Four episodes in, and “Lanterns” has officially become the kind of show where a man drops his robe and asks the guy investigating him for a nude charcoal portrait, and that’s somehow not even the strangest thing that happens. Welcome back to Rushville, Nebraska, where everybody’s hiding something and at least one of them might be a several-thousand-year-old genocidal robot.
Episode four, titled “The Weenie,” picks up the Manhunter hunt right where episode three left off, and spends the hour doing what showrunner Chris Mundy’s team does best: throwing out three or four plausible answers before landing on the one nobody saw coming. It’s a lot of exposition dressed up as a thriller, but it earns its twists. Let’s break down everything that happened, and then get into some responsible speculation about episode five.
Spoiler warning: if you haven’t watched “The Weenie” yet, now is the time to go do that, because this recap gives away the actual identity of the Manhunter.
Sinestro Drops A Bomb, As Usual
We open back in 2016, picking up Hal’s visit to Sinestro from a couple of episodes back. The imprisoned Lantern doesn’t waste time being subtle. He asks Hal point-blank if he really believes John is his backup, and Hal, sounding thoroughly defeated, admits the truth out loud for the first time: “He’s my replacement.” Sinestro’s response lands like a gut punch — he tells Hal he’ll have to kill John. Hal shuts that down immediately, insisting he’s “not evil,” but Sinestro isn’t done needling him. Before Hal leaves, his old mentor tosses him one useful nugget: a Manhunter’s heart carries an undetectable flaw while it’s alive, one that only crystallizes after death. Filed away for later. Very later, as it turns out.
Back in Rushville, John and Hal do some old-fashioned stakeout work, buying a rifle scope and climbing a water tower to keep eyes on William Macon’s compound. They clock a helicopter arriving at the same time every day and start piecing together that there’s a hidden structure somewhere on the property. Putting the clues together, the two men land on their leading theory: William Macon’s mysterious benefactor the man Will won’t stop talking about like he’s some kind of deity is the Manhunter. They loop Sheriff Kerry Kane in on the whole mess, informing her that Antaan’s people will level the town if the countdown runs out without a name. She admits she genuinely doesn’t know who the benefactor is, but agrees to help anyway, on one condition: they only get one shot at this.
“The Ring’s Always Been Mine”
Back at the motel, things get personal fast. Guardian Lianna, played by Laura Linney, shows up in John’s room, annoyed that he skipped a scheduled check-in. She reveals that Hal wasn’t off having a fling like he claimed; he was secretly visiting Sinestro, breaking his oath in the process. Her verdict: Hal’s recklessness has sped up the inevitable. She orders John to recite the official Green Lantern oath the next time Hal hands him the ring, which would officially make him the Lantern of Sector 2814.
John hesitates, and the Guardian pivots straight into emotional manipulation, telling him Hal’s own reports describe him as weak and uncreative. That’s exactly the wrong button to push. “That’s because he’s old, and he’s tired, and his time is up,” John snaps back, adding that Hal never earned this job the way he has. “The ring’s always been mine. That a**hole’s just keeping it warm.” The Guardian looks satisfied and vanishes with a simple: “Then go and get it, John Stewart.”
Fired up, John pitches Hal a genuinely solid infiltration plan for the Macon compound, complete with a hand-drawn map. Hal’s impressed enough to say so out loud, and John, deadpan as ever, replies, “Yeah, I’m creative.” That night, the two sneak onto the property, and Hal hands John the ring to manifest a massive drill. John still doesn’t say the oath. While the drill works, the two share a rare, quiet moment, with Hal opening up about his mother’s death from cancer and a father who wanted to appear fearless, whether or not he actually was.
Then, right as they reach a structure packed with high-tech weaponry, Hal fumbles into a pressure alarm. Macon’s security team floods in, deploys a smoke that blinds them both and deactivates the ring, and just like that, our two Lanterns are caught red-handed.
A Nude Portrait And A Very Awkward Office Meeting
William Macon has our heroes marched into his office, where the ring gets placed on his desk like evidence at a trial. Then, in a moment that genuinely nobody could have predicted, Will casually mentions that Zoe told him John is an artist and asks John to sketch him nude. Hal’s reaction is the highlight of the scene: “I’ve seen some s**t, been to a planet with sentient tentacles. But this is weird, right?” John’s answer: “Yeah.” Fair.
While John sketches, Will monologues about his mysterious benefactor, revealing the man cured his cancer, which is also how Will met Zoe; she was his nurse at the time. He explains that Rushville’s entire prosperity is basically a protection racket with a god: good crops, healthy kids, a hospital where nobody gets sick, all courtesy of this being’s generosity, in exchange for loyalty. Hal isn’t buying the reverence, but before things can escalate further, Kerry shows up, orders her father-in-law to holster his metaphorical weenie, and arrests Hal and John for trespassing mostly to get them out of the room alive. She grabs the ring on her way out. John, ever the professional, hands Will the finished sketch before he goes.
In the car, Kerry lays into both of them for blowing their one shot, revealing Zoe was the one who tipped her off in the first place. She’s close to identifying Will’s benefactor herself and tells them to sit tight. Then she hands John a gun for protection, and mockingly tells Hal he’ll just have to rely on his “superhero” abilities.
Zoe’s Shocking Ending
That night, Zoe shows up at John’s motel room, not Macon’s men as he initially fears. After a tense standoff, the two end up sleeping together again. Afterward, she warns him that everyone around him herself and Hal included is lying to him, and that telling him the truth would change everything. She begs him to leave town. He refuses. She leaves in her truck.
Seconds later, a red beam fired from orbit obliterates the vehicle in a massive explosion. Hal is on the scene almost instantly, snatching the responsible satellite out of the sky and throwing up a protective green dome around the wreckage. The satellite leads them to Atlas Inc., a high-tech slaughterhouse company associated with a man calling himself Hector Hammond but John immediately suspects it’s too neat an answer.
The Real Manhunter Reveal
At the slaughterhouse, Hal and John find themselves walking through a facility full of employees who seem unable to notice or acknowledge their presence, which is unsettling in exactly the way it sounds. The man calling himself Hector Hammond greets them by reciting John’s parents’ home address and threatening to detonate it if he’s not alive by the end of their conversation. He then reveals he’s been listening to their private motel conversations the entire time, including John’s exchange with Lianna.
Hammond claims to be the Manhunter, but Hal isn’t convinced. He tests him with a question only the real Manhunter would know: what color was Abin Sur, the alien pilot who originally gave Hal his ring? “Hammond” can’t answer. Hal falls back on Sinestro’s tip about Manhunter hearts crystallizing after death and forces a confession out of him. “Hector Hammond” isn’t real, and the man behind the name isn’t a Manhunter at all he’s actually Hector Gutierrez, a human given advanced tech and protection by the real Manhunter in exchange for serving as a decoy. Cornered, Gutierrez finally names a suspect: William Macon.
But the episode isn’t done pulling the rug out. In the car afterward, John admits he never intended to say the oath and hand himself over. Hal, surprisingly calm, admits he probably would have done the same thing. He also comes clean about visiting Sinestro, warning John not to trust everything the Guardians say. Then Hal puts the pieces together out loud: John never seemed properly devastated by Zoe’s death because he already suspected she wasn’t actually dead. The only way that’s possible is if Zoe herself is the Manhunter. John doesn’t deny it. “I just had a feeling,” he says. It’s a quiet, devastating gut-punch of an ending, made even stranger by Hal casually apologizing for wrecking the rental car and hopping out while it’s still rolling toward a pole.
Why Lanterns Episode 4 Works Despite The Detours
Some critics have pointed out that episodes two and four of “Lanterns” function more as exposition dumps than propulsive plot chapters, and that’s a fair read. But even at its most detour-heavy, the episode is doing real character work: Hal finally admitting out loud that he sees John as his replacement, John’s rage boiling over at the Guardian, and that gutting final scene where Hal realizes exactly how much his young partner has been keeping from him. The show is playing a long game, and “The Weenie” is where a lot of that groundwork quietly clicks into place.
Lanterns Episode 5 Predictions
Now let’s put on our tinfoil Green Lantern helmets and guess what’s next.
1. Zoe is confirmed alive, and the fallout begins immediately. The next episode’s marketing has already confirmed Zoe survived the satellite strike, so expect episode five to open with the show addressing that reveal head-on rather than dragging it out any further.
2. The Hal-and-John rift gets worse before it gets better. Trailer footage shows Hal apologizing to John, only for John to fire back that he’s furious and plans on doing something about it. That doesn’t sound like a relationship on the mend except real, lasting consequences from the secrets both men have been keeping.
3. Rushville goes on high alert. Preview footage teases an emergency broadcast warning residents that the unfolding crisis is “not a drill,” layered over gunfire. However this plays out, it looks like the Manhunter threat stops being a secret confined to Hal, John, and Kerry, and starts becoming the whole town’s problem.
4. Zoe’s real motives come into focus. She told John that telling him the truth would “change everything.” With her survival confirmed, episode five feels like the natural moment for her to finally explain herself assuming she’s willing to.
5. Sinestro’s fingerprints are all over what happens next. His warning that Hal would “have to kill John Stewart” has been hanging over the season since episode two, and with tensions between the two Lanterns already fraying, expect the show to keep circling back to just how much of Hal’s current instability traces back to his old mentor.
6. The show keeps its slow-burn structure intact. Zoe’s identity as the Manhunter is already out, so the mystery isn’t “who is the Manhunter” anymore, it’s everything underneath that. Expect episode five to keep digging into who created Zoe, why she came to Rushville, how much William Macon actually knows, and whether the Guardians understand the full truth, rather than wrapping the conspiracy up neatly in one hour.
Final Thoughts
“Lanterns” keeps proving that its best trick isn’t the cosmic mythology it’s how patiently it doles that mythology out while never losing track of Hal and John as actual people falling apart in slow motion. “The Weenie” answers one of the season’s biggest questions while opening up several new ones, and it does it with just enough dark humor to keep from feeling like homework.
Episode five, “Lights Out,” airs Sunday, September 13, at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max. Keep an eye on Zoe, keep an eye on Will Macon, and maybe don’t get too attached to any rental cars.
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