How Hal Jordan Became Parallax in the Comics, and What It Could Mean for HBO’s ‘Lanterns’

Few transformations in comic book history carry the emotional weight of watching a beloved hero descend into villainy, and few stories accomplish that shift as devastatingly as Hal Jordan’s fall from Green Lantern legend to galaxy-threatening menace. That dark chapter has become one of the defining moments in the character’s decades-long history, and it’s increasingly relevant as HBO’s “Lanterns” continues building its own version of Hal’s story.

“Lanterns” opens with Hal Jordan already dead, discovered in the snow with a bullet wound and his ring missing, sending the show’s central mystery spiraling backward into 2016 to unpack what led to that fate. While the series hasn’t referenced Hal’s comic book transformation into Parallax directly, that history looms over any story involving his eventual downfall, making it worth understanding exactly how that fall originally happened.

Hal’s descent begins during the “Reign of the Supermen” storyline, when the villains Mongul and Cyborg Superman destroy his hometown of Coast City, using it as a staging ground for a massive engine designed to transform Earth into the spaceship Warworld. Hal, who was off-world at the time, returns to find his entire hometown wiped out, including the people he grew up with and his own father.

Devastated, Hal uses his ring in a moment of pure anguish to attempt recreating Coast City exactly as it was, down to resurrecting the very people who died in the attack. When his ring’s energy runs out mid-effort, the Guardians of the Universe intervene, treating his desperate act as a serious misuse of his power rather than showing him any compassion, a response that ultimately breaks something fundamental in him.

That rejection sparks the 1994 storyline “Emerald Twilight,” in which Hal turns violently against the very institution he’d spent years serving. He hunts down and kills fellow Green Lanterns one by one, stripping their rings for power, including his own friend Kilowog. When the Guardians resurrect his old nemesis Sinestro in a last-ditch effort to stop him, Hal kills him too, in a moment later retconned as an illusion designed to break his will.

His rampage culminates at Oa, where Hal enters the Central Power Battery itself and absorbs the entire stored energy source powering the Green Lantern Corps. That act kills nearly every remaining Guardian except Ganthet, who narrowly escapes and passes the last surviving ring to a new hero, Kyle Rayner, setting up an entirely new era for the franchise.

Transformed by that absorbed power, Hal emerges from the Central Power Battery under a new identity: Parallax. In this villainous form, he spends years terrorizing the DC Universe, even attempting to rewrite reality itself during the “Zero Hour” crossover event, all while repeatedly clashing with Kyle Rayner and his former allies in a desperate, twisted attempt to bring Coast City back.

Years later, DC recontextualized the entire arc through 2004’s “Green Lantern: Rebirth,” revealing Parallax wasn’t simply a persona Hal adopted, but an ancient, malevolent entity of fear that had been imprisoned inside the Central Power Battery all along. It possessed Hal the moment he absorbed that energy, preying on his grief to fuel his villainous actions, a retcon that allowed the character to eventually be redeemed and restored as a hero.

Given that “Lanterns” has deliberately avoided referencing Parallax, Coast City or Emerald Twilight so far, it seems unlikely the show is building toward a direct adaptation of that specific comic arc. The series appears far more interested in grounding Hal’s downfall in a personal, Earth-based mystery involving the Manhunters and his fractured relationship with Sinestro, rather than a cosmic reality-warping villain arc.

That said, certain thematic echoes could still surface as the season progresses. Hal’s established comic history of being pushed toward darkness by grief and institutional betrayal from the Guardians could easily inform how the show explains his eventual death, especially given Sinestro’s ominous warning to Hal about trusting John Stewart. It wouldn’t be surprising if “Lanterns” borrows the emotional shape of Hal’s fall, a good man breaking under grief and institutional failure, without needing to import Parallax as an actual entity.

There’s also a possibility the show could still introduce a version of Parallax much further down the line, particularly if Sinestro’s imprisonment ties into similar themes of corrupted power or if the Central Power Battery becomes relevant to later mysteries. For now, though, “Lanterns” seems intent on carving out its own version of Hal Jordan’s tragedy, one rooted in a grounded murder mystery rather than a cosmic fear entity waiting inside a battery on Oa.

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