LANTERNS Co-Creator Chris Mundy Explains How Manhunters Can Reproduce and What Really Happened With Noah

The season one finale of DC Studios’ HBO series Lanterns delivered one of the strangest revelations in the show's run. It turns out that Manhunters, the murderous robots created by the Guardians of the Universe, can apparently reproduce. Yeah, that's a pretty wild development, and series co-creator Chris Mundy has offered some answers about how it happened.

The Lanterns Season 1 finale, “Dirt and Stars.” The finale took a different approach from what we've come to expect from superhero television. Instead of a massive battle or a showdown with some powerful villain, the story focused on conversations, personal choices, and the consequences of everything the characters had experienced.

One of the biggest revelations involved Sheriff Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald) and her son Noah (Shea Pritchard), who, as we learned, was actually born a Manhunter.

To understand how that happened, we have to go back to episode five, “Lights Out,” when Zoe (Poorna Jagannathan) used Manhunter technology to regenerate John Stewart’s (Aaron Pierre) badly burned skin following a car crash.

In the finale, Kerry reveals that Zoe previously used the same technology to regrow one of her fingers. Unfortunately, the machine did a little more than repair her injury. Somehow, the process also impregnated Kerry, resulting in Noah's birth.

Kerry doesn't fully understand what happened, which leaves some pretty interesting questions about Manhunter biology. These things are supposed to be robots, so how exactly does one end up having a child with a human? More importantly, did Zoe intentionally use Kerry to create another member of her species?

During an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Mundy explained how the writers approached the bizarre situation.

“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.”

Essentially, the technology's ability to generate human tissue and organs opened the door to something nobody expected. Even the people using it didn't fully understand what it was capable of doing.

But was Noah's creation really an accident, or did Zoe have something much bigger in mind? According to Mundy, the pregnancy wasn't planned, but once Zoe realized what had happened, she saw an opportunity.

“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.”

That's an interesting detail about Zoe's motivations. While she didn't intentionally create Noah, she apparently recognized that the accident could provide a way to rebuild the Manhunter population.

Considering the Manhunters' history as genocidal machines, the possibility of them figuring out how to reproduce through humans is pretty disturbing.

Mundy also makes it clear that Zoe was never able to successfully recreate the circumstances that led to Noah's birth. The writers imagined her experimenting with the process afterward, but none of those attempts actually made it into the series.

Noah appears to be a unique case, and the exact mechanics of his creation remain something of a mystery. What makes the reveal particularly interesting is how it changes our understanding of the Manhunters in the DC Universe.

They're no longer limited to being manufactured machines. Under the right circumstances, their technology can apparently produce an entirely new Manhunter through human reproduction.

That's a pretty significant discovery, especially when you consider what could happen if someone eventually figures out how to repeat the process.

The first season of Lanterns may be over, but the finale certainly gave fans something unexpected to think about.