HBO’s Lanterns knows how to make a question linger. Most of the premiere follows Hal Jordan and rookie John Stewart investigating the bizarre death of an alien in Rushville, Nebraska, in 2016. Then the story leaps a decade forward and drops its hammer: Hal is dead, sitting in the same football stadium where the case began, and his Power Ring is gone.
Episode 2 makes the rabbit hole deeper. John learns that a Manhunter may be hiding in Rushville, Hal uncovers alien-detection technology, and Sinestro arrives with a warning that makes John himself look potentially dangerous. Even John’s seemingly innocent green bird becomes suspicious when the construct persists without him wearing the ring.
That is a cracking foundation for a superhero thriller, but two DC shows still have Lanterns beat at sustained suspense. One built an entire conspiracy from a body hanging beneath a tree. The other hid its monster in plain sight, smiling at its hero from across a laboratory. And strangely enough, Lanterns coming third may reveal what makes it special.
Watchmen Is the Best DC Superhero Mystery Thriller of All Time
Watchmen wastes no time laying its cards on the table, then spends nine episodes proving that we never understood the game. Tulsa police chief Judd Crawford is found hanging from a tree, and Angela Abar discovers her wheelchair-bound grandfather, Will Reeves, nearby. From there, the murder opens a can of worms involving Judd’s hidden past, the Seventh Kavalry, Senator Joe Keene, Lady Trieu, and secrets stretching back decades.
Episode 6 is where the series earns the top spot. After swallowing Will’s Nostalgia pills, Angela experiences his memories and discovers that her grandfather was Hooded Justice, the mysterious vigilante whose identity had remained unresolved in the original Watchmen story. The same episode reveals that Will killed Judd after uncovering his connection to Cyclops. Most mysteries would lose steam after identifying their killer with three episodes remaining. Watchmen somehow tightens the screws.
Angela’s husband Cal is subsequently revealed as Doctor Manhattan, living with his powers and memories suppressed, while Angela’s attempt to understand Judd’s death loops back through Manhattan to Will in the past. The murder that looked like Point A turns out to be tangled in events across generations. That’s the difference. Lanterns has intriguing mysteries; Watchmen builds a maze where each answer opens two more questions.
The Flash Season 1 Was Miles Ahead at Building Suspense Than Lanterns
The runner-up is considerably less grim, but don’t let the bright red suit fool you. The Flash Season 1 begins with Barry Allen’s oldest wound: his mother Nora was murdered by an impossible figure surrounded by yellow lightning, while his innocent father went to prison for the crime. Then Barry gains super-speed and finds a mentor in Dr. Harrison Wells. That relationship becomes the season’s masterstroke. Wells helps Barry become the Flash while the show quietly reveals that something is rotten in S.T.A.R. Labs.
He can secretly walk despite using a wheelchair publicly, possesses knowledge of the future and takes a suspicious interest in making Barry faster. Eventually, Team Flash discovers that their mentor is actually Eobard Thawne, the Reverse-Flash, wearing the identity of the real Harrison Wells. Yet exposing him doesn’t puncture the suspense. It changes the game. Thawne came back intending to kill Barry as a child, murdered Nora instead, and became stranded in the past. He then spent years engineering Barry’s transformation into the Flash because Barry’s speed was ultimately Thawne’s ticket home.
The finale brings everything back to the murder that started the series. Thawne offers Barry the opportunity to travel back and save Nora in exchange for opening the route to his own future. Barry reaches that night but ultimately chooses not to rewrite his life, instead getting the goodbye with his mother he never had. That is why Season 1 edges Lanterns for now. Its mystery is not merely who the Man in Yellow is. Each answer changes the question: Who is Wells? Why does he need Barry? Why did Nora die? Can Barry undo it? The season keeps moving the goalposts without making the original mystery feel irrelevant.
Superhero Suspense Isn’t Even the Best Part of Lanterns
Here is the rub: Lanterns may not actually want to be the next Watchmen. Rushville is beginning to look less like the destination and more like the trapdoor into something enormous. Episode 2 establishes that the Manhunters predate the Green Lantern Corps. Created by the Guardians as synthetic enforcers, they became catastrophically dangerous, and now one may be hiding among Rushville’s population. John has just 48 hours to identify it before the aliens pursuing it are prepared to devastate the area.
That single development ties a Nebraska case to the buried history of the Guardians. Then Sinestro appears. Hal travels off-world to question his imprisoned former mentor about the Manhunters, only for Sinestro to suggest that the machine is merely the second-greatest threat Hal faces before turning his attention to John.
Suddenly, John’s anomalous bird construct takes on greater significance. The rookie can maintain something that Hal recognizes as extraordinary, opening a mystery about what John is becoming rather than simply what happened in Rushville. That is where Lanterns can ultimately leave its rivals behind in another category. Green Lantern mythology encompasses the Guardians, alien Lanterns, Manhunters, Sinestro, and an entire cosmic policing system that live-action DC has barely scratched.
Watchmen makes mystery its architecture. The Flash Season 1 turns one secret identity into a season-long pressure cooker. Lanterns is doing something broader: using a whodunit to smuggle us into an enormous cosmic mythology while developing the combustible Hal-John relationship at its center. Which DC series handles suspense best? Share your ranking below, and follow FandomWire for more Lanterns and DCU coverage.
Lanterns airs Sundays on HBO and streams on HBO Max.
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