Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen was exactly what people expected: a complicated meditation on Alan Moore’s original characters and a few of his own, with multiple tangents and diversions into backstories and subplots. What else are you going to get from the man behind Lost and The Leftovers? Fans watched as Angela Abar (Regina King), aka Sister Night, tracked down a right-wing conspiracy group and realized the most powerful being in the universe, Dr. Manhattan, was living incognito as her husband.
But the eight episodes that meandered through this story were building up to a final test. With so many themes and plotlines in the air, the finale needed to tie up all these loose ends so fans could say goodbye to these characters in a way that felt complete. It took some finagling, but five years ago today, Watchmen managed just that.
Over its hour-long runtime, Episode 9, “See How They Fly,” perfectly balances references to the original comic, conclusions to its standalone storylines, and even payoff to the series’ initial cold open. And somehow, it never feels rushed. Like Dr. Manhattan himself, it’s calm, collected, and more powerful than you could ever imagine.
It starts with the humble origin story of Lady Trieu (Hong Chau). Her mother steals a sperm sample from Adrian Veidt’s (Jeremy Irons) storage, and years later, Lady Trieu finds him in Antarctica, calling him the smartest man in the world and introducing herself as the smartest woman. Her true intent, as he learns, is to steal the powers of Dr. Manhattan (Yahya Abdul Mateen II), the one man with no limitations.
She’s not the only one with that goal in mind. Joe Keene has mobilized the Kavalry, a white supremacist group, to build a prison for Dr. Manhattan where he’s kept naked in his true blue form. Angela soon tracks them down, but she can’t stop Keene from attempting to steal her husband’s powers... until everyone is teleported away. It turns out Lady Trieu manipulated Keene into capturing Manhattan for her so she can finally take his powers for herself.
She almost succeeds. Angela cradles her husband as he dies in her arms, reliving all their moments together. A last-minute move by Adrian Veidt defeats Lady Trieu, but that’s only the beginning of the end. Later, Angela and Will Reeves (Louis Gossett Jr.) meet in the theater where everything began and discuss what it means to be a hero, super or not. “You can't heal under a mask, Angela,” he says. “Wounds need air.”
So do series finales, and this one gets some breathing room in a gorgeously shot final sequence, all set to the opening number from Oklahoma!, the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical used as a motif throughout the premiere. It’s not often we see mundane moments after a climactic final fight, but when Angela brings her family home, we watch her start cleaning up the carton of eggs she dropped in the previous episode.
That small moment is actually the kicker of the entire series. We get a flashback of a young Angela asking if Dr. Manhattan could put all his powers into a single egg, one that she could eat so she could walk on water. It’s the perfect thematic end, a final act of love inside the beginning of life itself. We didn’t get another season, but thanks to the final moments of Angela downing the raw egg and walking out to the family pool, we don’t need to. She’s on her own journey.
