The beauty of science fiction is that, in the right hands, it can tell stories that other genres can’t. Strip away the limitations of fact; tap into the power of imagination, and you can conjure scenes and situations the shabby metes and bounds of the real world couldn’t sustain. In the best hands, the absence of those limitations — the combination of fiction and abstraction — allows the author and their audience to reach truths that even the most poignant, most trenchant slice of reality cannot possibly match.
So when Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons imagined a god, a living embodiment of quantum entanglement, they used him to explore the bitter ironies of causality. They traced the lines of cause and effect, jumbled up in one man’s life, to find the knotted ends of detachment and transcendence and omniscience turned predestination. Jon Osterman had, like others before him, come unstuck in time. And his creators, like others before them, used that temporal hash to shine a light on the human condition in ways that linear storytelling wouldn’t allow for.
Jeff Jensen & Damon Lindelof use the same approach to tell a story about love and creation, and about how each produces a yearning for something destined to leave us.
Love is what motivates Dr. Manhattan to create his version of paradise: his own glass jar, his own comforting home, and his own replicas of the two people who first showed him what unrestrained joy looks like. He builds them to want nothing more than to spur that same joy in others instead of hoarding it for themselves. And yet, he leaves one of the originals bitter and abandoned by his creator. The man’s many copies stand wounded, in their firm and upright way, at the thought that their new master wants to leave them.
And love is also what causes Jon Osterman and Angela Abar to forge a life together, a joining of two souls into one that, unlike the “everything” Dr. Manhattan and Ozymandias once spoke of, must not only end, but end in abject tragedy.
"In this time and this place with an unstable human who drinks too much whiskey and called me a Smurf."
Watchmen takes advantage of Dr. Manhattan’s scattered, all-at-once experience of the timeline to incubate and dramatize those ideas in this novel fashion. The episode’s frame story amounts to Cal and Angela’s first date — a series of predictions and parlor tricks that warn her of everything that’s to come, in sufficiently vague terms, with the knowledge that it will nevertheless be enough to bring the two of them together. Some things Dr. Manhattan keeps hidden. Some things he allows Angela to arrive at on her own. But in any case, he does so with the certainty of where they will lead, because he’s already experienced their past and their future and their present, or rather, he’s experiencing them all right now.
Jensen & Lindelof justify the series’s most questionable, small universe twist with the prospect of how maddening it would be to fall in love with someone like that. Why would a god, any god, abandon his nigh-omnipotent existence and confine himself to a mortal life? Perhaps he would do it as “a Zeus thing,” a transformation borne of attraction. Or maybe it’s the only sort of risk he can take in order to show the woman he cares for that he would sacrifice for her, that he’d even give up paradise for her, that he’d live with fear again for her. The transition from Jon to Cal is a great leveling, one that calls for the grandest pound of flesh from a deity to earn ten years of love.
Watchmen likewise had a number of narrative bills coming due. Viewers needed to know why Adrian Veidt was on Europa and what the hell was happening there. We needed to know why a god would wrap himself in a human being’s skin and sinew. We needed to know what would motivate Will Reeves to go on this late life crusade. And against all odds, “A God Walks into Abar” offers roundly satisfying answers to each of these quandaries.
Europa is the Eden that Ozymandias thought he wanted, the chance to be adored, which he trades in exchange for the solution to Dr. Manhattan’s wish to be closer to the woman he loves (and, perhaps, not to lose her like he did Laurie). The servants orbiting Jupiter with Veidt are the product of Osterman’s effort to create life, to find a gentler world, amid the larger creation motifs the episode gestures toward throughout. Dr. Manhattan chooses to become human again to give his romance with Angela the opportunity to truly flourish. And over the course of ten years, Veidt’s liberation-turned-gilded cage, and the Abars’ love and life together, are each allowed to blossom in a way that fits the other puzzle pieces that Watchmen has laid down.
In this instance, the cake is only metaphorically a lie.
But not all of it fits so neatly. When it comes time to explore how Reeves became involved in all of this, “A God Walks into Abar” chooses to make Dr. Manhattan a conduit, a channel between two people who barely understand one another’s existence. He inadvertently (or purposely) allows them to start something that will bring each of them to the present moment. But in contrast to the other events in the episode — which marry each pre-ordained future effects with some account of their causes in the present — the time-shifted exchange between William Reeves and his granddaughter is sui generis. It is a stable time loop, one where it’s impossible to say who initiated the knowledge of Judd Crawford that starts all of this, if anyone did.
It is a paradox, the kind that not even Dr. Manhattan can resolve. But it’s not the one that moves the man who ascended to godhood. It is, instead, that Angela tries to save his life, even when told, by a man who sees the future, that it’s impossible. That is the moment when he falls in love with her. And yet, it is both the last moment they share together and also the thing that causes him to seek out the first one. With that, Watchmen’s penultimate episode is a paean to the inscrutability of love, the incomprehensibility of creation within this sorry universe, where misbehaving quantum particles tie pieces of us together across time and space, far beyond our comprehension and far outside our control
“A God Walks into Abar”, admittedly, writes too much of this on the screen, letting Dr. Manhattan’s trademark first person narration and a few writerly monologues do more of the heavy lifting where the clockwork situations presented do enough of that on their own. But the episode also realizes these piercing ideas in a way that only this sort of fantastical story can: the unknowable quality of vital things that seemingly emerge from nothing, whether it’s a man or a whole world, and the irrevocable pull of love between two people, that causes us to take risks, to make sacrifices, and do everything in our power to reassure and protect one another, even when fate itself stands in our way.
