After everything the show has put John through in Lanterns, it is a pretty shocking choice. He has spent his whole life being trained to become a Green Lantern, fights Hal for the ring and finally gets the chance to wear it. Then he decides he doesn’t want it. But why?

Well, Lanterns writer Vanessa Baden Kelly has now explained that John’s decision was always meant to go against everything he had been taught.

Episode 3 showed us John’s childhood and, more importantly, why he has spent his whole life preparing to become a Green Lantern. His parents trained him to overcome fear because the Guardians had identified him as someone who could eventually wield the ring. That included the brutal apple-shooting tests we saw as a child.

So when John finally puts the ring on in episode 5, it should feel like the end of his journey. Except it doesn’t.

After killing Zoe, John takes Hal’s ring and meets the Guardian. She congratulates him and tells him, “It looks good on you.” But John has just watched the destruction of Rushville and seen exactly what chasing the ring has done to Hal. And suddenly, the thing he has wanted for years doesn’t feel like the prize he thought it would be.

The writers wanted to create ‘a complex individual’

Lanterns writer Vanessa Baden Kelly has explained that episode 3 was important for this exact reason. She told GQ that episode 3 was originally supposed to come much later in the season. In fact, it was initially planned as episode 5. But the writers moved it earlier because they wanted John’s childhood to change how we understood everything that came afterwards.

Kelly said the episode “puts a lot of John Stewart into context as we’re moving forward”.

And then she explained why that matters so much for episode 5. She said, “When he makes a decision to not take the ring when he could have, we understand how that’s going against programming.”

Kelly also explained that the writers wanted John to feel like a fully formed person rather than simply the next person in line for Hal’s ring. She said the writers wanted to explore “what would it be like for somebody like John to get the ring?”

That led the writers to explore ideas around Black exceptionalism and extraordinary people. Kelly said they discussed figures including Tiger Woods, Venus and Serena Williams and the Jackson family.

The aim was to create “a complex individual”, rather than a simple superhero who had always been destined to wear the ring.

Tom King says the ring was never just about John

Before episode 5 aired, co-creator Tom King revealed that the mystery behind Lanterns was actually connected to Guy Gardner. Speaking to Inverse, he said, “The central mystery we started with is, ‘Why does Guy Gardner have the ring [in Superman]?’”

He explained that the writers were always thinking about John, Hal and Guy together. “There’s these two other Lanterns. Why is he the one you only see in the Superman movie?”

So, the writers knew from the beginning that they had to explain how Guy Gardner eventually becomes the Green Lantern we see in Superman.

And now episode 5 has given us a pretty big piece of that answer.

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