Spoilers ahead for the Season 1 finale of Lanterns.
The DCEU is in the rearview, and it's been fascinating to see the variety of DCU projects that co-CEO James Gunn has brought to theaters and streaming with a HBO Max subscription. Lanterns is in the latter category, and is the latest installment in the first slate of projects, titled Gods and Monsters. There were some lingering questions about Manhunters in the wake of the final episode, and showrunner/creator Chris Mundy has clarified things.
The mystery of who killed Hal Jordan was solved in the finale, revealed to be Kerry in a desperate attempt to save her Manhunter son Noah. It turns out that she had an immaculate conception when Zoe used the Manhunter machine to regrow her finger. This leaves the question: can the violent robots actually produce? Mundy was asked this by EW, responding with:
It’s an excellent question. Obviously in our story, they 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.
There you have it. Zoe's machine was capable of creating another Manhunter, but it was more of a fluke than a sure thing. As Chris Mundy put it, this was a set of "crazy circumstances" that happened to result in Kerry getting pregnant with her son Noah, who ended up being born as a Manhunter. So they can't reproduce in a regular way; Noah's birth was an exception rather than a rule.
Zoe's reveal as a Manhunter was a great twist, but Noah's was even more surprising. Some folks thought that he was the one who killed Kyle Chandler's Hal Jordan, but it turns out that Kerry did it while protecting her son. In the same interview, the Lanterns creator spoke more about Noah's origin story, offering:
It was kind of accidental. 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.
There you have it. While Zoe accidentally created a new Manhunter when using the machine on Kerry, it's not something they could depend on consistently. We didn't see it on screen, but the showrunner confirmed that Zoe tried to recreate this success to repopulate the Manhunter. Unfortunately it never worked, which is why the stakes were so high for the robotic race of androids.
Lanterns is streaming now in its entirety on HBO Max as part of the 2026 TV schedule. Fingers crossed we get a second season to continue John Stewart's tenure in the shared universe. Luckily he'll be back when Man of Tomorrow arrives in theaters next year.
