Watchmen 2019 Explained

Watchmen is one of the most ambitious and confusing new shows on television. For example, there are these squids, an elephant and pigs, and a catapult launching clones to the moon, and there's Lube Man, a meteorite, mind control, magic eggs, blue dicks, flashbacks and twists, what's going on? but there are also these serious, heavy themes about trauma, masks, and race in America. And all this is a kind of sequel to the original Watchmen from 1986, a comic about superheroes: the new Watchmen takes place thirty years later and its timeline interconnects with the original to rethink the history of heroes in the United States.

So what happens in the new Watchmen, how does it connect to the comic, and what does it all mean? Here's the basic timeline of the comic. The first masked hero was Hooded Justice, in 1938. He inspired the Minutemen, a group of heroes from the 1940s. In 1960, Dr. Manhattan arrived, the only hero with real superpowers. Manhattan won the Vietnam War and Vietnam became a US state: Richard Nixon remained president for decades. In '77, heroes were banned: only Manhattan and the brutal Comedian could continue working for the government. In 1985 the main story begins. Everyone fears a nuclear war with Russia and the Comedian is killed.

A weirdo named Rorschach investigates, along with Dan, aka Nite Owl, and Laurie, aka Silk Spectre. Adrian Veidt, a wealthy narcissistic genius, attacks New York with a giant psychic squid that looks like an alien, as a ruse to convince the world to make peace. And it works: the Cold War ends. Dr. Manhattan kills Rorschach to keep the hoax a secret. Dan and Laurie fall in love. Dr. Manhattan leaves Earth and says, "Nothing ever ends." That's the original comic. The new show continues the story in

2019

and adds world-building over the past thirty years, partly on a website called Peteypedia.

Then, in the '90s, Veidt helped real-world actor Robert Redford become president. Redford introduced liberal policies such as Redfordations, which gave tax breaks to victims of racial violence. In response, right-wing extremists emerged, such as the Seventh Cavalry, a group of white supremacists who wore the Rorschach mask. The Cavalry works with Cyclops, a branch of the Klan. Senator Keene and Police Chief Crawford are secret members of Cyclops, and in 2016, they orchestrated an attack on police called White Night. A new law was passed for police to wear masks and Keene uses the conflict between the Cavalry and the police to gain political power.

In

2019

episode 1, Will kills Judd and Angela Laurie and Wade investigate. Meanwhile, it turns out that Dr. Manhattan is in Tulsa in human form as Cal. Keene and Cyclops capture him and try to take his power, then billionaire Lady Trieu kills Cyclops to take over Manhattan, but then the squids kill her. As in the original comic, the main heroes of the story barely participate in "saving the day." The goal of Watchmen is to explore the lives and perspectives of these characters. So what are the stories of Veidt, Will, Angela, Laurie, Wade and Manhattan? Adrian Veidt was born super smart and ambitious.

He idolized Alexander the Great and the Egyptian pharaohs, so he took the name Ozymandias and decided to do great things. In the 1950s, he fought crime as a hero, but realized that beating criminals wouldn't save the world: Veidt decided to avoid a nuclear war. So he stopped being a superhero and built a corporate empire, becoming rich and famous with electric cars, like an '80s Elon Musk. In '85 he attacked New York with a squid to end the war. Veidt achieves world peace, but kills three million people, making him feel alienated from humanity. The TV show continues from there.

Veidt continues to rain squid from the sky, keeping everyone scared to maintain world peace. "Veidt influences politics and gets Redford elected in '92." Veidt asks Redford to work with him to build a "utopia", but Redford does not listen. Veidt loses his influence and popularity: he becomes “lonely,” frustrated and irrelevant. In 2008, Lady Trieu appears and says that she is her daughter. The cause turns out to be that, back in '85, a member of Veidt's staff, named Bian, stole a sample of Veidt's semen, impregnated herself, and gave birth to Trieu. Trieu asks for Veidt's help and her money for his plan to save the world by capturing Dr.

Manhattan. But Veidt is too proud and stubborn and rejects his daughter. The following year, Dr. Manhattan visits him and Veidt gives him a memory blocking device. In return, Manhattan does Veidt a favor. Manhattan describes the world he has created in Europe, a "paradise" inhabited by the kind and adoring Philips and Crookshanks. Veidt feels so desperate and defeated that he asks Manhattan to teleport him there. So Veidt lives in Europe for eight years and it sucks. Because the Philips and the Crookshanks have no purpose, no doubt, no identity, no sex, they are boring, it's like living in The Sims or the Garden of Eden before sin.

So Veidt makes a plan to escape from Europe. Back in 08, Lady Trieu mentioned a probe she was sending to photograph Europe, which would arrive in 2013. So Veidt spends four years creating a message for the probe to see. He catapults the Phillipses and Crookshankses out of the bubble of life and onto the surface of Europa to die, so he can use their corpses to spell the words "Save me daughter", so that Trieu will see and save him. The way Veidt uses the corpses of his servants is very similar to the Black Freighter story from the original comic.

In that story, a sailor is trapped on an island, so he uses the corpses of his friends to build a raft and sail home. The comic compares Veidt's feelings to the sailor's guilt and alienation. Over the years, Veidt clashes with the ranger, who tries to prevent Veidt from escaping. But in the end, Veidt reveals that he wanted the Warden to try to stop him. Veidt eventually kills the Guardian with a horseshoe that Philips tried to give him years ago. It seems that this whole conflict was written, like the play that Veidt writes and like that absurd trial in which Crookshanks winks.

Was Veidt really fighting to escape, or was this all theater to keep himself busy until he could leave? Veidt needs drama and adversity to thrive, and he doesn't care if innocents die for his pride. Trieu sees the message and sends a spaceship to rescue Veidt. She freezes him in golden carbonite for the journey, so Veidt looks like a yellow yolk inside an egg-shaped ship, one of many references to eggs this season. Veidt arrives on Earth in approximately 2017; this meteor in a flashback is the landing of Veidt's spaceship. But Trieu doesn't unfreeze Veidt right away; She is still angry because her father rejected her.

That's why she keeps Veidt like a statue in her garden for years, looking like one of her action figures, a monument to her vanity. Trieu only unfreezes Veidt in the season finale, because she wants him to see that her plan succeeds, to prove that she can win without him. But just as Trieu is about to steal Manhattan's divine powers, Veidt is teleported to her base and sends a shower of frozen squid to destroy Trieu and half of Tulsa. Then, once again, Veidt does something terrible to supposedly save the world: he kills his own daughter, who had rescued him from space, to prevent her from gaining the power of Manhattan.

But this time she doesn't get her way. Wade and Laurie arrest Veidt, so he'll finally be brought to justice for his squid attacks, which sucks for him, but on the plus side, he could finally get the recognition and attention he so desperately wanted. The story of Ozymandias is a warning that too much vanity, ambition and pride can separate you from humanity, as if you were marooned on a distant moon. Will's story spans a hundred years, from the genesis of superheroes to the present. Episode 1 begins in Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1921, with the Tulsa Race Riots. This was a real historical event in which a white mob attacked a wealthy black community, killing many people and destroying the neighborhood.

Young Will loses his home and his family, but escapes as baby Superman from Krypton. Will later arrives in New York and becomes a police officer, but the police are corrupt and Will is brutally attacked. Then Will becomes Hooded Justice, the first hero of Watchmen: he saves a couple from being mugged, just like in the comic. But Will uses white makeup to hide his race, fearing that white America will not accept a black vigilante. It turns out that the first superhero doesn't wear a costume to look good, as if he wears a mask to survive in an unjust society, and the noose around his neck is because he was almost lynched.

He inspires the entire hero lore in Watchmen, but America thinks he's a white man and never understands the true story of Hooded Justice. Peteypedia compares this to the iconic hero of the Western film The Lone Ranger, who some speculate may have been inspired by real-world black lawman Bass Reeves. It is an invitation to rethink the biases in the stories America tells about power violence and race. As in the comic, Will has a relationship with Nelson Gardner, also known as Captain Metropolis, and joins his group, the Minutemen; here in the background, you can see Silhouette, Mothman, the Comedian and the first Nite Owl.

Will uncovers a conspiracy by the Klan group Cyclops to use mind control against black people. Will asks Metropolis for help, but doesn't want to get involved: the Minutemen just want publicity, some of which perpetuates racism. Will is fighting to protect a society that doesn't protect him, so Will is angry and frustrated, his wife and his son abandon him. Will's son eventually has a daughter named Angela, so Will is Angela's grandfather. In '55, Will breaks up with Metropolis, leaves the police force and disappears. In '74, Metropolis dies, leaving all her money and his mansion to Will. Metropolis says that he was wrong for not helping Will, and says that of all the Minutemen, only Will was "fighting true evil." In 2009, he is visited by Dr.

Manhattan. Manhattan has fallen in love with Angela, Will's granddaughter, and he knows that will happen, so Manhattan suggests an "alliance" between Will and Lady Trieu to take down Cyclops. So in episode 1, Will kills Cyclops member Judd Crawford using the same mind control technology that Cyclops used in New York. Lady Trieu helps Will by trapping him in a car so Angela can't arrest him. And in the end, Trieu kills Cyclops' leaders, after reading a letter from Will about his crimes. So, one hundred years after the Tulsa and New York massacres, Hooded Justice finally gets “justice.” After a century of trauma, Will can begin to heal his wounds and look toward the future: he now has a family, with Angela.

Will's story is about the long legacy of injustice, masks, and pain in America, and explores the potential for justice and healing. Angela was born in Vietnam in the 70s; many African Americans moved there after Vietnam became a state. In '87, Angela's parents died in an attack. She identified the culprit to the police and got her first taste of justice thanks to police work. She also idolized Sister Night, a badass movie superhero. So Angela grew up an orphan and became a police officer in Vietnam. In 2009, she is alone, empty and grieving. Then this blue MF shows up and says he's in love with her.

Dr. Manhattan experiences the future and the past at the same time, so he is in love with Angela before he even meets her. Manhattan says that his love will end in tragedy, but all love ends in tragedy, so they begin a relationship. To hide the fact that Manhattan is an all-powerful blue god, he takes on the identity and appearance of a dead guy named Cal. After the tragic, random death of his parents, Angela takes comfort in knowing that Manhattan knows the future. But it can also be very annoying to have a boyfriend who knows everything and fears nothing: former girlfriends in Manhattan complained about the same thing.

So Manhattan decides to be more like a normal human being to Angela. He gets Veidt to give him a device that blocks his memory: Manhattan stops using his powers because he doesn't remember he has them and temporarily sacrifices his divinity for Angela. They get married, move to Tulsa, Angela joins the police force, and they begin a life together. But in 2016, the Seventh Cavalry attacked White Night. A gunman nearly kills Angela, but he activates a failsafe in Manhattan's memory block and saves Angela by teleporting her attacker away. This is how Joe Keene discovers that Manhattan is in Tulsa and begins to plan to capture him.

Dozens of police officers die on White Night, including Angela's police partner, Doyle. Then Angela and Cal adopt Doyle's children: Topher, Rosie and Emma. After White Night, Angela pretends to leave the police force and open a bakery. But secretly, she takes on the identity of Sister Night. She hides her pain behind a mask and fights for justice. Judd andJane Crawford befriends Angela and Cal, but only because the Crawfords and Keenes plan to betray and capture Manhattan, so the Crawfords are incredibly cold and manipulative. In 2019, Angela meets Will, experiences his memories, and discovers that she is part of his legacy of survivors, fighters, and masks.

Angela learns of the plot to capture Manhattan, so she takes the memory device from him and fights to protect it. Manhattan tells him that she can't save him, but that she fights for him anyway, and Manhattan says that's why he loves her: her determination and love in the face of the pain and adversity she's faced. In the end, Angela loses Manhattan, just as she lost her parents. But before he died, Manhattan said that he could put his powers in an egg, so that someone else could get his powers. Angela eats Manhattan's egg and tests if she can walk on water...and the season ends.

So does Angela get Manhattan's godly powers? Should she? The season explores how power can be misused: by Veidt, Keene, Trieu, and Manhattan himself. But maybe, after her experiences, Angela will have the right perspective to do something good. Angela Abar is named after an old movie called “Abar, the First Black Superman”; maybe Angela Abar is the hero the world needs. Or maybe Angela doesn't want to be a hero anymore. The ending is ambiguous – it's completely in your hands. Dr. Manhattan was once a normal boy named Jon. In the 1930s, he and his father fled Germany to an English mansion.

Jon saw the Lord and Lady of the manor having sex and Jon stole an apple. This represents the biblical story of the forbidden fruit with Adam and Eve. The Lord and Lady give Jon a Bible and describe the Genesis story, in which God creates the world; they ask Jon to "create something beautiful." Then, fifty years later, Jon creates life in Europe in the image of Mr. and Mrs. and his mansion, because while Manhattan is divine, he is not very original. In the original Watchmen, Jon and his father moved to New York, where his father was a watchmaker.

Jon became a scientist and in 1959 suffered an accident that shattered his atoms. But like a clockmaker, he pulled himself together and returned as Dr. Manhattan. In the television show, Veidt writes a play called The Watchmaker's Son, which retells this story of the genesis of Manhattan. Manhattan won the Vietnam War for the United States, which leads to Vietnamese nationalist terrorism, including the attack that kills Angela's parents, so Manhattan indirectly causes Angela to be orphaned. Manhattan is in a relationship with Laurie, aka Silk Specter, aka Agent Blake. In the year 85, Manhattan goes to Mars, because he is fed up with humans and their nonsense.

But Laurie convinces Manhattan that human life is special because of its improbability: the "thermodynamic miracle." At the end of the comic, Manhattan leaves Earth to create life elsewhere. So in the show, Manhattan creates life in Europe. He creates Philips and Crookshanks to be better than Earth's humans, to be "kind" and "gentle" beings in a new "Garden of Eden." But paradise becomes boring and, after twenty years, Manhattan returns to Earth to meet his beloved Angela. Manhattan visits Will and begins the alliance with Lady Trieu to stop Cyclops. Manhattan does this knowing it will lead to his death, but Manhattan has experienced the future and knows it is inevitable.

Manhattan becomes Cal, blocks his memory, and spends ten years with Angela, until Angela turns him back into Manhattan. In the end, Trieu destroys Manhattan, and as he dies, Manhattan experiences every moment he was with Angela all at once, and dies telling her that he loves her. So the original comic explored how superhuman powers can be dehumanizing: a god wouldn't care about people. But Watchmen 2019 takes a different perspective: exploring how Manhattan's powers make him more human, an infinite God of infinite love. He experiences the past, present and future at the same time, so he will forever be an innocent child, a dying scientist, a God, a husband and a lover all at the same time.

From his perspective outside of time, not even death can end his love, because “nothing ever ends.” The stuff of the Bible also comes full circle, because Manhattan consciously goes to his death, sacrificing himself like Christ, only to have his power resurrected in Angela, walking on water like Jesus. So Manhattan was kind of useless in the original comic; as Will says, he "could have done more." Perhaps this sacrifice is the redemption of a God. At least the guy hangs up on dong. Laurie is the daughter of Sally Jupiter, also known as Silk Spectre. Sally raised Laurie to be the second Silk Specter, a sexy and glamorous superheroine "Just like her mother." Laurie connected with Dr.

Manhattan and stopped being a hero. But Manhattan is a bad boyfriend, so Laurie dumps him and hooks up with Dan, aka Nite Owl. Laurie and Dan fail to stop Ozymandias' plan, but they come together because they rediscover being heroes together. On Mars, Laurie discovers that her father is the Comedian, the nihilistic brute who once attacked her mother, so Laurie is devastated and feels that her life is a cruel and meaningless "joke." At the end of the comic, Laurie rides off into the sunset with Dan, planning to be heroes, but Laurie's attitude has changed: she wants a different costume, with a mask and a gun, just like the Comedian's costume.

So in the new Watchmen, according to Peteypedia, Laurie started calling herself "The Comedian" after her father. Laurie and Dan worked as heroes for a while, but broke up because Dan "wanted kids" while Laurie "wanted guns." And Dan sensed that Laurie was still in love with Dr. Manhattan, so he made her a giant blue dildo as a "literal F you." The dildo, by the way, is called Excalibur. In the nineties, Laurie and Dan were arrested because heroes are still illegal. Dan refused to cooperate with the police, so he is still in jail. Laurie keeps an owl in a cage as an ironic tribute to Nite Owl.

But Laurie made a deal with the police to release her while she works for the FBI's Anti-Vigilance Squad, so Laurie goes from being a hero to being a hero hunter. We see her mercilessly shoot a man and she takes the name of her father. , Blake: embraced the dark legacy of The Comedian. Because Laurie is hurt by her origins and by the feeling that Dr. Manhattan abandoned her. That's why she hides the “trauma” behind a mask of cynicism. Like the Comedian, she calls everything a “joke” and laughs at the injustice and absurdity of the world. When Cyclops captures her, she says that she doesn't care about her evil plan, that she is tired of all the "nonsense".

But in the end Laurie does care. Because Cyclops' plan is to kill Laurie's ex, Dr. Manhattan, and when Laurie sees him, she for once shows real emotion. She still loves Manhattan, or at least she's nostalgic for a time when she felt love. And later, Laurie sees Dan's old airship, Archie, and once again shows genuine wonder and joy. It's as if Laurie's ex-boyfriends remind her what it's like to take off her mask and feel something real. So in the end, Laurie and Wade arrest Veidt. For thirty years, Laurie kept the secret that Veidt was behind the squid attack, but now she changes her mind and decides to seek justice. “People change,” she says. “I'm not kidding,” she says, because now she's not being the cynical comedian, she's doing something she truly believes in to make the world better.

It's subtle, but Laurie's story moves her away from her father's cynicism and toward a certain sincerity and hope. Wade is a new character in Watchmen. His story begins in 1985, the night of Veidt's squid attack. Wade is a Jehovah's Witness who evangelizes at a carnival, under the shadow of an imminent nuclear war. He knows some knotted guys, who are like a comic book punk subculture. And a knotted top seduces him, which is a challenge to Wade's religious faith. This temptation is a formative moment for young Wade: like Jon taking the apple, like the biblical original sin, Wade tries to move beyond innocence, but the girl betrays him.

As if that weren't humiliation enough, then the world ends. The squid arrives in New York and sends a psychic shockwave that kills millions of people. So this religious kid once tries to get his Watchtower wet, and the result is unimaginable horror: Wade is scarred and grows into a lonely, damaged person. His relationship with an ex of his fails because he can't trust anyone, because when he was vulnerable before, he was ashamed and traumatized. He is paranoid and very alert for more squid attacks, so he lives in a bunker and wears a tinfoil hat. Wade runs a support group for survivors and says that he “isn't afraid anymore,” but that's a lie: Wade wears a mask to hide his pain.

After White Night, Wade became the hero Looking Glass, an expert at interrogations and detecting deception, which are the exact skills that could have helped him with the girl from '85. In 2019, Wade dates a woman in his group of support. – but she turns out to be a Klansman who tricks Wade into capturing him. So, once again, when Wade is emotionally vulnerable with someone, it just gives him another “kick in the balls.” Wade discovers that the attack by Squid 85, the catastrophe that destroyed Wade, was a hoax by Adrian Veidt. Then Wade questions his whole life: "Is anything true?" he asks.

In the end, Wade goes into enemy territory and confronts the man who caused his trauma, and Wade arrests him with a wrench. Wade finally gets justice and takes off his mask – the first steps toward healing. So in a way, Watchmen 2019 is cynical. It's about violence and trauma. Adrian Veidt and Lady Trieu's utopian dreams fail. Dr. Manhattan, the divine figure, dies. But history also has hope. Will achieves justice and healing after centuries of injustice and pain. Angela gains divine power. Manhattan becomes a figure of transcendent love. Laurie achieves some optimism and Wade achieves justice. We also had a full season of Jeremy Irons eating cake and playing with catapults.

So Watchmen 2019 is not about superheroes conquering evil, but about some people finding hope and healing despite the darkness. The main symbol of the original Watchmen comic is a bloody emoticon, which appears throughout the comic. Because the bloody emoticon represents how the idea of ​​a hero is broken, obsolete and degraded. But Watchmen 2019 uses the egg symbol: eggs appear throughout the entire show, the season ends with an egg. Because the egg is the opposite of the cynical and bloody emoticon. Eggs represent rebirth, possibility and life. Thirty years after the original comic, this new show brings hope to Watchmen.

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