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If you're expecting a character named THAAL SINESTRO to be the big bad in HBO's Lanterns show... well, you'd be wrong! Sure, Monsieur Sinestro may be a villain in DC Comics, but he is not thee villain of Lanterns. And that's by design, according to Lanterns showrunner Damon Lindelof. Because, it turns out, there isn't one central villain of the season.

With the reveal of Sinestro in the second episode of Lanterns, Lindelof spoke with Entertainment Weekly about the process of reshaping an iconic evil guy like Sinestro into a grounded story like Lanterns. Lindelof compared Sinestro's role in Lanterns to Hannibal Lecter's in The Silence of the Lambs, where the serial killer essentially serves as the world's creepiest workplace consultant to the protagonist, Clarice Starling. "As big of a trope as it is to go visit Hannibal Lecter in the prison or Loki, this is tried and true," Lindelof said. 

"We wanted [Sinestro] in the show just because of his place in the mythology. But by nature of the fact that we were telling a mystery more than we were telling a thriller, we don’t really have a big bad in the season," Lindelof began.  

"We have mysteries [where] there might be something malevolent behind them or not, and there’s a mystery of people’s identities or who did what, but it’s not ‘we’re fighting this bad guy, and he’s gonna destroy the world.’ So in this weird way, it freed us up. We could use him sparingly," the showrunner concluded. 

Listen, I'm all for these takes on longtime villains like Sinestro, because we've seen the guy do bad guy stuff in the comics over and over again. Maybe it's because I studied psychology in college and was shaped by Grant Morrison and Scott Snyder's visions of the Joker, but there's something undeniably compelling about observing a villain like Sinestro in a controlled environment like a prison. Seeing him broken down to just a man (albeit an alien) in a cell wearing a prison uniform disrupts our expectations of him, and of the superhero genre more generally. 

The first two episodes of Lanterns are streaming now on HBO Max.

Shine a light on our list of the best Green Lantern comics.