SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from Episode 5 of HBO‘s Lanterns.
John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) has successfully taken down the last living manhunter and retrieved the power ring from Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) — but at what cost?
One of the central intergalactic battles in HBO’s Lanterns came to a head during Sunday night’s fifth episode after Hal and John finally realized that Poorna Jagannathan‘s Zoe Macon was actually the lone alien they’d been searching for in Rushville, Nebraska. Of the twist at the end of last week’s episode, Jagannathan tells Deadline she “made a meal out of it.”
“It was such a delightful twist. I did not see it coming. I only found out when I read the script with along with everyone else,” she said, musing that, as a South Asian woman in rural Nebraska, “she’s already an outsider, so she’s hiding in plain sight, for lack of a better phrase.”
Episode 5 opens with a bit of a backstory between Zoe and Sheriff Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald) to reveal that Will Macon isn’t the only one who feels a certain amount of debt toward Zoe for protecting their town.
“Zoe needs to survive, so she will look for protection everywhere and anywhere,” explains Jagannathan. “She’s a victim to her own programming, which is designed for her to survive no matter what, which is why she makes all these contracts with everyone.”
But, that doesn’t make her callous. While the Guardians now view manhunters as intergalactic war criminals, Zoe’s presence largely benefitted Rushville. She effectively eliminated their plight with advanced technology, curing disease and cultivating crops.
She “actually has human emotions and feels and feels regret and feels longing and wanting,” Jagannathan adds.
“She cares deeply about the people of the town,” Jagannathan tells Deadline. “She and William have created a town that is peaceful, abundant, prospering, and just perfect. The hospitals are empty. There’s no pestilence. There’s nothing going on. So these two Lanterns coming for this thing that has actually created goodness and granted miracles and all that, it’s not what anyone wants, including Zoe…it’s really a kind of a beautiful relationship she has that is being taken away and destroyed by ego, because John and Hal could have just left.”
They don’t just leave, though, and by the end of the episode Zoe is dead and the town is basically leveled. It’s no wonder that the people of this small town are wary of the Lanterns.
John, who nearly dies at the beginning of the episode when Hal sends their car careening into a utility pole, shoots Zoe in the head (and removes her frozen heart for good measure) at the motel before ripping the power ring off John’s finger and delivering it to the Guardian. It’s a pretty callous way to say ‘thank you’ to his lover after she heals his entire body of third-degree burns from an exploding vehicle, if inevitable given the mission she knew he was on.
“John really returned to his roots of the one with integrity. When you make a contract with someone or when you owe someone, you have to lose a part of yourself, and this was the one person who never lost himself,” Jagannathan says.
The tragedy goes much deeper than that of ill-fated lovers, or even a swindled suitor, though. However self-serving Zoe’s motives may have been for getting close to John — as Jagannathan says, “she will seduce the strongest threat or the most powerful person” to preserve herself — or vice versa, she was also endeared toward him, and he clearly was toward her as well.
“I think she sees so much of herself in him. The fact that [they are] two people of color in this tiny town is a source of great affinity right away, a source of great curiosity,” she says. “But over time, she meets someone who can match her for the first time, perhaps. In the very end, when she smiles, when he has a gun to her head, it’s more the recognition that she got totally out and over it for the first time in her entire life, and she wasn’t expecting that.”
For John, the entire Rushville experience sends him spiraling. He may have never lost sight of the mission, but he’s certainly questioning what, exactly, he’s fighting for in the first place.
“In the script, they describe it as a ‘strategic entangling,’ Jagannathan says. “It seems to get more complicated at some point than just strategy.”
