Welcome to the Heavy Spoilers show, I’m your host Deffinition and you’re now locked into the channel where we’ve been Watching The Watchmen to breakdown everything that you need to know about the new season on HBO.
Episode 7 has some major twists and turns most notably the reveal that one of the characters isn’t who they say they are. Throughout this we’re gonna be going talking about the twist that BLUE…our minds, some of the big revelations and why Laurie’s dildo is called Excalibur, get it like…Ex-Cal-Abar…never mind we’ll get into it as we go into the breakdown.
There will be Heavy Spoilers here, so if you haven’t had a chance to watch the latest episode yet and don’t want to know what happens then I highly suggest that you turn off now.
With that out the way I just wanna give a huge thank you for clicking this, now let’s get into our breakdown of Watchmen: Episode 7!
Episode 7 Breakdown
Ok so similar to the prior entry, the latest episode of Watchmen is a sort of trip down memory lane, however, where Episode 6 was about Angela’s grandfather Will, the latest release titled ‘An Almost Religious Awe’ focuses on Angela and one of the major characters around her.
The episode opens with a documentary on Doctor Manhattan and it chronicles his humble beginnings before he entered the intrinsic field generator that ended up creating him. This ends up being tied into the Seventh Kavalry, most notably Joe Keenes’ plans in which they wish to duplicate the process that created the superman but early on a warning comes with it in this glimpse into how the world views the character.
It’s said that whilst Doctor Manhattan was a great symbol for America, many also feared him and the events that transpired in the graphic novel that lead to Ozymandias having to fake an alien invasion in order to unite the world is a strong indicator of just how much that tensions rose with America possessing a weapon that no one could really touch.
It’s because of Doctor Manhattan that The U.S. won the Vietnam War and it’s also because of this rise in fear that the character ended up going into hiding although he kept a watchful eye over the planet on a human level as we find out in one of the major twists in the episode that I’ll get into.
Doctor Manhattan And The Birth Of Sister Night
Now at the end of Watchmen, Doctor Manhattan did say that he was going to go off into the universe and try to create life and though I have seen some people say that these are the clones that Ozymandias is surrounded by, personally I believe that these are inventions of Lady Trieu, who we know specialises in genetics and has created humans before.
Though the clones say ‘he gifted us life’ I think this is a sort of creation by the society that exists on the Moon who may have created their idea of a male God mistakingly. Obviously I don’t know for definite but I think Trieu’s genetic developments are tied in with them somehow.
We then jump to Saigon to see Angela’s childhood, most notably what inspired her to become Sister Night. Similar to Batman who was inspired by Zorro, Angela is influenced heavily by pop culture and adopts the bright, almost comedic depiction of them in film and media into a real-world format that as we know often comes with a dark side to it.
Similar to Batman, Angela or rather Sister Night, was born out of Tragedy and like most superheroes her parents, the ones that care for her are stripped away at an early age which means that she must adopt an almost larger than life persona in order to provide protection for herself mentally in what could be a very vulnerable situation.
Saigon
It’s the Doctor Manhattan parade and it’s clear that a lot of the locals in the area are heavily upset with the occupation.
In the Watchmen universe, after the Vietnam war the country became a territory of the U.S. and this is why the flag looks so different to the one that we have in the real world.
There’s a man who ends up becoming involved in the bombing that operates a puppet show which to me ties back to the line by Doctor Manhattan in Watchmen in which the character says ‘we are all puppets, I can just see the strings.’
I’m paraphrasing right now but this image shows that Doctor Manhattan controlled the people but that the people also have the ability to control him through their actions even though everything in the Watchmenverse is pre-ordained, there only exists the illusion of choice.
We discover that Angela’s parents were killed by a suicide bomber and we then join the character in the present, fresh from her Nostalgia trip. Because she took Will’s nostalgia, Angela’s memory is all over the place.
During the scene, there is a pivotal moment between Angela and her father in which he says ‘People who wear masks are dangerous, we should be scared of them.’ When asked why, he follows it up with ‘They’re hiding something’ and this really sums up the character for me who is an expert at hiding all the anger and pain that she has gone through in her life.
She clearly had a troubled childhood and even as an adult there is a lot that went wrong for her, however, she managed to move past it due to the Sister Night persona and this really exemplifies why a lot of the characters in Watchmen have dual personalities, one that can bear the brunt of the dark side of life whilst the other one can live a seemingly normal one.
Lady Trieu And Bian
Her short term has her constantly asking Lady Trieu the same questions over and over again and her long term memory, most notably her childhood, is laced with visions of Will’s past namely the Tulsa riots and his life as Hooded Justice. Trieu is trying to fix her memories and thus throughout Episode 7 she constantly sends her back to the past through neurodialysis in order to correct her recollection of it.
Trieu is using an Elephant in order to complete the process as we know an Elephant doesn’t forget and this has most likely been picked because of its strong grip on the past.
Bian tests Angela with a sort of modern-day Rorschach test but with images instead of inkblots. This highlights how perception is shaped by our history, namely what instances have shaped us and how some people view things a certain way whilst others don’t. We saw in episode four that Bian was also going through a similar treatment to Angela and that she was inheriting the memories of her mother.
We learn that Bian is actually a clone of Trieu’s mother and that the character has been slipping her nostalgia as she sleeps so that her parents can be there when she completes her greatest achievement. This cements that the past shapes who we are and how we view the world which is why Trieu wishes to shape Bian this way.
This is kinda horrifying and it highlights that Trieu really has difficulty letting go of the past, hence her invention of Nostalgia and the Millenium clock that she is about to launch.
The Comedian Fan Theory
Trieu also pays lip service to the fact that her father will be there too and this could either be Doctor Manhattan or the Comedian. Personally I’m going with the latter as I believe that Trieu is the daughter of the Comedian and the pregnant woman that he killed in Vietnam. Trieu could be recreating The Comedian and it would be awesome to see him show up in the finale.
There’s also mention of what the Millenium clock does and personally I believe that this has the ability to see through time, much like Doctor Manhattan does and that this will be used to predict future events. Trieu used this in order to see that she needed to purchase the farm before the thing that fell from space crash-landed there and it will also help her to achieve her end goal.
She knows that the Seventh Kavalry are rising and creating their own Doctor Manhattan and she has used the clock in order to unearth where he really is so that he can fight back.
Cal tries to visit Angela daily in a blue car and he wears a blue polo shirt and blue jeans…because…well we will get into it. Laurie also listens back to Angela’s outbursts during her nostalgia trip in order to get to the bottom of what’s going on.
Laurie’s Investigation
The most notable of these is the ‘you can hang yourself now’ one which of course is a command to Captain Judd to take his own life which Laurie relays to Judd’s wife.
Petey investigates Looking Glass’ bunker and we also now know for definite that LG survived due to all the members of the Kavalry being dead and his body being nowhere to be found. He knows that he has been turned on and thus will likely be lying low because of their double-cross.
When questioning Judd’s wife, Laurie reveals that she knows about Cyclops, Hooded Justice and has pieced together the connection between Judd, Joe Keene, Cyclops, and the Seventh Kavalry. Though Laurie is smart, she’s clearly not that smart, divulging all this to Judd’s wife who is actually in on all this and she traps her with like…I wanna say the opposite of an ejector seat.
Laurie awakens in the Seventh Kavalry headquarters and Joe Keene reveals that he is intending to turn himself into Doctor Manhattan because it’s extremely difficult to be a white man in America right now.
Right or wrong this mirrors Will’s time as Hooded Justice in which he pretended to be a white man in order to fit in. Joe wishes to be the best thing that he can in the eyes of society which is Doctor Manhattan hence the change.
Now Joe and the rest obviously have an altered perception of the world, namely because they don’t view themselves as racists and also because they think this is the way to change things. Trieu wishes to stop them because she doesn’t want the world ruled by a white supremacist and as we see from all the unanswered prayers in the episode, if someone was to adopt the moniker of the Doc, they would be extremely popular, thus Trieu must get the original in order to stop him.
Cal And Angela’s Origin Story
We learn that Cal received total amnesia after a car accident though we know that this isn’t really the case as Doctor Manhattan cannot be harmed, it is possible that Tachyons were used to stop his view of time simultaneously as we know from the graphic novel that these have the ability to do so.
We discover that after the death of her parents, Angela ended up living in an orphanage in Saigon and that she becomes inspired to become a policeman by a female officer who ended up investigating the bombing that killed her parents.
One of the terrorists that was in on the plot is unceremoniously lead away and executed and this could be a reasoning behind Angela’s choices as she wishes to find Justice in a world that seems to wish to just brush it under the carpet. Angela is adopted by her Grandmother, June, who as we know from last time was Will’s wife.
She pays lip service to the fact that she and her son had a fractured relationship and this drove him away from her. As we know he was aware of his father’s alter ego and this may have been a huge factor that pushed him into fighting in the military. Watchmen is massively about inheritance and just as Angela seemingly inherited the role as a masked vigilante, June’s son could have too.
Angela has carried the Sister Night video as a symbol and she hasn’t even watched it and we learn that Will ended up scaring his son when he was young which is why he distrusted those that wear masks.
June promises to take Angela to Tulsa but she, unfortunately, dies after putting her in the taxi.
Ozymandias On Trial
In Ozymandias’ world, the character is on trial for trying to escape the confines of his prison and breaking the cardinal rule ‘though shalt not leave.’
We see a sketch of the alien from the Graphic novel and also learn that the character has been on trial for a year, furthermore backing up that the Ozymandias entries are all an anniversary apart. There are a Skull and Crossbones behind The Game Warden which represents the pirate ship in the Black Freighter.
When asked if he has anything to say in his defense Ozy farts loudly and it’s one of the funniest moments in the series so far. Ozy is found Guilty by way of Pig and though we don’t see what happens to the character, I personally believe that as terms of breaking his agreement he is sent back to Earth and is then encased in the golden statue.
We saw his craft crash land on the planet in the opening of Episode 4 and this explains why Trieu wished to purchase the farmland in that entry and from there she captured him and put him in the Golden Statue.
Watchmen Episode 8 Ending Explained
The episode concludes with Angela discovering a globe that has the location of the Doctor Manhattan prayer booths on it. Here Trieu drops the bombshell that he isn’t listening because he’s here in Tulsa, pretending to be a human. She reveals that Will went to Trieu for help stopping the Seventh Kavalry who are planning on creating their own version of the Doc after destroying the old one. She reveals that she knows that the Seventh Kavalry will launch this attack in an hour which also adds weight to the abilities that the Millenium Clock has.
Trieu tricks Angela into revealing that the latter knows who he is because she doesn’t ask who he is, mainly because she already knows.
Angela rushes home, watched by Kavalry members and tells Cal how much she loves him before hitting him over the head. She says that they always knew this day would come but that Cal just won’t remember it. It turns out that there was no car accident and that Cal is really Doctor Manhattan who wished to go back to having a normal life after he saw the implications that his existence had caused. Cal doesn’t believe it but she hammers home the point and pulls out a ring from his head that is similar to the Doctor Manhattan symbol which is also the symbol for Hydrogen.
As mentioned earlier I think this may have been partially made from Tachyons and thus it removed the character’s memories of his life before the ‘accident’.
Cal Is Doctor Manhattan Clues
Will did mention that Doctor Manhattan was on Earth and disguised as a regular person. Damon Lindeloff upon announcing the show did say that Doctor Manhattan was perhaps just a scared man that was sad he would outlive everything so perhaps this move was the take him away from the pain that he would inevitably be on the receiving end of. The Watchmen graphic novel did say that though Doc was apparently emotionless, he gave away micro-expressions that showed he may as well have been sobbing.
This also explains how Angela survived the Seventh Kavalry attack as it was just her and Will in the house. Laurie’s Dildo was also called Excalibur which yeah, say that again Ex-Cal-Abar as in Cal Abar is an Ex of Laurie Blake. Probably the best easter egg in the show.
Episode 8 Predictions
Episode 8 will be fleshing out their first meeting and we see that even back then Doc was trying to hide his true identity away as he picks a mask off the ground and wears it to hide away.
Angela remained in Saigon as mentioned last episode and here Doctor Manhattan approached her saying that he loved her and always had. This is because the character can see the entirety of his life at once and thus this is how he knows they will be toghether. He also picks up two beers which mirrors his meeting with Janey Slater, the first woman that he fell in love with.
Now I do think this is all building up to Doctor Manhattan fighting the Kavalry’s version of the character and it looks like Angela may not make it out alive. Doc warns her that she will die trying to save him and this could be the eventual end for the character.
I love how the show is all slowly coming together and with just two episodes left, I’m hooked to see what the outcome will be. The show goes from strength to strength and it’s really got me invested in the outcome.
Your Thoughts
Obviously I’d love to hear your thoughts on this episode and if you agree with the theories in this video. Comment below and let me know!
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