Ryan Shoots First: Watchmen (S1 Ep4) “If You Don’t Like My Story, Write Your Own”

Welcome to this week’s episode of Watchmen recap.

The episode opens in the type of random out of context fashion the show has grown accustomed to with a family that farms eggs struggling to sell them then going through their normal life of brushing their teeth before bed and just being generally happy before being greeted by a Lady Trieu. She is the trillionaire building the Millennium clock we heard about last week. She is looking to buy the couples house and land by promising them a baby not just helping them in getting pregnant but straight up has baby taken from their DNA waiting outside. Weird. As the couple frantically sign the papers a rumbling is heard over head as a meteor crashes into the ground. This is the reason she needed the land so she could own the thing that crashed. 

We cut to Angela at her lair trying to clean up any evidence that Will was there previously as Laurie is on her trail. She breaks into the cultural center to investigate her heritage. The machine she previously visited literally gives you an acorn that you pop into the ancestry tree. Let’s see you do that 23 and Me. We learn about her great grandparents that we saw in previous episodes that are Will’s parents. She tells Will to leave her alone as we hear a crash outside its Laurie and the Angela’s car crashing in front of her that closed last week’s episode.

Angela visits Looking Glass at his home to check some things off the books. She shows him his Klan robes she took to keep them away from Laurie. Sister Knight dumps some evidence before realizing she’s being watched by a man in all silver spandex. She chases him down but he disappears into a sewer leaving no trace. Sister Knight runs into Senator Keane who thanks her for saving his life and reveals he knows her identity, everyone seems to know it. Laurie is set up in Judd’s former office and she reveals she got prints for Will of her car. She gives him some info about Will being a Cop in NYC and how she has tied it to the wheelchair tracks she found at the lynching site. They then go together to follow a lead and Peatty informs Angela all about Laurie’s parentage and backstory about Silk Spectre and The Comedian being her parents and how it was the result of sexual assault. They arrive at the Millennium Clock to tie everything together. 

The show really takes a big sci-fi turn once we get to the clock a big change from the pseudo tech future we see everywhere else. She is a trillionaire after all. The clock is the “First wonder of the new world” impervious to anything short of a direct nuclear attack. When Sister Knight asks what it does they reply “It tells time”. She replies about an old saying in Vietnamese but actually asks if she got her grandfathers pills. So it was one of their fancy tech planes that picked up the car and dropped it off and somehow Will is linked to this group. She idolizes Adrian Veit and has a statue of him which leads to our transition into Adrian’s Crazy Fun house for this week. 

He pulls a baby out of the lake but throws it back and comes back with another two babies that he puts into a giant machine. This seems to accelerate their aging making more servants for him. We get some exposition that while he is their master he is not their maker. He leads them into a room where a ton of the clones are dead and Adrian informs them “I had a rough night”. They hurl the bodies into the sky and they appear to disappear into the sky. Perhaps Adrian’s prison is not even on Earth. He is trying to escape this place which somewhat explains all of his schemes and tests. A transition back to Earth seems to imply his prison is on the moon perhaps created and maintained by Dr. Manhattan. 

The next cut is to Lady Trieu daughter waking up in her bed after having a nightmare. She appeared to be hooked up to an IV in her bed. She had a dream about men coming in the night and burning their village and making them walk. She tells her her feet still hurt and Lady Trieu says “Good”. She says goodnight to Will who is sitting at the table. After an argument he gets up from the table and walks away. He asks her how much longer and she answers 3 days. He says he has betrayed Angela and in 3 days she will know he has betrayed her. They look to the sky and Will says Tick tock, tick tock. 

And that’s it for this weeks episode. The show just keeps presenting new mysteries but also giving some answers to little questions along the way. For one we found out how Angela’s car was taken, who is helping Will and what is the nature of Adrian’s exile but every answer seems to raise more questions down completely different story plots. Whether that’s clever or infuriating I am not sure yet but in 3 days we should hit a crossing point per Will’s comment at the end of the episode. The issue with that is we are 4 episodes in and have only covered like 2 days. At this point it will take a while to get there. Next week looks to be a Looking Glass centric episode and Adrian appears ready to go for an escape so I’m guessing we will add a whole bunch of new mysteries and start this train all over again! Tick…tock..tick…tock.

Observations:

• The baby screams while Adrian was running his super aging machine were pretty horrifying. 
• I can’t keep track of all the threads and connections, I guess there is something to Angela meeting Cal in Vietnam and Lady Trieu being from there.
• Angela’s character seemed pretty weak this week literally just moving from scene to scene learning things. She never seemed to have time to react or develop much of anything. Just move from one mystery to another. 
• Laurie’s motives seemed to muddy this week as well as she was super nice and helpful.
• The idea of Dr. Manhattan just providing Adrian with endless clones to keep him busy is interesting.
• I hope we find out more about the trans dimensional stuff soon as that is all intriguing.
• Really want to know what that big ol’ clock does. 
• Will telling Lady Trieu after she questioned his handling of Angela “you mean the same as your daughter” she seems to be developing her for something. 
• Bets on how many questions answered and how many new ones asked next week? Vegas line is -1 for Answered.