Watchman, Episode 7: Black and Blue
“But… if me, my birth, if that’s a thermodynamic miracle…I mean, you could say that about anybody in the world.”
—Laurie Juspeczyk, the future Laurie Blake
Watchmen, Chapter 9
Cal Abar doesn’t really exist. And Angela Abar shouldn’t exist.
It’s a match made…on Mars?
Episodes 6 and 7 do more than simply explain the backstory to the graphic novel and TV series. By subjecting Angela to a life-threatening trip down multiple memory lanes, they also help us understand the rationale behind this week’s revelation. That is, we don’t necessarily know why Jon Osterman (Dr. Manhattan) became Cal, but we do know why he fell in love with Angela. Or why he is going to in the future.
Angela’s overdose on Nostalgia is yet another narrative analog to Dr. Manhattan’s fourth-dimensional experience of the universe, his ability to see all of time and space laid out before him as if it were a comic book page. Like Jon, Angela is bouncing through time in a non-linear fashion; like Laurie before her, the experience helps her (or maybe just the viewer) see the patterns in her life that she might otherwise fail to recognize.
Laurie’s discovery of her true parenthood in Chapter 9 of the original graphic novel prompts Jon to remember that life is random, unlikely, and therefore precious. Laurie’s father tried to rape her mother, years before Laurie was born. By all rights, she should never have been conceived. Yet there she is on Mars, vomiting after Jon teleports her from Earth. And there she is in the Judd basement, rolling her eyes as the Senator monologues at her, like some Republic Serial villain.
And Angela? Her grandfather was one of the few survivors of a racist massacre, who eventually married the other survivor (he and Jon are both cradle-robbers). He survives a lynching and becomes the first masked adventurer, making him both the origin of an entire genre (the superhero story) and the inspiration for every other hero in the Watchmen universe. He is also gay; in a different time, in a world where he could have come out of the closet (i.e., removed his heterosexual mask), Angela’s father never would have been conceived. [1]
How appropriate that an earlier episode sees Angela growing her virtual “family tree” at the Tulsa museum, since we now see that her family tree has been shedding limbs right in front of her for most of her life. First she survives the suicide bombing that kills her parents, then she narrowly misses bing rescued from the orphanage by her long-lost paternal grandmother, who drops dead of a heart attack before she can bring her home from Vietnam. Yet somehow Angela survives, eventually surrounding herself with a chosen family made up of orphans like herself, plus an amnesiac husband who is really Dr. Manhattan.
HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT
It turns out Dr. Manhattan has a type: impossible women. That is, women whose very existence is all but inexplicable. Technically, Angela and Laurie share this trait with all of humanity, but the drama that precedes and follows them highlights the improbability that Jon finds irresistible.
The preview for next weeks’ episode promises to show us yet another important moment from Angela’s past: the love story that unfolds between her and Jon. Once again, we are on fourth-dimensional territory. First, because we can now see that the series’ focus on flashbacks starts to resemble Jon’s own experience of time, and second, because the preview suggests that Jon seeks her out not because he loves her, but because he knows he is going to fall in love with her. This looks to be a love story that will be out of sync with linear time, and I suspect Jon will fall in love with Angela sometime in the next two episodes.
Jon and Angela clearly had some sort of arrangement that required Jon not just to forego his powers, but forget his entire identity. This means that the series’ writers have found a new solution to the problem of surprising an omniscient hero. Veidt confused Dr. Manhattan with tachyons, blinding him with science. Jon chooses to blind himself with love.
Various observations
I got a great deal fo narcissistic satisfaction from this episode, since it set things up in a way that allowed me to guess the final twist about five minutes before it was revealed, making me momentarily feel smarter than I am.
This episode really doubled-down on the clever transitions from one scene to another.
The courtroom drama was the first time I feared that the series was veering into the sophomoric symbolism and surrealism of 1970s Serious Superhero comics. The jury of porcine peers was a pig too far.
I guess it’s true: elephants never forget.
Note
[1] Yes, I know Will could be bisexual, and I do not mean to contribute to bisexual erasure. I have chosen to interpret him as gay because it is more thematically consistent with the themes of disguises and double lives.
Comments (2)
Anish 8 months ago · 0 Likes
Damn, I thought I was the only one who got the twist five minutes early. Wonder if you'll agree that Adrian Veidt is most likely Lady Trieu's father. A) She's a genius and she inherited Ozymandias' company. So I assume she'll bring her father home in time for the big finale. B) There's an article on Peteypedia, with a rumor that she's the daughter of the comedian, as most of us assumed when we first saw her. Looks like a red herring.
Also is Yahya Abdul-Mateen II going to play Dr. Manhattan now? I can't imagine the Seventh Cavalry (and certain message boards) will like that. If the Cavalry is anything like the Klan, they must already be pretty upset about the closest thing to God being Jewish.
Also, Laurie acted pretty recklessly this episode. That does fit her characterization in the series, looks like Petey and Looking Glass will team up and save they day.
Eliot Borenstein 8 months ago · 0 Likes
Well, there's certainly something going on with a) Lady Trieu's parentage, and b) Lady Trieu and Veidt. So providing one answer to both certainly appeals to my sense of narrative economy. BTW, "narrative economy" was what helped me guess that Cal was Dr. Manhattan--there were simply no other candidates without a backstory.
Yeah, Laurie was reckless, wasn't she? Still, it was all worth it to see Judd's widow clicking away at the trapdoor device like a grandma trying to work a complicated remote.