[Spoilers for all things Watchmen below.]
Watchmen’s finale appears to have left many viewers—including our own critic—with plenty of intriguing questions, but, in a series of interviews pegged to the show’s ending, series creator Damon Lindelof thinks the answers are clear. In the end, Angela Abar (Regina King) swallows an egg that may or may not be imbued with the powers of her late partner, Doctor Manhattan (Yahya Abdul-Mateen), who was vaporized out of existence in the show’s final act. Before the credits roll, we watch Angela dangle her foot over her swimming pool—if she can walk on the water, she (and we) will know that she’s now, well, a god. Whether she does or not, however, is left unanswered. Or is it?
“It felt very clear to me, if we had rolled another 10 seconds forward, what would have happened,” Lindelof told Vulture. He offered similar thoughts to Entertainment Weekly. “But I would say that if you look back at the breadth of the season, I think what our intention was is obvious. We’re not trying to be cutesy about it. It just felt the ending that we went with was meant to be more cinematic than ambiguous. It doesn’t feel ambiguous to me, but I’m the least qualified human on the planet to talk about ending ambiguity.” He stopped short, however, of confirming Angela’s transformation.
He did, though, elaborate on the implications of this not-so-ambiguous ending to Vulture, should it turn out Angela is a god.
If, in fact, Angela Abar is now empowered by the legacy of Will and the legacy of Doctor Manhattan, she is ready to take on white supremacy in a way that Doctor Manhattan was never interested in taking on. That’s going to be a battle that goes on until the end of time, unfortunately. I’d like to be more pie in the sky, but if I learned anything through the experience of writing the show and reading all the things that I’ve been reading, it’s the insidiousness of white supremacy. I don’t think that I ever would have even put it in the show if I felt like we were going to try to convince the audience that it could be defeated. But we could convince the audience that it was worthy of pushing back and fighting against, which is more than most superhero stories do.
Will this fight continue into a second season? Lindelof isn’t promising anything. “If I was going to do another season of Watchman, I would need to have a really cool idea and a justification for doing it,” he told EW. “I don’t have either of those things right now. It doesn’t mean that they won’t come at some future point. I just finished the show four weeks ago. My antenna is up, but it’s like only getting static. I can’t say that there will definitely not be a second season and I can’t say there definitely will be. That’s kind of where my head’s at.”
If there were to be a second season, though, he seems less interested in a continuation of the first season than he is a major shift in focus. “[A]m I interested in a second season? The answer to that question is yes, in the same way that I’m interested in anything that calls itself Watchmen. I do find it interesting, where the story could go next,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “More importantly, I think we always think about how season two of a show is the continuing adventures of the first season of the show. That’s what happened on Lost. That’s what happened on Breaking Bad. But there’s another thing that’s happened on television. Look at season two of The Wire. That season, it’s the docks. McNulty and the cops are relegated to being second-stringers, no pun intended, in the second season of The Wire. The third season is “Hamsterdam,” the fourth season is a deep dive on public schools. I think Watchmen, not unlike Fargo or True Detective, can accommodate a much larger space of storytelling. That’s interesting to me.”
There’s plenty of other interesting tidbits in the interviews. He told EW that he wishes he’d had more of a chance to delve into the pasts of Red Scare (Andrew Howard) and Lady Trieu (Hong Chau). He also told Vulture that he doesn’t think Lady Trieu really needed to be destroyed by Adrian Veidt (Jeremy Irons). “I would rather Angela have his powers than Lady Trieu, but I can’t tell you that Lady Trieu wouldn’t have done a very good job,” he said. “She seemed relatively well-intentioned, other than the fact that she needs to murder Doctor Manhattan in order to get his powers. So, Veidt saying ‘Masks make men cruel’ is actually a reflection of how he felt when he wore his mask.”
Speaking of Veidt, Lindelof says the humorous approach to the character came primarily from Irons’ performance.
From his THR interview:
This is going to sound crazy, but we cast Jeremy Irons, he came and shot the scenes in the pilot, and it became immediately apparent that his take on the character was going to be comedic. When we cast Jeremy Irons, he’s an incredible actor, but he’s not who you go to for comedy! He first impressed upon my pop culture awareness in Dead Ringers, which is one of the least comedic and most disturbing movies I have ever seen. There’s a wink and a twinkle to the guy, but when [executive producer] Tom Spezialy and I had lunch with him, we found he’s a very funny person. It felt to me like this was a really interesting take on Veidt. There’s no precedent in the original text that Veidt is funny. How do we have a comedic performance here where the character isn’t trying to be funny, but it’s a slightly absurd and ridiculous treatment of the character? We just went for it, because it felt right, but there are people out there who are [going to disagree]. If you told Alan Moore that Adrian Veidt farted in a prominent way? His head would explode. I can’t argue with that logic! In fact, if somebody told me that? If I wasn’t making Watchmen, and someone just said to me, “Spoiler alert, in the seventh episode of Watchmen, Veidt is on trial for dropping the squid on Manhattan, and the entire speech of his self-defense is that he farts,” I would say, “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard, and whoever wrote it clearly has no understanding of Watchmen.” And yet, here we are! There was a level of interpretation by the characters we just sort of leaned into.
Thank you, Jeremy Irons. Read our review of the finale here.
87 Comments
Angela’s not a god because Doc Manhattan was not a god. Just because people called him a god doesn’t mean he is/was.
He lived every second of his life at the same second, every second, and he was able to change precious little over the course of both the comic and the movie. He is defeated twice by human beings who were able to outsmart him.
He was omniscient, maybe, but he was not ever a god. He’s basically a watcher and nothing more.
This. Europa hammers home that Jon lacks the most necessary trait of a god – creativity. He gave life to a moon and all he could do is recreate a couple he once knew – and poorly, at that – and transport an actual castle. He’s sterile in more ways than one and goes through the motions, whether it’s getting disintegrated or making love to someone. It’s notable that while love made him more human, even it couldn’t get him arsed to do something.If Jon’s supposed to be a god, it’s only in the context of a truly damning critique of the idea.
Yeah, that’s the only thing that I wish they’d addressed more directly. It fucking sucks to be Doctor Manhattan. Everybody is so lustful of his power that they don’t take even a second to think about how nightmarishly trapped he is.
I think it’s pointless to try to make sense of Manhattan from a human perspective. Like, if he knows it’s coming, why doesn’t he just teleport the truck and weapon from the kitchen? Hell, he’s done it before, and there’s no clear reason why he can’t. In fact, in the original comic, why doesn’t he learn Ozymandias plan until the end? Shouldn’t he have known it the whole time?
“They outsmarted him” is a handwave, not an explanation. It seems like, on some level, he must be allowing these things to happen. Arguably, the most “godlike” thing about the character is that his psychology and motivation is unknowable and alienating to the audience, which was definitely intentional in the original.
I get the impression hes trapped in an eternal cycle of the chicken or the egg paradox and probably doesn’t know if he can actually change anything or if it’s even worth trying. I also figure he’s actually suffering.
Absolutely true. For some reason, Dr. M was able to teleport three of his friends across the planet due to some kind of contagious contact through blood. Why is blood better than air for a being like him? And certainly, he could have transformed the air in his cage into liquid methane and blown that shit up toot sweet. After teleporting his friends a few blocks away, of course.The only reasonable explanation for why he didn’t do any of that is because he was bound by determinism. But if that’s the case, the villains wouldn’t even need a cage.It’s nearly impossible to write for a character like Dr. Manhattan. As intriguing as he is, he doesn’t make a bit of sense.
Not for nothing, but he’s “a” god, not “the” god. Every mythology is filled with gods who, like Jon, are limited and fallible in any number of ways.
He doesn’t even floss.
Just because he was kind of stupid and feckless (considering), doesnt mean he didnt have god-like powers – he was just really bad at using them to any large positive effect (just like most of our made up deities).
“Stupid and feckless” covers most of the Ancient Greek pantheon.
Kind of how like Batman always criticized Superman for never learning how to fight because he just relied on his strength/powers, Manhattan didn’t really ever learn to think outside the box because he experienced everything at once, so he thought nothing could surprise him.
Your fictional version of ‘god’ is omnipotent. Moore’s fictional version of ‘god’ is not. That doesn’t mean your version is more valid. And, for what it’s worth, the whole ‘time is a flat circle’ business is a real thing. Just because he knows something’s coming doesn’t mean he can change it.
One of the main themes of the comic seemed to be that if ‘god’ existed, he’d rapidly get bored with us and wander off to leave us to our own devices (the other being the comically naive idea that fear of a common enemy would keep us from killing each other, but whatever). Lindelof apparently disagrees with my reading, though, so what do I know?
(the other being the comically naive idea that fear of a common enemy would keep us from killing each other, but whatever)That’s not a theme of the comic, though? Watchmen is about the inherent hubris of superheroics and how the idea itself – that someone is better and responsible for others – erodes the empathy that lead one to become a superhero in the first place.Veidt believes this comically naive idea, but Moore’s text points out several times that he himself does not: Veidt’s excitement giving way to doubt, “nothing ever ends”, Rorschach’s journal (which won’t start World War III, but it will also never allow the utopia Ozymandias hoped for).
“ Rorschach’s journal (which won’t start World War III, but it will also never allow the utopia Ozymandias hoped for).”My issue is this, why can’t they hold ozy accountable, but still try an benefit from his actions. Or are we going to ignore the fact that his plan actually worked and make those 3 million deaths meaningless.
It’s open ended enough in the same way Rorschach’s journal was – they don’t really tell you how Veidt will get punished. I don’t think they’ll completely open the book on what happened in the ‘80s, but I do think he’ll rot in jail.Also, his plan only really “worked” to a degree. He stopped the Cold War for a while, but also stopped technological progress because his plan relied on convincing folks that Manhattan is carcenogenic (and since most of technology in the world comes from him, people don’t want to touch that shit). As Veidt himself notes, humanity still produces nukes just in case. Right wing terrorism is on the rise to an even higher degree than in our world because Ozymandias tried to socially engineer a liberal society and it backfired due to his own arrogance: he didn’t count on things like Rorschach’s journal inciting enough unrest or the fact that world leaders would just no longer listen to some crusty old psychopath. And the Russians in the world of the show are already working on a way to make their own Doctor Manhattan by replicating the tech despite the squid-induced peace.Sure, he still maintained the threat through squidfall, but that’s a childish deterrent – the first instance of it in the show really shows that yes, squidfall is spooky and annoying, but people largely accepted it as part of life. Just as we accepted that terrorist attacks are a part of life after 9/11 – it didn’t stop anyone from funding fringe groups that later perform those attacks.The smartest man in the world is still pretty dumb and the comic itself points towards that.
Fair point!
God doesn’t mean necessarily omniscient, unkillable, nor infallible. Zeus is a god. He’s not infallible nor omniscient.
Eh, they walked back on his passivity at the end of this season, though. At a minimum, they made him much more at peace with what ends up happening to him. Arguably, they disrupted the no-free-will-at-all conceit that a lot of us thought the show (and even the comic) was/were operating under. I suppose you can’t ever prove that definitively unless the writers bash you over the head, but him arranging things with Angela’s grandfather could suggest true proactivity. It provides an explanation for why he *doesn’t* avoid his own death, rather than insist that “doesn’t” and “can’t” are identical because there’s no free will.It also suggests that maybe he’s got some imagination after all, which undercuts my previous preferred alternative thesis. It would still be fair to say that he doesn’t have nearly *enough* imagination to make for a truly cool and interesting god, but, well, it’s rather in keeping with John’s fundamental decency (often delayed and sidetracked by him doing what other people expect of him, to be fair) that his magnum opus is passing on his power to somebody he truly loves for all the right reasons.
That’s what I thought was so interesting with Keene and Trieu. Why did they assume their goals and desires would remain the same after being Manhattenized?
Because they are human.
Not showing what happens when Angela steps in the pool at the end of this episode kinda feels like the very definition of ambiguous. That said everything about the Dr. Manhattan’s relationship with Angela left me with the impression that the egg would give Angela god like powers.It’s just a little annoying that Lindelof would go out of his way to NOT show Angela walking on water and then be surprised that some people are left unsure about whether she has Manhattans’ powers.
I mean, I kind of get him. There’s a lot about eggs throughout the show, Jon makes a point about them several times and he even tells Angela to pay attention to him at the pool. I think they left enough answers to the question of “is she getting at least some of his powers” that I can cut them slack for prefering to go for a more cinematic ending. The text doesn’t imply it’s supposed to be open ended in the same way, say, Inception does.
Yeah, beyond the entire arc of the story leading to it and foreshadowing it, I think Manhattan standing on the pool and saying, “You need to see this for later”, pretty much cinches it. Otherwise, that scene just doesn’t make sense.
One thing I also noticed is that when Angela is coming out of the Dreamland Theater after the squidfall, most of the letters on the marquee are broken and not lit up. The 3 that are left are:
DR M
Digital Rights Management strikes again!
I loved Watchmen, but come on, Damon.“I never intended for the ending to be ambiguous. I think it’s totally clear and obvious. That’s why we cut away one second before the shot that would have answered the question, and it’s why I’m conspicuously refusing to explicitly answer the question now.”
*Inception totem still spinning to this day*
BUT IT WOBBLED!
The pool scene in “A God Walks Into Abar” pretty much spells it out for you.
If Angela has Manhattan powers, that fits with all the narrative buildup for the last several episodes. If she doesn’t, then the show would have had to continue so it could explain why it didn’t fit the narrative that was clearly being set up. Also, if it’s the latter, what is Season 2 supposed to do? Is it going to open on a soaking wet Angela climbing out of her pool, grumbling “guess that didn’t work” to the camera? What’s the point of setting up Angela’s Manhattan powers if it was a shitty bait-and-switch?
Damon Lindelof never intended for a second season. Also, if she has his “powers” wouldn’t she already know (and would have always known for that matter)? Also, why can there not be a season II without Dr. Manhattan’s powers?
I’m on board with watching an annoyed and incredulous Regina King swim out of the pool cursing about the eggs
when dr Manhattan is standing on the pool and angela tells him to get off, he says explicitly that he is doing so because it will become important later. There is no ambiguity.
Bruh I get where you’re coming from. But that’s to easy, I’m hoping it’s not that.
It’s not ambiguous at all. Obviously Angela went on to create that famous Coca Cola ad.
How exactly is Angela supposed to fight white supremacy? She’s not psychic. She can’t wave her hand and change people’s minds. As long as the white supremacists don’t put on masks and say “hey, look at us, we’re a cabal of open racists” there’s not much Manhattan’s powers can really do in that context. The problem of modern white supremacy is not “oh no, those Klansmen have some rocket launchers so our tanks can’t go in”. It’s like saying the F-35 is going to stop terrorism, it’s just not really terribly useful for it even if it works properly.
As long as the white supremacists don’t put on masks and say “hey, look at us, we’re a cabal of open racists” there’s not much Manhattan’s powers can really do in that context. Yeah, the real world isn’t so cartoonish, and it would be pretty difficult to locate the white supremacists in real life to figure out who was in need of some ‘splodin. Or…https://www.foxnews.com/shows/tucker-carlson-tonight
A), the number of people who are openly white supremacist is still fairly small, even if there are some Tuckers Carlson out there. B), it’s not like Tucker Carlson exploding would straightforwardly decrease the level of racism in America, these things would have ripple effects. C), any sufficiently angry person could go out and start killing white supremacists, you don’t need Manhattan’s powers to do so, so that wouldn’t really change anything here.
it’s not like Tucker Carlson exploding would straightforwardly decrease the level of racism in AmericaI’ll roll those dice.
+1 comment/name synergy. Thanks, Jerri!
This. Keene tried to pretend and downplay that he had anything to do with the 7k’s racism and so did Judd for that matter, until they just sort of inadvertently outed themselves.
the number of people who are openly white supremacist is still fairly small, even if there are some Tuckers Carlson out there. Maybe because I’m Jewish I’m just more sensitive to it, but I think it’s a lot of people. A lot more than you’d like to think. it’s not hard to find either.
Dr. M/now Angela may/may not have psychic powers, but could easily observe everyone’s actions throughout history if my understanding of his powers is correct – and that would give Dr. M/Angela a ton of insight into who the white supremacists are.
I would also guess that he/she may actually be psychic to some degree – and could likely influence people’s minds. There is some really neat research into adult neurogenesis (the brain creating new neurons) and how when one’s mind changes that there is likely a corresponding physical change of some sort (at the cellular level or below). If true, Dr. M seems to have near absolute control over matter and could literally affect the physical structures of one’s brain to modify the “mind.”
Manhattan exists at all points within his own life, but not within the lives of others. And just because changes in thought processes can lead to physical changes doesn’t mean he can figure out how to safely alter things.
I dunno that is a pretty narrow read of his powers. My understanding is that he could opt to be omnipresent – since he can “clone” himself infinitely and exist in two places at once (i.e. Mars and Earth and anywhere else).
Heh, *now* who’s got a painful lack of imagination about how to solve problems with godlike superpowers?Fuck’s sake, Dr. Manhattan could’ve literally turned everybody green. Trust me, that would’ve at least made white supremacy a lot more difficult and confusing to perpetuate. And that’s one simple idea I just had literally five seconds after reading your post. Let’s talk fundamentally altering the genetic code of the entire human race so they literally just *don’t* descend into superficial tribalistic bullshit anymore.God. Power.
I don’t think Angela could do a good job of literally fighting white supremacists for the reason you say. But there’s a lot she could do aside from that. A lot of racism comes down to unequal access to material resources, which we know she could fix easily. Wave a hand, replace all the lead pipes in Flint with plastic ones. Wave a hand, replace all the shitty outdated textbooks in inner-city schools with brand new laptops. Wave a hand, create a bunch of free cholesterol medication for poor old people. And then those material resources could also be used as leverage to fix the non-material problems (hey police department, I’ll magic you up some sick new flying cop cars, if you sign this consent decree to end stop-and-frisk policies). There are lots of options.
Doctor Manhattan already did a lot of stuff like that, though. That’s why the world ran on electric cars, because he synthesized so much lithium. That’s why Watchmen’s science is in a lot of ways better than ours, he pushed it forwards.
i.e. “He could have done more”
I mean I could give you a list of prominent nazis and nazi websites you could destroy, Dr. Manhattan.
Blowing up Richard Spencer isn’t going to change anything, and he can’t do anything meaningful to stop Nazis from going online. What’s he going to do, make some servers explode? He’s not some super-hacker, and even if you did take down Stormfront they’d just go somewhere new.
I thought with the eggs being a running motif throughout the season, Doc telling her “mind the eggs,” and explaining that theoretically ingesting one would imbue someone with his powers was about as cut and dry as one could get but christ, I guess people needed to see Angela doing cartwheels on top of the pool to feel closure.
I agree, but I would also think that the egg would have had some obvious effect – just like teleportation and the acute nausea.
I wanted to see Regina King doing a full floor routine across that pool but purely for personal aesthetic reasons, not because I needed the narrative spoon-fed to me.
The ending wasn’t ambiguous. The episode before, Jon is walking on their swimming pool and tells Angela she needs to see and remember him doing it. Also, I don’t think in the comic Dr. Manhattan ate food, so why would he in the show, after regaining his full identity, become hungry and want for waffles—unless he was hinting at Angela to watch the eggs.Yeah, the ending worked because it was cinematic. If we had seen a final shot of Angela standing on water, that would have been less exciting than seeing the closeup of her foot about to step onto the pool.
Well, I thought it was pretty clear, what with all the foreshadowing and the flashbacks to said foreshadowing about a minute before the scene. That said, as soon as the screen went black, I turned to my wife and said “that was great, but it’s gonna drive a lot of people insane.”
the show is bad, and I am confused by the high praise its been getting. The finale in particular was quite bad, and poor Alan Moore.
I gotta say, if the message Lindelof thinks we ought to take away from his Watchmen is that we need heroes to rise up and take on the insidious threat of white supremacy, he’s got a very different understanding of what it means to remain faithful to the spirit of the original graphic novel than I do.
To my mind, the central theme of the novel is that all pretensions to a heroic, “only a very special person like me can save us” mentality are destructive. That’s why it turns out that the villain is Ozymandias, the noblest and purest superhero of them all, who combines all the driving impulses of his fellow heroes—Dan Dreiberg’s romanticism, Rorschach’s existential nihilism, the Comedian’s cynicism, Sally Jupiter’s thirst for glory, and so on—into a justification for mass murder. And that’s why I was so impressed by the scenario set up in the early episodes of Lindelof’s show, which seemed to suggest that he would explore the same idea from a new and topical perspective: how Adrian’s plan had simply kicked the unhealthy exceptionalist thinking to the other side of the political spectrum via crusading cowboy liberal President Redford, allowing a new form of social discontent and instability to fester.As the season went on, though, that initial promise started getting subsumed by much less suberversive superhero storytelling. The show introduced the sorts of evil supervillain plots that implicitly justify the existence of superheroes, because who else can save the world from the insidious mind-control efforts of Cyclops? And by the time we get to the finale, the threat is not the mere fact that superheroes exist but who ought to be the superhero and how he or she should behave. Sure, racist wannabe god Keene and progressive wannabe god Trieu both get their comeuppance for thinking themselves worthy of ultimate power, but we also get Will’s assertion that Dr. Manhattan should’ve done more with his abilities; we get Angela apparently inheriting those abilities to take on the white supremacists. And we get a direct inversion of the end of the graphic novel, in which Adrian is finally brought to justice by other superheroes stepping up and doing the right thing, instead of his fate being entirely in the hand of some ordinary schlub who works at a fringe newspaper.And so the main thrust of the story changes from an intricate indictment of the very idea of heroic exceptionalism, to some milquetoast thing about how you gotta stand up and be a hero—but, like, not in a way that’s too extreme in either direction, man! That’s such a played-out message at this point, and not one, I think, that Alan Moore would much appreciate.
It also seemed that the show was leading up to rejecting the very notion of (super) power. Like the arms race that the original Watchmen was concerned with, Manhattan’s presence only created stronger reactions to overcome him.
The same way that the liberal hegemony of Redford provoked the Cavalry to try to create their own Manhattan.
In the end the closest we got to that was Veidt nobody who wanted that power should have it, but really they should have gone all the way and have Angela simply smash the egg.
I’m fine with Angela and Looking Glass taking in Veidt. His story was to a degree about the limits of escaping justice, so it makes sense. I’m just glad they didn’t have Looking Glass go berserk when faced with the man behind his trauma.
Angela could smash the egg or, alternatively, they could have ended it with her standing by the pool contemplating whether or not to eat the egg. That’s the sort of ambiguous ending I would be OK with.
Angela isn’t infallible though, why do you assume the text thinks she made the right choice by eating the egg?
Because it’s heavily implied she would be a better recipient of Manhattan’s power than the narcissists Keene and Trieu, because of the conversation she had with Will.
But Angela is a cop who tortures people, so I’d have liked it if the show had taken her on a bit more of a journey on that front.
Angela got the entirety of her grandfathers memories after the extra violent stuff. She maybe got some of Jon’s memories from the egg too and not necessarily all his powers, he stated an aspect of his powers, but maybe not all of them.
She tortured members of a murderous clan.
This, exactly. She is as flawed as the rest of the cast and she literally just lost her husband right before she made the decision. I saw it more as her wanting to hang onto something that’s a piece of Jon rather than an conscious effort to gain power. If the egg did contain his power then he would literally be with her, always. It’s romantic and sad.
I kinda agree, but at the same time, I think having Will be the person saying Manhattan should have done more is important. Jon Osterman was white. All the Crimebusters were white. Alan Moore is white. It’s all well and good for Manhattan to get all morose and disaffected by his godlike powers, he’s generally had doors open for him all his life, hasn’t been actively repressed by the system (except for the fleeing europe thing, which i don’t think was in the original graphic novel, and in any case was primarily an early childhood thing). I can see an indictment of Manhattan from the perspective of people of color that his whiteness made him blind to the systemic oppression faced by PoC, and that a PoC given his powers would attempt to end those injustices, rather than peace out to Europa.Of course, that’s easy for Will to say, he never had to reassemble his atomic components out of the primordial energy of the universe, and there’s no reason to assume Trieu or Keene anyone else wouldn’t immediately check out after being granted that power. But Angela still thinks she could change things with Big Blue’s juice, so she still tries anyway. And, crucially, she’s clearly not immediately struck by the overwhelmingness of being in all times at once (if she was, she would know she succeeded, and wouldn’t need to walk on water to prove it to herself), so maybe the way she inherited the powers means she won’t fall into nihilism as quickly.
That’s an interesting take on why Angela ate the egg, but I think it was something much simpler. She literally just watched her husband of ten years die. I think the eating of the egg was more of a way to quite literally keep a part of Jon with her always.
This!
Intriguing idea, but if Dr. Manhattan does “more,” then where does it end? It’s not like racism is the only problem in the world. Should he also get rid of cancer? War? Hunger? Unemployment? Death itself? Why not just give all humanity his powers? Or should he eternally play Blue Daddy to a species of inferior pets?If you take these ideas to their ultimate conclusion, he should just remake human beings into happy immortal limbless grubs, dreaming of infinite pleasure. Hooray!
To my mind, the central theme of the novel is that all pretensions to a heroic, “only a very special person like me can save us” mentality are destructive.The show doesn’t really contradict any of that. It’s still about the hubris associated with masks and superheroics. The cops are “promoted” to superhero-status, which only makes them more radicalized and in the end they never gave them actual safety. Angela lets the Sister Night persona dictate her life through anger and arrogance. Wade’s a look at the reclusive superhero detective – all he really does is delude himself that his anxiety and paranoia are a superpower (it’s telling that when he’s looking at the focus group for the NY advert, we don’t really linger on the expressions in the same way we do in the 7K interrogation). They are all only effective once the masks drop. The show introduced the sorts of evil supervillain plots that implicitly justify the existence of superheroes, because who else can save the world from the insidious mind-control efforts of Cyclops?I disagree. For the 7K plot, the existence of superheroes is the implicit reason why the plot even exists. Without Manhattan it wouldn’t be there. If anything, the show shits even harder on the concept of the “omnipotent superhero” than even the comic book, because it really hammers the point how useless Jon truly is. He can’t change fate, he can’t save the world, he can’t create a new, better life – he only exists to be an esoteric, unattainable ideal. As such, the final scene of the show seems to imply to me that Angela will have some of his powers, but also the will and ability to use them.As for the Cyclops story… But we know who saved the world from it: a dude who cared. It’s not like the white supremacists needed a massive conspiracy and superweapon to murder black people – we literally start off with the Tulsa massacre. To me, the whole Cyclops bit is really there to underline a simple concept: America’s system is such that black people are fucked. It doesn’t ultimately matter what the plot was because Metropolis would never believe anything Will told him – he just didn’t care about black people. He might as well tell him that the system is racist to begin with and he would get laughed off anyway. Instead of helping, the system put the task of fixing things in the hands of a single flawed human who couldn’t possibly live up to that responsibility. It’s reminiscent, to me, of how Obama was lauded by clueless libs into a messiah who would fix racism forever. Because it’s easier to hoist it onto someone instead of doing meaningful change.Watchmen is not a indictment of heroics altogether – it’s a critique of superheroes specifically and society that enables this exceptionalism. The Cyclops plot didn’t call for a superhero. It called for a society that isn’t racist and people in positions of power who listen. What Will did was heroic, but in the end putting himself in that position only destroyed him. And by the time we get to the finale, the threat is not the mere fact that superheroes exist but who ought to be the superhero and how he or she should behave.I don’t think Angela getting powers is meant to be understood as Lindelof pointing at her and going “this is the model superhero”. What the ending does is introducing a new variable to this world of Watchmen. The powerful one is no longer a being so alien and detached from humanity to be ineffective. Manhattan is finite and he’s making a gamble: how about we introduce powers to a person with a personality, lots of trauma and justified anger. The existence of a powerful being locked in battle will ensure that the sad loop of the Watchmen universe – hero comes, does grand gesture, world doesn’t care – will continue. Nothing ever ends. Sure, racist wannabe god Keene and progressive wannabe god Trieu both get their comeuppance for thinking themselves worthy of ultimate powerTrieu isn’t really a progressive, though? If anything, she’s a perfect representation of the worst capitalist – a greedy egomaniac with a god complex. She’s someone like Elon Musk, only on steroids; unlike Veidt, there was never a shred of good intention, even a delusional one. Politics don’t matter to her. It’s not both-siding, it’s condemning two different evils.And we get a direct inversion of the end of the graphic novel, in which Adrian is finally brought to justice by other superheroes stepping up and doing the right thing, instead of his fate being entirely in the hand of some ordinary schlub who works at a fringe newspaper.
His fate was never in the hand of that schlub. Rorschach’s journal doesn’t contain enough to do anything to Veidt himself and it’s in the hands of a fringe newspaper with little pull. The true threat of the journal was never to Veidt himself, but to his legacy – by dropping it at the paper, Rorschach ensured that the utopia will never happen, because some fuckers are gonna take that and use it as an excuse to do evil. Nothing ever ends.And at the end of the show, Veidt isn’t brought in by superheroes. Just cops who are doing the right thing. It’s a deliberate decision that Laurie is able to do the right thing only once she’s older and cynical, but also completely over the romanticism and thrills of superheroics. Last time she could have brought Veidt in, she was knee-deep into a doomed romance with Dan, literally distracted by romanticism.If anything, Watchmen the show continues Watchmen the novel’s message – superheroics are poisonous. Superheroes don’t ensure progress, they stop it in some way or other. Nothing ever ends. Angela will be locked into a battle with white supremacy which will only ensure complacency. The system won’t change, because there’s a superhero.
Lots of good thoughts here. I’ll especially have to think about the idea that Laurie can only capture Adrian once she’s no longer a superhero. I certainly see the logic in that, but I do think it’s undercut somewhat by the decidedly non-naturalistic way that scene plays, with glib, quippy dialogue (“People change, Adrian”; “That guy talks too much”) and the old bonk the bad guy on the head and knock him out harmlessly chestnut. In execution, at least, it didn’t feel like a clear repudiation of over-the-top superhero logic.On other points I’m not sure I can get past agree-to-disagree. I don’t think my reading of the original novel allows for the idea that one could have a non-superhero version of Dr. Manhattan; to me part of Moore’s point seemed to be that godlike powers would so completely alter a person’s sensibilities that they couldn’t help but detach from ordinary human concerns. In the same way that Rorschach is sort of Moore’s way of saying “If there were a Batman in the real world, he would be a socially maladjusted creep,” I see Dr. Manhattan as implying “If there were a Superman in the real world, he wouldn’t care about truth, justice, and the American way.”And when I look back at everything we learned about Angela over the course of the season, nothing about it suggests that she would be less likely than Jon to detach from humanity if she were to gain phenomenal cosmic power and the ability to experience every moment of her life simultaneously. If anything, the last few episodes make it clear how completely alien Jon’s time-bending perspective is, and how it’s a curse as much as a blessing. If you give that to Angela, I’m not sure she’s still Angela any more than Dr. M. is still unassuming physicist Jon Osterman. She’d be a superhero whether she wanted to or not.I mean, unless we’re supposed to think she only got a portion of Jon’s powers? That actually wasn’t totally clear to me, but I did wonder why Angel would need to step into her pool to find out if she had become an omnipotent being existing outside of linear time. If she’s only “half god” or whatever (as she imagines her and Jon’s children could be just before he brings up the power transfer thing in the first place), I guess that could suggest some message along the lines of Be heroic, but not superheroic. But, as with the Laurie is no longer a superhero thing, that could’ve been conveyed with more clarity. It’s an interesting alternate possibility, though.
“racist wannabe god Keene and progressive wannabe god Trieu”In what way was Trieu framed as the ”progressive” version of Keene? She’s a trillionaire pharma ceo who engages in animal testing.
This is a really well thought-out take. I read the theme of the show as being something like “you can’t cover up bad stuff, you have to air it out” – that’s true of America’s history of racism, and it’s also true about the masked vigilantes and their psychological trauma. And I think that fits with an alternate reading of the original book – the problem with the characters isn’t that they wield power, it’s that their wielding of power is shaped in weird and ultimately negative ways by their hang-ups and traumas and personality flaws. The masks are like a defense mechanism to avoid thinking about the trauma or processing it and letting it go. That’s true on a personal level for the characters, but it’s also true on a societal level (America and specifically white America needs to actually accept the fact of historical and current racism, instead of ignoring and trying to repress it).
I think the ending is meant on more of a metaphorical level – characters who were previously acting out of their own traumatic reactions have aired out and processed their trauma, and are now using power in a more positive and beneficial way. Angela has given up the mask (the sign of a police force literally run by a Klansman) and is now going to actively self-actualize in order to fight white supremacy.
“(America and specifically white America needs to actually accept the fact of historical and current racism, instead of ignoring and trying to repress it).” That would mean admitting American wasis wrong and that not something that wrong people or white people do.
I’m not sure if Alan Moore would necessarily take issue with the idea that sometimes we need heroes or at least we need the idea of superheroes or the myth of superheroes in order to sustain us.The comic was written in 1985 and made an overt attempt to draw parallels between superpowers with the Superpowers, and it emphasised the powerlessness of the average person in the face of such massive potential destructive power.Watchmen 2019 is post Cold War and post 9/11 and post Trump. The enemy is no longer some external force from overseas, but comes from within. “We have met the enemy and he is us.” From that perspective, the detached fatalism of Dr Manhattan no longer seems to fit in this world and Moore himself has expressed some regret at the increasingly nihilistic tone which comics took following Watchmen.I didn’t really have as much of a problem with Watchmen 2019 being more “traditional” in some respects than Watchmen 1985, because one of the joys of the show was watching them build something out of deconstructed tropes. Watchmen 2019 may have leaned into exceptionalism, but it also pushed back at the unspoken white supremacist narrative in a lot of superhero comics which Moore himself observed in an interview in 2017. I think Watchmen 2019 succeeds in being a snapshot of the times we are living through much in the same way that Watchmen 1985 was a snapshot of the mid 80s.
I agree that the adaptation didn’t need to be as pessimistic as the original comic, but I think a form of positivity more consistent with the original story would have been for Angela to reject exceptionalism, recognizing that it’s what got both her and the world into such a state in the first place. As I mention, that’s literally the case in the story, in which Adrian’s superhero scheme leads to celebrity president Redford, whose authoritarian nanny state fosters racial resentment and people use the image of a dead superhero to build a counternarrative of grievance and greatness lost. But it’s also a stark reflection of what happened in the real world, where technocrats thought they knew best how to run society, but their big ideas ended up fostering an aggrieved underclass that embraced a racist strongman who actually said to them “Only I can save us.” It’s a scenario in which, to me, it still seems preferable to advocate for humility and the uplift of the common man, rather than more myths about larger-than-life saviors.
Can you explain how DM transfers his powers to Angela in the egg while he’s alive, but still is able to use those powers before he dies? I’m a good TV fan, but know nothing about the comic book.
Manhattan’s powers aren’t a finite thing such that if he passes them on he doesn’t have them any more, because he’s not a regular man who “got” powers and then could lose them and just be a man again. His body was torn apart at the subatomic level, but somehow his dissolute consciousness was able to draw itself back together and assemble a physical appearance … but Jon Osterman is still dead. That he chooses to take a physical form or resemble the man he used to be (or the man Abar chose him to resemble) is a whim; he’s not a man, he’s an incomprehensible entity with a man’s memories and some of his personality. Now, his ability to give someone else his powers (or that someone else could, in destroying him, take them) is something that wouldn’t have occurred to me from the comic, but I can accept it as a given since his abilities are near boundless, and everything about the mechanics of it are left extremely vague.
what an absolute hack and moron!
The only problem I have with Angela becoming Dr. Manhattan—and the fact that it’s obvious that it’s what the show is telling us all the way to the final scene in question—is that the comic, the movie, and even the show, everything Watchmen has shown us to this point is that becoming a being like Manhattan brings all the detachment and lack of interest of most things human once you become essentially god like.What would make Angela any different? Now I’m sure there’s an explanation I can buy on why that would be the case, but unless I missed it, I don’t think the show clearly stated it. It’s the same thing many were saying about Senator Keene’s plan. Once he became the blue guy, he would probably shrug his shoulders and head off to the cosmos rather than become president or do anything the 7th cavalry wanted.Regardless, I liked this season a lot. It was great social commentary for our current fucked up times and damn entertaining. I don’t think it was The Leftovers good, but comparing one season of a show to three seasons is probably not fair to either. Unless Lindelof has a cracking idea, I agree with him and just let the mystery be, even though I’d love more good Watchmen. Maybe Ryan Coogler has a good take?
It would’ve been interesting if Keene had been gotten away with getting Dr. Manhattan’s powers, but upon doing so goes: “Wow! Now that my consciousness exists in this form on this plane of existence, being concerned about racial supremacy is so stupid and pointless. My priorities have changed and I don’t care about race and white people anymore! Well, Cyclops, Dad, backward, primitive racists, I’m off to go create another universe now! Buh-bye and have fun with Madam Trieu and Robert Redford!” and then teleports away showing everyone that the new god-like being doesn’t give a flying fuck about your stupid and petty culture/racial politics anymore.But Keene getting turn into pasta sauce and the 7thK/Cyclops vaporized was great enough and satisfying! Best part of the episode!
Hah, no ambiguity! If that’s so, then answer me this, Damon: Who is the Walrus? Is it you? Koo koo kachoo?
He also told Vulture that he doesn’t think Lady Trieu really needed to be destroyed by Adrian Veldt
There’s an argument to be made that godlike powers in the hands of a trillionaire narcissists is never a good idea, no matter how altruistic. And sure Trieu is not perfect— she is ruthless, masks her insecurity and daddy issues — she makes more sense than Veidt or Dr. Manhattan. In fact jealousy, rather than virtue, seemed to Veidt’s motivation. Couldn’t have his daughter do something he couldn’t.I do think its possible that Trieu, an expert on cloning and memory storage, has backups.
Overall I liked the series a lot, although the reveal took so long
that the season finale almost felt rushed. However in the end you realize that
this was Dr. Manhattan’s story all along and its a love story at that.At first I was
puzzled as to why he barely acknowledged his former wife Laurie (Agent
Blake) when reunited, although he did teleport her, Looking Glass and
Ozymandias to the safety of Karnak, so he obviously knew all along what
they would do to stop Lady Trieu. He kept Angela there to bear witness to his love for her and test her resolve.
In
the graphic novel, he showed little empathy for individual humans,
other than his wife Laurie and even that was limited. Yet he never strayed far from
Earth after the events of the novel despite saying he was going to explore the universe. Feeling a yearning for human
fellowship, he returns to Earth and romantically pursues an American
black woman working as a Saigon cop in the state of Vietnam. Indeed, he
fell so in love with Angela, that he modified his appearance
permanently. Even when he returned to form as Manhattan, he was no
longer a cyan version of his former self, German immigrant Jon Osterman,
but instead remained the form of Cal Abar. Osterman was completely race blind after he transformed to Dr. Manhattan, which didn’t didn’t really manifest itself in the novel, although it makes perfect sense in hindsight.Manhattan’s
not dead. Over and over again we learn that the world’s smartest human
posed no more threat to him than the world’s smartest termite. Even gods become lonely however, as was brought up by Angela herself when she compared Jon to Zeus, returning to earth as a swan. This was a
love story after all. Angela won’t become Jon and replace him. By eating the egg and willingly accepting his powers, she will
instead become his equal, immortal and eternal companion. Like binary stars, they will travel the cosmos together.
As to whether or not a season two will happen, it’s anyone’s guess, but I’ll venture that if it does happen, it will be a completely different setting, story line and all new characters.
Lindelof apparently doesn’t know what the word ambiguous means. This may be why his shows have always in the end been disappointing to me. I want to know what the polar bears were doing on the island, why people were so shaken when 3% of the population disappeared, and why Dr Manhattan wanted to die. Those ambiguities bother me but he doesn’t realize they exist.
My friend warned me about Lindelof. But I kept insisting that this was a great show with a great story. But he kept saying “that’s how Lindelof works”. He lures you in and then ruins the entire story with a complete shit ending. Well, I hate to admit it, but my friend was right. fuck Lindelof.
I honestly thing she falls into the pool, and not just because I want Manhattan to come back. It’s because he said he’d never give his powers to someone without their consent (I don’t recall Angela ever consenting). And it wouldn’t be all his power, anyway, since he had his powers right up until he was “destroyed”