That underwear, though. I can’t even.
on behalf of all Watchmen fans everywhere I sincerely apologize for this complete and utter trash on the TV show. I wish I was a reset button Let The Producers can wipe the Slate clean and start again. We the fans have waited too long for such a disappointing racially charged meaningless pile of trash to be shoved down our throats with the brand of Watchmen. I am not just disappointed but I am sad this TV show it's not worth it's salt. I'm not only wish that they no longer produce any additional Seasons but they delete and recant this first season. I pray we can wipe it from the history books.
Damon Lindelof is goddamn genius. I will watch anything that man is attached to.
The finale was not as great as I hoped it would be but the series as a whole was a homerun.
The grandfather blames the BlueMan for not doing more but I disagree. He is not God. He can’t make people be better human beings. He tried that in Europa. That didn’t turn out as he had hoped.
I just hope HBO has the common sense to not green light another season. Nothing more needs to be said here.
"I am the egg man, we are the egg men !"
“You can’t heal under a mask, Angela. Wounds need air.”
What a fucking abomination this entire show is. Some entertaining abomination, but abomination nonetheless. Might as well have just been haphazardly throwing shit at the wall.
Where to even begin for this episode. 1) I’m really not a big fan of Yahya as Dr. Manhattan. 2) Having a bunch of moronic racists achieve what Ozymandias couldn’t will never sit right with me. (In terms of being able to capture Manhattan.) Also, it's portrayal of Ozymamdias... yea yea bring him down a peg yada yada. No less of an insulting depiction, no different than the film. 3) How do you write that absurdly silly and comical conception for Trieu and think to yourself that you're on to something? Primetime stupid comic book material. 4) The continuing of the show’s graceless forcing of iconic lines from the novels never seems to not cringe me out. 5) It even abandons its own superficial themes. Everything about race and vigilante cops and trauma which it drops for the TV equivalent of superhero CGI fest. Not that the former ever excited me given that it has the nuanced storytelling capabilities of a Snyder film, but I can’t see even its stanched defenders defend this. It also completely fails to portray the institutionalized racism by making it seem like some small(ish) enclosed group, as if that struggle is over once the Cyclops group is over. 6) But holy shit, actually undoing the ending of the novel? Just fuck off. And FUCK that last shot too. The only hubris here is the notion that Lindelof can take someone else’s text, bent it over and contort it in about a million directions, and not only make his own interpretation of it but practically try to force his own mark upon the original text. There is actually zero originality here, and as it superficially apes the original novel it comes off as a cheap knock-off. What a simplistic, morally reductive piece of turd this ended up being. Just wow. If this is what one should expect from this Lindelof guy, then I can be certain that I won’t touch another show of his with a ten-inch pole.
Alan Moore was right, maybe no one should adapt or in general touch his Watchmen. But even Snyder's film feels less bone-head in its superficial frame for frame replication.
Also, talk about relying on a handful of soundtracks throughout the show. They really milked their money's worth out of “Lacrimosa” huh.
I love the storytelling of this show so much! At first I didn’t understand anything and I mean it, but by the end of this episode I was part of this complex universe!
One thing I would’ve done differently would be watching the movie first just to get a glimpse into the universe and understand who the hell are dr manhattan and co; and maybe I would’ve wanted for Lady Truit to get dr manhattan’s powers! It would’ve been interesting to see and I had confidence on her!
As farfetched as the show might look, if this year has proven anything is that white americans are gonna be racist no matter what! Robots, aliens, superheroes, squids, pandemics, their racism is gonna prevail and 70 million votes for trmp prove this, so this show is so relevant and necessary, one year ago I would not have believe how accurate thus show could be.
now you know why Angela is blue in that cover.
Why can’t I remember the ending :sob::joy: i finished this a week ago
No words. Just a sly grin I'm giving to Mr. Lindelof. Well done.
What a satisfying ending. I have never been a person to say I don't want more of a good thing but I hope they don't do another season of it. Lesson learnt: In the end, wearing a mask is, at best, a temporary measure that can stop the bleeding but bring no real healing. Healing will only occur when the minority can walk unmasked.
Reactions are different for finales of Lost (divisive) and The Leftovers (acclaimed), but I feel like the weight of original Watchmen’s legacy finally has Lindelof make a finale that prioritizes plot resolution over character catharsis, the reverse of his first two. I love the finales of Lost and Leftovers, while I think this one is merely very, very good. Still more than a worthy ending to this year’s most singular TV.
"That guy talks too much."
I'am the walrus in the end makes the episode tasts better "I am the egg man, they are the egg men, I am the walrus, Goo goo good joob"
this was amazing and I hope they don't do a second season.
Good episode, good finale. But it felt...I don't know, underwhelming. Perhaps it felt that way because the previous episode was very good, and I watched it too recently for this episode to seem better, rightfully better. Either way, it was good enough. I'm satisfied.
– Was I, Master? Was I a worthy finale?
– No. But you put on a hell of a show.
A classic. Maybe it was too ahead of its time for some people.
So the world's smartest woman fatal flaw was her daddy issues. While he only revealed his master plan after no one could no longer stop it, she had to tell Veidt everything she had planned the first time they met and most importantly have him be there when she completed it.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2019-12-17T06:18:11Z
[9.4/10] When I watched the first batch of episodes from Watchmen, I thought it tossed a number of interesting balls into the air, but I questioned how and if it would be able to catch them all. Showrunner Damon Lindelof, of Lost fame, is not necessarily known for delivering satisfying endings. And while his series asked all sorts of intriguing questions about the institutions of power and those marginalized by them, and while it threw in one eyebrow raising plot point after another, to answer all of the former, and tie together all the latter, seemed like too much for even the smartest (person) in the world to do in a satisfying fashion.
And yet “See How They Fly” somehow does it.
The finale of Watchmen’s first (and, blue god willing, only) season tells us what Lady Trieu’s angle is, how it fits with the Seventh Kavalry’s plot, how Ozymandias factors into it, what Dr. Manhattan’s role is, how it intersects with Will Reeves’s plans, and what Angela Abar’s place in these grand events is. It tells a story of so many people seeking power, seeking vindication, seeking adoration, and then puts it in the hands of the one person who wasn’t looking for it.
It also allows us to understand not only the plot mechanics that led to the second momentous rain of squid of sky, but the motivations of everyone who reached that point. The racist, status quo-preserving rationale behind the Seventh Kavalry’s scheme has been clear for some time now. But “See How They Fly” accounts for the consequences of Cal Abar’s moment of reflex on the White Night. It accounts for the collection of watch batteries from the pilot. And it accounts for their failure, the assumption that they’ve thought it all out and have all the right answers. The truth, however, someone much smarter is pulling the strings, and even left to their own literal devices, the forces of Cyclops would have turned themselves to mush anyway.
That someone is Lady Trieu, and in Watchmen’s last character-defining, plot twist-revealing vignette, it sets her up as Adrian Veidt’s inheritor. She is, through one enterprising refugee’s machinations, his daughter, one who has matched, if not exceeded, his genius. She is playing the Seventh Kavalry, letting them do the dirty work of capturing Dr. Manhattan so that she can dispose of them and localize him in one fell swoop. It is another instance of a Veidt being one step ahead.
But we understand, for the first time, why Lady Trieu is doing this. She claims that it’s to better the world, to use the power that Dr. Manhattan sits on to eliminate the world’s nuclear arsenals, to clean the air, to fix all that ails us. But she does not seek that goal for pure altruism and, like her father, she’s shown a disturbing propensity to use whatever means are necessary if her goals are just. Instead, the episode suggests that all of this is an effort to impress her parents, to gain their approval, to show herself worthy of the gifts that she’s been given and to prove that she can build herself up to the highest heights of human achievement on her own, as Ozymandias challenged her to do.
But it’s Ozymandias who thwarts her. He declares that she cannot be trusted because she suffers from the same sins he does: vanity and self-aggrandizement. He tells his compatriots that she has to be stopped because she’ll soon demand that everyone bow down before her, because he knows it to be true of itself. And in one of the many little bits of irony and connection in the episode and the season, he uses the frozen corpses of the veritable offspring of his giant squid to crush his daughter, must as he used the frozen corpses of Dr. Manhattan’s children to ask her for help.
There’s two ways to read that scene. The first is as a rare moment of self-recognition in Veidt, knowing what he would do with that power and why, given the hell he’s been through, where it would lead, to the point that he resolves to stop it. The second is another instance of, true to the show’s themes, a white male going to great lengths to preserve the status quo and prevent a person of color from overtaking his position and assuming his legacy.
Either way, the triumph if brief for Veidt. Whether his pronouncements are accurate for Lady Trieu, they’re true for himself. Ozymandias seeks veneration and adoration. He got to save the world, but grumbled miserably for decades because he never got to take credit for it, never got his due from the people he put in power or the lives he preserved. On Europa, he had the thing he always wanted -- endless appreciation and devotion from all those around him -- but it was given reflexively, without due, and thus became hollow and even maddening. And in the end, he saves the world once more, and gets to take credit for it, both for now and for 1985, but it’s also his downfall.
That’s the other cruel irony and the button put on the stories of Laurie Blake and Looking Glass. After everything, the two of them decide to arrest Veidt for the lives lost amid his gambit from the original comic. For Wade Tillman, it’s enacting justice against the man who wrecked so much of his life, who left him so scared for so long, in the name of a well-intentioned lie, but a bloody lie nonetheless. For the former Ms. Juspeczyk, it’s the chance for her to have agency in this story, to take charge rather than be more of a bystander to larger forces as she was in 1985, given time to reflect on what happened and her place in it. And for Ozymandias himself, it’s the price he pays for being known, the music he must face for returning home, the cost he finally has to account for instead of his gilded cage of anonymity.
But the thing that he and his daughter share is that they’re not able to thwart a god. Even though Dr. Manhattan is trapped in his lithium prison, even though he’s mentally disoriented from whatever Keene Jr. and Trieu have done to him, he still has the wherewithal to transport away the people whom he knows can stop this, and to spend his last moments with the woman he loves. If Ozymandias was sent to his own private hell, Jon Osterman spends his final seconds on this Earth in his own private Heaven, experiencing all of his best moments with Angela at once.
As much as Watchmen is a story about racism and its institutional infestation, as much as it’s about masks and what happens when people put them on, it’s also a story about love. It is, as the episode name-drops, another thermodynamic miracle in the making, of two people coming together despite lightyears of distance between them, and the way it changes the world.
That change takes a little dealmaking though. William Reeves gives Dr. Manhattan up to Lady Trieu in exchange for her rooting out and eliminating Cyclops. But Cal very probably knew what the result would be, even suggested the trade to Hooded Justice. Reeves’s plan was to stop the organization he’d been fighting for nearly a century. Dr. Manhattan had even bigger plans, ones that may have widened even Will Reeves’s aspirations here.
As the season’s penultimate episode portended, Dr. Manhattan left something behind for his wife, a piece of himself that would give her godlike powers. In the final scene of the episode, she consumes it, and while the episode ends too tantalizingly soon before she can walk on water, the implication is clear.
So many people in this episode reached toward Dr. Manhattan this season, so many aiming to replicate him or supplant him or best him. But the person who receives his abilities is not someone who sought it out. It’s someone who it was given to, who it was earned by, through her capacity to love, for her capacity to try to save what might be unsaveable, for her willingness to fight and appreciate what’s lovely and wonderful even if it’s only fleeting.
But it’s also someone who has awoken to the injustices that lie under her nose. When Will Reeves offers some comfort and commiseration to his granddaughter, it comes with one admonition -- that for all Dr. Manhattan did, he could have done more. THey’re the words of a man who seems to know what’s coming. His project, and the project of Lindelof’s Watchmen, was to show an awakening in Angela, an internal transition from someone who believed, like Reeves himself once did, that the systems could be fixed from the inside, that they could be welcoming to and changed by people who looked like them, but that the color of law was never going to supersede the color of their skin in the people who tried to hold onto the power that badge conferred. Hers is a tale of epiphany, of understanding, of an insidiousness in the institutions she risked her life to protect that was, unbeknownst to her, ready to chew her up and spit her out like it had done so many others.
So she takes the power that would never be willingly forsaken by those who possess it. It is, in its own subtle way, a radical message. It’s radical because it ties in with a moral that David Simon, who chronicled faltering institutions himself on The Wire once put it, that when those institutions have fully failed you, the only thing left to do is pick up a brick. Will Reeves couldn’t find justice from the police department or the sterling heroes that were supposed to help him, so he found it himself, often in bloody terms. Watchmen firmly suggests that these institutions retain the same debilitating stink of racism in 2019 that they did during the time of Black Wall Street, and ends with Angela Abar picking up one hell of a brick.
The way Angela’s son looks at her own mask, much as William Reeves’s son did his, suggests (as Watchmen inevitably must) that this cycle isn’t over, that the age of heroes and vigilantes and those who’ve suffered trauma finding a way to exercise it in the name of justice isn’t over just yet. Topher has suffered his fair share of trauma today, and long before. When Ozymandias kills The Game Warden, his erstwhile servant asks him why he made him wear a mask, and Veidt responds that masks make men cruel. Only time will tell whether Angela’s son will don the same type of hood his mother and great grandfather did, if he will mete out justice with the same sort of cruelty, and on whom.
But the other way that Watchmen is radical come in whose hands it puts the responsibility and the ability to obtain that justice. While superhero stories can come in many stripes, most often they are a power fantasy. A strapping hero, often one the reader or viewer can see themselves in, fights for truth and justice and the American way with a force and a level of excitement that the muddy grays and grim realities of the real world can’t match. It is, if not as radical as the show’s political message, then certainly bold, for the show to declare in Angela’s raw egg cocktail and first, tenuous step, that it’s time for a change in who gets to assume those power fantasies.
It is remarkable, then, how well this show puts everyone in place and builds, thematically and narratively, to that moment. In the end, Watchmen finds a reason to bring everyone of significance to the show’s story and themes into the same location, as though each vignette and sequence we witnessed led to this moment. It reaches its climax at the same place it started, in what was once Black Wall Street and the theater where young Will Reeves saw a black hero in a mask and borrowed his name and mission. For a show that, from its first frame, asked probing questions about who holds power, how that intersects with the color of law, and who gets to be inspired by the power fantasies of masked adventures, it answers all three with a woman of color about to walk on water.
Each setup had a payoff and each payoff had a setup. Almost every seeming loose end is weaved together by the final frame. There are still queries that can be raised, objections that could be lodged, but everything that the series set up it knocked down. It seems too easy to say -- for a show that trod into such messy territory, that tugged on so many knotted threads of both the real world and its fictional one -- but there’s only one word to describe Watchmen and its ending. Clockwork.