Last week’s episode ended with the shocking reveal that Dr. Manhattan, everyone’s favorite nude, blue quasi-deity, was living in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as the amnesiac husband of our plucky, morally grey heroine Angela Abar (Regina King, If Beale Street Could Talk). This week, we are gifted with another ambitiously constructed narrative delving into exactly how Dr. Manhattan went from floating adrift in space to living as Angela’s husband Cal (Yahya Abdul Mateen II, Aquaman) in blissful ignorance of the burden of seeing time all at once.
Watchmen Episode 8, ‘A God Walks Into Abar’ is cleverly framed around Angela and Manhattan’s first meeting, at a bar in Vietnam over a decade ago. Some sort of Dr. Manhattan themed holiday has occurred, so when a man with blue skin and a Manhattan mask approaches her, Angela thinks nothing of it. For the entirety of this initial encounter, Manhattan is attempting to convince Angela she is speaking with the real Dr. Manhattan, but so much of his prophetic rumination seem so far fetched and/or cryptic that she finds it hard to believe he is who he claims to be. However, she continues to speak with him nonetheless, clearly intrigued by this man beyond her own reason. King plays bemused better than anyone in the business and she uses that strength to great effect as Manhattan and his flat affect attempt to woo her how only he could.
This is not merely a frame narrative for further flashbacks to be funneled within, however. Creator Damon Lindeloff has the lone screenwriting credit tonight, and he makes the bold choice to tell the story of their date as Dr. Manhattan might experience it. One of his many powers is experiencing time in a relative (think theory of relativity kind of relative) way, and so he experiences the full total of their experiences together as a couple all during that initial encounter. We go on this journey with Manhattan, played expertly by Mateen often with his face obscured to ensure the actor could remain in the role throughout the episode. We see various milestones in the relationship, including a pivotal early fight and the selection of the “Cal” persona, as Angela gets to know Manhattan at the bar, creating a cumulative effect of a bizarrely beautiful love story. It’s one thing to know your romance may be felled by tragedy, (“Aren’t they all?” as Manhattan reminds Angela at one point) but it’s quite another to literally see the beginning, middle, and end of something beautiful all at once and still chose to indulge in it.
If this episode had firmly established the romance of Angela and Cal (aka Dr. Manhattan) in the manner in which previous episodes utilized powerful flashbacks and character moments to establish other key aspects of the series and its world, such as the masterful “An Extraordinary Being” and “Little Fear of Lightning,” and been allowed to focus solely on that utterly unique romantic tale, this could have been another highlight of a season chock full of them. However, it is also the season’s penultimate episode, and that means it’s time for answers, no matter how shoehorned in those answers feel.
Over the course of the episode, we learn that Dr. Manhattan did in fact leave Earth to create life, but he tricked us into thinking he was on Mars when really he was on Europa, a moon of Jupiter long rumored to potentially have the building blocks for alien life. We learn that the clones Adrian (Jeremy Irons, Margin Call) has been dealing with all season were created by Dr. Manhattan, along with the entire landscape within which he lives on Europa. We even get an origin story of the man and woman on which the clones are modeled (wealthy British noblemen who saved Manhattan, then called Jon, and his father during the Holocaust). We learn how Adrian ended up there (Dr. Manhattan described it as a utopia filled with compassionate life full of an unending capacity for adoration, which led Adrian to request to be sent there). We learn how Cal could not know he was Dr. Manhattan and not be in possession of his powers (a device Adrian developed that blocks his prefrontal lobe). We even learn how Angela survived the Christmas Eve massacre (Cal’s latent powers emerge as a reflex to save the woman he loves), which is a question I don’t think anyone was even asking. Finally, in possibly the best revelation of the episode, we learn than Angela set in motion the entire course of events that we have been witnessing over 8 episodes by using the reemerged Dr. Manhattan to ask her grandfather 10 years earlier how he knew her chief was a member of the Cyclops, therefore creating a paradox where her asking the question is, in fact, how he learned of this fact.
The episode ends on another cliffhanger, with yet another of Dr. Manhattan’s prophecies coming to pass, as the Seventh Cavalry successfully transports him to their base where they intend to kill him and steal his power. Again, King is excellent here, believing she’s finally found a way to cheat fate before yet another person she loves vanishes in front of her eyes. However, the impact of it all feels blunted by the episodes insistence on answering every question and revealing every mystery.
We still have a few dangling threads that will likely factor into the finale, but a show as rich and complex as this has been over seven hours did not need to spend its 8th and penultimate hour showing the audience its work and proving to us that every question has been answered in kind. Watchmen Episode 8, ‘A God Walks into Abar’ could have been that much stronger had Lindelof taken advice from the theme song to the second and third season of his previous alternate reality drama, The Leftovers, and “Let the mystery be…”
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