After “This Extraordinary Being”, pretty much everything was a disappointment that does so much work to tie together the threads from the last five episodes of Watchmen. But episode 7, “An almost religious reverence,” still feels like a noticeable stumble for the season, showing a jumble of threads in a way less likely than ever before, with some solid actors and bizarre twists and turns We turn almost entirely away from our new understanding of Will’s story.
Angela’s childhood in Vietnam is the first comprehensive review in the series that simply emphasizes our understanding of a character rather than expanding it. We learn that Angela’s parents are killed in a bombing of the holiday that commemorates America’s victory in Vietnam. She spends much of her childhood in a Vietnamese orphanage and paints dolls from Doctor Manhattan. She joins forces with some Vietnamese policemen and decides one day to join the troupe in the spirit of her hero, black heroine Sister Night. (The title, “Nun with the gun for motherfucking.”) Finally, her grandmother, June, prepares to bring Angela to Tulsa, and then has herself killed immediately after a heart attack.
These scenes are funny enough (especially in the score of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross), but they do too much to figure out why Angela is exactly what she is. Regina King is more than talented enough to communicate these layers, and gives us some clues as to what brought them there. The exact connection of the dots – stuff like the movie “Nun with the Wacky Weapon” – and a piece with some of the lazy tropes in superhero movies that Watchmen has commented on in all its forms is unnecessary. In particular, the death of June is the first plot beat in the series that has fallen flat.
Mark Hill / HBO
In a sense, “This Extraordinary Being” has made these scenes superfluous. The wounds of Angela’s ancestors became remarkably clear throughout this episode and are repeatedly incorporated into her experiences in this episode. The public should be given enough confidence to summarize how these decisions still live with her in the present. What does this information mean for Angela? How does it tie in with the broader plan of Will and Lady Trieu? We only get answers to these two questions in this episode, and it feels a bit frustrating.
It’s possible I’m just annoyed because Regina King does not have the least amount of time to do this episode. Most of the time, I’m wandering through Lady Trie’s crazy clock tower to find out what’s going on. Hong Chau is still excellent, especially when she thinks a bit more about the success of her plans – saving the world from the Seventh Cavalry aka Cyclops. We still do not know what the Clock Tower will do, but we know that Lady Trieu’s daughter Bian is actually a clone of her mother receiving memories in the form of a nostalgic drop.
Lady Trieu says her father will soon be there to witness the climax of her plans, even though he is not there at the moment. This feels like a blatant reminder that the identity of Lady Trieu’s father will be important later on – and for me, there seems to be only two guesses: Doctor Manhattan or Ozymandias. However, Chaus best acting moment comes when she realizes that she told Angela that Doctor Manhattan pretends to be human, and Angela did not ask who he is. She knows.
Everything in this episode is too neat and unresolved. When confronted with Jane Crawford, Laurie formulates the lesson “This Extraordinary Being” so that the rich, structured sequence of television feels like a didactic special after school: “White men in masks are heroes. But black men in masks? Are scary. ”
Laurie is thrown through a trapdoor into the basement of the Crawford House, which turns out to be another base for Cyclops. (I can imagine that Laurie Jane is one step ahead of this, but I think she underestimated someone again.) She thinks that Cyclops uses the police as a false flag to elect a white Supremacist for president as you of basic, ordinary diabolical plan. The actual Cyclops scheme, however, is even bigger: you will turn Joe Keene into another Doctor Manhattan. As a plan, this feels big enough to be a major plot, but it also feels a bit banal. The political and racist machinations of Cyclops feel far more convincing and motivated than it sounds when James Wolk just says it’s hard to be a white man in America.
Mark Hill / HBO
Nevertheless, it is an episode of Watchmen. So it happens a lot of funny, crazy things. The appearance of the elephant – an animal that never forgets – is a mere remnant reminiscent of the seemingly bizarre insertions of the show with lions and tigers. The Cerebro-like cave where Lady Trieu can see what everyone says in his prayer talks with Doctor Manhattan may be quite threatening. And of course there is the revelation at the end of the episode: Angela’s husband Calvin is Doctor Manhattan.
I’ve seen some people suspect that this might happen over the course of the season – his calm demeanor, his perspective on death, his consistent costume in the color blue, and most of all Laurie’s frequent remarks about his looks – but that’s still a pretty wild thing to learn. The deletion of this information so late in the game is undoubtedly bold, but it also seems that Angela’s relationship with her husband largely supplants her relationship with her grandfather when the season (and possibly the series) comes to an end.
One of the great things about the show is the way in which Doctor Manhattan has almost seemed casual to the extended world of Watchmen. Everyone treats him like a force of nature, a myth hanging over the costumed history of the world. Everyone has different thoughts and feelings about him, and we learn more about them by watching their reactions. In fact, focusing on Doctor Manhattan is, in a sense, the least interesting part. But in the wake of next week, Damon Lindelof looks exactly like that.
