Jonathan Millar 
Anil Krishna 
James Oconner 
Lanterns: A Fearsome Villain Just Made His Debut, But Not in the Way Fans Hoped
© HBO Max
Lanterns has reached the halfway point of its first season, and the bigger pieces of the mystery are finally starting to fall into place. Hal Jordan, Sinestro, the Guardians and the Manhunters are all connected somehow, although the show is still making us work for the full picture. Episode 4 also brought in a name that should have made Green Lantern fans very excited: Hector Hammond.
There is a catch, though. The man we meet isn’t actually Hector Hammond.
WARNING: SPOILERS FOR LANTERNS EPISODE 4
Hal Jordan and John Stewart spend Episode 4 continuing their search for the mysterious Manhunter. Their investigation takes them north, where they discover that the Manhunter has been doing a pretty good job of covering his tracks. Instead of simply disappearing, he has been using other people as middlemen and leaving behind decoys to keep Hal and John chasing the wrong leads. One of those people is introduced as Hector Hammond, which immediately sounds important if you’ve spent any amount of time reading Green Lantern comics.
Hammond is one of Hal Jordan’s longtime enemies in the comics, and his comic-book origin is about as strange as you would expect. He starts out as a low-level criminal before being exposed to radiation from a meteor. The radiation dramatically expands his brain and gives him powerful psychic abilities, including telepathy and mind control, but it also leaves his body severely atrophied. His enormous head and useless body are a huge part of the character’s appearance, making Hammond one of those villains that is difficult to mistake for anybody else.
That made his introduction in Lanterns particularly interesting. How exactly was the show going to pull off a character with such an exaggerated comic-book design while also trying to maintain its grounded, crime-thriller atmosphere? Well, apparently the answer is: don’t. When Hammond appears, he looks completely normal. There is no giant head, no obvious psychic powers and, as it turns out, not even a Hector Hammond.
Hal and John quickly get the upper hand, and the man admits that his real name is Hector Gutierrez. He isn’t the famous villain at all. He’s just a low-level henchman working for the Manhunters, using the name Hector Hammond as an alias.
It’s an odd little twist, and it raises an obvious question: why use Hector Hammond’s name at all? Is this just a wink to comic-book fans, or is Lanterns quietly leaving the door open for the real Hammond to show up later? The episode doesn’t give us much to work with. In fact, Hal’s reaction—or lack of one—may be the biggest clue. He’s been a Green Lantern for decades, yet hearing the name Hector Hammond doesn’t seem to mean anything to him.
That would suggest the real Hector Hammond either doesn’t exist in this version of the DC Universe or, at the very least, isn’t someone Hal has encountered before. And if that’s the case, then this may have been nothing more than a name-drop designed to make viewers think they were about to meet a major villain.
Why Lanterns May Have Done This
There is a reasonable explanation for the choice, especially when you look at what Lanterns is trying to be. James Gunn and DC Studios have been positioning the series as a grounded, mysterious crime story with a True Detective-style atmosphere. Dropping a giant-brained psychic villain into the middle of that in Episode 4 would be a pretty dramatic change of direction. It could work eventually, but throwing him into the middle of this particular investigation might have made the whole thing feel like a different show.
Turning “Hector Hammond” into an alias for a minor player lets the writers reference the comics without suddenly breaking the tone they’ve established. It’s a neat trick, even if it is a slightly frustrating one for fans who were hoping to actually see Hammond.
There is also the awkward history of the character in live action. Peter Sarsgaard played Hector Hammond in the 2011 Green Lantern movie, and that version of the villain is still remembered mostly for the enormous CGI head and the film’s general failure to make any of its stranger ideas work. Lanterns clearly doesn’t want to repeat that movie’s mistakes. Keeping Hammond as a fake identity conveniently means the show never has to figure out how to put a giant-headed psychic villain into its grounded world—or spend a huge chunk of its budget trying to make the whole thing look convincing.
The problem is that this approach can only work so many times. Green Lantern has a pretty deep rogues’ gallery, and if familiar names keep appearing only to turn out to be fake-outs or Easter eggs, it could start feeling like the show is spending its best comic-book material without actually doing anything with it. There’s a difference between adapting a character in a new way and using the character’s name simply because fans will recognize it.
For now, though, it’s too early to say what the writers are planning. Hector Hammond could still appear later as the real thing, and if that happens, this whole scene might look very different in retrospect. If he never shows up, however, then Hector Gutierrez may end up being nothing more than a strange little nod to the comics—a familiar name attached to a character who was never really Hammond at all.
And honestly, that would be a bit of a shame. Hammond is weird, sure, but Lanterns doesn’t necessarily need to make him exactly like the comics. It just needs to give the character a reason to exist beyond making fans briefly sit up when they hear his name.
Source: Comicbook.com
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