Lanterns Episode 5, titled “Lights Out,” aired on HBO and HBO Max on September 13, and within about six hours the internet had fully rebranded Hal Jordan as Frodo Baggins with a better haircut and worse decision-making skills.
Somewhere in a writers’ room, someone pitched “what if the Green Lantern ring… was kind of a metaphor for the One Ring” and instead of getting laughed out of the building, they got a green light (pun very much intended).
If you haven’t watched it yet: buckle up, because Lanterns Episode 5 is 51 minutes of a magic ring destroying a friendship, a city, and possibly a man’s will to live, and the parallels to J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy are now so widely reported that they’ve become their own genre of recap.
The Fight Scene That Launched a Thousand Mount Doom Jokes
Let’s start with the moment that broke containment. When John Stewart shows up in Hal’s motel room to reclaim the ring, the two Lanterns throw down in what The Ringer described as just about the sweatiest fight for a ring since Frodo and Gollum squared up in the fires of Mount Doom.
Read that outlet’s full recap here, because it is doing exactly what every good recap of Lanterns Episode 5 should do: treating a superhero brawl in a motel room with the same gravitas as an elf-dwarf-hobbit alliance fighting off Sauron’s entire military-industrial complex.
It’s a genuinely funny image once you sit with it — two grown men wrestling over a piece of extraterrestrial jewelry on a carpet that’s seen better decades, and somehow it still lands as “epic.” That’s the trick Lanterns Episode 5 pulls off again and again: it borrows LOTR’s emotional shorthand and cashes the check before you notice you’ve been charged.
John Stewart Is Basically Bilbo, and Hal Jordan Is What Happens If Gollum Had Abs
Over at But Why Tho?, the recap of Lanterns Episode 5 draws the comparison even more directly, noting that like Bilbo and Gollum in The Hobbit, the ring turned Hal into a different person that he didn’t want to become. You can read their breakdown of the episode right here, and it’s worth it just for how bluntly it calls out the show’s Tolkien cosplay.
This is where Lanterns Episode 5 gets genuinely clever instead of just aesthetically Tolkien-flavored: the ring isn’t corrupting Hal because it’s evil in some cackling, mustache-twirling way. It’s corrupting him the exact way the One Ring corrupted Sméagol — slowly, plausibly, one “just this once” at a time, until the guy who wanted it for noble reasons can’t remember what those reasons even were. John says as much when he finally gets his hands on the ring and — plot twist nobody called — decides he doesn’t want it either.
“One Does Not Simply Walk Into Rushville”
By the end of Lanterns Episode 5, John Stewart holds the most powerful weapon in his corner of the universe for approximately five minutes before setting it down on a bar like a guy returning a rental car early to dodge the late fee.
According to TheFilmGordon’s recap, John admits he no longer understands why he wanted it so badly, and for most of the series becoming Green Lantern has represented John’s destiny — right up until he finally possesses the ring, and rejects it. Full recap here.
That’s not a Green Lantern comic beat. That’s Frodo at the edge of the fire. That’s a hero looking at ultimate power and realizing the healthiest thing he can do is absolutely nothing with it. Lanterns Episode 5 essentially restages the climax of “The Return of the King” but swaps Mount Doom for a diner, and somehow it still works, mostly because the show has spent four episodes making you believe these two men actually love and resent each other in equal measure.
Even the Comic Book Nerds Think the Title Is a Deep Cut
If you thought the LOTR comparisons were the only Easter eggs buried in Lanterns Episode 5, think again. FandomWire points out that the episode’s title itself is a nod to the comics, since the name Lights Out is suitable for an episode wherein Rushville faces almost utter devastation and the issue of a depleting Green Lantern ring, and it is also related to a GL crossover story. Check out their full ranking of Easter eggs over here.
So really, Lanterns Episode 5 is playing a very fun double game: DC nerds get to feel smart for catching the comics reference, and Tolkien nerds get to feel smart for catching the “ring corrupts everyone who touches it” reference, and somewhere in the Venn diagram overlap is a very tired ring that just wants to be left alone.
The Ring Is Basically Running on 4% Battery, Just Like Your Phone During This Fight
One of the funnier threads running through Lanterns Episode 5 is that the ring isn’t just morally draining — it’s literally running out of juice, mid-apocalypse, like the universe’s worst possible time for your power bank to die. NetflixJunkie’s recap frames the whole hour around exactly this, with even the Guardians reportedly calling the situation what it is. You can read their take on what happened to the ring here.
And fans on social media noticed the LOTR-adjacent stakes of a depleting magic item too. Per CosmicBook.News’s roundup of the discourse, one fan joked that the charge level is determined by the writer lmao, there is no ‘comic accurate’ level of charge, while others compared it to how a certain hobbit’s journey only worked because the story needed it to.
Read the full fan-reaction breakdown of Lanterns Episode 5 right here — it includes gems like someone dubbing the ring’s battery life worse than their phone’s, and someone else insisting this felt like “a finale and we still have three episodes left”.
Critics Are Split, Which Somehow Makes the Tolkien Comparisons Funnier
Not everyone is convinced Lanterns Episode 5 earns its mythic aspirations. LeisureByte’s rundown of the online conversation notes that the episode has fans debating whether it’s working best when Lanterns remembers that its biggest weapon is not necessarily the ring but the characters — you can find that full piece here.
Meanwhile, Processed Media’s review calls getting the ring a clarifying “top of the mountain” moment for John, which — sure, why not, “top of the mountain,” very Mount Doom of you — before noting John quickly realizes what a dead man’s gambit he’s placed himself into. That review is worth the click here, if only because it treats a superhero having a full-blown Frodo-on-Amon-Hen identity crisis as the most normal thing in the world.
Honestly, that split reaction is the funniest part of all this. Half the internet thinks Lanterns Episode 5 just delivered the most emotionally devastating hour of superhero TV this year. The other half thinks a magic ring running out of battery in the middle of a city-wide crisis is a slightly silly stakes mechanism.
Both camps are, somehow, also just describing “The Lord of the Rings,” a story that is also, when you boil it down, about a piece of jewelry that occasionally just stops working at the worst time.
So… Is Lanterns Just Doing Lord of the Rings Cosplay?
Not exactly, and that’s kind of the fun of it. Lanterns Episode 5 isn’t remaking Tolkien beat for beat — it’s borrowing his most durable idea, the one that’s outlived every knockoff fantasy epic since 1954: power doesn’t corrupt because it’s cursed, it corrupts because it’s convenient, and giving it up on purpose is the single hardest, most heroic thing a person can do.
Hal Jordan spent the whole episode fighting to keep the ring. John Stewart spent five minutes with it and set it down like it was a hot pan.
Whether or not you buy the show’s execution, it’s genuinely impressive that a Green Lantern prestige drama managed to make “guy chooses not to keep a magic weapon” feel as weighty as Frodo at the literal edge of a volcano. Lanterns Episode 5 earned its fan comparisons the honest way — not by winking at the camera, but by actually understanding why “The Lord of the Rings” has worked on audiences for seventy years.
Three episodes are left. If Lanterns Episode 5 taught us anything, it’s that nobody in this universe is safe, no ring is fully charged when you need it most, and somewhere, a Guardian is definitely muttering “you shall not pass” under their breath at John Stewart’s retreating, barefoot silhouette.
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