WiC Watches: Watchmen

Watchmen 109. Lady Trieu 2. Mark Hill/HBO

HBO is making a show inspired by/adapted from Alan Moore’s classic graphic novel Watchmen, which is set in “an alternate history where masked vigilantes are treated as outlaws.” Showrunner Damon Lindelof (Lost, The Leftovers) is embracing the nostalgia of the original while attempting to make this updated version something uniquely different.

The show stars Regina King as the masked police detective Angela Abar, aka Sister Night, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Cal Abar (Angela’s husband), Jeremy Irons as “the aging and imperious Lord of a British Manor,” Jean Smart as Laurie Blake, Don Johnson as Tulsa Chief of Police Judd Crawford, and Tim Blake Nelson as the masked police detective, Looking Glass. Other cast members include Louis Gossett Jr. as Will Reeves; Hong Chau as Lady Trieu, the mysterious trillionaire; Tom Mison as Mr. Phillips; Frances Fisher as Jane Crawford; and Sara Vickers as Ms. Crookshanks. Rounding things out are Andrew Howard, Jacob Ming-Trent, Dylan Schombing and James Wolk.

We’ll be reviewing Watchmen episode by episode. Let’s dive in!

Mark Hill/HBO

Episode 101: “It’s Summer and We’re Running Out of Ice”

Watchmen opens with a flashback to the Tulsa Race Riots of 1921, and we’re abruptly slapped in the face with the realization that the show won’t be about costumed heroes rescuing kittens from trees. The story here is much more grim, and much more contemporary. In 2019, police officers have to wear masks for fear that they and their families will be butchered by a white supremacist terrorist organization called the Seventh Kalvary.

In this world, Robert Redford has been the President of the United States for nearly 30 years. Vehicles run on battery power, and the police must request permission to use their guns. At the top of episode, a black police officer can’t get permission fast enough, and is gunned down by a member of the Seventh Kalvary. Already, the series is playing with some heavy themes.

Van Redi/HBO

Oh, and while I didn’t take full notes on every Easter egg in the premiere episode, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the police officer called the mask in the racist’s glove compartment a Rorschach mask. I look forward to digging into that original graphic novel lore and why these assholes have chosen Rorschach, an uncompromising hero from Moore’s comic, as their muse.

Tensions are at an all-time high. When Angela Abar suits up for the first time as the badass Sister Night, she brings a perp back to the police station to be interrogated by Looking Glass in a windowless room while images of Americana are projected onto the walls. Complete with Looking Glass’ mirror mask, it’s an uncomfortable scene.

There’s also an overweight guy named “Panda” with a very large and very filthy panda head for his mask. He’s the least-liked cop at Tulsa P.D. because he’s the one who decides whether to let officers use their weapons; Chief Crawford releases all of their guns after the shooting, so the heat is on.

Other officers include Red Scare and Pirate Jenny. Wearing the masks and having to hide their identities seems to have pushed these officers into becoming superhero-like figures, complete with superhero names. Later in the episode, the lot of them help Sister Night infiltrate a Seventh Kalvary ranch where watch batteries are being harvested so they can be put to some sort of diabolical use.

Mark Hill/HBO

The resulting scene is complete chaos as the Kalvary opens fire with a truck-mounted heavy assault weapon to try and stop the cops from raiding their stash house, only to end up mowing down an entire herd of cattle. Archie — Nite Owl’s ship from the comics, and Zach Snyder’s film adaptation — also makes an appearance, piloted by the police chief. Does this mean that Crawford is Nite Owl? Or maybe this was just a version of Archie. Either way, it was a very cool scene.

Although a couple of terrorists escape, the raid is mostly a success. Later, Chief Crawford and his wife celebrate by having dinner with Angela and her family. Weirdly, Crawford snorts some powder that appears to be cocaine, and not only does his police subordinate and friend Angela not seem to care, but neither does his wife, really. So Robert Redford is president and superheroes are real and drugs are legal. What a weird world Lindelof has created.

Anyway, the episode ends with Crawford learning that the police officer from the start has woken up. But he doesn’t make it to the hospital. Instead, he’s stopped on the way by — I’m assuming — the Seventh Kalvary and hanged from a tree. Abar is summoned to the scene by a mysterious caller, and sees her dead friend. Will Reeves, who’s presumably the aged version of a boy we first saw in the Tulsa Race Riot flashback, sits below the corpse in his wheelchair.

Van Redi/HBO

The episode’s final moment shows us blood dripping on Crawford’s badge, reminding us of the blood dripping on the smiley face pin from Watchmen.

All in all, I’ve got to hand it to Damon Lindelof, because he really captured the feeling of the original story while also forging his own path. This episode kept me on the edge of my seat, and I can’t wait to see how the Tulsa Police Department deals with Chief Crawford’s death.

Episode Grade: B+

Mark Hill:HBO Official

Episode 102: “Martial Feats of Comanche Horsemanship”

This episode opens with a flashback to Will Reeves’ father fighting for the United States of America, while German propaganda falls from the sky, trying to convince servicemen of color to abandon their post and defect to Germany. (That really happened, by the way, although it was during World War II, not WWI. Maybe superheroes changed the timeline? Or historical inaccuracy, whichever.) That didn’t work out for the Nazis, but Will’s father kept the leaflet, and Will has clearly remembered it. “Protect this boy,” his father wrote.

Back in 2019, Angela Abar has arrived at the site of Judd Crawford’s hanging to find an elderly black man in a wheelchair claiming to have killed Judd himself. Obviously, Angela doesn’t believe him and takes him to the bakery she uses as a front for her life as Sister Night. She tries to interrogate the man (Louis Gossett Junior), but he just keeps repeating that it was he who strung up the Chief, impossible as that may seem.

Mark Hill:HBO Official

Of course, the rest of the Tulsa Police Department is up in arms and goes looking for revenge at a shanty-town/trailer park where known associates of the Seventh Kalvary are living. Angela cautions Red Scare against inciting violence, but he’s too wound up to stop now, and after someone throws a broken bottle at him, all hell breaks loose and the cops eventually round up everyone for questioning.

We also learn how Angela and Judd became such close friends. You see, during the first Seventh Kalvary attack on the police — before they wore masks — Angela was nearly killed and Judd was wounded. The rest of the department resigned because the Kalvary had their faces, numbers, and home addresses, and they no longer wanted to put themselves or their family at risk. And although it’s never clearly stated, it appear as if Angela and Judd rebuilt the department from the ground up, this time with officers in masks to protect their identities.

Masked Police Officers hold the line. Mark Hill:HBO Official

That night, Angela attends a memorial service for Judd and fakes a fainting spell. Once she’s left alone upstairs to rest and recover, she puts on some Nite Owl-esque infrared goggle and goes hunting for literal skeletons in her old friend Judd’s closets. That’s when she fins a Ku Klux Klan white robe and hood with a sheriff’s badge on it. Seems like Judd was harboring a very dark past.

This got me thinking: When Angela and her husband were attacked in their home during “White Night,” she killed one Kalvary member but was shot by another, who seemed to close in for the kill, but when she awoke in the hospital, it was Judd sitting with her. His wound seemed superficial at best…maybe a flesh wound or bullet graze to his arm. Is the show hinting that Chief Crawford was actually the leader of the Seventh Kalvary, or at the very least, an active member? That would explain why Will, so affected by the Tulsa Race Riots as a boy, might target him.

Sister Night 2. Mark Hill:HBO Official

Anyway, Angela gets a DNA test, and loe and behold, she’s a descendant of Will Reeves. His granddaughter, in fact. I can’t wait for that story to be explored in future episodes, but it was for sure not getting done in episode 2, because the moment Angela had him in her car, a giant magnet was lowered from some sort of hovering ship and picked the car up with Will inside and flew away. The mystery deepens.

Finally, we have Jeremy Iron’s character looking bored as his simpleton maid and butler enthusiastically watch him blow the candle out on yet another cake. What the heck is going on here? Is he repeating the same day over and over?

His servants then act out a play retelling of the events that turned Jonathan Osterman into the blue god-like being known as Doctor Manhattan, complete with vaporization. Like Jeremy Irons kills the guy.

Jeremy Irons cake. Watchmen official. Colin Hutton/HBO

But it’s big loss, because when the play is over, everyone in the play removes their masks, and we see they’re all clones of the wait staff, Ms. Crookshanks and Mr. Phillips. Irons’ character has been experimenting with something as yet unknown to us, and he’s got a whole bunch of clones he can dispose of whenever he wants. They’re all as dumb as a box of rocks, which seems to bother their master.

This was a great world-building episode. We got insight into who Will Reeves is and how he’s connected to Angela, and we got to see Irons get down to some truly kooky and heinous shit. Next week, Jean Smart makes her debut as Laurie Blake, aka Silk Specter, I think. I’m giddy with excitement for the conversations between her and Regina King.

Episode Grade: A

Watchmen. Mark Hill/HBO

Episode 103: “She Was Killed by Space Junk”

Three episodes into HBO’s Watchmen, here are things we now know to be true: 1) Jean Smart — playing Agent Laurie Blake, aka The Comedienne, aka Silk Spectre — is a freaking force to be reckoned. The head-to-head she had with Angela Abar, aka Sister Night, was worth the show getting made by itself; 2) Jeremy Irons is an aging and eccentric Adrian Veidt, aka Ozymandias; and 3) Damon Lindelof really loves to place Easter eggs in plain sight.

The first part of “She Was Kissed by Space Junk” is all about Agent Blake. We open with her using a Trieu Industries phone booth that allows people to make phone calls to Mars, where Dr. Manhattan is listening, maybe. Blake comes home to feed — of all things — her pet owl.

Watchmen. Mark Hill/HBO

Blake is working for the FBI’s Anti-Vigilante Task Force, and she’s good at her job. That’s why Senator Joe Keene Jr. (James Wolk) tracks her down and prepares her to come to Tulsa to investigate the murder of Judd Crawford. During their talk, we learn that Dan Dreiberg — aka Nite Owl, a hero from the original comic with whom Laurie was involved by the end — is in prison, probably because he kept being a hero even after vigilantes were outlawed. Keene offers to help free Nite Owl if Blake goes to Tulsa, so off she goes, grabbing Agent Petey from HBO’s interactive Watchmen site Peteypedia to go with her.

Once in Tulsa, Agent Blake sniffs out the Tulsa Police Department’s top-secret interrogation building and has a delightful conversation with Detective Looking Glass. From there, we’re on to Chief Crawford’s burial, where a member of the Seventh Kavalry has crawled through a prepared hole in a mausoleum next to Crawford’s burial plot, strapped on a suicide vest and takes Senator Keene hostage.

The terrorist claims the vest is synced with the beat of his heart and will blow up if he dies. Agent Blake promptly ignores his warning and puts a bullet through his head. As she explains later, she thought he was bluffing. He wasn’t. Thinking quickly, Angela drags the man’s body into the empty plot and tips Crawford’s casket on top, then runs as a disgusting explosion of body parts and coffin splinters erupt from the hole in the ground.

Afterward, Blake finds Angela in the hole the Seventh Kavalry guy used. Blake tries to intimidate Angela by revealing she knows about her secret identity, and about the KKK outfit that was hidden in Crawford’s closet. Angela fires right back, mimicking an owl while flapping her fingers. You could tell it was the first thing to get to Agent Blake since we met her.

Watchmen Colin Hutton/HBO

Meanwhile, Adrian Veidt is definitely making clones, you guys. He happily sends one up into space, apparently, or rather simulates it. In any case, he turns his latest butler into a popsicle. Veidt needs “thicker skin,” so he finds a herd of buffalo (which are plentiful in this world?) and kills one with a perfect shot through the eye. However, a masked man on a horse fires a warning shot at Veidt, who angrily leaves before being able to skin his kill.

Back at his lordly manor, Veidt receives a letter with a skull and crossbones seal from “the Game Warden” warning him not to test the boundaries of their “agreement.” He also thanks Veidt for the tomatoes. Undeterred, Veidt sends him a response, tells his clones that he’s going hunting at midnight, and dons his Ozymandius suit, which looks exactly how it did in the comics. It’s fantastic.

We end the episode on Agent Blake. She’s in her room at the Black Freighter Motel — a little Easter egg for the fans — and cracks open a case containing a massive blue dildo. It gives a whole new meaning to “Space Junk.”

Decided to go another way, Blake knocks on Petey’s door, and the two have sex. That’s when she leaves to go to the aforementioned phone booth, where she tells Dr. Manhattan this overly-long “brick joke” about members of the Watchmen confronting god at the pearly gates. It’s not bad.

Then, when she exits the booth, Angela’s car from last episode falls from the sky to crash land right in front of her.

This episode was easily the best of the season so far, and that’s saying a lot, because all three have been really good. I loved all the Easter eggs and can’t wait for more head-to-head whipsmart action between Blake and Abar.

Episode Grade: A+

Watchmen. Hong Chau as Lady Trieu 2. Photo credit: Mark Hill/HBO

Episode 104: “If You Don’t Like My Story, Write Your Own”

Hong Chau makes her Watchmen debut as the mysterious Lady Trieu, a trillionaire who acquired Veidt Industries back when Ozymandias vanished. We don’t know much about Trieu, but the episode left us just enough clues that we can begin to connect the dots from her to Veidt and maybe even to Doctor Manhattan.

Let’s look at the evidence:

• Lady Trieu is an expert at creating clones, and even produced a newborn made for a family who’s farm she bought at the top of the episode.
• She is cloning herself, as evidenced by her “daughter.” I wonder just how long she’s been doing this.
• She clearly has some way to tell the future, as she bought that farm just in time to claim ownership of whatever fell onto from out of the sky.
• She built the Millennium Clock in Tulsa, Oklahoma, just like Doctor Manhattan built the massive glass clock in the original Watchmen graphic novel.

Watchmen. Jeremy Irons as Adrian Veidt 1. Photo credit: Mark Hill/HBO

• Because Adrian Veidt is growing and killing clones of his own wherever he is imprisoned, we can safely assume Trieu is the one behind his imprisonment. Also, was I the only one freaked out by Veidt’s rapidly growing clone process?
• Veidt is using the bodies of clones to test the parameters of his prison, which we suspected was on Mars but might be on moon, based on the transition shot connecting his story back to the one on the ground.
• This leads me to ask one important question: Based of her ability to see into the future and her affinity for building clocks, is Lady Trieu Doctor Manhattan in disguise?

Last week’s episode was, by far, my favorite of the season, and “If You Don’t Like My Story Write Your Own” builds on that foundation. Although I’m left with more questions than answers. Just for starters, who was that costumed vigilante who lubed up on the run from Sister Night and slid down the street drain? That was freaky.

Also, what is in those pills that Will left for Angela to find? Is he using the wheelchair as an excuse to hide something about himself? I mean, he can clearly walk on his own. And what connections do Will and Lady Trieu have to the Seventh Kavalry? Will chanting “tick-tock, tick-tock” at the end left me scratching my head.

Watchmen. Regina King as Sister Night 2. Photo credit: Mark Hill/HBO

Agent Blake and Sister Night’s banter back and forth did not disappoint, and I loved the moment she had Agent Petey bring his nerd rage to bear, getting all angry about the inaccuracy of the in-universe television show about the Minutemen, American Hero Story.

Another possible connection between Trieu and Adrian: the statue she had of Ozymandias looked exactly like Jeremy Irons did in his superhero garb last week. She even referred to him in the present tense, which made Agent Blake curious. There’s definitely more going on with her than meets the eye.

Watchmen. Hong Chau as Lady Trieu. Photo credit: Mark Hill/HBO

Finally, tonight’s score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross was absolutely perfect, blazing in and fading out at just the right moments.

Episode Grade: A

Mark Hill/HBO

Episode 105: “Little Fear of Lightning”

We’re at the halfway mark for the first season of Watchmen. “Little Fear of Lightning” lets us in on two points of view: those of Wade Tillman/Looking Glass and Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias.

Let’s start with Veidt, who it appears is being kept on sort of extra-dimensional pocket on the moon. (Or one of the moons of Mars?) It was fun to see him use all the body parts of his Mr. Philips and Ms. Crookshanks clones to signal for help, but we still don’t know who or what the Game Warden is. Now that Veidt has been caught trying to escape his prison, I look forward to seeing what his punishment will be.

Adrian Veidt. Mark Hill/HBO

But the real star of tonight’s show is Detective Wade Tillman, aka Looking Glass. For those of you who’ve only seen the Zach Snyder’s Watchmen movie, that giant alien squid from the opening appears at the end of Alan Moore’s original graphic novel.

Image: Watchmen/HBO

We get a ton of insight into Tillman here. Like the heroes in Moore’s story, he wears a mask not necessarily because he wants to fight for good, but because he’s broken and scared and messed up in some way. In his case, he puts reflective tape over his face to protect against psychic blasts of the kind the squid monster set off on that fateful day in ’85. As Agent Blake pointed out last week, superheroes are born in trauma.

Let’s walk through Wade’s origin story:

• Although Wade was the main focus of “Little Fear of Lightning,” I very much enjoyed Agent Blake’s constant sarcasm. She’s already stood toe to toe with Angela Abar, and “Mirror Guy” is not spared her withering insights.
• Paula Malcomson’s character was talking about a Steven Spielberg movie called Pale Horse with Wade, and mentioned a scene with a little girl in the red coat wandering through a scene of devastation. She’s talking about a famous scene from Schindler’s List, but in a reality where a giant squid monster wipes out a few million people in the space of a minute, not even movie history is unchanged.

• The Nostalgia pills Angela asked Wade to get tested are created by Veidt Enterprises in the comic.
• Senator Keene is a bad dude, but you probably already suspected he was.

This was a great transition episode that it helped bring together some story points from earlier episodes — Veidt trying to escape his prison, the pills Angela’s grandfather gave her — while giving us some insight on a character who had, up to now, been largely flat. Let’s all hope Wade can survive this attack from the Seventh Kavalry. Way to leave us hanging at the midway point, Lindelof.

Episode Grade: B-

Watchmen. Photo credit: Mark Hill/HBO

Episode 106: “This Extraordinary Being”

(Note: David is needed elsewhere tonight, so Dan Selcke is taking on reviewing duties for this episode.)

Let’s get the hyperbole out of the way first. This was the best episode of Watchmen so far. It’s the best episode of TV I’ve seen in recent memory, and may be the best of the year. Lindelof and company have taken something that could have come off as very gimmicky — most of the episode is shot in black and white, it’s an extended flashback, there are few cuts, there are arty flourishes because technically the whole thing takes place in the memory of Will Reeves, the old man played by Louis Gossett Jr. and in his younger incarnation by Jovan Adepo — and made it into something special, something that cuts to the heart of what the show is trying to say while still being completely, enthrallingly watchable.

The basics: Angela Abar has taken a bottle of Nostalgia belonging to her grandfather Will Reeves. That means she’s going to experience his memories. She sees him get inducted onto the New York City police force in the 1930s, a time rife with naked racial hatred. She sees him struggle with racists within the police force, and she sees him become…Hooded Justice, the first superhero on record in Alan Moore’s mythology, and a figure of almost total mystery up until this time. No one in the modern world knows who he is. In a bitingly funny opening, he’s played by the blithely handsome Cheyenne Jackson on American Hero Story, the show’s show-within-a-show.

And that’s the first of many satirical stances “This Extraordinary Being” takes on the past 100 years of race relations in America. One of the many remarkable things about this episode is the way this Hooded Justice reveal fits so neatly into Moore’s established mythology. Cord Jefferson, who wrote this episode with Lindelof, repurposes the noose Hooded Justice wears around his neck as a souvenir of the time his fellow officers nearly lynched him for daring to arrest a white man who set fire to a Jewish delicatessen. He paints the area around his eyes white on the advice of his wife June (Danielle Deadwyler), who knows that the city will only accept Hooded Justice as a hero — as indeed they do — if they think he’s a white man.

This story is palpably good. We feel Will’s need to do something about the rampant injustice he sees at his job, something he can’t address as a police officer because many of his colleagues are just as guilty of these injustices as the people who ransacked Black Wall Street in his hometown of Tulsa, back when he was a boy. We get reminders of that event sprinkled into Angela’s remembrances — Will’s mother playing the piano at the theater, a pair of bodies being dragged behind a police car, etc. They’re surreal touches, but they’re not distracting or out of place. Rather, they reinforce what Will is feeling and needing, and they’re justified in-universe on account of Angela having a bad reaction to the Nostalgia. They help us understand Will. They help us get close to him, as do the lengthy takes. At no point in this episode was I less than completely involved with his crusade.

If the episode has a weakness, it’s that it glosses over a few of the journeys of ancillary characters. Near the end of the episode, Will burns down a warehouse operated by the Cyclops, a white supremacist organization he’s been chasing. After he returns home, June angrily accuses him of letting his identity as Hooded Justice consume him, and declares that she is taking their son to Tulsa and that Will is not to follow. The last time we saw her before this, she was happily playing with their son in a time-lapse montage, so I would have liked to see more of how she got to that point.

Likewise, we see the development of a relationship between Hooded Justice and Captain Metropolis/Nelson Gardner. Their relationship is more textured here than in the deliberately crude American Hero Story, but only just. Gardner, played rather effetely by Jake McDorman, recruits Reeves into the Minutemen — the 1930s-era precursor to the Watchmen — and they start having sex soon after. They get one post-coital scene where we see that Gardner thinks a lot of himself and may be with Reeves mostly for the kinky thrill of it. After that, he makes it clear that his priorities don’t align with Reeves’ — he’s in the superhero game for the publicity, not the opportunity to help people like the Harlem residents being terrorized by Cyclops. Why were these two be together in the first place? “This Extraordinary Being” doesn’t give us much of an idea of this part of Will’s life.

But then again, the episode shoots for the stars, so it’s easy to forgive it for landing on the moon. This is an incisive, gripping piece of television.

At the end of the hour, we see Will Reeves kill Judd Crawford by forcing him to hang himself, using a mesmeric device picked up from the Cyclops long ago. Hypnosis machines seem a little far-fetched, but this is a world where superheroes are real and alien squids rain from the sky, so I’m gonna go with it. Does this have anything to do with Lady Trieu’s plans to save humanity?

We can find out more about that next week. This week, let’s just give “This Extraordinary Being” a round of applause.

Episode Grade: A

Colin Hutton/HBO

Episode 107: “An Almost Religious Awe”

Adrian Veidt has been on trial for a year, and Angela Abar has known her husband — Cal Abar — is Doctor Manhattan this entire time. Yeah, that happened.

Throughout this episode, Angela is connected to a tube she’s been told is also connected to her grandfather Will Reeves, aka Hooded Justice. It’s part of her treatment to nurse her back to health following her taking a lethal dose of Nostalgia. Later, she finds out the tube is connected to a sleeping elephant — yet another unsolved mystery in a show full of them — and disconnects. Because of the side effects of the treatment, she vividly relives memories of her past. We learn that her parents were killed by a terrorist with a bomb strapped to his back back when she was a girl in Vietnam.

Mark Hill/HBO

Angela was put through the wringer as a child. After losing her parents, she lives in an orphanage until her grandmother June, whom we met in “This Extraordinary Being,” comes for her. She dies of a heart attack right as they’re getting into a cab to go to the airport.

We also learn little incidental details about Angela’s life, like how she chose the persona of Sister Night based on a blaxploitation movie of the same name, and how she chose to become a police officer after helping the Vietnamese police force carry out an extrajudicial killing of the man who murdered her parents. We’ve already gotten deep dives into the pasts of characters like Laurie Blake and Looking Glass, so it was long past time Angela got her turn.

Mark Hill/HBO

In Tulsa, Agent Blake talks with Judd Crawford’s widow in her home. Everything is going as planned, when all of the sudden Jane pulls a lever and drops Blake into a room below, where she’s then tied up and transported wherever the Seventh Kavalry are plotting their dastardly masterstroke. Apparently, it involves Senator Keene transforming into Doctor Manhattan, or at least getting his powers.

Elsewhere — somewhere — Adrian Veidt is on trial. It’s been going on for a year, and at the end, when the Game Warden asks him to speak in his defense, he only stands and farts. It’s still hard to tell where this plotline is going, but that was funny.

Some other thoughts:

• Looking Glass killed the five Seventh Kavalry men who were going to be attacking him at the end of “A Little Fear of Lightning.” But we don’t know where he is.
• Lady Trieu is cloning her mother and calling her daughter. Whatever, man. That shit is weird. Apparently, she wants both of her parents to be there when she turns on her Millennium Clock. So who’s who father? Given the big statue of Ozymandias in her garden, my money’s on Adrian Veidt. I’m betting she’ll be the one to bring him back to Earth, if she hasn’t already. Remember that something fell out of the sky back when she was first introduced, onto land she just bought.

Mark Hill/HBO

• Doctor Manhattan was Cal Abar the whole time and Angela knew it. And damn, that hammer scene where she bashes Cal’s brains out to get Doctor Manhattan’s symbol…”Hey baby,” she says, as a blue glow begins to shine in her eyes.
• The clones Adrian Veidt has been using for years in his prison consider him guilty for killing them. Oof, Veidt never had a chance. He was also on trial for killing his fellow vigilantes of the Watchmen group, as well as the millions he killed with the giant squid alien.

Damon Lindelof just dropped a twisty bomb on us, the viewers, and I totally dig it. I can’t wait to see how the final episodes play out. This show could be Lindelof’s masterpiece.

Episode Grade: A+

Photo credit: Mark Hill/HBO

Episode 108: “A God Walks into Abar”

Or as the opening spells it, “A God Walks Into Abar.” Oh, Damon Lindelof.

The penultimate episode of Watchmen season 1 is basically one giant tragic love story. It opens with Doctor Manhattan walking into a bar, true to its title. He sits down for an episode-long conversation with his future wife, Angela, at this point in her life a cop in Saigon. Throughout the conversation, Manhattan tries to convince Angela to have dinner with him, and over the course of their talk, a ton of information is revealed:

• Before he became Doctor Manhattan, as a young boy, Jon Osterman and his father — a Jewish man fleeing Germany during Hitler’s rise to power — stayed in an English manor house where the Lord and Lady were kind to him. Much later, Doctor Manhattan will use this lord and lady as the models for Mr. Phillips and Ms. Crookshanks, the Adam-and-Eve figures he created on Europa, designed to be gentler and kinder than humans.
• And that sounds good in theory, but Doctor Manhattan became dissatisfied with their uncomplicated love and came back to Earth. Later, he sent Adrian Veidt to Europa as a kind of thanks for saving the human race from a nuclear apocalypse, something Veidt clearly thinks he deserved. Naturally, Veidt took advantage of these new lifeforms, and eventually grew tired of this paradise himself and plotted to get back to Earth.
• We visit Karnac, Veidt’s home in the Antarctic, where he continued to create periodic squidfalls to “maintain world peace.” Not sure who’s been making him since he went to Europa in 2009.
• Doctor Manhattan has never really been on Mars. The figure people have been seeing is just a decoy.
• The brain ring Angela pulled from Manhattan’s brain was created by Veidt way back before the original Watchmen. Originally, Veidt intended to use it to pacify Doctor Manhattan, but it also allowed the superhero to forget who he was and that he had powers, so he could live a normal life as a human being with Angela, at least for 10 years. After that, their relationship will end “in tragedy,” although we don’t know exactly what that means yet.

Photo credit: Mark Hill/HBO

I enjoyed how everything, in the end, came down to the “chicken and the egg paradox.” Angela feared she started this whole conspiracy by having Manhattan ask her grandfather — 10 years in the past — about Judd Crawford and his Klan outfit. It’s a twisting tease of a problem, and one could easily get lost in the question. Instead, we just need to accept that it happened. It doesn’t matter how we got to where we’re at.

This episode ends with a haunting scene as Doctor Manhattan realizes why he fell in love with Angela, then comes to her defense against the Seventh Kalvalry members trying to kidnap him so Joe Keene can take his powers and become a god. It doesn’t work, though, and one of the last things we see is Angela crying out as her man is zapped away. Goddam chickens and eggs.

But wait, there’s more…

In a post-credits sequence, Adrian Veidt is pelted with tomatoes courtesy of the many Mr. Phillipses and Ms. Crookshankses living on Europa. They ask him if he’ll stay, he says no, and their smear him with fruit. It makes sense if you’re them.

Later, he’s sitting in a dank dungeon when the Game Warden walks in holding a cake with seven candles: it’s now been seven years since Veidt arrived on Europa.

The Game Warden explains he was the first man created by Doctor Manhattan, so he knows the profound sense of loss you get when your creator leaves you forever. He then walks out, but turns around and says, “enjoy your cake.”

Adrian blows out the candles and realizes there is something shiny baked inside: it’s that horseshoe Mr. Philips kept mysteriously going on about in the premiere, the one he wanted to cut the cake with. Veidt starts laughing an begins to use the horseshoe to scratch at the floor. Oh boy.

Episode Score A+

Watchmen 109. Lady Trieu 2. Mark Hill/HBO

Episode 109: “See How They Fly”

The Watchmen finale was basically an origin story for Lady Trieu, who, as it turns out, is the big bad of the entire season. The Seventh Kavalry and Cyclops, the Tulsa police department, the FBI, Adrian Veidt and even Doctor Manhattan were manipulated by Trieu so they would be right where they needed to be as her master plan unfolded. Lady Trieu wanted to be a god. Her plan was to use the Seventh Kalvalry to capture him, and then kill him and take his power.

in a flashback, we learn that Trieu’s mother stole a vile of Veidt’s sperm and injected it into herself in order to have his baby. Years later, Trieu arrives at Karnak — Veidt’s home in the Antarctic — and confronts her father. His pride bruised when he learns who she is, he refuses to acknowledge her and says he will never call her daughter.

Then, we’re shown Veidt in his prison on Europa as a ship lands. He escapes his prison through a tunnel he dug with the horseshoe a Mr. Philips (or a Mrs. Crookshanks) baked into his cake. As he approaches the ship — fully costumed as Ozymandias — the Game Warden rides up and warns him he will fire his gun if Veidt keeps walking.

Watchmen 109. Adrian Veidt. Mark Hill/HBO

The Game Warden fires, but Veidt catches the bullet as he did in the original Watchmen comic, and stabs the Game Warden with his sharpened horseshoe. As he bleeds out, Veidt cradles him. The Game Warden asks why he was made to wear the mask. “Because is makes men cruel,” Veidt says. Apparently, Adrian Veidt created the entire scenario with the Game Warden so he would have something to occupy his mind so he wouldn’t go insane while imprisoned on Europa. The trial, his imprisonment, all the clones of Mr. Philips and Ms. Crookshanks pelting him with tomatoes…they were all scenarios Veidt allowed to play out so he could have an opponent that he had to defeat. At the end, all the clones line up on either side of the ship, like they were playing a part in another play that Veidt wrote.

Anyway, we also learn that Adrian Veidt has been on Earth the entire season…as a golden statue in Lady Trieu’s garden. That whole deal just oozed Star Wars.

Okay, so, Angela makes her way to the Seventh Kavalry’s secret lair just in time to watch her husband — Doctor Cal-hattan — die. Of course, we had to sit through Senator Keene’s evil bad guy speech first, and then we got to enjoy Lady Trieu opening the door of the chamber he hoped would deliver Manhattan’s power to him only to see he had been completely vaporized into a mass of blood and goo. It was satisfying.

Cal-hattan used that goo to teleport Veidt, Blake and Looking Glass to Karnak in hopes that Veidt would figure out a way to stop Trieu. He does. He freezes the tiny squids and makes them rain down on Tulsa, killing anyone who wasn’t indoors and protected. Lady Trieu’s machine is destroyed by the squids and it crashes down on her, killing her. Ozymandias once again used squids to save the world.

Veidt then shows Blake and Looking Glass Nite Owl’s ship, Archie, which was NOT the ship Chief Judd used to destroy the Seventh Kavalry soldiers in the first episode. (Although it also kind of was, because apparently the police modeled their airships after it.) Before they leave, Blake and Glass arrest Veidt. He’s going to be brought to justice…for now.

Now let’s talk about the egg. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking a couple of eggs,” Angela’s grandfather tells her. He said Cal-hattan told him Angela would know what that meant when the time came.

Watchmen 109, Angela Abar. Mark Hill/HBO.

Once she and her children and grandfather are home, Angela begins cleaning the cracked eggs mess she created when Cal-hattan was making waffles in Episode 8. She finds one egg that was not smashed, and remembers a conversation where he told her he could put his essence in something like an egg, and his powers could be transferred to whoever ate it. Then, in theory, that person could walk on water.

Angela then goes into the back yard, eats the egg, and steps into the pool. And that’s it. Cut to black.

I very much enjoyed the finale of Watchmen. We don’t know if Lindelof and HBO are going forward with a second season, and honestly, I’m not sure we need season 2. This entire season was built and delivered to be a one-off series. Sure, I want another season, but if it doesn’t happen, I’d be fine with how it ended.

Watchmen 109. Agent Blake. Mark Hill/HBO

Now, we wait to hear if there will be further seasons of Watchmen, and let’s just sit back and watch as the show wins every award ever.

Episode Grade: B

Series Grade: A+

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