The season one finale of Lanterns, DC Studios’ HBO television series, wasn’t exactly conventional by superhero media standards. There was no big battle, no final faceoff with a big bad. It was mostly quiet and contemplative, with a lot of conversations and internal moral reckoning. And somehow, in the middle of all that, it left a lot of people wondering how—and if—Manhunters can reproduce. Turns out series co-creator Chris Mundy has an answer. Major spoilers for Lanterns episode eight, “Dirt and Stars,” follow.
In Lanterns episode five, “Lights Out,” Zoe (Poorna Jagannathan) uses Manhunter technology to regrow John Stewart’s (Aaron Pierre) skin after he’s severely burned in a car crash. In “Dirt and Stars,” we find out that Zoe used that same technology years ago to regrow Sheriff Kerry Kane’s (Kelly Macdonald) finger. Except that time, something went awry with the machine, and in addition to regrowing her finger, the machine impregnated Kerry. As a result, her son, Noah (Shea Pritchard), was born a Manhunter.
As Kerry is explaining this to John, she glosses over the details of what happened because she doesn’t really understand it herself. Consequently, her story raises a lot of questions about whether Manhunters, a race of genocidal robots created by the Guardians of the Universe, can reproduce and whether Zoe purposefully used Kerry to propagate her species.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Mundy addressed both issues. When asked whether Manhunters can reproduce, he said, “Obviously in our story, [Manhunters] have that machine that can bring back people’s tissue and all that. So that, to us, was an ability to create human tissue and organs and those kind of things. So the crazy mishap—Noah’s birth—was born out of that gray area of not even understanding it and it never being put to the test. So we’re positing, yes, in crazy circumstances.”
His description of Noah’s birth as a “mishap” seems to imply that it really was an accident, but EW pressed him on that point just to be sure.
“It was kind of accidental,” Mundy said. “We talked about the fact that, in our minds, Zoe tried to reproduce it again after that in various ways and never could. It’s not on screen anywhere, but just in the little bubble of our writers’ room, we thought if she saw that that happened and she then got Noah, she’s like, ‘I’m gonna start doing that.’ It’s one of those things where it was lightning in a bottle and she might have kept trying, but was never able to. I believe, given the way that Manhunters think of the world, she would’ve seen it as an opportunity to start to repopulate.”
So there you have it: yes, Manhunters can reproduce, but it’s unclear how, and no, Zoe wasn’t trying to propagate her species, though she did want to once she realized it was possible. According to Mundy, Zoe never had another chance to try to make more Manhunters after Noah—but after all the Manhunter-related reveals on Lanterns, we wouldn’t be surprised if that’s just another misdirection.
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