Who Is The Manhunter In ‘Lanterns’? Here’s The Best Theory So Far

Lanterns

Photograph by John Johnson/HBO Max

Lanterns aired its second episode last night, and now people are mostly past the realization that the show is actually good and are diving into its mysteries. Things are getting very interesting very quickly.

In episode 2 of Lanterns, we learn that a Manhunter is hiding among the people of Rushville, Nebraska. Right away, I think it’s important to clear up something that may separate normal and harder-core DC fans (I am in the former camp and only learned this last night). Manhunters are not the same race as Martian Manhunter, the Justice League member who is also able to shapeshift. This is understandably a bit confusing, but these robots were based on those Manhunters from Mars. As the first attempt at forming a galactic police force, they eventually rebelled against the Guardians and are now the villainous race we see in Lanterns. Or at least that we hear about.

The idea Lanterns presents is that a Manhunter is somewhere in town, and John Stewart is tasked with hunting them down by Antaan, who fans believe will become comic character Atrocitus, given that they have the same origin story (that’s a whole other thing).

The problem is that there are really only four actual characters in Rushville, all members of the same family. Macon, his wife Zoe, his son Billy and of course, Billy’s wife Sheriff Kane. A guessing game with such a small pool of characters seems a bit strange.

The new theory fans have concocted after this week, however, is that it’s not one of these four who is the Manhunter, but the entire town. A few points here:

• The biggest oddity of the night is that Hal Jordan wakes up in an empty hospital, one with no other patients and equipment that hasn’t been used at all. Even if Kane dismisses it as being a small town, it is effectively impossible to believe that an entire town has zero patients in a hospital (and towns this small are hardly known for their stellar health care). If they were robotic Manhunters, of course no one would need medical care.
• There is the matter of Macon’s ranch and his benefactor. Jordan suspects there is some piece of technology on the ranch that is more significant than the alien detectors Macon has put around town. A theory here is that Macon and his army are at the forefront of all this and that technology is creating more Manhunters rather than the one that allegedly arrived and is being sought after.
• The benefactor? Potentially Lex Luthor. There is nothing Luthor hates more than aliens, so recruiting/building a robotic race that specializes in hunting down and exterminating aliens seems like exactly the kind of thing he’d do. This is the DCU, and it is hard to imagine too many other ultra-rich, alien-despising characters at the moment.
• I also wonder if the hush that fell over the crowd when Hal Jordan walked into the meeting has something to do with this. Again, 100% of the town was at that meeting, which is why the entire city was empty. They could have been planning their next moves there.

The modification to this theory is that everyone is Manhunter except Sheriff Kane herself, recently transplanted from Gotham and arriving at the tail end of this takeover rather than being part of it. But to her, everything seems to be operating like a normal small town, short of the recent alien murders. I’m not sure what I believe about this part of it. Of course, some believe she’s the Manhunter herself

I can buy the town theory. It’s more interesting than, say, Zoe being the Manhunter, which the show seems to be pushing already, with her trying to divide John and Hal. There is plenty more to figure out here (it seems pretty clear with all the shapeshifting that’s probably not Hal himself dead at the end), but we have many more weeks to dive into all this further.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.