Halfway through this week’s Lanterns, the mystery in Rushville, Nebraska, cracks wide open: A Manhunter walks among us, and the Green Lanterns might not be able to stop it. That sounds ominous, even if the significance of “Manhunters” eludes anyone without a firm grasp of the larger DC Universe—including, for instance, Green Lantern rookie John Stewart (Aaron Pierre), who clearly hasn’t been debriefed on the matter. When his captor, the enigmatic alien Antaan (Paul Ben-Victor), drops the name, John barely blinks his steel-gray eyes: “I’m sorry, am I supposed to react?”
John doesn’t get to play it cool for long. Soon, Antaan orders his followers to inject into his mind a memory of the “holocaust” a single Manhunter caused on Antaan’s homeworld years earlier. It’s an undiluted infusion of a race’s collective sorrow and a crash course in what the Manhunters are, giving John Stewart—and, indeed, us—ample reason to fear them. Even John’s cocky mentor, Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler), knows it’s time to get serious when people start throwing around the M-word.
As Lanterns‘ primary threat, the Manhunters embody a broader theme of institutional rot festering at the show’s periphery. The authority that controls the universe’s police force is compromised by a deadly, ancient failure that the creation of the Green Lantern Corps was meant to obscure, making Hal and John unwitting participants in a cosmic atrocity. So, what are they? Aren’t there half a dozen people running around the DCU with the “Manhunter” moniker? What do they have to do with the Justice League’s favorite Martian, J’onn J’onzz? Let’s add a little comic book context to the menace Lanterns is currently hyping up.
Right now, we know little about what these genocidal robots are as they exist in this show, though Antaan clarifies a few things during his poorly conceived recruitment pitch to John. They were the galactic peacekeeping force before the Green Lantern Corps, androids created by the Guardians Of The Universe—the Lanterns’ little blue bosses, one of whom we know is played on the show by Laura Linney. “They were synthetic,” Antaan says. “Able to build new bodies, which meant they could take the form of any species, and embed, undetected, within any society.”
The comics muddy the story a bit. When assembling their red-and-blue Terminator cops, the Guardians modeled them after the Martian police force, as revealed in the 2003 JLA story arc “Trial By Fire,” tying them symbolically to DC’s resident Martian Manhunter, who wears similar colors. Shame these peacekeeper droids didn’t share his benevolence: Cold, unfeeling, and wielding the same manifesting power as the Lanterns, the Manhunters rebelled against their creators and enforced their own cruel vision of justice across the universe. The ensuing chaos led to a multiplanetary massacre in Space Sector 666, as recounted in the 2008 Green Lantern story arc “Secret Origin” by Geoff Johns and Ivan Reis—similar to the holocaust Antaan shows John this week.
The Manhunters are also tangled up with William Macon (Garret Dillahunt), the sanctimonious cowboy-militia man installing alien detectors in Rushville like ‘roided-out Flock cameras. Macon says he receives the Manhunter technology from a mysterious benefactor whose identity remains under wraps. If Lanterns creators Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof, and Tom King want to get cute with comic lore, this “mystery man” could share a name with one of the human action heroes who’ve gone by Manhunter over the years, such as Paul Kirk, created by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon in Adventure Comics #73, or Mark Shaw, created by Kirby in 1975’s First Issue Special #5. The latter carries more DC weight: After the 1988 event Millennium, he became an apostate of a Manhunter cult; much later, he led Leviathan, a super-terrorist organization created in the aptly titled 2020 DC event Event Leviathan.
Setting aside that whole “Leviathan” thing, Shaw’s “Manhunter cult” wrinkle could complicate Lanterns‘ story. After the Guardians attempted to cull the Manhunters, survivors infiltrated and “liberated” planets in secret, including Earth, using their shape-shifting technology to build a death cult. In the show, we’re told that Green Lantern Abin Sur—the Lantern who gave Hal his ring—apprehended the Manhunter responsible for the devastation of Antann’s planet, which makes it a funny coincidence that Abin Sur crashed and died in Nebraska. Hal tells John it was a cosmic fluke that he became Sur’s successor; the facts suggest otherwise. The Manhunter in Sur’s custody could have been with him the night he died and might now, years later, be building a cult in Rushville, which brings us back to Millennium. In that story, the Manhunters disguised themselves as the trusted family and loved ones of Earth’s superheroes, suggesting that the Manhunter in Hal and John’s midst could be someone very close to them.
Whatever their true purpose in Lanterns, John’s invocation of the Manhunters has Hal’s hackles up, prompting a flight to Oa. That’s the center of the DC Universe, home of the Guardians, and headquarters for the Corps—and the prison holding supervillain Sinestro (Ulrich Thomsen), who might shed some light on this Manhunter situation in future episodes if he’s in a chatty mood.
This creepy comic history adds thrilling uncertainty to Lanterns. As artificial intelligences that alter their appearance at will (there’s a metaphor in there, no doubt), Manhunters could be anyone in Rushville. Several people, even the town’s entire population, could be Manhunters! Either way, Antaan isn’t taking chances: He’s given John 48 hours to identify the rogue robot, or his crew will wipe Rushville off the map. The clock is ticking, and all we have are these facts: The Guardians made the Manhunters, the Manhunters ran amok, and their crimes were covered up. We also know, thanks to Sheriff Kerry Kane’s (Kelly Macdonald) smartphone, that Sinestro, a former Green Lantern, turned on the Guardians and was defeated by Hal. Are these events related? Is the Guardians’ original sin the reason their greatest Lantern rebelled against them? And if Sinestro knows the truth, what will Hal do with it? What will John do? The answers, when they come, are bound to be deadly—and messy, in that fun, churlish Lanterns sort of way.
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