When I watched the first batch of episodes from Watchmen, I thought it tossed plenty of interesting balls into the air, but I questioned how and whether it would be able to catch all of them. As I discussed on The Serial Fanaticist podcast, showrunner Damon Lindelof (of Lost fame) is not necessarily known for delivering satisfying endings. His new series asked all sorts of intriguing questions about powerful institutions and those marginalized by them, and it threw in one eyebrow-raising plot point after another. But to answer all of the former and resolve all of the latter, seemed like too much for even the smartest [person] in the world to do in a satisfying way.
And yet, somehow, “See How They Fly” does it.
The finale of Watchmen’s first (and, blue god willing, only) season reveals Lady Trieu’s angle here, how it fits with the Seventh Kavalry’s plot, how Ozymandias factors into the proceedings, what Dr. Manhattan’s role is, how these schemes intersect with Will Reeves’s plans, and ultimately what Angela Abar’s place in these grand events is. This last chapter tells a story of so many people seeking adoration, vindication, and power, only to put it in the hands of the one person who wasn’t after any of it.
“See How They Fly” doesn’t just clarify the plot mechanics that lead to the episode’s climax, but also the motivations of everyone who reaches it. The racist, status quo-preserving rationale behind the Seventh Kavalry’s scheme has been clear for some time now, but the finale explains so much more about their plans. And it accounts for the Seventh Kavalry’s essential failure, the foolhardy assumption that they’ve thought this through and have all the right answers. Even left to their own (literal) devices, the forces of Cyclops would have just turned themselves to mush. The truth is that someone much smarter than them, a woman of color no less, was always pulling the strings.
That puppet master is Lady Trieu, and in Watchmen’s final character-defining, plot twist-revealing vignette, it establishes her as Adrian Veidt’s inheritor. She is, through one enterprising refugee’s plan, the daughter who has matched, if not exceeded, his genius. In the end, she plays the Seventh Kavalry like a fiddle, letting them do the dirty work of capturing Dr. Manhattan so that she can dispose of them and pin him down in one fell swoop. It’s another, echoing instance of a Veidt being one step ahead of everybody else.
This is really just a high class Gargamel-style smurfberry plot.
But “See How They Fly” explains why Lady Trieu is doing all of this. She claims that it’s to better the world, to use the power that Dr. Manhattan hoards to eliminate nuclear arsenals, to clean the air, and to fix all that ails us. But like her father, she’s shown a disturbing propensity to use whatever means are necessary if she believes her goals are just, and according to the man himself at least, her aim here is not one of pure altruism.
Instead, the episode suggests that all of this is an effort to impress her parents, to gain their approval, to show herself worthy of the gifts that she’s been given. She wants to prove that she can build herself up to the highest heights of human achievement on her own, as Adrian once challenged her to do.
But it’s Adrian who eventually thwarts her, declaring that she can’t be trusted because she suffers from the same sins he does: vanity and self-aggrandizement. He tells his compatriots that Lady Trieu must be stopped since soon she’ll demand the same sort of fealty he would. And in one of the many little bits of irony and connection in the episode and the season, he uses the frozen corpses of the offspring of his original giant squid to crush his own daughter, a dark echo of how he used the frozen corpses of Dr. Manhattan’s “children” to ask for her help.
There’s two ways to read that scene. The first is as a rare moment of self-awareness from Veidt, knowing what he would do with that power and where, given the hell he’s been through, it would eventually lead. The second is as another instance of, true to the show’s themes, a white male going to great lengths to preserve the status quo and prevent a person of color from surpassing him and assuming his legacy.
"Headbands are still cool in 2019, right? Right?"
Either way, the triumph is brief for Veidt. Whether his pronouncements are true of Lady Trieu, they’re true of himself. Ozymandias still seeks veneration and adoration. He saved the world, more or less, but grumbled miserably for decades because he never got to take credit for it. On Europa, he had the thing he always wanted — endless appreciation and devotion from everyone around him — but it was given reflexively, without genuine intention, and thus became hollow and even maddening. In the end, he saves the world once more, with an eye toward finally taking credit for it, but it’s also his downfall.
That’s the other cruel irony of “See How They Fly” and the button for Laurie Blake and Looking Glass in the episode. After everything, the two of them decide to arrest Veidt for the lives lost amid his gambit in the original comic. For Wade Tillman, it’s the opportunity to finally deliver justice to the man who wrecked so much of his life and left him so scared for so long, under the yoke of a lie.
For the former Ms. Juspeczyk, it’s the chance for her to have agency in this story. Having had time to reflect on her place in the events of 1985, she can now take charge rather than act as a bystander to larger forces. And Ozymandias himself pays this karmic price to have his deeds known, to return home, to leave his gilded cage of anonymity.
Despite that bitter triumph, Adrian and his daughter share an inability to thwart a god for more than a fleeting moment. Even though Dr. Manhattan sits trapped within his lithium prison, even though he’s disoriented from whatever Keene Jr. and Trieu have done to him, he still has the wherewithal to transport away the people he knows can stop this. He chooses to spend his final moments with the woman he loves. If Ozymandias was sent to his own private hell, Jon Osterman spends his last seconds on this Earth in his own private Heaven, experiencing all of his best moments with Angela at once.
"Oh sweetie, you've got a little schmutz on your forehead there."
As much as Watchmen is a story about racism and its institutional infestation, as much as it’s about masks and what happens when people don them, it’s also a story about love. It is, as the episode underlines, another thermodynamic miracle in the making, where two people come together despite lightyears of distance between them and change the world.
That change required a fair bit of bargaining though. William Reeves gave up Dr. Manhattan up to Lady Trieu in exchange for her eliminating Cyclops. But Dr. Manhattan very likely knew where his path led, and perhaps even suggested the trade to Reeves. Hooded Justice’s plan was to stop the organization he’d been fighting for nearly a century, while Dr. Manhattan had even grander plans, ones that may have widened Will Reeves’s aspirations.
As the season’s penultimate episode portended, Dr. Manhattan left something behind for his wife — a piece of himself that would give her godlike powers. In the final scene of the episode, she consumes it. Although “See How They Fly” ends too tantalizingly soon before she can walk on water, the implication is clear.
So many people in this episode have grasped at Dr. Manhattan this season, aiming to replicate or supplant or other best him. But the person who ultimately inherits his abilities is not one of the many who sought them. It is, instead, someone to whom they were given freely, who earned them. Angela showed herself worthy of that power through her capacity to love, to try to save what might be unsaveable, and for her willingness to fight for and appreciate what’s truly lovely and wonderful in this world, even when it’s inevitably fleeting.
Angela's so distraught that she's planning to escape to The Matrix.
But she’s also someone who has awoken to the injustices that lay under her nose. When Will Reeves offers some comfort and commiseration to his granddaughter, it comes with one admonition — that for all Dr. Manhattan did, he could have done more. They’re the words of a man who seems to know what’s ahead for the once and maybe future Sister Night.
His project, and the project of Lindelof’s Watchmen, was to show an awakening in Angela. She once believed, like Reeves himself once did, that our broken systems could be fixed from the inside, that they could welcome and be changed by people they once oppressed. But now she’s come to realize that the color of law was never going to supersede the color of her skin in the eyes of those who tried to hold onto the power her badge confers. Hers is a tale of epiphany,, of an insidiousness in the institutions she risked her life to protect that was, unbeknownst to her, ready to chew her up and spit her out as they had done with so many before her.
So she seizes the power that would never be willingly forsaken by those who possess it. That is, in its own subtle way, a radical message. It’s radical because it ties in with a moral that David Simon, who chronicled faltering institutions himself on The Wire once put it, that when those institutions have fully failed you, the only thing left to do is pick up a brick. Will Reeves couldn’t find justice from the police department or the shining heroes who were supposed to help him, so he found it himself, often in bloody terms. Watchmen firmly suggests that these institutions retain the same debilitating stink of racism in 2019 that they did during the time of Black Wall Street and ends with Angela Abar picking up one hell of a brick.
The way Angela’s son, Topher, looks at her mask, much as William Reeves’s son once did, suggests (as Watchmen inevitably must) that this cycle isn’t over, that the age of heroes and vigilantes isn’t done just yet, and that those who’ve suffered these traumas will keep searching for ways to exercise them. When Ozymandias kills The Game Warden, his erstwhile servant asks him why he made him wear a mask, and Veidt responds that masks make men cruel. Only time will tell whether Angela’s son, who’s suffered his fair share of trauma, will don the same type of hood his mother and great grandfather did, and whether he’ll mete out justice with the same sort of cruelty.
Joke's on her. That water is probably FREEZING.
But the other piece of Watchmen’s radicalness comes from whose hands it chooses to leave the power to obtain that sort of justice. While superhero stories can come in many stripes, most often they are a power fantasy. A strapping hero, typically one the audience can see themselves as, fights for truth and justice and the American way with the sort of outsized, rousing thrills that the gray areas and grim realities of the real world can’t match. It is certainly bold for the show to declare in Angela’s raw egg cocktail and first, tenuous step, that it’s time for a change in who gets to embody those power fantasies.
It is remarkable, then, how well this show puts everyone in place and builds, thematically and narratively, to that moment. In the end, Watchmen finds a reason to centrally locate everyone of significance to the show’s story and themes, as though each vignette and sequence we witnessed led to this moment. It reaches its climax at the same place it started, in what was once Black Wall Street, in the theater where young Will Reeves saw a black hero in a mask and borrowed his name and mission. For a show that, from its first frame, asked probing questions about who holds power, how that intersects with the institutions of law enforcement, and who gets to be inspired by the power fantasies of masked adventures, it answers all three with a woman of color about to walk on water.
Each moment had a prelude and each setup led to a payoff. Almost every loose end is tied together by the show’s final frame. There are still question that can be raised, objections that could be lodged, but incredibly, everything that the series set up, it knocked down. It seems too easy to say — for a show that trod into such messy territory, that tugged on so many knotted threads of both the real world and its fictional one — but there’s only one word to describe Watchmen and its finale: clockwork.
