Watchmen: Nostalgia Explained

In tonight’s episode of Watchmen, viewers see what happens next after Sister Night/Angela Abar (Regina King) impulsively takes Will Reeves’ (Louis Gossett Jr.) full bottle of pills, pills revealed to be Nostalgia in last week’s “Little Fear of Lightning.” While the show did a fairly good job teasing early on that the pills contained Will’s “memories”, tonight’s episode may leave fans wanting to know a bit more about the interesting pharmaceutical with such curious power in the world of HBO’s Watchmen — and we’re here to help break it all down.

Spoilers for tonight’s episode of Watchmen, “This Extraordinary Being,” below.

As fans saw tonight, taking the full bottle of Nostalgia sent Angela on a weird, deeply intense trip through her grandfather’s history, giving viewers the truth about the identity of Hooded Justice, part of Angela’s heritage, and perhaps most shockingly, the death of Judd Crawford (Don Johnson). While the memory sequence is one that helps fill in quite a few blanks and connect many dots for Watchmen viewers, it is also one that is presented as being very dangerous for Angela. As Agent Blake (Jean Smart) tells Angela before she falls into her grandfather’s memories, not only is taking too much Nostalgia dangerous but taking someone else’s Nostalgia can be lethal.

That detail about Nostalgia is one that the show’s companion site, Peteypedia, examined in great detail by releasing an a pamphlet for the medication that reveals exactly how it works, describing it as a “revolutionary, all-natural personally customized medication for people suffering from anxiety, dementia, and psychic trauma” that works by turning “memories of your choice into easily digestible tablets that will allow you to experience those memories in the most lucid way possible.”

As you might guess the medication, developed by TRIEU, quickly became problematic despite various safety measures, such as the multiple approval process required to get a prescription (when it was legal, more on that in a bit) and the color coding of the pills based on the nature of the memories — red being the most intense memories one can experience. Because of the medication’s dangers — it led to psychosis in many users — the pills were outlawed, and those dangers paint a grim picture for what might happen to Angela considering she took what appeared to be a full bottle of red pills.

What’s also interesting about Nostalgia is that it also has a connection to the original Watchmen comics, albeit the comics take on things. In comics, Nostalgia is a perfume from Adrian Veidt’s Veidt Cosmetics & Toiletries company, and it’s designed to appeal to the public’s concerns about an uncertain future by enticing them to withdraw into the perception of a safer, and more idyllic past — albeit through the use of a fragrance. The fragrance was being phased out to make room for his Millennium line, set to be released in the summer of 1986.

While Veidt’s fragrance and Trieu’s pills have dramatically different mechanisms of function, they both seek to do the same general thing: allow people to indulge in the comfort of the past. With that in mind, it’s especially interesting that Trieu — who purchased Veidt’s company in 2012 — would name the memory pills the same thing that Veidt named his fragrance (though Trieu’s Nostalgia hit the market in 2007). It’s just another curious connection between Trieu and Veidt as Watchmen’s mystery continues to unfold.

Watchmen airs Sundays at 9/8c on HBO.