Lanterns Episode 7 Ending Explained: What Does John Stewart Find in Hal Jordan’s Vault

The penultimate episode of HBO’s Lanterns reunites John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) and Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) in a very unusual way. With the story set in the present day, the central mystery focuses on who killed the real Hal Jordan. John digs up the casket at the end of episode 6 to take Hal’s Green Lantern ring. This allows him to manifest the Hal-ogram, which is a backup of Hal’s consciousness from 2006 stored inside the ring.

As the final episode before the finale, Lanterns delivers major moments, a shocking cliffhanger, and the resolution to a mystery that did not need solving.

Note: Major spoilers follow for Lanterns season 1, episode 7.

What is inside Hal Jordan’s vault?

Episode 6 revealed that Hal rented a storage unit in Rushville. Inside sits a large alien vault similar to the one he used to store his lantern at his mansion. John and Kerry (Kelly Macdonald) cannot open it because the lock requires Hal to identify himself aloud. A voicemail recording on Kerry’s phone fails to fool the system. To bypass this, John tricks Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion) into burying Hal with his uniform and ring so John can dig up the body later.

The Hal-ogram agrees to open the vault only if John lets him meet Kerry first. Inside the vault, they discover very little. The contents include a bag packed with supplies like a handgun and a canteen, alongside one of the black spheres capable of creating portals. John describes these items as stuff for a hike. Flashbacks in the episode, however, reveal that a Jordan family safe carries a much heavier meaning.

Episode 7 opens in 1975. A young Hal gets into trouble after refusing to surrender a baseball during a game, causing his team to forfeit. He sits in a classroom holding the ball when his father, Martin Jordan, arrives and immediately fights the coach.

Later, Martin gives Hal a strange key. He explains that before Hal’s grandfather left to fly in a war, he placed money, keepsakes, and private items inside a safe and gave Martin the key to that failsafe. Martin passes his key to Hal as part of the Jordan family legacy. The show initially frames this as a military tradition for men preparing for the possibility of not returning home.

Hal later reveals the painful truth. Martin gave him the key several months before dying by suicide. Inside the safe, Hal found money, coins, photographs, and a note explaining that his father lived with worsening pain and believed his family would be better off without him. Hal’s grandfather also died by suicide.

“It’s the same pain passed down generation to generation,” Hal says, explaining what Martin truly meant by the legacy of the Jordan boys. That context makes Hal’s storage unit feel much more grim.

Because the Hal-ogram distrusts Kerry, he and John take the portal device to the old town water tower. They open it there and step through to an alien planet.

What alien planet do John and the Hal-ogram visit?

John and the Hal-ogram step out into a flat desert littered with bones. An enormous abandoned city hangs in the sky above them, while a distant island and lighthouse appear to be the only accessible structures on the ground. John experiences déjà vu because he has been there before.

The episode does not name the planet, but John confirms it is the destroyed homeworld of Antaan (Paul Ben-Victor). In episode 2, Antaan’s henchmen abducted John and used an alien device to inject him with the memories of the dying civilization.

“We weren’t the only ones looking for a Manhunter,” John explains to the Hal-ogram. “I got grabbed by this guy Antaan. He told me he was the last of his kind. I didn’t believe him, so he injected me with his people’s experience, and I felt it. Like it happened to me.”

John remembers standing inside a city as gas spread through the streets. Anyone who breathed the substance grew terrified and began attacking one another, killing themselves, or jumping to their deaths. At the time, John did not understand why people were falling.

“I just didn’t know the city was in the sky,” he says. “I didn’t understand why they were jumping. Now I know.”

The shapeshifting Manhunter took the form of Zoe (Poorna Jagannathan) on Earth. Antaan revealed in episode 5 that he and the Manhunter were previously in a romantic relationship and failed to conceive a child before Abin Sur crashed on Earth with the Manhunter and the Green Lantern ring in 1996. Because Antaan blames the Manhunter for the genocide of his people, and because Zoe admitted her programming compelled her actions, the story implies she orchestrated the gas attack.

Traces of that substance remain in the planet’s clouds and water. While John and the Hal-ogram cross a lake on a man-made boat, a storm causes John to hallucinate. He sees his abusive father and his younger self accusing him of fear. When John falls into the water, the Hal-ogram saves his life by pulling him back aboard.

This raises the question of why Hal maintained a private portal to this planet. Was he investigating the destruction of Antaan’s people before the Rushville incident, or did he start after leaving jail? John and the Hal-ogram reach the island and find Sinestro trapped inside a building that appears to emit the gas.

How did Sinestro get to Antaan’s planet?

In episode 6, Guy Gardner told John that someone broke Sinestro out of Spacekaban, the extraterrestrial prison where Hal visited him earlier in the series. He ended up stranded on Antaan’s dead world. Since Hal had easy access to the portal, he may be responsible for the breakout, though his motives remain unclear.

Sinestro knew more than Hal about the Manhunters and the Guardians’ buried crimes in 2016. Hal might have freed him to gather information, but that does not explain why Sinestro held someone who looked like Hal at knifepoint.

Episode 7 establishes a clear chain of connections. Someone freed Sinestro, Hal kept a secret route to his hiding place, and someone murdered Hal months after his return to Rushville. Sinestro may not have pulled the trigger, but he likely knows why Hal died.

Source: Polygon