Watchmen Episode 4: Who Hatches the Eggmen?
The biggest mistake most superhero adaptations make is forcing the audience to sit through yet another retelling of the hero’s origin. The latest big screen iteration of Spider-Man was refreshing for many reasons, not least of which was its recognition that the story has already planted itself firmly in our collective consciousness. We know he was bittern by a freaky spider (Is he strong? Listen, bud! He’s got radioactive blood!). We know about great power and great responsibility. And we know better than to get too attached to whoever is playing Uncle Ben this time around.[1]
As a resolutely indirect sequel to the classic graphic novel, the HBO production of Watchmen is haunted by its origins, from the allusions to the original story to the illicit genealogy of the series itself: Watchmen the comic had two daddies who were so ill-treated by Big Comics that one of them has gone so far as to remove his name from the birth certificate. The TV series is the creators’ unwanted bastard grandchild, whose stunning beauty is an inexplicable miracle. Lindelof’s Watchmen is like a freakish baby homunculus fished out of a swamp, tortured and twisted into something that is simultaneously new and familiar. Adrian Veidt’s words could just as easily belong to Lindelof: “While I may be your master, I am most definitely not your maker. …With your broken, mangled bodies one way or another I will escape this godforsaken place.”
By happy accident, my travel schedule forced me to watch this episode twice before writing this blog entry later than usual. The first time, I was half-asleep, and I wasn’t sure if my sense of this episode as fragmentary and scattered was intrinsic to the work itself or a function of my own wandering attention. I came away with the feeling that Episode 4 was probably the sort of place-setting exercise that is often necessary halfway through a story arc. Taken together, the first four episodes reminded me of the structure of the first season of The Leftovers: after an episode focusing on a single viewpoint character (Matt Jamison in “Two Boats and a Helicopter,” Nora Durst in “Guest’) the return to multiple storylines and perspectives always felt like a bit of a letdown. “She Was Killed by Space Junk” is a tough act to follow.
Upon a second viewing, though, I found the episode held together far better than I had thought, and its title (“If You Don’t Like My Story, Write Your Own”) felt less like an ironic reference to the question of Alan Moore and originality and more like a personal rebuke for my failure to follow the thread. I noticed what must have been obvious to anyone who was actually awake while watching it: the story is obsessed with eggs and babies. The poultry farming couple in the cold open meet cute over some broken eggs; the woman’s own eggs are not viable; Angel and Cal are cracking eggs in the kitchen. Lady Trieu gives the poetry farmers a baby (their own genetic offspring) in exchange for their property; Veidt fishes baby-creatures out of a swamp; Angela’s and Cal’s children were never their babies. On a broader level, the episode is preoccupied with family ties and legacy: Lady Trieu’s speech to the farmers; Lady Trieu’s discussion with Will about how to deal with their respective (grand)children; Angela’s acorn turning into a Family Tree; the beautiful shot of young Will’s face superimposed onto that of his granddaughter, Angela; the discussions of Laurie’s parentage and superheroic formative trauma; Lady Trieu’s assertion that when family gets involved, deals go bad.
KINDLY COUPLE
We could chalk up the egg motif as Lindelof’s variation on the circular imagery that dominated the graphic novel (the clock, the smiley face, the perfume bottle), and with good reason: Adrian, trapped in his own little ovoid pocket reality, watches a flying corpse through his spyglass, which segues into a shot of the moon over Tulsa (a classic Watchmen shape-based transition). But when we take the eggs together with the babies and the family tree, we are left with an episode that, while not an origin story, is a meta-origin: without revealing much about where everyone comes from, it puts their roots and their lineage front and center.
I SPY WITH MY MANIACAL SUPERVILLAIN EYE
Indeed, the cold open is a call back to both the season opener and the Superman story so efficiently dispensed with in Morrison’s All-Star Superman. If Will’s parents’ placing him in the wagon was a remix of baby Kal-El’s escape from the destruction of Krypton, the poultry farm episode might be a further remix of the same story, but this time from the point of view of the future Superman’s adoptive parents, Jonathan and Martha Kent. In Episode 4, the childless Clarks (!) are presented with a surprise baby who is somehow their genetic offspring, all as part of a set-up that allows Lady Trieu to take possession of whatever it is that has landed on their (now former) property. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Who the hell knows? [2]
Everything about reproduction and family ties in this episode moves against the natural order: instead of simply having people give birth to children, the show has to either complicate conception or focus on the attempts to work back through the family tree and figure out where (and from whom) the characters come from. Instead of straightforward “legacy,” as Lady Trieu puts it, we have a view of the generations that seems almost…fourth-dimensional. Maybe not quite as sublime as Dr. Manhtattan’s worldview, but close. This, after all, is the episode where Cal explains death to the children in terms that recall the most famous fourth-dimensional novel before Watchmen: Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (first Chief Judd didn’t exist; he was nowhere. Then he was a baby, then he was a child, then an adult, and then he died. Now he’s nowhere again).
Lady Trieu, who positions herself as Adrian Veidt’s spiritual heir (her reference to her success growing from the “seed of his inspiration” is certainly suggestive), recapitulates one of his classic moments. In the penultimate chapter of Watchmen, Veidt tells Laurie and the others that the actions he was just describing are not his future plans: “I did it thirty-five minutes ago.” Lady Trieu tells the Clarks that she could create a baby for them, and then admits that she has already done it. Even Angela gets into the act, calling in a report of a break-in at the Greenwood Center for Culture Heritage, after which she breaks in.
This framework also helps motivate Laurie’s invocation of the term “thermodynamic miracle” to describe the theft and return of Angela’s car. At first, it seems like a clumsy way to bring us back to the graphic novel, because when Dr. Manhattan spoke of thermodynamic miracles, he meant something else entirely. But the we recall what it is he meant: the unlikelihood of a particular sperm and a particular egg joining at a particular moment to create a particular person. What he calls a thermodynamic miracle, others might call a blessed event.
So I’m going to go out on a (family tree) limb and predict that the rest of the season will make many blessed thermodynamic events central to the plot. In keeping with the show’s (and the comic’s) disruption of linear time, these little miracles will have already taken place, but might provide some explanatory power. To wit:
Lady Trieu’s daughter has memories of burnt villages and forced marches. Her own mother made her promise not to leave Vietnam. Vietnam was important to the comic, but not nearly so central. It was the site of the Comedian’s murder of his Vietnamese lover and their unborn child, forming a nice symmetrical relationship with the book’s big revelation (that Laurie is the offspring of the Comedian’s surprisingly non-violent sexual encounter with her mother). Even though that woman was murdered, I’m going to make a wild, baseless prediction: Lady Trieu is somehow the daughter of the Comedian, making her Laurie’s half-sister.
Unless she’s somehow related to Angela, which would have the advantage of not only fitting the timeline better, but of recycling a motif from the comic without forcing so strong a connection to the original plot.
I’m most likely wrong in the specifics, but I have no doubt that there is something going on with Lady Trieu’s connection to the rest of the characters. If not, I’ll just have egg on my face.
Minor Observations
Will can walk now. Like John Locke on Lost, and Mary Jamison on The Leftovers. Is Damon Lindelof contractually obligated to include a character who stops using a wheelchair?
The name of Angela’s bakery (“Milk and Hanoi”) is a nice twist on the hybrid names Moore and Gibbons come up with at the end of the comic (“Burgers ’N Borscht”).
I want a Silver Lube Sewer Guy action figure.
Notes
[1] Grant Morrison famously dispensed with Superman’s origin in his own adaptation of the now-venerable property (as a comics ministries, not a movie): the first page of the series has a few key images, accompanied by the words “Doomed planet. Desperate scientists. Last hope. Kindly couple.”
[2] Later in the episode, Laurie tells Angela, “I don’t kid about things falling out of the sky.” Interesting choice of words. Hrm.