Lanterns Revives One of Classic Green Lantern’s Silliest Concepts

This article contains spoilers for Lanterns season 1 episode 1.

John Stewart spends most of the premiere episode Lanterns living in the shadow of his mentor, Hal Jordan. And it’s an unpleasant place to be. Hal never misses an opportunity to needle the young hopeful, whether it’s abandoning him in a crashing car or making him navigate his own way to Rushville, Nebraska. But Stewart does manage to earn the older man’s respect in one case, when he describes the copy that Hal made for himself as a “Hal-o-Gram.” The name makes Hal smile and say, “That’s clever,” before checking himself and saying, “Not that clever.”

“Hal-o-Gram” is a clever name, in part because it’s not one that most Green Lantern fans would use. Instead, longtime comic readers know the backup personality as an “Energy Twin,” a largely forgotten power of Green Lantern Corps members and one of the many Silver Age concepts that make their way into the HBO drama.

Everybody knows that Green Lantern rings channel willpower to create whatever the user can imagine. Usually, that means laser blasts and various bubbles, an aura that protects the user and lets them fly, and various constructs. But throughout comic book history, Green Lantern has used their ring to age themselves up, to change their external appearance (even creating colors other than green, including the dreaded yellow), read and control minds, and open portals through space.

One might blame these wild powers on Silver Age storytelling, a standard practice in the time when Superman would suddenly throw his voice across the room with super-ventriloquism or when Batman just had shark repellent on his utility belt. But it actually stems from the earliest Green Lantern appearances, back when Alan Scott was the Golden Age Green Lantern. Scott’s creators Martin Nodell and Bill Finger intended Green Lantern to be a magical character, and Nodell even originally named him Alan Ladd to riff on Aladdin (he went with Scott to avoid confusion with the Hollywood star of the same name).

In those Golden Age stories, Alan Scott would shoot lasers and create constructs. But he was just as likely to use his ring to walk through walls and make himself invisible. Scott’s ring was a wishing ring, and if the story called for a magic trick, the ring would allow him to pull it off.

Even DC reimagined Green Lantern as a sci-fi character in the 1950s, making the rings a product of advanced alien science instead of deep magic, they still operated the same way. So when Hal Jordan needed to dissuade someone from figuring out his secret identity, he would just use his ring to create an exact copy of himself, allowing the plain clothes Jordan to stand next to an in-uniform Green Lantern. Even though early stories tried to limit the ability to something that only Hal could do, and even then only in certain places—Green Lantern #6 from 1961, by John Broome and Gil Kane, stipulates that the magnetic fields of the planet Aku allowed him to make a double—it soon became standard practice for all GL’s.

Energy-twins were particularly common during Steve Englehart and Joe Staton’s run in the mid-1980s, when several GLs relocated to Earth and the book changed its name to Green Lantern Corps. There, the heroes needed to deal with various issues on Earth while still maintaining contact with Guardians of the Universe on the planet Oa, as well as other deep-space GLs. 1985’s Green Lantern #194 by Englehart and Staton provides a perfect example. Throughout the issue, Green Lantern Katma Tui sends an energy-twin to Oa to report on the events of the Crisis of Infinite Earths from Earth. When the Anti-Monitor launches an attack on Oa and incapacitates the Guardians, Katma’s energy-twin finds itself cut off.

Energy-twins would make scattered appearances over the next few years or so. But by the time that Hal Jordan flipped and became the villain Parallax, killing the Guardians and decimating the Green Lantern Corps, there was no need for energy-twins. The lone Green Lantern Kyle Rayner had no one to contact, and thus never made a twin. But even when Hal was restored and the Corps was rebuilt, energy-twins became a lost art—so much so that it became news among nerds when writer Morgan Hampton brought them back in last year’s Green Lantern Corps #11.

Lanterns was the last place fans expected to see energy-twins return. Creators Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof, and Tom King want to keep things relatively grounded. But given that energy-twins allow GLs to travel space while staying on Earth, maybe they’re just what Lanterns needs to be a Green Lantern show that appeals to wide audiences.

Lanterns airs new episodes every Sunday at 9 p.m. on HBO and HBO Max.

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