Last week on HBO’s Watchmen, FBI Agent Laurie Blake (Jean Smart), aka the former Silk Spectre, arrived in Tulsa to investigate the murder of Chief Judd Crawford (Don Johnson). However, it soon becomes clear that Blake is already somewhat onto Angela Abar/Sister Night (Regina King) who is quietly doing her own investigation trying to figure out what exactly her mysterious grandfather, Will Reeves (Louis Gossett Jr.) is up to. This week, those questions and mysteries only deepen with the introduction of Lady Trieu to the unfolding story.
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Spoilers for tonight’s episode of Watchmen, “If You Don’t Like My Story, Write Your Own,” below.
The episode opens in rural Oklahoma A woman has a roadside stand selling eggs, packs it up and goes about a normal day with her husband, putting together puzzles, getting ready for bed. The couple is settling in for the night when the doorbell rings and its Lady Trieu. She wants to buy their house and farm. When the couple resists, she tells them that she knows of their struggle with infertility, so she created a baby for them. It’s enough to sway them to signing away their property. Moments later, something crashes down from space onto the property — which now belongs to Lady Trieu.
In Tulsa, Angela goes to her bakery and cleans up all evidence of Will’s presence when a phone call comes in from the Greenwood Cultural Center identifying another branch of her family, causing her to accidentally burn the note Will left behind. Sister Night then breaks into the center where she asks to see her family tree. The holographic tree allows her to “meet” her great-grandparents as well as see a photo of her grandfather, who was believed to have died in the Tulsa Massacre. An alarm goes off and Angela races outside to find Agent Blake laughing and Angela’s car having fallen from the sky. Angela acts like she doesn’t know about the sky/car situation, though she identifies it as her own and calls it in as a recovered stolen — checking the glove compartment for Will’s pills.
At home, with two of her kids having taken over her bed, Angela goes to sleep in Topher’s room where they talk a bit about the funeral and Topher gives Angela his stuffed animal to sleep with. At breakfast, the kids have a disagreement about where Judd went when he died, with Calvin telling them that heaven isn’t real — Judd just went back to “nowhere”. Later, Angela goes to pay Looking Glass a visit at home. He’s been photographing the squid falls and has a bunker complete with darkroom. She wants him to figure out what’s in the pill bottle. She also reveals what she found in Judd’s closet, though Looking Glass notes that the badge on the hood is an old one an may have belonged to his grandfather. Angela, as Sister Night, disposes of something off an overpass and realizes she’s being watched by someone in a silver costume. She gives chase, but they slide into the sewer and escape. At the police station, it turns out that Agent Blake is now the new chief. She dusted the car for prints and identifies Will, revealing that he was once a police officer and soon there is a new lead about the car.
Blake and Angela have a tense conversation in the car on the way to the lead while Blake has Petey reveal her true identity as the former Silk Spectre. They then arrive at Trieu’s Millennium Clock and are invited to meet with Trieu herself — except Petey, because he’s a dude. Lady Trieu turns out to be from Vietnam, interestingly enough, and provides them with a list of people who operate the flying machines housed at the Clock. Trieu, in Vietnamese, gives Angela/Night a message from her grandfather, asking if she found the pills. Trieu also has a statue of Veidt — one that is age-appropriate.
Elsewhere, Veidt literally harvests what appear to be babies from a lake, throwing back the ones he rejects, taking a pair to his lab where he puts them in a machine and puts on music to drown out their crying and screams. After a moment, he gets the now-adult beings out of the machine. They are two new “clones” of his staff and it’s revealed that not only is he not actually their maker but, in the house, he’s gone on a killing spree of his previous staff and has the new clones help clean up by tossing the corpses with the catapult. Veidt reveals it’s been four years since he was “sent there” and calls the place a prison. He’s trying to find a way to escape it.
At home, Angela talks to her husband, who reveals that he lied to Agent Blake. He also says he didn’t tell her about his “accident”, and he thinks Agent Blake is trying to help her. At Trieu’s, her daughter wakes up from a nightmare of being in a burning village and being forced to walk. Trieu does little to comfort her and sends her back to bed before chatting with Will. She is hiding something from her daughter and questions Will’s commitment to whatever they are doing — something that will happen in three days. The episode ends with Will saying he’s committed and ominously saying “tick tock tick tock”.
Watchmen airs Sundays at 9/8c on HBO.
