You know that thing TV shows do where they end one week on a massive cliffhanger and open the next episode with something completely unrelated? Well, Watchmen is no different. After last week’s episode ripped our hearts out as the Seventh Kavalry ripped Cal/Jon away from Angela, the season finale begins with a flashback. Oh you’ll get answers, it says, but only when we’re ready to give them.
Yes, this Damon Lindelof production has actual answers waiting at the end. Looking back on it, that’s why the show has been so good week after week. Each episode was building up to something and everyone behind the scenes knew it. It was a carefully plotted, joyously comic book sci-fi tale. And everything that mattered paid off here.
I say “mattered” because, as much as some fans wanted it, we were never getting an answer to Lube Man. It just wasn’t meant to be. I prefer it that way. Let the show have one moment of inexplicable weirdness just to keep us on our toes. This episode is packed with information as it is, though it manages to dole it out in an organic way.
The flashback that opens the episode tells us pretty much everything we ever wanted to know about Lady Trieu. We see a young Adrian Veidt just after he teleported a giant squid into New York City. He’s recording his message to future president Robert Redford. A Vietnamese cleaning lady sneaks into Veidt’s office and steals a sample of his semen, which he keeps behind a painting of Alexander the Great. Of course he does. She shoots it inside her, and that’s the story of Lady Trieu. Moving on.
23 years later, a young Lady Trieu finds Veidt’s base in Antarctica. There, she tells him her whole plan: She’s designed a device that will allow her to transfer Dr. Manhattan’s energy into her. That’s what she’s been building in Tulsa all season. The way she sees it, she would do better with those powers than he has. She would ensure permanent peace by making all the world’s nukes disappear, for starters. She even calls out Veidt’s baby squid rain a pathetic rerun. He’s impressed until she asks for money to build the device. She reveals she’s his daughter, but he rejects her. Veidt says he’s giving her the opportunity to build herself up from nothing, just like she did. And he will never call her daughter.
Jolie Hoang-Rappaport, Hong Chau (Credit: Mark Hill / HBO)
It’s not long before we see him go back on that promise. Trieu tells Veidt she sent a probe to Europa to prove that Dr. Manhattan is there before she can capture him and take his energy. It’s going to take a while for it to get there though. The show lets you piece together the order of events here yourself, which is such a satisfying way to present a reveal.
In the present, Veidt sees a ship land outside his prison cell. He climbs through the tunnel he dug with his horseshoe (I guess it was actually useful) and runs towards it. In one last fight with the warden, it’s revealed Veidt is the one that told him to wear a mask so that he would become a worthy adversary to occupy Veidt’s time. As Veidt kills him, he says the warden wasn’t a worthy adversary, but put on a good show. Ouch. As he boards the ship and files back to Earth, we see the message he spelled out for Lady Trieu in the bodies of all those clones. “Help me, daughter.” Aww.
Photo Credit: Mark Hill / HBO
Trieu brings him back to Earth just in time to put her plan into action. For all her aloofness, it really is important to her that her father is here to see this. She starts her machine up and a glowing metal sphere floats through the city, toward the warehouse where the Seventh Kavalry is getting ready to capture Dr. Manhattan. I love how we see the fight scene from last week from another perspective here. As Laurie, still tied up, is brought in front of the giant cage, she hears the fight through one of the Kavalry members’ walkie talkies. We hear the fight being described from the moment Angela starts shooting to the moment Senator Joe Keene Jr. orders the last remaining member to shoot Dr. Manhattan. Suddenly, Jon is in the cage.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen a finale as generous as this. We’ve waited weeks for some kind of answer as to what happened to Looking Glass. Turns out, after the Kavalry attacked him, he killed them and has been biding his time among them ever since. He stands next to Laurie to keep her safe, while Keene gives a big speech about white people being made to apologize and how bad that is.
It’s the same stuff you hear from your worst family members on Facebook or pundits on Fox News. The show is saying in no uncertain terms that these are white supremacist talking points and should be disregarded as such when you see them in the wild. Angela fights her way into the facility and tries to convince Keene not to do it. She’s seen the inside of Lady Trieu’s facility. She knows that Trieu had all this planned, and that if Keene steps inside his machine, it won’t turn out the way he thinks it does. He steps in anyway, and that’s when Trieu shows up.
Hong Chau (Credit: Mark Hill / HBO)
I can’t remember a finale that’s been quite this satisfying. Every turn the story takes has been expertly set up by the previous eight episodes. We’re seeing so many plans come together here: Trieu’s, Will Reeves’, and Dr. Manhattan’s. Now, it’s just a question of how far ahead each one of them planned, and what their desired outcome is.
Trieu mocks the white supremacists for how their leader didn’t protect himself from the radiation he was trying to steal away. She opens the doors of his machine and his liquified remains pour out. I know she’s going to be the bad guy here, but that moment was so cathartic. As was what happens when she reads out Will’s condemnation of the Seventh Kavalry, Cyclops, and white supremacy in general. Mrs. Crawford interrupts her and tells her to just kill them already. Which she gladly does with four powerful beams. Awesome.
During this time, Jon notices that Keene’s blood has spread inside his cage. That’s enough of a connection to outside for his powers to work. He sends Laurie, Looking Glass, and Veidt to Antarctica, keeping Angela with him. So he doesn’t have to be alone when he dies. Yeah, my heart sank when he said that. As Lady Trieu steps into her own machine, it starts draining his power for real. Angela stays with him until the end, encouraging him to fight it, but he can’t. Instead he spends his last moments reliving every moment he spent with her. It’s sweet, sad, romantic and devastating. I never expected Watchmen to make me cry like this. But after an entire season with Cal and a brilliant episode with Jon, this scene made me melt.
In Antarctica, Veidt figures out why Jon sent them there. Trieu, he says, may start out by doing good things with Dr. Manhattan’s power, but she’ll want more. She won’t stop until she is the all-powerful dictator of the world.
Dr. Manhattan says can’t be in the hands of a dangerous narcissist. And he knows she’s a dangerous narcissist because she’s his daughter. He recognizes it in her. This is the closest Veidt comes to admitting that his actions in the past may have been even slightly wrong. Of course he doesn’t quite get there. Knowing he’s a narcissist doesn’t stop him from being one. He can see the wrong in other people’s actions, but not his own. Still, he has an opportunity here to save the world again. He sends another squid storm to Oklahoma, only this time he highly pressurizes the portal. Instead of harmless splatters, they’ll fall down at lethal speed. Five blocks in, Tulsa will be destroyed, but the world will be spared Trieu’s rule.
Jean Smart (Credit: Mark / HBO)
The squids start falling and Treiu looks in horror as a squid pierces through her palm. Though knowing her ultimate plan, maybe she thinks it’s a stigmata. Laurie calls Angela and warns her to find shelter quick. As the lethal squids start raining down, she takes cover in the theater where she saw Oklahoma back in the first episode. It’s also where Will watched the Bass Reeves movie as a young boy before it was burned down and rebuilt as a performance space. Inside, Angela finds her kids safe and her grandfather waiting. It turns out this was all part of Dr. Manhattan’s plan. He told Will to work with Trieu to wipe out Cyclops and find his granddaughter. Will also delivers one last message: “To make an omelette, you have to break some eggs.”
Angela doesn’t understand what that’s supposed to mean until she gets home. She finds the eggs she broke on the floor. As she prepares to clean them up, she realizes one of them hasn’t broken. She remembers what Jon told her when they first met. That he could theoretically transfer his power into something like an egg. If a person consumed it, they would gain his abilities. Angela walks out to the pool, eats the egg… and then the music kicks in. At that moment, I was 100 percent sure we weren’t going to get an actual answer here. And of course, as soon as her foot touches the water, the episode cuts to black. It’s a frustrating tease, but it feels so good. I like how open-ended that ending is. The episode tied up all the loose ends, leaving us just enough to wonder about and debate. It’s a satisfying question to leave us with.
Regina King (Credit: Mark Hill / HBO)
Watchmen was a brilliant series from start to finish. For the most part, each episode was better than the one that preceded it. It told a fantastic story that expanded on the ideas of the comic. This Watchmen sequel spoke to our world in 2019 just as the comic did in 1985. And I don’t want any more of it. It was such a fantastic season and such a powerful story that any more risks diminishing it. Watchmen said everything it needed to say and left the rest up to us.
The show seems to know that too. That’s why it ended on the question of Angela gaining Manhattan’s powers. Whether she did or not isn’t that important. What’s important is what she does next. This was a show about fighting white supremacy. And while Lady Trieu wiped out one particular group of white supremacists, the ideology isn’t dead.
It probably never will be but the point of the show is that it’s always worth fighting it. Whether she has god-like powers or not, Angela will keep fighting. She has no choice now that her children know she’s Sister Truth. Whatever the case, she’ll do more with what she has than Jon did. This is how you end an HBO series. I hope certain writers of another acclaimed genre show on the network are taking notes.
Watchmen aired Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO
Previously on Watchmen:
- Watchmen Season 1 Episode 8 Recap
- Watchmen Season 1 Episode 7 Recap
- Watchmen Season 1 Episode 6 Recap
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