Watchmen Review: An Almost Religious Awe (Season 1 Episode 7)

For a show that has been rather dense and is in need of time for decompressing, Watchmen Season 1 Episode 7, “An Almost Religious Awe,” decides to go a different route and starts to open up some of its larger questions.

But by doing so, only more questions come to mind. This is a good thing, really, that a show this deep into its season can still surprise and create a sense of awe, just as the episode title suggests. There’s method to the madness, a steady hand at setting things in place so that the endgame is properly ready.

Angela’s past is made up of tragedy and loss, where the hint of happiness is always snatched away moments later. It’s happened with her parents, her grandmother, the White Night attack, a nice evening with Crawford, and now with Cal. The life of a masked avenger is marked by tragedy, as each episode has proven.

The episode beautifully takes that concept and applies it to Angela, whose drive for normalcy outside of her masked life is, ironically, tied into that same life, with Manhattan hidden in plain sight. It’s a reminder that both business and personal are inseparable from one another in masked life.

The editing on the episode is a more traditional fashion from Watchmen Season 1 Episode 6, “This Extraordinary Being,” splicing two lives together and connecting them in key, revelatory ways. Angela’s exposed to justice and pain at such an early age with the bombing of her parents in Saigon, so much so that the badge she carries as a child is continuously an icon of her life.

Imagery plays an important part on the episode, especially with Doctor Manhattan. His iconic look is plastered on every corner in Saigon, and happens to be the repeating image behind Angela during her most traumatic memories, both losing her parents and her grandmother.

Doctor Manhattan being locked away inside Cal the whole time feels a little too coincidental, though the hints have been a slow trickle for some time, with Cal’s accident in Saigon being mentioned multiple times and having Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in such a supporting role this whole time. There’s a need for more, as being hidden in Oklahoma with the granddaughter of Hooded Justice is certainly a stretch.

But Angela taking a hammer to Cal is such a visceral moment, one that comes across as a last resort. There is still the question of whether or not Cal’s image will be Manhattan now, or if the image we’re used to seeing, the blue visage, will be there now. Is this the end of Cal, or has Manhattan been Cal the whole time? It’s a mind-boggling revelation, one that will need the next episode to work properly.

The larger plan starts to make more sense, Senator Keene planning to become his own version of Doctor Manhattan, but Lady Trieu’s Millennium Clock still remains a mystery. With the cut to Adrian’s statue after his trial, it does cause a wonder if the tower is Trieu’s own form of capturing device, but unlike the Seventh Calvary wishing to capture Doctor Manhattan, perhaps it’s to bring Adrian back down to Earth.

Adrian’s trial is somehow the most surreal moment on an episode coated in it. Many Ms. Crookshanks and Mr. Phillips as jurors is such a fantastic, surreal visual, but it becomes clear once the pigs come crashing in that the trial is nothing more than a sham to shame and guilt Adrian into submission. It’s a way of bringing humility to a man normally far above it.

What Adrian’s sentence could possibly be is an interesting notion, along with the idea of time at his location. The very first line of the scene makes mentions that an entire year has passed by, making the time inside his prison either faster than our own, or this is taking place at a different time than everything else.

With this, and mention that Adrian’s only been there for a few years, it makes Doctor Manhattan’s banishment of him there a question of time.

If Doctor Manhattan has been locked away inside Cal for the span of his marriage to Angela, how is it possible for him to banish Adrian there only a few years before? There may be time shenanigans afoot, or there’s an explanation still to come.

Some quick hints of what’s to come are found through smaller moments. The ignition of the Millennium Clock, and what it potentially does, is only hours away now, and Wade survived the Seventh Calvary attack and has taken a Calvary mask, leaving open Laurie’s rescue before Senator Keene becomes a more racist version of Doctor Manhattan.

Watchmen Season 1 Episode 7, “An Almost Religious Awe,” takes a more straightforward approach, but ends up taking a hammer to what we’ve seen up to this point. Doctor Manhattan being right under our noses the whole time is a clever trick, but it will need something more to fully pay off, as right now, the coincidence is rather stunning.

But the episode finds its greatest success through continuing the bond Angela and Will share, how their lives shape the justice they seek. Though the show is keeping them apart as much as possible, Watchmen has created a family that is destined to tragedy every generation, and is at the precipice of monumental moments in history where time calls on them to do what’s right.

Will has done what he can in the shadows, but for Angela, with Doctor Manhattan at her side, she may need to push into the blue light to find her own destiny.

Some stray thoughts on the episode:

• Lady Trieu’s world continues to grow stranger. Not only is her daughter essentially a clone of her mother, she’s transferring Angela’s bad Nostalgia trip into an elephant. The old saying that elephants have excellent memories makes that poor elephant’s life one of reliving pain.
• The Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross rendition of David Bowie’s “Life On Mars?” that caps off the episode and plays throughout the end credits becomes a quick favorite of the always beautiful score.

 

What did you think of this episode of Watchmen? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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Watchmen airs Sundays at 9/8c on HBO.

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