When it comes to Watchmen one of the big things that has played out over the course of the HBO series’ first season is that everything is connected. Viewers have learned over the previous eight episodes that Detective Angela Abar/Sister Night is the granddaughter of the original Hooded Justice who, it turned out, was responsible for the death of Tulsa police Chief Judd Crawford who himself turned out to be connected to the modern day incarnation of Cyclops, the Seventh Kavalry. Going into tonight’s finale, though, there were still some questions about how a few other players fit into the show’s big puzzle, specifically when it came to Ozymandias himself, Adrian Veidt. Now, however, we know how it all fits together and just what role Veidt plays.
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Spoilers for tonight’s season finale of Watchmen, “See How They Fly,” below.
The episode wastes no time in tying Veidt to the story in a way that is far, far larger than just his being the mastermind behind the 1985 Dimensional Incursion Event. It opens up in 1985 with Veidt recording his message for President Redford and viewers watch as, while Veidt makes his video, a Vietnamese cleaning woman breaks into his office and inseminates herself with one of his many semen samples. The result of that moment is none other than Lady Trieu. She later pays Veidt a visit at Karnak in 2008, revealing who she is and her plan to take Doctor Manhattan’s powers for herself so that she can “fix” the world. Her purpose for visiting Veidt? She wants money from her “father” to make those plans a reality, but he turns her away — and refuses to acknowledge her as his daughter.
Lady Trieu’s connection to the larger story beyond her Millennium Clock is something that fans have been trying to sort out since her first appearance, especially after it was revealed that she had cloned her own mother — the girl Bian passing for Trieu’s daughter is, in fact, a clone of her mother Bian. That reveal led many fans to think that the connection between Trieu and the rest of the story was a twist on something from the original comics. In the comics, The Comedian murders a pregnant Vietnamese woman in a bar after she claims that he is the father of her baby while Doctor Manhattan watches without intervening. May fans suspected that in the show’s subtly rewritten reality that perhaps Manhattan did intervene, and that Trieu was the child.
While that theory has now been fully debunked by the events of tonight’s episode, it is still hinted that Manhattan’s inaction is in part what drives Trieu. Thanks to the supplemental site, Peteypedia, we know that the real Bian did have an encounter with The Comedian in 1971 when he and his battalion passed through her village outside My Lai. While the piece on Peteypedia doesn’t get into detail, given the horrors of the real-life My Lai Massacre, it’s probably not a stretch to think that Bian’s experience with The Comedian was a negative one and if Manhattan simply turned a blind eye, it may have bred a resentment that passed onto her daughter, Trieu, leading her to want to destroy the god who did nothing to save her people.
The truth about Lady Trieu’s background is one that Watchmen writer Jeff Jensen spoke a bit about in a recent interview, specifically a bit of the misdirection in that Peteypedia piece.
“Yeah, that was fun,” Jensen said. “That was a fun one to make, ‘Lady Trieu: Fact or Fiction.’ I wrote that with help from Damon, and I really love the design that HBO came up with for that one. But yeah, Lady Trieu doesn’t talk to the press all that much, and there’s certainly a lot of mystery and lore attached to her. It was definitely a fun way to download a tremendous amount of content about Lady Trieu, some of which may prove not to be true. We’ll see, you know. When you don’t talk to the press much, but you do the kind of things that Lady Trieu does, a lot of myths and lies and far-out rumors get attached to you, and it’ll be interesting to see by season’s end how much of that is accurate, how much of it is not accurate, and then maybe how much of it is close to the truth, but they got some huge stuff wrong. So all I know is that the society reporter at the Tulsa Star Sentinel is not exactly the most careful journalist, so we’ll see how well he and his fact-checking department got things right about Lady Trieu.”
Were you surprised by the reveal that Veidt is Trieu’s father? Let us know in the comments below.
