‘Watchmen’ Episode 7 Recap: The Manhattan Project

We get a lot of capital-A Answers in this episode of Watchmen. Sometimes they’re Answers for Questions we didn’t even know existed until this episode of Watchmen. For example, show of hands: Who guessed Dr. Manhattan, the omnipotent blue superbeing, was lying dormant in some dude’s noggin this whole time?

This surprising installment is titled “An Almost Religious Awe,” after a phrase Dr. Manhattan used in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s original comic to describe how surrendering Vietnamese troops viewed him after he beat them almost singlehandedly. Is it a good description for how to view the episode itself? I don’t know about all that—though it does come close to how I felt about hearing Trent Reznor cover his late friend and mentor David Bowie’s song “Life on Mars?” at the end of the episode.

The best way to describe this episode is that it’s replete with the abrupt narrative swerves and blow-to-the-head surrealist imagery that have been showrunner Damon Lindelof’s specialty since his masterpiece The Leftovers (and arguably even before that: cf. the polar bear in Lost). And I’m not even counting the actual blows to the head delivered by Angela Abar to her husband Cal in order to free the Dr. Manhattan persona within by using a hammer.

Take Angela herself, for instance. We spend much of this episode stranded in her mind, as Lady Trieu detoxes her brain from her overdose on her grandfather’s Nostalgia memory pills. We see how she lost her parents to a suicide bomber in Vietnam, how she spent time in a girls’ orphanage, how she ID’d the bomber and listened to his extrajudicial execution by the cops, how her grandmother found her at the orphanage and freed her, how she clung to a VHS tape of a blaxploitation movie named Sister Night because the main character looked like her, how her grandmother then suddenly dropped dead before they could leave the newly minted state for a new life in Tulsa.

We also see that her “neural dialysis” or whatever it’s called is conducted by hooking up her nervous system to a freaking elephant.

Another example: Laurie Blake visits Jane Crawford, the widow of police chief Judd Crawford and a former advisor to Senator Joe Keene Jr., to inquire if just maybe her husband was a secret white supremacist and part of the Cyclops conspiracy. Jane Crawford basically says “yep” and then drops Laurie through a trap door located under her armchair.

Another: Ozymandias stands trial (for almost a year, apparently) for his many crimes against humanity and…whatever all those Philips and Crookshanks clones are called. His sole defense: cutting a loud fart. The judge’s response: unleashing a herd of pigs to represent Ozy’s true peers.

Also Lady Trieu’s childlike assistant isn’t her daughter or even a clone of herself, but rather a clone of her mother.

Also all the calls placed to Dr. Manhattan don’t go to him at all, since he’s not on Mars, duh—they go to Lady Trieu, who knows he’s lurking in Tulsa but doesn’t seem to know his secret identity.

But the 7th Kavalry does, and they’re staking out Angela and Cal’s place as the episode ends. Why? Because they aim to destroy the original Dr. Manhattan and replace him with a Dr. Manhattanized Joe Keene Jr., the ultimate weapon in the coming race war.

Also at some point Looking Glass killed like five 7th Kavalry dudes and disappeared. That’s, like, the twelfth-craziest thing that happens.

Are you seeing where I’m going with this? The art of this show doesn’t lie in Damon Lindelof’s nervous-breakdown interviews or contractually-obligated making-of mini-documentaries, or in the Peteypedia supplementary materials on HBO.com, or in finding just the right place to stop the chicken-and-egg cycle of racism and racism-induced trauma that led to the state of vigilantism and policing today. It’s in the pacing and the imagery, in that staccato strangeness that Lindelof has developed and unleashed in his Gibbons-endorsed, Moore-ignored homage to the original.

If that’s not to your taste, that is fine—even The Leftovers was Not For Everyone TV. But at least respond to it as a work of visual narrative, not a thinkpiece. At least reflect on and wrestle with where the art of the thing really is, not where you feel you need it to be.

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 7 ("An Almost Religious Awe") on HBO Go

Stream Watchmen Episode 7 ("An Almost Religious Awe") on HBO Now