Is Sinestro the Key to Unraveling the Biggest Mystery in 'Lanterns'?

[MUSIC] Every hero needs a villain, especially in a superhero story. And in the best of these timeless tales of good versus evil, the hero needs a worthy opponent. Superman has Lex Luthor, Batman has the Joker, and the Green Lantern has Thal Sinestro. This video contains spoilers for Lantern's episodes 1 through 7. So make sure you're all caught up with a series before watching this. For most of the first season of Lantern's, Sinestro was a minor character who played more of a role than Hal Jordan's past than anything related to the show's current events. He made a couple of brief appearances in the first few episodes before disappearing from the screen altogether. But that changes in a major way at the end of episode 7, when John Stewart and the holographic ghosts of Hal Jordan find Sinestro hiding on an alien planet. [MUSIC] You must be John Stewart. Heading into the finale, Sinestro might just be the key to unlocking the show's biggest mysteries. My name is Daniel Chin, and I'm a staff writer at The Ringer. In this Ringerverse video essay, we're going to explore the history of Sinestro. In each section, we're going to ask and answer a key question about this villain. And to do that, we'll break down how the topic is presented in Lanterns before diving into the comic books to provide some context. One of the really fun things about this HBO series is how it reintroduces the world of the Green Lanterns as a story in progress. By the time the series premiered starts and earnest, Hal Jordan has already been a superhero for decades. Although the show provides some windows into the character's past, like when young John Stewart is getting Apple shot off his head in episode 3, it doesn't often wait around to catch the audience up on anything they might have missed, and so we're here to fill in those gaps. Now, let's begin with the most basic question. Who is Sinestro? You may remember the Mastacheot Alien from the time that Mark Strong portrayed him in the 2011 Green Lantern movie with Ryan Reynolds. For most of the film, he's bullying Hal either verbally, physically, or both, like in the sparring scene on Ola, when Sinestro humbles the rookie Green Lantern. Sinestro is Hal Jordan's former mentor and eventual arch nemesis, and he's often considered to be one of the all-time great DC villains. In Lanterns, we first meet Sinestro, played this time by Ulrich Thompson at the end of episode 2, when Hal pays him a secret visit in space prison. But earlier in the episode, after Hal wakes up in a rush-fill hospital bed, Sheriff Kerry Kane asked him an important question first. So, what's with Sinestro? Why are you asking me that? You kept saying his name in your sleep? I'm not authorized to talk about that. While Hal might want to keep a lid in this conversation, Kerry has access to the internet, and the story of Faust Sinestro isn't exactly secret in the DCU. After Kerry puts on her reading glasses, she recounts how Sinestro was a Lantern, who attempted to coup and killed one of the Guardians, the ancient alien race who established the Green Lantern Corps. She also reads that Hal was the one who stopped him. This bit of exposition is an interesting entry point for the show's depiction of Sinestro, who's already had his fall from grace after once being considered the greatest Green Lantern of them all. Lantern's waste no time on focusing on the finer details of Sinestro's past. But we will. Sinestro was created by John Broome and Gil Kane, and he made his first appearance in Green Lantern number 7, released in August 1961. That's just two years after Hal Jordan made his own comic book debut as DC's second Green Lantern. Back then, Sinestro had a bit of a different look. As you can see in these images from his debut, he had a darker red skin, but he still had that iconic preceding hairline, though I guess it wasn't quite as bad as the Guardian in the panel next to him. Sinestro is introduced as a renegade Green Lantern, who abused his ring of power to install himself as the dictator of his homeworld of Korugar. When the Guardians discovered this, they stripped Sinestro of his ring and banished him to the planet Quart in the anti-matter universe, where Hal Jordan eventually fights Sinestro for the first time. Given that we're talking about the world of comic books and the fact that his debut came all the way back in the 60s, Sinestro's origin story has grown and changed since then, but many of the foundational elements of Sinestro's silver age debut have stood the test of time, his ambition, his ego, and his use of fear as a weapon to achieve order in the universe have remained essential to his character. And Hal is often the one who stops him. That brings us to our next section. What is Sinestro's relationship with Hal Jordan? In Lanterns, most of what we've seen or heard of Sinestro has come as an extension of Jordan. And as we find out from Sheriff Carey in episode two, Hal only talks about Sinestro in his sleep these days, but that doesn't stop Hal from talking to Sinestro. In the opening of episode four, Lantern circles back to Hal's visit to Sinestro at the Science Cell Prison. The Green Lantern is there to gather information about the Manhunters, but he ends up getting unsolicited advice about the one who Sinestro predicts could be an even greater threat to Hal's existence. John Stewart. Deliver the Manhunters to the Guardians and disgrace Stewart in the process. Tell me, does he speak to the Guardians directly? He says he doesn't. And you're believed him? He found out about the Manhunters he could be kept to himself. Well, he does his follow orders. And then he can be controlled. They can believe that you're embracing his worthiness as your replacement. This opening scene does a great job of quickly establishing Hal and Sinestro's dynamic, and how even now, Sinestro serves as a mentor to Jordan. As we later find out in episodes four and five, Hal pretty much follows Sinestro's scheme to a T. Even if it doesn't work out so well for Hal, but the tension between them is also palpable. Sinestro betrayed the Green Lantern Corps and killed one of the Guardians. And Jordan is the reason why he's now sitting in this prison cell. There's a lot of history between these two that we've heard about, but at least so far, we haven't seen much of it in full on screen. In the late 80s and 90s, DC Comics gave Hal Jordan a new origin story over two six-part miniseries. Emerald Don and Emerald Don too. In the second miniseries, written by Keith Giffin and Gerard Jones and illustrated by M.D. Bright, the creative team reimagines Jordan and Sinestro's longtime rivalry as having started as this mentor-mentee relationship. After Hal becomes Earth's Green Lantern and Emerald Don, he finds himself in prison and Emerald Don too for drunk driving shortly before getting the ring. The DUI is definitely a bizarre setup for a superhero origin story, allowing for this absurd yet kind of incredible scenario where Hal is splitting time between carrying out his 90-day prison sentence and sneaking away for training sessions with Sinestro. Here's Hal getting lantern pointers from Sinestro in space and him also playing football in the prison yard and Emerald Don too, part three. In 2004, writer Jeff Johns took over the Green Lantern line with Green Lantern Rebirth and he began to vastly reimagine and expand the Green Lantern mythology. Four years later, Johns and artist Ivan Rice ran another retelling of Hal's origin story called Secret Origin. Johns borrows some of the elements from Emerald Don and Brett Kahn's others. Sadly, there isn't a sequel to Hal's longest yard experience. Secret Origin reinforces this mentorship program between Hal and Sinestro. And it also draws parallels between the two disruptors who won't hesitate to question the Guardian's authority. Not long after Jordan inherits power ring from his predecessor and Sinestro's best friend, Abynsir, Hal and Sinestro team up to take down Abyns Killer. Although Hal and Sinestro aren't exactly fast friends, a mutual respect begins to grow between them. As you can see here in Secret Origin, part six with this momentous handshake. In the next and final issue of this origin arc, the Guardians assign Hal as Sinestro's responsibility after Hal has managed to piss off every one of his new bosses. To the point that these little blue aliens look like they're ready to hop across the table and set him straight. These later reintroductions of Sinestro establish a new bond between him and Hal before they become mortal enemies. And they also continue to expand on the story of Sinestro's fall from grace and his abuse of power that first appeared in a silver age debut. And the third issue of Emerald Dawn 2, published in 1991, Sinestro brings Hal to Corrigan and Hal is shocked to find Sinestro's face plastered everywhere in a city built on a culture of fear. They soon discover that the Corrigans have been awaiting Sinestro's return to begin their revolution. In the following issue, Hal witnesses Sinestro fight back against his own people as he desperately tries to regain control over them. Before long, Hal and Sinestro fight each other and Hal calls for backup from the other Green Lanterns so they can liberate the planet from Sinestro's dictatorship. In Lanterns, it isn't clear if Sinestro's dictatorship on Corrigan and Hal's role in bringing it down is part of their shared history. But we do know from Sheriff Kerry's internet search that Sinestro attempted a coup and Hal prevented it. This brings us to the final question of our Sinestro deep dive. What is Sinestro's relationship to the Green Lantern Corps? We've already touched on some of the fraught history between Sinestro and his former employer, but we still haven't addressed the big event that Sheriff Kerry mentions in Lanterns. The coup. I summarized her explanation earlier, but here's exactly what the Roshville Sheriff says to the wounded Hal in episode two. - Says here he was a lantern, attempted a coup, killed one of the bosses. It also says you're the one who took him down. - I don't talk about that. - The details are sparse here, but this coup definitely sounds like the show's making a departure from the comics. Lanterns creators Chris Mundy, Damon Lendeloff, and Tom King might be trying to keep this conflict between Sinestro and Hal more closely associated to the Guardians, their planet Owa, and the Green Lantern Corps, rather than complicating it further by adding Corrigan and its rebellion into the mix. But even though it might not be directly adapting anything. Everything, Lantern still seems to be drawing inspiration from Sinestro's many clashes with the Green Lantern Corps in the comics. One of the best storylines of Sinestro rising against his former bosses and allies is the Sinestro Corps War, which was published in 2007. The 11th part, crossover of that, was written by Jeff Johns, Dave Gibbons, and Peter Tomassi, and was drawn by Ivan Rice, Patrick Gleason, and Ethan Van Skyver. The story follows Sinestro as he assembles his own order in the anti-matte universe. The self-titled Sinestro Corps, to destroy the Green Lantern Corps once and for all. He basically decides to take the fascist rule he imposed on his home world and apply it to the rest of the universe, creating order through fear. Now the concept of fear is essential to the world of the Green Lanterns, and it is for this HBO series as well. If you recall from the beginning of Episode 3, when John Stewart's father gets a rude wake-up call, every Green Lantern candidate is met with the same question. Are you afraid? Are you afraid? Yes! Yes! We haven't seen this depicted or explained in lanterns yet, but just as willpower is converted into the green energy that the lanterns wield, fear is manifested through the color yellow. Stay with me here as we briefly get into some green lantern color theory. As the Green Lantern, Kyle Reiner explains here in the pages of Green Lantern Rebirth #3, the living embodiment of fear is an ancient being known as parallax. This yellow entity threatened to consume the entire universe before the Guardians imprisoned it in the central power battery, Monoa, which all Green Lanterns draw their energy from. But this created a yellow impurity in the lanterns' reigns that made them weak against the yellow energy of pure fear, and Sinestro uses this flaw to his advantage. In the Sinestro core war, Jeff Johns expands DC's emotional color spectrum to include five more colors. As you can see here from these panels in Green Lantern #25 from the same arc, these seven colors represent seven emotional energies, and ultimately, seven different core that will eventually clash in the crossover event called the Blackest Night, but for our purposes, all that really concerns our discussion of Sinestro is this yellow power of fear. In the war that Sinestro declares against the Green Lanterns, Sinestro arms his followers with yellow power rings, and he teams up with parallax, along with some other prominent DC villains. And it all stems from Sinestro's desire to prove to the Guardians that his way of establishing order in the universe is superior to theirs. While the Cooon Lanterns might not be as extreme as the Sinestro core war, these conflicts always come back to this fundamental difference in moral philosophies. We'll wrap this up with some Lantern's season finale speculation. At the end of episode 7, John Stewart and the Hallogram find Sinestro on this dying planet. But how did he get there? And what was he doing before they found him? As we heard from John in the show's mid-season trailer, I'm clearly not the only one who wants to know. When Guy Gardener visits John Stewart in the Rushville jail in episode 6, he explains that someone has busted Sinestro at a space prison, or Spasca Van, as Guy calls it, but we don't know who, how would have been the prime suspect to free his old mentor, but he was locked up in prison. Now he's dead, or at least, that's what we've been led to believe, ever since Sheriff Carey and John found his frozen corpse in the bleachers at the end of the series premiere. The mid-season trailer gave us a few clues that suggest that Hall's death may have been more complicated than it already seems. There's this shot of how lying on a grimy floor that looks pretty similar to the high-tech slaughterhouse we saw in episode 4. As you can see, Hall is missing a circular chunk of flesh on his right arm, and it looks a lot like what happened to John's arm in episode 5, after Manhunter Zoe gave him a fresh coat of skin. Her alien tech is capable of curing cancer, re-growing limbs and skin, and we haven't even seen what its limits are, it's possible that Hall was cloned, and the corpse they found in Rushville may have just been one version of him, although we don't know what happened to Hall yet. It doesn't seem like a coincidence that the portal from Hall's lock box led John to this alien world where Sinestro just happens to be lurking in the shadows. Hall could have taken Sinestro here, but to what end? And unless he has any other portals lying around, how could he have freed Sinestro without his ring? Regardless of how Sinestro ended up on this planet, John now finds himself alone with a notorious fugitive, and barely any charge on a ring that doesn't even belong to him. John and the Hallogram came to this planet searching for clues to solve Hall's murder, and they ended up finding Sinestro instead, but it doesn't seem like the alien is here by choice. When Sinestro gets the jump on them in episode 7, he demands their boat and their directions to the portal off this "God for Sagan World." Yet John's intense interrogation of him in the mid-season trailer suggests that Sinestro is hiding a deeper plot. Early on the teaser, Sinestro tells John that "fear can be the most powerful force in the universe." And he also says that Hall didn't have to die in vain. The fact that Sinestro is suggesting to have any insight into what Hall would have wanted or what he was even doing before he died is interesting in and of itself. You saw how desperate Hall was to keep the ring. That was before he spent the better part of a decade in prison. If there's anyone who's already at odds with the Guardians that could have helped him get a ring, or even forage a new one, it would have been Sinestro. And speaking of forges, this possibility could clue us in on what Sinestro was doing at the strange building on this dying planet. The structure, which we can see a clear shot of from the mid-season trailer, looks like it could be some type of alien forge. It's very possible that Sinestro was attempting to forge a yellow ring. To wield this powerful force of fear that he's telling John about. And maybe how was to? Unless there's a new threat that lanterns will suddenly introduce in the finale, it's most likely going to be something, or someone, that we've already met this season. Sinestro and a shiny yellow ring sounds pretty exciting to me. But maybe Zoe wasn't the last surviving manhunter. And how knew it. Or maybe Zoe had other contingency plans in place in Russia before she died. Ever since he was a little boy, something is felt off about Noah Macon, and not just because he was portrayed by the same young actor who played that traumatized little boy in weapons. And Zoe's final conversation with Noah at the Macon Ranch in episode 5, she had some strange parting words for her grandson. The real reason that Hal returned to Rushville after prison may have not just been because he had a see about a girl from Gotham, but because he had to finish off what he started with the last manhunter. If there's anything that could have reunited Hal with his former mentor, it might have been ending the line of the manhunter who killed Abinsur, House predecessor and Sinestro's best friend. Or maybe Sinestro just wanted to finish off his coup and take down the rest of the Guardians. We'll find out the answers to all these questions and more soon enough. Until then, thanks for watching.