Showrunner confirms exactly where Adrian Veidt is on Watchmen

CAUTION: SPOILERS FOR WATCHMEN BELOW

If you’ve been watching Watchmen on HBO, one of the biggest questions you probably had over the first three episodes is: Where exactly is Adrian Veidt (Jeremy Irons)? His story has been happening separate from the rest of the action, and has gotten increasingly weird. He has a bunch of cloned domestic servants, he’s building a catapult…what is going on?

Although there are still questions to be answered — who exactly is the Gamekeeper? — the most recent episode showed us that Veidt is being kept in a kind of prison…in outer space.

Showrunner Damon Lindelof recently spoke to Collider and cleared up exactly where Veidt is supposed to be. “I think that if Adrian Veidt is trying to escape from prison, that’s not a good challenge for him,” Lindelof said. “He’s going to do that very easily — there’s no prison that’s going to hold Adrian Veidt, unless that prison is on Europa, a moon of Jupiter.”

"Then it might be a little more challenging. I kind of felt like, if we’re going to lock this guy up somewhere—and by Episode 5 we still don’t know who locked him up and why—it’s gonna have to be quite an overwhelming challenge for him to escape, so that felt like this was a good place to put him and throw away the key."

Okay, so instead of Mars, where Doctor Manhattan was last seen, Veidt is on Europa. The questions of how and why he got there are still open — we have to assume Doctor Manhattan, who can teleport people anywhere in the universe, is somehow involved — but we’re willing to take baby steps.

Another questions involves why we constantly see Adrian’s domestics presenting him with a birthday cake, which he sometimes eats and sometimes throws on the ground in frustration. As Linedlof reveals, it’s not some kind of Groundhog Day-style nightmare. Those birthdays are just happening far apart in time. “[For Adrian,] a year lapses in between each episode,” Lindelof said. “It’s a story told on a very, very large canvas, each installment taking place on another anniversary of another year that he has spent wherever the hell he’s spending [it].”

In this past week’s episode, Veidt took a step towards home. Will he make it back, and what fresh hell could he wreck when he does? New episodes of Watchmen airs every Sunday night at 9:00 p.m. EST.

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