do we extract that for him to become the Green Lantern?”

Her character delivers one of the episode’s most powerful lines to a young John: “Sometimes, a Black man has to raise his own hand. Doesn’t mean you’re not good enough, doesn’t mean you’re not better. It just means they don’t see us.”

J. Alphonse Nicholson spoke to what drives John Sr.’s approach to his son. “Essentially, he felt like he let himself down, he let his community down, let his wife down, so now it’s up to him to make sure that his son doesn’t feel that way and doesn’t go into the same spiral of depression,” he said to Variety. “It’s really cool to see him protect his son in a really tough way, but it’s tough love.”

Three episodes in, Lanterns is doing something that most superhero television doesn’t attempt: asking what it actually costs a person to become what the world decided they needed to be. Episode 3 makes that question impossible to look away from.

New episodes of Lanterns air Sundays on HBO Max.

Photo Credit: John Johnson/HBO Max