Watchmen composes the greatest love story ever told – The A.V. Club, Avclub.com
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“Tunnel Of Love” plays on the jukebox and Manhattan spits some of the sickest game in dating. Angela asks him, “Why’d you leave Mars?” He replies, smoothly: “So I could meet you.” To hide in plain sight, Manhattan wears a mask of his own face. Manhattan, like everyone on a first date, wears a plastic version of his face. He’s as forthright about his identity as he knows how to be. Manhattan experiences time not in a linear fashion as we do — there is no before, middle, and after — but all at once. Angela takes comfort in his knowing; to be seduced mentally often means experiencing a profound shift in one’s understanding of the world. Even if Angela doesn’t recognize the shift taking place, it’s occurring.
One of my favorite aspects of the original graphic novel resides in the way in which Gibbons and Moore illustrate time. Knowing that time is relative to each individual, then we must acknowledge that we too experience our lives in a non-linear fashion. My memories of running through an open field under a dome of stars is as close as the memory I’m creating looking at the LA skyline, even though I cannot see the stars here. Though we cannot know our future, everything we do now impacts the people we will become. Little inklings, gut checks, and inspirations give us flashes into what tomorrow will bring. The greatness of humanity is enduring despite knowing immense and unavoidable pain lies around the corner of every perfect moment.
Manhattan tells Angela, “This is the moment. I’ve just told you, you can’t’t save me. Yet, you’re going to try anyway. ”I wonder if this line is less about this specific moment, and more a definition of love in general — a statement from the writers through their characters. Maybe I’m over romanticizing the moment, but I shed real tears throughout director Nicole Kassell’s incredible action sequence: Black love in the face of white supremacy and certain death surges forward undaunted, as Angela lays waste to a small army like she’s been doing it her entire life. Every department leans into the romantic tragedy of the moment, but Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor really bring it home with the score. When that guitar solo starts and Manhattan begins blowing people to smithereens, it brings the entire moment to crescendo.
In a little over an hour, Jensen and Lindelof take the audience through an intense emotional journey of a decade-long relationship. Once again, time takes center stage as a device. Because the series has established so clearly their love and devotion to one another, hearing of all their ups and downs over the course of their first date makes those 64 years flash by in seconds. The foretold fight hits like a ton of bricks. The fight needed to happen in order for Manhattan to grow. Ozymandias moved to a new planet to become a mortal god and succeeded. Manhattan cloaked himself in a human form and became a human, even maintaining the face of Cal Abar when he returned to his god body. Why did the change occur? There are multiple ways to look at it. The romantic in me wants to believe that the face his love chose became the face he saw in the mirror, the one that made Jon feel like Jon for the first time. Some could call it appropriation. Maybe there’s a scientific reason I’m too ignorant to comprehend, or perhaps if you keep making that face, it really will get stuck like that. Either way, it’s not a mask. For the first time, he isn’t hiding. He revealed the only secret he kept from Angela, about visiting her grandfathers. He laid out a plan to keep her safe. I think he made her a god.
If he did, there are two, maybe three god level heroes on the playing field in the finale. Lady Trieu, Angela Abar, and Adrian Veidt all have either money, power, or a cult following. We’re one week away from the season finale. There’s a lot to wrap up, but the strings have been pulled closely together. Hopefully Looking Glass (Tim Blake Nelson) pops up to assist Laurie with taking out the Kavalry.
Stray observations:****************************Why would Veidt have a plan A, but not use it? He said, “A little elephant told me …” Was the elephant Lady Trieu? It doesn’t seem there was a lot of time to plan before Veidt was sent away. I have a feeling there will still be some final show down between these titans.
Europa was one of Zeus’ mortal lovers. She bore him three sons. They ruled the major Greek islands. She was worshiped as a queen. Look who else has three children who were magically whisked away to their grandfather.
Visual representation of eggs inWatchmenreached its peak. Eggs appear when Angela gives her tragic backstory to Topher’s class. They re-emerge when William explains part of his backstory to Angela in the kitchen, right before she learns he is her grandfather. Eggs represent trauma. When does it begin, and when does it end? I wonder if episode nine will offer any definitive answers to the show’s biggest question.
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