Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Green Lantern (Vol. 5), Issue #4 – “Sinestro (Part 4)”! In the previous installment, Hal Jordan and Sinestro fly to Korugar in order to stop the yellow corps that have enslaved the planet. Sinestro’s plan is to create a diversion while Jordan flies into the yellow central battery with a green lantern. This will disrupt the yellow light, which will power down the corps’ yellow rings. A fine plan! I don’t see any issues!

Oh wait, when Hal Jordan enters the battery with the lantern, the battery detects its presence and initiates a disintegration sequence. The last thing we see is the remnants of Jordan’s dissolved body. Whoops!

The last thing Jordan thinks is that he’s been set up, but Sinestro observes the disintegration with complete alarm, confusion, and panic.

Get it while the gettin’s good! Let’s see what happens next.

Green Lantern (Vol. 5), Issue #4 [February, 2012]
Written by: Geoff Johns
“Sinestro (Part 4)”

As Hal Jordan is dying of being dissolved alive in some strange yellow battery acid, he sees visions of his relationship with Carol Ferris, but only the bad stuff. None of the sexy times. Just the scoldy times. “It was a mistake to get involved in the first place.” and “I think it’d be better if we didn’t see each other again.”

Jordan is screaming. The battery recognizes him as not being Sinestro, and aborts transport to the “antimatter universe”. The battery starts to go haywire, and Sinestro wonders aloud if Hal Jordan actually succeeded. But then the battery spits out an unlit green lantern (as in, a lantern that is green, not an unlit Hal Jordan ha ha ha whaaaat?), and Sinestro’s face falls. And then the battery spits out an unlit Hal Jordan! Fully integrated, not at all a pile of goo, possibly unconscious, and his hair still looks good.

One of the Sinestro Corps henchmen asks for some guy named Arkillo. “Tell him we have the traitor! Tell him we have Sinestro!” Another henchman warns the others that Sinestro can defeat any of them if he goes near their rings; he defeated Mongul that way, you know. He’s good with the rings, he can rig them!

You leave a beautiful corpse, sir.

Another ugly corps creep with a dorsal fin fish head and the bird beak gets all nice and close to Sinestro’s glowing green ring. He can’t believe his eyes that Sinestro would just betray his own corps like this! They plan to remove Sinestro’s ring and take Hal Jordan to the “decharging cells” so that they can kill him as soon as he’s out of power.

They throw him right in the brig! He uses his ring to try to bust out, but his efforts prove futile. He was even warned that it wouldn’t work, but he tried anyway. And now his ring is already almost out of power, and he should probably find a recharge station quick. Hal Jordan is driving a Tesla in the middle of Iowa here, you see, and he’s about to be stranded. He has enough power left for one more move, so he needs to make it count.

WARNING. POSSESSER OF THIS RING IS A DOOFUS.

So he decides to conjure up an image of Carol Ferris. Good idea, that’ll get you outta there! He makes the image smile at him, and he says a simple “I’m sorry.” to it before it vanishes in a wisp of green glowing green lantern green glow!

Hal Jordan frowns in the dark.

Meanwhile, Sinestro is having the time of his life entangled and writhing and yelling in some weird, glowing yellow skeletal restraint. One henchman points out that he had never heard Sinestro scream in pain before. Seems weird and unnatural, man. He doesn’t like it and wants to stop, but another guy insists on continuing. “Curses, no. We don’t want Sinestro lucid enough to create any constructs, do we?”

So the conjured-up images and objects from the ring are called CONSTRUCTS! All right, now I’m hep to the lingo, baby.

How many hegatoxes are there in a schmoogenvolt?

What I can only assume are jolts of electricity, or something comparable, shoot through Sinestro’s body as he screams and wriggles and swivels and bops. The ring should’ve been destroyed by now, but it’s still intact even after all this punishment. Sinestro huffs and puffs and points out that it’s HIM that’s resilient, not the ring. He threatens the one called Professor Insidd: “Release me or die.” HA! ARE YOU KIDDING! WITH YOUR PAIN LEVELS AT SEVENTEEN HEGATOX?? NOT BLOODY LIKELY!

Hal Jordan’s power is gone, which means he’s now dressed smartly in his dinner-date suit and tie. The brig door creaks open, revealing a window view to the outside of the room. Jordan presses his ear next to it and listens to a conversation between two corps members about their failure so far to remove and/or destroy Sinestro’s ring. The new plan is to drain Sinestro’s ring of its power as well, so IN THE BRIG WITH YOU, YOU SCALAWAG!

Sinestro’s cell isn’t empty, though, it’s full of civilians. Men, women, children, the whole package. He tries to comfort a small child, but she and the rest of the prisoners cower and back away from him. Irked, he asks them what they’re afraid of, and Arsona pipes in: “They’re afraid of you, Thaal Sinestro.” Ooooooh, that one smarts!

Arsona airs out her dirty laundry here and now. Sinestro tells her that she was right to support him, but that was the WRONG thing to say, sir! She pushes him hard against the wall and doubles down: “I was wrong to have anything to do with you!”

In short, I was loyal to you like a dumbass for far too long.

Hal Jordan, in the adjacent cell, jumps back from the WHAMM of Sinestro hitting the wall. Wake me up before you go-go! Hahaha. wham.

Sinestro continues to defend himself and his actions, but Arsona tells him that he had turned the symbol of the Green Lantern into a “symbol of terror”. Backed into a corner, both literally and metaphorically, he insists that the corps is now performing acts that he himself would have never allowed. Arsona doesn’t want to hear any of it. “We trusted you! We believed in you! I did! But you betrayed us. You betrayed me.”

The civilians are just standing there silently watching the show. Sinestro, now that he’s back on Korugar, is offering to help fix the pesky little enslavement problem they’ve got going on here, but Arsona, speaking for the people, don’t want Sinestro’s help. She says the same thing Hal had told him: he started this whole mess. The road to hell is paved with good intentions and all that jazz.

When Arsona says her partner would’ve said the same thing (but he’s dead now), Sinestro finally takes pause for a few moments. He apologizes. Arsona tells him that his empty regrets and apologies won’t fix anything, and the planet is beyond fixing anyway.

Jordan, who had been listening to the whole exchange with giant headlight eyeballs, chimes in so that they can all hear him. He reminds Sinestro that he created a green ring for him. Subpar, certainly, but it did the job. “You want to give your people the ability to fight back…” he leads him on.

Sinestro thinks about it, but says that divvying up the power among 100 rings wouldn’t be good enough. Maybe only 5 or 10 minutes of power each. Hal Jordan says that it’s the only chance anyone has.

So Sinestro assumes the position and poops out enough green rings for everyone in the cell with him.

They don’t look particularly thrilled for the opportunity.

Ugh. I hate having all the power in the universe.

As everyone dons a green ring and turns into Little Lanterns, Arsona declares that Sinestro succeeded.

“You gave us the chance to finally get our revenge…”

“…ON YOU.”

Eep!

Final Thoughts

Sinestro done fucked up! I don’t know what this guy did to piss everyone off, but- OH WAIT, yes I do, the whole “ruining the planet” thing. Ha! I forgot!

Sinestro is having a tough time earning everyone’s trust, but this silver-tongued motherfucker was able to get Hal Jordan on his side. Will he be able to win over his people? Do he and Arsona have a history? Does he want to bang her? Probably!

Tune in next time for more Greened-Lantern Goodness.