Lanterns has only aired two episodes, but Rushville, Nebraska, is already looking like one of the most suspicious towns in the DC Universe. After rewatching the second episode, I’m starting to think the show’s biggest alien mystery has been sitting right in front of us the whole time.
The residents of Rushville aren’t hiding aliens…. I think they are the aliens.
Episode 2, “Trust Fall,” has me convinced that Rushville could be an entire community of surviving Manhunters hiding on Earth. If that theory turns out to be right, Lanterns could be building toward something much bigger than Hal Jordan and John Stewart investigating strange activity in a Nebraska town.
Episode 1 confirmed that Hal Jordan was right to suspect extraterrestrial activity in Rushville. Several aliens were killed, but Hal didn’t pack up and leave once that mystery was cracked. He stayed with John Stewart because something about the town still didn’t add up.
“Trust Fall” gives us a pretty compelling reason why. While John is in Coast City, he’s kidnapped by Antaan, an extraterrestrial who is searching for a Manhunter hiding somewhere on Earth. Antaan also drops an important question on John: “You really think the Green Lanterns came first?”
For anyone familiar with Green Lantern mythology, that changes how you look at what’s happening in Rushville.
The Manhunters, not to be confused with Martian Manhunter, were an extraterrestrial race of robots created by the Guardians of the Universe before the Green Lantern Corps. They were supposed to function as a galactic peacekeeping force, but things went very, very wrong.
As the Manhunters became increasingly intelligent and self-aware, they began rejecting the Guardians’ restrictions. Their idea of maintaining order shifted toward punishing the wicked rather than administering justice.
Eventually, they rebelled against their creators, lost the fight, and were exiled. The Guardians ultimately replaced them with the Green Lanterns.
Within the DCU, the Manhunters are believed to have been wiped out. What if they weren’t?
I think that the surviving Manhunters found a place where nobody would think to look for them. Instead of hiding on some distant planet, they built themselves a small American town and started pretending to be human. That town is Rushville.
Once you consider that possibility, some of the stranger moments from the first two episodes start fitting together.
Take the town meeting in “Trust Fall.” The conversation stops when Hal walks into the room, and everyone suddenly becomes extremely guarded about what they were discussing.
Maybe they’re simply locals who don’t trust an outsider poking around their business. Or maybe Hal walked into a room full of Manhunters discussing plans they really don’t want a Green Lantern hearing.
Then there’s the hospital. Hal finds himself waking up in a medical facility with no patients and equipment that apparently hasn’t been used. That’s an incredibly strange detail for the series to include unless it means something.
If Rushville is populated by machines pretending to be humans, though, it makes perfect sense. They wouldn’t actually need a functioning hospital. They’d only need something that looks like a hospital so their town appears normal to anyone passing through.
The technology around town is even harder to explain. In Episode 2, Hal drags the corpse of one of the aliens killed in the mass shooting through a metal detector, which immediately reacts to the body. Hal is impressed enough by what happens that he confronts William Macon, played by Garett Dillahunt.
Hal has traveled across the galaxy and says he hasn’t encountered technology like this before, yet somehow a tiny Nebraska town has access to it.
Macon points toward a mysterious benefactor as an explanation, and maybe that person really exists. Still, there’s a much simpler possibility. The technology belongs to the people of Rushville because they aren’t from Earth either.
The detectors themselves might be one of the strongest clues supporting the Manhunter theory. On the surface, they appear designed to identify extraterrestrials entering town. That raises an obvious question: If Rushville wants to keep aliens out, how did multiple aliens get into the football game without causing an alarm?
Maybe the detector going off isn’t the warning. Maybe not going off is. If Rushville is populated almost entirely by Manhunters, the devices could be designed to confirm that whoever enters one of their gatherings is extraterrestrial.
An alien walks through, gets scanned, and everything is normal. A human passes through and suddenly the residents know someone who doesn’t belong has entered their space.
That would explain why the aliens at the football game were able to walk right in. The scanners recognized them as extraterrestrial, just like everyone else.
Sinestro’s conversation with Hal near the end of “Trust Fall” adds another interesting piece to the puzzle. Sinestro tells Hal that one surviving Manhunter would represent the “second greatest threat” he’s currently facing. His interest in John could mean he considers John the greater danger, but there’s another interpretation worth considering.
One Manhunter might be the second greatest threat. An entire population of them could be the first. The comics offer another connection here.
At one point, the Manhunters resurfaced alongside the Sinestro Corps, longtime enemies of the Green Lantern Corps. Lanterns doesn’t have to follow that story exactly, but the history gives the series plenty to play with, especially now that Sinestro and the Manhunters are both part of the conversation.
If Rushville really is a refuge for surviving Manhunters, they might be doing more than hiding from the Guardians. They could be preparing for revenge. That could eventually put Oa, the homeworld of the Guardians of the Universe, directly in their sights.
Suddenly, a strange investigation in rural Nebraska becomes the opening move in a much larger conflict. Hal and John wouldn’t simply be uncovering a town conspiracy. They’d be stumbling onto a surviving army created by the Guardians themselves, one with every reason to hate both its creators and the Green Lanterns who replaced it.
There are still plenty of ways Lanterns could pull the rug out from under this theory, and Rushville’s residents could be hiding something completely different. After “Trust Fall,” though, the Manhunter explanation fits surprisingly well.
The fake-looking hospital, the suspicious meetings, the wild technology, the alien detectors, Antaan’s mission, and Sinestro’s warning all seem to be circling the same mystery.
Rushville may look like another sleepy Nebraska town, but I’m convinced Hal Jordan has walked straight into a community filled with the Green Lantern Corps’ forgotten predecessors.
If that’s what Lanterns is cooking up, Hal and John have a much bigger problem on their hands than a few aliens hiding on Earth.
