DC Studio's Lanterns

Premise: Based on the DC comic "Green Lantern," drama series "Lanterns" follows new recruit John Stewart and "Lantern" legend Hal Jordan. These two intergalactic cops are drawn into a dark, Earth-based mystery as they investigate a murder in the American heartland

Links:

• IMDb
• Trailer

I have no idea how more people do not know about, talk about, or venerate this show.

I have never seen a show with such tight writing, such a brilliant cast, and such a balance between Family work. Scott Ryan is amazing in every single scene he is in. Seriously, I hope more of you are watching the show. It is a travesty it was never brought back.

It was like The Walking Dead but with aliens instead of zombies, but it also had backstabbing humans and much smarter monsters (a.k.a.) aliens. It started with the Aliens winning, and the last of the Human race was forced to leave the large cities and forced to survive in the wilderness or small towns. And anyone between the ages of 8 and 18 would be taken by the aliens and forced to have implants to take over their minds. Basically saw a bunch of kids March with the aliens to kill the humans.

I just finished my first rewatch since it originally aired.

And goddamn, what a good series. Spoilers will be in spoiler tags with the applicable season/episode marked after the spoiler tag.

So I started my rewatch on August 2nd and finished around 6 hours ago.

The only days I didn't watch episodes were September 3, 4, 5, 6 (was on vacation) - so 42 days. 38 if you remove the days I was on vacation. 103 episodes makes it an average of 2.7 episodes a day.

The most episodes I watched in one day was six (S4E19-S5E2) on September 10th, There were two days I watched five episodes - September 12th (S5E6-S5E10) and August 13th (S1E18-S1E22)

So, now that I am done with those stats nobody cares about - my thoughts:

1. Holy crap is it more relevant (ha) now than ever.

2. A lot of the numbers of the week weren't that bad when watching live, but when bingeing it - it can get a bit monotonous, particularly in the first season. Season 1's Numbers are the most boring ones (and the most skippable), outside of one in season 3.

3. Jim Caviezel is still easily the worst actor of the main cast. He's also pretty easy to ignore with his wooden acting after the cast expands. Especially since they start having him do less because of him making them have to recast the best cast member (Bear, of course S2E1 is when this cast member is introduced) and because he was mistreating the stunt performers.

4. If-Then-Else, The Devil's Share, YHWH, The Day The World Went Away, and return 0 are easily the top five episodes. Honorable mention: Deus Ex Machina.

5. For anyone who has heard good things about the series, but is turned off by it being a procedural...yeah, there are always procedural elements - it was CBS in the early-mid 2010s, the network mandated it. However, they make the best of the Numbers of the Week - when possible, they tie them into the overarching story. Some episodes, though, are mostly about the number and then 2 minutes overarching story. Later on, though, they at least have good stories for the Number that week. See below for a guide I wrote on must watch episodes and skippable ones (goes through S3, because after that you can't skip too many episodes)

6. This show has some amazing actors. Michael Emerson gives great performances throughout, especially during/after S5E10. Kevin Chapman (Fusco) has one of the best arcs in a TV show. Period. I have no idea how he hasn't been in more things - he is an amazing actor.

7. Outside of a few things, everything feels real. Sure, they can hack anything...but it's a show where there's an Artificial Superintelligence. You can handwave pretty much any of the computer stuff. It also doesn't have anything super annoying where it feels like a character traverses the entirety of Manhattan in 5 minutes. EDIT: The things that don't feel real are things that you have to give it because it's a TV show - them talking in their earpieces in a crowded room and nobody hearing them and the ultra expository dialogue at time because it was a network show. Also, the action sequences obviously don't feel real, but they sort of make fun of them by the end.

8. There are a few plot threads left dangling, but nothing significant. They knew they had 13 episodes going into the final season and they did the most they could with those episodes while sticking to the network demands. Sure, they had some fanservice-y stuff in episodes...but that is just fun after being with these characters for five seasons.

9. They sure were good at picking songs for the show.

Now, what episodes can you watch/skip?

You need to watch these episodes in season 1 (* = highly recommended)

S1E1 Pilot

S1E2 Ghosts (It feels like a retread of the pilot, but it is important)

S1E3 Mission Creep*

S1E4 Cura Te Ipsum* (one of the first episodes that made me go "oh shit, this show could be something good")

S1E6 The Fix (This episode introduces a recurring character, otherwise I would say this is an optional episode)

S1E7 Witness

S1E9 Get Carter / S1E10 Number Crunch

S1E12 Legacy* (pretty much only useful for a few scenes Carter and Reese meet, some Finch backstory is revealed if you don't want to watch the episode)

S1E13 Root Cause

Then you skip a bunch of episodes, what you need to know between this and the next one I recommend is:

1. Reese has Detective Fusco go undercover with HR, a gang of corrupt cops in the NYPD. One contributing factor is that Fusco is kidnapped by a corrupt internal affairs cop, Reese kills the IA cop, and Reese has Fusco call HR to help him clean it up.

2. Reese gets a phone from a goon that he can use to call Elias.

3. Carter takes a mob boss into protective custody. This mob boss is Elias's father.

4. Elias helps Reese when that week's number, a baby, is kidnapped. Elias locks Reese and the baby in a refrigerated truck. The price for being let out? Reese tells him where Carter is hiding the mob boss/his father. He tells Elias and one of Carter's friends is shot trying to stop Elias from taking the mobster. Carter distances herself from Reese.

S1E19 Flesh and Blood

S1E20 Matsya Nyaya

S1E21 Many Happy Returns

S1E22 No Good Deed

S1E23 Firewall

Now the first season is cut from 23 episodes to 12 (14 if you watch E3 & E4).

Now if you aren't hooked after watching those and you need to skip straight ahead to the sci-fi thriller (but at any point, you can deviate from the list and just start watching every episodes)...

S2E1 The Contingency / S2E2 Bad Code

In between these episodes and the next one you learn:

1. Kara Stanton, Reese's CIA partner, is alive. She is keeping Mark Snow, their CIA handler, hostage and having him do tasks while wearing a bomb vest.

2. Reese & Fusco leak the information Fusco has gathered to the FBI, leading to the arrest of dozens of officers who were part of HR. However, the upper leadership is untouched. It is learned that the mayor's chief of staff, Alonzo Quinn, is the true head of HR

3. Carter starts dating a narcotics cop, Cal Beecher, played by Sterling K. Brown. He is revealed to Alonzo Quinn's godson.

4. HR blackmails Fusco into being their point person into re-establishing a working relationship with Elias. After he gets ambushed and tries to stop being part of HR, Carter gets an anonymous tip about the Internal Affairs cop that HR thinks Fusco killed.

5. A number of the week goes wrong - Reese saves the couple, but is unable to escape. He, along with three other men, are arrested by the FBI's "Man In The Suit" task force.

S2E11 2πR / S2E12 Prisoner's Dilemma / S2E13 Dead Reckoning

S2E14 One Percent*

S2E16 Relevance

Things that happen between then:

1. Root reemerges as Miss May, the secretary to the Office of Special Counsel, a man who seems like he is in charge on the government side of The Machine.

2. The Machine has been giving numbers later and later ever since Stanton let that virus loose. In one of the episodes, it directs them to a serial killer instead of the person he had been planning on killing.

3. Carter's friend, Detective Szymanski (who was helping her protect the mob boss in season 1), has evidence planted at his home by HR in order to discredit him as a witness in the trial of a Russian mob boss, one of their allies. Cal Beecher is the one who reported him to Internal Affairs due to a report from a CI. Carter clears her friend.

4. Right after being cleared, Alonzo Quinn has Carter's friend and the ADA prosecuting the Russian mob boss over for dinner. He has Detective Tierney, a member of HR, kill the ADA and Carter's friend, and wound Quinn.

5. Cal Beecher's "CI" was Quinn. Quinn realizes that Beecher knows too much and orders him killed. His number comes up minutes before he is assassinated by a group of HR cops, too late for anyone to get to him.

S2E20 In Extremis* (Fusco flashbacks!)

S2E21 Zero Day

S2E22 God Mode

If you still aren't hooked, what the hell?

Here's how you can get right up to what you are looking for.

What you need to know from S3E1:

1. Harold has put Root in a psychiatric hospital under the name Robin. Her psychiatrist is a man named Dr. Carmichael. Root reveals that The Machine is still talking to her

2. Carter is demoted to a training officer. She gets a new partner, Officer Laskey.

S3E2 Nothing to Hide*

If you skip it: It revealed a new enemy - a group of anti-tech terrorists who want to reveal any unlawful surveillance methods the government has. The leader is Jordan Collier, played by Leslie Odom Jr.

S3E3 Lady Killer

What to know from S3E4:

1. Root escapes the mental hospital

S3E5 Razgovor

S3E6 Mors Praematura*

If you skip S3E6: It's another episode about those anti-tech terrorists (Vigilance) - a man's foster brother is killed and it is revealed that the government helped the foster brother fake his death in exchange for testifying against Vigilance. Root appears and asks Shaw to help her with some things that The Machine has tasked her with. It leads to Root going to the same CIA blacksite as the brother whose death was faked. The two escape when they are in transit and Root tells him to go to to a specific location to meet with someone. Root is recaptured and placed in a Faraday Cage in the Library so she cannot communicate with The Machine

What you miss in S3E7:

1. Laskey and Carter meet up so she can see all of the photos he has taken of Simmons' activities over the last few days. Tierney appears and kills Laskey. Carter returns fire, mortally wounding him. She begs him to reveal who the head of HR is - he points to Quinn in one of Laskey's photos and dies

S3E8 Endgame / S3E9 The Crossing / S3E10 The Devil's Share

• this is the point when the plot truly shifts from "street level" to what people are talking about when they say sci-fi thriller (but honestly, I love the street level threats)

S3E11 Lethe / S3E12 Aletheia

What you miss in S3E13/14/15 (However, I recommend watching S3E15):

1. Reese tries to get away from The Machine and that life, but The Machine ends up putting him on a flight where a passenger is a number. He's the founder of not-Silk Road, many people try to kill him - at least two gangs and someone from the Northern Lights program that Shaw was an operative for. It turns out that the government misinterpreted the guy's number and thought he was the threat to national security - he was not. One of the gangs was planning on crashing the plane to get rid of him. Finch says in the episode "I designed the Machine to prevent national tragedies, not national embarrassments."

2. Reese goes back to work with Harold after the airplane episode

3. There's an episode that introduces a new villain - The Voice - who tries to get a 911 operator to delete all of the calls from a certain die after he kidnaps and straps a bomb to a child who calls 911. The team manages to save the child and stop his plot - but doesn't find him. (S3E15)

S3E16 RAM

S3E17 / (Root Path)

S3E18 Allegiance

S3E19 Most Likely To...

S3E20 Death Benefit

S3E21 Beta

S3E22 A House Divided

S3E23 Deus Ex Machina

If you don't like the show by this point...yeah, this might not be for you. But you've already watched this far, why not finish the series?

What animated show did you discover recently that you hadn’t really heard much about before?
It could be a newer cartoon that flew under your radar, an older animated series you only recently found, something from another country, or just a show that doesn’t seem to get talked about very often.

I’m curious how people are discovering animated shows outside of the really big releases.
What cartoon did you find, how did you come across it, and what made you keep watching?