‘Lanterns’ Episode 3 Just Became the Show’s Highest-Rated Hour

HBO’s ‘Lanterns‘ spent its first two episodes establishing a slow-burn mystery around a small Nebraska town, an alien conspiracy, and the uneasy dynamic between veteran Green Lantern Hal Jordan and his rookie partner John Stewart. That approach earned steady, respectable audience scores, but nothing that suggested the show was about to have a genuine breakout moment.

That changed the moment the season made a surprising structural choice. Rather than continuing to build out the Rushville investigation, the third episode pumped the brakes entirely and handed its full runtime to John Stewart, framing the hour as a nonlinear job interview with one of the Guardians of the Universe, played by Laura Linney.

The bet paid off in a big way. ‘Lanterns’ episode three, titled “OutKast,” debuted with a score of 9.4 on IMDb, a jump from the 8.3 ratings earned by both the first and second episodes.

That kind of leap signals a clear turning point in how audiences are responding to the show, at least among the viewers rating it. Rather than advancing the alien mystery, “OutKast” digs entirely into Stewart’s fragmented backstory, weaving together his unconventional childhood, a harrowing Marine Corps mission, and an unexpected detour into art school, all building toward the moment he’s finally handed a Green Lantern ring.

Much of the praise circling the episode centers on credited screenwriter Vanessa Baden Kelly, who took on the difficult task of piecing that backstory together across multiple timelines without losing the emotional throughline. The episode also gives Aaron Pierre considerably more room to work than the first two hours allowed, letting him show the toll of a childhood built entirely around suppressing fear.

Not every reaction to the episode was uniformly glowing. Collider’s review landed on the more critical end of the spectrum, giving the episode a 6 out of 10 and arguing that the show had now spent two consecutive episodes overemphasizing John’s importance to the broader story.

That critical pushback remained something of an outlier compared to the wider wave of praise the episode received elsewhere. Vulture and Den of Geek both landed closer to the top of the scale, with reviews specifically pointing to the episode’s willingness to embrace its sci-fi concepts in service of a richer, more humane character study.

The jump from an 8.3 average to a 9.4 rating suggests “OutKast” resonated with viewers on a fundamentally different level than the show’s slower-paced opening episodes managed to. It’s a notable shift for a series only three episodes into its freshman season, especially given that the jump came from an episode that deliberately paused the main plot rather than advancing it.

With the Rushville mystery now on hold for an entire hour and John Stewart’s origin fully unpacked, ‘Lanterns’ has set a considerably higher bar for itself heading into the season’s next chapter. Whether the show can sustain that same audience reaction once the central investigation resumes remains one of the more interesting questions left hanging over the rest of the season.

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