WiC Watches: Watchmen

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+