‘Watchmen’ Season Finale Recap: Blue Dude G’joob

It’s very simple, really. (Deep breath.)

Years ago, on the eve of dropping a gigantic telepathic squid on New York City and killing three million people, Adrian “Ozymandias” Veidt had a vial of his sperm stolen—he was, in the parlance of our times, “volcel,” so that’s the only way you were gonna get that stuff out of him—by Bian, a Vietnamese cleaning woman in his employ, who then somehow fled his Antarctic base to safety without him noticing.

Years later, his now-grown daughter, Lady Trieu, appeared on his doorstep, asking for his help in capturing and harnessing the power of Dr. Manhattan, whose secret location she’d discovered. Ozymandias, an actual self-made billionaire, said no, and disowned her.

Years after that, Ozymandias fashioned the message “SAVE ME DAUGHTER” out of the dead bodies of the clones who served him in the outer-space paradise/prison where Dr. Manhattan sent him, setting them up to be visible at precisely the moment Lady Trieu had told him her probe satellite would pass over the area. So she rescued him (remember that thing that fell to earth on that farm a few episodes back?) and kept him frozen in stasis as that golden statue in her headquarters until the time was right.

Meanwhile, Lady Trieu had learned both that Dr. Manhattan was now alive and well and living as a human in Tulsa, and that a vast right-wing conspiracy centered on Senator Joe Keene Jr. was planning to capture and harness his power themselves, setting up Keene as a white-supremacist god-emperor. She allowed the plan to go forward so that Doc wouldn’t see her coming, then hijacked it for her own purposes, killing all the racists in the process. (Except for Senator Joe, who’d already blown himself up by then.)

But she didn’t count on Dr. Manhattan still being able to use some of his powers, which he does to teleport Ozymandias and Laurie Blake and Looking Glass to Ozy’s Antarctic hideout. There, Ozy rigs his “squidfall” machine to drop frozen squids on Tulsa rather than live ones, obliterating Trieu’s floating Dr. Manhattan de-powering machine and dropping it on her head (though not before poking a hole right through her hand). He did this because, he says, anyone who wants the power of a god has thereby proven they can’t be trusted with it. (“Takes one to know one,” he adds.)

After that it’s a mopping-up operation. Blake and LG knock Ozy out and prepare to fly him back to civilization to stand trial, apparently content to expose the truth of his giant squid ruse to the world and risk the ensuing political re-realignment. (To be fair, it’s not like Ozy had practiced good op-sec with that information, since he recorded a damn video for the President about it.)

Angela Abar, who tried and failed to save her husband Dr. Manhattan from his captors, is reunited with her children, who’d been safely teleported to the theater where her grandfather, Will “Hooded Justice” Reeves, hid out when he was a child during the Tulsa Race Massacre and is now hanging out in once again. They return to the Abar home, where Angela discovers an egg she believes her husband imbued with his power. She eats it and prepares to test the outcome by walking on water. Cue Spooky Tooth’s cover of “I Am the Walrus,” cut to credits. The end.

But in the end, things wrap up a bit too quickly, don’t they?

We’re mere minutes after learning Lady Trieu was the show’s Big Bad all along when she gets perforated by frozen squid and squashed by her own floating MacGuffin. We’re a single episode out from learning Dr. Manhattan can walk on water and pass his powers along by injecting them into foodstuffs when Angela sucks down the innards of an egg and decides to go for a stroll across her backyard pool herself. Ozymandias is rescued, frozen, thawed out, humbled, teleported, vindicated, and arrested in the space of a single hour.

It all fits together like clockwork—and from me, at least, that’s not a compliment. Indeed, that’s been my primary quibble with the work of original graphic novel author Alan Moore for years now: He has a tendency to show his authorial hand a bit too plainly, tie things together a bit too neatly, let you see the brilliance of his constructions while he’s in the process of constructing them. (This is more of a problem with the work of his youth than his later stuff—his recent-ish Lovecraft homage Providence comes together in the end like a nightmare, not a pocketwatch, just for example.)

But at least in the original Watchmen, Moore and his collaborator Dave Gibbons were making, well, the original Watchmen. Showrunner Damon Lindelof aping its slightly too-cute patterns in an extended homage three decades later, when he’s not even starting from scratch like Moore and Gibbons did, is harder to excuse than the enthusiasm of a writer marveling at his own brilliant creation.

In pure plot terms, the thing I’m wrestling with more than anything else, at the moment at least, is why Dr. Manhattan allowed himself to die. We know he had the power to prevent this, since he offed every single 7th Kavalry member except the guy with the big sci-fi gun; he could just as easily have blown that guy’s head up, or warped the dude and the gun to Gila Flats, New Mexico or wherever, but he didn’t. Nor did he exploit whatever flaw in the Cyclops conspirators’ trap allowed him to teleport Laurie, Ozy, and Looking Glass to Antarctica to just, like, become a vaporous cloud and yeet himself out of there. So either the show left an enormous plot hole in the middle of its climax or Dr. Manhattan allowed himself to be killed.

Let’s say it’s the latter, just because that’s more interesting to talk about, I’m in the business of assuming artists are intelligent, and treating everything in a given work as intentional is a more fruitful form of criticism than just pointing and yelling “plot hole!” Why would Doc want to die? Perhaps it’s because, like both Lady Trieu and Will Reeves say during the episode, he never did much of value with his godlike powers, and he’s realized he’s congenitally incapable of harnessing his own enormous potential for good. (Like, he really could have cleaned the oceans instead of lighting Viet Cong guerillas on fire.)

Then, given his cryptic statements about Angela needing to see him walk on the pool and various egg-related colloquialisms, perhaps we can infer that he felt giving Angela his power would put it in the hands of a kinder, loving person—a person he knows well after their ten years of bliss. The argument here would be that unlike the Senator Keenes and Lady Trieus and Ozymandiases of the world, Angela is not the kind of raging narcissist who’d think she deserves this power.

But is that really the case? Angela Abar is a cop with no actual respect for the law. We’ve seen her assault and torture suspects repeatedly, including in this very episode, when she breaks a guy’s fingers to find where the 7K have taken her husband. (I’m going to set aside the noxiousness of depicting torture as an effective means of gaining intelligence; the entire superhero genre, the original Watchmen included, is predicated in part on scenes of masked heroes beating information out of bad guys while threatening to do even worse.) Would any of that change if she were given the power of a god, or would it just get worse? Why should Manhattan, or we in the audience, trust it to be the former rather than the latter?

(There’s also the matter of why Will “Hooded Justice” Reeves was so sanguine about teaming up with Lady Trieu for a while if he felt she was nearly as bad as the Cyclops/7K conspiracists. Did he think things would work out the way they did? I don’t have a theory for that one.)

Anyway, there’s some perfunctory “and the moral of the story is…” stuff about masks—Ozymandias says they “make men cruel,” Hooded Justice says “you can’t heal with a mask” because “wounds need air”—the sum total meaning of which you can grasp in about the time it took you to read this sentence. It seems to me that in an episode that featured, again, Angela Abar breaking someone’s fingers one by one for information, you should probably have shown how vigilantism and unaccountable law enforcement are bad rather than just told us. It would have made it easier to believe the show meant what it was saying.

As it stands, I’m not really sure what the show means. Not that meaning is the be-all and end-all of visual narrative—like I said a few episodes ago, this is a drama, not a thinkpiece. If you were to treat all of this as an essay rather than serialized television, you’d miss how much dizzying fun Damon Lindelof’s brand of blow-to-the-head surrealism can be, or how good Regina King and Jeremy Irons and Jean Smart and Tim Blake Nelson and Louis Gossett Jr. and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Tom Mison and Sara Vickers and Don Johnson and Hong Chau were in their roles. (Seriously, that is a murderers’ row of individually vivid performances, whatever you think about the show they were in.)

But seriously, what do we have here that we didn’t have before? Watchmen the original article had a lot to say about America, the Cold War, vigilantism, the right, the superhero genre, and the comics art form. Other than opening with the Tulsa Race Massacre—a big point in its favor—did Watchmen the TV show comment on politics in general or its own medium in particular with anything approaching Moore & Gibbons’s innovation, vision, and purpose? The puzzle pieces all fit, but what kind of picture are we looking at? I’ll give you a little time to think it over. Tick tock, tick tock.

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 the Watchmen Season Finale on HBO Go

Stream the Watchmen Season Finale on HBO Now