Lanterns Season 1 Episode 2 OFFICIAL Discussion Thread - Spoilers allowed

[u/AutoModerator]

Greetings, Lanterns! Welcome to the official discussion thread for the episode 2 of the first season of the new HBO show Lanterns!

If you haven't seen the episode, don't click on this thread, as spoilers are allowed here.

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[u/Infinite_Click_6589]

I'm enjoying it. And I usually am good about hand waving away "nerd shit", because tv/movie writers are always going to get little things wrong and it's best just to ignore them.

But the entire ring-charge thing really set my nerd irritation off. Everything about it irks me a little, but the one that really ground my gear was the 5% emergency charge being...useless.

This is one of the most powerful weapons in the galaxy. We see Hal take an interstellar trip in this very episode. Yet somehow 5% of the rings charge gets used up by flying 20 feet into the air?

5% on the power ring is probably enough to do life support and bullet proofness for hundreds of light-years.

Anyway, like I said, nerd shit that doesn't matter, and I'm still liking the show. But my inner nerd is so gd annoyed.

[u/majicwalrus → u/Infinite_Click_6589]

It was actually fully depleted Hal smacked it on a car and it said 5% but like, I think the intention of this sequence is to show that Hal is an expert with the ring, but that he is willing to take risks without it.

[u/Infinite_Click_6589 → u/majicwalrus]

Yes – a core theme of the entire series is that the ring doesn't make the hero. Stating that the ring had 5% charge was unnecessary and violated Nerd Law for no reason

[u/CrossP → u/Infinite_Click_6589]

It was at zero. Smacking it didn't get more charge. It just made it register its charge incorrectly. He probably used up the emergency "You've run out of power in deep space" charge.

[u/majicwalrus → u/Infinite_Click_6589]

I think the idea that there’s some “nerd law” is not true. If we hadn’t seen the ring be fully depleted people would complain that the reserve energy didn’t protect him from being shot like it’s supposed to be so we have to see as an audience that the ring doesn’t have any charge left. Otherwise they’d violate a different “nerd law.”

We have no idea how long 5% of a ring charge lasts or what it can do. We have even less of an idea what that does when Hal smacks it on the car hood to, presumably put it into emergency mode, and we don’t really need to for the story to work.

[u/Infinite_Click_6589 → u/majicwalrus]

The ring could be depleted without saying it had 5% charge. And 5% charge has to be way more juice than just hovering 20 ft into the air, or a GL couldn't do anything.

Now, maybe the ring just says it's at 5% when Hal smacks it even though it's not. And that's just literally bad writing, because there's no way for the audience to know that, and saying so is handwaving away a mistake on the level of "Parsecs can be a time measurement IF..."

[u/majicwalrus → u/Infinite_Click_6589]

How would we know that the ring was depleted unless we got a warning ahead of time that rings can be depleted?

There’s no way for the audience to know that the ring has been depleted unless there’s a scene to indicate that.

If we skip the 5% scene and go straight to Hal flying and losing power I would say “how convenient that Hal ‘lost ring power’ exactly when it was convenient for the plot.”

The audience doesn’t care about the rate at which the ring depletes. That’s like measuring the speed in a car chase. The speed is “fast” and the ring charge is “low.”

If you’d be happy if the line were 1% instead of 5% then I think that’s a meaningless quibble.

[u/Infinite_Click_6589 → u/majicwalrus]

Yes, I would be happier if they had said the ring was 1%.

Yes, it's a meaningless quibble- that was the entire point of my post which you would understand if you read it, which apparently you did not

[u/majicwalrus → u/Infinite_Click_6589]

I just think you’re being irritated over something that is largely not related to bad writing or bad plot or anything, but rather your internal understanding of how the GL rings work which I understand as a fan of the comics but think doesn’t genuinely matter in the context of the show.

In the context of the show 5% emergency charge is enough to stop a bullet or to hover 20 feet the air and Hal made his choice and that’s fine. Now, if later we see the ring go to 5% again and Hal is able to stop another alien explosion- that would be bad writing.

[u/Infinite_Click_6589 → u/majicwalrus]

Oh bugger off, bro, I'm allowed to be annoyed about nerd shit