Noah Macon being a Manhunter was the finale’s big swing. The question it left behind is simpler and stranger: how does a Manhunter end up with a human mother? Showrunner Chris Mundy has the answer, and it’s messier than you’d expect.
How Was Noah Macon Born in Lanterns?
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Mundy was asked directly whether Manhunters can reproduce. His answer starts with the machine in the slaughterhouse, the one that rebuilds living tissue.
“Obviously in our story, they have that machine that can bring back people’s tissue and all that,” he said. “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.”
Asked if it was an accident, he didn’t hedge: “It was kind of accidental.”
According to Mundy, Zoe did try to do it again, but that part never made it on screen. It lives in what he calls “the little bubble of our writers’ room.” In their minds, Zoe tried to repeat it in various ways after Noah and never managed it.
“It was lightning in a bottle,” he said. Given how Manhunters think, he believes she would have seen it as a chance “to start to repopulate.”
Related: Lanterns Finale Explained: Why Did Sheriff Kerry Kane Kill Hal Jordan?
Is Noah Human or Manhunter?
Both, as far as Mundy is concerned.
“We feel like he’s a hybrid,” he said, calling Noah “the real test of nature versus nurture. What’s programming and what’s free will?”
That’s the part that works for me. Noah was born from a human and raised by one. Mundy says he was “loved and nurtured, but he’s definitely the other, too.” It als explains why he asks John to kill him in the finale as he doesn’t trust what’s inside him.
With season 2 in early development, I’d bet on the writers coming back to him. The showrunner described Noah a test of programming versus free will, and a test needs an outcome. In the finale, Noah chose to protect his mother even if it cost him his life. Whether he keeps choosing that way is the story I want to see.
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