‘Watchmen’ Recap Episode 5: We’re Through the Looking Glass Here, People

Lots of people in the world of Watchmen had a bad day on November 2nd, 1985. Wade Tillman had a worse day than most, excepting of course the three million people that died. Visiting a Hoboken carnival on a mission trip for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, he’s seduced into taking off all his clothes by a “knot-top” punk girl as a prank. She steals his clothes…and suddenly the death throes of a gigantic monster that materializes in Manhattan kill nearly everyone at the fair, leaving Wade naked, alone, and terrified.

As recipes for superpower-based neurosis go, this one’s an award-winner.

“Little Fear of Lightning,” the show’s fifth installment, is essentially the Wade Tillman Show. It follows him for a few days in the life: his day job/cover as a focus-group consultant with an uncanny ability to detect when people are lying; his rough-and-tumble banter with the other masked detectives in the Tulsa PD; his visit to his ex, a geneticist who takes a break from her job cloning dogs and destroying the ones who don’t make the grade in some kind of microwave doohickey in order to identify the pills Sister Night took from her mysterious grandfather; his contentious relationship with FBI Agent Laurie Blake, who’s bugging his desk and getting under his skin; and most especially his constant vigilance against another extradimensional event, which involves a bunker, an early warning system, and a snake-oil substance called Reflectitine that’s supposed to protect him against psychic blasts like the one emitted by the dying squid. That’s what his mask is made of—Laurie speculates he joined the force after the White Night just to have an excuse to wrap his whole head in the stuff, instead of merely lining his baseball caps with it.

A not-so-chance encounter at an AA-style support group for people with squid-based PTSD (“Friends of Nemo,” they call themselves, after the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea captain who battled a giant squid in his submarine) changes everything for ol’ Wade. It’s there he meets a beautiful, funny, earthy woman played by Deadwood‘s Paula Malcolmson, with whom he goes on an impromptu date after the meeting. They drink, they chat, they kiss. It’s really quite romantic.

Until…well, her Rorschach mask kind of says it all, doesn’t it?

Their whole meet-cute was a scam, designed to lure Wade to the secret headquarters of the 7th Kavalry. It’s there he discovers they’re messing with “portals,” falsely alleged to be the cause of the squid explosion on 11/2. It’s there he meets their secret leader, do-gooding cop-loving Senator Joe Keene Jr. And it’s there he learns the truth.

Senator Keene offers Wade a Matrix-style red pill, in the form of a videotape that will dispel all illusions and calm all his fears. The star of the tape? Your friend and mine, Adrian “Ozymandias” Veidt, admitting he’s the culprit behind the “11/2” extradimensional squid attack, as well as the subsequent minor events known as “squidfalls”—and promising the video’s intended recipient, Robert Redford, that he’s also worked (or will have worked, given that Redford’s not supposed to see the tape until he’s in office) to get the actor elected president. (It’s here where I’ll note that “Looking Glass” is almost certainly a tip of the hat to Oliver Stone’s conspiracy-theory masterpiece JFK and the famous Kevin Costner quote in the headline above.)

As far as game-changing revelations go, it’s…well, it’s not much! We already know Ozymandias is behind the squid attack, of course—it’s the entire plot of the comic book. Given his espoused liberal politics (the whole “killing three million people” thing was an exception), it’s not a huge stretch to imagine him engineering the election of a liberal president to offset decades of Dick Nixon. And if you can drop a gigantic squid on a city, I suppose it’s also possible to drop tiny squids all over the place now and then for a few decades.

What really matters here is how Looking Glass takes it, and that’s written all over his face. I’m sorry, I know that sounds like a bad joke given his faceless mask, but it’s really not Looking Glass who receives this revelation—it’s his secret identity, Wade Tillman. Without saying a word, actor Tim Blake Nelson makes the man’s relief so obvious and so strong it borders on awe. You almost expect him to start weeping tears of joy. In dramas, human responses beat shocking twists every time.

And why shouldn’t he be happy? He was a victim of one of the worst events in human history (the horror of which is very effectively conveyed by that flyover shot of the squid’s path of destruction, accompanied by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s horror-movie score). He’s spent the rest of his life terrified, wearing tinfoil hats to protect him from ever experiencing that sort of thing again. His entire life, in fact, revolves around a worst-case scenario that this videotape, in one fell swoop, erases from the realm of possibility. What would you do on behalf of someone who allayed your greatest fear?

In Looking Glass’s case, we find out soon enough. Following Keene’s instructions, he deliberately entraps Sister Night into revealing the truth about finding her grandfather at the crime scene and covering up his presence there. It’s enough for Laurie Blake, listening to the conversation via the bug she planted in LG’s desktop cactus, to make an arrest, though not before Night chugs all the pills her grandfather left for her to find.

But no sooner does Wade return home than a posse of gun-toting, Rorschach-masked 7th Kavalry members show up and storm into his garage. We cut to black before we see what they’re up to, but they sure don’t look friendly.

It should be noted here that if things turn south for LG, he’s not the only character whose moment of triumph is thwarted. Off on his little prison in the sky, Ozymandias manages to breach its barrier and walk around in outer space, where he takes the bodies of the many slain Crookshanks and Phillips clones he’s killed and arranges them into a call for help. It’s quite gruesome, though you wouldn’t know it from looking at him: Thanks to Jeremy Irons’s whimsical performance, you get the sense Ozymandias stopped caring about individual human lives decades ago.

Unfortunately for Ozy, the masked Phillips clone known as the Game Warden is there to rain on his parade when he returns. “Your god’s abandoned ya!” Ozy shouts at the assembled clones—referring, one presumes, to Dr. Manhattan. Unfortunately for him, the Game Warden agrees…all the more reason to show Ozymandias “no mercy.” That’s Watchmen for you: Lots of people putting on masks and playing god. If only there were a moral lesson to be learned here….

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Stream Watchmen Episode 5 ("Little Fear of Lightning") on HBO Go

Stream Watchmen Episode 5 ("Little Fear of Lightning") on HBO Now