Lanterns Episode 3: HBO’s show nails the Black American experience in unexpected ways.

This article contains spoilers for Season 1, Episode 3, “OutKast,” of Lanterns.

Lanterns, HBO’s new series adapting DC’s Green Lantern comics, has been unfolding like a narrative set of Russian nesting dolls, wherein one mystery always leads to yet another and every character’s background is shrouded in secrecy. This is why, three episodes in, we’re only now getting the origin story of the show’s unflappable co-lead, John Stewart (Aaron Pierre), a former U.S. Marine and Green Lantern–in–training to Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler), the jaded, virid hero currently tasked with protecting Earth from alien threats. Sunday’s episode of Lanterns plays a pivotal role in peeling back the show’s exterior of puzzles and spandex and deftly approaches a more jagged topic: John’s reality as a Black superhero in training, whose life has been shaped by an immense pressure to defy the world’s racial expectations. This pressure is placed on him by his parents, characters who are approached here with a great level of nuance and care.

In Episode 3, titled “OutKast,” written by Vanessa Baden Kelly, Lanterns reveals that John’s father, John Stewart Sr. (J. Alphonse Nicholson), was asked by the Guardians of the Universe to be Green Lantern before Hal Jordan. We see the extraterrestrial presence kidnap John Sr. in a green bubble and ask him the one question needed to pass the test: “Are you afraid?” John Sr. replies honestly: Yes, he is. That spells the end of that possibility, and on top of everything else, no one believes John Sr.’s claims that an alien kidnapped him, least of all his wife, Bernadette (Jasmine Cephas Jones), causing him to begin devolving mentally. It’s not until an unnamed member of the Guardians (played by Laura Linney) arrives in front of Bernadette to apologize for any “emotional turmoil” caused by the Lantern initiation process that Bernadette believes her husband. But she also immediately begins to feel cheated. Bernadette grills the Guardian: “Do you understand how unfair it is to ask a Black man in America if he’s afraid?” She continues, “We are terrified daily of persecution and still show up, sometimes better than everyone around us. Did you know that?” When the Guardian replies that she did not know that, Bernadette quips: “Even in space y’all don’t consider us.”

But, the Guardian hints to Bernadette, even if her husband didn’t make the cut, her child could be a candidate to replace the current Lantern, when the time comes. Bernadette’s resentment toward the Guardians passing up John Sr. for the job drives both of them to believe in that promise; as Bernadette tells her husband: “We didn’t break every stereotype and face down every fear for you to be penalized because you’re scared to leave the people that you love.” From then on, the couple ruthlessly “conditions” John, their youngest son, to become “used to fear” in an effort to turn him into a nearly inhuman shoo-in for the role. This preparation involves training John as an expert sniper, but also as a target, tasking the child to stand still while his father shoots apples off of his head with a gun, and making him do the same to his parents. John is obliged to sleep in a separate room from his older brothers and forced to walk home from unfamiliar, potentially dangerous neighborhoods when he’s barely a teenager. He is asked to sacrifice his interest in drawing, his relationship with his brothers, and his capacity for emotions, all so that he can, eventually, become the next Green Lantern and prove that Black people should no longer be left out of conversations of capability and power and renown.

This dream, though, is eventually revealed to be something of a sham. John becomes a Marine, but winds up dishonorably discharged from the military for a mistake everyone knows he didn’t make. Later, he is told by the Guardians to, in practical terms, shut up and follow orders. And, on top of that, the job of Green Lantern isn’t even all that great. It doesn’t pay well, and, as Hal’s trainee, John is affronted by the superhero’s mediocrity—which actually caused John’s dishonorable discharge—yet subjected to his lackluster teachings. John’s parents reared their son to take on an honored role, but for what? At the end of the day, John realizes, he is still meant to answer to a dubious group of beings that couldn’t care less about him beyond what he can do for them. He’s been weighed down by the enormous psychological and emotional burden of his parents’ expectations all his life, for little more than the same old crap.

This harsh revelation gets at the fallacy and the pressure of “Black excellence,” an idea often used to describe a Black person breaking barriers or achieving a set of accolades that even their white counterparts find impressive. Yes, Black successes should be celebrated, and the notion that Black people can be great should be a given, not an idea we have to fight for. But, in a world where other people from various backgrounds get to be mediocre, fail upward, or show imperfections, so, too, should Black people. We should be allowed that same grace without suffering what feels like life-ending, or career-disrupting, repercussions. Great shouldn’t be the only thing Black people are allowed to be, especially when that is a humanly impossible achievement, and particularly when that status of great or excellent that we’re trying to attain is defined by the groups who fail to acknowledge us, anyway.

Lanterns tackles this sharply. Notably, John’s parents specifically strive to make him something that is a little less than human. As viewers, it’s hard to watch this young child (played by Cairo Cash Lee) be separated from the people he loves and the activities he cherishes. It would’ve been all too easy to merely cast blame on John’s parents, or approach them with uncomplicated resentment, especially considering John’s parents are fully aware of the sacrifice they’re asking of a son who is too young to consent to it. “He’s gonna hate us,” John Sr. says, to which Bernadette replies, “So be it.” But John doesn’t, and neither does the show. Lanterns makes you understand that John’s parents made what they felt was the best choice for their family, driven by an exasperation with surviving under the threat of persecution and consistently being perceived as inadequate while doing it. As Bernadette tells John Sr., “We can’t raise three boys and believe that no matter how good they are, they get looked over.” To Bernadette, everything began “falling apart” on “the night they rejected” John Sr., and it’s telling that she sees that incident as a rejection and not a failure of her husband, that she knows that the Guardians’ test was not one that considered the totality of their experience.

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By withholding from assigning total and straightforward blame, Lanterns is able to fully consider what it would look like if a Black parent dedicated their child’s life to making them the undeniable best, the epitome of Black excellence, even in a supercharged world. It’s ultimately a misguided decision, sure, but it was born out of a deeply justified feeling of dissatisfaction with the status quo. Though John Sr. and Bernadette’s pursuit ultimately feels ill-advised, we’re only able to reach that conclusion about the fallacy of Black excellence because we understand why John’s parents would do that in the first place. The only way to deconstruct our staunchest cultural ideas is with the nuance of having empathy and understanding regarding where those ideas came from in the first place.

John’s story is a tough one, but it echoes the real-life Black American experience in more ways than you might have come to expect from a show that could have been about little more than guys flying around in green Lycra. Seeing the internal politics of Black parenthood folded so well into a series about larger intergalactic politics is not such a huge surprise, once you remember that Lanterns co-creator Damon Lindelof also made Watchmen, which similarly pulled off a tough balancing act. During a panel at San Diego Comic Con, Pierre, who gave a heartfelt speech about the significance of John Stewart, a key Black hero in the DC comics, said: “My hope is that when folks watch this, they watch it and they feel a tangible relatability.” For Pierre, that means embodying John’s “heart” and looking up to the role of Green Lantern as John Stewart befits it. But maybe, for the rest of us, it means unlearning the harsh expectations the world has unfairly placed on us.