MOTHERFUCKER
– mrw watching another lindelof masterpiece
I still don’t know where exactly this is all going!
There is only 1 episode left.
What a ride this has been.
This is a classic Lindelof move. He has, after all, mastered the art of the side-step. However this episode contains bits that are truly inspired but perhaps lingers in its mechanisms just a touch too long.
Sets up the finale beautifully though.
This was the best episode yet (maybe the finale will top it) but I do have one major issue: why didn't Jon/Dr. Manhattan just teleport away - or even just behind the group of goons to take them all out? If he can experience all time simultaneously, can create a world in 90 seconds, and is "the most powerful being this universe has ever seen", then his demise/teleporting away by that cannon was wholly avoidable.
Like Dr. Manhattan, the creators knew that this episode will be the one to make the show unforgettable before it aired, and that all the confusion that came before had a purpose.
I got a strong the Leftovers vibes from this one. Eventually, it's always a story that starts and ends because, about and for...
#LOVE
Plus, there's a post credit scene (I hope I didn't miss some of those before)
Not gonna lie. Last week’s episode ending left a very weird taste in my mouth. I really thought this show, which up until now was pretty fucking good, was about to shot itself in the foot, not with a simple hand gun but with a .50 caliber (just so you understand the damage).
However, this episode turned out to be an incredible achievement for the cinematic industry. It is astonishing that the writers were able to pull this off and that the director who was able to bring it to life.
Every character got the depth they needed for an epic conclusion and the not linear storytelling fit so well with the cinematography of the show but the clear winners of the episode were Jon and the Causal Loop (which I’m a big fan of in fiction).
Jon is supposed to be this ultimate god who lives throughout the entirety of the universe and that just happens to have lost the touch with human emotions. Yet, he seemed so easy to empathize with. Not relatable, that definitely not but I really did empathize with is non-existential crisis and the lengths he went to be someone again. To matter again even if that means dying stop existing.
The way this episode changed Jon and Angela was already more than enough to satisfy me. However, I honestly didn’t saw that the Casual Loop coming.
This kind of loop is (probably) the most famous in fiction but also the harder to pull off in order to leave a long last impression in the viewer. Why it works here is the because 1) the episode is told in a non-linear way, creating a sense of disorder and order in your brain and 2) because Jon just keeps mention the future, present and past as one single point (including the “tunnel”). If he never used is powers (or at least not to the necessary extent) the reveal that a Causal Loop exists would’ve crumbled right when it was created.
Thanks to the way this episode was structure everything I saw hit me in the perfect tone and the Angela-Grandad Causal Loop is like my 2nd favorite now. I don’t know, I also love the one from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (which is 3rd; the 1st one is unbeatable btw).
The only things I didn’t like: Jon’s blue CGI (kind of :/) and probably the acknowledgment of the Causal Loop so suddenly but either way, that was nothing compared to the great things it did.
This show is a masterpiece of intricacy, character development, excellent acting and production, and loving homages to comic.
The show has been hinting at this reveal all along in a really satisfying way.
This conveys what it's like being Doctor Manhattan in a way that the comic / movie never really touched on. Absolutely enthralling.
BTW if you missed the after credits scene, go back and watch it.
Doctor Manhattan looked a little tacky at times. But I guess you can explain that away by saying he can look like whatever he wants to look like.
What a fantastic episode. I couldn’t help but be reminded of one of my favorite episodes of LOST, “The Constant,” which told Desmond and Penny’s love story in similar anachronistic fashion. I think Lindelof did it even better here.
Everything else has been said. What stays with me is this:
"Heaven isn't enough because Heaven doesn't need me."
Time paradoxes. But really well executed ones.
This was sad. But suddenly things make sense. What they have not explained yet is how Topher got his powers then, if Jon in theory can transfer his powers to others, but then how, if he was amnesiac the entire time Topher was a child.
And we're still in the unknown about how come Laurie is Dr. Manhattan's girlfriend, before Angela, when this has never come up in conversation. I guess exes are normal, even when you're a god, but that was very unkind toward her.
But also - is Adrian actually also “a god”, not just a megalomaniac super hero? How literal are we to take him that he created humans, or rather that they’re all his children? He is giving them squids after all. That’s been confirmed.
This was nothing short of fantastic. I've had mixed feelings about this show thus far, and overall, I've not found it all that enjoyable most of the time. But this episode has made it all worth it. Great stuff.
I was enjoying the episode until I realised Angela could have just shot the cannon with the gun she was holding in her hand and going all pew pew everywhere except at the friggin' cannon...
That was so stupid. The most powerful being couldn’t stop a bunch of humans. HBO keeps fucking shit up just like they did with GoT. Nonsense episode...
I knew not this TV show was not worth watching. however out of sheer curiosity and boredom I continue to indulge in new episodes. only to descend deeper into levels of disappointment that I can hardly Express. many people are referring to this episode as one that explains everything. Sadly I do not find satisfaction in the answers given in this episode. in the movie Doctor Manhattan is how many referred to as the most powerful being in existence. In this series is also referred to as the most powerful being in existence. in this episode we see Manhattan actively fighting to save the woman. However he does not attempt to destroy the weapon even though the series clearly states that he has the power to do so yes he does not knowing that the attack comes does not even try and therefore episodes and I so they have killed dr. Manhattan. I do not even accept this TV series as an actual part of the Watchmen universe and I again call for HBO to apologize to the fans and to this shameful attempt
The hype for the finale is present. I have no doubt it'll be exceptional. That will be three episodes in a row that were fantastic.
this is why I'm still alive, fuck yeah
And so we have here our romantic episode. Told in a manner that recalls all the time traveling romance movies (The Time Traveler's Wife, About Time). As it end sup I was right on one aspect of Veidt's captivity. I suspected that he was on another planet or dimension. Honestly I was learning on dimension I hadn't thought planet in weeks. But the episode is primarily about the relationship between Angela and Cal or as we now know Jonathan Osterman aka Doctor Manhattan. Typically I find this metaphysical conversations about existing in every period of time simultaneously to be an exercise in frustration like when a TV show or movie insists that time doesn't work like Back to the Future and then time works exactly like Back to the Future (Avengers: Endgame). But I don't want to open up my rant about how annoying sarcastic every aspect of Marvel movies are. In spite of the constant chicken/egging where Doctor Manhattan constantly does things because he knew he was going to do things. Somehow a cohesive romance manages to work it's way forward. The cutting which ordinarily show a shift in timelines work as a continuous timelines for Manhattan as he's always present in all of them. It gives him a 3D person stuck in a 2D world sort of perspective.
I ended up liking this episode and I ended up liking one of the least interesting characters in Watchman. I liked watching him fall in love in a way that only makes sense to a creature like Doctor Manhattan.
thanks yahya abdul-mateen i cried
Doesn’t achieve the story-telling deft of Watchmaker, obviously, but neither does it achieve the stylistic impression that Snyder’s film does, though the show understands how to communicate his perception of time better. Still, how, or rather, what it uses them for is rather objectionable. Introducing time paradoxes, tinkering with the powers of Dr. Manhattan, from his ability to turn human, supposedly being able to pass his powers*, coming back from his voyage in the first place, etc. Not to mention the fact that the seventh cavalry will apparently kill him, or the fact that Veidt's attempt to kill him was actually plan “B”. I don’t think I was really ever going to be satisfied with anyone trying to do their own interpretations of the epilogue of the Watchmen’s lives, but I’m particularly not impressed with what Lindelof has done here. (Also, I'm pretty sure just because he can "see" the "future" and is not be able to change it does not mean that he still does not act rationally. If Dr. Manhattan can destroy whatever that machine is, or the man maneuvering it then he would, which would be the future that he would be seeing. What we see is just lazy writing from Lindelof.) It doesn't help that despite being the very intention, Iron's portrayal of Ozy as a rather pathetically stupid figure barely offers the character any more generosity than Snyder's botched depiction of him.
*I'm gonna guess he has already given Will his powers based on what Will said to Angela in episode 1 (or was it 2?). Dear lord if the show turns into bullshit superhero wish-fulfillment taking down the KKK...
one of the best and well made episode... whoever made this concept possible is from another dimension.
This is the most perfect episode title ever!!!!
Heh, For a super natural being who doesn't understand human feelings anymore, who said he's lost touch with humanity, his sex drive hasn't been affected much.
Best episode yet! (The love story, not the creepy old dude who enjoys killing Adam and Eve on Europa).
This episode ruins the whole serie. Dr. M. is completely misrepresented and denies himself respect to the novel's ending. It would have been better not to involve him in the serie but let him on Mars.
Many of the mysteries of the season were answered here, still there are other questions that demand answers. This episode is truly an achievement in writting, plot structure and the whole direction that leads to the explosive finale next week. Can't wait how it all plays out in the finale and how my personal questions about the show are resolved at last.
You need to watch the post-credits scene :see_no_evil:
I loooooooooved everything about this episode except the Cal/Manhattan look at the end... especially without the glowing eyes.
Simply delicious . It’s a pleasure for the senses
You see the slay?? Zack Snyder wishes!
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2019-12-10T03:28:14Z
[9.0/10] The beauty of science fiction is that, in the right hands, it can tell stories that other genres can’t. Strip away the limitations of fact, unleash the powers of imagination, and you can conjures worlds and situations that the poor metes and bounds of the real world cannot sustain. But in the best hands, the absence of those limitations, the combination of fiction and abstraction, allows an author and an audience to reach truths that even the most poignant, most trenchant cut of reality cannot match.
So when Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons imagined a god, a living embodiment of quantum entanglement, they used him to explore the bitter ironies of causality. They traced the lines of cause and effect, jumbled through one man’s life, to find the knotted ends of detachment and transcendence amid omniscience turned predestination. Jon Osterman had, like others before him, come unstuck in time. And his creators, like others before then, used his temporal dilation to explicate the human condition in ways that linear storytelling would not allow.
Jeff Jensen & Damon Lindelof use it to tell a story about love and about creation, and about how both create a yearning for something that is fated to be gone. Love is what motivates Dr. Manhattan to create his paradise: a glass jar, a comforting home, and the two people who first showed him what resolute joy looks like. He constructs them to want only to spur that same joy in others, rather than hoard it for themselves, but it leaves one of the originals bereft of a creator who abandoned him, and his many copies hurt, in their firm and upright way, that their master wants to leave them. And it’s what cause him and Angela Abar to forge a life together, a joining of two into one that, unlike the “everything” Dr. Manhattan and Ozymandias one spoke of, must not only end, but end tragically.
Watchmen takes advantage of Jon Osterman’s scattered, all-at-once experience of the timeline to channel those ideas. The frame story is what amounts to his and Angela’s first date -- a series of predictions and parlor tricks that warn her everything that’s to come, in sufficiently vague terms, with the knowledge that they’ll be enough to bring them together. Some things he keeps hidden. Some things he allows Angela to arrive at on her own. But either way, he does so with the knowledge of where they will lead, because he’s experienced their past and their future and their present, or rather, he’s experiencing them all right now.
Jensen & Lindelof justify the series’s biggest twist by how maddening it would be to love something like that. Why would a god abandon his life, confine himself to a mortal? Maybe he would do it, in a bizarre sort of way, as “a Zeus thing.” Maybe it’s the one sort of risk he can take to show the woman he cares for that he would sacrifice for her, that he’d give up paradise for her, that he’d live with fear again for her. The transition from Jon to Cal is a leveling, one that requires a great deal to earn ten years of love.
Watchmen likewise had a number of narrative bills that were coming due. We needed to know why Adrian Veidt was on Europa and what the hell was going on there. We needed to know why a god would wrap himself in a mortal’s bones and sinew. We needed to know what motivated Reeves to go on this crusade. And against all odds, “A God Walks Into Abar” has roundly satisfying answers.
Europa is the paradise that Ozymandias thought he wanted, the chance to be adored that he trades for the answer to Dr. Manhattan’s desire to be closer to the woman he loves, and not lose her like he did Laurie. The servants there are his effort to create life, to find a gentler world, amid the larger creation motifs and allegories the episode unleashes with regularity. Dr. Manhattan chooses to become human again to give his romance with Angela the opportunity to blossom. And over the course of ten years, Veidt’s liberation-turned-gilded cage, and the Abar’s love and life together, are each allowed to blossom in a way that fits the other puzzle pieces that Watchmen has laid down.
But not all of it fits so neatly. When it comes time to explore how Reeves became involved in all this, “A God Walks into Abar” chooses to make Dr. Manhattan a conduit, a channel between two people who barely understand one another’s existence, and inadvertently (or purposely) allows them to start something that will bring all of them to the present moment. But instead of the other events, which cloak some certain effect in the future with some mention of its cause in the present, the time-shifted exchange between Reeves and his granddaughter is sui generis. It is a stable time loop, one where it’s impossible to say who initiated the knowledge of Judd Crawford that starts all of this, if anyone did.
It is a paradox, the sort which not even Dr. Manhattan can resolve. But it’s not the one that moves him. Instead, it’s the fact that Angela tries to save him even when told, by a man that sees the future, that she cannot. It is the moment that he falls in love with her, and yet it is both the last moment they share and the thing that spurs him to seek out the first one. It is a paeon to the inscrutability of love, the incomprehensibility of creation in this sorry universe, where misbehaving quantum particles tie parts of us together across time and space, far beyond our comprehension and outside our control.
“A God Walks into Abar” writes a bit too much this on the screen, letting Dr. Manhattan’s trademark first person narration and a few writerly monologues do some of the heavy lifting where the situations forged do enough of that on their own. But it also realizes its ideas in a way that only this type of fantastical story can: the unknowableness of something emerging seemingly from nothing, whether it’s a man or a world, and the irrevocable pull of love between two people, that causes us to take risks, to make sacrifices, and do everything in our power to reassure and protect, even when fate itself stands in our way.
(Two asides for things that didn’t fit in this review: 1. This was Jeremy Irons’s best episode and his scene with Dr. Manhattan was incredible and 2. My bet is that whoever eats that damn waffle, containing the same egg Manhattan made on his first date with Angela, inherits his powers, and my money’s on their son.)