In its most LOST like episode yet, Watchmen introduces us to a very important character, answers a few small questions, but more or less continues to throw down new questions at an alarming rate.
This week’s title comes from Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, the book that Cal is reading and Angela tries to spoil for him
1. Lady Trieu arrives
The scene introducing us to Lady Trieu begins by introducing us to the Clarks, owners of a large chicken farm and roadside egg salespeople. Their scene is one of domestic bliss, though almost comically old fashioned and a little dull, and is set to “Islands in the Stream” by Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers. All of this is very ‘normal,’ especially for this show.
But then, Lady Trieu rings a doorbell in the middle of the night, offers $5 million and a baby for their farm, and turns their world upside down.
Lady Trieu is a character we’ve heard referenced in earlier episodes, but are only getting to know a bit here. She is a combination of Howard Hughes and Elon Musk, but dresses like a video game boss. She lights up the screen the second she appears, and is unnerving and electrifying with every bit of dialogue or action she delivers.
By the end of the episode, we begin to get a little better sense of her, but she is easily the most mysterious character on the show so far. And that includes a 106 year old man who we previously thought was confined to a wheelchair and admitted to hanging Judd.
2. “Doomsday Clock?”
So, one of the weird ironies of this series is that its entire production will have happened in the time it took DC to produce their “Doomsday Clock” series, a “Watchmen” sequel with a very, very different tone. But there is an interesting intersection of the two, and that is Superman.
While Superman has not been mentioned on this series, this episode continues the theme of Superman’s origins being referenced. In the pilot, we see a pair of parents put their small child on a vessel out of harm’s way. Sure, this is also the story of Moses, but Superman was always supposed to echo that. But here, we get a double dose: some sort of object crash lands on a farm in the midwest to a family named “Clark.” Except here, Lady Trieu has purchased the farm, and so the projectile is hers.
But the Clarks do get their adoptive child, though this one isn’t an alien, its origins are just as miraculous. I do not think in any way that we will ever see Superman anywhere near this show, it is just an interesting parallel.
Also, one of the songs on the newly released soundtrack album is called “Orphans of Krypton.” So there.
3. The Museum Scene
I go into detail about this on this week’s podcast episode, but I think that the scene of Angela breaking into the Center for Cultural Heritage is the worst in the series thus far for two reasons. First of all, for someone who is taking so many precautions, it is the sloppiest plan imaginable. Nothing she is doing is illegal or suspicious, and yet she chooses to do them in the middle of the night? I know she somewhat covers for her break in, but there must be security cameras capturing her just chilling with her acorn and ‘planting’ it and whatnot.
But even more than that, Angela talking to a hologram of her grandfather as a child doesn’t ring true at all. Now, I can understand that the show is beginning to show that this is all too much for her to take, and that she’s beginning to, perhaps, get sloppy or lose her mind a bit with all that is going on around her. But that’s not really indicated anywhere else on the show. Angela seems to be an excellent cop, and this is just stupid police work.
4. Checking in at the castle part 4: Those fucking noises
The Veidt stuff continues to be fucking bonkers, in the best possible way. Here, we see Veidt essentially using a crab trap to get not quite ready to be born children from a lake, chucking back the ones he doesn’t need, and then collecting one male and one female and placing them in his satchel. Back at his castle, he puts them into what Zach describes as a microwave, and looks like a weird carousel / oven, and essentially grows two adult humans in less than a minute. Instant Crookshanks and Phillips. They are naked and unable to comprehend of speak at the moment, though all three of those are eventually remedied.
We also see that, the prior night, Veidt has killed all of the other clones, and seems to feel very little remorse about it. Veidt’s lack of compassion for his help was established in the comic, but we’ve seen him grow even colder over the first four weeks of this series. But this episode also gives us the two biggest clues about Veidt’s potential location. The first is that we can see, when fired off the trebuchet, that there is some sort of porous membrane between where Veidt is and…somewhere else.
But the other clue we get about where Veidt may be is found in Lady Trieu. We learn that she has purchased Veidt’s company, and also that she has, essentially, a Biodome outside Tulsa. Is that where Veidt is? Was this takeover hostile? I don’t quite believe this, but it’s fun to consider it.
5. Vietnam’s importance
Vietnam is a huge part of “Watchmen,” but so far, it has been just a bit of set dressing for the show. in this episode, Angela and Trieu’s shared knowledge of the language allows them to have a private conversation, but it also adds an interesting layer to the geopolitical state of the world on Watchmen. There are folks, like Laurie, who were raised before Dr. Manhattan changed the world, and for them, Vietnamese is not a second (or first) tongue. But then, just a few years later, you get Angela and Trieu, who are basically walking, talking faces of globalization.
This new status quo still bears a lot of the old, but there is something fundamentally different about growing up in the aftermath of a god walking the Earth. And then, for kids like Topher, they take that godhood for granted. Angela is part of the generation that is sandwiched between amazement and boredom, and that puts her at odds with people on both ends.
Since this show is so mysterious, each week I’m going to ask three big questions to wrap up each review.
1. Is Petey the vigilante?
We get a glimpse of a bizarre vigilante, dressed in a silver body condom who lubes himself up and slips through a sewer opening. It is the show’s weirdest non-Veidt scene thus far, which is saying quite a lot. The only person who matches that body type thus far is Petey, but it would be a really weird move to have him ‘randomly’ assigned to come to Tulsa, to pack a costume, and to have such a great sense of Tulsa geography to know where the sewer entrances are? It doesn’t really add up, but I love the scene.
2. What is Cal’s injury?
Angela finds out from Laurie that she interviewed Cal about the night of Judd’s murder. Aside from seeing Cal lie for his wife, this scene introduces an interesting question: Angela asks Cal, “did you tell her about your injury?” “It didn’t come up” is how he replied. What injury?
This is way too weird of a question to be asked with no storyline implications. Something important happened to Cal, but we don’t know what that is just yet. I’m eager to find out.
3. Is Will breaking the Fourth Wall at the end?
When we see Will and Trieu discussing ‘their plan,’ he eventually gets up and walks ‘outside’ her house (still contained within the dome). But then he looks towards the camera and starts saying “tick tock tick tock.” This is a creepy scene that almost appears to be breaking the fourth wall. Are we to believe that Will has something to do with the 7th Kavalry? Is he just using their words as a sort of joke? Is he referencing the Doomsday Clock? The Atomic Clock Trieu is building? Is he really Dr. Manhattan after all?
