Want to hear more from the actors and creators of your favorite shows and films? Subscribe to The Cinema Spot on YouTube for all of our upcoming interviews!
Managing editor & film and television critic with a Bachelor's of Arts in English Literature with a Writing Minor from the University of Guam. Currently in graduate school completing a Master's in English Literature.
God is among us, and he has returned as a black man. In this article, we review and analyze the penultimate episode of Watchmen‘s first season.
“A God Walks into Abar” is directed by Nicole Kassell and written by Jeff Jensen (Tomorrowland) and Damon Lindelof.
If you haven’t seen the previous seven episodes (or this one for that matter) of the season and want to avoid spoilers, do so now then return to this article. With that said, major spoilers are ahead! You may also check out our reviews on the first several episodes of the show.
This week’s episode of Watchmen doesn’t revolve around any theme seen before such as vigilantism but instead focuses on a tragic love story intertwined with space-time. You can almost say that, as revealed last episode, Angela Abar is the time traveler’s wife.
“A God Walks into Abar” is exactly what the pun is about. A god, Doctor Manhattan, walks into a Vietnamese bar on the anniversary of Abar’s parents’ death, on a day where the country celebrates Manhattan’s end to the Vietnam War. The episode takes a diachronic narrative that spans over decades of time, and its complex events are difficult to grasp upon first viewing unless one meticulously pays attention as the episode progresses.
In the past, Jon Osterman had been a young boy in 1936 who stays in a couple’s home prior to moving to America with his father, and he makes it his purpose to “create something beautiful.” He wanders into the couple’s room where he finds a glass container full of nature’s beauty. He hides in their closet, where he spies on the couple having “overwhelmingly joyful” sex.
Before departing for America, the couple gives Jon a Bible and tell him about the Book of Genesis:
God created the world. You see, there was a time when there was nothing at all, and he made everything. The sky, the seas, and he even made the people.
The couple tells young Jon that they were “creating a life” after the death of their own son.
At the bar, Abar is a soldier in the country. Manhattan offers her a drink, then tries to convince her that he is Doctor Manhattan. He can create life and proves it by forming a chicken egg in his right hand. He also tells her that they adopt three children in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where her family is from. She disbelieves him but eventually agrees to go out to dinner with him. As they are having this conversation, Manhattan is also present a moon on Jupiter called Europa. He creates life there along with his own Adam and Eve after the likeness of the couple from his youth.
He says:
Adam and Eve are fictional characters. In Europa, I did it for real. I knitted their bodies from the microbes in the water. Two infants that, by virtue of accelerated biomechanical maturation, would soon become a man and a woman. I could then higher brain function, instantaneous speech, self-awareness, and then I bring them a place in which to live: a manor house.
Later, Abar picks out cadavers for Manhattan to replicate as his Earthly human form. He takes the identity of Calvin “Cal” Abar. Their marriage lasts 10 years then ends “tragically.”
Cal meets Adrian Veidt, who gives him a device that allows him to completely forget his past life as Doctor Manhattan. Veidt explains:
You seem to replicate basic human physiognomy, but what about the physiology? Theoretically, [the device could be placed] into your prefrontal cortex that would short circuit your memory. Without the awareness of your abilities, [Angela Abar] wouldn’t know to use them [ex]cept perhaps as a reflex in life-threatening situations. You could walk and talk and live among the normal [human being]s undetected. You just wouldn’t know you were Doctor Manhattan. I irradiated it with tachyon particles. One small part of the universe even you can’t see. A blind spot. This, Jon, is Plan A. ‘A’ for ‘Amnesia.’
Cal, as Manhattan, then sends his old friend to Europa, where Veidt believes he is living in utopia. Cal then travels to Nelson Gardner/ Captain Metropolis’s mansion in New York City (where Will Reeves resides) and tells him about his granddaughter Angela Abar.
In the present, Abar breaks the device out of Cal’s head in attempts to save him from the Seventh Kavalry. Cal, as Doctor Manhattan, teleports the children to safety and speaks to his wife about her grandfather before he is inevitably captured by members of the Kavalry.
What’s crazy about this whole episode is its theme of life. While Manhattan can create life and be in a lifeform, he cannot seem to properly imitate it. His lack of social skills is replaced with a knowledge of science and logic, and it is he who is another catalyst for the show’s events. His powers of living within space and time invoke “the Chicken or the Egg” paradox:
The answer appears to be both at exactly the same time.
As he speaks to Abar in the present, he sets up Chief Crawford’s murder by literally simultaneously revealing to Reeves ten years in the past the man’s role in the Kavalry and the fact that his detective Angela Abar is his granddaughter.
The episode includes the return of the Egg as a symbol for life. In the fourth episode, the object represented legacy and wealth, but the overall meaning this season has been life. When Manhattan creates an egg from nothing, he tells Abar he would never pass his powers onto offspring without their consent. He explains:
I suppose I could transfer my atomic components into some sort of organic material. If someone were to consume it, they would inherit my powers.
Fortunately, Abar cracks the egg and drops its yolk into Manhattan’s glass of beer, and he drinks it.
With life, the episode brings us a tough lesson on love. With a capital ‘L.’ As he says, “Don’t all relationships end in tragedy?” As a boy, he is told that what he witnessed “was a good thing, a beautiful thing; make it your purpose to create something beautiful.”
For Manhattan, it seems love conquers hate. He knows Abar will fall in love with him despite him being the indirect reason for her tragedy. Doctor Manhattan was in Vietnam, where he decimated a village, leaving a boy as a survivor and growing up to be the puppeteer killed Abar’s parents. At the bar, he tells her, “Haven’t you ever done anything you knew you were gonna regret?”
For Angela Abar herself, the meaning of love involves being with loved ones and more so, in her case, family. Manhattan speaks of his higher dimensional knowledge about the love she desires:
I know the moment I first see her, I sense profound emptiness and loss. I know because she says over and over again that she doesn’t want a family, yet it is clear through her actions that it is all that she wants.
Lastly, the episode teaches us about time and how it’s tied to life and love. Manhattan tells Abar, “The way I experience time is unique and, for you particularly, infuriating … I was already in love with you I don’t experience the concept of ‘before’.” When he speaks of their future together, he continues by saying, “There is a period of time I cannot see. When I try to look, there is only darkness. All I know is that you were there before it begins and you are there when it ends.”
“A God Walks into Abar” explains why Doctor Manhattan was on Earth and never on Mars as people have thought. It is an episode that you could consider to be a filler but, on the other hand, could work as an integral component to the Watchmen season. Its use of the egg symbolism continues to be a great one. Life, love, and time are the trio of humanity, and tragedy lends itself as the meaning and purpose of the three. As usual, the cinematography and musical score are on point but focuses more on what makes being human so bearable. The writing of the episode is very much of Jeff Jensen’s style. His work on Disney’s Tomorrowland really transfers over to this HBO episode. Overall, an excellent addition to the Watchmen lore, and here’s to hoping we end the season with a bang!
(Please add Doris Day’s “The Tunnel of Love” and The Fleetwoods’ “Mr. Blue” to your music playlists.)
If you stick around after the credits, you’ll see that Adrian Veidt is punished for his crimes but is broken out of confinement. He is asked, “Why is Heaven not enough?” and he replies, “Heaven is not enough because Heaven doesn’t need me.”
What do you think? Are we missing anything? Have you seen Watchmen yet? Have you read the 1986-87 run of the comic book series? If not, do you plan to? Let us know! For more DC-related news and reviews follow The Cinema Spot on Twitter (@TheCinemaSpot) and Instagram (@thecinemaspot_).
Watchmen is out on HBO now!
Managing editor & film and television critic with a Bachelor's of Arts in English Literature with a Writing Minor from the University of Guam. Currently in graduate school completing a Master's in English Literature.
