In Review: Watchmen – See How They Fly

Synopsis: Everything ends. For real this time.

Review: This final episode of the season brings all the story threads together, which includes Adrian Veidt’s return to earth.

The Story

The episode begins with a few flashbacks to Adrian Veidt in 1985 shortly after the events of the comic book. We see a young Vietnamese woman injecting herself with Veidt’s semen, which he apparently keeps locked in a sade behind his treasured picture of Alexander The Great. It is obvious that this is the mother of Madam Trieu. Time shifts slightly forward to 2008 in the arctic, where Veidt has a giant size lab and home. He gets a visit from Trieu who tells him that she is his daughter and explains how she was conceived. Veidt rejects her and says that she will never get any acknowledgment of money from him.

We then see Veidt’s rescue from the planet where he has been playing god to the beings that Dr. Manhattan created. It turns out that the message with the bodies that he used a few episodes back was to Madam Trieu.

Back on Earth. The seventh cavalry is proceeding with their plans to teleport Dr. Manhatten and steal his powers from him, but unbeknown to them is the fact that Madam Trieu has orchestrated everything so that she will be the one to take all of Dr. Manhatten’s power. It’s up to the combination of Angela, Agent Blake, Looking Glass who has been hiding in plain sight, and Adrian Veidt to stop Trieu, but Veidt’s plan to do these involves a lot of death.

The Acting

Jeremy Irons has been superb as Adrian Veidt throughout this series, but it is this episode where he truly gets a chance to show off the genius and hubris that is Ozymandias. The scenes where he is impatiently walking Angela and Looking Glass through his plans are absolutely brilliant. Irons does pretty much steals the show. But he also has a great scene with Hong Chau near the beginning of the show and it is a credit to her acting and Iron’s generosity as an actor they she is able to hold her own in a scene, which is pretty much the meeting of two geniuses that lack any sense of a moral compass or any compassion.

Overall

This was a wonderful finale, which puts all of the pieces from the season arc together in such a way that your jaw drops to the floor as you think to yourself, ‘So that’s what that was.’ The episode ends with a twist insofar as something that could happen in Angela’s future if indeed her theory about an egg turns out to be true. If it does turn out to be true. Then I should imagine a second season would focus on that.

Overall. A satisfying conclusion to what has been a pretty clever story, which is very worthy of the source material that it came from.