HBO is set to join the many properties honoring Juneteenth this year by streaming all nine episodes of their landmark television drama Watchmen. The series, based on the events of Alan Moore’s graphic novel of the same name, deals with many of the issues currently in the American news cycle, most notably protests after the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department.

Watchmen opens with a sequence set during the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, when mobs of white people attacked Black residents and Black-run businesses in the Oklahoma city. The event is cited as “the single worst incident of racial violence in American city” and is a catalyst for the HBO series. Regina King stars in Watchmen as Angela Abar, a Tulsa detective and secret vigilante investigating the murder of her superior, Judd Crawford.

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The series will stream for free on HBO.com and HBO on Demand on a weekend that also marks the date of the unofficial holiday Juneteenth. A portmanteau of “June” and “nineteenth,” the day marks the anniversary of Major General Gordon Granger came coming to Galveston, Texas with news that the Civil War was over and enslaved Black Americans were free.

HBO will freely stream other properties that highlight the Black experience, including the documentary Being Serena, the feature film The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and select episodes of series like Treme, True Detective, and The Shop.

We commend HBO for using its platform to invite people to a series like Watchmen—entertaining, rich with thought, and a reminder of the dark and dangerous anti-Black violence that still permeates through our country and our culture.

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The big screen adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen has been controversial since its release. Some felt it stuck way too close to the book, while others feel it veered too far from the original story. But one thing most fans can’t fault Zack Snyder’s film for is the casting. Almost everyone fit their iconic roles to a T.

But some six years earlier in 2003, a very different version of Watchmen was nearly brought to the big screen. This one was being adapted by X-Men screenwriter David Hayter. And if it had come to fruition, it would have featured Game of Thrones‘ Iain Glen, a.k.a. Ser Jorah Mormont, in the role of Nite-Owl!

Via Winter Is Coming, we’ve discovered a quick glimpse into Hayter’s version of the legendary story that never was. A screen test was filmed with Glen as Nite-Owl… or should we say, as his civilian identity Daniel Dreiberg. He shares a scene with the vigilante Rorschach that is ripped straight from the pages of the original graphic novel. Glen actually does quite an admirable job as the now-retired superhero, but whoever it was they got to voice Rorschach, well… let’s just say that Jackie Earle Haley’s legacy is secure.

DC Comics

Although Iain Glen did not get to play Nite-Owl in the film, which ultimately saw release in 2009, he did actually get to finally play a superhero when he joined the cast of Titans last season as Bruce Wayne. But just as in this Watchmen test footage, he never gets to put on a costume there either. Here’s hoping he eventually gets cast in a superhero project where he finally gets to kick some ass in full costumed regalia. Anyone who has seen him in Game of Thrones knows he could do it in his sleep!

Featured Image: HBO/Warner Bros.

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There are some simple, necessary steps we all must take to help stop the spread of COVID-19. All of us have to practice safe social distancing. We also have to make sure we are consistently washing our hands thoroughly. Because you don’t have to be a superhero to help save the world right now. You just need to do the right thing. That’s the message from some of our favorite masked vigilantes, who want to ensure we’re all cleaning up correctly. The cast of HBO’s Watchmen came together for a new video that answers that age old question, “Who washes the Washmen?”

The Watchmen.

Some of the stars of Damon Lindelof’s hit series helped put together a fun how-to video on how to wash our hands correctly. It includes Tim Blake Nelson, Danny Boyd Jr., Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Jean Smart, Dustin Ingram, Sara Vickers, Tom Mison, Regina King, and Andrew Howard. But this isn’t another celebrity mashup like the unfortunate “Imagine” group singalong. They all did it in character.

So of course the masked vigilante-obsessed Special FBI Agent Dale Petey did his dressed as Sister Night. It’s an absolutely perfect touch to this video, but it’s not the only one. Vickers’ Ms. Crookshanks sings “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” rather than “Happy Birthday,” in honor of her former master Adrian Veidt. And Mison’s Mr. Phillips—all of them—manages to do a spot-on impression of Jeremy Irons’ Ozymandias.

Obviously we know how our favorite “stay-at-home dad,” Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s Dr. Manhattan managed to be involved even though he died. He filmed his part long ago, because he knew the coronavirus was coming. (And in classic Dr. Manhattan fashion, did nothing to stop it.)

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So remember, no superheroes are coming to save us. But now’s a chance where it doesn’t take much for us to act like ones. “Who washes the washmen?” All of us.

Featured Image: HBO

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It looks like we’re done watching HBO’s Watchmen… or are we? Showrunner Damon Lindelof says he’s stepping away, but HBO execs may have other plans. Dan cracks open the conspiracy on today’s Nerdist News!

Do you want another season of Watchmen? Let us know in the comments!

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It is December 15, 2019. The Watchmen season one finale is airing for the first time. It is November 9, 2018. We have just reported HBO is producing a sequel series to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s seminal graphic novel. It is March 15, 2022. We are still hoping a second season will take place. It is April 30, 2025. We are losing hope of Watchmen returning. Okay, we’re just guessing about those last two things. We don’t actually experience time like Dr. Manhattan. It’s just that it certainly seems like that’s the fate that awaits fans of the hit HBO series. The network has said it will not go forward without show creator Damon Lindelof. Unfortunately he’s not interested in returning to the series.

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Lindelof told USA Today he will not be doing a second season of the critically acclaimed series because he completed the story he wanted to tell. He didn’t say no one could make a second season though. Lindelof gave his “blessing” to HBO to continue on without him. The problem is the network has been adamant it’s not interested in going on without him. HBO programming chief Casey Bloys said this week the network has no intention of handing the series off to someone else. “It would be hard to imagine doing it without Damon involved in some way,” Bloys said. That’s not a definitive statement, and things can always change. But that has been the consistent message from the network.

Bloys has even said the show wouldn’t have to be a direct follow-up to the first season if that’s not what Lindelof would want. It could continue as an anthology series, like Fargo or True Detective. However, that doesn’t seem to matter to Lindelof. It’s also debatable how much that would actually work. Anthology series normally don’t have the same characters. Part of what made HBO’s Watchmen so good was the way it built off of the original comic. Major figures and history from Moore and Gibbon’s story were a huge part of the TV series. To tell an unrelated tale in the same world might not be as effective.

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The first season did tell a self-contained story, so it’s easy to see why Lindelof would want to walk away. But it also ended with a cliffhanger, just like the graphic novel did. The answer to what happened to Angela Abar after she ate that egg is enough to set up more story. And Lindelof certainly left himself plenty of other interesting ways to continue on. We want to know if Sister Night really walked on water, and just exactly what happened to Agent Dale Petey.

But as of now it seems like we will never find out. If HBO truly won’t go on without Lindelof, and Lindelof isn’t going forward with a second season, that’s it. It’s not what we want, but there are worse fates than being one of the all-time great one-hit television wonders.

Of course, if there’s one thing Watchmen has taught us, “nothing ever ends.” Things change. HBO could find someone else they trust to lead another season. Or Lindelof could one day come up with a new chapter of the story he’s excited to tell.

It is January 16, 2020. We are hopeful Watchmen will return someday, even if we don’t know exactly when.

Featured Image: HBO

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Watchmen‘s first season ended with a cliffhanger, but since we’re positive Angela Abar obtained Dr. Manhattan’s abilities via a magic egg, it answered nearly every big question we had ahead of the finale. Our only unresolved issue was the identity of LubeMan, the mysterious figure in a skintight silver body suit. He only appeared once during the season and we never learned who he was. Fortunately the show’s companion website has all been confirmed that the greased up weirdo was actually the superhero-obsessed FBI agent Dale Petey. And he will likely play a huge role if the show returns for a second season.

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HBO’s Watchmen continued one of the best elements of the original graphic novel. Each chapter in the comic concluded with supplemental reading materials that contributed to the main story. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons used book passages, medical reports, newspaper clippings, and other primary sources to augment their story. These sections provided needed exposition and world-shaping historical facts, and they also offered powerful characterization and thematic connections.

The show did the same thing with their companion website Peteypedia. FBI Agent Dale Petey, the lanky, masked vigilante historian who accompanied Laurie Blake to Tulsa, was “responsible” for it. Petey updated it with relevant primary sources after each episode. They included things like FBI memos, self-help pamphlets, interrogation transcripts, news reports, and even the blueprints for a Dr. Manhattan sex toy named Excalibur. (As in, “Ex-Cal-Abar.”)

These helped fill in some gaps the show never addressed, like how Laurie Blake avoided jail and why computer technology was so far behind. But they also offered insights into Dale Petey himself. Many of the documents on Peteypedia were memos he wrote. They were informative and insightful, but they were also self-indulgent and annoying. Frequently, they bordered on being unprofessional, as Petey often shared his own personal thoughts on topics no one at the FBI cared about. But he never mentioned the strange figure in the metallic bodysuit Angela chased down in the show’s fourth episode. At least, not directly.

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After the show’s eighth episode, the only two documents added to Peteypedia were pieces related to the novel Fogdancing. It was the book about “loneliness” Adrian Veidt was reading in his cell on Europa, and it appeared multiple times throughout the season.

The only thing comic readers knew about Fogdancing was that it was a) wildly popular and b) written by Max Shea. He was the “author” of Tales of the Black Freighter, a fictional comic book within the Watchmen graphic novel that thematically mirrored Moore and Gibbons’ story. (Ozymandias killed Shea after the author finished his work on Veidt’s giant squid.)

Agent Petey’s site provided a deep look at what the apparently hard-to-understand novel was about. This is how he described Fogdancing in a memo he wrote after finding a copy of the book in Wade Tillman’s shelter.

“Shea, a former writer of acclaimed, genre-bending pirate comics (including the thrice-filmed “Charnel Messiah”), wrote the novel in 1972 while working at a VA hospital in Cleveland. Facilitating an art therapy program for soldiers suffering from PTSD, Shea was struck by their testimonials — their awe of serving under the god-like Dr. Manhattan, their guilt of committing atrocities with the Comedian, their rationalizations about going from liberators saving a people from communism to conquerors seizing a country for capitalism. Their poignant stories of shattered worldview and conscience inspired Shea to capture the confused state of America’s heroic character.”

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Petey, who mentions in his memo he entered a Fogdancing summary competition years earlier, ends that message with some self-reflection. It indicated he was undergoing a major change of his own.:

“Finding that edition in Detective Tillman’s gloomy bunker (what are the odds?) and reading my own words
of years ago by its dim light, was a veritable Campbellian experience, an encounter with my innermost self
in some dreadful cave of reckoning. What I saw — what I see — in that reflection exposes limits and flaws
that I’ve never outgrown. This entire adventure in Tulsa has shown me that I am not the enlightened intellect
I thought I was, but remain compromised by blinkered, assumptive, know-it-all thinking. I feel challenged
to engage our culture with a more generous and empathetic spirit. (Perhaps I’ll start by giving the fiction of
American Hero Story a second chance.) If I’ve just confessed to any incompetence that should cost me this
job, I accept that.

He also shared his old summary to his site. And it was Petey’s documents about Fogdancing, combined with his height and lithe build, that led us to theorize he was Lube Man. That strange, tall, thin man Angela followed wore a skintight silver suit and used oil to help him slide into the sewer. And this is how Petey describes the Fogdancers, who are essentially war criminals, in the novel (bold ours):

“They’re the most special of special-forces, braver than a Ranger, deadlier than a SEAL. Fogdancers do the ghastly wet-work that grease the wheels of the American machine and mop up proof of all the sick stuff you’re not supposed to do during combat. The canisters of toxins, the animals with weird boils, all the charred bodies who can still breathe and talk. See him now in your mind’s eye, moving through boiling clouds of Sunset Haze, wearing his gas mask and skin-tight silver suit shimmering with SPF-666, looking slick and doing what must be done, in secret, to keep you and me and all of us free. Or so we tell ourselves.”

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LubeMan dresses like a Fogdancer, a character who obviously fascinated Petey. Those two documents alone make Petey the only logical candidate to be that slippery figure. Petey obsessed over superheroes and then he suddenly found himself in their midst in Tulsa. And his experiences there caused him to have an existential crisis. Sounds like a perfect recipe to make him put on his own mask.

And now, the last entry on Peteypedia has all but confirmed our theory. The FBI fired Petey (off-screen) for insubordination and he then went missing. Or rather, he likely went into hiding. His now former boss wrote this in a memo to Petey’s ex-colleagues:

“Given the simultaneous deaths of a U.S. senator and a prominent trillionaire, it would appear Petey has taken it upon himself to continue the investigation despite our closing it. It’s clear now from his memos that Petey (Hero Enthusiast-Obsessive/Solipsist on the Werthem Spectrum) is at risk for vigilante behavior, and most likely, always was. Perhaps sooner or later, this task force will be investigating him.”

One of the items found on Petey’s now abandoned desk? “A jug of what appears to be some kind of canola oil,” which sounds perfect for sliding into sewers. However, considering the moral ambiguity—if not outright war crimes—of the super soldier Fogdancers, it seems like a weird costume for a “hero” to wear.

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If Petey really is embracing his dream to be a masked vigilante, is he also going to embrace the ethically questionable tactics of his chosen inspiration? We know there’s great meaning in him picking that skintight silver suit. This was the last thing he ever wrote to his colleagues at the FBI:

Agent Blake once told me that masked vigilantes often get two origin stories in life. The identity that circumstances create for you, and the one you choose for yourself. Perhaps the same can be true for me.”

A masked hero with an oversized ego and questionable tactics? Dale Petey’s Lube Man sounds like a perfect character for season two of Watchmen.

Featured Image: HBO

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Warning: This post contains major spoilers for Watchmen‘s first season.

Showrunner Damon Lindelof won’t commit to another year of Watchmen, but he hasn’t completely ruled it out either. If Watchmen caps at one season, it will go down as one of the best one-and-dones in television history. That said, the series did leave some intriguing doors open to continue the story. The finale raised new questions, and other ideas that came up during the season were never revisited. Here are six ways Watchmen set up a second season.

1. Angela’s Egg

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Season one’s cliffhanger—did Angela obtain Dr. Manhattan’s powers?—is the most obvious jumping-off point  for a second year. All signs point to the fact that Angela did gain the powers. It defies the laws of physics an egg remained perfectly intact after being smashed to the ground. Only Dr. Manhattan could have kept it safe. And with Will telling Angela, “You can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs,” it certainly seems like “Cal” left some clear instructions behind for his wife.

It’s hard to imagine Watchmen without an all-powerful, complicated human-god figure around to raise the stakes, and season two already seems to have a new Manhattan replacement ready. In fact, it might have two.

2. “Dr. Moscow?”

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The writing on Watchmen was truly phenomenal, with even the tiniest moments paying huge dividends later. With such a high level of craftsmanship it’s hard to think any one scene or line of dialogue was filler. Yet one quote seemingly had no connection to anything that happened in season one.

The scene in question saw Senator Joe Keene talking to reporters after the Seventh Kavalry attempted to take him “hostage” in episode three. A reporter yelled out, “Can you comment on the Russians building an intrinsic field generator?”

It seemed like a monumental question at the time, because Jon Osterman became a blue god thanks to an intrinsic field subtractor. That was the only time the issue was raised though. Why mention the Russians and amazing technology at all if they weren’t going to matter in season one? It only makes sense if Russia will play a huge role later.

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America’s pending nuclear war with Russia framed the original Watchmen comic. The U.S.S.R. invaded Afghanistan after Dr. Manhattan, America’s ultimate nuclear deterrent, left Earth. Russia’s aggression brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation, and only Adrian Veidt’s squid stopped that. But as we learned, the squid didn’t really bring peace and love. And if the real world has taught us anything, it’s that Russia might not be quite as committed to being America’s ally as it once seemed. The former Soviet Union would instantly regain its footing as a superpower if it creates its own superbeing.

Angela might be the new Dr. Manhattan, but she could meet her equal in Dr. Moscow.

3. LubeMan

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A new memo on the show’s companion website Peteypedia has all but confirmed our theory that LubeMan is (now former) FBI Agent Dale Petey. The thin figure in the skin-tight gray suit was only seen once in season one. Sister Night chased him until he slid into a sewer. It was a weird scene that ended up going nowhere, seemingly.

But a disgraced former agent with an unhealthy superhero obsession would make for a dynamic character in season two. Especially since his costume is a direct reference to a character from Fogdancing, an important (fictional) book in the Watchmen world.

4. The Kids Might Not Be Alright

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Young Topher finally seemed to find some peace after discovering Angela was a superhero. But is that a good thing? “Masks make men cruel,” and they cover up a lot of painful emotions and make them impossible to recover from. For a kid who lost his parents under truly awful circumstances, it might not be the best thing for him to find comfort in masked vigilantism.

But at least he’s not in Bian’s shoes. She realized she’s a clone filled with the memories of a dead woman. Then she saw her mother/daughter die while attempting to become a literal god. You don’t have to be a child psychologist to know that this is a lot for a kid to take in. Now Bian’s a genius child trillionaire orphan with access to Lady Trieu’s fortune and technology. What will she do with those incredible resources, a broken heart, and impossible-to-answer questions about her own identity? Will she want revenge? Will she want to rescue her “grandfather” Ozymandias from jail, or kill him? She seems capable of anything and everything, and could easily fulfill the kind of role Adrian Veidt and Lady Trieu played previously.

The next chapter of Watchmen could end up being its answer to The Wire‘s fourth season.

5. The Truth About the Squid

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The worst people in the world, white nationalists, were right about Adrian Veidt’s squid. It was a huge hoax. Now Laurie Blake and Wade Tillman are going to reveal the truth to everyone, using Ozymandias’ own stupid message. And when they do, they will take down President Robert Redford and much of the U.S. government too.

It’s going to reshape the entire planet overnight. It will destroy three decades of tenuous world peace. Redford’s liberal policies could become null and void, and anger could replace mass fear about alien invasions. And even if Russia doesn’t have its own Dr. Manhattan, the world could return to the brink of nuclear war once again.

It’s enough to set up multiple seasons of stories.

6. Nite Owl

The only still-living major figure from the original comic not seen in the first season was Nite Owl. Dan Dreiberg was referenced on the show, and Laurie still keeps a pet owl as a tribute to her ex, but that was it. He wasn’t released from jail and he never personally contributed to the story, even though his iconic airship Archie did.

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A Nite Owl return in season two would help connect the show and comic in a new way. It would also open up new possibilities for Laurie Blake’s own story. And Nite Owl was arguably the most pure-hearted of the old superheroes. How has he changed—or not—after years on the run and decades spent in jail?

Watchmen might not return for a second season, but it won’t be because there’s not more story to tell.

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Warning: This post contains major spoilers for the season one finale of Watchmen.

Watchmen had a lot off proverbial eggs to juggle in its finale. It needed to resolve multiple “vast and insidious” conspiracies in a way that also connected every major character. It had to conclude numerous plotl ines while offering emotionally fulfilling conclusions to its more personal stories. And it needed to pull all that off under the incredible weight of its own expectations and standards. The show’s first eight episodes were television at its best. The writing and acting were both sublime. Its story, full of mysteries and flashbacks, was wild, surreal, and at times totally crazy, yet it was still accessible and heartbreaking. Considering this, calling the finale “only good,” which it was, may feel like an insult. On the whole it just didn’t reach the same transcendent level as the rest of the season. But two amazing scenes did.

A major pitfall to offering so many intriguing elements on a show full of mysteries is that they all start to feel equally important. That builds expectations, fair or not, for what role they will play in a story’s endgame. Ultimately, not everything that seemed vital on Watchmen ended up mattering in the end, which did feel like a letdown.

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Cyclops’ mesmerism technology, which Will used to make Judd Crawford kill himself, didn’t end up proving otherwise important. Despite Will’s decades-long fight against the white nationalist organization, there was no poetic justice to their demise. They were unknowingly used by an impossibly brilliant woman, but she quickly disintegrated them once they were defeated. There was no larger payback using their own awful methods, and their scores of followers were essentially let off the hook, because there was no great white reckoning.

The gigantic Millennium Clock also ended up feeling like a red herring. Lady Trieu’s massive and mysterious structure, the one that literally loomed so large all season, was really just a big battery. All it did was power up her much smaller Manhattan-draining machine. The show did a good job combining Trieu’s plan with the Seventh Kavalry’s in a way that made sense and logically brought everyone together, but it ended up feeling much smaller in scope than what the show seemed to be building towards.

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As did Lady Trieu herself. She wasn’t quite as interesting in the end as she was before we knew what she truly wanted. The series did a superb job showing how Vietnam was Dr. Manhattan’s greatest victim. And it gave us a shadowy figure named for a real-life warrior hero who fought for Vietnamese independence. Yet Lady Trieu’s plan wasn’t really about revenge, which would have made her story more personal. Her goal ended up being a classic case of someone craving power. Lady Trieu might have hated Dr. Manhattan, but her attempts to destroy him weren’t really about Vietnam. She just thought she’d be a better god than he was. She ended up feeling more like a stereotypical comic book stock character and less like the dynamic figure she had been previously.

Her demise at the hands of her father also contributed to an oversized role for Adrian Veidt. He was a huge part of this episode, and that came at the expense of two other characters who were more important figures during the season. Laurie Blake and Wade Tillman felt like minor secondary figures to a man who spent the entire season in an intergalactic Looney Tunes subplot. Jeremy Irons was brilliant again, but there was too much Ozymandias in the finale. And even if he’s finally going to answer for his squid, him getting a chance to legitimately save mankind first seems like too good a fate for him.

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But these complaints are all relative to the show’s previous excellence, which created an incredibly high threshold to live up to. The Millennium Clock ended up being a Millennium Ball, but it was still a cool plan to kill Dr. Manhattan. And all that time on Europa with Ozymandias did matter in ways that made sense both plot-wise and thematically. This was a good finale that featured outstanding acting, logical conclusions, and some beautiful cinematography.

The most personal elements of the episode were also its best. The conclusion to Dr. Manhattan and Angela’s relationship was tragic and beautiful. He always knew being with her would lead to his death, but he didn’t care. It was worth it, and it might have left the world in a better place. And while he used his godly powers to send others away to safety, his human side made him keep Angela nearby. He didn’t want to die alone.

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In his final moments, the man cursed to experience his entire life all at the same time finally got to enjoy that power. As his life truly flashed before his eyes, all he felt was love; all he saw was Angela. It was as powerful a moment as any during the season, which was no easy feat considering many there were.

Yet, somehow, just a few minutes later, it was matched by Angela and her grandfather’s scene in the theater, which rendered the emotional weight of 100 years of pain and fear and anger with quiet dignity. Will’s story ended where it began, and it came with a family that had been stolen from him long ago. Angela was finally able to open up and let herself feel all the emotions she had been covering up her whole life. Two superheroes took off their masks and let the other one see them for what they really were, good and bad.

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Even if nothing else had worked in this episode, those two scenes with Angela would have made it a success. They were Watchmen at its absolute best, and a fitting and worthy end to what was a great season of television.

Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist. You can follow him on Twitter at @burgermike, and also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.

Featured Image: HBO

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Warning: This post contains major spoilers from Watchmen‘s season one finale.

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Watchmen‘s first season didn’t go out with a bang. It went out with a lot of them, as frozen baby squids fell from the sky. They stopped Lady Trieu from becoming the new Dr. Manhattan, but that was only one of many monumental moments in the episode. Here’s everything that happened in a season finale that was bizarre, intense, and heartbreaking.

“Surprise! It’s a Girl!”

Adrian Veidt was Lady Trieu’s father. She was conceived on November 1, 1985, one day before he sent his giant squid to New York City. He just didn’t know that. Trieu’s mother Bian broke into his office at Karnak and stole one of his sperm samples while Ozymandias recorded his message to future President Redford. She referenced the words of the real-life Vietnamese warrior hero Lady Trieu as she impregnated herself. She then escaped Karnak, with Veidt unaware of what she had done. (Between her and Nite Owl, Ozymandias has a lot to learn about strong password security.)

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In 2008, the modern day Lady Trieu visited her naïve father. She initially entered his good graces by praising him for his squid scheme. He was already isolated and bitter by then. “Redford won’t even return my calls,” he whined. Veidt also explained his ongoing baby squid showers to her. He used a random automated system to teleport them into the stratosphere.

Trieu called that a “rerun” and asked how he would save the world if the proverbial doomsday clock started up again. He didn’t have an answer, but she did. She was going to use a quantum centrifuge capable of absorbing Dr. Manhattan’s energy to become a god herself. Then she would then do all the things Manhattan never did but should have. She’d destroy all nuclear weapons, fix the air, and solve world hunger.

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She needed $42 billion from him to do that. He refused after Trieu told him she was his daughter. He had built himself up from nothing, and she could too. As a final insult, he swore he would never call her “daughter.”

Veidt Catches a Bullet and a Ride

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The Game Warden wasn’t Veidt’s natural enemy on Europa. Veidt made him play his adversary to help stave off madness during his long wait to be rescued. Ozymandias knew it would be years until Trieu could save him, because she told him in 2008 how long it took for her probe to reach Jupiter. (Which is where she unexpectedly found Dr. Manhattan’s unique radioactive frequency.) He needed to pass that time with his very own villain, which he created by making the Game Warden wear a mask, because they “make men cruel.”

Forever an asshole though, Veidt couldn’t even give a dying man a kind word. He couldn’t lie to the Game Warden and say he was a worthy adversary. Masks do make men cruel.

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From there, Ozymandias boarded his Trieu’s rescue ship (she got his “save me daughter” message). He was preserved in gold until the night Lady Trieu planned to become Dr. Manhattan. His daughter reveled in how he had to “completely cave” and “humble” himself to her after she freed him from his gilded prison.

At least Lady Trieu was a worthy adversary. Being told by the newspaper salesman that “nobody cares” what happened to Adrian Veidt was much worse for his ego.

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Cyclops’ Master Manhattan Plan

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Senior leadership of Cyclops extended to some of the most powerful people in the country. That included Joe Keene’s father. The elder Keene was the Senator who authored the 1977 bill that outlawed masked vigilantes.

Cyclops didn’t care about the squid; they wanted to destroy Adrian Veidt’s “real monster,” President Redford. Their original plan was to get Joe Keene Jr. elected President. That involved orchestrating White Night so they could get the police in masks. They would then control both the law and the Seventh Kavalry, which would help get Keene elected. He could then undo the grave “injustices” against White Americans they blamed Redford for.

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But on White Night, an unknowing Cal saved Angela by teleporting the second Kavalry in their home shootout to Gila Flats, New Mexico. Jon Osterman became a god there. Manhattan’s instinct to save his wife directly led to his own death.

Using “stolen” Lady Trieu technology (which she let the Kavalry take), Cyclops was able to trap Manhattan in a unique cage. Those old watch batteries that were seen being collected in the premiere were old synthetic lithium ones created by Dr. Manhattan long ago. They melted them down to make bars that Manhattan couldn’t escape. The blue god was locked inside by his own technology, which also made him drift in and out of his past life.

Lady Trieu’s Secret Plan

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Like we suspected, Lady Trieu was using the Kavalry for her ultimate purpose. Cyclops had no idea she manipulated them to capture Dr. Manhattan for her. Angela Abar tried to warn the smug senator, but he ignored her. He turned on his machine anyway, and because he absorbed “quantum energy” without filtering it first, he popped like a balloon.

That was the moment everyone in the Kavalry’s abandoned mall was instantly teleported to the Greenwood District in Tulsa. Lady Trieu was waiting there with her floating quantum centrifuge. (Which apparently needed a massive structure just to turn it on. Despite her Modern Day Wonder, most of her structure was a battery of sorts.)

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Greenwood was where the show began, when young Will’s life was destroyed during the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. It was a fitting place for Cyclops’s leaders to be murdered, as Lady Trieu fulfilled her end of the deal with Will. They were disintegrated by Manhattan-like technology.

The Deaths of Jon Osterman and Lady Trieu 

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Dr. Manhattan was able to teleport Veidt, Laurie Blake, and a returning Looking Glass to Karnak by touching Joe Keene’s blood and guts. The remains of the exploded senator had leaked into his cage. Ozymandias immediately recognized Manhattan had sent him there to “save the day,” which he did by weaponizing his baby squids. Those frozen tiny cephalopods destroyed Lady Trieu’s quantum centrifuge. They fell from the sky like bullets fired by a gatling gun.

She might have been his daughter, but the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. Adrian Veidt knew Lady Trieu was a raging narcissistic who would use Dr. Manhattan’s powers to subjugate the entire world. “Anyone who seeks to attain the power of a god must be prevented at all costs from attaining it.” All that’s left of Lady Trieu is her mighty works and Bian, her daughter/mother clone (who knows the truth about who she is).

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Unfortunately, the frozen squid bullets were too late to save Dr. Manhattan. Trieu had already drained him of his power, killing him. He didn’t teleport Angela to safety when he had the chance though. “I don’t want to be alone when I die,” he told her. But his last moments might have been the first time ever his curse of seeing and experiencing his entire life simultaneously was a blessing. As he died, he was reliving every moment he had spent with Angela. When his life flashed before his eyes it was full of love.

He might have been a god, but Dr. Manhattan’s death was all too human.

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The Arrest of Adrian Veidt

Laurie Blake kept the secret of Adrian Veidt’s squid for 34 years, but fear of that squid haunted Wade Tillman during all that time. The two decided it was finally time for Ozymandias to answer for his crimes, even after Veidt legitimately saved the world. He killed three million people, and he will finally face the consequences for his actions after getting a ride back to the world on Nite Owl’s old ship, Archie.

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The people in the United States government who perpetuated Veidt’s lies over the years will also answer for what they did. That includes President Robert Redford. His arrest, and the truth of Ozymandia’s squid becoming public, could send the world into chaos.

Angela and her Grandfather

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Will had known all along what Lady Trieu was really after: power. Dr. Manhattan had told him to ally with her to stop Cyclops, but Will wasn’t truly working with her. And thanks to his Manhattan, Will got his family back. And he got it back while sitting in the same theater seat he was in when his family and life were stolen in 1921. Him and his granddaughter discussed how the masks they wore hid their fear and pain, but “wounds need air” to heal.

Angela invited him to stay with her and his great grandkids “for a couple days,” a reunion decades in the making. As they left the DreamLand theater, the broken sign spelled out “DR M.” He had brought them together, and likely for more than one reason.

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What’s in an Egg?

“Considering what he could do, he could have done more.” Will was right, and so was Lady Trieu. Dr. Manhattan could have truly saved the world. He could—and should—have made all the nukes disappear. He should have purified the air and made food plentiful. Dr. Manhattan was a god, but he never answer mankind’s prayers. Throughout Watchmen‘s history, heroes never do. The are no supermen coming to save the world.

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But you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs. And Manhattan’s death might have been the only way to give the right person the power to finally do all the things he never did. It would have to be someone who knows about pain and suffering, and someone who doesn’t actually want that power. And it would have to be someone he loves and trust. Someone like Angela Abar.

Was that egg she found “inexplicably” intact really full of his powers? Was the final part of Dr. Manhattan’s plan to make Angela the new him?

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We don’t know for sure, but it doesn’t take a big leap of faith to think she can now walk on water.

Featured Image: HBO

The post Explaining Everything from the WATCHMEN Finale appeared first on Nerdist.

The entire fate of the world will be determined with one last chapter of HBO’s Watchmen. We don’t know how they’ll do it, but we can’t wait to finally get answers to the many mysteries we’ve obsessed over throughout the season. Here are our 12 biggest questions for the finale. Tick tock, tick tock….

1. Who did/will Dr. Manhattan give his powers to?

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Forget “Chekhov’s Gun,” we’re all about “Manhattan’s Egg.” You don’t discuss transferring your atomic powers via an organic vessel unless you are going to. Or already have. Dr. Manhattan will either give some or all of powers to someone else before the Seventh Kavalry can take them. Our best guess for who that might be/was? Angela’s grandfather Will, the original superhero of the Watchmen world, who he met with ten years earlier.

2. What is Lady Trieu’s real goal?

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Lady Trieu wants to “save f***ing humanity” from white nationalists gaining the powers of a literal god, but is that all she wants? She seems to also hate Dr. Manhattan and possibly America itself for annexing Vietnam. She might even be working with the unaware Seventh Kavalry to achieve revenge for her country. But is it possible that she might have the exact same aspirations as Joe Keene and she wants to steal Manhattan’s powers for herself? Her motives and endgame are likely as complicated as Adrian Veidt’s were in 1985. Will they be more or less sinister?

3. What does the Millennium Clock do?

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Bian said, “It tells time.” Yes, but time is relative, especially for someone with Dr. Manhattan’s powers. So what time is the massive, nearly indestructible Tulsa building telling? And what might it have to do with the mesmerism technology Will used to make Judd Crawford kill himself? Is the Millennium Clock a type of bomb? Time machine? Hypnotic device? Or does it instill memories in people, a la Trieu’s Nostalgia? The possibilities seem both endless and terrifying.

4. Who is Lady Trieu’s father?

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Her daughter-mother clone Bian will be there when Lady Trieu accomplishes her life’s work, but she also said her father will be too. So who is he? The three best candidates seem to be Dr. Manhattan, Adrian Veidt, and Laurie Blake’s father, the long-dead Comedian. Death hasn’t stop Lady Trieu from having her own mother around, so even a crazy theory like Blake being her father isn’t impossible.

5. Where is Ozymandias now?

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Adrian Veidt’s entire story has been told in flashback so far, but we expect him to catch up to the current timeline in the season finale. If he made it off Europa after 2016, when and how did he do so? Lady Trieu seems like his only hope, so did she save him with a spaceship? Or via teleportation? If so, where is he now? Have we already seen him back on Earth? Is that gold statue in her vivarium actually him in his own Han Solo-in-carbonite-esque prison? And what role did a horseshoe actually play in all this?

6. Why did the Seventh Kavalry collect old watch batteries?

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One of our first questions from the premiere has still not been answered, though it has been slightly focused. They are planning on destroying Dr. Manhattan and stealing his powers. How will old Manhattan-created batteries help them do that?

7. Where is Looking Glass?

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Joe Keene showed Wade Tillman his entire sad life was a lie. There was never an alien squid. Then the Seventh Kavalry tried to kill Looking Glass after they used him. He escaped, along with one of their masks, so what is he going to do with it? Did he already infiltrate the Kavalry? For what purpose? Could he help save the day before they acquire ultimate power? or is he focused on anyone who helped maintain Ozymandia’s lie?

8. Will the world learn the truth about Adrian Veidt’s squid?

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A “vast and insidious conspiracy” is trying to steal Dr. Manhattan’s powers. Meanwhile, Adrian Veidt’s own conspiracy that killed three million innocent people seems on the verge of finally being made public too. But with so much going on, will the truth of Ozymandias’ “alien” squid finally become public? Or will it remain the greatest lie ever told all in the name of world peace? And who, if anyone, still wants it to remain a secret and why?

9. Will Laurie Blake learns the truth about Dr. Manhattan?

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Laurie Blake’s unique “suitcase” and her calls to Mars proved she is still somewhat attached to Dr. Manhattan. How will she react to learning she was talking to him (and calling him “hot”) the whole time without knowing it, i.e. in the form of Angela’s husband Cal? How much more can one person take in a life full of tragedy and insane situations? And could it be another ex that helps saves her? Could Nite Owl finally appear for an unlikely reunion of the Crime Busters?

10. Who is LubeMan?

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Sister Night saw a tall, lanky masked man in a full skin-tight gray body suit. He lubed himself up and escaped down a sewer when she gave chase. And that’s all we’ve seen of him. At least in the suit. Was that mysterious figure who only appeared in one scene actually Special Agent Dale Petey? He fits the body type, and two new files on the show’s companion website certainly point to him as being the strange “Fogdancing” figure we saw.

11. Who is Will really working with?

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Dr. Manhattan met with Will long before the former Hooded Justice knew Lady Trieu. If Lady Trieu’s plans are more nefarious than we think, Dr. Manhattan would also know that, which means Will knows that too. Who is Will really working with then? Did his alliance with Dr. Manhattan give him the power to stop Lady Trieu from going too far? Or is she truly Will’s ally as well?

12. What is Dr. Manhattan’s plan?

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He said the Seventh Kavalry will destroy him, but it seems unlikely Dr. Manhattan would let an evil group steal his powers without a plan to prevent that. So even if he did/will transfer his powers, how exactly will that prevent Joe Keene from becoming an all-powerful god? Why was Dr. Manhattan unconcerned by any of this during his final moments with Angela? Why was it “important for later” that she see him standing on the pool? What did his actions after waking up in 2019 have to do with his ultimate plan?

And what did waffles have to do with any of it? And broken eggs?

We’ll find out during the season finale. Tick tock. tick tock….

Featured Image: HBO

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Warning: This post contains major spoilers for episode eight of HBO’s Watchmen.

We’ve been unravelling the bizarre mystery of Adrian Veidt throughout Watchmen‘s first season. It’s been a weird journey, but the show’s beautiful eighth episode finally gave us many of the answers we’ve been looking for. We know exactly when Dr. Manhattan sent Ozymandias to his paradise-turned-prison on Europa and how long he has been there. We even saw the man Adrian Veidt became after he “saved” the world. And his post-credits scene was also a clue about where he is going next. (Or where he might already be). But even beyond that, his jailhouse confession also explored one of the show’s biggest themes—loneliness. It’s a feeling that drives every main character on the show.

HBO’s companion website for the series, Peteypedia, said the world learned last saw Adrian Veidt in public in 2007. In 2012 authorities announced the recluse genius billionaire formally missing. He was officially declared dead in 2019, at the start of the show.

But Dr. Manhattan actually sent him to Europa in December 2009. They had not seen each other for 24 years, 41 days, and 13 hours—not since Veidt launched his squid on November 2, 1985. (Math!)

Phillips and Crookshanks always celebrated the anniversary of Veidt’s arrival on their home planet with a cake. Each year was marked by another candle. The one he was given in his cell in episode eight’s post-credits scene had seven. Ozymandias started making his horseshoe-aided escape in 2016.

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Veidt’s plans for mankind’s “great future” had been ignored. His squid might have saved the world from nuclear annihilation, but it didn’t save humanity from itself. Even continuing the lie with his baby squid showers wasn’t enough. All of the lives he sacrificed had been for nothing. Not only that, no one knew what he had done. The brutal reality he was both unappreciated and a failure was too much for even the “smartest man in the world.” It left him broken, reduced to a being Watchmen’s own Howard Hughes-like figure. He lived alone in his ivory tower of Karnak, yelling at his wall of TV’s like an angry old man.

When Dr. Manhattan offered him a chance to live in the kind of Utopia he always dreamed of, an emotional and exhausted Veidt jumped at the chance. He left his disappointments behind for a paradise full of people “who are designed to care for others instead of themselves.” He had everything he wanted. Or so he thought.

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Unfortunately, Veidt learned the same thing Manhattan did. “Infinite love” is unsatisfying. Creatures made to “appease” and “adore” you no matter what you do can’t give you real love. Ozymandias wants to be worshipped, but Phillips and Crookshanks’ worship is empty. They make a literal Garden of Eden into a form of Hell for him, so like Dr. Manhattan, he wanted to leave. At least messy Earth with its flawed, selfish people is authentic. Unlike Dr. Manhattan though, Adrian Veidt can’t teleport. He spent years working towards that goal, breaking the only rule he had to obey. He became a joke, despite all of his genius and efforts: pigs declared him guilty in a kangaroo court, tomatoes were smashed in his face by idiots, and he was left to rot in a dingy jail.

The episode’s post-credits scene indicated he will/has finally succeed in getting off of Europa. Phillips finally gave Veidt a horseshoe when he actually needed it. Lady Trieu, if she saw his “Save Me” message, can rescue him after he digs himself out of his cell.

She already might have, and we might have seen his return to Earth. When she bought the egg farmers’ land, which was also a flashback, a spaceship crash landed. She said it belonged to her, and Adrian Veidt may have been on it. That would explain how he might currently be a gold statue in Trieu’s vivarium. Maybe it was safer to transport him back at high speeds from Europa in a Han Solo/carbonite situation. If he is her secret father, she might be waiting to free him when she launches her Millennium Clock. It would be one hell of a reunion.

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But that final scene with the game warden was about more than just the end of Veidt’s silly escape plan. It touched on the show’s recurring theme of loneliness. It’s a feeling that drives the actions of almost everyone on the show.

Ozymandias was reading Fogdancing in his cell, a fictional Max Shea novel mentioned in the original comic. (Veidt hired Shea to help create his giant squid and then killed him.) The book was a huge hit in the world of Watchmen, and has been spotted multiple times on the show. The egg farmer’s wife was reading it. A VHS copy (of one of the book’s two movie adaptations) was on the rack when a young Angela Abar bought Sister Night. Veidt said he likes the novel because it’s about loneliness, something he has felt his whole life. Alexander the Great is the only person Veidt has ever felt any kind of connection with. He decorates Karnak with items celebrating the famous Macedonian to try and make that feeling tangible.

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But he’s not the only one who feels lonely. Angela Abar grew up alone, like her grandfather Will did. Wade Tillman’s fear of another squid left him isolated in his sad bunker. Laurie Blake makes calls to her ex and carries around the weirdest suitcase in the world to deal with her loneliness, which isn’t as strange as Lady Trieu cloning her own mother. Even the members of the Seventh Kavalry feel abandoned and alone in a country they hate. Even Dr. Manhattan felt alone in his own world, enough that he came back to Earth even though it means he will be destroyed.

Laurie Blake said people put on a mask to hide their pain, and all of those covered faces hide the same pain. They are lonely. Phillips and Crookshanks know it, too. Their god already abandoned them and it hurt them when their new master wanted to leave them, too. Dr. Manhattan’s departure turned the Game Warden, the original Phillips created to care about others, as bitter and angry as anyone on Earth. Loneliness turned his heart cold.

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For the first seven episodes, Adrian Veidt’s story was absurd and silly. And despite everything he still hasn’t learned any humility. His savior complex is worse than ever. “My children are undoubtedly standing in their cribs crying out in desperation for me to return,” he said. But the same thing that brought him to Europa is the same thing that has made him want to leave, and that’s a human emotion we all know.

“Heaven is not enough because Heaven doesn’t need me,” Veidt said, because even geniuses and gods want to be needed and loved. Everyone does. It’s the only way to know you’re not alone.

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Warning: This post contains major spoilers for episode eight of HBO’s Watchmen and speculation about Lady Trieu.

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When she was five years old Watchmen‘s Lady Trieu named herself after a legendary warrior who fought against Chinese occupation of Vietnam. The trillionaire genius now aspires to be a hero herself. She plans to save the world by stopping the Seventh Kavalry from acquiring Dr. Manhattan’s powers. The Rorschach-wearing face of Cyclops is an enemy of the world, but the group might also be Lady Trieu’s naive allies in her ultimate goal. She wants to kill the god who stole her country. It would be a double-cross worthy of her hero, Adrian Veidt.

Watchmen‘s seventh episode bolstered our theory that Lady Trieu hates Dr. Manhattan like many others in her homeland. However, her hatred seems to go beyond how he helped America annex Vietnam as the 51st state. She knows he’s not on Mars and never has been. (Her deep space probes were certainly how Ozymandias knew Manhattan was on Europa. Veidt said to Jon “a little elephant” told him.) He gave people false hope as a decoy, just like all of those phone booths she set up around the world to “call” him are fake. Dr. Manhattan isn’t listening to anyone’s prayers, and Lady Trieu resents the blue deity for abandoning mankind.

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The Seventh Kavalry doesn’t have any obvious personal issues with Dr. Manhattan, though. They worship Richard Nixon, and Manhattan was Nixon’s great weapon that won the Vietnam War. They merely want to capture and destroy Dr. Manhattan—which the blue god said they will do—so that Senator Joe Keene can steal his abilities. Cyclops wants to restore power to white Americans. Making Keene a god instead of a president ensures they not only can, but that they will always maintain white power. Lady Trieu has no intention of letting that happen.

“They’re going to capture Dr. Manhattan, and they’re going to destroy him, and then they’re going to become him,” she told Angela. “Can you imagine that kind of power in the hands of white supremacists? I’m sorry Angela, I know you asked me not to say it but I am saving fucking humanity.”

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In episode eight the Kavalry was able to pull off the first part of their plan. They used a tachyonic cannon to teleport Dr. Manhattan to their secret base. It was an amazing feat requiring amazing technology. But a machine that can best a literal god seems to be well beyond anything a bunch of “morons” (as Joe Keene called them) could build. That’s because they didn’t.

Every machine they constructed in front of a tied-up Laurie Blake, the same ones they used to capture Dr. Manhattan, belong to Trieu Industries. They all had the same “T” logo sported by Trieu workers at her Millennium Clock.

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Did the smartest woman in the world, a genius beyond compare, allow her technology to be stolen by idiots? Did they really get a hold of Adrian Veidt’s Teleportation Window (which she owns)? And did they do all of this right under her nose in Tulsa. It seems insulting to Lady Trieu to even suggest it. Plus, her knowledge of their plan shows she’s aware they have her technology and her machines. How else could they best Dr. Manhattan? Which leaves only one other option for how they got her tech—she gave it to them.

Lady Trieu admires Adrian Veidt, the “truly great man” she knew before he went missing. She bought his companies and took control of his estate. She was also the one he almost certainly called to save him from Europa. It’s even possible Veidt is her father (and also that he actually IS the gold statue in her vivarium). Either way, Trieu told Laurie Blake and Angela Abar, “So much of my success grew from the seed of his inspiration.”

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Lady Trieu’s connection with Veidt goes beyond her respect for him, though. She is the modern day Ozymandias. He too was/is an unparalleled genius determined to save the world at al costs. To do so he used people as unwitting pawns in 1985, including supposed allies. A big part of his giant squid scheme involved letting Rorschach go on a wild chase for a masked vigilante killer. Veidt even hired a hitman to attack him to sell the lie. It was one of many red herrings he used to hide his true intentions.

Letting the Seventh Kavalry do her dirty work for her, all while she plans to stop them, would be a move right out of Ozymandias’s playbook. Lady Trieu’s not playing 4D Chess, she’s playing a game no one else is even aware of, just like Veidt did when he “saved” the world.

And just like Ozymandias, part of her plan involves trying to kill Dr. Manhattan. Veidt tried to destroy him with an intrinsic field subtractor. It was the same machine that turned Jon Osterman into a god, but it didn’t work. But that was 34 years ago, and in that time Lady Trieu’s technological advancements have far exceeded what Adrian Veidt had in 1985. An intrinsic field subtractor might not have killed Dr. Manhattan then, but a new and improved one could now. And that’s exactly what Cyclops seemed to be building.

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There would be an obvious poetry to Trieu using the Seventh Kavalry the same way Veidt used Rorschach. She’s smarter than they are, and they don’t even know she is playing them. But she might finally do the one thing Ozymandias couldn’t—she could kill Dr. Manhattan. Cyclops wants an all-powerful god who can control the world, and she knows how that turned out for Vietnam.

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Warning: This post contains major spoilers for episode eight of HBO’s Watchmen.

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Watchmen‘s eighth episode was a stunning hour of television, one that beautifully complemented the original comic. The story of Jon Osterman’s life got a moving and likely final chapter, as his tragic tale seems ready to come to an end after emerging from his tunnel of love. But even though Dr. Manhattan appears on the verge of death, his powers aren’t going to die with him. He’s going to transfer them to someone else. That is, if he hasn’t already.

Dr. Manhattan’s awful “power” of experiencing all time simultaneously is how he knew he would only get ten years with Angela. He doesn’t merely know the future, his future is happening to him at the same time as his past and present. Since it is already happening, there’s nothing he can do to change it either. But that doesn’t make him a victim of fate.

As Angela readied herself to save him, Dr. Manhattan realized the answer to the question of what came first, the chicken or the egg? “The answer appears to be both, at exactly the same time,” he said. That’s how his life works, too. But while he can’t “change” his future, it’s not pre-written in the stars. He writes his own future. He’s “destined” for a specific path because his actions bring him to it. Unlike us mortals, he’s burdened by the knowledge of it.

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It was only fitting Angela asked Dr. Manhattan during their first meeting if this was some “Zeus” thing, because his answer to the question of “fate versus freewill” hearkens back to the Ancient Greeks. Throughout Greek tragedy, characters like Oedipus fulfill prophecies told about them before their birth, and yet their lives were not controlled by fate. Just like Manhattan who knows the future, the soothsayers simply foresaw the future Oedipus would create for himself. The universe doesn’t conspire against us, it conspires with us.

Manhattan’s revelation isn’t just philosophical though. It tells us—and Angela—what we might expect for his final act.

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During their first meeting at that Vietnam bar, Dr. Manhattan told his future wife, “I would never pass my abilities on to someone without their consent.” No one had ever heard him say anything like that before, so Angela asked if he really could give someone his powers. “I suppose I could transfer my atomic components into some sort of organic material. If someone were to consume it they would inherit my powers.”

“So you can put them in this egg,” she said, holding the one he had just created from thin air, “And if I ate it I could walk on water?”

“Theoretically yes,” he responded.

She didn’t eat that egg, but it did give birth to monumental possibility for Watchmen‘s season finale. Dr. Manhattan says he can create another god-like figure, and that’s exactly what he might do as part of his grand plan to defeat the Seventh Kavalry. He might have already done that already.

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The last thing Dr. Manhattan needed to do before having his memory erased was meet with Will Reeves. “Cal” said he was worried about Angela, who was desperate to have a family of her own. During that meeting though Dr. Manhattan also gave us a glimpse into his plans for 2019.

He told Will, “The future is uncertain and my ability to influence events is limited. In order to ensure an optimal outcome I would like to form an alliance.” Dr. Manhattan knew the Seventh Kavalry would use their tachyonic cannon to transport and ultimately destroy him (because for him they already had). Yet he didn’t use his powers to turn that cannon into water or teleport it to another planet when he had the chance. We don’t know why he didn’t yet, but his meeting with Will indicates he does have a plan to make sure the white terrorist group doesn’t acquire his powers.

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Dr. Manhattan said his ability to influence events is “limited.” That implies he has some control. He wouldn’t leave his African American wife behind to live in a world run by a white racist deity. Dr. Manhattan would make sure his powers went to someone else first. That person could end up being Angela herself. Or maybe it will be Lady Trieu, whose desire to save the world from those same white nationalists would align with Dr. Manhattan’s wishes. (Though maybe he shouldn’t trust a Vietnamese woman who hates him as much as she does.)

But could Manhattan transfer his powers after his capture? He said he “would never pass my abilities on to someone without their consent,” but when will he have time to ask someone for consent while the Kavalry has him imprisoned? That’s why he might have done it before, when he transferred his powers to Will.

The former Hooded Justice, the first superhero ever, is 105 years old, yet he has the build and strength of someone half his age. He also seems impervious to heat. He drinks piping hot coffee like iced tea and he pulls eggs (always with the eggs) out of boiling water with his barehands. It’s almost like he has superpowers himself.

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Dr. Manhattan could have asked for Will’s consent to give him his powers in 2009. If he accepted them, that would explain why Manhattan sent his kids to be with their grandfather. Who better to protect them than someone with god-like powers? It would also explain how Will learned about the Klan robe in Judd Crawford’s closet and the vast and insidious conspiracy Cyclops is still engaged in. He could teleport himself anywhere and see anything. And it would also explain everything Dr. Manhattan did in his final moments with Angela.

Angela asked “Cal” why he didn’t mention the Seventh Kavalry was already outside. He said, “There were more important matters to discuss.” That involved him making waffles (which, with this show, means we can’t rule out a giant waffle being dropped on Tulsa), and it involved him walking on water.

“You need to see me on the pool,” he said to Angela, “It’s important for later.” Why would that be important for later? Because only a god can walk on water. If she sees her grandfather Will—or anyone else—walk on water Angela will know everything.

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Or maybe he made waffles because he knew she’d break those specific eggs, and not a different egg he left sitting in the fridge, one that contains his powers. With Watchmen, any possibility is in play, because no theory is too crazy.

One idea isn’t crazy, though. Even if Dr. Manhattan is going to die, his powers will live on.

Featured Image: HBO

The post Why Dr. Manhattan Will Transfer His Powers on WATCHMEN appeared first on Nerdist.

Warning: This post contains major spoilers for Dr. Manhattan’s life as seen in episode eight of HBO’s Watchmen.

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Chapter four of the original Watchmen comic, “Watchmaker,” tells the tale of Dr. Manhattan’s life before and after the accident that made him a god. In it he shows the unique and terrible way he experiences his entire life at the same time. It’s beautifully written, haunting and powerful, like a Greek tragedy about the perils of power. But it also reads like the sad origin of a super villain. At that point in his existence Dr. Manhattan had become an uncaring god indifferent to humanity’s fate. “A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles,” he said earlier. That’s not who he was by comic’s end, though, and that’s the man we met in Watchmen‘s gorgeous eighth episode, which was an incredible hour of television and a fitting tribute to the graphic novel.

Try to remember the best moment in your life, all the joy and elation you felt. Now try and remember your worst moment, with all of the pain and hurt it brought you. Can you hold both memories at once? What if you also try and remember the second, third, and fourth best and worst moments too? Seems impossible, but even if you could how quickly would the weight of them collapse on you, leaving you flat? How soon would would all those emotions overwhelm you and make you feel nothing at all? That’s the burden Jon Osterman carries at all times. He’s always experiencing every event in his life, along with every emotion he ever felt during them, at every moment. Extreme happiness and sadness, anger and confusion, hope and despair, they are always right there, now and forever. Because now and forever are the same to him.

DC Comics/Dave Gibbons/John Higgins

Maybe we don’t know what it’s like to be a god, but that horrible burden makes it easy to understand how Dr. Manhattan lost most of his humanity by 1985 when he left Earth for Mars. The few emotions he still felt had been manipulated by Adrian Veidt, and his only other connection to mankind, his girlfriend Laurie Blake (then Juspeczyk), left him. It was too much even for a literal god. And who would want to continue living the complicated life of a human when you aren’t one anymore? Who can stay connected to people when they can’t empathize with you or you them?

But at the end of the graphic novel he did reconnect with humanity. He realized human life is a thermodynamic miracle, each and every person’s existence a near improbability defying all odds of science and logic. Dr. Manhattan wasn’t the uncaring monster we first met, he was Jon Osterman, a man unfairly burdened with the powers of god.

He left Earth again in 1985 after failing to stop Adrian Veidt’s squid, but not to run away from life. He took his newly rediscovered empathy with him to create life of his own somewhere else. That was the last we saw of him until HBO’s Watchmen brought him back, in a story that truly understands the beautiful tragedy introduced in the comic.

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Dr. Manhattan went to Europa and created a simpler kind of life, one devoid of the complications of Earth. His Adam and Eve, who care more for others than themselves, were based on the couple who saved him from the Nazis as a young boy. It was a gorgeous revelation, one of many throughout the episode, that showed just how human he is. He also feels regret for what he did to Vietnam, and he set up a decoy of himself on Mars so the world would not think he had totally abandoned them. Of course he had for 24 years, until he returned on VVN Day in 2009. That’s when an unbelieving Angela asked him why he had come back. “So I could meet you,” he told her.

Dr. Manhattan returned to Earth for the most human reason of all—love. Real love, not the “unsatisfying” infinite love he got from his children on Europa. He created them to adore him. They couldn’t provide him with the feeling of fulfillment you can only get when someone chooses to love you of their own free will. There are no thermodynamic miracles of love if you create them with the wave of your hand. Those require risk. They require sacrifice and pain, because without pain joy is meaningless.

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And he wanted to take that risk even though he knew it would all end in tragedy. Him and Angela came out of their tunnel of love to find the Seventh Kavalry waiting for him with a tachyonic cannon. Dr. Manhattan always knew they would. There’s no reason to doubt him when he says they will also use it to destroy him. To him they already have. For Dr. Manhattan tomorrow is now, and so is yesterday, forever and always. It’s horrible when you remember underneath that glowing blue skin he’s just a man. That’s what also make it so beautiful too, because it was his final moment with Angela that made it so he always loved her. She was going to try and save his life even when she couldn’t.

Her true love for him is why it was all worth it, even though he has always—and will always—live through their sad ending already.

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“By definition don’t all relationships end in tragedy?” he asked her when they first met. They do, and yet one foregoes them because of that reality. It’s the nature of love and being loved that some day we say goodbye, like Angela and Jon are now. But their ending will also mark the end of the tragic life of Dr. Manhattan, a character whose lost humanity only highlighted just how human he was.

His touching and terrible tragedy started in the comic, and its final chapter only made it better.

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Warning: This post contains major spoilers for episode seven of Watchmen.

We spent the first six episodes of Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen wondering when Dr. Manhattan would return, only to find out he was there the whole time. We thought there was a chance he was hiding in plain sight, but we didn’t think he was Angela’s husband Cal. So why did he come back to Earth after leaving in 1985? And how did he wind up in Angela’s life? The answers might be found in his past, when another woman who was a thermodynamic miracle reconnected him to humanity.

A Man Without Time

Dr. Manhattan does not experience the passage of time the way we do. For him, time is not linear with a defined past, present, and future. It’s not even a flat circle. It’s more like a dot; his entire existence takes place all at once. He simultaneously perceives everything that has happened and will ever happen to him. He takes a photo in New Jersey in 1959 while at the same time sitting on Mars in 1985. He is not totally omnipotent, though. Back in the ’80s, Adrian Veidt used tachyons, a hypothetical time-traveling particle, to blur Manhattan’s vision of the future. It was how Veidt was able to launch his giant squid without Manhattan knowing.

DC Comics/Dave Gibbons/John Higgins

Manhattan’s experience with time is more a curse than a power. The de facto deity, who was born Jon Osterman, can see the future, yet he has no ability to change it. Dr. Manhattan has to play out his life like an actor who can’t change his character’s lines or his fate. Without extraordinary interference, he never experiences surprise, hope, expectation, or even fear. It’s why that brief moment when tachyons took away this ability was exhilarating for him. For the first time since the accident that made him a god, he didn’t know what was going to happen, and it was exciting for him, even in the midst of an unthinkable tragedy. Excitement about not foreseeing the death of three million innocent people might sound inhuman, but it was one of Manhattan’s most human moments in the original comic.

The way he experiences time contributed to him losing his ties to the rest of mankind. His growing disconnect with humanity turned him into an uncaring monster. When told about a former colleague’s death, he famously answered:

“A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there’s no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts. Why should I be concerned?”

Laurie Blake referenced that heinous statement on HBO’s Watchmen when she told Dr. Manhattan her joke about him being sent to Hell (which ended with him saying he’s already there because of how he experiences time). It was only fitting that she reminded him he once found no value in human life, because she was the one who long ago reconnected him to mankind.

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Laurie Blake’s Trip to Mars

Dr. Manhattan first met Laurie Blake, a.k.a. Silk Spectre II (then known as Laurie Juspeczyk), in 1966 when she was only 16. The two began a relationship shortly after, with Manhattan no longer interested in his girlfriend Janey Slater, who left him soon after. The Keene Act of 1977 then outlawed any non-government-sanctioned masked vigilantes, temporarily ending Laurie’s superhero career. In 1981, the two moved to a U.S. government base. Dr. Manhattan was America’s greatest weapon and supposedly the ultimate nuclear deterrent. Her job was to keep him happy. But their relationship over the years deteriorated as Jon (as she still called him) drifted further away from humanity. Tired of only being someone’s girlfriend, tired of being under strict surveillance, and tired of him, Laurie left Dr. Manhattan in early October of 1985.

DC Comics/Dave Gibbons/John Higgins

The two spoke one more time before Adrian Veidt’s squid attack on November 2. Manhattan brought her to Mars where he had spent the last few weeks alone. It was there, where Dr. Manhattan allowed her to momentarily experience time the way he does, that Laurie finally realized the truth about her father: He was Edward Blake, better known as The Comedian, the man who tried to rape her mother years earlier.

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Thermodynamic Miracles

Dr. Manhattan didn’t see the truth of Laurie’s parents as a tragedy or a joke. He saw the improbability of her very existence as a thermodynamic miracle that helped him find his lost humanity.

“Thermodynamic miracles… events with odds against so astronomical they’re effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing. And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter… Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold… that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermodynamic miracle.”

DC Comics/Dave Gibbons/John Higgins

She answered by saying that logic meant ever human in the world was a miracle. He agreed.

“Yes. Anybody in the world… But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget… I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from the another’s vantage point. As if new, it may still take our breath away. Come… dry your eyes. For you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly. Dry your eyes… and let’s go home.”

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Dr. Manhattan did love Laurie. Though he left the planet when she broke up with him, it was that love for her that ultimately helped him realize that every human life has value. Only then did he return to Earth to try and save mankind. Unfortunately, he was too late to stop the squid. But he didn’t forget what he had learned on Mars.

After killing Rorschach to ensure the peace created by Adrian Veidt’s atrocity would stand, Dr. Manhattan said he was leaving Earth again. “Human affairs cannot be my concern,” he told Veidt, “I’m leaving this galaxy for one less complicated.” So he left, but this time with his newfound love of life. He told Ozymandias he would try creating his own life somewhere else. The imperfect Crookshanks and Phillips are proof that might not have been as easy as he thought. Even the seemingly all-powerful Dr. Manhattan has his limits. One such limit: that he never fully lost his connection to his past life.

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Something brought him back to Earth. Was he lonely? Did Dr. Manhattan miss people, or Laurie in particular? Did he feel guilty for what he did to Vietnam? We don’t know yet the why of his return, but we know what kept him here. We know what made him give up his powers—another thermodynamic miracle.

The Miracle of Angela Abar’s Life

Angela Abar is the granddaughter of two survivors of the Tulsa Massacre. She survived the terrorist attack that killed her parents. She also endured after losing her grandmother under impossibly awful circumstances. Her very existence defies probability, both good and bad, just like Laurie Blake.

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And just as it was a thermodynamic miracle that brought Dr. Manhattan back to the world in 1985, one kept him there until 2019.  Laurie Blake understands why better than anyone. She didn’t know that Cal (who she kept saying was hot) was the man she once loved. But she never forgot what Jon Osterman said to her 34 years ago on Mars about her life. She has referenced thermodynamic miracles on the show twice, including to Angela Abar herself. Without knowing, she somehow knew.

Dr. Manhattan is indirectly responsible for so much of Angela Abar’s miraculous life. If he hadn’t conquered Vietnam, her parents never would have moved there. She never would have become a cop or a masked vigilante. And they likely never would have met. Even their relationship is a thermodynamic miracle.

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It’s why even though his secret life on Earth was a shock, from everything we know about Dr. Manhattan’s past his love for Angela isn’t a surprise.

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Warning: This post contains major spoilers from the seventh episode of Watchmen.

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You know what’s crazier than the end of Watchmen’s seventh episode? Someone on Reddit predicted it. Yes, someone actually theorized Angela’s husband Cal was Dr. Manhattan in disguise. We thought he might be hiding in plain sight, but we didn’t think he was Cal. It’s an amazing revelation, but it wasn’t the only huge moment in an incredible and shocking hour of television. Here’s everything that happened, what it all means, and the biggest questions it raised.

Angela’s Superhero Origin Story

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The most (only?) straightforward parts of the episode were the flashbacks to Angela’s sad life in Vietnam as a kid. In 1987, her parents were both killed on VVN Day (Victory Over Vietnam) by a separatist bomber. When the people of Vietnam first saw Dr. Manhattan in 1971 they felt “An Almost Religious Awe,” the episode’s title that comes from Manhattan’s own words in the comic. But while some still celebrate him as a god, others clearly think of him as the ultimate weapon of an oppressive regime. Not everyone in Vietnam wants the country to be the 51st state in the U.S. and they haven’t for a long time.

The future Sister Night didn’t just get a badge and the dream of being a cop from that Vietnamese officer, though. Her parents’ murderer was executed without trial. Angela Abar and her colleagues in Tulsa in 2019 don’t have much use for the law and frequently act without boundaries as well.

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We now also know why Angela is so angry like her grandfather, Will Reeves. The death of her grandmother was too cruel even for a cruel universe. Is this why Dr. Manhattan found her? Was her life so sad it broke through to his remnants of humanity, the same way the revelation about Laurie Blake’s father did in 1985?

Lady Trieu, Crazy (Like a Fox?)

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First, good luck to anyone trying to draw Lady Trieu’s family tree. Second, WTF? The show’s mysterious trillionaire offered so many crazy moments she needs her own subsections just to break them all down.

Nostalgia and Memory

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Trieu’s now illegal memory pills are more than just a brilliant plot device to tell the story of Hooded Justice. The virtual “promo” Angela watches to explain her treatment showed how invasive and destructive Nostalgia can be, especially when a person takes someone else’s memories. In large doses, it can drive them insane and cause them to lose their own identity. And no one but Lady Trieu knows how to treat an overdose.

That treatment involves an elephant. Nostalgia is so dangerous, Angela’s “natural host” was a six-ton animal. It required a living creature that large to clear her system of Will’s memories. It’s only fitting—and telling—it was an elephant, since “an elephant never forgets.”

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In 1985, Adrian Veidt’s squid killed millions with a psychic shockwave the human mind couldn’t handle. Now, another super genius who is trying to save the world has pills that can also can destroy the mind by feeding it terrible images.

Mother Bian and Lady Trieu’s Mystery Father

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Trieu wasn’t feeding child prodigy Bian own horrible memories of the Vietnam War like we thought. Bian is a clone of Trieu’s mother, receiving her own memories. “If I had a nickel….”

The more important issue raised by that incredible revelation, though, is the identity of Lady Trieu’s father, who she said will soon join her. There are three prime candidates: Dr. Manhattan, the Comedian (Edward Blake), and Ozymandias.

Dr. Manhattan and Edward Blake both fought in Vietnam. Lady Trieu’s mother was a brilliant and successful woman herself. Manhattan, a known philanderer, might have been attracted to her. Maybe Trieu is what brought him back to Vietnam eventually, where he then met Angela Abar. It could be why Lady Trieu has so much resentment for the god who doesn’t answer anyone’s prayers (which she’s been collecting). She hates Manhattan for what he did to Vietnam and for abandoning the world, but maybe Trieu also hates him for being a bad dad.

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Edward Blake also got dozens of Vietnamese women pregnant during the war (we saw him kill one in the comic). The Comedian was murdered in 1985, but that’s not a problem for the parent-cloning Trieu. If The Comedian is her father, that would make her and Laurie Blake sisters. On this show, that sounds about right.

But if her father is Adrian Veidt (who really might be that gold statue,) it would explain why he sold her his estate and companies. She is his only intellectual equal on the entire planet, and who better to trust than your own blood?

The Past and the Future

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In her first scene on the show, Lady Trieu spoke of legacy and how it’s passed down in blood. In this episode, she also talked about how people are afraid to let go of past trauma because then they won’t have an excuse to move forward. During her lunch with Angela, the loudspeaker counting down to the Millennium Clock’s activation said, “The future thanks you for your service.” Later, during her own announcement, she said future generations will “gaze upon our mighty work” with despair, a direct reference to Ozymandias who killed millions to move the world forward.

She’s focused on making a better world tomorrow, but she’s the one who made it possible for people to experience the past as if it was happening now. Nostalgia’s “failure” was so important, it’s what she focused on during her big “rah-rah” speech.

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Those two facts aren’t mutually exclusive. By forcing people—and America itself—to confront their past, she will drag the world forward whether anyone wants it or not. Bian wasn’t lying when she said the Millennium Clock tells time. It will likely tell of many times.

Looking Glass’s New Mask

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The last time we saw Wade Tillman, he returned home after betraying Angela. His house was then attacked by armed members of the Seventh Kavalary, who were likely there to clean up a major and questionable loose end. So much for that. Looking Glass killed all of them in his squid bunker. Before he fled, he took one of the Kavalry’s masks. Was he outside Angela’s house at the episode’s end? Possibly, though another 7K member was in that truck too. It might have been hard to infiltrate the group that quickly, especially on such an important task with one other person. It seems unlikely, but definitely not impossible for someone with his skills.

Either way, Looking Glass will almost certainly appear at a later date in a Rorschach disguise. Fortunately for the world, he is definitely an enemy of the Kavalry, cover front for Cyclops.

Joe Keene Makes Laurie Blake Feel Blue

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Kudos to Laurie Blake for being a fantastic detective. The FBI agent cracked Judd Crawford’s murder and the underlying Cyclops conspiracy connected to it almost immediately. However, she really has to improve her reaction time to slow-moving trapdoors. (In fairness, who expects a trapdoor anywhere, let alone in a living room?)

As for Keene’s master plan….. uh…. wow. “The original idea” for Cyclops, of which Judd Crawford and his wife Jane were both members, was for Keene to become president. He would have overseen a shift back to a country run by a white American for white Americans. But as Jane Crawford told Laurie, “Something extraordinary happened and suddenly, President seemed a bit small potatoes.”

We don’t know exactly what that extraordinary event was. Was it finding out the truth about Ozymandias’s squid, getting their hands on a Teleportation Window, or finding out Dr. Manhattan was living in Tulsa?

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What we do know is their ultimate goal: Joe Keene and Cyclops are going to try and capture, destroy, and become Dr. Manhattan. Keene will use technology to become the blue god himself. We heard in an earlier episodes the Russians were working on their own intrinsic field generator. That’s the machine that created Dr. Manhattan. Was Laurie Blake watching the Kavalary make their own? While we don’t know the specific science of their plan, it must have something to do with the 7K collecting old Manhattan-created lithium batteries.

If successful, a god-like Keene would rule over a white-power world government. No one would be able to stop him. When Lady Trieu says she has to save the world from that nightmare, she definitely is not crazy. At least, not about this.

Ozymandias on Trial

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We would cry too if we had to spend 365 days straight in a courtroom, but that’s not why Adrian Veidt was in tears by the end of his scene. The smartest man in the world, someone who believes he saved mankind, was being judged by a jury of half-idiot space clones. His very existence had become a big joke, as a judge in a mask held up a pig declaring him guilty.

This is his reward for being mankind’s “savior?” To be exiled without recognition for his contributions to humanity? To be laughed at by morons? His hero and the only human he ever viewed as his equal was Alexander the Great. He’s remembered as a conqueror and a hero. Meanwhile, Adrian Veidt is farting in a kangaroo court on Europa.

The big reveal at episode’s end also seems to finally prove Dr. Manhattan put him there. Manhattan would not have wanted to worry about Adrian Veidt while living his secret, unaware life with Angela. The safest thing for Manhattan to do before erasing his own memory was to remove Veidt from the planet entirely. Manhattan successful sold the idea to Ozymandias as being given his own paradise, when in reality, it was a prison.

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If Veidt does get back to Earth (or already did) will he want to remain silent about his achievements anymore? Did his banishment break him by breaking his vanity and illusions of grandeur? But telling the truth about the squid could ruin Lady Trieu’s plan. How can you save a world if it destroys itself first?

That’s why he’s probably a gold statue in her vivarium.

Dr. Manhattan in Disguise

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In 1985, Dr. Manhattan left the complications of mankind behind. He abandoned Earth to go off and make life somewhere else. (Phillips and Crookshanks prove that’s easier said than done.)

At some point—and based on Angela’s age hopefully in the late ’90s at the earliest, since Dr. Manhattan did date a 16-year-old Laurie Blake once—he returned to Earth and Vietnam. Did he regret what he had done to the country? It’s unclear, but eventually, he met and fell in love with Angela Abar. Their only chance to be together was for Manhattan to erase his own memory (his idea) and adopt a human identity. It allowed Angela and Jon, his real name, to be together and to live a (relatively) normal life as a couple.

But Will Reeves discovered the truth. Either through his investigation of Cyclops or on his own, he learned that Cal was really Dr. Manhattan. Will told Lady Trieu, who then created a fake news feed of Dr. Manhattan on Mars to help hide the truth. This is seemingly why everything is happening in Tulsa. A literal god is there, and white nationalists want to kill and become him.

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It’s not clear Lady Trieu wants to save him, though. Her conversation with Angela strongly implies she knows the truth about Cal, but she also seems to hate Dr. Manhattan. He conquered Vietnam and he abandoned mankind. He doesn’t answer any prayers because he doesn’t listen to them. The Millennium Clock might stop the Seventh Kavalry, but what if it stops Dr. Manhattan too? The only thing that might be scarier than Dr. Manhattan leaving Earth is him coming back.

Now, after a hammer to his head, he really is back. And if Watchmen‘s seventh episode was this crazy, what the hell is going to happen in the final two episodes with a blue god walking around?

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Warning: This post contains major spoilers for Watchmen‘s first six episodes.

There’s only one thing we can say for sure about how Watchmen will end: literally anything is possible. Once you’ve witnessed space babies pulled out of a lake like lobsters and then Easy-Bake Oven’ed into full-grown slaves, it’s hard to be surprised by anything. But all of the show’s standing mysteries offer clues about what could happen in the season’s final three episodes. Here are the most pressing issues that still need to be answered, along with some of our best theories on what’s really happening and why.

What will Lady Trieu and Will’s Millennium Clock do?

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A trillionaire who can also grow babies in a lab and a 105-year-old former superhero are feeding their relatives’ real memories of their own horrible pasts. They also built a massive, menacing “clock” in the middle of Tulsa and no one knows what it does. Could it be a giant mind-control flashlight like the one Will used on Judd Crawford? Or does the Millennium Clock do exactly what Lady Trieu’s daughter Bian said it does: tell time? Whatever it does, it sounds like it’s counting down to a catastrophe.

Does Will have superpowers, and how?

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Hooded Justice, the first ever masked vigilante who was known for his almost superhuman strength, but the man behind the mask is now 105-years-old. How can Will Reeves still be so physically fit? And why does he seem to be impervious to heat? Did Lady Trieu, who made her fortune in advanced pharma and medical tech, make a pill that creates actual super-powered people?

Why is the Seventh Kavalry collecting old batteries?

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Republican Senator Joe Keene is the Seventh Kavalry’s secret leader. He’s also running for president and could undo the progressive policies Adrian Veidt made possible with the giant squid. The Kavalry knows all about Veidt’s lie. They also have his teleportation window and are testing how to use it. But what does their master plan have to do with old watch batteries? Why were they collecting so many of them in the show’s premiere? It could be far more sinister and deadly than what Cyclops had planned in 1947.

Is Doctor Manhattan back on Earth?

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Everyone on Earth believes Dr. Manhattan is on Mars. They also believe it’s impossible for him to take on a human form. Are either of those things correct? Manhattan is basically a god, and he can be in two places at once. Is he currently on both Earth and Mars right now? If so, have we already met him in his human disguise?

Why did Trieu set up phone booths to Dr. Manhattan?

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Lady Trieu has no apparent connection to Dr. Manhattan. There’s also no obvious reason for her to have set up phone booths around the country for people to call him on Mars. Why do it then? Is it all a ploy to record people’s secret thoughts so she can use those messages as a weapon against them? Or is she trying to emotionally manipulate Dr. Manhattan as part of her plan, the same way Adrian Veidt did in 1985? Dr. Manhattan would have to be listening to all of those messages for that to work. Is he? Could hearing all of the hopes and fears of mankind reconnect him to humanity and Earth? Or are Laurie Blake’s messages all he needs to hear to return?

Who put Adrian Veidt in space and why?

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The mystery of Ozymandias has only grown stranger the more we’ve learned about his magical space prison. His story has also taken place entirely in the past so far, and seems certain to resolve in the present timeline of the show. So who put him on Jupiter’s moon Europa? Dr. Manhattan? Who will bring him home and why? And have we already seen him in 2019? Was he the gold statue of Lady Trieu’s vivarium?

Why did Kavalry members storm Looking Glass’ house?

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The Seventh Kavalry seemingly tried to free Looking Glass from his lifetime of fear over alien squids. He rewarded them by taking Angela Abar “off the board” days before they plan to unleash their master plot. So why did they storm his house with guns at the end of episode five? Are they done using him and are now trying to tie up any loose ends? If he escapes their clutches, could he ultimately be the one who stops them? Or, just as Rorschach failed in 1985 with Ozymandias, will he be too late to do anything about it?

How many people know the truth about the Squid?

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The Seventh Kavalry knows. President Robert Redford and seemingly every U.S. senator on the Appropriations Committee know. And now Looking Glass knows. With the secret of the giant squid no longer so secret in 2019, how many others also know the truth? And what will happen if everyone does?

We don’t know the answer yet, but we do know one thing: anything is possible. And anything could be terrifying.

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Warning: This post contains major spoilers for Watchmen‘s sixth episode.

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Hooded Justice was the first masked adventurer in the world of Watchmen. He was also the only masked hero in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ comic who kept his secret identity. But what we thought we knew about him completely changed in the sixth episode of HBO’s Watchmen. It re-contextualized the character entirely, in a development that deepened the show’s ties with the graphic novel while also bringing its own story into focus.

Hooded Justice in the Comic

The original Watchmen comic reveals few hard facts about the noose-wearing Hooded Justice. His first documented act of masked vigilantism took place in Queens in 1938. He saved a couple from a mugging and beat up the three perpetrators so badly they had to go to the hospital. One of them he permanently paralyzed. Hooded Justice’s savagery became his calling card as a hero. It also led many armchair psychologists to believe his brutality and costuming adventures were related to his sexuality.

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A week later, Hooded Justice stopped an armed robbery at a local supermarket. He jumped through the window and beat up the group’s leader so viciously the other robbers dropped their guns and fled. (American Hero Story’s dramatization in Watchmen‘s second episode showed him beating up all of the assailants.) Witnesses described the masked-figure as tall and with the build of a wrestler. The press formally dubbed him Hooded Justice after this event.

He joined the Minutemen, organized and led by Nelson Gardner, a.k.a. Captain Metropolis, in 1939. Rumors started immediately that Hooded Justice and fellow group member Silk Spectre (real name Sally Jupiter, Agent Laurie Blake’s mother) were dating. The two were frequently seen arm-in-arm, but it was all for show to protect the group’s image. They were never a couple. Nite Owl, Hollis Mason, wrote in his tell-all book years later that “HJ” and Captain Metropolis were romantically involved. Sally Jupiter also implied the two men were a couple in an interview. That’s all she seemed to know about her “protector,” though. Jupiter never saw Hooded Justice without his mask. She didn’t know his true identity either, even though he was the one who saved her when the Comedian tried to rape her in 1940.

DC Comics/Dave Gibbons/John Higgins

The Minutemen broke up in 1949, but Hooded Justice remained active until 1955. That year, the House Un-American Activities Committee requested all masked vigilantes reveal their true identity to a congressman in their home state. Hooded Justice refused to share his identity with anyone, despite the government’s promise of anonymity. Mason Hollis wrote his former team member seemingly chose to retire instead. The first masked vigilante was never seen again.

That’s all we know for certain from the graphic novel, and even then, Hooded Justice’s relationship with Nelson Gardner is technically hearsay. The comic does offer a suggestion as to who he really was, though. A few months after Hooded Justice went missing, the very large, very muscular body of East German circus strongman Rolf Müller washed onto a Boston shore. (American Hero Story recreated this moment too.) He had been shot in the back of his head, execution style. The ultra right-wing newspaper The New Frontiersman said Müller might have been killed for being a Communist sympathizer, since he was East German. It was even suggested he was a Communist spy.

Hooded Justice himself had been known to hold far-right views. He had expressed approval of Hitler’s actions prior to the U.S. joining the war. While Müller’s supposed opinions and the totally unsubstantiated rumors he was a spy don’t match Hooded Justice’s own known political leanings, the two men’s physiques do. Here’s them side-by-side in the original Watchmen comic.

DC Comics/Dave Gibbons

Adrian Veidt theorized Eddie Blake, who promised to get revenge on the former Minuteman one day, might have killed Rolf Müller during a mission to unmask Hooded Justice in 1955. Veidt could never confirm his theory (though Ozymandias was rarely wrong) and the true fate of Hooded Justice was never discovered. The only viable candidate offered in the comic was Rolf Müller.

Now HBO’s Watchmen has given its own answer to that enduring mystery.

The Two Masks of Will Reeves

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The original Watchmen comic—and only the original comic—is canon for Damon Lindelof’s series. Before Watchmen and Doomsday Clock do not count. While the show is not changing the canon of the graphic novel, where Hooded Justice was most likely Rolf Müller, it uses the comic’s ambiguity to craft its own story. The series’ version of Hooded Justice now connects the show with the very origins of Watchmen‘s masked vigilantes. It also completely re-contextualizes the origins of superheroes in this world, and in doing so we now have greater insight into why the show is set in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Young Will Reeves survived the very real, very tragic Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. No one would have faulted him if he grew up bitter about the law that failed to protect him and his family. Instead he followed in the shoes of his hero, Bass Reeves. The exploits of the real-life sheriff were the inspiration of the movie Will was obsessed with as a child.

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The institutionalized racism he found in New York City was no different than what he had experienced in Tulsa, though. His near-lynching by his fellow white officers made it impossible for him to “trust in the law” anywhere in America. It also led to an unplanned start as a superhero when he saw innocent people under attacked. In that vulnerable moment, he found protection in the mask. It protected him from being a black man in a white world. Like Laurie Blake told Angela, the mask “hides the pain.” For Will Reeves, the anger that gave him physical strength was his pain.

The common belief in the comics was Hooded Justice wore a mask because of “sex stuff”. Will Reeves wore two masks—his hood and the white makeup to hide his skin color—so he could be a man of the law, even if it meant acting outside of it. (Superman comics also inspired Nite Owl, who was also a police officer).

Masks didn’t give Will Reeves what he wanted, though.

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The famous story of him jumping through the supermarket window was a convenient lie. It hid the truth that Hooded Justice had actually broken up a secret meeting of Klan members. He didn’t jump through the window in a daring and dramatic rescue, he jumped out of it to flee for his life. White America didn’t want to hear that story anymore than they wanted a black superhero.

His fellow Minutemen didn’t want to hear about Cyclops either. Will uncovered a “vast and insidious conspiracy” to make black Americans kill each other, and no one cared. Not even vain glory boy Nelson Gardner, who knew the truth about Hooded Justice. The only thing Will could believe in the end was mob justice. His hero Bass Reeves wouldn’t kill the corrupt white sheriff, but Hooded Justice had no other choice.

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HBO’s Watchmen didn’t completely re-write the story of Hooded Justice. He did have a sexual relationship with Captain Metropolis, and he was full of rage. Will might have even had sympathetic views about pre-World War II Germany after carrying his father’s WWI pamphlet for years. But he wasn’t some East German strongman hiding his sexual identity. He was a black man who knew he could never trust in America’s laws.

Seventy years later, he still can’t. Police chiefs with Ku Klux Klan robes in their closet and U.S. senators who might become president lead the Seventh Kavalry. And nefarious forces have never stopped plotting against black Americans. The difference now is Will has powerful friends, and he has Cyclops’ own subliminal technology to use against his enemies.

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American Hero Story doesn’t know the truth about Hooded Justice. History doesn’t know who Will Reeves was, that he was really black, or why he put on a mask. It doesn’t know why he wore a noose, or what happened to him in his hometown of Tulsa. But it does know one thing about Hooded Justice that has always been true: he’s angry. And he’s still channeling his anger into becoming a symbol of justice.

Featured Image: HBO

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Warning: This post contains major spoilers for the sixth episode of HBO’s Watchmen.

HBO

Watchmen‘s sixth episode featured a living flashback. Angela Abar didn’t just learn about her grandfather’s history as the first-ever masked vigilante Hooded Justice, she experienced it firsthand. The horrifying power of Nostalgia pills also gave us greater insight into what Will Reeves and Lady Trieu might be planning against the “vast and insidious conspiracy” he’s been fighting for more than 60 years. But the episode also showed Will’s old foe never disappeared. It got a new face and some world-changing technology.

Will Reeves spent years investigating Cyclops, a shadow organization connected to the Klu Klux Klan in New York City. The first time he learned about them was in 1938, when he broke up a Klan meeting in the back of a local supermarket. A paper indicated Cyclops was targeting multiple cities on the Eastern half of the United States. He also located “Mesmerism,” a book about hypnotism.

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He found out exactly what they were planning in 1947, when Danny Kaye’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty was in theaters. A subliminal message caused the theater’s black audience members to inexplicably attack each other with deadly force. Officer Reeves realized a camera had flashed a secret mind-control message to turn them on each other. He followed it to a warehouse owned by a known Cyclops member. Will found they were recording messages to make black Americans murder each other before he killed all of them. Hooded Justice burned down the building and all of the cameras, except for one that he kept for himself.

Will used that same “mesmerism” technology over 60 years later to make Judd Crawford kill himself. His flashlight sent a mind-control message that left the police chief totally helpless, just like that black movie audience. The Chief of Police hanged himself without thought. It’s a terrifying power that could kill millions if it could somehow be amplified to a mass audience.

Which might be exactly why Lady Trieu built her Millennium Clock.

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Both Will and Lady Trieu have been victimized by the United States. We know his story, but we’ve been given insights into her past too. Lady Trieu is from Vietnam, which the United States made the 51st state after Dr. Manhattan won the Vietnam War. Many other countries and people believe Vietnam is an occupied state. Lady Trieu, who shares her name with a famous warrior hero who fought against Chinese occupation of Vietnam, almost certainly does too. Her grievances against America are far more personal, though.

Lady Trieu’s daughter Bian woke up from a nightmare she suffered while hooked up to an IV. She described a dream to her mother about men burning down a village. It’s now clear from Lady Trieu’s conversation with Will that Bian’s nightmare was Lady Trieu’s own memory. She gave them to her daughter via Nostalgia. The two are both making their descendants experience their pasts so they understand what they are going to do in the future. In only a couple of days they have something catastrophic planned. All the evidence points to them enacting revenge against white Americans for their past and present crimes.

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It’s why Will expects Angela to hate her when this mysterious plan takes place—Angela’s kids are white. Even if they are safe and Will and Lady Trieu only target racists and bigots, the fallout will be unthinkable. It could destroy America entirely.

But they aren’t the only one who are counting down to an event that could change the very face of America. Last week’s episode revealed that Senator Keene, a current presidential candidate, is a leader of the Seventh Kavalary. His intentions seem to be more Machiavellian than ideological, though. He appears to have a real contempt for the racists in his employ, it’s just that has common cause with them. Adrian Veidt’s giant squid led to President Robert Redford. He’s enacted a progressive agenda for more than 30 years, including reparations for black Americans. White conservative Americans resentment over Redford’s administration turned violent on White Night. The Klan was replaced by the Rorschach-idolizing Seventh Kavalry, along with their rage and bigotry.

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Ultimately they want a return to the days of Richard Nixon, but undoing thirty-plus years of Redford’s liberal policies can’t happen overnight, even if Keene is elected. To do that, the Seventh Kavalry would need their own world-changing event, one that would reveal the truth of Ozymandias’s lie. And they have his teleportation technology to do it.

They aren’t going to drop a massive squid on Tulsa, but they can drop an unthinkable truth on America. When they do it will be under the banner of Cyclops. Looking Glass walked by the group’s logo in the Seventh Kavalry’s abandoned mall.

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Cyclops might not have the power of mind-control anymore, Will does, but they do have the truth on their side, and they have a way to reveal it to the entire world.

It’s why the two vast and insidious conspiracies unfolding on Watchmen are both counting down to the ultimate showdown. If they are both successful will anyone be left standing when it’s over?

Featured Image: HBO

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Warning: This post contains major spoilers for Watchmen’s fifth episode.

HBO

Some fans worry that adaptations, remakes, sequels, or—as Damon Lindelof describes his Watchmen series—a “remix” will somehow “ruin” the thing they already love. No amount of midichlorians can ever destroy a great piece of art. Not only is that concern almost always unfounded, sometimes experiencing a beloved story through the lens of another artist or medium can elevate the original work. That’s what happened in Watchmen’s fifth episode, which opened with a flashback to November 2, 1985, the night Adrian Veidt dropped his giant “alien” squid on New York City. It was the show’s most powerful and moving sequence, one that made Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ seminal comic book far more real and meaningful than ever before.

“Little Fear of Lightning” opens in possibly the most ominous place in the Watchmen universe: Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1985. The Soviet Union and United States are on the verge of nuclear war. The young Jehovah’s Witnesses are just across the Hudson River from New York City, working as missionaries, believing the end of the world is imminent. The only thing stopping nuclear holocaust is a transdimensional squid, courtesy of Ozymandias, in the middle of Manhattan. As we know from the book, Adrian Veidt genetically engineered a fake alien attack to bring about world peace. All he had to do to accomplish that was kill roughly three million people, traumatize millions more, and terrorize everyone on Earth forever.

DC Comics/Dave Gibbons/John Higgins

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon show the fallout from this unfathomable catastrophe in full, dialogue-free pages of the comic. Dead bodies cover the streets of New York City as giant tentacles hang from destroyed skyscrapers. The panels are haunting yet strangely beautiful thanks to the work of colorist John Higgins. Including minor characters among the dead also helps make the terrible scene more emotionally accessible. Even though the scope of the devastation is limited to a small section of Manhattan, the overall effect of the aftermath is monumental. It’s the kind of moment that fundamentally changes the world forever.

But for everything the graphic novel achieves in that moment, it’s a surreal experience. It’s the most comic book-esque element in the story. Otherwise it feels like an authentic portrayal of a world with actual superheroes and incredible technology. And it has to be. Adrian Veidt designed the squid to be “alien,” and the comic’s vivid colors highlight its extraterrestrial appearance. It works both visually and in the context of the story, but it also limits how “real” the monster feels. Combined with the near impossibility of comprehending the instantaneous death of three million people, the entire scene is ultimately more shocking than heartbreaking. And one defined more by its audacity rather than how we can connect to it emotionally.

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Seeing it on screen makes that connection. The brutal shot of the young girl who stole Wade’s clothes makes the surreal tangible. Ozymandias cloned the brain of a psychic and pumped violent imagery into it. Then he put that brain in a massive, colorful monster which emitted a psychic shockwave as it died. It was too powerful for human minds to handle. The story of the squid might be hard to make sense of, but the girl’s face wasn’t. Those not lucky enough to be in a house of protective mirrors die in the “blast zone”; blood pours from their eyes and ears, as a final frozen look of horror conveys the agony they felt in their last terrible moments.

If the scene had ended there, or after the camera panned over to a handful of traumatized survivors amid a sea of dead, it would have made the squid’s impact more powerful than ever. However, the camera continues across the Hudson and into Manhattan. With the weight of what we’ve just seen in Hoboken, it’s a nightmare come to life. Veidt’s victims are no longer faceless and remote, and neither was the tool of his heinous act. Seeing the creature draped across the greatest city in the world isn’t a splash page like in the comic. In the show, it’s heartbreaking.

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Our post-9/11 world gave that scene a context it never could have had in 1985. But it contributes to the overall effect; seeing it in the live-action series is more powerful than how it comes across on the pages of the comic. That’s not a criticism of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ work. It’s a compliment to what Damon Lindelof is accomplishing with his remix. It’s also an acknowledgement that different mediums have different strengths. No one would deny the graphic novel is nuanced, insightful, and beautiful in ways the movie adaptation isn’t, even when it’s at its most faithful.

HBO was never going to “ruin” Watchmen, but there was no guarantee it would do what it. The show stood on the giant shoulders of Moore and Gibbons and gave their work more emotional weight. It made both versions better.

Featured Image: HBO

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Warning: This post contains major spoilers for Watchmen‘s fifth episode.

HBO

The strangest part of this week’s Watchmen was not the giant monster that destroyed New York. The weirdest moment took place in an abandoned mall, when the Seventh Kavalry lured Looking Glass there to show him the truth about Adrian Veidt’s giant “alien” squid. The scene contained deep and important references to the comic book, and gave us insight into Senator Joe Keene’s mysterious plan. And all of it revolved around teleportation technology that could change the world once again.

“Are you opening portals?” Wade Tillman’s fear about the squid that nearly killed him in 1985 led to him becoming an expert on the “science” behind the event. That’s how he knew those basketballs falling from the sky were being thrown into a “CX-924 Teleportation Window.” It’s the machine the world believes brought the transdimensional squid to Earth, which is what Adrian Veidt wanted everyone to think.

DC Comics/Dave Gibbons/John Higgins

Part of Ozymandias’s plot involved preparing people to accept the “reality” of an extraterrestrial attack. For years, a number of his companies subliminally planted the possibility in the public’s consciousness. His movie theaters showed old alien invasion films. The most important aspect to this part of his plan was the work of the Institute for Extraspatial Studies. It was another one of Veidt’s corporations no one knew he secretly owned and operated.

Wade said the Teleportation Window he saw the Kavalry using was “just like the one they were playing around with at the Institute for Transdimensional Studies in Harold Square on 11/2” in 1985. Slight name change aside, the respected Institute was looking for energy sources from other dimensions. When the giant squid appeared on top of the building, it was easy to believe they had been responsible for accidentally bringing it to Earth. It was Veidt’s covert way to offer a plausible, scientific explanation for what had happened. In reality, he had utilized that very same technology to teleport his squid from Antarctica to New York City.

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An unintended result of Veidt’s grand plan was the world shunning Dr. Manhattan-related technology after the squid. The Institute was using technology based on Manhattan’s own teleportation power. (The god-like figure’s influence can be seen when the Teleportation Window turns Manhattan-blue as basketballs go through.) No one wanted to accidentally open another portal with technology based on Manhattan.

Looking Glass now knows the truth about other dimensions and aliens. He doesn’t have to worry Senator Joe Keene and the Kavalry are “gonna open up a portal in Tulsa, drop another squid on us.” But what exactly is Joe Keene planning with that teleportation machine? Just like Adrian Veidt in 1985, he wants to reshape America and the world into his own version of Utopia.

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“I’m not a murderer. I’m a politician,” Keene said to Tillman. He then explained his association with the Seventh Kavalry terrorist organization is a pragmatic association, not an ideological one. “I came down here and assumed leadership of these idiots to prevent that shit from happening again. And my buddy Judd did the same as Chief of Police, each of us managing our respective teams so we can maintain the peace.” That might sound like a lie, but it’s likely not.

Keene’s D.O.P.A. law allowed Tulsa police officers to be masked after the Kavalry’s White Night slaughter. It’s his signature achievement, the one he will tout during his current presidential campaign. It’s been such a success other cities around the country are close to passing similar laws. Its continued effectiveness was so important to both him and Judd Crawford, who was attacked on White Night. Infiltrating the group helped them both maintain the peace they craved.

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Keene’s motives are obviously more self-serving than Crawford’s were. Chief Crawford wanted to keep his officers safe; Keene wants to be president. Keene sent Laurie Blake down to Tulsa to find Crawford’s murderer to make sure that happened. He must maintain the peace to protect his presidential aspirations. But that’s not why he wanted Angela Abar “removed” from the proverbial board the next couple of days. That’s related to his secret plans for the Teleportation Window and his grand plans.

Robert Redford’s decades long presidency has been a sweeping success for liberal policies. It has made the right bitter and violent over gun and environmental laws, and furious over reparations for African Americans. And all of those Democratic accomplishments were possible because of Adrian Veidt’s lie.

The Seventh Kavalry wants to turn back the clock to Richard Nixon’s administration. Republican candidate for president Senator Joe Keen saw value in aligning with them. How will they get the country and result they want when the greatest lie and decades of liberal rule stand in their way?

Keene told Looking Glass he’s not going to send a squid through that Teleportation Window, he’s “gonna do something new.” Whatever it is will help him destroy what Adrian Veidt built.

Featured Image: HBO

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Warning: This post contains major spoilers for Watchmen‘s fifth episode. Be like Looking Glass and shield your brain.

HBO

Watchmen‘s flashback to the giant “alien” squid from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s graphic novel was the show’s most powerful scene yet. It made Adrian Veidt’s surreal and incomprehensible disaster—where a literal monster killed three million people—feel more real than ever before. Rather than a historic event that informs the show, Ozymandias‘s squid now shapes everything about it. And how we experienced that catastrophe, through the eyes of a young Looking Glass, has re-framed the entire world of Damon Lindelof’s sequel series.

Through its first four episodes, Watchmen has felt like a logical, authentic, and compelling followup to the comic. It has also seamlessly included countless Easter eggs that show a true love for the source material. Even its new characters and stories have direct ties to the comic. They feel original as opposed to adaptations; a testament to the series’ writing. The show has told a story both engrossing on its own while also referential. But there’s an inherent limit to how much a live-action series set in Tulsa can connect to a comic book set in an futuristic New York City in 1985. It’s hard to empathize with people, no matter how real they are, if a monster squid defines their entire existence.

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By letting us share the experience with young Wade Tillman, that barrier has been erased. Now we know why he’s Looking Glass. We know the terror of feeling the squid’s psychic shockwave; to have your head ripped apart from the inside. We walked out with him to find the unimaginable, the dead forever frozen in a final look of agony and fear on their face. The horror of what Adrian Veidt did that night truly came to life on the series.

And now we really understand how that event has haunted the world since. From those who were there personally to those who grew up in the squid’s shadow. There are those who try to ignore that threat by stoically cleaning baby squids off their windshield, and there are those who think of nothing else but a giant squid landing on them. But that “reality” is ultimately inescapable for both groups; everything in the world is built on and around that one moment.

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Detective Wade Tillman can’t forget what happened. He can’t stop running his own squid alert tests. He can’t stop wearing hats with the reflective material that seemingly saved his life in 1985. His fear and his obsession cost him his marriage. It’s also why he became Looking Glass. His alter ego doesn’t protect his identity from others; it protects his brain from a monster that has never left it. Everything he does and everything he has become stems from and is defined by the night of November 2, 1985.

Adrian Veidt wanted to save the world. The cost wasn’t just three million souls, it was the peace and happiness of everyone on Earth forever. The man Wade Tillman was before the squid didn’t survive that night. That naive, young missionary died. He was reborn a scared person who can’t enjoy the world he must live in now. How many billions in the world of Watchmen are living the same sad existence? What good is peace without the freedom of fear?

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By letting us experience the squid attack, and by showing us how it serves as Looking Glass’s own sad origin story, everything on Watchmen has changed. Every character, every event, every lie, every scheme, and every strange moment ties directly to that event with an intimacy that wasn’t completely there before. No one in this world can escape the squid, and now we can’t either.

Even Looking Glass’s other job as a human lie detector goes back to that night. He foolishly allowed a young girl in the fun house to trick him and humiliate him. And that, more than the 7th Kavalry or Lady Trieu, makes the end of the episode so terrifying. Wade Tillman has dedicated his life to two things since 1985. One is protecting himself from another squid; the second is knowing when someone is lying to him. Now he knows the squid was a lie, a lie that destroyed his entire life and left him and everyone else paralyzed for 34 years.

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The first thing Wade Tillman did when he learned the truth was betray his colleague Angela. And that was without fully believing the squid was fake. What will become of an otherwise good man if he accepts that Adrian Veidt’s monstrous deception was the real attack on him?

How will the the rest of the world of Watchmen react when they learn the truth too? The answer could be more catastrophic than the squid ever was.

Featured Image: HBO

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Watchmen‘s Dan Dreiberg and Laurie Juspeczyk (now Blake) were the only two people on the planet in 1985 who knew a transdimensional squid had not landed in New York. They knew Adrian Veidt had sent it. The newly romantic pair decided to keep the secret and go into hiding. There they continued their illegal costumed adventuring as the vigilantes Nite Owl and Silk Spectre. In 2019 though one of them is a highly respected FBI agent while the other sits in jail for the same crimes. And now we might know why. Laurie was willing to use that terrible secret to blackmail the U.S. government for her freedom.

And it might have worked because they already knew.

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Thanks to HBO’s companion Watchmen site, “Peteypedia,” we now have access to a redacted transcript of Laurie Blake’s interrogation after she and Dan Dreiberg were arrested in 1995, when they stopped Timothy McVeigh’s terrorist attack in their alternate timeline. Blake’s interview offers insight into her failed relationship with Dreiberg, which she said had been over “for awhile” as of 1995. They had financially supported themselves over the last decade thanks to Dreiberg selling his Nite Owl technology to law enforcement through a shell corporation known as MerlinCorp. That’s how the Tulsa police have their own fleet of “Archies” at their disposal.

The pair had only reunited for “one last job,” which was when they were arrested together. As for why they split up, Blake said, “He wanted kids and I wanted guns,” though her inability to totally get over her ex, Dr. Manhattan, also seems to have played a role in their separation. It was a sore enough subject that Dreiberg was the one who built her the large blue Manhattan-inspired sex toy no one will ever be able to un-see (though if you want to see a blueprint of “Excalibur” you can, you weirdo). Blake says the device was a literal “f### you” from Dreiberg. Obviously their separation was not completely friendly, though she does want to see him freed from jail now.

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While Dreiberg refused to say anything to the FBI (a silence he has maintained to this day), Blake was willing to discuss almost everything with them. And we do mean everything, even beyond her Dr. Manhattan… machine. The redacted interrogation transcript ends with Blake, aka The Comedienne during her time on the lam, asking about being released.

Agent: “That’s not going to happen.”

Juspeczyk: “Well….If you don’t let me walk…..I might have to talk.”

Agent: “Talk……about what?”

Juspeczyk: “Tell your boss to tell his boss to tell his boss to tell Gatsby that Laurie Juspeczyk knows what really happened on 11/2. I’ll wait.”

“Gatsby” is President Robert Redford; 11/2 was the date Ozymandias sent his giant squid to New York City. Laurie Blake pointblank told the FBI to let her go or she would reveal the biggest secret ever. It’s a secret holding together a tenuous world peace, one that could destroy the planet if it were revealed. Look at what the Seventh Kavalry, a white nationalist group who already believes the squid was a hoax, has done. What would happen if everyone knew they were right?

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Her threat clearly worked. Not only was she free, she got an important, high-ranking position at the FBI where she is a respected agent to this day, the kind who presidential candidates ask for favors while offering to free Dan Dreiberg. Its certainly debatable if blackmailing the U.S. government to gain her freedom was ethically moral or not. She served her country both officially and unofficially for decades; she was also a criminal who leveraged the safety of the entire world to escape consequences. But there’s a much bigger question her actions raise: did Redford already know the truth about the squid?

After 1985 the world shunned wireless technology, fearing it was responsible for opening a transdimensional rift that sends squids through it. But in 1993, two years before the arrest of Nite Owl and Silk Spectre, a new law gave the president the ability to force government workers to adopt new tech. Did they pass that bill because the government learned the truth about the “alien” squid and the danger was fake? Did the FBI confirm Rorschach’s otherwise debunked journal outlining Adrian Veidt’s plans was in fact authentic?

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Has the government – in an effort to protect its liberal policies and the dream of a worldwide utopia – been perpetuating the greatest lie ever told for decades? Is that why they immediately caved to Laurie Blake’s blackmail? Because they knew she was telling the truth?

It’s certainly possible, but no one’s talking. Yet.

Featured Image: HBO

Jean Smart as Laurie Blake.

Mark Hill/HBO

Regina King as Angela Abar.

Mark Hill/HBO

Jeremy Irons as Adrian Veidt.

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Regina King as Sister Night and Tim Blake Nelson as Looking Glass.

Mark Hill/HBO

Hong Chau as Lady Trieu.

Mark Hill/HBO

Regina King and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Angela and Cal Abar.

Mark Hill/HBO

Regina King as Sister Night.

Mark Hill/HBO

Louis Gossett Jr. as Will Reeves.

Mark Hill/HBO

Jeremy Irons as Adrian Veidt.

Colin Hutton/HBO

Don Johnson as chief of Police Judd Crawford.

Mark Hill/HBO

Regina King as Sister Night.

Mark Hill/HBO

Regina King as Sister Night.

Mark Hill/HBO

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Warning: This post contains major spoilers for Watchmen‘s fourth episode.

Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen has proved itself to be the kind of multi-layered mystery where even the smallest elements can have tremendous payoffs. So when something like broken eggs keeps appearing, it feels monumental. We’ve seen eggs crack more than a few times in the four episodes so far, and all those shattered shells suggest there’s a truly catastrophic and deadly event on the horizon.

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In the show’s first episode, Angela Abar explained the chemistry of eggs to her son Topher’s class. She broke a few eggs into a clear bowl and formed the yolks into a smiling face, the iconic symbol of the Watchmen graphic novel (minus the blood). With no other context, this felt like little more than a fun Easter egg (no pun intended) in the moment.

In the second episode, Angela discovered that Will had escaped her “bakery” but had returned anyway because he wasn’t finished talking to her yet. And how did he pass the time? By making some hard boiled eggs. Once again, in the moment there was nothing inherently nefarious about a character, even one as mysterious as Will, making eggs… minus the way he was able to pull them out of boiling water without getting burned. In retrospect, his choice of eggs has taken on a whole new context.

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The following week, Laurie Blake told Dr. Manhattan her joke about three heroes who meet god at the Pearly Gates. When it was Ozymandias’ time to learn his eternal fate, god asked him what he had done with the gift of intelligence. The “smartest man in the world” said he had “saved” mankind by dropping a giant alien squid on New York City. An impressed god then asked how many people he killed, and a confident Ozymandias answered, “Three million, give or take, but you can’t make an omelette without breaking a couple of eggs.” The idea of Adrian Veidt describing genocide in such a cavalier manner feels so true to his character it’s both hilarious and horrifying.

But that “joke” took on a whole new meaning this week, when Watchmen‘s fourth episode opened with a childless couple breaking dozens and dozens of eggs right before Lady Trieu showed up. While those shattered eggs were an on-the-nose metaphor for their fertility problems, in the larger context of the show they were an ominous sign of what’s to come.

We learned that Lady Trieu and Will are plotting something major, something Will is counting down to. (And countdowns never end well on Watchmen.) We have an idea of what they hope to accomplish, but we don’t know how they plan to do it. That’s why all of those broken eggs—including another when we saw the Abar family making breakfast—feel like the most terrifying imagery on the show, far more than even a masked army of Rorschachs.

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The last Watchmen character with a secret scheme was Adrian Veidt, whom the genius Lady Trieu called her “inspiration.” His “alien” squid resulted in three million dead New Yorkers. He knew it was a grotesque plan, but one he believed was necessary, because “you can’t make an omelette without breaking a couple of eggs.”

How many eggs will Lady Trieu be willing to break to make her omelette? Based on how many we’ve already seen on Watchmen, it will be a very large, and very deadly, meal.

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Warning: This post contains major spoilers for Watchmen‘s fourth episode.

HBO

When it comes to all-time great introductions, a cape-wearing trillionaire showing up in the middle of the night to surprise a couple with an offer of their lab-grown child and five million dollars – with just three minutes to accept – ranks among the best. But it’s Lady Trieu’s final scene in Watchmen‘s fourth episode that will likely prove more important. It hinted that her and Will are plotting a massive act of revenge on America.

We learned a lot about actress Hong Chau’s mysterious and powerful Lady Trieu in her insane, incredible debut. During her year living in Tulsa she has rarely been outside her Millennium Clock, a gigantic structure she says is “more than a clock,” even though her daughter claims it “tells time”. That leviathan of tech is also the “First Wonder of the New World;” will survive anything short of a direct nuclear blast. Trieu also made her unfathomable fortune in “advanced pharma and biomedical tech”;  this helps explain how she can grow people’s biological babies in a lab.

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The industrialist from Vietnam also credits her success to the “truly great man,” Adrian Veidt, whose companies she purchased right when he went missing in 2012. She even has her own Vietnam-inspired vivarium in the middle of Oklahoma, just like he had his own vivarium full of plant life in Antarctica. The name of the Millennium Clock also pays tribute to his line of Millennium cosmetics that went on sale after his squid attack in 1985. And of course, she owns a life-sized gold statue of Adrian Veidt as well.

Unless of course that “statue” actually is Adrian Veidt.

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(It’s definitely him, right? At minimum, the show wants us to think it might be, and it’s certainly possible. Trieu has incredible technology, including what might have been a spaceship seen falling from the sky. She could be the one who trapped Veidt in his paradise-turned-prison. He did fish fetuses out of a lake like they were lobsters, and she can grow babies. Since his story is in the past, we don’t know where he is in the present. Until we learn the true nature of her relationship with the “smartest man in the world,” nothing can be ruled out about either of them, even the crazy idea of him being transformed into a literal idol.)

As for Lady Trieu’s pharmaceutical advancements, they appear to have given Will de facto super powers. He told Angela those pills were to help his memory. But for a 105-year-old man, he is not only incredibly sharp and lucid – he is in remarkable shape. He can walk and has the strength to lift a 200-pound man with a rope. Also, in episode two, he seemed impervious to heat. He chugged hot coffee like it was a can of soda, and later pulled an egg out of boiling hot water without burning himself.

Those pills are miracles of science, as was the I.V. Lady Trieu’s daughter Bian was sleeping with. It triggered a very specific, very vivid “dream” that Trieu was happy to hear her daughter recount. Trieu’s conversation with Will afterwards indicated that nightmare was something Trieu did – including her daughter’s very real feeling of burning her feet, which Trieu said was “good.”

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Watchmen also provided context for why Trieu would do something like that. Will equated the orchestrated “dream” to how he is forcing his granddaughter Angela to explore her family’s traumatic past. There are only three days to go before their secret, seemingly catastrophic plan comes to fruition, and both are trying to make their descendants learn about where they came from. And where they come from are both places that were destroyed by America.

In the world of Watchmen, Vietnam is the 51st state in the union. Dr. Manhattan defeated Lady Trieu’s homeland using his god-like powers to help the United States achieve a quick and decisive victory in 1971. The reaction to the war’s end was so popular, the Constitution was changed so Richard Nixon could be re-elected to a third term. But if Bian’s dream was created by her mother, it might not have been a dream at all. It might have been her Lady Trieu’s own memories.

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Lady Trieu clearly doesn’t look back on her country’s annexation fondly. To her it was a terrible event, one she carries with her (literally in her Vietnam vivarium), just like Will carried the literal memory of his parents’ death during the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. He held on to that piece of paper for almost 80 years until he gave it to his granddaughter. Neither Will nor Lady Trieu have forgotten America’s past, with its racial injustice and imperialistic conquering of Vietnam.

Whatever they have planned to get back at the U.S. is horrific enough that Trieu is worried about Will getting cold feet, and he knows Angela will hate him when she learns about what he’s done to her family. We don’t know what their plot is yet, but it seems clear America itself will be the main target. And based on Lady Trieu’s “hero,” it’s going to be deadly.

Lady Trieu said “so much” of her success “grew from the seed” of Adrian Veidt’s “inspiration”. What Adrian Veidt did in 1985 was kill three million New Yorkers to create world peace. But America destroyed both Will and Trieu’s home; how peaceful can the world be when its most powerful country still sees white nationalists terrorize black citizens and Vietnam is an occupied country? If Veidt wanted to save the world from nuclear holocaust by killing three million Americans, how many will Trieu and Will be willing to kill to save the world from America?

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The episode’s title,”If You Don’t Like My Story Write Your Own,” comes from the very real book Cal Abar was reading, Things Fall Apart. Nigerian author Chinua Achebe’s beloved 1958 novel tells the story of an African tribe colonized by Westerners. It’s a fitting reference, and an ominous sign for Watchmen’s America.  As is the name of the woman who is plotting against it. In a world full of superheroes, the mysterious trillionaire in the white cape takes her name from a 3rd century Vietnamese warrior who fought against Chinese occupation of her homeland.

The real Lady Trieu remains a hero in Vietnam to this day. Soon, Watchmen‘s Trieu could be a hero to her people who live under American occupation. How many Americans will die when her Millennium Clock goes tick tock for the last time?

Featured Image: HBO

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HBO’s Watchmen universe is dark, gritty, surreal, and sometimes, even kind of comedic. But it takes more than mysterious characters and narrative twists and turns to pull viewers into the show. It takes a soundtrack that sets the tone, and if you want that soundtrack to become the auditory backdrop for your own life, now you can. Vigilantes and mask-wearers, may we present to you the Watchmen TV series soundtrack, expertly crafted by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of Nine Inch Nails (NIИ).

It’s no surprise the haunting soundtrack is so good, considering Reznor and Ross’ background in scoring. The duo, both current members of NIИ, have graced numerous films with their scores, including The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl, and even Bird Box. And while the Watchmen series soundtrack has a similar feel to the ones in those films, it still stands out as especially ominous, which makes sense considering the show’s content. Tracks like “Never Surrender” would be good for getting ready to go out for a run or a ride aboard the Owlship though.

If you’ve been watching #WatchmenHBO then you know that Trent and Atticus are a gift. Welp! This is happening…Volume 1 is now available streaming here???? https://t.co/hwN53VQJhK

— Regina King (@ReginaKing) November 6, 2019

For anybody whose boat is not floated by the suspenseful tingling of Reznor and Ross’ score, there’s another “HBO official soundtrack” for the series on Spotify, which is made up of a bunch of music ostensibly taken from the 2009 film. Songs such as Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin'” and Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” fill up that list.

What do you think of Reznor and Ross’ score for the HBO Watchmen series? Slap on your masks and give us your real, hidden thoughts in the comments!

Images: HBO 

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UPDATE, Episode 8: That episode was so crazy when it came to our favorite Alexander-the-Great-loving-mass-murdered it needed its own column: What Watchmen’s 8th Episode Revealed about Ozymandias

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UPDATE, Episode 7: How long was Adrian Veidt’s trial for trying to escape his prison on Europa? It took 365 days for a pig to find him guilty. Even O. J. Simpson’s murder trial “only” lasted 11 months. And they took the weekend off. (Though O.J.’s defense stunk just as bad as Ozymandias’s, just in a different way.) But Watchmen‘s shocking seventh episode did seem to finally answer a huge question we’ve had all season: who put him there and why? Now we know it was Dr. Manhattan, who didn’t want to worry about an unchecked Adrian Veidt.

At some point Dr. Manhattan returned to Earth, fell in love with Angela Abar, and willingly gave himself amnesia so they could live a relatively normal life together. Before he turned himself into “Cal” though Dr. Manhattan made sure mankind’s greatest mass murderer would not be free to do whatever he wanted without a time-bending god to stop him. Manhattan convinced Adrian Veidt to move to the “paradise”  built for him far away in the solar system, and that allowed Manhattan to be with Angela.

Not even the powerful Lady Trieu could create a hospitable zone on a frozen moon, especially when it doesn’t have a protective barrier. It just exists all on its own, defying the laws of nature. Only a deity could create something like that. Once Veidt realized he had been duped into moving to his own prison he became obsessed with escaping. Manhattan had given him an endless supply of subservient clones, but not free reign over his world. The game warden ruled there, the most powerful and capable of Manhattan’s “children.”

Veidt certainly asked Lady Trieu to save him from Europa though. Which might have already happened. But before that Adrain Veidt was pronounced guilty. And when he was he wept (after passing on his own “thoughts” on the kangaroo court.) The only other time we ever saw him cry was when he learned his squid attack had worked. But sitting there being judged by a jury of idiots who are definitely not his peers, Adrain Veidt reminded us once more of his hero, Alexander the Great. Plutarch wrote, in a line frequently misquoted, that when Alexander learned there were infinite worlds he wept, for he had not conquered even one.

Neither has Adrian Veidt. Forget Earth, he couldn’t even conquer Crookshanks and Phillips.

UPDATE, Episode 5: Everyone’s crazy theory was wrong; Ozymandias isn’t on Mars. He’s somewhere even more insane–Jupiter’s frozen moon Europa. Watchmen‘s fifth episode revealed Adrian Veidt’s bucolic prison is, somehow, a habitable zone on an otherwise inhospitable celestial body. We don’t yet know who put him there, but all signs (made of dead bodies) point to Dr. Manhattan. But Ozymandias might have turned to the wrong friend to help him get back home.

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Ozymandias was finally able to break through his prison after years of work. There was no physical barrier keeping him locked in. It seems impossible an Earth-like area far from the sun on a frozen moon could exist without a bubble. It’s magical, or at least it would be if a literal god exist. Dr. Manhattan could easily make such a prison. He could also make human life, the “god” who Veidt said abandoned Phillips and Crookshanks.

What Ozymandias did once he catapulted himself to “freedom” also points to Manhattan being his captor.  Veidt used frozen bodies of Phillips and Crookshanks to spell out “save me.” Eventually a deep space probe passed by, which he celebrated. Dr. Manhattan wouldn’t need a probe to check on Adrian Veidt. Lady Trieu would though. She owns incredible technology, and she bought Adrian Veidt’s companies when he was first imprisoned. She is the most obvious–maybe the only—person who Veidt could ask to rescue him.

Which she might have already done.

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Lady Trieu’s introduction on the show featured her buying a large amount of land in Tulsa. This scene appears to have been set in the past, before she built her Millennium Clock, though we don’t know how long ago it happened. Adrian Veidt’s story has also been set in the past so far. Was the spaceship that crashed, the one Lady Trieu said belonged to her, Adrian Veidt’s return trip to Earth? Hopefully for him it wasn’t, because it would make it more likely he really is the Ozymandias gold statue she has in her vivarium.

Considering the world might soon find out the truth about his giant squid and how he made Robert Redford president, Ozymandias might be safer as a statue.

—

UPDATE, Episode 4: The mystery of Adrian Veidt on HBO’s Watchmen has become a hydra. Every time one question about him gets answered two more pop up to replace it. So while the show’s fourth episode cleared up some of our biggest issues about Ozymandias’s timeline, we are more confused than ever about what has happened to him, especially because he might be a gold statue in Lady Trieu’s vivarium.

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“If You Don’t Like My Story, Write Your Own” confirmed the candles on Veidt’s cakes were counting down years he has spent in hiding/isolation/imprisoned. Based on when he was declared missing, episode four likely showed him in 2016, still three years before the current events of the show. The way he described his time at his chateau also implied he went there willingly at first, unaware of what it really was. “In the beginning I thought it was a paradise, but it’s not. It’s a prison.”

Someone – almost certainly either Lady Trieu or Dr. Manhattan – tricked the smartest man in the world into agreeing to be locked away. That’s no small feat. Now, slowly losing his mind and killing Crookshanks and Phillipses, he’s obsessed with escaping. But where is he escaping from?

The failed spacesuit we saw Mr. Phillips freeze in, combined with Veidt’s massive catapult to the sky, points to him being on another planet. That shot of a dead Crookshanks disappearing into the clouds supports the theory Dr. Manhattan destroyed Veidt’s palace on Mars in the series premiere. That would also mean those Phillips and Crookshanks lobster babies (that get tossed in the weirdest Easy Bake Oven ever) are Manhattan’s own attempts at creating life, which is what he said he was going to do at the end of the graphic novel. We know Veidt didn’t create them. “You are flaws in this thoughtless design, for while I may be your master, I am most definitely not your maker.”

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But as crazy as it seems, we still can’t rule out that Lady Trieu was the one who sent Veidt to another planet. She can create children in a lab, built a massive Vietnamese-inspired vivarium in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and her amazing technology seems to include spaceships, as we saw something belonging to here crashing from the sky. She might have built a habitable zone on another planet for Veidt and supplied him with a lake full of half-idiot servant babies, all so she can pull off her own master scheme back on Earth. She did set up phone booths to call Mars.

It’s all so very (VERY) weird, but when the two candidates for Veidt’s captor are a god-like being and a genius trillionaire with unlimited resources, no theory is too crazy. That includes Veidt having been turned into a gold statue. We are not betting against Ozymandias making his way back to civilizations in the current timeline of 2019. We also are not betting against that statue in Lady Trieu’s vivarium actually being him either. Who would do that and why? Those are just two of the many questions we now have – along with what he has planned for that horseshoe and why he went on a murder spree – after getting some answers from this hydra.

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—

In 1985 Adrian Veidt and his giant “alien” squid proved trying to unravel his plans is nearly impossible, but HBO’s Watchmen sure is making it fun to try anyway. Through three episodes Ozymandias’s story has been the weirdest, most mysterious subplot of the show. And when the smartest man in the world is capable doing something totally audacious, no theory is too wild. Here are the best ones we’ve heard or come up with about what he’s really up to.

Wherever and whenever he is.

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Counting Candles

Watchmen‘s third episode indicated that Ozymandias might not be in hiding, as we first thought, but rather imprisoned. Eagle-eyed viewers also noticed that each time we see Phillips and Crookshanks present Adrian with a new cake (and rendition of “He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”), the cake has one more candle than when last seen. We don’t know what “anniversary” these cakes celebrate, but if the candles each represent one year, it means we are seeing Veidt’s story span a very different timeline from the rest of the show.

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Thanks to the show’s companion site Peteypedia, we know that Veidt’s last public appearance was in 2007, but he wasn’t formally declared missing until 2012 when Trieu Industries purchased his companies. If that’s when he was imprisoned, the first cake would have been from some time in 2013, likely the anniversary of when he first arrived at his prison castle. Veidt seemed genuinely touched by the cake that day, which was also when he announced he had started writing a new play.

He was a lot less enthused about the second cake, even though by then his play was not only finished, it was being performed with a full set, marking a meaningful passage of time. An uncharacteristically angry Veidt threw the third cake to the ground after being frustrated by the “game warden” who reminded Veidt of the agreed-upon rules he is bound by. At that point he was also well into his experimental “spacesuits” that left Phillips nothing but a popsicle.

Who Imprisoned Him and Where?

If Adrian Veidt really has been imprisoned since 2012, who put him there? One potential answer is Lady Trieu, the trillionaire industrialist who owns his companies, runs his estate, and formally accepted the FBI’s recent announcement Veidt is dead. We don’t know much about her yet, but she built the mysterious Millennium Clock tower and gave the public phone booths to call Dr. Manhattan on Mars. If Veidt is trying to escape her prison, he is almost certainly on Earth, which could help explain the massive trebuchet he is working on (the one teased for episode four that we’ve already seen a miniature model of).

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But another theory says it was Dr. Manhattan himself who imprisoned Veidt. The castle Ozymandias is living in looks remarkably similar to the one Manhattan was seen destroying on Mars (and also like the floating model Topher made in his room). Did the godlike Manhattan create a second Earth, or possibly a hospitable zone on Mars, for Veidt to live on for some yet unknown reason? Is that why Veidt was seemingly trying to create a spacesuit for Phillips? Was he testing if it would be safe enough for him to use on his own voyage back to Earth?

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If Veidt’s story on the show began in 2013, and Manhattan destroyed a similar castle in 2019, did he destroy it after Veidt escaped? Or did Manhattan recreate Veidt’s former prison as a coded message to either Trieu or Veidt back on Earth that Manhattan knows Veidt is free? Each theory raises a number of questions, each equally insane. Ultimately, where Veidt is imprisoned would likely tell us who put him there, and vice versa, but without knowing either our only other clue as to his whereabouts are the weirdos he lives with.

By Hook or by Crook(shanks)

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Here’s what we know about the childlike Mr. Phillips and Miss Crookshanks:

They are clones totally loyal to their “master” Adrian Veidt.
Neither have any survival instincts and are unfazed by the deaths of their doubles.
They are “dimwits” who confuse horseshoes with knives.

What we don’t know is who created them and why.

At the end of the graphic novel, Dr. Manhattan said that he was going to try creating some life of his own. If he imprisoned Veidt, Manhattan might have given him some of his “new” people to serve him. That would explain why they might also be his captors. The game warden looks like he might be a “Phillips” with a mustache.

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(If Manhattan did create Phillips and Crookshanks, it might show even he has limits as a “god,” a major development for his character.)

However, Adrian Veidt was able to genetically engineer a giant squid monster in 1985. It’s certainly feasible that he would be able to create flawed human clones by 2012. That would explain why they are totally loyal to him. If Ozymandias created them, it raises an even more intriguing question: Who are they based on?

The first thing we learned that Phillips can do is fix an old watch. Veidt also had his servants star in his play The Watchmaker’s Son, which was about Dr. Manhattan’s life. Then Veidt tried sending Phillips to space, where we know Dr. Manhattan lives. Since everything about Phillips’ existence connects to Dr. Manhattan in some way, is Mr. Phillips a clone of Jon Osterman, a.k.a. the human Manhattan was before his accident? And is Miss Crookshanks Janey Slater, the woman Manhattan was with before he left her for Silk Spectre?

DC Comics/Dave Gibbons/John Higgins

Ozymandias was only able to pull off his squid plot by emotionally manipulating Manhattan in 1985. Could he be trying to do that again now with a Manhattan clone? It sounds nuts, but that’s exactly why it can’t be ruled out.

Literally nothing can be ruled out when it comes to Adrian Veidt, especially when he’s either competing or working with a godlike figure who can see through time and transport across galaxies, as well as a trillionaire tech giant who might have outsmarted the smartest man in the world.

All we can do is keep counting how many candles those clones put on his cake as the clock counts down to the big reveal.

Featured Image: HBO

The post Unraveling the Mysteries of WATCHMEN’s Ozymandias appeared first on Nerdist.

Warning: This post contains major spoilers for Watchmen‘s third episode and Lady Trieu.

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“Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Adrian Veidt took his superhero name from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” a poem about hubris and the fleeting nature of power. When FBI Agent Dale Petey quoted the sonnet’s iconic line in Watchmen‘s third episode though, he referenced a different character; Lady Trieu. We don’t know much about this mysterious titan of industry yet, but her connections to Ozymandias raise one of the show’s most important questions. Is she working with or against Adrian Veidt? No matter the answer, the nature of their relationship could be catastrophic for the world.

Lady Trieu will be played by Hong Chau, and the character has appeared in trailers and teasers that promise she will play a major role going forward. Her absence through the first three episodes hasn’t stopped her from making an impact already though. The trillionaire Lady Trieu, who appears to be sending a young woman to collect newspapers for her, is the head of Trieu Industries. The show’s companion website revealed she purchased Adrian Veidt’s company in 2012, right when he went missing. Trieu Industries also began formally running Veidt’s estate in 2017, and accepted the FBI’s recent announcement that the very-much-alive Veidt is dead.

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In addition to controlling Veidt’s vast fortune and incredible technology, Trieu Industries is also responsible for the blue satellite phone booths on which Laurie Blake called Dr. Manhattan. They appear all across the U.S.; you can see one outside of the bank at which Laurie arrested Mr. Shadow. In a world full of technophobes where wireless tech was delayed by decades, Trieu has given everyone the ability to call a god on Mars.

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Her company also built the massive and imposing Millennium Clock in Tulsa, an especially ominous building. The imagery of a clock nearing midnight is a recurring motif in both the graphic novel and television series; Watchmen is always counting down to something terrible. The richest person in the world owns a mysterious building called the Millennium Clock; we can only guess what nightmare awaits when the clock counts down to zero.

It was that unsettling building that made Agent Petey reference Trieu directly. He said Lady Trieu quoted Shelley’s poem when the Millennium Clock opened. He said “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair” was her “shout out to Adrian Veidt”. Considering Trieu controls Veidt’s wildly successful business and personal estate, that might have been a subtle dig at the former vigilante’s fall from grace. Shelley’s “Ozymandias” is about a powerful king whose giant monument to himself and his legacy now sits broken and alone in an empty desert. If Trieu meant for her “shout out” to be an insult, she couldn’t have picked a more fitting line to get her message across.

And since the third episode also presented the possibility Veidt is not so much in hiding as he is imprisoned, it could be Trieu herself who has him locked away. The smartest man in the world might have been bested by a foe of superior intellect.

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But, what if instead of mocking him, Trieu really was paying tribute to Adrian Veidt? It would likely mean she is working for Ozymandias. It’s a terrifying possibility.

Adrian Veidt is a mad genius, and a major part of his giant “alien” squid plot involved the use of other corporations which he secretly controlled from the shadows. He was pulling strings at companies where the employees didn’t even know he was the puppet master. If Veidt is in hiding, putting his company into the hands of someone he trusts – someone the world would never suspect is working for him – would ensure he still maintained his power while his vision was being carried out.

If Trieu Industries really is a front for Veidt, it makes those phone booths to Dr. Manhattan far more sinister. Instead of offering hope/letting mankind “pretend” the blue god still cares about people, it could be another form of emotional manipulation by Veidt. In 1985 he used Manhattan’s remaining ties to humanity to drive him away from Earth. Is Veidt now trying to draw Manhattan back by letting people pull on Manhattan’s last remaining heartstring? Or do all of those phone calls serve as a reminder to Manhattan about why he left long ago, ensuring he stays away?

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Dr. Manhattan can see through time, but he was unable to foresee Ozymandias’s plans in 1985. It’s unlikely anyone else will fully be able to predict what an 80-year-old genius who is currently murdering clones and dressing up in his old costume is up to until it’s too late. But we do know what motivates him. Adrian Veidt named himself after a poem about how the achievements of powerful men don’t last. Instead of being a constant warning to himself though, it felt like a challenge to overcome. His life’s work was so audacious – what could be crazier than faking an alien monster – because it was meant to last. The sands of time were never supposed to bury his false world peace, like the statue in Shelley’s desert.

Ozymandias’s hero is also Alexander the Great, whom he said in the comic is the only person in history he can relate to. We saw Veidt still keeps the Macedonian general’s bust (adorned with his own mask) in his office, and he named his horse Bucephalus after Alexander’s famous equine. We still remember Alexander the Great to this day, and Adrian Veidt won’t stop fighting to make sure we remember him too.

Just like he remembers the last thing Dr. Manhattan said to him: “Nothing ever ends.” Adrian Veidt’s quest to “save” the world hasn’t ended either. So while e might not know exactly what he is up to, whatever his plan is will be in service to maintaining his own monument to himself. To erect it cost the lives of three million souls. How many will have to die to maintain it forever?

Lady Trieu alone might be able to stop him, unless she’s secretly working with him. We’re not sure which is more dangerous for the world.

Featured Image: HBO

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Warning: This post contains major spoilers for Watchmen‘s third episode, specifically about Laurie Blake’s long joke.

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Watchmen‘s “She Was Killed By Space Junk” reintroduced the world to the former masked vigilante Silk Spectre II, who now goes by Laurie Blake, having adopted the name of her late father Edward Blake. He was also the “superhero” The Comedian; it was poetic the episode focused on his daughter telling a joke. And while it might not have had the funniest punchline, it did reference the comic book and give us an insight into the woman the former Ms. Juspeczyk has become. More importantly, though it might have foreshadowed the major role she still has to play.

What thought she was telling two separate jokes. However, it ultimately turned out to be one elaborate gag. Laurie didn’t actually mess up the bit about the bricklayer’s daughter who throws a single leftover brick into the sky, it was an intentional misdirect. She was using an old trope designed to leave the listener hanging and frustrated, only for the payoff to come later when they aren’t expecting it during a seemingly unrelated joke.

Laurie’s bricklayer bit itself might have been a multi-layered reference to the comic book. Long before Jon Osterman became Dr. Manhattan, the god-like person she was calling, he was the son of a watchmaker. After the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb on Japan, Jon’s father threw all the pieces of the watch his son was repairing off their fire escape, taking a proverbial sledgehammer to Jon’s own budding career as a watchmaker. Also, just like the bricklayer wanted his daughter to follow in his footsteps to maintain his legacy, Laurie only became a masked vigilante because her mother pushed her into it.

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There’s no question the second part of her joke was a direct reference to past events though. The three “heroes” who arrive for Judgement at the Pearly Gates are Nite Owl II, Ozymandias, and Dr. Manhattan. The first to stand before God is Nite Owl. Laurie said God gave him the ability to create amazing things. But rather than send Nite Owl to Heaven for not killing anyone, God damned him for “being too soft.”

Since the real Nite Owl, Dan Dreiberg, is currently sitting in a jail cell, it seems like this is her own judgement of her former lover’s personal failing. Nite Owl was brilliant and kind, but he might have been too kind in a world so hard and brutal (echoes of her father’s own nihilistic views). Maybe if Dan wasn’t so “soft” he’d be a free man and they’d still be together now.

The second hero to stand before God was Adrian Veidt, the smartest man in the world. Ozymandias says he used God’s gift of genius to “save” mankind by dropping a giant alien squid on New York City, killing “three million, give or take.” Arrogantly assuming he could beat this “game,” Veidt seems shocked when God says, ‘Christ, you’re a f***ing monster,” right before snapping Ozymandias to Hell too.

The third and final hero to learn his fate is Dr. Manhattan, a man gifted with actual superpowers. God asks how many people he killed, and Manhattan says it doesn’t matter. “A live body and a dead body have the same number of particles,” he says. This isn’t just Laurie describing her other former boyfriend as cold and unloving, it’s something Dr. Manhattan actually said in 1985 when he was losing his final shred of humanity. But the blue god doesn’t need someone to judge him; he already knows he’s going to Hell because he’s already there. Dr. Manhattan can not only see through time, he experiences it all at once. He’s watching his father throw his watch pieces over the fire escape in 1945 at the exact same moment he’s sitting on Mars in 2019.

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Laurie’s comments on each of the three men, and her own Judgement on why they are all doomed, reveals what she thinks about them, how they used their incredible gifts, and the lives they led. Dan didn’t do enough. Adrian did too much. Manhattan didn’t do anything. It’s a hell of a joke, the kind Eddie Blake might have told.

But then God notices someone he didn’t even know was there, a woman “standing behind those other guys the whole time.” God gave her no talents to speak of, and he’s embarrassed he doesn’t know who she is. “I’m the little girl who threw the brick in the air,” she says.

The little girl with the brick from the first joke is Laurie herself, who unlike her male superhero counterparts had no special ability. And just like the God of her joke did, it was easy for others to overlook her. She wasn’t a hero as much as she was just Dr. Manhattan’s girlfriend, starting at the age of 16. Yet while Nite Owl sits in a jail cell, Adrian Veidt has been declared dead, and Dr. Manhattan lives alone on Mars, she is working as an FBI agent, still serving the public.

Laurie Blake’s life doesn’t seem especially happy. She seems lonely, leaving messages for an old boyfriend she doesn’t even think he listens to or cares about. She keeps an owl to remind her of the man she can no longer be with. She lives with the impossible burden of what Ozymandias did. And her joke reveals what she thinks of each of those three men, of who they are, what they’ve done, and what awaits them all.

But it’s the punchline that might be most telling, because it could tell us about what awaits her. God never saw the brick coming, and it smashed him in the head and kills him. And where does god go when he dies, Laurie asks? “He goes to Hell.”

What “brick” has Laurie thrown in the air no one will see falling until it is too late? And what “god” will it kill when it lands? Will she finally reveal the truth of what Ozymandias did? Will it doom mankind to Hell, the same fate as everyone else in her joke? Or will this brick actually kill a god, a blue one?

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As she looked to the sky after Angela’s car dropped from space almost killing her, Laurie saw a red flare from Mars, as though Jon Osterman on did hear her message. In the words of Rorschach which Laurie referenced, did Dr. Manhattan think it was a “good joke?”

Will he still think so if it proves to be a distraction from the brick that is about to hit him and mankind?

Featured Image: HBO

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Warning: This post contains major spoilers for Watchmen‘s second episode.

We don’t know a lot about Will, but we know he’s definitely not Dr. Manhattan… Almost definitely. That’s the way we’re leaning after Angela told her husband Cal about Will’s claim that Dr. Manhattan can pretend to be human. “No he can’t, and he’s on Mars,” Cal said, a “fact” Angela was completely sure of too. But why should they, or we, believe that?

Why couldn’t Dr. Manhattan—someone who can see through time, simultaneously exist in multiple locations, teleport across galaxies, and bend matter with his thoughts—pass himself off as human? Disguising himself as a regular person doesn’t sound all that challenging for someone with his abilities. And the more confident everyone is that he can’t, the more it raises one monumental question: “Is Dr. Manhattan hiding in plain sight?” If so it’s an ominous sign of just how dangerous things are in the world, and maybe why Adrian Veidt is currently producing a play about Manhattan’s life.

Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen series is a sequel to the graphic novel, and unlike Zack Snyder’s movie, Dr. Manhattan did not become mankind’s greatest threat at the end of the comic book. It was Adrian Veidt’s “alien” squid that united the world in peace against a common enemy. Dr. Manhattan, having rediscovered his compassion for mankind after learning the truth of Silk Spectre’s father, was too late in his efforts to stop Ozymandias, who had blocked Manhattan’s ability to see into the future as part of his master plan.

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In his final moments in Watchmen, Dr. Manhattan refused to condone what Veidt did in killing millions to save billions, but he also refused to condemn it. Ultimately the lie had value, and Manhattan killed Rorschach to maintain a peace so many had been sacrificed to gain. Manhattan then told Veidt he was leaving entirely. “Human affairs cannot be my concern,” Manhattan said. “I’m leaving the galaxy for one less complicated.” Thanks to his newly rediscovered interest in human life, Manhattan said he might try and create some life of his own wherever he went.

But right before he left, an uncharacteristically unsure of himself Ozymandias asked Manhattan if he had done the right thing, justifying that “it all worked out in the end.”

“In the end?” Manhattan replied, “Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.” It’s a sentiment Ozymandias has clearly not forgotten, as he echoed those exact words in the show’s second episode. Manhattan’s own self-imposed exile certainly didn’t end his story on Earth. He returned to this galaxy at some point, and now a 24/7 news feed tracks his every movement on Mars.

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Just because he’s on Mars doesn’t mean he isn’t somewhere else too at the exact same moment. Manhattan can split himself into multiple beings that coexist in different places. He could be on both Mars and Jupiter at the same time. Or he could be visibly on Mars and secretly on Earth. Since no one thinks he can pretend to be human, no one would even think to look for him, even though he was human before his accident that turned him into a god. He was born Jon Osterman, the man who inspired Veidt’s play.

So what would bring him back? Loneliness? Did Manhattan find (like Adrian Veidt has with his own “dimwit” clones Crookshanks and Philips) that creating life isn’t quite as rewarding as he hoped? We don’t know what happened to Manhattan after 1985, but something has made him interested in human affairs again. And the last time Dr. Manhattan was concerned about humans, a giant squid killed millions in New York City.

Without Adrian Veidt using tachyon generators to send particles into the past to block his vision, Dr. Manhattan can see into the future. How many would have to be in danger now for him to care enough to come back? His mere presence near Earth is equal parts comforting and concerning.

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Yet, for as complicated as it is to try interpret the decisions of a god, it’s even harder to guess what the man with the god complex is up to. Even though all of the clues made sense afterwards, no one could have predicted Ozymandias was genetically-engineering an “alien” squid with psychic powers in 1985. No one should be arrogant enough to think they can predict his newest plot now. The best we might hope for is to predict what he still cares about: his life’s work.

Adrian Veidt’s greatest accomplishment was “saving” the world from nuclear holocaust, and to do that he had to emotionally manipulate Dr. Manhattan into leaving Earth entirely. Now, in his secret lair, Veidt’s producing an emotionally manipulative play about Manhattan’s life. And he’s doing it using humans he created, as though he took his final interaction with Manhattan as a personal challenge.

DC Comics/Dave Gibbons/John Higgins

What does it all mean? What the hell is Ozymandias up to? Adrian Veidt is the smartest man in the world, but we can be confident whatever purpose the tragedy of The Watchmaker’s Son is meant to serve, it’s not about entertaining himself at home. Is he preparing something that will tug on Manhattan’s small sliver of humanity, because once again he has to prevent Manhattan from stopping his scheme? Or does Veidt know something Angela and her husband don’t, that Dr. Manhattan is already back and pretending to be human? Is he hiding in plain sight, ready to save mankind, whether it be from Adrian Veidt or from Veidt’s lie becoming known? It all sounds so crazy, which is why it doesn’t sound crazy at all.

So no, Will probably isn’t Manhattan. But someone might be.

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Warning: This post contains major spoilers for Watchmen episode two.

The most infamous vigilante of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen was Rorschach, an uncompromising and violent sociopath dedicated to his twisted ideal of justice. Since his death in 1985, his iconic white mask with a swirling black mass has been adopted by the Seventh Kavalry, as seen in HBO’s new sequel series. That unsettling visage is a fitting one for a group of white nationalists who idolize a fascist. But it’s another character, one who stands against the domestic terrorist group, who is more like Rorschach than any of them. Tulsa police’s Looking Glass shares more in common with him than just a disguise. And if he follows a similar path in life to Rorschach’s, then Looking Glass could end up seeing himself in the dead vigilante’s ink blot.

The silver, form-fitting mask worn by Tim Blake Nelson’s Looking Glass stands as the spiritual descendant of the one by worn by Rorschach, both in style and intent. The ever-changing ink blot face challenged Rorschach’s enemies with a question: “What do you see?” Each answer revealed something about themselves, and since those who saw that mask were usually terrified of the man wearing it, their responses were unguarded and honest even when their words were not. Looking Glass’ mask also asks those who gaze upon it to reflect on who they are. And as the light around him shifts and changes the shadows and contours of his mask, what they see does too, like a shifting ink blot.

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That both men adopted masks that make it hard for criminals to hide who they are is fitting, since both excel at high pressure interrogation. Rorschach embraced physical violence when questioning people, innocent and guilty alike, and he was greatly skilled at determining who was lying and who was telling the truth. Looking Glass shares this ability, as seen in the first episode when he rightfully determined the suspect he was questioning was a member of the Kavalry. And while he didn’t use physical torture like Rorschach, Looking Glass did use psychological torture. The off-putting music and intense images of the “pod” were the virtual equivalents of a fractured thumb. And just as effective.

Even the way Looking Glass speaks, deliberately and without inflection, echoes that of Rorschach, whom Silk Spectre described as having a “horrible monotone voice.”

But it’s something Looking Glass does in the second episode that connects the two in a way that should worry anyone who cares about Tulsa’s chief interrogator staying on the right side of the law. When he sits alone at home, safe and away from the public, Looking Glass keeps his mask on. He pulls it up above his mouth, just enough to eat, exactly like Rorschach did long ago when he sat at Dan Dreiberg’s table and ate cold baked beans from a can. In this moment, Looking Glass mirrors Rorschach’s troubled past, around the point when the line between man and vigilante was erased forever.

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Rorschach used to take his mask off when he was at home, but that was a strategic choice to make sure he wasn’t accidentally spotted in a busy New York City apartment building full of prying eyes. But more than that, taking off his mask was Rorschach’s way of putting on his “secret identity” as Walter Kovacs. He considered his ink blot mask to be his real “face.” After investigating the unthinkable murder of a young girl, he truly became his alter ego: an uncompromising sociopath who acted independent of the law as judge, jury, and executioner.

If Looking Glass already wears his “face”—the exact term Judd Crawford used to refer to his mask in the premiere—the same way Rorschach wore his, how close is Looking Glass to also losing himself to his alter ego entirely? What horrible event might push him over the edge the way Walter Kovacs was lost forever? One day Walter Kovacs woke up a masked vigilante who arrested people and served the public good. That night he went to bed Rorschach, a murderer not unlike the very people he hated.

Angela calls her colleague Looking Glass a “cold motherf***er” as he not-so-discreetly interrogates her about Chief Crawford’s death in Watchmen‘s second episode. He challenges that by telling her that he is crying for his dead boss under his mask. Those tears are a sign that a person still exists underneath his “face.” But if Looking Glass really is the modern day Rorschach, how much longer will he be capable of any emotion beyond hate? How long will he keep his humanity?

If the two men are fated to take similar paths soon, what we will all see when we look at his mirrored mask is an ink blot, and it will only reflect back darkness.

Featured Image: HBO/DC Comics

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Warning: This post contains major spoilers for Watchmen‘s second episode.

As of the second episode of Watchmen, we’ve learned a lot about the child who survived the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, depicted in the show’s premiere. In 2019, Louis Gossett Jr.’s Will is now 105-years-old, and he’s carried with him all these years the message his father wrote on the back of a WWI German leaflet: “Watch over this boy.” We also now know that he is Angela Abar’s previously unknown grandfather, and finally that he claims to have strung up Judd Crawford for having “skeletons in his closet.” And he definitely has “friends in high places,” the kind who can pick up cars from the sky. But every fact about Will raises more questions, all of them connected to the “vast and insidious conspiracy” at the core of the show, one that predates any giant squid.

Nearly a century of Will’s life remains a mystery. Who raised him after the horrific events in Tulsa? What happened to the baby girl he picked up in that field? Why did Angela’s parents, whose fate also remain a mystery to us, never speak about him to their daughter? And who is his other living descendant unearthed by his DNA test?

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But while we know few specifics about him, we have been given glimpses about Will that paint a broad picture of someone who knows a great deal about the world, both big and small. He knew Judd Crawford was hiding something dark and sinister about himself, even though Judd’s own best friend, a skilled detective, did not. And in a world constantly threatened by “alien” squid rain we know to be fraudulent, Will’s claims of an unthinkable conspiracy in Tulsa are anything but the ravings of an old man. Will does not live in ignorance like those around him.

His uncanny awareness of the truth about the world proves Will is a major player, both in his granddaughter’s own story and in the larger one unfolding around them both. However, the flying apparatus that rescued him from arrest  (a machine whose existence itself is revealing) shows Will’s significance expands well beyond that of his own life and family. Someone truly powerful and with incredible means is doing what his father asked of the world in 1921: they are watching over this boy. Will and what he knows must be powerful too.

That power and knowledge seem grounded in his past as much as it does in the present, because Will has not forgotten his father or where he came from. He still reads the paper his father’s note was printed on, just like he did as a child when he wore his father’s uniform. That leaflet, based on one really dropped by the Germans during WWI,  underlined that black soldiers were fighting for a country that treated them as undeserving of the very freedoms the were protecting. Those pamphlets might have been released as propaganda, but they they told no lies about America. Those letters told a truth Will’s father carried home with him, and those words still mean something to Will a hundred years later as he reads them beneath Judd Crawford’s hanging body.

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The world of Watchmen is built on a lie that landed in New York City in 1985. But what was the America of Watchmen built on? The paper Will dropped to his granddaughter is a reminder that it too was built on a lie: the lie that it was a new nation that believed all men were created equal.

Will learned in 1921 that the United States—and its laws and officials and police—didn’t believe he and his family were equal. For everything we don’t know about Will, we know he’s never forgotten that lesson. And now, while the world looks to the sky and worries about falling squid, a new generation of white nationalists are readying for another war in Tulsa. The last time they waged one an affluent black neighborhood was destroyed, its citizens killed and its buildings burned, and for decades America kept it a secret as part of a vast and insidious conspiracy.

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In his final moments, Will’s father asked the world to “watch over this boy,” and now Will has a powerful friend who does just that. Why? It seems because for one hundred years Will himself has watched over the world and learned the truth of what it really is.

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Warning: This post contains major spoilers for Watchmen episode 2.

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“He had skeletons in his closet.”

Judd Crawford’s skeleton turned out to be a Ku Klux Klan uniform with an old sheriff’s badge on it. For a respected man and leader, and best friends with Angela Abar, it was a shocking discovery. But do those white robes tell us the whole story? Was Chief Crawford’s own secret identity that of a violent racist? Or is there something else going on here? Ultimately the answer might not matter as much as why he died, in a plot mirroring the Watchmen graphic novel.

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As Will joked, there might be a good reason for someone to keep a Klan uniform hidden in their closet, but it’s hard to think of any. The most obvious and simple explanation is Judd Crawford was at some point a secret bigot; he possibly remained one until the time of his death. He wouldn’t have been the only Chief of Police in history to have worn the blue uniform during the day before changing into a white one at night. Even if he had renounced his bigotry at some point, it’s still weird the head of law enforcement kept a symbol of hate in his home, and in such an easy to find spot.

The horrible white sheets of the Klan are an old symbol now in Watchmen‘s world; a relic from before the giant squid. When Angela threw them at Will she didn’t ask if her friend had been a Klan member. She asked if they meant Crawford had been part of the Seventh Kavalry. The Rorschach obsessed group are the descendants of the old Klan, having replaced them as the primary hate group. And if you are looking for a sign Crawford really was a member of the Kavalry, Angela’s flashback to “White Night” certainly raised the possibility.

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After she killed the first intruder, a second Kavalry member shot Angela. He then approached her on the floor and put his shotgun to her head. His ink-blot face was the last thing she saw before she closed her eyes and passed out.

The very first thing she saw when she opened them was the face of Judd Crawford.

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If Judd Crawford was the second Kavalary intruder this framing is a clever way for the episode to reveal that.

By safely shooting himself in the arm during his own “attack,” no one would ever think to question his involvement or association with the Kavalary. But if Crawford really was a member of the terror group why didn’t he kill Angela when he had the chance? Why would he help plan the murder of his own officers at all? Especially if he then spent three years fighting the Kavalry with cops who had even more power?

The show raised the distinct possibility Crawford was Kavalry, but it doesn’t make any sense.  Not with what we’ve learned about him personally, or in terms of why he would have done any of this. It’s so strange it almost feels like his secret Klan uniform has a totally different meaning. The episode also provided a less incriminating reason for why he owned it.

Inside Judd Crawford’s closet was an old photo of a young boy and a police officer. It was important enough to be in the premiere too. Based on the age of the boy and the clothes in the picture, it’s almost certainly a young Judd Crawford and his father. Between the badge in the photo and the weathered look of that Klan uniform it’s far more likely both belonged to Judd’s dad.

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Maybe Judd followed in his father’s racist footsteps, or maybe he kept his dad’s uniform as a bizarre homage to his dad. Or maybe it was a personal reminder of his own family’s horrible past. Watchmen‘s America refuses to let anyone forget about the country’s racist history. That suit could have been Judd’s own way of remembering where he came from versus who he had become.

The discovery of those white robes don’t paint the best picture of Judd Crawford, but they might not be as damning as they seem.

No matter what Judd’s Crawford’s own racial views turn out to be though, ultimately they might not have anything to do with why he was killed. His death and Angela’s discovery of a secret identity in his closet mirrors that of Eddie Blake’s in the comic book. The graphic novel opened with Rorschach—a masked vigilante who didn’t believe in due process just like Angela – secretly investigating Blake’s home. Rorschach found a secret door inside a closet, and inside of it was a disguise. Eddie Blake was actually the vigilante the world knew as the Comedian; and just like fellow government employee Judd Crawford, Eddie Blake was a complicated figure with skeletons beside the costume in his closet.

But Blake wasn’t killed for those past transgressions. Eddie Blake was killed because he uncovered a horrible secret, the type of plot that can best be described in Will’s dire warning to Angela, “a vast and insidious conspiracy.”

Will knew something about Judd Crawford’s closet. He clearly knows something about a horrible secret plan that is unfolding in Tulsa. What we don’t know yet is what Judd knew about a new conspiracy. Whatever his connection to it is likely the real reason he was murdered, not an old Klan robe. Watchmen is really heating up.

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At the end of Watchmen, Dr. Manhattan left the galaxy, leaving only two people on Earth who knew Ozymandias had sent the “alien” squid to New York City—Nite Owl II and Silk Spectre II. The masked vigilantes Dan Dreiberg and Laurie Juspeczyk had agreed to maintain the lie rather than threaten world peace. The new couple, now fugitives, adopted new identities and went into hiding together as Sam and Sandra Hollis. They planned to continue “adventuring” though. Now, thanks to HBO’s new sequel series, we know they are no longer together, having taken two very different paths. One is a respected FBI agent, while the other sits silently in a cell. While each continues to serve the public in their own way, how and why they split apart could tell us about the possibility of Adrian Veidt’s lie becoming public.

What we do know is that in her final moments in the comic, she said she wanted a “better costume” that protected her, “maybe something leather” with a mask over her face, and “also maybe” a gun. The Comedian underwent the exact same transformation during his vigilante career. And just like Eddie Blake, Laurie now works for the government in an official capacity.

But while her new name and job tell us a lot about her, it doesn’t reveal what happened to Night Owl. Fortunately HBO’s companion website “Peteypedia” includes some information on what happened to him in the last three decades. A memo titled “Rorschach’s Journal,” which outlines how the missing vigilante became the hero of far right terrorists, also includes information on both Laurie Blake and Dan Dreiberg. In 1995, the pair were arrested for violating the Keene Act, which had outlawed masked vigilantism in 1977. The pair had also helped Rorschach escape from jail in October 1985, days before the squid appeared in New York City. Her crimes were forgiven though. She has since become an FBI agent, one the memo writer goes to great pains to show absolute respect to. And everyone knows who she was before.

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Meanwhile, Dan Dreiberg has been in jail for the last 24 years, where he hasn’t said anything about what really happened in 1985. The memo notes, “Dreiberg, now in federal custody, has steadfastly refused to speak to the Bureau about ‘Rorschach’s Journal,’ or anything, for that matter.”

After a decade on the lam together, the couple, both fugitives, were arrested in 1995. She became an important and powerful FBI agent while he was jailed for those very same crimes. How and why did this happen? Did Laurie play ball with the government in exchange for both her freedom and the ability to serve like her father before her? If so, what did she have to barter? Maybe it was Dan’s technology, which is why the Tulsa police has their own fleet of Archie flying machines. Or did she barter with the truth? The government is pushing for the reintroduction of technology now that it is positive it was not responsible for the giant squid (even as bay squids continue to rain down).

Did Laurie tell high ranking officials about Ozymandias’s lie, and in their desperation for it not to get out gave Silk Spectre her freedom in exchange for her continued silence?

DC Comics/Dave Gibbons/John Higgins

If so, what happened with her and Dan that his freedom wasn’t on the table? Did she want him to go to jail? Did things end poorly between them? It is even possible she betrayed him?

Maybe it’s far more simple; and he is so committed to keeping the greatest secret in the world he decided a cell was the best place for him. It also keeps him safe from Rorschach’s followers who want to know the truth about the squid and believe Dan Dreiberg is the only person who can reveal it.

Whatever happened between Dan and Laurie, both Night Owl and Silk Spectre are still serving the common good in their own ways. The more important question is whether at least a third person on the planet knows about what Adrian Veidt really did.

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The Watchmen graphic novel ended with the fascist right-wing newspaper the New Frontiersman discovering the journal of one of its most fervent, dedicated readers: the recently deceased Rorschach. It outlined the truth of Adrian Veidt’s deadly scheme, and its possible release threatened the world peace created by the lie of the giant squid. Now HBO’s new sequel series has shown that while the journal became public over 30 years ago, almost no one believes it’s veracity. No one except the white nationalist terror organization the Seventh Kavalry, who have adopted Rorschach’s iconic mask as the literal face of their terrorist group. The reasons why are explained in a “report” from the show’s new companion site, and it lays out why a new showdown between Rorschach and Ozymandias is brewing.

DC Comics/Dave Gibbons/John Higgins

The website “Peteypedia,” from special agent Dale Petey (who will appear later in Watchmen‘s first season), includes a confidential memo from Petey to the FBI’s Anti-Vigilante Task Force. Titled “Rorschach’s Journal,” it is ultimately an argument for why the FBI should not declare Adrian Veidt dead, but it also outlines when and how the infamous journal was released and why it became the rallying cry for white nationalists.

When Rorschach, real name Walter Joseph Kovacs, was arrested in October 1985, the FBI came into possession of another one of his journals. His messy, coded handwriting made it totally indecipherable. The FBI did confirm that after he was sprung from prison, Rorschach was seen on November 1—a day before Veidt sent his squid to NY—taking another hidden journal out of his apartment’s floor. Rorschach was heard calling it his “final draft.” We know this journal was both real and accurate, and that Rorschach dropped it off at his favorite paper before he left for Antarctica to confront Veidt. Four months later, the journal was found in the crank pile of the New Frontiersman.

The paper wasn’t just a right-leaning publication. It was led by editor Hector Godfrey, whom Petey accurately describes as “a hideous racist.” Godfrey ran pieces praising the KKK for trying to “preserve American culture.” He was also a champion of masked vigilante (with the exception of the liberal Ozymandias), not in spite of their fascist tendencies but because of them. We now know Godfrey tried multiple times to confirm the journal’s authenticity, including trying to gain access to the first Rorschach journal to compare them, but was thwarted by the government. On March 21, 1986, he began publishing excerpts anyway.

DC Comics/Dave Gibbons/John Higgins

It was easy to dismiss this “final draft” journal as a fake—or at best the rantings of a lunatic, either a crazed Walter Kovacs himself or a person who believed they actually were Rorschach—because the handwriting in the second journal was easy to read, the complete opposite of the other one in the FBI’s possession. However, it did contain some nuggets of authenticity, notably that its writer knew the recently deceased Eddie Blake was the masked vigilante the Comedian.

Godfrey couldn’t prove it was real, but no one could prove it was a hoax either. Meanwhile the baby cephalopod rains that started shortly after the giant squid appeared continued to fall from the sky, reminding the world of the alien “threat” still looming.

The journal’s most shocking accusations were nearly impossible to believe. Rorschach said Adrian Veidt—philanthropist, smartest man in the world, former superhero, and wildly successful businessman—was responsible for killing the Comedian, giving hundreds of people cancer, and driving Dr. Manhattan from the planet, all in service of some mass conspiracy. Rorschach also wrote that he didn’t expect to survive his confrontation with Ozymandias.

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In the New Frontiersman‘s tenth and final installment on the journal, Godfrey concluded the giant squid was a false flag orchestrated by Veidt in an attempt to create a liberal government. Godfrey wrote:

“Behold the most diabolical plot against America ever designed: to destabilize the governance of righteous conservative rule, Veidt concocted a counterfeit cosmic cataclysm rendered with Hollywood magic and Satanic science for the purpose of turning the Stars and Stripes onto Hammers and Sickles. AND IT WORKED! The events of the past six months are proof! Our commander-in-chief has been frightened into brokering peace with the Kremlin for the sake of creating a ‘common defense’ against a threat that doesn’t actually exist! (How SUSPICIOUSLY CONVENIENT of that pile of psychic seafood to melt into a puddle of harmless water and then evaporate away before science could study it. Dubious, I say! Dubious!) The Ruskies have gained a foothold on our sacred soil (Burgers-n-Borscht anyone? I HOPE NOT!), and our glorious Manifest Destiny march toward global Democracy, Capitalism, and Christian Supremacy has been stalled. Now we cower as we wait for the next shoe to drop. You know what it is. It’s not another beastie from the outer limits of Dimension X, and it’s not the nuisance of spoiled shrimp sloshing from the sky. No, this jackbooted jabberwocky is the Anti-Christ masquerading as a bleeding heart cowboy, a bad actor on so many levels who seeks to re-educate us into slaves of Big Brother. IT’S A GODDAM LIBERAL PRESIDENT!”

Veidt denied the incredibly accurate allegations, which were ignored by mainstream media, and they never really stuck. Petey says initially the journal was considered “at best” an “outrageous entertainment from an outrageous outlet that provided brief distraction” from squid anxiety.

DC Comics/Dave Gibbons/John Higgins

Then in 1992, a “blue wave,” backed by Veidt’s donations, created the kind of liberal government Godfrey had warned his readers about. When the New Frontiersman republished “Rorschach’s Journal,” the bookazine became a best-seller, especially with right wingers. Petey writes:

“For them, ‘Rorschach’s Journal’ — and Godfrey’s interpretation of it — challenges the new, heretical orthodoxy that makes them feel marginalized and obsolete, written by a revolutionary they revere as a saint. It rationalizes their conviction that our current president is an illegitimate president, brought to power because of the [giant squid] , which, again, per the convoluted logic of Godfrey’s conspiracy theory, was essentially an insidious coup concocted the embittered liberal elite, as the ramifications of the [squid] paved the way for the Blue Wave of ‘92. This belief is the justification for any number of anti-social behaviors, from the formation of drop-out communities known as “Nixonvilles,” to domestic terrorists like the aforementioned Seventh Kavalry, who protest the president by committing violence against symbols of the executive branch, which is to say, law enforcement.”

Rorschach’s “enduring appeal” has led to a cult-like following by a group whose “own warped ideology” is “reflected in the mad swirl of his ink blot face.” Petey warns that what the Seventh Kavalry ultimately wants, as much as an end to liberal policies, is “justice for their martyr-messiah,” whom they believe was murdered by Ozymandias.

And Ozymandias was just declared dead by the same government the Kavalry doesn’t trust, a decision that could lead to more bloodshed.

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Petey says ending the search for Veidt “risks antagonizing and activating Rorschach-inspired extremists who express their distrust of government with maverick vigilantism or brazen attacks on law enforcement or both” because declaring him dead “will look like a cover-up.” He also asked what will happen if Veidt suddenly shows up? “Given his vast resources and even vaster ego, isn’t it more likely than not that ‘The Smartest Man in The World’ is planning a show-stopping comeback of his own?” Petey asks.

Ozymandias almost certainly is, and he could be planning the final showdown between him and Rorschach, who three decades later lives on as the face of white nationalist terrorists. It’s a war the Seventh Kalvary has been waiting for. Tick tock, tick tock…

Jean Smart as Laurie Blake.

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Regina King as Angela Abar.

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Jeremy Irons as Adrian Veidt.

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Regina King as Sister Night and Tim Blake Nelson as Looking Glass.

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Hong Chau as Lady Trieu.

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Regina King and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Angela and Cal Abar.

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Regina King as Sister Night.

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Louis Gossett Jr. as Will Reeves.

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Jeremy Irons as Adrian Veidt.

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Don Johnson as chief of Police Judd Crawford.

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Regina King as Sister Night.

Mark Hill/HBO

Regina King as Sister Night.

Mark Hill/HBO

Featured Image: HBO

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HBO’s Watchmen companion website, “Peteypedia,” includes a memo sent by FBI Director James Doyan to the Anti-Vigilante Task Force on August 29, 2019, eleven days before the start of the series. Titled “The Computer and You,” it encourages his employees to embrace their new legally mandated crime-fighting equipment: a computer model first released in our own world in 2000. The document is an inside look at why Ozymandias’s squid made the world turn its back on tech, and how it is finally making a comeback.

DC Comics/Dave Gibbons/John Higgins

The FBI’s new cutting edge device is the IBM NetVista X41, a computer line first sold in our timeline back at the turn of the century. It houses the agency’s new electronic database, replacing agents’ hard copy blue books (which were completely taken away). Doyan’s memo also encourages his employees to start communicating with electronic mail (called “El-mail”), and to use their word processors to produce inter-office memos. Any questions or issues can be directed to the special agent responsible for “Peteypedia,” Agent Dale Petey, who “is eager to help.”

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Doyan writes he’s not worried about his agents “shar[ing] the old technophobia that still persists in some sectors of society,” but it’s unclear from his memo just how much he actually believes that versus how much he is telling them technophobia is not an option. (Later in the memo he does explicitly say the law prevents agents from publicly denouncing the computers or sharing any worries about their safety.) Either way, federal policy requires the director to present “the following assurances, disclaimers, and orders” to his agents, and they help explain why this world’s technology is 20 years behind our own.

“This electronic device has been deemed SAFE by the Food, Drug, and Technology Administration as defined by the Tech Recall and Reintroduction Act of 1993.”

After the giant squid appeared, the regulation of technology became equivalent to ensuring the safety of food and drugs, with tech formally becoming the domain of the FD(T)A. The same agency responsible for making sure chicken and Tylenol doesn’t poison you also makes sure the pager Regina King’s Anegla Abar uses won’t either.

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“This electronic device does not contain Manhattan-made components and does not emit D.I.E.-grade radiation. Surgeon General Oz maintains you will not get cancer by being exposed to this device and you will not damage the (hypothetical) dimensional membrane by using it.”

D.I.E. stands for “Dimensional Incursion Event,” the official name for the giant squid. Surgeon General Oz appears to be TV’s Dr. Oz, proving there are always worse timelines.

Most important is the guarantee the computer was not built with “Manhattan-made components.” In the early ’60s, Dr. Manhattan used his superpowers to synthesize mass quantities of lithium, giving birth to electric cars thanks to his now-outlawed batteries we saw the Seventh Kavalry collecting in the Watchmen premiere. However, after Ozymandias made the world believe that Manhattan gave his former associates cancer via radiation, people became wary of using any technology Manhattan created or was the basis for.

Also, after D.I.E., the world worried that the transdimensional passage the “alien” squid had seemingly traveled through was created by technology that had tore a previously unknown (hypothetical) dimensional membrane, which we know does not exist. When baby squids started raining down not long after D.I.E. (an occurrence that still takes place in 2019), the world shunned most of the technology that had been developed during the previous 25 years, explaining why they are just getting 2000 computers now.

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“The Tech Recall and Reintroduction Act of 1993 grants the president of the United States authority to draft federal employees into the work of reintroducing technologies once deemed unsafe or illegal back into the public space according to the 30-year, five-stage plan outlined in TTR93.”

The world became so fearful of any technology after 1985 that reintroducing it into society has been equivalent to fighting a war. In response, a 1993 a law allowed the president to literally draft federal employees like soldiers into a 30-year plan that would slowly convince the public that tech previously feared unsafe was totally fine.

Did Adrian Veidt have anything to do with this law, or did he possibly oppose it for being too slow? He viewed science as a pathway forward for mankind, and he was the leading Democratic political donor and friends with President Redford until 1993. The last thing Veidt wanted was for his squid to set technology back decades.

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“Your department of government has been drafted to participate in the reintroduction of STAGE FIVE technologies.”

Later in the memo, Doyan discusses his own hesitance to use computers in the ’70s even though they proved highly efficient and effective in fighting crime. In a country beset by domestic terrorists, it’s understandable computers are considered among the highest priorities of to bring back. (Good luck to any society just getting the internet for the first time. You’re going to need it.)

“Agreeing to use this electronic device in the course of your duties represents a commencement of draft service. In performing this service, we ask you to model confidence in this device to the public and refrain from behavior that might subvert confidence in the type of technology this electronic device represents. You are permitted to opt out of draft service only if the device in question has been deemed unessential to the performance of your duties.

This device has been deemed ESSENTIAL to the performance of your job duties. Failure to use this electronic device in the performance of your duties may result in demotion, reassignment, or termination.”

The reintroduction of technology into society is so daunting it’s equivalent to a publicity war, one that requires the drafting of combatants who might otherwise not enlist. Taken together these two passages are troubling, making federal employees de facto propagandists by enforcing them to be compliant with the wishes and message of its government. But they do reveal that the government—for reasons we don’t know yet—have properly learned the truth: technology was not to blame for the squid and scientific advancements were possible without Dr. Manhattan’s help.

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Doyan ends his memo by saying, “The computers, the phones, the towers that would have provided communications without wires—we destroyed it all, hoping it would save us. And yet, baby cephalopods still rain from the sky. Our fear of technology was for naught. Don’t be like me. Don’t be stupid. The future is here again. Don’t fear it. Embrace it.”

He’s right; technology is safe. But it isn’t just a mere PR battle to make the world believe that, it’s a war, and when has one side being right ever stopped a war from happening?

And when you have a war you have casualties.

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Adrian Veidt, the exalted and athletically gifted masked vigilante Ozymandias, was the smartest man in the world. In 1985 he executed the greatest con in history: genetically-engineering an “alien” squid monster and teleporting it to New York City, killing half the city’s population. His deception did avert the looming threat of nuclear war, by uniting the nations of the world against a common enemy. Years later, that same world believes he is dead, though he is very much alive in a secluded chateau where he lives with his strange personal servants. What happened to him after the squid could explain why he went into hiding, because his original plan didn’t work out exactly liked he hoped.

“Veidt Declared Dead,” an obituary posted on HBO’s Watchmen companion website Peteypedia dated September 9, 2019 (and seen in the series premiere) came after the FBI officially ended its seven-year global search for the “billionaire industrialist, political kingmaker, and controversial futurist.” It gives an account of the former masked vigilante’s life after 1985, and before he went missing he had a turbulent couple of decades.

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In the immediate aftermath of the squid attack (officially known as D.I.E., Dimensional Incursion Event), Veidt became the largest donor to the Democratic party and progressive causes, helping fund the “blue wave” of 1992 that put Robert Redford into the White House after Richrd Nixon’s 24-year reign (as of Watchmen‘s 2019, Redford is still sitting president). However, the passage of the Campaign Finance Reform and Donor Disclosure Act of 1993 dramatically limited how much Veidt could influence politics, and the law might have been responsible for causing a rift between himself and President Redford. Still, Veidt, always a target of right wing ire dating back to his masked vigilante days, remains a symbol of the liberal policies that have governed America for nearly 30 years.

A far bigger problem for Veidt than campaign finance reform was what happened to technology in his world. The tech of Watchmen‘s 1985 was more advanced than our own in significant ways, most notably battery-powered cars. Dr. Manhattan’s ability to synthesize massive amounts of lithium led to electric cars in the early ’60s. Adrian Veidt also dedicated massive amounts of personal resources into technological advances (both for good and bad reasons), because he viewed science as another important path towards mankind reaching its full potential. But his grand deception had the unintended consequence of curtailing all technological advancements for decades. Fearful that any Manhattan-related tech both caused cancer and was responsible for opening up the transdimensional rift that the “alien” squid “traveled” through, almost all new technology of the last 25 years was discarded as the world became technophobic.

(Note: In fairness to the world, baby squid rain began almost immediately after the giant squid appeared. As far as anyone knew a transdimensional rift remained open for unknown reasons. Ironically, the continuance of cephalopod showers into 2019 appears to be proof old technology wasn’t to blame, leading to a revival of technology in the Watchmen universe.)

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A global rejection of technology in the ’90s not only harmed his plans for a world made better through science, it cut into his vast fortune. His electric car energy sources known as spark hydrants became worthless, as did his Millennium by Veidt brand, which tried “to evolve society toward a technology-based utopia led by transcendent supermen.” It wasn’t until 1999 that his company gained back all of its value by “licensing proprietary technology to other fields, most notably, pet cloning.” Veidt had mastered genetic-engineering, which he used to make his famous pet lynx Bubatis and his monster squid.

The release of Rorschach’s journal by the right wing paper the New Frontiersmen in early 1986, which outlined all of Veidt’s master plan, did little to diminish his reputation (outside of the far right). Most took it as an elaborate hoax or the rantings of a known lunatic. It also seemed impossible Veidt could have killed so many as he engendered good will after 1985 by donating “millions to hospitals dedicated to treating post-D.I.E. PTSD and private laboratories devoted to researching experimental technologies and alternative energies.”

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Veidt made his last public appearance in 2007, but by that time he had already become known as a recluse, though no one could agree why. He wasn’t declared formally missing though until 2012, after Trieu Industries purchased his companies but could not find him to approve the deal. There were no signs of any foul play at his known homes in the states of New York and Vietnam, or at Karnak, his base in Antarctica. After a seven-year worldwide search the FBI finally declared him dead in 2019.

Of course, the 80-year-old is still alive, living in a hidden chateau with two very weird servants, Crookshanks and Philips, writing plays about Dr. Manhattan and eating cake. But becoming a playwright doesn’t require total seclusion and the appearance you are dead; so why did he go into hiding in the first place? Was he running from someone? It seems unlikely the government was after him, since, strained relationship with Redford or not, he was a champion of progressives and the left. And while he was a target of right wing domestic terrorists, the smartest man in the world with unlimited resources could better protect himself than even the president.

He must want to have total anonymity and freedom for prying eyes for some other reason.

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The last time Adrian Veidt operated in secret, he produced a giant squid and changed the world with the greatest lie ever told, but not in all the ways he hoped or wanted. What master scheme is he working on now to reshape mankind in the image he always intended, one where science and technology help produce supermen of unlimited potential? And how will he keep it all hidden this time? Rorschach was able to reveal his plan to the world, even though Veidt killed everyone else who worked on his project. Did he genetically-engineer loyal servants completely dedicated to him this time? Is that why Crookshanks and Philips are so strange, because they were only recently created in a lab like Bubastis?

Ozymandias had a plan in 1985, and it almost worked perfectly. But one person who knew the truth almost ruined it, and the same technology Adrian Veidt used to pull off his scheme, something he hoped would help mankind, made the world wary of it entirely.

Now everyone thinks he’s dead, and once again war that threatens the peace he killed so many to achieve. What will he sacrifice to “fix” both issues in 2019?

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Did you watch the Watchmen? The pilot episode of HBO’s sequel series to the DC comic of the same name premiered, and it proved to be as dense as the source material! Amy cracks open all the Easter eggs on today’s Nerdist News!

Did you catch any other references? Tell us in the comments!

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Warning: This post contains major spoilers for the first episode of HBO’s Watchmen.

There was a lot, and we do mean A LOT, going on in the first episode of Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen series. From baby squid rain, to cows being blown to smithereens, to a stunning final scene, the premiere had more Easter eggs and major developments than many shows have in a single season. But it also raised plenty of questions that will have huge ramifications for the rest of the season and beyond. These are the biggest mysteries we need answered after the pilot.

1. Who was the baby girl the young boy picked up after the Tulsa Race Massacre?

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We know the young child who survived the massacre in Tulsa is still alive nearly 100 years later, as we see him in 2019 holding the note (“Watch over this boy”) that his parents had left with him after the aforesaid tragedy. He is seemingly responsible for hanging Don Johnson’s Judd Crawford from a tree (though the season preview after the episode suggests he wasn’t the one who killed him). But who was the baby girl he picked up in that field so long ago? Is she still alive a century later? If not, who was she and how does she connect to the story?

2. Who killed Judd Crawford and why?

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Whether it was Louis Gossett Jr.’s old man, the Seventh Cavalry, or some other person or group, the murder of Chief Judd Crawford could send an already tenuous situation in Tulsa over the edge. Could the cause be revenge for the unlawful violation of civil liberties by the police, or an old grudge against the city itself? An attempt by the Cavalry to create an Archduke Franz Ferdinand moment and start the war they so desperately want? Or is it possible this was far more personal and Judd Crawford wasn’t targeted because of his job but because of something else?

3. Why is the Seventh Cavalry collecting watch batteries?

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What could a group of white nationalist terrorists want with little watch batteries? (“The old kind, with the synthetic lithium, the ones that were making people sick.”) There are easier ways to make an explosive, though Judd Crawford wondered if they were working on a cancer bomb… which isn’t farfetched, since in the comic book, Adrian Veidt did give people cancer. But a deadly disease seems like a slow way to start a war already on the verge of breaking out. So what do they really want those batteries for?

4. How did the police get their own fleet of Archies?

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Night Owl II, whose real identity was Dan Dreiberg, was wealthy, which is how he was able to afford his fancy gadgets and high-end crime fighting technology. The most memorable piece of such tech was his flying apparatus called Archie. But Night Owl II went into hiding after the Giant Squid attack, taking on an entirely new identity to protect himself. How did his owl-shaped plane end up in the hands of the Tulsa police, who had a fleet of them patrolling the skies? Was it discovered when Dreiberg left it behind? Did he give it over freely? Was he arrested and his technology seized?

Or is it possible Dreiberg brought it with him to his new job in Tulsa? Was Judd Crawford really Dan Dreiberg, which is why he had an owl mug and a copy of the original Night Owl’s tell-all memoir on his desk?

5. Who is responsible for the baby squid rain? The government, Ozymandias, or someone else?

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The people living in the world of Watchmen believe a transdimensional monster alien squid landed in New York City in 1985. However, that was the work of Adrian Veidt, a.k.a. Ozymandias. His plan was to unite the world against a common enemy that appeared in the form of a space invader, and it worked. Mostly.

The Seventh Cavalry thinks “alien” squids, whose babies now rain down upon the cities randomly, are a government hoax. We know the government wasn’t behind the first squid, but are they behind these latest “attacks”? Did the governments of the world uncover the truth of Veidt’s plan but, like his fellow Watchmen, decide it would be better to maintain the lie than admit the truth? Or does Ozymandias still send baby squid rain showers sometimes using his teleportation technology to help maintain his deception? Could it even be someone else, or some other group, entirely?

Between Night Owl II, Ozymandias, and Silk Spectre II (Jean Smart’s Laurie Blake who didn’t appear in the pilot but will soon as an FBI agent), the question of how much the former Watchmen are working with or against the government will be a major element of the season.

6. Why is Dr. Manhattan on Mars?

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Dr. Manhattan left Earth’s solar system at the end of the graphic novel to start new life somewhere far away. So why did he return to Mars, his former planet of solitude? Was he lonely in the universe by himself? Did he miss his original cosmic neighborhood? Or does he want to be close to Earth because something terrible is going to happen soon (he can see through time) and a small part of him still cares about the fate of mankind?

And why didn’t his appearance seem like a very big deal on Earth? Is a Dr. Manhattan sighting a frequent occurrence and not all that surprising? If so, why does he sometimes reappear?

7. Why did Adrian Veidt go into hiding?

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A newspaper headline reported Jeremy Irons’ Adrian Veidt had been officially declared dead, but he’s very much alive at his private chateau. Exactly how long has he been in hiding and why? What does he gain from being presumed dead? Is he on the run from the world’s governments, possibly because they uncovered the truth about his giant squid? Are they in on the lie to protect him? Could he need privacy to work on something new (and not just a new play)?

8. Why are Adrian Veidt’s servants so weird?

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Mr. Philips, who tried to cut a cake with a horseshoe and wrapped a gift in rabbit fur, and Miss Crookshanks, who was completely undisturbed by rubbing her naked master’s thigh as he typed, are weird. Really weird. Is that because Adrian Veidt, who once created a massive biological monster, genetically-engineered them too? For a man in hiding from the world, it would be the best way to ensure total loyalty and devotion, even if both servants are a little off.

9. What anniversary were they celebrating?

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The cake that Philips and Crookshanks prepared for Veidt was part of an anniversary celebration, but which one? The premiere took place in September, so it couldn’t have been the anniversary of the first squid attack, which occurred in November. What other monumental event in Ozymandias’ life was worthy of celebration?

For an episode loaded with so much we still have a whole lot of questions we need answered.

Featured Image: HBO

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In The Leftovers, a man named Kevin Garvey travels to the underworld, searching for meaning in an impossible place. What does it mean to be alive after a global event has rocked the world to its core? How do you go on when you realize–finally, fatally–that the universe is full of inexplicable phenomena, a total lack of reason? Lindelof has been probing at these thoughts even before The Leftovers, with his first big series, Lost. Both shows explored similar themes of survival, love, death; our role in this celestial clump of matter. Attempting to articulate the unimaginable, and using humor and pop culture references to weight these fictional worlds—not so dissimilar from our own—in something recognizable. Both arrived at a similar place in the end: accepting that existence isn’t about the answers, but the questions themselves.

But Lindelof’s new series, HBO’s Watchmen, is a different beast entirely. Instead of posturing existential what-ifs, the show concerns itself with the here and now: “Why did this happen?” and, “How did we get here?” and, “How do we fix this?” It’s a more direct approach to storytelling, one that orients us in a familiar alternate reality, where race relations are a boiling pot without a lid, police must shroud their faces in secrecy to avoid targeted violence, and where the facade of global unity masks the rot around the edges. It’s not our America, but it is our America. Lindelof borrows moments from our history (like the massacre on Black Wall Street, which opens the first episode), but keeps us at a distance. In the world of Watchmen, Robert Redford has been president for 30 years, the sky rains baby squids, and masked vigilantes perform detective work. It’s reality as much as it’s surreality; discernible but foreign.

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The alternate reality setting creates a sandbox of sorts for Lindelof, where he can build structures, knock them down, and examine the rubble. The story is set 30 years after the events of Alan Moore’s graphic novel of the same name. It’s 2019, and we open in Tulsa, Oklahoma; urban, but not a metropolis. A police officer is shot by a white supremacist, setting off a chain of events that lead us to Regina King’s Angela Abar. She’s a retired police officer, who lives out a secret life as a masked detective called Sister Night.

The police officer was injured by a member of the Seventh Kavalry, a terrorist organization who wear hoods inspired by Rorschach, the “protagonist” of Moore’s comic who’s now the face of white nationalism. Sister Night and her fellow vigilantes try to track down the Kavalry, and not for the first time. Like a stubborn virus, they keep coming back, with inkblot faces instead of sharp white hoods. The layers of this conflict aren’t entirely clear after just the pilot, but the seeds are planted. This is a rudderless, ugly world, where Rorschach’s moral absolutism—black and white, good and bad—was something like foresight. How can Sister Night save the world? Is it even worth saving?

In a past life, Lindelof might have spent an entire series leading us to this impossible, endless fight against corruptibility. But with Watchmen, he opens the series at its natural end. He’s doing something different here. Posing questions that might lead us down several divergent paths. It doesn’t feel rooted in amorphous tectonics, like Lost and The Leftovers. It feels like a place where things could happen that evoke real change. Where characters might learn to stop asking questions and to start asking the right ones.

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It’s too early to say how successful Lindelof’s endeavor will be, or if this observation is even the point. But the pilot reeks of maturation. With Lost, the camera zoomed around an impressively large island, an insurmountable gulp of land where mysteries would later turn to rot. In The Leftovers, sad music revealed a desolate world, drenched in white fabric—the remnants of a fallen society that could never be repaired, and would learn to live in ruin. But Watchmen is sharp angles, dark colors, pulsating momentum. It’s an artery instead of a cloud. Eager to crack some eggs and get to work. Reparations need to be made, or vanquished, and Watchmen is Lindelof showing how hungry he is after decades of no dessert.

Whatever the show morphs into, whatever pattern appears on its Rorschach canvas, we’ll be watching.

Featured Image: HBO

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Nicole Kassell knows good television. You can sense that when you tick through her résumé, a robust and impressive collection of titles: Westworld, The Americans, Better Call Saul. For the last decade, she’s worked hard directing episodes of these shows and busting down gender barriers for women in media. But it was her work on HBO’s The Leftovers that changed her career in a major way. It introduced her to showrunner Damon Lindelof, whom she’s now collaborating with on an adaptation of Alan Moore’s seminal 1987 graphic novel Watchmen. Kassell directed the first two episodes of the show and also serves as executive producer, meaning she’s intimately involved in major creative decisions. Ahead of the pilot’s premiere on HBO, Kassell chatted with Nerdist about working on the show and what viewers can expect.

There was one scene from the pilot that we really wanted to discuss with Kassell, and it’s not the much-talked-about prologue or even that shocking ending. Rather, a unique action scene that felt unlike anything we’ve ever seen on TV⁠—or anywhere else, for that matter. It’s a sequence that, as we learned during our conversation, is both a riveting set piece and a bit of a thesis statement for this new take on Watchmen.

The pilot, titled “It’s Summer and We’re Running Out of Ice” (which takes its name from the song “Pore Jud Is Daid” from the musical Oklahoma!) introduces us to a very different version of modern day Tulsa: police wear masks to protect their identities; racial power structures seem in reverse⁠—most cops are black, and are hunted by a group known as the Seventh Kavalry, a white-supremacist terrorist organization who wear Rorschach masks, their philosophies inspired by said character.

Luckily, there’s a team of masked detectives led by Regina King’s Sister Night, a former cop, hoping to snuff the Seventh Kavalry out. In the pilot, Sister Night follows a breadcrumb trail and discovers a Kavalry compound where a massive shootout takes place. It’s a thrilling sequence set at night in a field, where cows are used as shields, and blood and bullets fall like rain.

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“It was the weirdest sequence to read and to wrap our heads around,” said Kassell of the sequence. “It’s very funny and disturbing.”

But it’s not just there to be gross-out fodder or to shock audiences. Kassell explained that setting these cows in the middle of a violent shootout was a different way to show the “horrors of violence.” 

“It was very important to me that the cows would not simply just die, but that there’d be suffering,” she said. “We’ve gotten so desensitized to seeing humans massacre. Making it innocent cows was a way to wake [the audience] up.” 

Kassell said the scene was full of technical challenges, as you can probably imagine. Some of the cows were real (“Who knew that cows like to lie down and sleep at night?” she joked.) so keeping them awake and functional was difficult. “The real challenge was once the gunfire started. Describing it to the actors, and having to talk them through what would be happening. How the cows would be stampeding, or the bullets shredding a body.”

The Seventh Kavalry members end up escaping on a plane, so the mission is ultimately unsuccessful. But the moment isn’t just a one and done action set piece; Kassell explained that this whole sequence explains a lot about what this version of Watchmen will be.

“It’s kind of a pinnacle moment, this one scene taking all of the different tones throughout the episode, if not the season, and saying these are all going to live in the same space,” she said. 

Violence. Oppression. The cost of innocent lives. This is Watchmen. We can’t wait to see where it goes next.

Featured Image: HBO

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The pilot for Watchmen premiered on HBO tonight and it’s exactly as riveting as you’d expect something from Damon Lindelof to be. The auteur television creator is known for his showrunning work on series like Lost and The Leftovers, where he added a cerebral layer of inquisitiveness to seemingly mundane subjects. He’s always been great at mixing genre with guttural truths, something that was demonstrated most keenly in characters like Jack Shephard on Lost and Kevin Garvey on The Leftovers; two 40-something guys navigating life while grappling with philosophical extremes.

You might expect Watchmen to continue that trend, especially if you noticed Don Johnson on the cast list. While Johnson’s character, Judd Crawford, is a hair older than Jack and Kevin, the pilot makes it clear that he shares some commonalities with those men. He’s embroiled in social conflict, struggles with the past, and is more mysterious than first impressions might suggest.

If you’re a fan of Lost, and have followed behind-the-scenes conversations about that show, then you might have noticed another major thing Judd Crawford shares with Jack Shephard. Something that shows that Lindelof isn’t shortsighted about his storytelling, and will use new opportunities to complete past ideas that didn’t quite work out.

In the final moment of Watchmen‘s pilot episode, “It’s Summer and We’re Running Out of Ice,” we see that Judd Crawford has been killed, presumably by Louis Gossett Jr.’s character. The episode closes on an image of him hanging from a tree, as the song “Pore Jud Is Daid” from Oklahoma! plays in the background. If you’re familiar with the production history of Lost, then this moment might set off a bell. Indeed, back in the day, Lost creators J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof actually wanted their leading man Jack to die in the show’s pilot. In fact, they even wanted to cast an actor with the same sort of name recognizability as Don Johnson in the part: Michael Keaton. The working idea was that Jack would die and Evangeline Lilly’s character, Kate, would become the de facto lead–throwing the audience for a major loop before the second episode even came to pass.

ABC made the Lost showrunners change the whole Jack death thing before production began, so we never got to see how that would play out. Instead of Keaton, actor Matthew Fox was cast as Jack, who became the lead protagonist until the finale. So the Watchmen pilot feels sort of like Lindelof paying homage to what he and Abrams had originally planned for Lost. On a cable network like HBO, it all becomes a little easier to pull off.

Image: HBO

And before you start doubting whether or not Crawford is actually dead, it’s been confirmed by those involved with the production that he is, indeed, a goner. Watchmen director and executive producer confirmed to Vanity Fair that Johnson’s role was a one-and-done situation. “It’s horrible,” she confirmed. “Even with the casting of it, that had to be the ending.”

With Judd’s death confirmed, it’s nice to see Lindelof’s bold storytelling finally come full circle, and we have to imagine he’s is quite happy with the final results. It’s always satisfying when brave and bold story choices are paid off… even if it took more than a decade to come to fruition.

Featured Image: HBO

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Warning: This post contains major spoilers for Watchmen premiere, episode one.

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Here’s every reference, Easter egg, world-building development, and plot point you need to know from the premiere of Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen on HBO.

The Episode’s Title

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If you’re the biggest fan of Oklahoma this was probably the greatest episode of television you’ve ever seen, and not just because it included a stage performance of the musical’s title track. The episode’s name, “It’s Summer and We’re Running Out of Ice,” is a lyric from another Oklahoma song, and it contained some major foreshadowing about the episode’s shocking end.

Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921

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The show’s opening scene is not from an alternate history of the United States. It was a real event that took place from May 31 to June 1, in what is one of the worst race riots in American history. White citizens in the highly segregated city of Tulsa tried to storm a courthouse where a young black boy was under the protection of armed black men, some of them WWI veterans like the father seen in the episode. After shots were fired the black citizens, outnumbered 1,500 to 75, retreated to the neighborhood of Greenwood, an affluent part of town known as “Black Wall Street.” From History.com:

“Over the next several hours, groups of white Tulsans—some of whom were deputized and given weapons by city officials—committed numerous acts of violence against blacks, including shooting an unarmed man in a movie theater.

The false belief that a large-scale insurrection among black Tulsans was underway, including reinforcements from nearby towns and cities with large African-American populations, fueled the growing hysteria.

As dawn broke on June 1, thousands of white citizens poured into the Greenwood District, looting and burning homes and businesses over an area of 35 city blocks. Firefighters who arrived to help put out fires later testified that rioters had threatened them with guns and forced them to leave.

According to a later Red Cross estimate, some 1,256 houses were burned; 215 others were looted but not torched. Two newspapers, a school, a library, a hospital, churches, hotels, stores and many other black-owned businesses were among the buildings destroyed or damaged by fire.”

For decades records and reports on the massacre were intentionally hidden, erased, or ignored, with a near total media blackout keeping the true story hidden from most Americans. There was no memorial service until 1996 on the 75th anniversary. A 2001 report found that, rather than 36 deaths originally reported, “between 100 and 300 people were killed and more than 8,000 people made homeless over those 18 hours in 1921.” The tragedy is now taught in all Oklahoma schools.

The Seventh Cavalry

The show’s white supremacist terror organization known as the Seventh Cavalry takes its name from the 7th Cavalry, a U.S. Army regiment that was created after the Civil War. The unit originally fought in the Indian Wars, and are most famously remembered for being slaughtered in 1876 at the Battle of Little Bighorn, also known as “Custer’s Last Stand.” (That’s why Judd used the code “Little Bighorn” when he paged Angela.) While the regiment has fought in many American wars since then, including WWII, in 1890 the 7th Calvary was responsible for the Wounded Knee Massacre, which marked the end of the Indian Wars. The show’s Seventh Cavalry, which wants to exterminate all people of color, “whores,” and “race traitors,” take their name from the regiment’s early years.

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The masks they wear pay tribute to Rorschach, Watchmen comic book’s uncompromising “hero” who was also a fascist with a rigid worldview. He left his journal outlining the truth of Ozymandias’ fake squid alien scheme to the ultra right wing newspaper the New Frontiersman, which ran the story.

Based on the pod interrogation scene the Seventh Calvary believe the otherwise refuted story that “transdimensional attacks are hoaxes staged by the U.S. government.”

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It’s not clear who or what is responsible for baby squids raining down with little warning outside of a siren alert, even if the Calvary blames the government for them. Either way, some entity has continued to perpetuate Ozymandias’s lie in order to keep the peace.

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The leader of the Seventh Calvary also made two direct references to Rorschach. The first was when he echoed the vigilante’s famous quote about whispering “no” when people call out to “save us.” The other came when the group’s leader said, “And we will never compromise,” just like Rorschach refused to compromise even in the face of Armageddon.

As for their secret grand plan, the group was collecting watch batteries that are no longer sold, “the old kind, with the synthetic lithium, the ones that were making people sick.” Judd Crawford half-jokingly asked if the “Cavalry is gonna make a cancer bomb” with them, which might not be as crazy as it sounds. In the comic book Adrian Veidt did give people cancer to trick Dr. Manhattan into thinking he was responsible for their illnesses. And since Dr. Manhattan was responsible for that lithium battery technology it’s likely they blamed his tech for making them sick.

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Masked Police Officers

Three years prior to the start of the show the Seventh Cavalry staged simultaneous attacks on the police at the officers’ own homes. After the “White Night” attack cops started wearing masks to maintain total anonymity, with higher-ranking officers like Sister Night, Red Scare, and Looking Glass dressing up in costumes rather than uniforms with yellow masks. These protective protocols require each officer to have their own cover story for where they are when they are on duty, just like masked superheroes.

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The Tulsa police were all frustrated with their colleague, Panda. Responsible for authorizing the release of a police officer’s gun, which is kept locked in their patrol car until Panda is the only one on the force concerned with following the law and not escalating the violence in response to the Calvary’s shooting of a cop.

Panda was unable to stop the implementation of Article 4, which allowed all police officers to be armed for 24 hours.

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Judd Crawford also ended the meeting by saying, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” which famously translates to “who watched the watchmen?” Previously that was a cry from citizens fed up with masked vigilantes. Now it is a rallying slogan for the police.

Watchmen‘s America of 2019

Robert Redford has been president of the United States for nearly 30 years, during which time he has governed as a liberal. At some point under President Redford the U.S. instituted reparations for Black Americans, derisively referred to as “Redfordations” by that burgeoning young racist who asked Angela Abar if she used that money to open her (fake) bakery. Another question asked during the pod interrogation implied these reparations have come in the form of not taxing black Americans. Tim Blake Nelson’s shiny-mask wearing Looking Glass asked the Seventh Cavalry member, “Should all Americans pay taxes?” and he answered yes.

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Vietnam is also a U.S. state, dating back almost 50 years during Richard Nixon’s extended presidency after Dr. Manhattan led the U.S. to a decisive victory. Angela Abar was born there three years prior to Vietnam joining the Union.

President Redford is not popular with right-wing Americans. The trailer park where Angela kidnapped the Calvary member had a giant statue of his predecessor Richard Nixon, and one trailer had “Fuck Redford” spray-painted on it.

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Later in the episode, Judd Crawford listened to talk radio in his car as a caller aired some of the right’s grievances with Redford’s liberal policies. He also discussed a possible opponent for the next presidential election, a candidate with a famous name in the Watchmen universe.

“But it’s a hell of a name isn’t it? Senator John Keene was a real cowboy, unlike our current Sundancer-in-Chief. Now thirty years of Redford and what do we got to show for it? More land we can’t live on, more animals we can’t kill, and a six month wait to get a gun for our own protection. Hell, if Joe Junior wants to mount up and gallop into the White House I say let him ride.”

John Keene Sr. was the senator who wrote the 1977 bill known as the Keene Act. In response to an anti-vigilante police strike, it outlawed all “costumed adventuring,” ending the legal protections of masked vigilantes after the public grew disillusioned by superheroes. (Only Rorschach, who precipitated much of the backlash to superheroes after he started executing criminals without trial, refused to comply with the law).

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Keene’s son appears to be a viable opponent for President Redford’s right-wing detractors to get behind. With his name and father’s legacy, Keene the younger could stand as a voice against police who now use many of the same lawless tactics the Watchmen employed long ago.

American Hero Story: Minutemen

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The premiere teased the upcoming release of a heavily promoted show-within-a-show, a docu-series about the original Minutemen, the official name of the superhero group. The first masked vigilante was the figure seen on the side of the bus, Hooded Justice. His story, as well as those of the first “superheroes” who were seen in a commercial, is likely to be explored in greater detail when we get to “watch” the first episode. What’s clear already though is the history and importance of masked vigilantes on society have not been forgotten. How the former Minutemen are presented – as heroes or lawbreakers – should tell us about the legacy they left, which will likely reflect on the attitudes towards masked police officers now.

The tell-all book Under the Hood by Hollis T. Mason, the original Night Owl and member of the first Minutemen group, was also spotted on Judd Crawford’s desk. Angela Abar also drank out of his owl mug, a clear reference to the superhero Night Owl.

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Crawford also flew in Night Owl II’s Archie, the rotund flying apparatus that resembles an owl. How the police came to have Daniel Dreiberg’s technology is unknown, but a fleet of Archies was briefly seen monitoring the skies over Tulsa.

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Adrian Veidt, Not Dead

While unnamed, Jeremy Irons is playing Adrian Veidt, the smartest person in the world and former superhero Ozymandias who engineered the fake giant squid attack that united the world in peace in 1985. A newspaper said he has been officially declared dead, though it’s unknown why he went into hiding in the first place and would want to be presumed deceased. It’s also not clear what “anniversary” of his Veidt’s two servants were celebrating.

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Mr. Crookshanks and Miss Phillips total devotion and strange behavior (like not being weirded out by rubbing his naked thigh, trying to cut a cake with a horseshoe, and wrapping a gift in fur) could be an indication they were genetically engineered by Veidt, who used the technology to make his monster squid in 1985.

Is Veidt also responsible for the baby squid rains using the teleportation tech he also used then? It would be an effective way to maintain the authenticity of his lie and phony threat decades later. The poster of a squid’s anatomy in the schoolroom highlights how kids only know a world where a transdimensional “danger” could kill them at any moment.

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Crookshanks gave his master a pocket watch that resembled – possibly even was – the one once owned by Dr. Manhattan. Veidt’s new play, the tragedy in five acts “The Watchmaker’s Son,” is a direct reference to Dr. Manhattan, who was born Jonathan Osterman, the son of a watchmaker.

Clocks and the passage of time were a recurring motif in the Watchmen comic, and they were found throughout the show’s premiere. Tick tock, tick tock….

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The cyanide capsule the Seventh Calvary member used to kill himself was also a reference to the pill Ozymandias forced into the mouth of the assassin he hired to try and kill him (to throw everyone off the scent of his plan) in the graphic novel.

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Dr. Manhattan

It’s not clear when the big blue demigod came back to Earth’s solar system, but Dr. Manhattan was spotted on Mars during a live news broadcast destroying his own sand buildings. Why did he come back? What does he know about the future of Earth and mankind that would interest him enough to return?

And why didn’t his appearance on Mars generate a bigger reaction from the characters?

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Not So Super Heroes

Unlike the Watchmen movie, the “superheroes” of the comic book were not especially superhuman outside of Dr. Manhattan and Ozymandias, who didn’t even have superpowers himself. Adrian Veidt was just a genius with incredible physical capabilities.

The unremarkable nature of masked heroes is especially true of the show’s new police super figures, who outside of Sister Night’s hand-to-hand combat skills, mostly looked unremarkable, if not downright silly.

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Judd’s Demise

“Pore Jud is Daid,” the song the episode took its title from, is a number where Curly jokingly sings to a somber Jud about what it would look like if Jud hanged himself. Don Johnson’s character Judd Crawford was hanged, and “Pore Jud is Daid” played before the credits.

Judd’s death at the hands of Louis Gossett Jr.’s old man, the same young black child who survived the opening massacre in 1921, was also foreshadowed when he asked Regina King’s Angela “Hey, you think I could lift two hundred pounds?”

She was right – he could.

A Drop of Blood on a Badge

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Fittingly the last image of the premiere recreated the iconic Watchmen logo – which had a drop of blood across a yellow smiley face – as a streak of Judd Crawford’s blood dripped onto his fallen police badge.

Did we miss anything? Help us with any references, world-building, or major plot points we missed by sharing them in the comments below.

Featured Image: HBO

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From the get-go, Watchmen established itself as a show that meant business. Not only by attaching television visionary Damon Lindelof to the project, but also by assembling a truly exceptional cast of heavy hitters, including Regina King, Tim Blake Nelson, Jeremy Irons, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Don Johnson, Louis Gossett Jr., Jean Smart, Tom Mison, and Hong Chau. Early reviews have praised Lindelof’s take on Moore and Gibbons’ graphic novel and it doesn’t feel like a coincidence that part of that praise is due to the stellar group of actors who bring their characters, both new and known, to life.

Nerdist spoke with most of Watchmen‘s key players during a press junket leading up to the series’ debut at New York Comic Con and found that the cast’s knowledge of the show’s source material ranged quite a bit. “I’d never heard of it,” Jeremy Irons admitted, before revealing that when he did finally pick Watchmen up, it was the first graphic novel he’d ever read. Meanwhile, Tim Blake Nelson was very familiar with the story thanks to his three sons, and Abdul-Mateen had gained familiarity with the story due to his work on Aquaman. But while the cast’s introduction to the source material varied, there was a unified response when it came to why they signed on.

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“Something about Damon’s writing fit, and I was grateful for the opportunity to be in this thing,” said Gossett, who plays the mysterious Will Reeves. Added Irons, “I think any story which makes you think about the contemporary situation is valuable. It stirs up your mind and I think that’s one of the things that stories should do.”

“The original Watchmen dealt in extremes, which is what graphic novels and comics do. They paint in primary colors; they’re very linear in their depictions. Cartoons are meant to be strong,” explained Nelson. “Cohering with that, with the original graphic novel, is that Alan Moore was writing about extremes. He was writing about nuclear war, nuclear annihilation, the Cold War, a bipolarity in terms of hegemony on the planet. These were enormous issues. And now Damon has transposed it into the present day looking at that as canon, and he’s dealing with the extremes of right now. And I think what’s going to be very exciting for people is that this is a look at a very loud and indicative culture in America right now and to some degree, in the world.”

Much of Watchmen—from the characters to the storylines—has been shrouded in mystery reminiscent of Lindelof’s previous shows, Lost and The Leftovers. That meant that the actors, as excited as they were to talk about their roles, were hard pressed to find things they could tease lest they give up any spoilers. Irons in particular is a character whose identity has been wrapped in secrecy. He plays an older Adrian Veidt, who is heavily implied to be Ozymandias, the comic’s secret villain.

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“I would go as far as saying he’s not particularly happy where he is and I think that for people who are used for being at the center of things, like presidents or prime ministers, when they get removed or remove themselves, it must be quite difficult to fill your days with interest,” Irons said carefully, referring to where viewers find Adrian in the premiere. For Nelson, who plays the Tulsa detective simply known as Looking Glass, it was a personal choice not to learn too much about who he was and what his motivations were.

“I decided very early on not to give into looking at information concerning him being weeded out so slowly as a problem, but more as an opportunity,” Nelson said. “And that has been a very good approach at least in terms of my sanity, but building a character who’s therefore got a good measure of mystery and who’s inclination anyway is to withhold information about himself.”

The actor continued, “One aspect I really appreciated, even in the pilot, is how much he withholds about himself. I normally play, let’s call them loquacious extroverts, who are usually dimwitted or eccentric in some fashion. This character is much more about restraint and that’s been a wonderful departure for me. I really enjoyed playing scenes in which I didn’t say a word or syllable more than was needed.”

And then there were others, like Abdul-Mateen (Cal, the husband to Regina King’s Angela Abar), who took their character’s surface traits and trusted that, if nothing else, the story would carry them through.

“The clues told me he was at home, he was a stay at home dad, he was a husband… there wasn’t very much dialogue about him having desires and dreams to go out,” Abdul-Mateen said. “So I said, he sounds like someone who sounds like he’s very confident, comfortable, able… and I just want to make sure he’s as rock solid as her [Angela] when she comes through that door. If I play that character, the writer is going to give me enough problems that it’s going to be difficult for me to hold it down.”

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Though this version of Watchmen is very much its own entity, audiences will see the influences of the graphic novel throughout each episode. Both cops and criminals wear masks and break the laws, making it difficult to draw the distinction between “good guys” and “bad guys.” And while that mentality is very much in tune with the original work, it also provides viewers with a brutal exploration of the world’s current political climate.

“When trauma strikes, what do we do? My answer was, we wear the masks,” said Gossett. “We blend into society, but inside, we have this mask that we finally get big enough to use. There must be some explanation for this. There’s a lot of people out there like that on all levels. It submerges into our personalities and all of a sudden it comes out.”

“When you put on the mask, you get to break the laws. You get to create the laws, you get to create your own reality. And how do you deal with that when you take the masks off?” asks Abdul-Mateen. “And also, who are the people in our society today who wear the masks? Hopefully those are some of the things that will cause people to look at where we are today. There’s a lot of tension in our show and I think there’s a lot of tension in our world, and hopefully it’ll be a warning of what the consequences of the tension could be in our own world.”

Watchmen premieres October 20 on HBO.

Jean Smart as Laurie Blake.

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Regina King as Angela Abar.

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Jeremy Irons as Adrian Veidt.

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Regina King as Sister Night and Tim Blake Nelson as Looking Glass.

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Hong Chau as Lady Trieu.

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Regina King and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Angela and Cal Abar.

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Regina King as Sister Night.

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Louis Gossett Jr. as Will Reeves.

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Jeremy Irons as Adrian Veidt.

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Don Johnson as chief of Police Judd Crawford.

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Regina King as Sister Night.

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Regina King as Sister Night.

Mark Hill/HBO

Featured Image: HBO

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Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ classic graphic novel Watchmen had a very different ending from Zack Snyder’s 2009 big-screen adaptation. In the movie Adrian Veidt, the superhero known as Ozymandias, unleashed simultaneous attacks around the world that were designed to look like they were done by Dr. Manhattan, all in the name of creating a global utopia by uniting every country against a common enemy. In the comic book, Veidt had the same goal, but, rather than frame Manhattan, he transported a massive tentacled “alien” monster to New York, killing half the city. Yes, it’s as weird as it sounds, but it’s a cataclysmic event that frames the past and present of Damon Lindelof’s new Watchmen series on HBO, a direct sequel to the comic. And whether you have never read the comic or need a refresher, here’s everything you need to know about the giant squid who will loom over the series.

Veidt’s master plan maintained most of the same elements in Snyder’s film as it did in the comics. In both, he manipulated Dr. Manhattan emotionally by making the godlike being think he had caused loved ones’ cancer, all to drive Manhattan away from Earth while he neutralized the other Watchmen who might stop him. Veidt also sent tacyhons back in time to block Manhattan’s ability to see into the future and exploited the blue demigod’s own powers as a major part of his plot. In the movie, Veidt harnessed Manhattan’s energy; in the comics, he exploited Manhattan’s teleportation powers.

The movie ended with Veidt’s Manhattan-powered energy reactors murdering millions in major cities around the globe, which made the whole world think Manhattan was responsible. The deception not only stopped the Cold War and the looming threat of nuclear war; it united the planet against a common enemy, forging a new era of peace. But in the graphic novel, Veidt’s fake common enemy was not Manhattan. It was a giant monster that closely resembled a squid.

Decades earlier, Ozymandias had realized that the Comedian was right: mankind would never be saved by superheroes fighting crime, let alone avoid nuclear holocaust because of them. Veidt, both the world’s smartest person and incredibly wealthy, gathered some of the best writers, artists, and scientists on a remote island for a secret project. They all believed they were working on a movie that would include an enormous, genetically-engineered monster.

Standing at least 100 feet tall, the creature of their making had dozens of long tentacles covered in boils, one giant eye, and a terrifying horned beak for a mouth. It was clearly not of this world. For the creature’s massive mind, which sat exposed atop its nightmarish head, Veidt stole the brain of a dead psychic. He then cloned and strengthened the squid’s brain with a device that amplified its psychic capabilities and he fed it horrible images and sounds.

DC Comics/Dave Gibbons/John Higgins

To ensure his plan would remain secret until he was ready to use his squid, which he did on New York City the night of November 2, 1985, Veidt killed everyone who worked on the monster, blowing up the ship that was meant to them home. Meanwhile, Dr. Manhattan, Night Owl, and Silk Spectre agreed to keep Adrian’s terrible secret, but Rorschach refused to stay quiet and was thus killed by Manhattan, who left Earth soon after.

Veidt was able to send his monster to New York after partially harnessing Dr. Manhattan’s teleportation powers. He could transport an object across the planet, but he couldn’t prevent it from occupying the same space as something that was already there; two objects simultaneously existing in the same spot would result in an explosion. This didn’t pose much of a problem, as Ozymandias wanted his squid to die, which it did instantly after suddenly appearing in the city out of thin air. (Even if the explosion hadn’t killed it instantly, the squid was intentionally designed not to survive. It lacked a skeleton.)

Some perished in the resulting blast of tentacles breaking through buildings, but half of New York died when they were hit with the squid’s psychic shockwave, which it emitted the moment it died. Bodies with gruesome dying screams on their faces lined the streets, blood pouring from their ears. The horrible images and thoughts emitted by the squid were too much for the human mind to deal with.

To the world, it looked as though an alien, either from another planet or dimension, had killed millions. It was easier for mankind to accept this story as true because Veidt had been sending subliminal messages about alien invasions via his many consumer products and movie theaters for years.

DC Comics/Dave Gibbons/John Higgins

Veidt’s plan worked, giving the earthly nations a much greater existential threat than one another to worry about. The unifying cry of “Watch the skies” served as a reminder of the alien danger the new world would always have looming over it. With Dan and Laurie on board, Rorschach dead, and Dr. Manhattan off the planet entirely, only one threat to Veidt’s grand plan remained unaccounted for: Rorschach’s journal that outlined the whole scheme.

Before he went off to Antarctica to try and stop Ozymandias, Rorschach left his notebook with the fascist right-wing paper the New Frontiersman. Both the comic and the movie ends with its discovery; each teases the unraveling of the greatest lie ever told. When Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen series picks up the story almost 35 years later, the terrible truth of what Adrian Veidt did will hang over everyone and everything. Along with the memory of a giant alien squid.

Featured Image: DC Comics/Dave Gibbons/John Higgins/Warner Bros.

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Damon Lindelof is one of the most ambitious storytellers in Hollywood, and Watchmen is one of the most ambitious graphic novels in terms of content and legacy. So it seems only right that the two ended up working together.

This weekend, the world will finally get a chance to dive into Lindelof’s Watchmen series, with the popular story by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons reimagined to fit present day themes and characters. That the show doesn’t necessarily involve a panel-by-panel recreation or even every character from the comic doesn’t mean it completely ignores its roots — far from it. Starting with the pilot, it’s abundantly clear that the original story is very much alive, the events of Moore and Gibbons’ graphic novel thread through the series in an interesting way: everything that happened in Watchmen is canon; this present day alternative world devoid of things like cell phones and plastic water bottles is built on the multitude of threads left up for grabs at the end of the graphic novel.

“I think that in many ways, the world is the same as the way it was in the mid ’80s,” Lindelof told Nerdist during a recent interview. “Still kind of a scary place to live, very divided and opinionated, and we’re all sort of just struggling to make our way through. We’re all tribal in our existence and we’re concerned about authority…and the central idea of ‘who watches the Watchmen’ is just as pervasive now as it was 30 years ago or 30 years before that or 100 years before that.”

Still, the Herculean task of translating one of the most iconic graphic novels to a new medium⁠—especially one that has already been given the film treatment via a 2009 feature by Zack Snyder⁠—is something that the Leftovers and Lost creator knew he couldn’t undertake unless he felt absolutely confident that it would be worth the effort.

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“For me, as a television viewer, the thing I get most excited about when I see TV is if I don’t know what’s going to happen,” explained Lindelof. “So if it’s basically like, if I know episode two is just going to be issue two and episode three and going to be issue three…how is that an exciting television show to watch? That was a lot of the thinking.”

Lindelof continued, “But most of all, I felt like the biggest challenge I’d potentially be facing is: the reason we’re still talking about Watchmen 30 years later is not because we just made a TV show called Watchmen. It’s because it’s brilliant and because it was original. And whether this is a sequel or a remix or whatever people want to call it, it is certainly in continuity with the original Watchmen. But I felt like to do something original, that was the mandate. That was what Alan Moore did. That’s what Dave Gibbons did. It was based on an existing IP, but they did something that hadn’t been done before, and I wanted to start there.”

“Starting there” meant throwing viewers directly into the action. The series premiere begins with a flashback to the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, a moment in American history that’s not very well known. Bringing it to the attention of a television audience is not the sole reason Lindelof decided to include it in the story; while the bigger explanation is a spoiler⁠—Lindelof teases that “Tulsa is really the beginning, middle, and end of our story”⁠—the inclusion of real historical moments in the graphic novel, such as the Vietnam War, was something that the creator wanted to keep at the forefront.

“In 2019, I think there are much more prevalent ideas culturally, politically, and sociopolitically that are worth examining through the lens of ‘comic book storytelling,’ and chief among them for me was racial dynamics in the United States,” said Lindelof. “I feel like almost everything, the most intense challenges that are faced in our country, are all based around the question of race and discussing our country’s problematic history with race. And I felt like Watchmen was a very worthy vessel for making an exploration.”

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With something like Watchmen, where its audience ranges from devoted, lifelong fans to those who might not have ever picked up a graphic novel, it’s easy to wonder if the pressure to please diehards without alienating new viewers loomed almost as large as Doctor Manhattan himself. According to Lindelof, navigating that balance was all about understanding and trust.

“I think that it was really important for us to create an on ramp to Watchmen where both neophytes who didn’t really have any familiarity with the original and people who had a chapter-in-verse knowledge of the original Watchmen were united in saying, what the f**k is this? At least, the idea that neophytes would turn to someone who knew a lot about Watchmen and say, ‘What’s going on here? And they’d say ‘I don’t know.’ That’s phase one, that’s the on ramp,” he revealed.

“But I think once you get into the middle of the season, there are much more direct references back to the original source material. And I hope by then, the neophytes have gotten an opportunity to familiarize themselves with the source material, because I didn’t want Watchmen to be a required reading for the series. But my hope is that if they like the first three or four episodes, they will go back to the old testament and familiarize themselves, and that will ready them for the middle and endgame of the season.”

Watchmen premieres October 20 on HBO.

Featured Image: HBO

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Coming off his critically-acclaimed three season run with The Leftovers, which followed his smash hit ABC series Lost, Damon Lindelof could have done any project he wanted. Yet no one could have predicted it would be a sequel to Alan Moore’s seminal graphic novel Watchmen. Rather than try and outdo Zack Snyder’s uneven 2009 big screen adaptation, Lindelof’s story is set decades later, with old and new characters forging another story in a world where superheroes are real – and not always that super. Two years after it was first announced, the show is ready to make its debut on HBO on October 20. Will the series live up to its source material and the heavy burden of oversized expectations? Based on the first reviews, we should all watch Watchmen, especially because it’s going to generate some interesting conversations about major issues we face.

Haleigh Foutch at Collider praises the cast for their performances and Lindelof for creating a rich and compelling world dealing with serious topics.

“It’s provocative and challenging, posing hard questions with no easy answers, and the conversation around the series is probably going to get pretty… intense. But its greatest rewards are the strength of its perspective, the depth of its humanity, and the risky creative swings it takes to create an entirely new story that also feels right at home in the world of Watchmen.”

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Charles Pulliam-Moore wrote about the pilot at io9, which had him worried about how the show presented one of its biggest topics.

“King is captivating as Abar. But her performance can only do so much to distract you from the fact the Watchmen (at least in its first episode) frames white terrorists and cops as being diametrically-opposed groups that have no ideological overlap. Because this is a show that’s meant to explore aspects of American society, that framing just doesn’t work, or rather it doesn’t work if you’re actually trying to think your way through the multitude of things Watchmen is attempting to comment on.”

He expanded on his thoughts after seeing more of the first season.

There’s something to be said for putting faith in a show’s cast and creative team knowing that they’ve got to stick the landing with a story that’s as complicated and painful as Watchmen’s.

But also, HBO was very seriously considering making Confederate, so. You know.

— Charles Pulliam-Moore (@CharlesPulliam) October 15, 2019

At The Daily Dot, Gavia Baker-Whitelaw doesn’t think the early episodes quite live up to the comic series, but there’s still plenty going on to make for a successful show.

“Watchmen arrives with high expectations and a lot of baggage, so I’m a little surprised to realize that it’s just… fine. It’s pretty good! You can’t go wrong with actors like Regina King, Jean Smart, and Jeremy Irons, and they get plenty of punchy dialogue to play with. Unlike the Watchmen movie, which painstakingly recreated the comic without understanding its deeper meaning, the HBO show does want to say something meaningful about race and law enforcement —and finds cinematic ways to translate the comic’s use of juxtaposed imagery.”

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There is no question how highly Darren Franich at EW thinks of the show, which he praised for its handling of the source material.

“Credit Lindelof and his collaborators for telling a hyperbolic story shaded with good humor and sweet emotion. Like Lost, it’s a sci-fi tale shrouded in theory-provoking mystery. (Squids aren’t the only things falling out of the sky.) Like The Leftovers, it’s a vividly felt tale of generational sorrow, tapping deeper weirdness and structural experimentation as it goes along. Watchmen doesn’t overdose on nostalgia, like so many franchise extensions in our reboot-soaked decade. It’s dangerous, and invigorating. Like the proverbial Space Squid, it blew my mind.”

Kelly Lawler of USA Today thinks the show deals with the personal stories of its characters better than it does the the social issues it raises.

“This Watchmen is a huge undertaking, a complex story with as many plot threads as a squid has tentacles (and yes, there’s a squid). Like the original, it has a lot to say, and is gorgeously realized with strong writing and performances, particularly from stars Regina King and Jean Smart.

But its messaging is somewhat muddied. Like much of Lindelof’s work, Watchmen has conflicting themes, selective points of view and multiple timelines, which in the six episodes made available for review are balanced fairly well. But a show juggling so many elements always has the potential to come tumbling down.”

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THR‘s Tim Goodman says the show is a “tour-de-force, no doubt,” but could prove challenging for viewers unfamiliar with the comic book.

“Again, the series will be utterly confusing (if visually astonishing) for newbies unless they brush up on their Watchmen backstory. That’s because the new series includes both references to and appearances by the superheroes of the original — including Irons as Adrian Veidt, a.k.a. Ozymandias, Doctor Manhattan, Silk Spectre and others. If you didn’t know that an alien squid landed on Manhattan and prevented World War III, that the United States won the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon was never impeached (he actually served into the 1980s and was succeeded by Robert Redford, who is still president), or that even though it’s 2019 there’s no internet or cell phones and tobacco is illegal, then you should probably do a little homework.”

Over at IndieWire Ben Travers also praised the show, which he says “starts upending expectations and provoking conversation” throughout the first six episodes.

“Masks, identities, and the murky, muddled truth they form are central themes of “Watchmen.” If the cops and criminals wear masks, how do you tell them apart? Who’s the hero and who’s the villain? Who, in other words, do you trust? Looking beyond the veils people share with the world, “Watchmen” finds fundamental truths about an America divided by a lack of faith in itself, its people, and its institutions. The series’ scope is astonishing given its subject matter, and even more so given its relentless entertainment value. Through six episodes, “Watchmen” has already provided a bounty of intelligent theories to study and debate, but it’s designed to be one helluva good time, as well.”

HBO

At /Film, Chris Evangelista writes the show is one of the year’s best, and lauds its pacing and handling of its biggest ideas.

“Watchmen unpacks all of this information gradually, and, most impressive of all, organically. There’s no sudden rush of exposition; no on-screen title cards to fill in the blanks. Instead, show creator and writer Damon Lindelof and his team have managed to overload Watchmen with intense world-building that comes naturally. This is no easy feat – just look at the dozens upon dozens of movies that attempt the same thing, with terrible results. Even if the narrative and the mysteries Watchmen has to offer up ended up disappointing, the world-building elements alone might be enough to knock the series into the stratosphere.”

Based on these early reviews, the show is going to generate a whole lot of conversation, but there seems to be one question that has already been answered: we want to watch Watchmen.

Jean Smart as Laurie Blake.

Mark Hill/HBO

Regina King as Angela Abar.

Mark Hill/HBO

Jeremy Irons as Adrian Veidt.

Colin Hutton/HBO

Regina King as Sister Night and Tim Blake Nelson as Looking Glass.

Mark Hill/HBO

Hong Chau as Lady Trieu.

Mark Hill/HBO

Regina King and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Angela and Cal Abar.

Mark Hill/HBO

Regina King as Sister Night.

Mark Hill/HBO

Louis Gossett Jr. as Will Reeves.

Mark Hill/HBO

Jeremy Irons as Adrian Veidt.

Colin Hutton/HBO

Don Johnson as chief of Police Judd Crawford.

Mark Hill/HBO

Regina King as Sister Night.

Mark Hill/HBO

Regina King as Sister Night.

Mark Hill/HBO

Featured Image: HBO

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“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” The Roman poet Juvenal never could have known what his question would mean to future generations, but Alan Moore’s seminal graphic novel gave that existential quandary an all-new life. “Who watches the watchmen?” Based on the official trailer for Damon Lindelof’s upcoming sequel series on HBO, one answer certainly appears to be us. What we’ll see when we tune in to the new Watchmen is a world on the edge of war, as a terrorists group fighting a police and superhero force who are no more beholden to the law than their masked counterparts. And at the heart of it all is a secret that could undo the peace Ozymandias killed so many to create.

This latest look at the show, which will be a sequel to the comic book and not Zack Snyder’s big screen adaptation, focuses on the threat of war being raised by the terrorist group the Seventh Kalvary, whose have their attacks on the police. Years earlier the white nationalist group killed large score of law enforcement officers, which led police to don masks themselves. But as Jean Smart’s Laurie Blake, the former superhero known as Silk Spectre II, tells Regina King’s modern day vigilante, “People who wear masks are driven by trauma, they’re obsessed with justice, because of some injustice they suffered.”

What trauma are the Rorschach-masked Seventh Kalvary claiming as their trauma? This trailer reveals the group’s trying to instigate a war in an effort to reveal a conspiracy, one Louis Gossett Jr.’s character says will “make your head explode.” It seems likely it’s related to the truth about what Ozymandias did when he faked an alien attack, killing millions, all to unite the world. In the decades since, it appears two different stories have emerged. Each has produced two groups of masked vigilantes who are not bound by the law.

How much longer can the lie be maintained? And is that what will draw Dr. Manhattan back?

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” We will to find out.

Featured Image: HBO

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“Tick tock, tick tock.” We’re only a month away from the highly anticipated premiere of Damon Lindelof’s new HBO series Watchmen. Rather than make another adaptation of the iconic graphic novel series, the show will pick up decades later with a completely new story that combines old characters with new. Watchmen‘s last trailer dropped a big blue bombshell on us, confirming the return of Mr. Manhattan. However, there’s still a lot we don’t know about the series, including its main plot. But thanks to a new featurette with the cast and crew that includes lots of new footage, we have a better idea of how the show will explore the similarities between its heroes and villains.

“Watchmen examines how we as a society feel about heroes, most notably people who wear masks and fight crime,” Damon Lindelof says in the featurette. While Lindelof’s tease doesn’t reveal too much about the upcoming series, the rest of this behind-the-scenes look makes it clear there may not be much of a difference between the good guys and the bad guys on the show.

After a coordinated attack on the police by a white terrorist group, law enforcement began wearing their own masks to hide their identities. However, as evidenced by Jean Smart’s Laurie Blake, the former superhero known as Silk Spectre II, anonymous officers don’t seem to care about the law either. And if two groups of masked vigilantes are both breaking the rules, what’s the difference between the police and the criminals?

That idea is far more in line with the original comic than Zack Snyder’s big screen adaptation, which turned Alan Moore’s fascist Rorschach into an uncompromising hero worthy of universal praise. Damon Lindelof turning the Seventh Cavalry into an entire army of white terrorists is far more fitting, especially since the masked “heroes” aren’t very different themselves.

This featurette might not have answered all of our questions, but as the clock ticks closer to the show’s premiere it, did answer a big one.

Featured Image: HBO

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UPDATE: 07/24/2019

HBO has revealed a few character details of the upcoming Watchmen series, and the release month, which is October. A few of the tidbits seem to confirm some of our earlier theories based on the recent trailer. Regina King is playing Angela Abar, “who wears two masks; one as a lead detective in The Tulsa Police Force and another as wife and mother of three.”

Interesting how Jeremy Irons still hasn’t been confirmed to play Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias. He obviously is, but the HBO press release only calls him “the aging and imperious Lord of a British Manor”. Don Johnson is Judd Crawford, Tulsa’s chief of police while Jean Smart is indeed playing FBI Agent Laurie Blake. Now we think Johnson’s Crawford could be Dan Dreiberg, aka Nite Owl II, in hiding. Why Laurie doesn’t need to, we have no idea.

The rest of the cast is as follows: Louis Gossett Jr. as Will Reeves; Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Cal Abar; Tom Mison as Mr. Phillips; Frances Fisher as Jane Crawford and Sara Vickers as Ms. Crookshanks. Additional cast include Hong Chau as Lady Trieu, the mysterious trillionaire, Andrew Howard, Jacob Ming-Trent, Dylan Schombing and James Wolk.

The pilot of Watchmen comes from writer/producer Damon Lindelof with Nicole Kasell directing.

Trailer Breakdown Below

A metaphorical giant squid was dropped in the middle of this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, with the release of HBO’s insane new trailer for their upcoming Watchmen series. It was not only our best look yet at the show, it was loaded with clues about what happened in this universe since the events of the comic book unfolded, as well as which major figures are still around. Here’s all of the crazy things we think we learned from it, and what it all could mean for the show.

What Happened Over the Last 30 Years

First thing of note: The series is a followup to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ iconic graphic novel, not Zack Snyder’s movie. In the comic, Ozymandias made the world think an alien squid attacked New York, whereas in the film he led the world to believe Doctor Manhattan was responsible for attacking multiple cities worldwide. Both ended with a reporter at the New Frontiersman finding Rorschach’s journal explaining what really happened and how Adrian Veidt was responsible, in turn threatening the standing international unity.

Based on Don Johnson’s line, “We convinced ourselves that they were gone, but they were just hibernating. They came for everybody—all police,” we believe the following: at some point after the events that concluded the comic, a well-organized group of domestic terrorists, possibly wearing Rorschach masks and likely accepting the giant squid was a false flag, murdered large numbers of police officers. That led cops to don the yellow masks (and one panda head) we see them in now, so they could serve with anonymity.

At the start of the series, this group of Rorschach followers has risen from their “hibernation,” most likely because they believe there is a “vast and insidious conspiracy at play,” like Louis Gossett Jr.’s mysterious character says. Is the conspiracy the truth about what Adrian Veidt did with his squid, or something else? That’s unclear, but it’s noteworthy that masked vigilantes appear to have been co-opted by a government likely harboring a major secret. If you wanted to keep something hidden, wouldn’t you want the greatest independent investigators in the world working for you?

All of that could explain Ozymandias’ weird situation. He (here played by Jeremy Irons) seems very much alive and still engaged with the major events of the world, despite a newspaper saying he has been “officially declared dead.” Was he presumed dead before? Did he go into hiding before? Fake his death? Why the mystery?

What does he have to gain from the world believing he isn’t alive?

Masked Non-Vigilantes

Regina King might be dressed like a superhero, but she also wears a police badge. She also has a very strict black-and-white view of the world, just like Rorschach does. The other seemingly new superhero, the silver-masked man seen eating beans out of a can (à la Rorschach), also works with the police. The independent Crime Busters seem to be a thing of the past. That means the question of “who watches the Watchmen?” has changed, and could explain why the police are now the target of the hate and distrust that drove masked vigilantes into retirement long ago. They’re not in any less danger now, though, since they are aligned with a group an anti-government collection wants to murder.

Speaking of the past, Jean Smart introduces herself as FBI agent Laurie Blake. Either that’s one hell of a coincidence, or she’s playing an older Silk Spectre II. Laurie Juspeczyk learned her real father was The Comedian, Eddie Blake. At the end of the comic, she and Dan Dreiberg went into hiding with new identities as Sam and Sandra Hollis. It seems at some point she took on a new name and entered the lawful side of crime fighting.

So what happened to Dan? We don’t know, but Don Johnson’s Southern-sounding police chief is seen flying Archie in the trailer. Is he playing the older Night Owl II, who also assumed a new identity serving the public side of the law? The circumstantial evidence isn’t enough to say one way or the other, but the possibility exists. Regina King’s character does seem awfully happy to see Archie in the sky fighting the Rorschach army, indicating Archie isn’t entirely foreign to her. Has Dan or someone else been using it the last 30 years?

Oh, and why does it look like there’s an owl behind his shoulder on the ship?

Dr. Manhattan Returns

Dr. Manhattan said he was going to go off and create some new life in the universe in 1985, but at some point he returned to our solar system to live on Mars. That’s where the powerful blue demigod is first seen in this trailer, in a video where he destroys one of his own structures on the red planet. Why did he come back to Earth’s neighborhood at all? And what will make him show up in a dapper suit on his former home planet? (Could it have something to do with that blue telephone booth-looking structure?) His return is the biggest mystery of the trailer, and also the most exciting. He gave the okay for Adrian’s deception to stand. Could he be here to help maintain the lie? Or to finally reveal the truth?

The “truth” and who controls it looks to be one of the biggest themes the show will deal with. The presence of a TV show about the original Crime Busters, starring the founder of masked vigilantes, the tragic figure known as Hooded Justice, shows a world grappling with its masked past. Will the fictional TV show be an honest re-telling, or another lie designed to make the current cop superheroes look better? We don’t know yet, but either way the answer will contribute to the bigger ideas of the Watchmen series itself.

We can’t wait, and it’s only just begun.

Images: HBO

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