So, picture this: a wise alien being who protects the universe lands at your family’s house and tells your mom that you may one day be worthy to wield a powerful ring as an intergalactic space cop called a Green Lantern.
But, before that can happen, you have to be trained to be ‘fearless’ to earn the ring which deems a person without fear worthy of wearing it.
And as a showing of good faith, the wise alien disguised as a Mary Poppins-esque white woman hands your mom a massive diamond because, apparently, that’s how these alien beings comfort people on Earth.
What happens next is totally up to your parents and whether they are normal, loving, and supportive or completely unhinged like John Stewart’s mom and dad who think they have to traumatize their son to prepare him to be a Green Lantern.
From shooting apples off of his head to leaving him in the middle of the ‘hood’ and forcing him to find his way home at night, John’s ring-crazed parents spiral into a shared psychosis fueled by their desire to prepare their son for his destiny.
There’s also the added layer of John’s father, John Sr., struggling to accept that he wasn’t fearless enough to wield the ring after an earlier encounter with the alien beings.
In the critically-acclaimed third episode of Lanterns, it becomes clear that John was raised by abusive parents who misunderstood their life-altering assignment on multiple levels.
It’s worth noting that in classic Green Lantern lore a person doesn’t have to be completely fearless to be worthy of the ring. It’s their ability to overcome fear with sheer willpower that makes them worthy which John’s parents completely misunderstand.
If anything, they should have focused on teaching their song to be resilient rather than putting him through traumatic training that they believed would make him fearless.
Following in father’s footsteps, John eventually joins the marines as a stoic soldier who operates without fear as a seemingly normal person without the strain of emotional trauma from his childhood.
Naturally, social media erupted over the buzzy episode written by child star-turned-writer/executive producer Vanessa Baden Kelly who starred in Kenan & Kell and Gullah Gullah Island.
“[It’s] one of the most brilliantly written episodes of television that I’ve personally read,” said Pierre in an interview with USA TODAY, adding that it captured the social commentary “in such an eloquent [and] articulate way. It creates an immediate conversation, and it inspires people to want to find a solution and want to find a way to successfully defeat these troubles that are present in the world we live in today.”
What was your reaction to John Stewart’s superhero origin story? Tell us down below and peep the social media hysteria over Lanterns episode 3 on the flip.
