This post contains frank discussion of Watchmen Season 1, Episode 9 “See How They Fly.”
Given that Watchmen showrunner Damon Lindelof set out to create an origin story for Angela Abar’s Dr. Manhattan in this nine-episode serving of a comic book narrative at its finest, he could quite easily close up shop with this season and call it mission accomplished. The only trouble is Watchmen is a hit. Not just with critics (who love it) but with HBO viewers more of whom discover the show with each passing week. So of course fans and, likely, the corporate overlords want another season of the show. But does Lindelof want to make one? The answer to that, as he explains to Vanity Fair, is a little tricky.
First it’s useful to get Lindelof’s explanation of the finale’s closing moments which, to some, could be read as ambiguous. To Lindelof, they’re not. Lindelof’s first show, Lost, famously caught a lot of grief for the way in which it explained the various mysteries that had enchanted audiences for years. His next show, The Leftovers, swung hard in the other direction with it’s “Let the Mystery Be” theme song prepping fans for a finale the stubbornly refused to confirm any truths one way or another. But despite the fact that the Watchmen finale cuts to black just before Angela puts her weight on that foot in order to see if she can really walk on water, Lindelof says there should be no doubt in audience’s minds.
“I don't want to the person who says like, ‘Here’s exactly what happened if we had let the camera run for another five seconds,‘” Lindelof says. “We chose to cut to black where and when we did for a very specific reason that I don’t really want to interrogate in any real way. Can someone really make a legitimate argument that Dr. Manhattan said all that stuff about the egg and that Angela grabbed that carton of eggs and threw it down as hard as she could yet one miraculously survived? Or that Dr. Manhattan said in Episode 8, ‘I need you to see me on the pool, it's important for later.’ And that then she would just basically splash into the pool and be like, ‘Well I guess I misunderstood what he was going for there?’”
More importantly, there’s no emotional payoff to Angela being wrong about Cal’s intentions. In The Leftovers, the ambiguity was part central relationship of the show and to this day Lindelof says you can argue that ending any way you like: “The overall point was the truthiness of Nora speech was irrelevant to the fact that it's what she needed to tell herself and tell Kevin in order for them to be together.” But as for Angela and the egg and that pool? “I’m not saying that it’s an illegitimate argument that Angela just probably got salmonella and wet hair, but that would be the lamest—a really shitty ending.”
Okay so Angela is Dr. Manhattan now and Hooded Justice is sleeping in her spare room and Ozymandias is under arrest and Lube Man is probably working for Silk Spectre II, who was last seen in the company of Looking Glass. Sounds like a nice gallery of heroes to me. But from the start Lindelof has been consistent about where he stands on a second season: “These nine episodes were planned to stand alone and that doesn’t exclude the possibility that there will be more Watchmen.” Okay but the show’s a hit so there will probably be more more Watchmen. But will it be written by Damon Lindelof and company? There’s the rub.
“Whether or not I’ll be involved will be driven almost entirely by whether or not I come up with an idea that I feel is worthy of telling another story,” Lindelof says firmly. “I’m super protective of this material. I understand that that sounds like hypocrisy because its original creator was super protective of it and then I came along without his permission and did this anyway. I would not invoke that feeling onto anybody else who wanted to come and do Watchmen. It's not mine. It never was. I got to spend some time with it and raise it. But, it’s its own thing—it’s so much bigger than me.”
Lindelof only just wrapped post-production on Season 1 two weeks ago, and once his press duties around the finale are over he says he plans to take a nice long holiday break with his family: “I’m going to read a lot of books that have been piling up by my bedside and watch a lot of television shows and movies that I am desperate to see and then when I show back up in January, hopefully the antenna will be back up again. If it receives something that feels like it could be a another season of Watchmen, I would definitely be inclined to pursue it. There is no guarantee of if and when that’ll happen.”
Fair enough and I think I speak for a lot of Watchmen fans when I say that I would take no second season of Watchmen over a season with not enough there there. (A second season with not enough there there is too often the case these days.)
That being said, there are a few promising seeds, other than our curiosity about what Angela would do with those god-like powers, dropped in the finale that could be picked up for a second season if Lindelof decided that he wanted to return to these characters at all. First and foremost, of course, there’s everyone’s favorite slippery boy: Lube Man. The shiny, masked vigilante did not show up again in the season finale but it’s very possible that his alter-ego did. The most prevalent theory about Lube Man is that he’s actually Dale Petey, Laurie Blake’s helpful, hero-obsessed assistant. Petey’s appearance is brief but helpful and one can only imagine what Silk Spectre II and Lube Man could do if they teamed up in a more meaningful way.
Then there’s the kids. Watchmen is not only a show deeply interested in superhero origins, but has taken us all the way back again and again into the childhoods of our various masked heroes and villains. We see Hooded Justice, Sister Night, and Dr. Manhattan as young children—to name but a few. Lindelof explains: “Origin stories are three-fold—or at least two-fold in many instances. If you look at Superman’s origin story, part one is the destruction of Krypton and then part two is him being raised in Smallville and deciding he is going to become Superman. And for Batman, part one is when his parents are killed and part two is later in life when he decides to start dressing up like a giant bat and fighting crime.”
Lindelof and his writers applied this formula to Watchmen: “For Will Reeves part one was the destruction of Greenwood and then part two was what happens in New York in 1938. For Angela, part one is what happens to her when she's a little girl and sort of everything in between and part two is what happened over the course of these nine episodes that's preparing her for whatever happens when she steps onto the pool.”
So does the finale include part one of an origin story for anyone? We should probably pay close attention to the way the camera lingers on two children. Lady Trieu’s mother/daughter (it’s complicated) Bian gets comforted by Red Scare and Pirate Jenny in the back of a squad car after her mother dies in the rain of frozen baby squids. Look familiar?
The camera lingers even longer on Angela’s son Topher Abar as he silently discovers that his adopted mother is secretly Sister Night.
Not only that but she’s also Dr. Manhattan now? As was his adopted father? And his biological parents were killed tragically? If this isn’t crimefighter/supervillain origin story fodder, I don’t know what is. How seriously are we supposed to take the "DR—M" of the DREAMLAND sign lit up directly over Topher’s head?
Perhaps I’m being too literal here. A major theme of both the Watchmen comic and show (and everything Lindelof has ever done) is cyclical, inherited trauma from our parents. So it makes a lot of sense that the finale’s camera would linger on the children damaged by this incident. Watchmen doesn’t need to show us what comes next for us to know that these kids will carry this wound with them forever.
But the finale has one more possible set-up lurking in the shadows. We’ve checked in with most of the original members of the Watchmen team either directly—Silk Spectre II, Dr. Manhattan, Ozymandias—or indirectly—Rorschach via the 7th Cavalry and The Comedian via his daughter Laurie. But what about Laurie’s other love interest Nite Owl? We know Dan Dreiberg was arrested and sent to prison for violating the Keene Act. Laurie accepted the Oklahoma assignment because Senator Joe Keene implied he would pardon Dreiberg if he became the next President of the United States. But good old Dan never once makes an appearance in the show’s first season. But the show makes room for a Dreiberg nod in its final moments when Veidt reveals he still has Dan’s ship, Archimedes.
It could be nice to see Nite Owl back in action for Season 2. In the words of Dr. Manhattan: “Nothing ever ends.” But if Watchmen does end, well, in the words of Ozymandias:
