Watchmen episode 8 post-credit scene, explained by the comic

Unlike Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen comic, the HBO sequel to Damon Lindelof is not just about deconstructing modern comic heroes (aside from the occasional American Hero Story sequence). Watchmen 2019 tugs deeper into the social and political threads of the original and builds on its mythology in a provocative way.

But episode 8, “A God goes to Abar,” builds on a new superhero tradition from the last decade: the post-credit scene. The idea of ​​involving a person feels like a devilish wink, but in true watchmaking it is also a moment that challenges what the onlookers think they know.

(Ed. Note: The rest of this story contains important spoilers for the Watchmen episode 8.)

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“A God Goes to Abar” reveals the mystery of what happened to Doctor Manhattan after the events of the comic, and ties loose ends together in multiple time series. We see Jon Osterman meeting Angela in Vietnam, how the two fell in love, and how Jon transformed into the body of “Calvin” who finally blocked his memories and godlike self-esteem with a Tachyon Beetle from former superhero Adrian Veidt He makes a detour to Europe to live in paradise. We also see Jon “dying” by the Seventh Cavalry, which hopes to replace the otherworldly being with its new and improved Doctor Manhattan, Senator Joe Keene.

Episode 9, the Watchmen finale, will deal with all this. Lindelof, co-writer Jeff Jensen and director Nicole Kassell devote the entire episode to Jon / Calvin, but after the credits, a new scene returns with today’s Adrian, joined by a jury of pigs and has now been tied to a rack. “Will you stay, master?” Ask his constituents. Every time he refuses, he gets another tomato in his face. Finally, he ends up in a jail cell where the “Adam” of Doctor Manhattan’s terraformed Europe visits him. The masked man has a cake for Adrian – and questions. Will Adrian suffer?

Although Adrian plays with the creation of Doctor Manhattan, the last blow of the post-credit scene is a convincing argument that he wants to suffer.

As Ozymandias, Veidt took on the Herculean task of forging world peace at the most difficult moment in human history. He became a hero justifying the means and staged a three-dimensional squid attack on New York City, leaving millions dead and bringing the living together. The end of the comic by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons has seen the criminal act as a success – as long as Rorschach’s diary never got into the wrong hands.

But the world did not need a conspiracy to break again. In “One God is Going to Abar” Manhattan Adrian 2009 in his Antarctic base to see the supervillain staring at his TV bank and fumbling with a remote control. The world is still making “godforsaken bombs,” and Adrian is still trying to avert the doomsday, dropping Baby Mutant Squid through portals to sustain his charade in the hope that society will be wise.

The meeting of old friends ends with Adrian giving Manhattan a tachyon ring to keep his nonlinear understanding of the universe in mind. Doctor Manhattan reciprocates by giving Adrian what he thinks he wants: paradise. The people of the people that the Blue Superman has produced in Europe are “still there waiting for someone to worship them,” and Veidt is an obvious candidate.

HBO

Based on the last seven episodes we know how the experiment works. Adrian’s behavior, in which clone bodies were thrown across the moon’s bubble barrier to turn them into SOS, suggests that his life on Europe was a monkey request that fell back on him. But did Doctor Manhattan punish Adrian for murdering millions, or did he inadvertently damn him stranded 390 million light-years from home? Talking to Polygon, the executive producer of Watchmen, and the director of A God Walks Into Abar, Nicole Kassell, we should not assume that Manhattan’s non-linear understanding of time gives him so much foresight.

“He’s just incredibly honest,” Kassell says. “The future exists only for him, without the emotional weight that we or the civilian population muster for it. I think it’s a big deal to deal with this character, that he is not perfect, even though he is the most powerful being in the world. He is not perfect and that is very important for us to think about it. “

If Veidt’s existential torture was entirely coincidental – if Doctor Manhattan knew that Veidt would eventually decide it was hell but did not attribute meaning to that result, Veidt’s subplot feels more calculated than ever. The post-credit scene in episode 8 puts it in a nutshell: Veidt may really enjoy being tormented by the challenge of impossible scenarios, how to solve the destructive instinct of humanity, or return home from Jupiter’s moon. Veidt is just another man with envy of Doctor Manhattan. He wants to be the greatest hero ever, proving that his genius is a superpower comparable to the manipulation of matter. He is ready to prove this by doubling every idea he has by squirting cuttlefish at cities, murdering Europeans to use them as props, digging ever deeper into his own limiting holes. The last blow of the post-credit scene is a nasty twist in this whole idea. Now armed with a horseshoe, Veidt believes he can leave prison and take advantage of the opportunities.

Why leave the poignant moment to a scene that some viewers may miss? Kassell says it was a structural decision.

“This story as a whole flows so perfectly,” she tells Polygon. “It was calculated very mathematically and recorded in the script. And the structure of the source comic – it contains the chapters that appear at the end of each chapter, the snapshots under the hood, and other clues. It allowed us to make an episode that was structurally a tribute to this structure in comics. “

Under the Hood makes structural sense, but Tales of the Black Freighter, the in-universe pirate comic, makes thematically more meaningful. Lindelof hinted in the Veidt story that there were parallels to Black Freighter – see the crossbones banner in Episode 3 – and “One God goes in Abar” drops another. As the “Adam” clone enters the prison cell, reads Adrian Fogdancing, a novel by Max Shea, the author of the comic “Black Freighter”.

In Watchmen Black Freighter was a straightforward allegory for Veidts Bogen, the hero pirate who later became a murderer. In the sequel to HBO, Veidts story serves a similar purpose. The words that Dr. Manhattan, who spoke to him in the 1980s, seems fitting for the present: “Nothing ever ends.” Veidt will constantly try to solve the biggest problems of the universe and to come up short. The characters on Earth might encounter the same problem in the final act of the series.