‘Lanterns’ Episode 4 Trailer Puts Sinestro’s Twisted Plan Into Motion, and John Stewart May Not Survive It

HBO’s freshman DC drama ‘Lanterns‘ has spent its first three installments quietly building a slow-burn mystery around a small Nebraska town, an alien murder, and the uneasy partnership between two very different Green Lanterns. What started as a grounded, almost noir-inflected cop drama has steadily widened its scope, folding in cosmic stakes without ever losing its human core.

Kyle Chandler’s veteran Hal Jordan and Aaron Pierre’s rookie John Stewart have carried that tension since the pilot, their contrasting temperaments, one loose and instinctive, the other guarded and methodical, shaping nearly every scene they share. Meanwhile, Ulrich Thomsen’s Sinestro, Hal’s disgraced former mentor turned prisoner, has lingered at the margins of the story, feeding information from behind bars while clearly working an angle of his own.

That angle finally comes into focus with the newly released preview for the show’s fourth episode, which arrived on Sunday, August 31, and immediately reframed the season’s central relationship. In the clip, Sinestro presses Hal about Stewart, dismissing the rookie as merely “a contingency plan, a backup,” and when Hal pushes back, Sinestro delivers a line that recasts the whole season: he warns Hal that he really will need to kill Stewart.

The exchange lands just as the show appears ready to hand Stewart the ring he has spent his whole life training for. Episode three revealed that Stewart’s parents, aware that Green Lantern eligibility could run in the family, deliberately raised their son to be fearless enough to qualify, and the new preview suggests that payoff is finally close at hand.

Fans reacting to the footage have already zeroed in on the widening gap between the two men, noting that Stewart’s discipline and obedience stand in sharp contrast to Hal’s increasingly erratic, Sinestro-influenced behavior. It is a dynamic that echoes decades of Green Lantern Corps lore, where trust between ring-bearers is rarely absolute and never permanent.

The stakes are heightened further by how the show has handled Sinestro himself. Formerly one of the Corps’ own before he was stripped of his ring for abusing his power, the character has spent ‘Lanterns’ operating as a manipulator working every angle from his cell, and the new preview positions him as the true architect pulling Hal’s strings from behind bars.

The next chapter is set to premiere Sunday, September 6, continuing the show’s steady weekly rollout since its August debut. That launch drew a strong 9.3 million viewers across its first three days, a figure that reportedly outpaced the openings of both ‘Peacemaker’ and ‘Creature Commandos’ within the same shared DC Universe on HBO Max.

With several installments still to come after this one, ‘Lanterns’ has plenty of room to answer the question its own villain just raised. Whether the show actually turns Hal and John against each other, or whether Sinestro is simply lying to serve his own ends, remains the biggest open question heading into next week.

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