Welcome to the Heavy Spoilers show, I’m your host Deffinition and this is the channel where we’ve been watching the Watchmen to break down everything that you need to know about the show and the characters in it.
Throughout this, we’re gonna be discussing the mysterious Lady Trieu and going over the best fan theories about her origin story and what her overall plan could be.
There will be heavy spoilers here so if you aren’t fully caught up on the show and don’t want to know what could be happening in the future then I highly suggest that you turn off now.
Thank you for clicking the, now let’s get into who Lady Trieu is.
Lady Trieu Explained
Lady Trieu, played by Hong Chau is a world-famous trillionaire that owns a vast majority of businesses and research departments that specialise in cloning, pharmaceuticals, and temporal devices. Trieu is a futurist who seems to have an unlimited amount of resources at her disposal and the means to get whatever she wants.
This is exemplified in her introduction in Watchmen Episode 4 in which the character wishes to trade a newborn baby with a couple who are unable to have children in exchange for their land. Using DNA samples Trieu has managed to create the child from their genetics and it’s clear that she has the means and abilities to play God with whoever she chooses.
Trieu also owns all of Ozymandias corporations and subsidiaries after purchasing them in 2012 and she seems to be obsessed with the character, erecting a mysterious location known as the Millenium Clock on the outskirts of Tulsa and breaking the group by quoting Shelley’s poem Ozymandias , most notably the line ‘Look Upon My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair.’
The character also keeps a golden statue of Ozymandias as company in her Vivarium that bears a striking similarity to the one that Veidt had at his palace in Karnak and she clearly knows that the character is still alive because of her accidental use of the present tense when discussing him.
I’ll get into the more major connection between the two later but I just thought I’d drop that in as we talk about where Veidt is later on.
Lady Trieu’s Origin And Name
Lady Trieu hails from Vietnam but outside of this very little is actually know about the character.
The name Lady Trieu actually comes from a 3rd Century Vietnam Warrior. Lady Trieu managed to resist The Chinese Occupation of Vietnam and she is pretty much known as the Joan Of Arc of the country.
Vietnam is a massively important part of Watchmen lore and it actually differs massively from the real world country that we know today. In Watchmen history, America actually won the Vietnam war because of Doctor Manhattan and since then it has become a part of the United States.
This is why the American Flag in the show differs slightly to the one we know as it contains Vietnam and several other territories. This explains why Trieu is able to accumulate such a vast fortune and easily operate within the U.S. as they are technically all part of the same entity.
Trieu’s Daughter
It’s clear that Trieu had a troubled childhood and this has, in some strange way been passed onto her daughter who is too haunted by the memories.
Initially, a lot of people guessed that this was because Trieu’s daughter was a clone and was somehow carrying her memories and this may be true however there is another possibility.
We know that Trieu upon purchasing Veidt’s companies that this too brought his perfume range Nostalgia over. Trieu then repurposed the name into a range of pills that are literally memories.
When researching this product through HBO’s supplementary material on the show, there is a warning that if one takes the pills whilst pregnant that they have the potential to fuse with the fetus and this may cause the child to retain the memories of their parent. To me this explains why Trieu’s daughter remembers the Vietnam War and it’s also reasons like this that the pills were outlawed.
Anyway, the Vietnam memories themselves could also paint out the truth about who Trieu truly is. In the Watchmen graphic novel we learn that during the Vietnam War, The Comedian ended up getting one of the locals pregnant and in a fit of rage he murdered her. It could be possible that Trieu is actually the daughter of this woman and though the mother died there is potential that she was saved.
Doctor Manhattan was present during all of this and though it seemed like he did not act on the murder, he may have intervened to save the child.
Trieu Is The Comedian’s Daughter?
Now, this is a big point of contention and I can see a lot of people disagreeing with it.
During an outburst, The Comedian did say that Doc could have saved her at any moment but he chose not to which cemented that he was truly detached from humanity. However, by the end of the work, we know from Ozymandias that this is not the case and he states that Jon shows his emotions through micro-expressions and whilst the majority of people are too unaware to pick them up, to him Doc might as well have been sobbing.
This makes me believe that during this murder, Doctor Manhattan still had an attachment to humanity and he saved the child which later grew up to be Lady Trieu.
Doctor Manhattan has the ability to see every moment in his life simultaneously and if his future version was interacting with Trieu then that would mean that his past version would have to save her during this time. It’s all complicated how the time stuff works with Doc but there is causality in which everything has to happen the way that it happens.
Doc sums it up when he says ‘we are all puppets, only I can see the strings.’ Therefore his past has to line up with his future and though he doesn’t necessarily have free will, he is complicit in carrying out actions that lead to the future.
Anyway, whatever the case, Doctor Manhattan during the war would have been aware of Trieus importance in the future so he would have known about her existence during the conflict. Whether he is the Comedian’s daughter and therefore Laurie’s half-sister or not remains to be seen but there is a lot of potential that the two interacted early on and he may have been instrumental in how she was able to gain such wealth. We know that Doctor Manhattan is able to create duplicates of himself and this could have been the key to Trieu discovering how to create clones.
Ozymandias
She already runs a successful business at Forever Pets that carries this out and Doc could have given her the wisdom of how to create replicas of cells.
There is another aspect of the show that deals massively in clones and this is a huge aesthetic of Ozymandias’ prison. Whenever we see the character he is typically joined by clones of both a male and female servant who attend to his every whim without question. Except for the Game Warden of course.
These clones have likely been created by Trieu in order to serve and keep him on the grounds of his prison.
Personally, I believe that after the election of Robert Redford, Ozy realised that the world was not going to end up becoming the Utopia that he had once envisioned and thus he became depressed and fed up with humanity. Sharing a similarity with Doctor Manhattan he decided to ostracise himself from humanity and he sold his company to Trieu, divulging all his secrets in the process.
Ozy just wished to be away from it all and this for me is cemented by the line in which he says that he originally arrived at the castle and its grounds believing it to be a paradise but he soon realised that it was a prison.
How Ozymandias Got To His Prison
It’s also possible that both Doc and Trieu helped Ozy move to his prison and Trieu may have created the environment with the same skills that she used to build her Vivarium and then Doc created the castle. We did see in episode one that he was building a castle on Mars and this bore a striking resemblance to Ozy’s so perhaps this was a prototype of the one that would eventually come to be on the moon that Ozy now inhabits.
Doctor Manhattan can teleport anywhere at once along with others so this would also make it possible for him to take Ozy anywhere in the galaxy at a moment’s notice.
Ozy is probably on the Jupiter Moon Europa and we did see him arranging the corpses of clones to spell out ‘Save Me D’ which could be a call out to Doctor Manhattan because the character wishes to return to Earth.
Ozy is pulled back into his prison and we are then told that he will be put on trial and potentially this could have him being found guilty and therefore sent back to Earth for breaking the terms of his agreement. It is possible that the meteor that we see crashing down to Earth on the farm in the fourth episode is Ozy coming back and this would be why Trieu wished to purchase the property.
Ozymandias Fan Theory
The Gold Statue that we see of the character could literally be the character encased in Gold which yeah. Not a nice way to go.
How Trieu managed to predict this crash could be because the clock that she is building tells time. When the clock is discussed it is specified as something that can ‘tell time’ and this may mean that through it the user is able to see their own future and past similar to Doctor Manhattan. We know that Trieu has a fascination with the past due to Nostalgia and this could be an extension of that which explains how she is able to know to be at the farm for the arrival of the meteorite.
There’s also a theory that the Judd Crawford we see hanging in episode one is actually just a clone of the character and he’s actually still out there, working with the 7th Kavalry but yeah…that’s for another video.
Overall though Trieu is a fascinating character and I hope this video opened your mind up to what could be going on with her and where the show might be heading. I just wanted to redeem myself for the Angela Pill statement so yeah, haha thanks for sticking with me.
Your Thoughts
Obviously I’d love to hear your thoughts on Lady Trieu and what you think is going to happen in the show going forward. Comment below and let me know!
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