Things are not what they seem in the town of Rushville, Nebraska. The small backwater town where Lanterns’ Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) and John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) have been investigating a mysterious mass shooting seems to be perfectly normal until Jordan starts poking his head around. He quickly finds an alien hiding in human form, and piques the interest of shady, wealthy rancher William Macon (Garret Dillahunt), who seems to hold huge sway over the whole town.
But one person he doesn’t seem to have influence over is his wife, Zoe (Poorna Jagannathan), who hopped into bed (or, er, car) with John as soon as he arrived in town. As Hal and John get closer to William — who happens to be the father-in-law of Sheriff Kerry (Kelly Macdonald) — John and Zoe continue their illicit affair. But Episode 4 of Lanterns just threw a wrench into this already complicated situation with an explosive (literally) revelation that shatters everything we know about Zoe and this small town of Rushville.
Warning! Spoilers ahead for Lanterns Episode 4.
The longer Hal and John have stayed in Rushville, the deeper the mystery has become. The alien that Hal had interrogated, Waylon Sanders, had turned out to be from a race of aliens who were all but extinguished by a shape-shifting android known as a Manhunter. Sanders’ allies had kidnapped John and given him 48 hours to find the Manhunter, or they would destroy Rushville.
In Episode 4, John returns to Rushville and eventually meets with Zoe at a seedy motel for a late-night liaison. Zoe urges him to leaves Rushville or lose his life, but John refuses. But as Zoe drives away from the motel, her truck is destroyed by a laser beam from a satellite and goes up in flames. It’s the kind of attack that would definitely kill her, right?
“I die!” Poorna Jagannathan tells Inverse.
Well, that puts that to bed. But maybe not...
As Hal and John investigate the satellite, they trace it to Atlas, Inc. owner Hector Hammond, who presents himself as the Manhunter before Hal calls his bluff by threatening to rip his heart out. Hammond identifies William Macon as the real Manhunter, sending Hal and John back out to his ranch. But as the two of them have a heart to heart on the drive over, Hal deduces that Zoe is the real Manhunter. He also deduces that John — after not showing that much grief over Zoe’s supposed death — had figured out her true nature as well, taking his revenge by diving out of the car and crashing it.
But this opens up dozens more questions about Zoe: Why was she hiding out in Rushville? How much did her husband William know? And is she really the genocidal android that the aliens hunting her have presented her as? Thankfully, the non-chronological structure of the series — which has been flashing back between 2006, 2016, 2026 and beyond — will allow us even more revelations about the Manhunter, and perhaps give more insight into how she ended up building a life for herself in Rushville as Zoe. Jagannathan teases as much, describing the Manhunter as “a victim to their own circumstance, their own programming, and nothing more, nothing else.”
“What I love about the show is that it upends the genre itself,” she adds. “It is the fact that you can have a superhero be so flawed, and sometimes the only thing left is just the fact that they have the ring, but they're as flawed as any one of them. And for the villain, there's such a humanity behind the manhunter.”
