There are secrets kept from the audience, and there are secrets kept from the very actress speaking the lines, and Lanterns on HBO has now given us a most singular specimen of the latter. Poorna Jagannathan, who plays the fascinating Zoe of Rushville, has confessed she had no notion that her character was the concealed Manhunter until the script for Episode 4, “The Weenie,” was placed into her hands. A revelation for us, dear reader, but a positive surprise to the poor woman herself.
A Secret Guarded Even From Its Keeper
We had suspected, for some weeks now, that a Manhunter dwelt somewhere in Rushville, a survivor of that dreadful race of beings once fashioned by the Guardians to guard the innocent creatures of the universe. When these mighty, various guardians turned violent, the Guardians destroyed them and raised up the Lantern Corps in their stead — or so they believed. One Manhunter escaped their justice, and has dwelt among ordinary persons ever since, concealed beneath an ordinary face, waiting.
That Manhunter, DECIDER can now confirm, is none other than Zoe — the very woman who appeared, with dreadful fullness, to be destroyed before John Stewart’s own eyes following their guilty meeting. And yet Jagannathan herself did not know this fate awaited her character until the pages of Episode 4 arrived. “Did I know that was happening?” she asked, almost lost in her own wonder. “I don’t think when I was shooting Episode 1, I don’t think we had the writing for Episode 4.”
Even Her Fellow Player Was Kept in the Dark
Garret Dillahunt, who plays Zoe’s husband in the drama, seemed equally astonished to learn of his fellow player’s ignorance. “I am astonished that I never knew that she didn’t know she was the Manhunter until episode 4 or something,” he admitted. Jagannathan confirmed the singular arrangement plainly: “Until I read it, I had no idea!” Dillahunt, with a touch of dark humor, offered his own notion as to why the production kept such a dreadful secret from her: “They don’t trust you.”
Jagannathan did not entirely dispute this melancholy verdict. “Yeah, they kept it from me,” she said, reflecting on how such scenes are formed and kept even from those meant to give them life most intimately. It is an extraordinary endeavour, this business of acting a truth one does not yet possess — and yet Jagannathan managed it, apparently, without letting slip so much as a hint of the dreadful destiny awaiting her character.
The Hector Hammond Trick
Naturally, Lanterns could not simply hand its audience the truth without first leading us down a winding path. After Zoe’s carriage meets its end by a fiery ray from the heavens, Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) and John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) trace its source to a keeper of flocks of considerable oddity named Hector Hammond, whose grounds conceal all manner of curious instruments beneath their ordinary fields. For a time, this Hammond seems the very picture of wickedness — cool, calm, richly furnished with wonders.
But the truth, when it comes to light, proves far less grand than the name suggested. “Hector Hammond” is revealed to be nothing more than a mere front, a plain man named Hector Guiterrez, entirely separate from the true horror dwelling in Rushville. The name borrowed from old tales was but a mask laid over a mask — a trick worthy of Ebin Sur’s own doomed arrival, which set this whole singular chain of events into motion.
A Melancholy Truth Awaits
With Zoe’s true nature exposed, we are promised — in the episodes yet to come — a fuller accounting of her history among the persons of Rushville, and of the pursuers from beyond who have tracked her with such dreadful patience. Whether Jagannathan will be told what fate awaits her before the scripts arrive remains, one suspects, entirely at the discretion of those who “don’t trust her” — a jest, we hope, though a fitting one for a tale formed upon secrets kept even from its own players.