Watchmen showrunner talks all about that Doctor Manhattan twist

CAUTION: SPOILERS FOR WATCHMEN AHEAD

Last night’s episode of Watchmen, “An Almost Religious Awe,” turned the show on its head. Angela’s husband Cal is actually Doctor Manhattan! Senator Joe Keene is trying to gain Doctor Manhattan’s powers so he can spread his White Supremacist agenda worldwide! Adrian Veidt can fart on command! The twists just kept coming.

“I were watching the show, I’d be starting to panic that we can’t possibly bring this all together in just two more episodes,” showrunner Damon Lindelof told The Hollywood Reporter. “So, uh…don’t panic?” I’ll try, Damon. No guarantees.

We’ll take this thing one breath at a time. Let’s start with the question everyone wants to know: what was Lindelof’s thinking behind revealing Cal to be Doctor Manhattan, the only superhero with actual superpowers from Alan Moore’s original comic book?

"I started this whole journey from the perspective of a fan — what would I have to see in a television show daring to call itself Watchmen? Dr. Manhattan was near the top of that list. But even higher was that we needed to tell a new story with a new character at the center of it. Once we landed on Angela Abar as that center, the new rule became that any legacy characters we were using (Veidt, Laurie and Hooded Justice) could only be used in service of Angela’s story…she was the sun, everyone else needed to be orbiting around her. So how could Dr. Manhattan, a man with the power of  God, be in service of Angela’s story as opposed to the other way around? Based on his past (and all the tropes of Greco/Roman mythology), the answer was intuitive…love. We knew this relationship could only work if Manhattan took the form of a human, and so, the idea of Cal was born. And yeah, it came early. Almost from the jump."

The idea of Doctor Manhattan falling for a human is also very in keeping with his character from the graphic novel. After physicist Jon Osterman was turned into Doctor Manhattan following one of those scientific accidents that seem to crop up in superhero stories again and again (gamma rays creating the Hulk, radioactive spider bite creating Spider-Man, etc), he stayed with his wife, fellow researcher Janey Slater. But eventually, his eyes turned to the young Laurie Juspeczyk, aka Silk Spectre II. We saw that relationship play out and end in Moore’s original book, although clearly Laurie — who goes by the surname Blake in the show — isn’t over it.

And now, we see that Doctor Manhattan fell for another woman, Angela Abar. We don’t know quite why not, but this time he decided to camouflage himself as a human played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II.

So there are a lot of questions left about Doctor Manhattan, and I’m excited to get them answered. Although “An Almost Religious Awe” did finally confirm that he made good on his proclamation at the end of Moore’s graphic novel that he wanted to go create some life: he’s almost undoubtedly the guy who created all the clones Adrian Veidt is expending over on his part of the show. So maybe he didn’t create the perfect life form, but it’s his first try.

Suddenly everything is about Doctor Manhattan, isn’t it? The god-like superhero is also at the center of Joe Keene’s plan to become the most powerful being in existence. What were Lindelof and his team thinking of with that twist?

"As subversive a text as the original Watchmen was, in the end, it followed the same arc as any superhero story: the hero saves the world. The paradigm shift here was that the ‘good guy’ and the ‘bad guy’ were the same person. In our Watchmen, there are more clear cut bad guys who represent an ideology that is almost impossible to defeat. Bad guys always want the same thing: power. There’s something fundamentally ridiculous about the idea of “white power” in its redundancy as if everyone in America was born onto the same playing field. Sadly, almost every one of our institutions demonstrates that inequity, so the idea that a white, male senator actually wanted MORE power was equal parts absurd and irresistible. As is the case with most White Supremacists, Keene doesn’t see taking Manhattan’s power as appropriation as much as taking something he already feels entitled to."

You had to love how Laurie Blake rolled her eyes when Senator Keene pulled out the “It’s hard to be a white man these days” line, which is just as insufferable in the show’s reality as it is in this one. Although there is something a little disappointing about the show having more clearly defined heroes and villains, when int he original comic Ozymandias toed the line in such an intriguing way. What kind of hell is he going to raise when he inevitably gets back to Earth, I wonder?

Mark Hill/HBO

Whatever it is, it must connect to the Angela of it all, as Lindelof outlined above. “Angela’s story at its core is ‘Who am I?’ — her entire journey is built around answering this question…and it can’t be answered until Will arrives and shows her who he is.”

"It felt important for Angela to be an orphan herself…and not just without parents, but without a sense of place. Vietnam might as well be Mars for a young African American girl. The whole idea of having her be born and raised there (in addition to connecting her to Dr. Manhattan’s history as he single-handedly won the war) was to give real power to her grandmother’s invitation to come back to Tulsa because it’s “where she’s from.” In many ways, Angela’s story starts in the Dreamland theater in 1921. If Tulsa was the final destination in her journey of self-discovery, we wanted to start her as far away as possible."

Finally, is it possible that we’ll see any more legacy Watchmen characters before the season wraps up? Dan Dreiberg, aka Nite Owl, has been mentioned a couple of times, but not seen. “I regret to inform you…and you have my word on this…there will be no Dan in this season of Watchmen,” said Lindelof. “Beyond his hovership and dildo design, there was no natural fit for him in this particular story.”

Wait, Nite Owl designed Laurie’s now-iconic blue dildo? I feel like I missed that.

I’m also encouraged to hear Lindelof say that Dreiberg won’t feature in “this season of Watchmen.” The way Linedlof has talked, it sounds like this may be the only season of Watchmen we get. But considering how good it’s been so far, I’d love more.

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