‘Watchmen’ Episode 8 Recap: Rhapsody in Blue

Want proof that this is Watchmen‘s boldest episode yet? Look no further than the music cues. “The Blue Danube”—straight outta Kubrick’s 2001. A version of “My Prayer”—the song that played a key role in Twin Peaks: The Return episode eight, aka the single best episode of television ever. “Rhapsody in Blue,” which I first really listened to when I was a film student and Woody Allen’s love letter to NYC, Manhattan, used it as its opening theme, having not yet been written out of the canon (justifiably).

Yep, this episode—titled “A God Walks Into Abar,” a bad joke that it feels made it out of the writers’ room simply because the writers said “why the fuck not”—is Damon Lindelof and company at their most swing-for-the-fences ambitious. Which makes sense: It’s their take on the original Watchmen‘s most iconic character, the sad blue man who launched a thousand memes about depression and isolation, and also exposed male genitalia.

There’s a little bit of all of that in this episode, which is simultaneously the show at its best and, thus far, its worst.

So here’s the basic scoop, as far as I can break it down into easily digestible chunks. On one random night commemorating America’s victory in Vietnam, Dr. Manhattan shows up in Saigon, where he dons a Dr. Manhattan mask to blend in (he was the reason for the aforementioned victory after all) and offers a beer to a younger Angela Abar. As a wise man once said, they’re sharing a drink they called loneliness, but it’s better than drinking alone.

Dr. Manhattan, as you might recall from the comics, experiences the whole of time simultaneously. He’s always everywhere he has ever been or will ever be, doing everything he’s ever done or will ever do. What this translates into for Angela is basically semi-endearing pickup-artist-style confidence that they will not only go out for a second date, but that they will also fall in love and spend ten years together, after which things will end in tragedy. But hey, ten blissful years of love—a tradeoff worth making, no?

In the process of this conversation, and with a little help from the good Doctor’s time-jumping, we get a lot of Answers. Yes, Dr. Manhattan created the strange paradise-prison where Ozymandias is now stranded—the first Philips and Crookshanks were Doc’s Adam and Eve, the country estate they live in was the same country estate where a young Doc stayed after fleeing Nazi Germany, and Doc sent Ozy there because, after saving humanity from nuclear armageddon with his dirty squid trick, he craved an adulation that he couldn’t find except among people created only to love and serve.

And how did Dr. Manhattan end up occupying the body of an extremely handsome guy with black skin, as opposed to his blue hue and the white skin of his old human self, Jon Osterman? He recreated a cadaver in the Saigon morgue, one hand-picked for him by Angela. Then, when his ability to see the past, present, and future simultaneously threatened to disrupt his and Angela’s relationship, he called on Ozymandias for help; Ozy produced that tiny metal atomic symbol Angela pulled out of her husband’s head, which is actually a tachyon-irradiated device custom-made to make Dr. Manhattan forget he’s Dr. Manhattan, which was Ozy’s Plan A for his eventual showdown with the big blue hero. (In the comic, apparently, he went with Plan B, B for “blowing him up,” as opposed to A for “amnesia.”)

Got all that? So far so good, right?

It’s only when the episode reaches its conclusion that it starts to trip over itself. First, it indulges in a cheap and easy Terminator-style temporal paradox: Angela tells Dr. Manhattan that her grandfather murdered Judd Crawford for being a closet Klansman and member of the Cyclops conspiracy, facts of which he goes on to inform her grandfather years earlier, causing him to commit that very murder in the first place.

Alan Moore wisely avoided these chicken-and-egg brainteasers when he wrote the character. Instead, he emphasized the way Dr. Manhattan’s quantum-physics experience of life would affect him emotionally. Passing messages backwards and forwards in time until reality becomes a loop is a lot less interesting than the idea of a man constantly adrift in an endless sea of memory, experience, and anticipation. One is a parlor game; the other is a story. It doesn’t surprise me to see the co-writer of this episode is Jeff Jensen, the former TV critic best known for his elaborate and always incorrect theories about what was really going on on Lindelof’s Lost. (Apparently Lindelof appreciated those pieces a lot more than I did.)

A far more dramatic stumble follows. Despite his ability to teleport people and things with a wave of his hand, and despite his ability to blow up 7th Kavalry members’ heads in a similar fashion, Manhattan essentially parks himself right in front of the sci-fi cannon that the Kavalry constructed to kill him, and allows one of its members to live long enough to pull the trigger.

Once again, we turn to Alan Moore for guidance. Moore very carefully constructed the science part of his science-fiction story to explain away Dr. Manhattan’s obliviousness to Ozymandias’s mass-murderous plan. For a time, at least, the show followed suit, employing the rather ingenious device of Ozy’s memory-and-telepathy impediment gizmo. But once said gizmo is removed, and certainly once Dr. Manhattan begins taking out 7K goons one after another, there’s really no reason for him not to target the key weapon or the 7K goon who fires it.

Unless, that is, Dr. Manhattan wanted to die. But he never says anything to that effect; we’re left with what’s on screen, and what’s on screen doesn’t make sense. I mean, it could be tied to his cryptic statement that Angela needs to see him walking on the water of their swimming pool—like, maybe the Dr. Manhattanized Senator Joe Keene Jr. won’t be able to walk on water, which will be Angela’s tipoff that he’s not as omnipotent as his predecessor. But again, you can only review what you’re actually witnessing. And what we’re witnessing feels like a thing that the plot needed to happen, not that actually needed to happen.

Unusually, there’s a post-credits stinger at the end of all this. Ozymandias, bound and imprisoned, gets tomatoes smushed in his face by his creations as punishment for wanting to leave. He’s tired of his paradise and wants simply to get back to earth, where he claims he’s needed. The episode ends with him pulling a horseshoe out of one of those inedible birthday cakes his subjects keep making for him—presented to him by The Game Warden, aka the very first Philips—and beginning to dig himself to freedom with it.

I feel a bit like Ozymandias at this point, to be honest—like we’re tunneling through the unknown in this show, with some unforeseen destination waiting for us. I hope we’ll all be happy with what we find.

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 8 ("A God Walks Into Abar") on HBO Go

Stream Watchmen Episode 8 ("A God Walks Into Abar") on HBO Now