Key Points
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What are Manhunters? The Lanterns creators explain the comic book history they tapped for the HBO drama.
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EP Tom King calls the characters a “deep, dark secret” of the Guardians.
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“It felt like you could have somebody hiding in plain sight and it tied back to the Guardians,” showrunner Chris Mundy explains.
Warning: This article contains spoilers fromLanternsepisode 2.
With one name, Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) and John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) shed new light on the mystery unfolding: Manhunters.
The second episode of the HBO drama series mentions the intriguing figures from way back in the Green Lantern Corps’ history who are now central to the 2016 case happening in Rushville, Neb.
Paul Ben-Victor debuts as a character named Antaan, a member of an undisclosed alien species. Waylon (Chris Coy), the exploding extra-terrestrial from the premiere episode, was one of his buddies. A group of them traveled to Rushville in pursuit of a lone Manhunter, a synthetic being capable of building new bodies to help them embed within any given society. Antaan notes how Manhunters can even invent technology that surpasses the cultures they inhabit.
This particular Manhunter engineered a holocaust on Antaan’s home world, and though a Green Lantern showed up at the time with a promise to dispose of the creature for good, they learned it’s now very much alive and living in hiding on Earth in Rushville.
The mass shooting at a football game that initially drew Hal and John to the area occurred when Antaan’s team was exposed, causing the Manhunter to retaliate. Now, these aliens are giving the Lanterns 48 hours to discover the identity of the Manhunter, otherwise they will destroy the whole town to be safe.
Lanterns showrunner Chris Mundy tells Entertainment Weekly they settled on the idea of the Manhunters “pretty quickly” in the process with executive producers Damon Lindelof and Tom King. “The execution took us much longer to figure out,” he adds.
So what are Manhunters exactly?
In the history of DC Comics, the Manhunters predate the Green Lantern Corps as the first attempt by the Guardians of the Universe to create a cosmic police force.
The name “Manhunter” might make anyone even casually familiar with this franchise think of Martian Manhunter, the shapeshifting superhero from Mars and member of the Justice League. There’s good reason for that. The Guardians modeled their creations after the Manhunters of Ma’aleca’andra (a.k.a. the Red Planet).
Unlike the future Green Lanterns, however, the Manhunters were robots. After thousands of years serving at the Guardians’ direction, they evolved past their programming and became so focused on their “No Man Escapes the Manhunters” code that their hunt for criminals led to catastrophe.
One particular comic book story saw the character of Krona — a scientist from the planet Maltus, birthplace of the Guardians — compromising the Manhunters’ programming. To prove their flaws, Krona reconfigured the synthetics to believe all organic life should be wiped out, leading to massacres across multiple worlds.
The Guardians eventually defeated the Manhunters, though the few robots that survived hid away on various planets, disguising themselves as living beings.
According to King, who wrote many DC Comics runs, including Batman, Mister Miracle, and Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, the team started talking about Manhunters in the first meeting that birthed the entire DCU as we now know it.
James Gunn and Peter Safran, the new co-heads of DC Studios, assembled a group of their writer friends, including King, at Safran’s home in Los Angeles to brainstorm ideas. King pitched the concept of a True Detective-style cop show for DC’s own space cops, which went up on a giant whiteboard.
“There were people [in the room] who were deep nerds and other people who had no knowledge of the DC universe. All were just fantastic writers,” he recalls. “When I pitched this, they’re like, ‘What is a Green Lantern? What do they do?’ And just because I’m a super nerd, I was like, ‘Okay! Here’s the actual mythos.'”
There was a noticeable reaction in the room from the fandom novices listening to King relay that deep lore. “These people who were trying to fix the universe got it wrong and then killed everyone and then tried to start again. Everyone gravitated to that as a deep, dark secret that an organization would have,” King continues. “So, from the beginning, James, Peter, and everyone in that room said, ‘Yeah, that’s a way to point [the show].'”
When the Lanterns creative team officially assembled to break the show, however, they tossed out all the ideas, including the Manhunters, to begin again from scratch. And yet, they found their way back to the Manhunters as a concept for their pseudo-adversary of season 1’s 2016 timeline.
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“When we brought in the other three writers and all the assistants who were also in the room, we didn’t know how per se, but we felt like we could locate it and there could be a mystery inside the context of Rushville,” Mundy explains. “It felt like you could have somebody hiding in plain sight and it tied back to the Guardians. And, in some ways, since this was about passing the torch…you could almost see the paper trail.”
Now the big question is, who is the Manhunter hiding in Rushville? The answer will come eventually as Lanterns continues to roll out episodes of season 1 on HBO and HBO Max every Sunday night at 9 p.m. ET/PT.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
