Secrets were revealed, questions were answered, plans were unfurled, and by the time the dust
settled, even secret identities seemed to be changing hands.
Now we're here to unpack it all.
This is the ending of Watchmen season one, explained.
Though Angela Abar was the clear main character for much of the series, at least in Tulsa,
Watchmen also featured two other key law enforcement officers whose lives were forever tied to
the events of the original comic.
In the HBO series we meet an older version of Laurie Blake, the second Silk Spectre and
Doctor Manhattan's ex-girlfriend, and Looking Glass, a Tulsa cop who happened to be near
ground zero on the day Adrian Veidt unleashed his alien creature to save humanity.
As the season ends, both Laurie and LG find themselves in the same place, with the same
agenda: Arrest Adrian Veidt for his genocidal crimes, and keep pushing their investigation
as high as it needs to go, in spite of Veidt's insistence otherwise.
"Because the world will end."
"Yeah.
People keep saying that, but it never seems to happen."
So what happens to them next?
Well, it's easy to see them teaming up on the future of the Veidt investigation and
following it all the way through.
By the time it's all over, Looking Glass might even join the FBI, and Laurie might finally
be able to move on from the last shreds of her superhero past.
Watchmen the comic famously reached its climax with the reveal that Adrian Veidt was behind
the death of the Comedian, and that it was part of his own massive scheme to "save" humanity
by uniting the world behind a common alien enemy.
To do that, he teleported a giant squid creature into the heart of New York City, killing three
million people.
Veidt's bounced around a lot since '85.
He spent a lot of time holed up in his Arctic sanctuary, Karnak, then was trapped on Europa
for several years, and upon finally returning to Earth he summoned all of his ego and intellect
and stopped Lady Trieu from taking Doctor Manhattan's power.
With that in mind, he was convinced he'd be worshipped as the World's Smartest Man yet
again.
Laurie Blake and Looking Glass had other ideas, though, and armed with the video Veidt made
for newly elected President Robert Redford in 1985, they decided to arrest him for the
deaths of the three million in New York, and for the conspiracy that had continued since,
via intermittent squid rain engineered by Veidt.
After a strange trial on Europa, Veidt is presumably headed for another trial on Earth,
but this time he's likely to have plenty of defenders who hail him as a visionary who
did what he had to in order to save the world.
For all we know, Veidt won't even survive long enough for a trial, but that might be
what Laurie and LG are angling for.
As for Redford, who became a co-conspirator in Veidt's plan when he took office, Blake
makes it clear that it would be fine with her to bring the president up on charges as
well, which means the United States government is about to be rocked by a lot of upheaval.
Much of Watchmen's season finale is devoted to explaining exactly what was really going
on with the mysterious Lady Trieu, and it turns out there's quite a history to mine.
Lady Trieu, the Smartest Woman in the World, was born to a mother who stole a semen sample
from Adrian Veidt's private vault.
Trieu inherited Veidt's intellect, ambition, and insatiable ego, and it all led her to
believe that she was the only one in the world worthy of holding Doctor Manhattan's power.
"If I can take his power, I can fix the world."
As it turns out, Trieu was planning to kill Manhattan all along, and her Millennium Clock
housed the device that would have allowed her to do it.
Adrian Veidt was able to stop her at the last moment with a rain of frozen squid, but while
Lady Trieu is dead, her legacy is not.
Bian, the clone of Trieu's own mother who served as her daughter, is still alive, and
her massive corporation and its many holdings will go to her.
Will Bian learn the right lessons from her mother's hubris?
Will she right the wrongs of Trieu, or will she in time adopt the same egotistical outlook
on the world?
Lady Trieu's plan to take Doctor Manhattan's power for herself nearly worked, in part,
because she was using the Seventh Kavalry plan to also take Doctor Manhattan's power
as cover.
The Kavalry, an extension of the racist organization known as Cyclops that William Reeves spent
nearly all of his adult life fighting, had been scheming for years to incite an overthrow
of President Redford, and their fortunes shifted dramatically when they learned Manhattan was
back on Earth.
Armed with this knowledge and the resources of Joe Keene Jr., they developed their own
plan to essentially take over the U.S. government.
In the end, their plan failed, and Trieu used her own resources to vaporize all of Cyclops'
key leadership, including Joe Keene Sr.
The Cyclops is headless, but that doesn't mean it's dead.
White supremacy has been shown to have a particularly insidious hold on this world, and it's doubtful
that organized versions of it will vanish so quickly.
The season finale of Watchmen managed to pack a lot into its runtime, but one thing the
episode didn't address was the identity of one of Watchmen's strangest new characters:
"Lube Man."
The character - so named because of his greased, skin-tight silver suit - appeared only once
in the series proper, and made a very fast but unforgettable exit via a storm drain.
Ever since, fans of the show have been wondering who exactly was under all that silver.
The season finale didn't tell us, but HBO's canonical supplement to the series, Peteypedia,
seems to have spelled it out.
The compendium, named for Laurie Blake's FBI subordinate Dale Petey, hinted in previous
entries that Petey himself may have adopted the Lube Man identity, and the entries added
after the final episode aired all but confirm it.
Petey was Lube Man, and he was snooping through the investigation via his secret identity.
Angela Abar's life was forever changed by the events of Watchmen's first season.
She found out the grandfather she never met was Hooded Justice, and that he was still
alive and still working as a vigilante.
She found out the truth about her friend and mentor.
She had to reveal her husband was secretly Doctor Manhattan, only to lose him hours later,
and she had to figure out how to pick up the pieces after Jon died once and for all.
With all this in mind, Watchmen season 1 approaches its final moments with the promise of a new
beginning for Angela.
With her children and her grandfather sleeping safely inside, she walks to her swimming pool
with a miraculously unbroken egg, swallows it, and remembers something Doctor Manhattan
told her.
"So, you can put them in this egg, and if I ate it, I could walk on water?"
The season stops short of visually confirming that Manhattan did imbue that last egg with
his powers, therefore passing them on to Angela, but according to creator Damon Lindelof, there's
no real ambiguity there.
There's no reason to think all those things Jon said were leading nowhere, and after all...
Angela was bathed in blue light on the poster for the series.
The message is clear: Angela Abar is the new Doctor Manhattan, whether we got to see her
walk on water or not.
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