Watchmen Addresses Dr. Manhattan with a Shocking Private Pageant

Warning: This article contains spoilers from the second episode of Watchmen, "Martial Feats of Comanche Horsemanship."

Last week's first episode of Damon Lindelof's Watchmen dropped the viewer right in the middle of a world greatly changed from the one we live in today. This week's second episode, "Martial Feats of Comanche Horsemanship," went a long way to filling in some of the gaps in our understanding of what's happening, both in this universe and on this series. We get a flashback to the fateful White Night, where Detective Angela Abar (Regina King) and her family were nearly killed by the Rorschach-masked Seventh Calvary. We learn that after the White Night, Angela and Cal (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) adopted the orphaned children of a fellow officer. Angela finds a secret compartment in the late Judd Crawford's closet while snooping during his memorial service, and in that closet a set of KKK robes, which promises to open a door to a whole mess of reinterpretations down the road. And Angela also learns that the wheelchair-bound Will Reeves (Louis Gossett Jr.), who keeps trying to take credit for Judd's hanging, is in fact her grandfather. And then he gets spirited away by an airship with a giant magnet. It's a ride!

But the standout moment of "Martial Feats of Comanche Horsemanship" came from a storyline that has thus far not connected itself to the rest of the tale, depending instead on viewers (especially those familiar with the original Watchmen graphic novel) to connect the dots. Thus far, we haven't seen Jeremy Irons' as-yet-unnamed-on-screen character do much but ride around his great country estate (location unknown) and get feted with birthday cake by his creepily android-esque servants Mr. Phillips (Tom Mison) and Mrs. Crookshanks (Sarah Vickers).

The one big Easter egg that Irons did drop last week was that he was working on a play, to be titled "The Watchmaker's Son." In the Watchmen graphic novel, the watchmaker's son is Jon Osterman, who grows up to be a nuclear scientist and, on one fateful day, is obliterated by an accident in the testing chamber, only to return a short time later as the atomically reconstituted, omnipotent being known as Doctor Manhattan.

This week, Irons was back, riding his horse around that same estate, eating tomatoes that somehow grow on trees, and seemingly celebrating his birthday yet again with Mr. Phillips and Miss Crookshanks. But this time around, there's an edge to Irons's character that wasn't there before. An impatience in preparation for what we soon see is a private production of a scene from "The Watchmaker's Son."

We still didn't get in-show confirmation of his identity yet, but it's been all-but confirmed that Irons is playing Adrian Veidt, whose superhero alter ego was Ozymandias. The renowned "world's smartest man" and a proto-Elon Musk-style techno-industrialist, Veidt was revealed to be the villain in the Watchmen graphic novel, killing off masked heroes like The Comedian, manipulating Dr Manhattan to vacate Earth for Mars, and — in the book's most outrageous development — arranging for a giant, interdimensional squid to obliterate Times Square, thus taking the Americans and Soviets back from the brink of nuclear war and united to face a common enemy. Knowing that to expose Veidt's plan would undo this necessary alliance, Dr. Manhattan departed Earth, and gone he remains at the beginning of Lindelof's tale.

The scene where Phillips and Crookshanks perform "The Watchmaker's Son" for Veidt in their roles as Jon Osterman and his great love Janey Slater may just take the mantle for most thrillingly insane scene of the year. In a precise recreation from the book, Osterman goes to the testing chamber to retrieve the watch he left in his labcoat pocket. After the door shuts and locks behind him, Janey — after Miss Crookshanks initially fumbles over Veidt's over-wordy dialogue — looks on in horror as Jon is obliterated. Which in this case means Veidt plunges a detonator which ignites the contents of the chamber, burning Mr Phillips alive, and even though the audience most likely figured Phillips was some kind of synthetic person by this point, it's still shocking in its intensity. Next, a masked, blue-painted, and very naked depiction of Dr. Manhattan descends from the rafters. (At least now we won't spend all season wondering when we're gonna get to see that familiar big, blue penis, even if this was merely an artistic rendering.)

After the scene ends, "Dr. Manhattan" unmasks to reveal an exact replica of Mr. Phillips. So we're dealing with clones and not androids, perhaps? Whatever the realities of Veidt's domestic situation, the fact that he's staging ultra-real pageants of the life and times of Dr. Manhattan is deeply fascinating. There's something about Veidt's isolation and the low-fi staging of the pageant that recalls post-apocalyptic fiction like the novel Station Eleven or the play Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play, both of which deal with traveling troupes of actors who stage the remnants of popular/classical works of fiction in a way that keeps culture alive in a world that's dying. Neither one of them is a 1:1 correlation with what Veidt's doing, but it seems clear that he wants to re-introduce the concept and the legend of Dr. Manhattan back into a world that, if they can't exactly forget him, they've at least gotten used to his absence.

We know from the trailers that it appears at some point that Dr. Manhattan will re-enter the Watchmen story. What role Adrian Veidt wants to take in how that story shakes out should be very interesting indeed.

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Joe Reid is the senior writer at Primetimer and co-host of the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast. His work has appeared in Decider, NPR, HuffPost, The Atlantic, Slate, Polygon, Vanity Fair, Vulture, The A.V. Club and more.