‘Lanterns’ New Clip Shows Guy Gardner Confronting an Imprisoned John Stewart in a Full Scene

HBO’s ‘Lanterns‘ has spent its opening episodes building a genuinely unsettling mystery in rural Nebraska, blending small-town crime drama with the kind of cosmic dread that only intergalactic peacekeepers can bring to the table. As the series heads deeper into its eight-episode run, the show is finally starting to reveal what’s waiting for its heroes further down the road.

The series follows Kyle Chandler as veteran Green Lantern Hal Jordan and Aaron Pierre as his trainee John Stewart, two intergalactic cops pulled into a dark, earth-based mystery while investigating a murder in the American heartland. That investigation took a devastating turn in the show’s premiere, ending with the discovery of Hal Jordan’s body, a twist that immediately reshaped the trajectory of the entire season.

Now a new clip from the show’s third episode is giving fans their first real look at what happens next, and it centers on a very different kind of reunion. The scene shows Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner visiting an incarcerated John Stewart in the show’s 2026 timeline, marking the first return to that later period since Jordan’s body was found in the pilot’s closing moments.

What exactly landed Stewart behind bars remains unclear, but based on the tense dynamic shown in the footage, Gardner doesn’t appear to be there to break him out. Series showrunner Chris Mundy has previously confirmed that Jordan’s Green Lantern ring was passed on to Gardner following his death, a development that seems unlikely to have gone over well with Hal’s former trainee.

Fillion, who first introduced Guy Gardner to audiences in this year’s ‘Superman’ before reprising the role for ‘Lanterns,’ has spoken about how the character shifts throughout the series. He’s previously teased that Gardner becomes noticeably less smug and more visibly uncomfortable as the story progresses, a change that appears tied directly to his complicated relationship with Stewart.

That tension lines up with long-standing speculation among comic book fans that the series may be drawing from a storyline in which Gardner ultimately helps break Stewart out of prison after he’s sentenced to death for killing another Lantern. Whether the show follows that exact path remains to be seen, but the prison setting alone has already fueled plenty of theories about where Stewart’s arc is headed.

Fillion recently discussed his growing footprint across the DC Universe during an appearance on ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!,’ where he was asked whether Guy Gardner has become something like an anchor character tying different corners of the franchise together. He responded modestly, saying he isn’t sure he qualifies as an anchor being, though he acknowledged feeling like a connective thread running through the DCU’s expanding slate of films and television projects.

‘Lanterns’ was co-created by Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof, and Tom King, with Mundy serving as showrunner alongside a directing team that includes James Hawes for the first two episodes. The series also stars Kelly Macdonald, Laura Linney, Ulrich Thomsen as Sinestro, and Garret Dillahunt, rounding out a cast built to support the show’s blend of cosmic mythology and grounded crime drama.

With Jordan’s death still casting a long shadow over the season and Stewart’s imprisonment raising fresh questions about the story’s direction, ‘Lanterns’ looks poised to keep deepening its mystery well beyond the murder that kicked things off. Fans will get their next answers when the new episode featuring this confrontation airs this Sunday.

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