Spoilers ahead for Lanterns Episode 3 "Outkast."
The DCU's first slate of projects is titled Gods and Monsters, and includes stories told on both the big screen and streaming with a HBO Max subscription. The latest release is the new show Lanterns, which features both Kyle Chandler's Hal Jordan and Aaron Pierre's John Stewart. The third episode "Outkast" showed the latter's backstory, and now one writer is responding to claims the show is "woke".
What we know about Lanterns has been limited, and there's been a ton of discourse over the new series online. While there was some backlash to there not being enough green in early footage, there's been a ton of chatter lately about John's history. Specifically how the Stewart family spoke about the Black experience in "Outkast", with some naysayers claiming the show was "too woke." Writer Vanessa Baden Kelly responded to these claims in an interview with The Wrap, saying:
I stumbled across some people calling the show ‘woke,’ and there were people putting panels in the reactions and the comments, and they were panels from the 1970s John Stewart. Him calling people ‘Whitey’ or him opposing wars, and I’m like, ‘Oh my God.’ I read a bunch, but I couldn’t read all of it, and you’re just like, that’s right, just keep it in the front of your mind — that this is who John Stewart’s always been.
There you go. It seems like Baden Kelly isn't taking the Lanterns backlash to heart. Namely because John Stewart's Blackness has always been a major aspect of the long-running superhero's history. She's seemingly standing by the script she wrote for "Outkast" and is pointing the source material for folks who are unhappy with the episode's contents and calling it "woke".
Episode 3 revealed John's childhood decades earlier, where racial inequality was worse than it is now. In the flashbacks his mother Bernadette (played by OG Hamilton star Jasmine Cephas Jones) spoke about how Black people needed to work twice as hard to get half as far, and also cued in Laura Linney's Lianna to how racism works on Earth. As the writer went on to explain, this was key to crafting a new backstory for Aaron Pierre's hero. In her words:
What (does it mean) to be a Black man and get that ring when other characters canonically had it? We really started discussing how much more a Black superhero has to do to be accepted in that world.
Personally, I thought that these discussions were part of what made "Outkast" such a strong episode of Lanterns. Seeing how John's family struggled with his father almost being chosen to be a Green Lantern was fascinating, along with the unconventional way they tried to raise him to be fearless. And while we're following a show involving an intergalactic law enforcement agency, including discussions about the Black experience helped make the story feel all the more real and human. As the writer points out, this has always been part of John's character on the page.
Lanterns airs new episodes Sundays on HBO as part of the 2026 TV schedule. We'll just have to wait and see how John and Hal's relationship changes throughout the rest of the show's first season.
