Warning: SPOILERS for Watchmen episode 9.
HBO's Watchmen season 1 finale saw the end of Doctor Manhattan (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) - but, because "nothing ever ends", a new Doctor Manhattan may have been created in his wife, Detective Angela Abar AKA Sister Night (Regina King). In its 9-episode run, executive producer Damon Lindelof's "remix" of the classic graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons furthered Watchmen's story, setting it 34 years later in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and examining the Watchmen universe through the lens of racial injustice in America. The results were a provocative, intricate, and stunning TV series - a truly worthy successor to Watchmen.
But, even though he was hidden in plain view until the big twist in episode 7, Watchmen revolved around Doctor Manhattan, which is fitting. After Adrian Veidt's (Jeremy Irons) hoax saved the world from nuclear war on 11/2/1985, the world's only superhuman being was an absentee god; he spent 20 years on Jupiter's moon Europa creating life on his own before he returned to Earth and fell in love in Angela Abar. In order to live together, Doctor Manhattan (with Veidt's help) posed as a human being and raised a family with Angela for ten years as her husband, Cal Abar. But Doctor Manhattan's presence was ultimately discovered by the Seventh Kavalry, the Rorschach-masked white supremacist cult that is an offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan organization called Cyclops; under the leadership of Senator Joe Keene (James Wolk), the 7K wanted to steal Doctor Manhattan's omnipotence for themselves.
Doctor Manhattan's superpowers - and who should have the right to wield them and for what reasons - lie at the very heart of Watchmen. The desire to become a god was also the life's ambition of Lady Trieu (Hong Chau), the trillionaire genius who is the daughter of Adrian Veidt, and she also plotted to siphon Doctor Manhattan's powers for herself. Everything came to a head in Watchmen's season 1 finale, "See How They Fly", when the Seventh Kavalry captured Doctor Manhattan with a tachyonic cannon, which ended up playing right into Lady Trieu's hands. Although, because of his unique ability to see his past, present, and future simultaneously, most of it was foreseen by Doctor Manhattan himself - and the superpowered blue god made his own preparations for the inevitable.
Senator Joe Keene decided he wanted to become Doctor Manhattan after he learned that the superhuman was posing as Cal Abar in 2016. To save Angela's life during the White Night, Cal reflexively teleported Mike, one of the Seventh Kavalry, to Gila Flats, New Mexico - the birthplace of Doctor Manhattan in 1959. Originally, Cyclops' plan was to spark a culture war between the Seventh Kavalry and the masked Tulsa Police; with Chief Judd Crawford (Don Johnson) and Keene running both sides together, Keene had ambitions to replace Robert Redford as President of the United States. But after Keene learned Doctor Manhattan was hiding in Tulsa, the senator decided he wanted Manhattan's superpowers to further his white supremacist ambitions.
The Seventh Kavalry spent years stockpiling banned Manhattan-class lithium batteries to build a cage that could hold Doctor Manhattan while Crawford and his wife Jane (Frances Fisher) befriended the Abar family. However, even though they were able to capture Doctor Manhattan, Keene and the 7K's knowledge of physics wasn't equal to their ambition. Not knowing Doctor Manhattan's quantum energies needed to be filtered, Keene was reduced to a puddle of black goo when he tried to absorb the blue god's superpowers.
Meanwhile, Lady Trieu desired Doctor Manhattan's powers far longer than Keene did - because she wanted to outdo her father, Adrian Veidt. Although she believed she had more altruistic reasons to become Doctor Manhattan ("saving humanity"), Trieu - like her father, Ozymandias - was a raging narcissist who can't be trusted with omniscience. Still, Trieu learned that Manhattan was really Cal Abar from Angela Abar's grandfather Will Reeves AKA Hooded Justice (Louis Gossett, Jr.). When Doctor Manhattan visited Reeves in 2009, he told the elderly ex-vigilante all about how he was going to die in 2019 at the hands of the Seventh Kavalry and Lady Trieu. As Manhattan intended, Reeves struck a deal with Trieu; he told the trillionaire that Manhattan was Cal Abar in exchange for her help wiping out the Cyclops' senior leadership, who Reeves had been fighting against his entire life since the Tulsa Massacre of 1921.
While Doctor Manhattan's foreknowledge of his future ended with his own death, he also knew his "old colleague" Adrian Veidt would be the key to stopping Lady Trieu so in his final act, he teleported Ozymandias, Laurie Blake (Jean Smart), and Looking Glass AKA Wade Tillman (Tim Blake Nelson) to Karnak, Veidt's antarctic fortress. Ozymandias altered his squid rainfall and used it to destroy Lady Trieu's quantum centrifuge that launched from her Millennium Tower, killing her and ending her dream to become Doctor Manhattan.
By preventing his daughter Lady Trieu from becoming Doctor Manhattan, Veidt saved the world for a second time. Ozymandias used Lady Trieu to escape from Europa, where Doctor Manhattan had sent him in 2009, by preying on her desire to be recognized as his daughter after he claimed in 2008 that he never would. However, during his time in exile, Veidt was unaware that numerous people learned of his hoax on 11/2/85 and that, essentially, the state of the world was Ozymandias' doing. Looking Glass, a traumatized survivor of 11/2, possessed a disc containing Veidt's videotaped instructions to President Robert Redford - Ozymandias' confession. And, even though Veidt did save the world once again, Laurie and Looking Glass still apprehended Ozymandias in order to finally bring him to justice for killing 3-million people on 11/2.
For Laurie, nailing Veidt alleviates the guilt she has always felt since the ending of the Watchmen graphic novel, when she and Dan Dreiberg AKA Nite Owl went along with Veidt's hoax and kept silent with everything they knew for 34 years. Looking Glass also 'got' the mass murderer who also essentially ruined his adult life and he finally found a means to put his trauma to bed. Together, Blake and Tillman, both cops, caught the man who is arguably history's greatest criminal - and they even get to fly back from Antarctica on the original Owlship that was left behind at Karnak at the end of the comic. This brings the stories of Ozymandias and Silk Spectre's full circle to a fitting conclusion - at least for now.
Ironically, if Watchmen did christen a new Doctor Manhattan, it could be Angela Abar herself who inherited her husband's abilities. Angela discovered that one of the infuriating things about loving Doctor Manhattan is coping with how he's essentially a slave to his own timeline and that he's constantly experiencing his past, present, and future simultaneously. This is why Manhattan blocked off his own memories to live as Cal and give Angela a normal life with him for a decade. However, Doctor Manhattan knew how his journey would end and took several steps to pass on his abilities, something he confessed he could do to Angela when they met in Vietnam in 2009.
Through Doctor Manhattan, Angela and her grandfather Will got caught in a paradox where Sister Night in 2019 inadvertently supplied Hooded Justice in 2009 with the foreknowledge that Judd Crawford (someone Reeves had never heard of prior) was a member of Cyclops. This was, as Doctor Manhattan described, a "chicken and the egg" paradox wherein it's uncertain what could have come first. And, after he told Angela in 2009 that he could theoretically transfer his essence (and his abilities) to something organic - like an egg - and whoever eats it could become Doctor Manhattan, Angela discovered just such a pristine egg left behind by Manhattan in her kitchen. Watchmen's finale leaves it intriguingly ambiguous whether Angela, who ate the egg, does get Doctor Manhattan's powers and "walks on water", but if there's anyone on Earth that Jon Osterman would have wanted to receive his powers, and can shoulder their responsibility while making better choices, it would be Angela.
Watchmen certainly makes powerful statements about the malignancy of white supremacy and it flips the traditional superhero script by making its three most heroic and sympathetic characters, Angela Abar, Will Reeves, and even Doctor Manhattan African-Americans, though the Vietnamese-born Lady Trieu (who is half-German on Adrian Veidt's side) is the Big Bad along with the Caucasian Seventh Kavalry. Still, there are also plenty of noble Caucasian characters like Laurie Blake, Looking Glass, so Watchmen is a properly complex world without easy, straightforward answers, although the basic morality of good and evil is still clear as day.
The main villains wanted to become Doctor Manhattan and while they had opposing rationales as to what they would use omnipotence for, the underlying truth about Doctor Manhattan's greatest failing is stated by Will to Angela at the end of Watchmen's finale: "He was a good man... but considering what he could do, he could have done more." While Joe Keene and Lady Trieu would have used Doctor Manhattan's powers to cause further damage to the world, Manhattan's overall disinterest in humanity wasn't the right answer either. Perhaps if Doctor Manhattan had chosen to work alongside people (and not serve as a political puppet as he did in the past), he could have benefited the world in more profound ways. If Angela, who is a loving mother who understands the values of family, is indeed the new Doctor Manhattan, maybe she can find a way to do "more" - and better if Watchmen returns for season 2.
Just like the graphic novel, Watchmen ends with another supervillain scheme but this one is foiled, unlike Adrian Veidt's successful hoax - proving that Damon Lindelof's series commendably isn't just a rerun and that it did do something new. And if there is a moral to the story, such as it is, it could have been said by Laurie Blake to Adrian Veidt: "People keep saying [the world will end] but it never seems to happen" and more importantly, "People change, Adrian. Least some of us do..." These nuggets of truth should keep fans pondering and debating as we wait for a potential Watchmen season 2 because, after all, "nothing ever ends".
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