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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.
“The End, my friend. The End is Nigh.” In this article, we review and analyze the first season finale of Watchmen.
“See How They Fly” is directed by Frederick E.O. Toye (Alias, Fringe) and written by Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof.
If you haven’t seen the previous 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.
The direction of this finale is beyond outstanding, and if the show ends here, that could be alright too. Damon Lindelof and everyone else who helped get the season to this point must be lauded for their excellent work!
“See How They Fly” ties up all the major loose ends but leaves us wanting more and wondering what else could happen in the alternate universe of which Watchmen is a part. Leaving where the penultimate episode ended: in a post-credits scene of Adrian Veidt in Europa confinement. The year in which this particular event occurs, as it turns out, is between 2008 and 2019.
First, we have to return to where it all started: November 1st, 1985, the day before Ozymandias’s giant squid creation destroys a great population of North America. While Veidt is recording a message to future President Robert Redford from his Antarctic lair, a Vietnamese woman sneaks into his office and covertly retrieves a vial of Veidt’s semen from a hidden vault. She impregnates herself. She is Bian.
Later, in 2008, Bian’s daughter Trieu visits Veidt at his lair to thank him for saving the world. As they have tea, she discovers his device and tells him his idea is obsolete, that doing what he did would be a “rerun.” She tells him that she’s found Doctor Manhattan by tracking his “very specific radioactive frequency” in Jupiter. Trieu wants “destroy [Manhattan] and take his power” in order to become the next Ozymandias.
I can fix the world. Disappear the nukes, end starvation, clean the air. All the things [Doctor Manhattan] should have done. I already designed a quantum centrifuge capable of absorbing his energy so I can transfer it to me.
Sure enough, she soon does so. She gets $42 billion from Veidt by telling him she is his daughter and introduces herself as “Sample 2346.” Her mother Bian was one of the Vietnamese refugees working in his lair; she recovered his semen sample from a “refrigerated vault with all [of] his vials of cum” hidden behind a painting of Alexander the Great.
Back in the near-future on Europa, Veidt escapes from his prison cell and kills the masked clone with a horseshoe. The man wears a mask because Veidt says, “Masks make men cruel [and] having a worthy adversary helped keep me sane.” However, the masked man is not but “puts on a hell of a show.” The other clones bid Ozymandias farewell as he boards the spacecraft. He watches as he ascends into space, and his message atop of the moon that says “Save Me” is followed by the word “Daughter.”
Veidt steps into a chamber of preservation — “to prevent dehydration, starvation, and potential insanity” — where his body is encased in gold.
In the present, the golden statue of Adrian Veidt is brought to Lady Trieu in her facility. Her father is released from his hypersleep, just in time for the Millennium Clock to be activated in the coming minutes.
Wade Tillman disguises himself as a Seventh Kavalry member and attempts to break a restrained Laurie Break from their clutches. Senator Joe Keene has Doctor Manhattan in a cage made of synthetic lithium made from a myriad of melted watch batteries. Angela Abar storms into the SK lair where she tells everyone that Lady Trieu planned for Doctor Manhattan to be caught this way. Her equipment was stolen because she allowed it to be.
Keene steps into a chamber, where he intends to draw in Manhattan’s power, but everyone is teleported by Lady Trieu and transported elsewhere in Tulsa, where Veidt is also present.
Trieu opens the chamber, where Keene is now a big pool of blood, gushing out under Veidt, Blake, and Tillman and through the bottom of Manhattan’s cage. She then uses his energy to disintegrate the members of the Kavalry, while Manhattan teleports his three good allies to Veidt’s Antarctic lair. Abar is left behind in the Tulsa area because her husband says, “I don’t wanna be alone when I die. Don’t touch the light.”
In Antarctica, Veidt intends to drop more squid, this time in Tulsa. He uses his device and algorithm to teleport them directly to the Oklahoman town. Tillman discovers he was behind the attack in 1985, and Blake had known about it.
Before he is absorbed by Trieu’s technology and dies, Manhattan leaves Abar with his final words: “I’m in every moment. We were together. All at once.” Abar receives a call from Blake through the Doctor Manhattan phonebooth as Tulsa police arrive and Trieu attempts to become a god. She takes refuge in the Dreamland theater as a barrage of frozen squid falls from the sky like “a Gatling gun from the heavens.” Trieu is crushed by her own device, her fate presumed dead.
In the theater, Abar finds her grandfather Will Reeves. He tells her that Jon had foreseen his own death by having Reeves make a deal with Trieu. Meanwhile, Veidt is arrested while having Blake and Tillman depart in Nite Owl’s old aircraft “Archie.”
In the aftermath, Abar leaves the theater with her children and grandfather and it is revealed that Red Scare, Pirate Jenny, and Bian are survivors. Abar takes her family to her secret hideout in the bakery, where he oldest child Topher discovers his adopted mother’s vigilante identity. She takes them home and waits for everyone to sleep. She cleans the mess she made in the kitchen before her husband was captured. There, she finds an uncracked egg inside of the carton.
Abar consumes the egg yolk at the poolside of her home, then puts one foot above the water.
The Watchmen Season 1 finale sets aside vigilante as a theme and manifests what is under the many layers of the show: the wrath of colonialism.
On the one hand, we have Lady Trieu and her mother-daughter Bian. In 1985, Bian colonizes herself with the DNA of an American as a form of revenge. In her native tongue, she says:
I want to ride the strong winds, crush the angry waves, slay the killer whales in the Eastern sea, chase away the Wu army, reclaim the land, remove the yoke of slavery, I will not bend my back to be a slave.
Trieu’s maternal blood relative “shot herself up with some of [Veidt’s] legacy” because she is angry at the white man’s power. In order to beat him, she must join him, and she birth a daughter who Veidt soon discovers is his “most worthy adversary.”
Trieu, with the anger of the indigenous and the arrogance of a colonist, represents a power we must not take lightly. As Veidt says of her (and lowkey of himself):
She is clearly a raging narcissist whose ambition knows no limits. It’s hubris, literal hubris. Anyone who seeks to attain power of a god must be prevented at all costs of attaining it.
Of course, like father like daughter. Veidt adds, “Opus esse uno unum cognoscendi,” or “It takes one to know one.” People have limitations but Doctor Manhattan has none. When you achieve his level of power, the impossible can be made possible. This is why Veidt says:
Without a constant reminder of otherworldly threat, the world’s superpowers would start pointing their arsenals at each other again.
Veidt initially underestimates his daughter’s prowess when he belittles her at his lair. She rescues him from Europa just to show him what she can do.
I brought you back so you could be here in person to watch me achieve anything having coming from nothing.
On the other hand is the colonizers themselves, although the vilest of white men tend to lack brain power and they will always be undermined by the minority. Senator Keene talks about riding on a white horse into the White House. The White Horse, as written in the Book of Revelation, is the symbol of death, and this is only the beginning of the end for Watchmen.
In the middle is the oppressed citizen: Will Reeves. As his civilian identity and as vigilante Hooded Justice, he is the synecdoche for Westernized minorities. By wearing the mask, Reeves conveys not anger, but fear and hurt. He tells his granddaughter:
You can’t hide under a mask. Wounds need air. You can’t make an omelette without breaking a couple eggs.
Nearly a century after the riots that it’s faced, Tulsa endures another disaster. This season finale of Watchmen remains breathtaking in its storytelling narrative, cinematography, and musical score. In the end, the town’s Dreamland theater loses several letters from its sign, with “DR M” shining in bright light. This is a little allusion to Doctor Manhattan and what happens in the finale’s final scene, in which Abar may just become the next Manhattan. The “Wild Animals” poster in Abar’s daughter’s room is another synecdoche of Watchmen and how the world is full of wild animals just wanting to tear at each other.
Speaking of animals, the Beatles’ song “I Am the Walrus” ends the season with a splash in the final scene, and its lyrics are integrated visually throughout the episode. Even its lyric from the first verse “see how they fly” is the title of the finale.
Another song used in the episode is Gordon MacRae’s “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'” from the 1955 film Oklahoma, the same state in which Watchmen takes place.
“See How They Fly” provides a promising ending to the season, however, it leaves some unanswered questions for the nine episodes of the show.
- Who is the Lube Man, and does he have any significance whatsoever to the series?
- Will we ever get to see what becomes of Angela Abar?
- Will we see Red Scare and Pirate Jenny get larger roles if a second season is to be ordered?
- With Lady Trieu and the Seventh Kavalry gone, Adrian Veidt arrested, and perhaps the same with President Robert Redford, who will be in charge of North America now?
Regardless, we get a meritable sequel to the comic arc with this season of the show. As I’ve predicted/theorized in my reviews of the previous episodes since the fourth, Watchmen remakes the events of the comics but in a way that we haven’t seen before. Now, we have more details to corroborate:
- A female character discovers her estranged bloodline. In the comics, Laurie Blake finds out Edward Blake the Comedian is her father. In the show, Angela Abar discovers her grandfather is Will Reeves the Hooded Justice, while it is revealed that Adrian Veidt/ Ozymandias is Lady Trieu’s daughter.
- Now that he’s revealed to be a vigilante, Will Reeves is an old-timer who goes into hiding like Blake and Veidt in the series and like Sally Jupiter and Hollis Mason in the comics.
And what is lovely to note is the fact that Manhattan creates life on Europa, a moon of Jupiter, which is the surname of his former lover, Laurie Blake Jupiter.
The finale further showcases the effects of post-colonialism in ways that we could never imagine. It goes as far as incorporating the Merneptah Stele, a rare remnant from a lost civilization ruled by a Pharoah and full of slaves. Veidt cites a couple lines from its inscription:
Israel is desolate, and her seed is no more.
Palestine is become a widow for Egypt.
With that said, we also learn about the preservation of history. As Manhattan says moments before he dies, “All we ever see of stars are their old photographs.”
Watchmen deserves many awards, and this episode is just a synecdoche of the show as are the previous episodes. Its themes on vigilantism, post-colonialism, and family are more than enough to prove why this is so. The meaning behind the show’s symbolism of the egg and the consequential reveal of Abar as the potential new Manhattan have been foreshadowed since the pilot. If we don’t get a second season (but perhaps this won’t be the case), at least we have a one-season television series that people will have discussions on for years to come. It teases the return of Cyclops but unpredictably eliminates that possibility and reveals Trieu as the true (no pun intended) mad mastermind of the show. Its remarkable writing and every other aspect have meticulously made the series so great that it would be difficult to say otherwise.
9.8/ 10
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.
