HBO's Watchmen forges its own path, but it also doesn't forget where it came from.
It's packed full of covert references throughout its first season - so if you're curious, here
are some of the Easter eggs you might have missed.
In what might be a meta-joke about Easter eggs, Watchmen features a ton of actual eggs.
"Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
The answer appears to be both."
Some serve as references to the comic series.
For example, in the first episode, as Angela Abar breaks up egg yolks in a bowl, they form
the smiley face you might recognize from the cover of the first issue of Watchmen.
There are plenty of other eggs throughout the season that are more generally symbolic.
Dr. Manhattan conjures and drinks one during his first date with Angela.
In the fourth episode, we see a couple that gets some much-needed fertility help from
the mysterious Lady Trieu spilling eggs on their porch.
And during the series finale, Angela finds one egg left unbroken among the others she
smashed to the ground earlier in the evening.
Dr. Manhattan left that egg behind after his death as a way of transferring his powers.
Angela consumes the egg, but whether she has his powers is left ambiguous.
Let's jump back to the smiley face image: Naturally, show creator Damon Lindelof and
his crew found other ways to work the iconic visual into the show, particularly the blood
spatter on the Comedian's yellow button.
The first episode of Watchmen opens on a horrific depiction of the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921,
which remains one of the most devastating instances of racial violence in U.S. history.
White citizens attacked Greenwood, a primarily African-American neighborhood, looting, robbing,
and killing with abandon.
In Watchmen's universe, descendants of the attack were paid reparations, causing resentment
among white supremacists.
In that sequence, the show sneaks in a terrible, tragic reminder of the button - a blood spatter
on the head of young Will Reeves that perfectly mimics the smiley face.
A similar blood splatter can be spotted later in the same episode, on Judd's badge during
his hanging.
Watchmen takes place in a world quite different from ours, where Nixon never resigned and
Robert Redford was the president that followed him.
A lot is different culturally, too, including the popular reading material.
Max Shea's pirate yarn Tales of the Black Freighter is prominently featured and excerpted
in the original comic.
That explains why there are so many references to pirates in the show, specifically, a detective
named Pirate Jenny, a costume donned by one of Angela's children, a skull-and-crossbones
wax seal on a game warden's letter, a pirate flag, the name of Laurie's hotel, and more.
Several characters are also spotted reading a book called Fogdancing in quick blink-and-you'll-miss-it
shots, another novel written by the prolific, fictional Shea.
Seems like it's pretty good, too.
"Would you like me to get you another book?
"No, I like this one.”
When a young Angela looks at a series of VHS tapes in the show's seventh episode, one of
them is a Hollywood adaptation of Fogdancing.
Both versions of Nite Owl were major characters in the Watchmen comic, but his story doesn't
get much play in the show.
The show is, however, rife with actual owls and references to the nocturnal birds.
Laurie even has a pet owl.
"What's his name?"
"Who."
"The owl."
"Who.
That's his name.
Ask him yourself."
Angela's other daughter dresses as an owl, and the kids also have a few owl toys visible
on their dresser.
Plus, when Angela dons night-vision goggles, she looks eerily like Nite Owl himself.
The first Nite Owl's famous tell-all book, Under the Hood, also makes a cameo.
In the first episode, a copy of the book is on doomed Sheriff Judd Nelson's desk when
Angela stops by his office, and during their subsequent chat, she sips coffee from an owl-shaped
mug.
One of the big questions in the early episodes of the season was where Dr. Manhattan was
hiding.
Was he on Mars as widely believed?
Or somewhere else?
As it turned out, he was hiding in plain sight as Cal Abar, supportive, loving husband to
Angela.
After the two fell in love, Dr. Manhattan took on the appearance of a regular human
and had Angela wipe his memory so he could live as normal a life as possible, at least
for a while.
There are plenty of clues leading up to Cal's big reveal.
Other characters are skeptical about Cal's "accident" that left him with amnesia.
"It was a car crash, right?
I've done a lot of research on memory.
Total amnesia's extremely rare."
And he and Laurie, a former lover of Dr. Manhattan, seem to have a special connection right off
the bat.
In the eighth episode, we learn how he and Angela met.
Two very specific musical cues accompany Dr. Manhattan throughout the episode: "Mr. Blue"
by The Fleetwoods and a riff on George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue."
In the Watchmen universe, the U.S. wins the Vietnam War decisively thanks to Dr. Manhattan's
help, and President Richard Nixon is exalted as a hero.
Vietnam becomes the 51st state, and Nixon is remembered as an American icon.
Throughout the series, Vietnam's inclusion in the United States is addressed rather broadly.
Angela grows up there, and Saigon is mentioned repeatedly as an American city.
During Judd Crawford's funeral, the flag draped over his coffin looks very different from
the real flag, and it bears 51 stars.
During the show's pilot, when Looking Glass interrogates a suspect inside a mysterious
chamber that shows alternating patriotic and disturbing images, Nixon's face can be seen
on a revised Mount Rushmore.
The bar in Saigon where Angela and Dr. Manhattan first meet is called Mr. Eddy's Bar, a direct
reference to the comics and the site of one of its most horrific events.
Eddie Blake, also known as the Comedian, took up with a Vietnamese woman during the war,
but when she became pregnant, he lost interest in her.
After the unnamed woman slashed Blake's face with a beer bottle, leaving a scar, he shot
her in the face at Mr. Eddy's and killed her.
The director of the episode, Nicole Kassell, told Polygon that the show's production crew
used descriptions from the comic to inform what the interior of Mr. Eddy's would look
like.
Dr. Manhattan explains towards the end of the season that everything that will happen
has either already occurred or is happening right now, making every outcome inevitable.
He's also notably the son of a watchmaker.
As such, there's a clock motif that runs through Watchmen, connecting Dr. Manhattan's thought
process and wisdom to Adrian Veidt.
Veidt, who spends years imprisoned on Europa with cloned servants created by Dr. Manhattan
as his only company, writes a play for the clones to perform called The Watchmaker's
Son.
It's a retelling of Dr. Manhattan's origin story, though it burns one of the clones to
death rather than giving him superpowers.
Beyond that, there are plenty of clocks in the show, all of which reference the comics'
Doomsday Clock as well as its final cover, which itself depicts a bloody clock.
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