---
title: 'Lanterns Episode 4 Breakdown: The Lady''s Misdirection and Manhunter Reveal'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=bKgVDVLliuo'
video_id: 'bKgVDVLliuo'
date: 2026-09-10
duration_sec: 2496
channel: 'New Rockstars'
---

# Lanterns Episode 4 Breakdown: The Lady's Misdirection and Manhunter Reveal

> Source: [Lanterns Episode 4 Breakdown: The Lady's Misdirection and Manhunter Reveal](https://youtube.com/watch?v=bKgVDVLliuo)

## Summary

In this episode breakdown, Eric Voss analyzes DC Studios' Lanterns episode 4, 'The Lady,' uncovering over 100 Easter eggs and clues. He explores the episode's themes of misdirection, the Manhunter's identity, and the complex dynamics between Hal Jordan and John Stewart, while also discussing the episode's structural choices and theories for future episodes.

### Key Points

- **Episode Overview and Misdirection** [00:13] — The episode's title 'The Lady' has multiple literal meanings all pointing to misdirection. The Manhunter is revealed, but a space laser blows them up, setting up deeper mysteries.
- **Episode Reordering** [00:55] — Originally, episode 3 was meant to be episode 5, so episode 4 plays catch-up to remind viewers of where episode 2 left off, including a 2016 timestamp for Hal's meeting with Sinestro.
- **Sinestro's Manipulation** [01:34] — Sinestro reveals knowledge about the Manhunter's crystalline heart and coaches Hal on manipulating John by appearing to embrace his worthiness, playing on Hal's fears about being replaced.
- **John's Sketches** [04:14] — John has already sketched Zoe from memory, the ranch layout, and the blue bird from episode 3, showing his attention to detail and obsession with the bird.
- **The 'Weenie' Concept** [05:59] — Hal explains Walt Disney's 'weenie' principle—a landmark structure that draws people into an area. The episode uses this concept to describe major set pieces designed to lure the eye in specific directions.
- **Rushville's Complicity** [08:06] — The people of Rushville benefit from advanced health and nutrition, so they collectively keep up the guise of hiding the Manhunter among them, acting out of survival or complicity.
- **Leanna's Manipulation** [09:05] — Leanna, the Guardian, tells John that Hal lied about seeing Sinestro and that the Guardians have agreed John can take over the mantle. She claims Hal filed reports saying John lacks creativity, which is likely a lie to make John hate Hal.
- **The Drill Manifestation** [11:46] — John manifests a burrowing drill based on his schematics. The episode's writer compares the dynamic to a rom-com, with Hal and John being coached by toxic 'Cyrano' figures.
- **Pressure Alarm and Movie Reference** [14:44] — Hal steps on a pressure alarm and jokes about the movie 'Set It Off,' a 1996 heist film, which is a nod to the pop culture touchstone year for both characters.
- **Darkness Guns** [16:02] — Goons use darkness guns that disable John's ring, which must be developed by a Manhunter who knows the Green Lantern oath and ring functionality.
- **Macon's Deal and Scar** [18:06] — Macon is on the phone about a deal for 200 head, and later reveals a scar from heart surgery, which was treated for inoperable cancer that the Manhunter cured.
- **Zoe as the Manhunter** [20:21] — Macon refers to the Manhunter as 'he,' but it's revealed that Zoe was his nurse and the Manhunter is actually Zoe herself, who has been manipulating everyone.
- **John's Hunch About Zoe** [23:12] — John sees Zoe driving up and readies a shotgun, indicating he already suspects she is the Manhunter. They have sex, and Zoe urges him to leave town.
- **Zoe's 'Death' and Editing** [24:20] — The episode uses out-of-sequence editing to suggest Zoe faked her death. The explosion is perfectly timed, and the bracelet left behind may contain her backup to rematerialize.
- **Hal's Speed Calculation** [26:37] — Hal flies to a satellite and back in under 10 seconds, covering 200 miles, which means he would have to move over 72,000 miles per hour.
- **Hector Hammond as Red Herring** [28:08] — The satellite is traced to Atlas Inc., owned by Hector Hammond, but this is a fake alias used by Hector Gutierrez, an engineering student supplied with tech by the Manhunter.
- **Slaughterhouse Details** [31:43] — The slaughterhouse plays Kenny G's 'Songbird' to calm livestock, and uses organic portal technology similar to the Guardians'. The lasers that kill the cow are the same as those on Macon's desk.
- **Hal's Bullshit Detector** [34:45] — Hal tests Hector by asking the color of Abin Sur, which the Manhunter would know but a human decoy wouldn't. This pressures Hector into revealing he's human.
- **Final Confrontation** [36:07] — Hal reveals he knows John's hunch about Zoe and that John failed to tell him. He drops the act and confronts John, then apologizes for the rental car, mirroring the pilot episode.
- **Theory 1: Episode 5 Resolution** [37:43] — Episode 5 'Lights Out' may resolve the Manhunter vs. Anton conflict, with satellite lasers possibly being controlled by Zoe to destroy parts of Rushville.
- **Theory 2: Parallax in the Cell** [39:18] — Sinestro's knowledge about Jon and Manhunters could be due to encountering the fear entity Parallax in his cell, as in the comics.
- **Theory 3: Dead Hal is a Manhunter** [39:50] — The corpse in 2026 might be a Manhunter taking Hal's form, with a crystallized heart, explaining why Jon sheds a tear and why the ring is missing.

### Conclusion

The episode is a masterclass in misdirection, using the 'weenie' principle to guide viewers' attention while hiding the true Manhunter in plain sight. The theories about Zoe's survival and the 2026 mystery set up an exciting second half of the season.

## Transcript

I figured out exactly how this supposed death in this episode of Lanterns was fixed by watching it extremely closely. Welcome back to New Rockstars, I'm Eric Voss, and this is the breakdown of DC Studios' Lanterns episode 4, The Lady.
A title with multiple literal meanings that all mean the same thematic thing, misdirection. As soon as we find out who the Manhunter is, a space laser blows them up? But of course, there's a lot more going on here, and I found over 100 detailed Easter eggs and clues
in this scene-by-scene breakdown and analysis of this episode. And against any more of my theories for future episodes, all right, I'm going to save all of that kind of discussion for our end-of-video segment, No Theory Shall Escape My Sight. And the shirt I'm wearing is a Ring Weapon shirt,
available at our merch store, NerdRite.com. We love it when our supporters wear our gear out in the world, post selfies, and tag us like Otto. Episode 4 opens by replaying some of the shots from the end of Episode 2. In our exclusive interview with the writer of Episode 3,
Vanessa Baden-Kelly, watch it if you haven't already, we learned that originally episode 3 was going to be episode 5. So Jon Stewart's origin and his family flashback episode was originally going to come after this episode and the episode that comes after it.
Since they reordered things, episode 4 plays a bit of catch-up to remind viewers of exactly where episode 2 left off and gives us a 2016 year on screen to remind us of when exactly Hal met with Sinestro.
Again, this planet has not been confirmed as Oa. I highly doubt it is. This is a frozen-over-exile prison planet used by the Guardians and the Green Lantern Corps that Sal Sinestro has only been imprisoned in for about two months. Episode 2 ended with Sinestro telling Hal that if a Manhunter still existed,
it would be the second biggest threat that Hal was facing, so why don't you tell me about Jon Stewart? And now episode 4 shows us Hal Jordan's response. Where'd you hear that name? Around. There's some great rapid back and forth where Sinestro says that the fact that his trainee has a trainee
is seismic news that found its way to him, and then asks where the Guardian found Jon. I don't care where they die. I care. How? Assuming Sinestro is in solitary confinement, Jon Stewart must have been a name that he learned about before staging the coup against the Guardians,
and also might have been part of the reason Sinestro staged that coup. But I do have another theory in the theory section. Hal says that they found Jon in the Marines, but that's not quite the full truth. Leanna found Jon when he was still a baby in a Marine family,
but not exactly recruited directly out of this Earth military, as Sinestro called it. So if Sinestro already knows that the Guardians found Jon as a baby, he is sensing here that Hal does not know the whole story, and how long the Guardians were actually grooming his replacement.
Sinestro is playing on Hal's fear and getting them to admit that John isn't his backup, but his replacement. Now, here in the episode Editing, there's something really interesting. It overlaps this dialogue between Hal and Sinestro with thoughts of John back in the Westville Motel.
The middle of this episode does something similar with John's post-coital goodbyes to Zoe and the scene that comes after it. And in both of these instances of overlapping, we see two characters conspiring with a secret, a secret that's being kept from the Lantern who's not in the scene.
In this case, Jon Stewart is the one out of the loop, and Sinestro tells Hal that he'll need to kill Jon Stewart, but Hal claims that he's not evil to do that. Sinestro says, that's right, you're just old. Now, Hal never answers the question of whether or not he respects Jon,
and to keep Hal there talking to him, Sinestro reveals that he knows unique information about the Manhunter's physiology, and something that they cannot change within shapeshift, which we find out later, is their crystalline heart. Again, how does Sinestro know all these secrets about Manhunter, secrets that he never shared with Hal until now?
Well, all of these are clues pointing to Sinestro's ultimate goal, to manipulate Hal in this conversation. He proceeds to coach Hal on how to manipulate his trainee by appearing to embrace John's worthiness. This is exactly what we see Hal doing to John in their final scene of the episode.
Now, Hal is smart enough to know that he was manipulated by this father figure, but Sinestro claims that he was never deceptive and presented himself as he was. My ambition was always a threat. You think I chose not to see it.
I love how this is both a warning to Hal Jordan to beware the ambition in John, and an insult that Hal failed to see Sinatra's ambition, and how it could threaten the Guardians because Hal had no ambition himself. So much knowledge and power could be in Hal Jordan's hands
if he could socialize with other Lanterns and spend less time bay chasing on Earth. But back on Earth, we see that John Stewart has sketched the layout of the Macon Ranch with the exact dimensions and lines of sight for the sniper towers. But in this, you can see a sketch of Zoe Macon from memory,
So when Will Macon later says that John could draw his wife from memory, surprise, he already has. And some sketches of the bird that he's still obsessed with. I think he was drawing that blue bird from episode 3, from the mailbox at the end of the episode,
and the one at the top of the garage in the middle of the episode. But it shows how it was at the front of his mind in episode 2 when he had to manifest the flight. John gets a call from his parents, saying the Guardians need to make contact. Why do the Guardians talk to John Sr. and Bernadette first?
Couldn't Leanna just appear to John directly in private, as she does in this episode? It's interesting to me that the Guardians continue to back channel their way to John through his parents. It would be like getting a new job where your boss's boss calls your parents to get in touch with you.
In these establishing shots of Rushville, the post office has a sign wishing the pioneers good luck, and it reads, in memory of Michael Eugene Fleming, there's a DSX coordinator on the show named Taylor Fleming, so maybe this is a relative of theirs. And there's this preschool house with a Be Kind mural,
and the green section is one solitary kid playing with a truck, maybe a worthy Lantern candidate. John goes into a guns and ammo shop to get a sniper scope and deals with some hostile remarks from the seller and the patron about Hal and John being an unwelcome package deal duo in Rushville.
John buys the full gun and scope but leaves the gun behind. I mean, didn't he never got the chance to pull that trigger in his final mission against the Gray Wolf and then got dishonorably discharged and went to art school? It seems as though John Stewart has never used an actual firearm since that point.
And now, learning what we learned in this episode, it's interesting to just look at all the locals in Rushville as being part of this conspiracy to protect the person who's giving them all these benefits. From the water tower, John uses the scope to spy on a helicopter coming and going from Macon Ranch.
Looking back on the episode, it kind of seems like this was all the display by the Manhunter to make John, and I guess Hal, to think that this wealthy slaughterhouse tech entrepreneur, Hector Hammond, was going back and forth to the ranch, when in reality, he probably wasn't.
I love how Hal lands his butt right in front of that scope, as if to say, look right in my asshole. John breaks down the layout of the ranch to Hal, calling the mystery building at the center a weenie, referring to the internal term that Walt Disney came up with for the architecture of Disneyland and the Southern Park.
It's a really simple thing, though it's spelled weenie referring to a hot dog, not anything else. Walt Disney said that he would come home from work and take out two hot dogs, and his dog would follow him around the house in hopes of getting one of the weenies. So Walt applied that principle to have one clear landmark structure in each part of his park visible from other areas in order to draw guests into that part of the park.
So you can see Sleeping Beauty's castle from other areas, and a Matterhorn from other areas, and an Astro Orbiter from other areas. Interestingly, Universal's Epic Universe seems to be defying that concept and really focusing on the immersion of the line of sight so that you are unable to see any part of the park until you go through the portal that leads you to that area.
Now, obviously, an episode kind of like Weenie also applies to the elephant in the room of Will Macon's junk, but on the cinematic level, it speaks to all the major set pieces in this episode really being spectacle-designed to lure the eye in a specific direction.
The Atlas Inc. Hammond slaughterhouse, a weenie orchestrated by the Manhunter to get Hal and John out of Rushville. The apparent linger explosion of Zoe Macon's truck, a weenie that she also set up to make Hal, at least, think that she couldn't possibly be the Manhunter.
John jokes that he's never been to Disneyland. They didn't let me in. It's the happiest place on Earth, but they said I was killed to buy it. Hal and John briefed Sheriff Carrie in the bar. Now, this is the same bar with the pool table and the jukebox that we saw in episode one.
I assume it's the only bar like this in a small town like this. So now Carrie reveals that it's owned by her husband, Will McKin Jr.? Huh. So we see John now sitting in that same corner of the bar where he and Hal talked about the origin of Abbotsburg,
where the now-confirmed demand hunter, Zoe, was sitting right there the whole scene listening to the conversation. This was also in a bar where Zoe's stepson, I'm assuming stepson, owned the whole place. Indeed, as Carrie says here,
In the after show podcast, the writer of this episode talks about how the people in Rushville, benefiting from advanced health and nutritional privileges, are doing what they do out of survival or complicity or both.
But in addition to living their ordinary lives, they must also collectively keep up the guise of hiding this Manhunter among them. And by the way, I love the writing of this scene. The moment the audience starts to side-eye Carrie for perhaps being too dumb about the Manhunter,
they make any possible subtext text to signal to the viewer that they've done all the homework that we were doing in our heads. If it could be anyone, why not me? And Hal answers this question to keep us from theorizing in the wrong direction. Since there were records of Carrie and Gotham before Abbotsford crashed with the Manhunter in Rushville in 1986,
Carrie could not have been an identity that the Manhunter would assume. Hal and John assume that the Manhunter is the mystery benefactor of the ranch, A theory that this episode suggests is more complicated. Back in the motel, we see that they're still driving around John's banged up Toyota rental,
still missing its grill from when Hal ripped it off in episode two, all this setting up Hal's final line in this episode. I'm sorry about the rental. In John's motel room, they do the entrance of Laura Linney's guardian, Leanna, as a practical entrance.
You failed to make contact. It wouldn't have been too complex here. Laura Linney was probably just standing just out of frame and then stepped into position when the camera turned. But the placement of her is still super interesting because as John speaks to her, you can see her reflected in the mirror behind him.
It's actually the same framing of Hal Jordan when he spoke to John here in this room in episode two. Leanna tattles to say that Hal lied about where he was the night before, that he had violated his oath and saw Sinestro. I'm curious to know what part of the Green Lantern oath
seeing Sinestro would have violated. If anything, no evil foul escaped my sight means that Hal should continue to keep tabs on Sinestro, But maybe, let those who worship evil's might be where my power green lanterns light, is kind of an elastic clause, meaning, just don't fraternize with the enemy,
especially after they've been incarcerated. Leanna says that Hal making that prison visit led the 11 remaining guardians to convene and agree that John can now aggressively take over the mantle by quickly reciting the oath next time Hal gives him the ring for training.
And in that moment, John would become the lantern of Precinct 2814. Now, Sector 2814 was established as Earth's precinct. From the beginning of the Silver Age, Green Lantern era of Hal Jordan and his comic debut in 1959's Showcase No. 22,
Leanna is clearly being manipulative of Jon Stewart here. I did not realize that your father's weakness runs within you. And she claims that Hal has filed multiple reports on his training saying that Jon lacks creativity and that he too weak This leads Jon to call Hal old and tired and undeserving of the ring audio that Hector will play back later The ring always been mine and that all she keeping alive
But the Guardians are clearly over-eager to make John hate Hal Jordan, pushing John to attempt this kind of hostile seizure of the ring, and a betrayal that really does feel unbecoming of the virtues that the Green Lantern Corps should be all about. I don't even buy that Hal wrote any reports.
I mean, think about it. They've only been doing this for two months, and Hal is obviously super lazy. He was supposed to have been backing up his memory on his ring often, but he went 10 years without recording the hologram. And Jon Stewart coming up with bubble wrap in episode 1,
and the very impressive bird in episode 2, represented creativity that Hal did seem impressed with. I mean, Hal's constructions so far in the series have been pretty much all bubbles and domes, and parlor tricks like a $20 bill and a bottle opener.
I think Leanna is totally lying and deceiving and just dropping verbal weenies this whole conversation. We see Leanna disappear here, and in the final few frames of that fantasy, you can see her true bald alien guardian form,
which makes it really interesting that they framed the shot with her mirror reflection. And if you look closely at the final frames that were there, you can barely make out the front side of her Malthusian form. John shows Hal some schematics of a burrowing machine that he came up with.
He says, I'm creative. Deliberately contesting what Leanna said Hal wrote in his report. Again, Hal was probably too lazy to ever write that report, but John's saying this here shows that the guardians effectively touched the nerve. Outside the ranch, Hal makes John manifest the drill.
Even with a quick glance at the schematics, He knows that John knows the machinery much better to build something that won't result in them getting crushed under the dirt. I love this moment of hesitation when John puts on the ring and then the drums kick in.
John is peeping from Hal with the guardians charging to do innocent back moments, and Hal is peeping from John with Sinestro warning to watch for in this kind of moment. This episode's writer, Brianna Gibson, compared this to a rom-com, or what the after show host to Juju Green called a bromantic comedy,
and that we are seeing these two men in a kind of love-hate relationship being coached from their respective corners by toxic Cyrano-DiBerge acts. For an architect like John, manifesting a theoretical drill like this, burrowing through the earth like the vehicle in The Core, must be a dream,
because a drill like this would never be built in real life. It's not clear what this drill does with the displaced dirt and rock. We don't see any dirt being spewed out or pushed upward at the surface, so maybe part of the schematics is to either teleport that dirt
or digest it or process it into a fine powder that can be dispersed into the air or compacted into the surface of the tunnel that it forms to form a kind of super-dense cement. That could be why a clump of it drops when John loses focus a few minutes after this.
Hal asks about John's mother, Bernadette, and Hal reveals that his own mom is dead from cancer. So this is twice that cancer comes up in this episode. Once with Hal's mother and again with William Macon. Maybe when Hal hears that the Manhunter miraculously cured Macon's cancer,
he must feel a little sting that this Manhunter helps the citizens of Rushville and not the entire planet. Hal says that having lost both parents makes it easier with no ties. And he says that his father, the test pilot who died in the crash the 60 Minutes episode reported about, was fearless, but...
That's what he wanted people to think. So John asks what Hal's dad was afraid of, and Hal does not answer. Hal began to seem scolding John for needing to be able to concentrate and answer personal questions at the same time. and now Hal refuses to do so.
We know that we're going to get a Hal Jordan flashback episode at some point this season. A trailer shot showed an Air Force funeral with young Hal and his mom seated beside each other. If my timeline math is accurate and Hal's father died in early 1970s,
a lot of Air Force pilots in that era really dreamed of being NASA astronauts. Maybe Hal's father didn't have the right stuff and freaked out about space travel after incidents like Apollo 13 in 1970, which would make it interesting for a young Hal Jordan to push beyond his father's fears
and become a straight-up space top. All of this is just interesting context for Hal's daddy issues and why he ended up gravitating to Sinestro as a father figure. Hal and John sneak past the searchlights to the Weenie building. Now, I know the convention here is that they'd only be seen by the actual lights,
but based on how this all goes down, I'm pretty sure that Minkit, his goons, and Zoe expected these lanterns to try to break in, and they just let them do it. Like, there's no lock code on the door, there's no guard posted there or in the first corridors,
but inside is an armory filled with conventional firearms and a few experimental extraterrestrial weapons, further leading Hal and John to incorrectly suspect that the benefactor is the Manhunter. Despite these items also being part of the Manhunter, we decide to mislead them.
Hal steps on this pressure alarm. Don't move. It's a pressure alarm. If you move, it'll set it off. It's a good movie. Great movie. So, a lot of people seem to be reading this joke as a reference to other pressure alarm scenes in movies,
like the toilet bomb in Lethal Weapon 2, where Danny Glover steps on a pressure-sensitive bomb rigged to his toilet, and Mel Gibson helps them swap places with heavy weight. But I actually think that Hal Jordan is just quick reacting to John's exact word choice of
Set It Off, and recognizing Set It Off as the title of the 1996 F. Gary Gray L.A. Heist movie, which is indeed a great movie that not enough people talk about. And I think particular men like this, in 2016, and the writers writing for them,
would give this movie a shout-out. Because it came out in 1996, and that seemed to be a particular touchstone year of pop culture for both of these characters. It's when young John Stewart was listening to Outcast's A.T.E.L.I.E.N. and Hal Jordan, as a West Coaster cinephile,
probably saw that L.A. heist movie and loved it. So go watch Set It Off. It is awesome. Now, Hal says that he weighs 185-ish, and John takes him literally and manifests the kettlebell weighing exactly 185 pounds.
Also, a low-key flex by John here to physically lift that much weight right next to Hal. Hal totally reacts in a subtle way as he realizes that John is lifting, well, an approximation of his full body weight, without breaking a sweat.
But it doesn't work. I could say it. Making goons storm in with these specially designed darkness guns and special night-missing goggles and fire the weapons to envelop the lanterns in darkness, disabling John's use of the ring.
Remember, the oath is, in brightest day, in blackest night, no evil shall escape my sight. So these weapons would have to be developed by a Manhunter who knows that oath and knows the exact functionality of these rings
and how to fully block that type of sight. And I know this is a standard convention for night vision, but I love how the point of view of the goons who are able to peer through this swirling darkness is that it all shows up as the same color of green as what the ring normally conjures.
Now, we still don't know the context of this, but we now have a bit more context for the trailer shot of Hal pointing the ring from a swirling dark cloud while wearing shades. Those aren't just sunglasses to look cool, you've got to get a hold of these special goggles.
Part of what makes Landring so fun is the sense of mystery that surrounds everything. Just when we think we've figured out what's next for Rushville, Hal, and John, the show tosses us a new clue or a curveball and we're back in the dark. It makes for great TV.
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Yes, sir. 200 head. Good night. Are we to believe that he's talking with Hector here? Is the kind of deal for maybe $200,000 for a satellite? I mean, I thought they were dealing cows here, but a standard cow goes for just like a few thousand dollars.
Now, there is a detail on the desk here that will become very important later. I'm just kind of hanging a lantern on it right here for you. But Maken disrobes before them, telling John to draw me like one of your French girls. I love the difference in reactions.
Hal, coming from his generation, is triggered by this nudity, while John, as an art student who's probably had to sketch all kinds of nude models in the past, is very calm. Yes, Maken is a freak. And crazy sexual stuff like this does happen sometimes in rom-coms,
but it's certainly a sexual power play for dominance by Macon, who certainly feels emasculated by his wife figure. And then you can see on Macon's chest a scar. He later reveals that he was being treated for inoperable cancer, and the Manhunter cured him. In the after show podcast,
Garrett Dillahunt confirmed that this scar was from Macon's heart surgery. Hal mentions having encountered sentient tentacles in the past. I was wondering if this could be a nod to Ye Gardens, the living planet, a tentacled planet that fought Adam Strange from 1960's Mystery in Space No. 60,
later revived as the living planet with cybernetic tentacles, Or it could just be some breaking sexual stuff Hal went through in the past. Zoe herself hands John the sketchpad while Makin puts on Franz Schubert's Arpatione Sonata. And as he strikes his pose, notice that Zoe whispers something to one of the goons in the background.
This is already some early evidence showing that she is really running this operation. Actually, this might have been when she put in the call to Sheriff Carey. If Zoe hadn't called me, you'd be beyond fucked. I mean, Zoe has to be the boss here because it's why Makin seems to be so cool with her stepping out on him,
why she's not really hiding it, and why Megan is doing these kind of antics as the only way he would be able to express himself. Hal asks, Can we talk about the elephant in the room? Which elephant? Not that one. Megan defends their darkest guns in preparation for any kind of alien invasion,
even Green Lantern technology, anything that could pose a threat to his boss, and says that there's really no difference between boss and benefactor. Yeah, in this moment, he's directly reporting to Zoe, but as Megan tells him here that Zoe was his nurse when he was the cancer patient
who kept working with him after the doctor called him a goner, and then the Manhunter showed up and worked his magic to miraculously heal him. Yeah, throughout this, they keep using he for the Manhunter, but in truth, it was really simpler. It was just Zoe herself for all of it.
And he says, Now you talk about him like he's a god. I do, don't I? And on this line, you can see Zoe staying out of focus, prominently positioned in the background, the same way she was in episode one in the bar when Hal and John were talking about the events of her arrival on Earth.
Naked confirms the empty hospital is an effect of the local Manhunter. Everything changed when he showed up. crossbow kids thrive and you saw the hospital no one gets sick
lanterns would be on the scene. But that's also a bluff, because we find out later that Hal Jordan never talks to the other lanterns. I mean, this is the guy who's made his password, Movo Doesn't Socialize, probably because he values the rare lantern who doesn't play with others. Also,
Hal at this point knows that the Guardians want to replace him. They'd probably be thrilled that Hal died here so that John could take the ring. But Sheriff Kerry is responding to the call that was put in by Zoe to put a stop to Megan's threats and charge Hal and John with trespassing to get them out of
there. Megan doesn't put up much of a fight here unless Kerry does kind of pick up the ring with no I think it's okay to feel a little intrigued as to what exactly the power dynamic was in this scene. Now, of course, all of it seemed to be an act, a distraction, a literal weenie to scare Hal and John with these darkness guns,
to make Hal and John feel like they got off easy, but also to leave thinking that there's some other off-site mystery benefactor that they should remain curious about. But to maintain that charade, Zoe had to bring in Sheriff Carey, who's an independent authority with plausible deniability,
to distract Hal and John to make them feel like they were saved from a close call. But in reality, Hal and John were never in any actual danger here. Edwin here just wants them to leave and to let the Manhunter and Macon's militia
deal with Anton's group the way that they did on the football field. As they leave, we see John's sketch of Macon, and we can't show the whole thing here, but John was certainly generous when it comes to the elephant in the room. I like the detail that when Sheriff Carey drops them back off the motel,
he tells them to get out, and Hal says, You kind of got to let us out. Yeah, because with the Manhunter's influence on this town, there probably isn't much violent crime in Rushville, so Carrie has less practice in dealing with perps in the back of her police SUV.
In the child block, Carrie puts the ring back on Hal's hand. So, episode one, two, and now four, have all these little moments of Hal flirting with Carrie, from manifesting a bottle opener to open her beer,
to the cute little way he asked about her troubled marriage in episode two. They bring Gary to hell with a lot of food, guys. You know what I just said? Carry arms down to the police shotgun, but nothing for Hal. The ring itself is a more than effective defensive weapon. So John sees Zoe driving up and coming to his motel door
and readying the shotgun despite knowing it's her. It's only a surprise to the viewer. So this tells us that John already has a hunch at this point that Zoe is the actual Manhunter. It's why he's intimidated here. But just as a series of glances, John realized what Zoe's here for,
and he's like, you know what? Let's fuck, alien android. in the episode podcast, they repeatedly made it clear that part of the Manhunter's tactics is to manipulate with intimacy. Here with John, it's sex. And with the whole town of Rushville, it's the nurturing qualities of healthcare and agriculture.
Afterwards, Zoe says that this has to be the last time, and again urges John to just leave town. He says that he feels like he has to stay because everyone is lying to him. And she responds, And I'm telling you what I know.
Everything changed. When John asks what she owes Will, she corrects him saying that Will owes her. He's dying on a mountain when I take his life. So I understand that later in this episode when Hector says that Will Macon is a Manhunter,
some viewers just read that as literal confirmation and turned off their brain. But this line right here, plus what Hal says in the part at the end of the episode, are this episode's actual confirmations that Zoe Macon is the Manhunter. The constructing the episode feature ad and the after show podcast confirm it.
As John reviews this to leave town, there's another example of the out-of-sequence editing. We see John and Zoe continuing to talk in bed while we intercut with the shots of her leaving that happen several minutes after this. It's a super suspicious moment to be doing this when this episode, especially on rewatch,
invites us to watch Zoe very carefully in this scene. So let's break down exactly what we see Zoe doing here with a kind of Zapruder-level attention to detail. In slow motion, we see Zoe leave the doorframe after the last look with John
and then momentarily disappear from view and then reappear in the window frame behind the curtain and then disappear again as the camera slides leftward into the doorway, and then she appears again in the parking lot over John's right shoulder, and then the camera's continued movement has John blocking where she is momentarily,
and then she appears again over his left shoulder, and I gotta say, I know she's out of focus, and maybe I was staring at the shop for too long, but her blue jacket just looks a little too bright for me, and she might even be keyed in here. Like, what we see here might be a kind of hologram or halogram projection.
Let's see some wordplay here. Instead of a hologram, maybe a hologram. And notice how we don't see her actually get into the truck. The truck is still gone as we hear the truck door open and shut. And as the car drives past, you can barely see in there.
The windows are tinted so we don't really fully see her. I mean, this whole goodbye is shot in this insanely artful way to suggest that there would be plenty of time for this state-shifting manhunter to do a Texas switch. I mean, this is also an episode where people jump out of moving cars repeatedly.
And as a follower of every Damon Lindelof series, His rule is that until you see a body, do not believe a character is dead. So assuming that Manhunter Zoe faked her death here, where exactly is she? Well, I think I know where. I'm going to get to it in a couple seconds, but there's a really cool tip that happens in this explosion that I want to point out.
Lasers from above converge on the truck to blow it up, and it's all perfectly timed so that John would see it and that it would be in the eyeline of Hal before the truck passed out of view from room number 16. It was all perfectly timed to be part of a genie.
And I love that we stay in this shot of John looking at the fire as Hal comes out. Where'd it come from? 45 degrees north of the fucking point. Yeah, all of that was one shot, including Kyle Chandler again,
nailing the choreography of Hal Jordan's flight launch. It's just a confident march out into danger and then a downward thrust of his arms and whoosh, a supersonic aura. And then in less than 10 seconds, Hal floats back down carrying the culprit's satellite.
How fast must Hal have flown to break Earth's escape velocity like that, reach low orbit, find the right satellite, and get back this quickly? while the lowest satellites above our heads, in like onesies for weather tracking or espionage, are only 100 miles above us.
So to move there and back, that would be 200 miles in like 10 seconds. Hal would have to be moving over 72,000 miles per hour. Anyway, after he lands, Hal stands long and hard at John as John watches the fire. It's in this moment where Hal is gauging John's emotional response to Zoe's apparent death
to get an empathy baseline that he will use later. Sometime later, Hal is projecting a dome over the whole motel. I love how there's some brighter green nodes kind of pulsating through the dome, looking like veins in an eyeball or nerve endings firing to keep it active.
I also love the visual detail of Sheriff Carrie's police lights reflecting off of that dome. Inside, Carrie notices this bracelet on the nightstand. It's recognizable enough from the daughter-in-law for Carrie to know it was Zoe who died
and realize that she's going to have to explain to Noah what happened. Okay, so here's the answer. I think Zoe might actually be in this bracelet. I think this bracelet might actually contain Manhunter's always backup ready to rematerialize when the coast is clear.
Like, think what Manhunters are. They were created by the Guardians of Oa. The Guardians of Oa gave Lanterns rings. Maybe they previously gave bracelets to the Manhunters that preceded the Lanterns. And while the Manhunters struggle to replicate a carbon-based life-form multi-chamber heart,
maybe, as synthetic beings, their hearts actually come from these ring-shaped objects. I mean, android hearts don't have to look anything like our hearts. Anyway, just the way Carrie looks at it, and the multiple shots we get of Zoe's bracelet in this episode, I think there's going to be something to this bracelet.
So while they research the satellite, Terry narrows down the manufacturer to three companies, Atlas, Vermont, and Rutger, all of whom they can decide any age with. John unscrews his panel to reveal the serial number, which they trace through the SEC database, which is by Atlas Inc., a company that runs high-tech slaughterhouses all over the country, owned by Hector Hammond, something with no public record before 1986.
So, Hector Hammond is an important Easter egg. Hector Hammond is one of the most well-known Green Lantern villains from the Silver Age Hal Jordan era, a criminal who exposes himself to a meteor with radiations that enhances one's intellect and causes Hector's brain to grow to a huge size, making him immortal and giving him psionic powers,
a version of Hector Hammond displayed by Peter Skarsgård in the 2011 Ryan Reynolds Green Lantern film. Now, Hector Hammond in this episode is kind of a red herring, a fake alias used by Hector Gutierrez, an engineering student turned tech entrepreneur whom the Manhunter supplied with precise lasers and portals
that are used to expand this beef industry company, Atlas Inc. But the fact that there was no public record of Atlas or the name Hector Hammond before 1986 tells us that the Manhunter set all of this up as a shell company, maybe one of many shell companies, to shield themselves from anyone looking into them,
a corporate villain that authorities and space cops might just stop at before digging any further. But I don't know if this means that Hector Hammond in his comic actor form doesn't exist in the DCU and can never exist in the DCU. I think they just used this name to misdirect any DC Comics fan for about, like, 10 minutes of the episode.
Either way, it's another weenie to keep us looking in the wrong direction. But John is smart enough to know that saltiness was just too easy, that anyone with a God's eye space laser could have tapped in at any time before this, and that they're clearly being invited to go to the Atlas Inc. slaughterhouse.
And I gotta just say, slaughterhouse for an episode titled The Weenie, based on Walt Disney using hot dogs to lure his dog around the house, how funny is it that all of this leads to a slaughterhouse where brands like Nathan's Famous and Hebrew National would use all beef trimming to fill the casings of their hot dogs?
John continues to ponder over Zoe's bracelet as we do another example of overlapping editing. Hal, sometime later, says, Earth to Stuart, over this moment, when that audio is actually coming from a scene taking place several minutes after it. So I do think this bracelet is going to be key to Zoe's rematerialization in episode 5.
On the drive, Hal asks John how he's doing, trying to check his emotions after he saw Zoe blow up. He has never asked me that before. I give some flowers to Aaron Pierre for getting correct the African-American vernacular English for the word ask.
and asked something an Englishman like him would probably have to attentively do. I want to write for it again. This despite his natural accent coming out in a moment of rage later. Who the fuck are you? John asked how, if on this lonely job, he ever talks to other lanterns.
I'm the only human. They're English. One of them's a fucking squirrel. Nobody like me. The squirrel's green lantern is a reference to a whole of a nine species that resembled a rodent from Earth. And I gotta say, whenever I theorize that the squirrel that Superman saved
in the 2025 film, In Metropolis and the Kaiju, is Chip, just please know that I'm joking. Because Chip would never need savings and he probably would not be in this precinct. They drive right into the slaughterhouse where there's this sign, we can judge the heart of a man
by his treatment of animals. A crazy quote to have on a slaughterhouse of any kind. But maybe this just shows the company value of Atlas Inc that using lasers like this is a faster and a more humane way to slaughter Over the PA we hear this repeated message Remember security is the first step towards a safer environment
Stay secure. Stay vigilant. This slaughterhouse is clearly bizarre. The workers pass them without acknowledging them and proceed with their tasks like mindless drones. I think the idea here is to make John and Hal and us think that these workers are mind-controlled drones
puppeted by the big-brained Hector Hammond, the one from the comics. But once we realize it's Hector Gutierrez, what's going on there? Maybe Manhunter Zoe did share with him some human programming tech via hormones in their food that would make the workforce do their jobs more efficiently.
Hal and John enter this killing war where we hear this smooth jazz. Kenny G's Songbird. This is the same iconic song that in Pixar's 2006 card, the tuner gang plays on DJ speakers to put back to sleep. We've got ourselves a nodder.
This calming music was likely chosen as an ethical option to put the livestock in a relaxed state at the moment of death. Kind of like how in Soylent Green, people who opt to go through the procedure can pick relaxing music and imagery while they're being killed and converted into food for the masses.
But Hal says, Also, a song called Songbird, we can help it connect back to Jon Stewart's obsession with birds. This object widens on the wall to become a portal.
This appears to be the same organic portal technology that we saw the Guardians use to transport Jon from the college campus to the abandoned shopping mall in episode 3. So the manhunter must also have the same technology and gave it to Hector Gutierrez and Atlas Inc.
to gently transport a nervous cow from its stable to this calm room without having to make the scary green mile walk. Maybe the idea is that without the rush of fear and stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol and the muscle tissue, the beef would be more tender?
I have to shout out my colleagues Mallory Rubin and Joanna Robinson on the House of R Podcast, who love tracking the insane sound effect words streamers put into the closed captioning for sci-fi and fantasy sound effects. For in this portal, HBO gives us tinkling warbles, burbling rumbles,
tickering tinkles, echoing whoosh. Lasers draw the precise lines on the cow that would separate the different parts that butchers use to identify different kinds of meat. From this, Hal knows what's about to happen and bubbles on himself and John.
It's nice to include the blood umbrella for the vegan in the room. But these wall-mounted devices that the lasers emit from? We definitely saw one of these on Will Macon's desk in the earlier scenes. Yes, I rewatched this episode again and again and again to find this exact detail,
and it blew my mind when I found it. So even though Hal, John, nor we realized it back in that moment, they could have lasered them to pieces in that moment. And maybe he has even done that to other threats that he brings into his office. So this shared technology is another example of all the tech coming from Manhunter and Zoe.
They leave the killing floor and enter Earth with no resistance again, Hector's office, where he immediately shares John's parent's address and brings to kill them with another one of his satellite lasers for the classic comic book villain or Bond villain three-minute countdown dead man switch.
Dead man's trigger. Don't act like you invented it. Hector tells John to use the phone that Anton gave him to lure Anton's group here to the slaughterhouse, where he can linger them, too. I think in reality, Manhunter, though, he just wants these walking nukes to be, like, 95 miles away from Rushville,
and that she'd be willing to fry this whole slaughterhouse so long as Rushville would be out of the blast radius. But Hal is correct to ask how Hector would know about the phone, and Hector claims to have just monitored the whole motel, including John's conversation with Lena earlier,
which he plays to basically distract Hal's line of questioning. While Hal is annoyed to hear John and the Guardian talking this shit, it really just confirms what he already knew and what he and Sinestro already talked about. Really, Hal is just collecting the clues here
that Hector is not the Manhunter himself because an ancient pre-Landron Master of Disguise would not be so hokey villainous and obvious like this. So Hal goes into the same bullshit detector mode as he did with Waylon the Alien in Episode 1.
What color is that, sir? What? While the true Manhunter, Zoe, would totally remember that Abin Spur is pink-skinned, it is a trivial detail that she probably would not think to tell this human decoy pretending to be the Manhunter.
Hector deflects, I don't remember. He was a very memorable shape. I've met a lot of aliens. No, thank you. Hal is right. The Manhunter would remember the Green Lantern who brought in two Displanners to execute him. Hal fares the one physical flaw in the Manhunter replication process that Sinestro teased earlier,
the heart. When copying carbon-based life forms, Manhunter's heart crystallized when they die, at least so Howell says here. So now he brilliantly uses Hector's own recording of John talking shit to get a proper emotional rise out of his partner,
to convince Hector that he's serious, and he uses Hector's own countdown to count exactly on each beat, towards ripping out his heart. And this pressures Hector into telling the truth. He's human! And not Hector Hammond, but rather Hector Gutierrez, an engineering student approached by the Manhunter sometime in 1986,
offering meat processing technology to revolutionize this community. Hector claims that the Manhunter is Will Macon, but he avoids eye contact. And notice how Hal looks directly at John in this moment to see how this lie was square with what Hal knows is John's actual hunch about Zoe.
So, the final scene is on the drive back, where John confesses to Hal what the Guardians instructed him to do, and that he did plan to give Hal the rain back at the Macon ranch. Hal plays like he's forgiven here, but actually he's just following what Sinestro told him to do earlier
by flattering Jon's worthiness, affirming his belief that Jon might make a better Lantern than he is. Hal, meanwhile, acts like they're both confessing and apologizing to each other, saying that he actually went to go see Sinestro, and that Sinestro told him about the Crystal Hearts and that Manhunter
were in their way in communities by emotionally attaching to the weakest part of it. And hinting that Jon is the weakest part of anyone in Rushbow right now is also kind of a subtle dig at him. But Hal says, They find a path of power every time as they identify a threat to that power.
They'll manipulate that threat into believing anything they want them to. Mind if anyone we know? Hal in this moment is testing John to see if he will tell him about his Zoe hunt, and John fails that test. He just says it must be Megan, like Hector said.
So Hal pulls over and tells John to call Anton to meet him at the cafe outside Rushville. But it's just like the switch from sweet to ruthless that Hal did at the end of episode 3. He drops the bullshit here and tells John that he really did forgive him for what he said on the recording,
and that John's muted response to Zoe's death was not consistent with John's panic when his parents were threatened, and that Zoe could only have gotten out of that truck if she was a Manhunter. And the only thing he doesn't know yet is how long John knew this. Just as Hal did in the pilot episode, he again ladybirds out of the car.
But before he did that, he finally does what John napped at him about in episode two when John got back from Coast City. He got on Hal for not apologizing to the damage that he did to his rental car. So now, Hal does apologize. I'm sorry about the rent.
The music of Midas by Wooter Horse takes us through the credits. Okay, we have to end this episode now on our theory discussion section. No theory, no game insight. Theory 1. Is this Manhunter vs. Anton conflict going to resolve in Episode 5?
Episode 5 is going to be called Lights Out. And a quick survey of the next episode promo shows a lot of fighting happening in Rushville. However, now that we've seen the satellite lasers in action, satellite lasers that this episode at first told us were operated by Hector,
but now we can assume are actually the Manhunter's technology using Atlas Inc. as a spell company, we now have to assume that the precise timing and location of those lasers is controlled by Manhunter Zoe. So now when we look at a preseason trailer shot where we see Hal casting a shield over downtown Rushville
from lasers that look exactly like that, is that now the Manhunter destroying parts of the town to kill Anton's group or maybe just to eliminate them before they nuke themselves? Now remember, Episode 5 was originally going to be John's origin episode.
They reordered things to move that to Episode 3. So I think the original plan was to resolve the Manhunter vs. Anton conflict in Episodes 1 through 4, and then have a big mid-season cliffhanger, and then in episode five take a break and flashback to Jon's origin,
and then maybe do Hal Jordan's origin flashback in episode six, and then spend the final two episodes of the season resolving the bigger mysteries, Hal Jordan's murder, Sinestro, and the whole drama with the Guardians. I think they might have reordered things, because as they were reviewing the season,
they were like, eh, I need two back-to-back episodes of Jon's origin, then Hal's origin. It was just a little redundant, and we wanted to change up the pace of the season a bit more. I just love how fast this season has been going to answer the questions that it sets up.
I think it was all in this really clever structural way to kind of put some distance between the bigger questions that were introduced in the first episode, so that it would feel more structurally cathartic when the final two episodes answered those questions. By the way, this shot from the next episode promo where we see an extreme close-up of blood dropping in, I think that's John Stewart's eye.
I think this is Manhunter Zoe holding his face and dropping some of her Manhunter blood in his eye to rapidly heal him from the injuries he's going to sustain from this car crash. On to Theory 2. Is Parallax already in the cell with Sinestro? Seriously, how did Sinestro know about Jon Stewart and all this information about the Manhunters and their anatomical secret? Well, in the comics, Sinestro's time in a science cell on Oa is where he encounters the fear entity of Parallax, the entity that takes over Hal Jordan after some tragic events, drives Hal crazy, and the Emerald Twilight event. I still think it's possible that this season adapts that in some way.
Theory 3. Is dead Hal Jordan in 2026 actually the Manhunter? Now that we're being told that Manhunter's heart crystallized at the moment of their death, some are now looking back at the moment Hal's corpse is discovered in 2026.
It was hard to see in HBO's lighting in episode 1, but Jon sheds a tear in that scene. And so far, nothing Hal Jordan has done this season suggests that Jon Stewart would cry upon finding his corpse. But what if the reason that that corpse wasn't wearing the Green Lantern ring
is that it was actually the Manhunter Zoe taking the form of Hal Jordan. And that when 2026 Jon Stewart will do an autopsy, he's going to find that this Hal Jordan's heart is actually a crystallized Manhunter heart.
That it's not actually Hal Jordan. That it was actually a Manhunter form that the real Hal Jordan killed. I'm surprised that halfway through the season, we still have not gone back to 2026 since the end of the pilot episode. So there is going to be a lot more story to tell there.
And maybe the writers just feel like they can't really tell that story without revealing a lot of these big twists. Vanessa Bain Kelly told us in the interview that the mystery of who killed Hal is going to be revealed in the final episode of the season. Comment down below with your thoughts on this episode. And a special thanks to one of our NR Underground subscribers, Ethan Teskers, for supporting us at the executive producer level.
You can get all of our exclusive bonus content by clicking the link in the description below or going to nrunderground.cippercast.com. Big thanks to Studio Tech Brian Ginn, New Rock Stars editor, Joshua Steven Hurd, and Abby Friel, and all of our supporting editors for their work on this video.
Follow me at ebayboss and hit that subscribe button. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time. Bye. Thank you.