Doctor Manhattan is a figure that looms large in the world of Watchmen — and not just because he’s a large, powerful, glowing blue practically all-powerful and omniscient being. With Doctor Manhattan not even residing on Earth, having instead gone to Mars 30 years previously, he has become something of a mythical figure on the HBO series. Despite this absence and his mythical status, in tonight’s episode “She Was Killed By Space Junk,” Doctor Manhattan has a major role and it’s one that offers as many explanations as it does create new questions.
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Spoilers for tonight’s episode of Watchmen, “She Was Killed By Space Junk,” below.
The episode opens up with a woman, who we soon learn is FBI Agent Laurie Blake, aka the former Silk Spectre, making a trans planetary phone call to Mars where she begins to tell Doctor Manhattan a joke. The joke is about a bricklayer who is precise with bricks and how he plans to teach his daughter to be a bricklayer, too by having her build something. She does it perfectly but there’s one extra brick. The bricklayer is upset, but the daughter tosses the brick into the air. As Laurie tells the joke, though, she stops and says that she’s messed it up somehow.
The telling of jokes in a message to Doctor Manhattan remains a constant element of the episode. We return to the booth and Laurie’s message several times with each return telling more of this joke. She tells him about three dead heroes who get to the Pearly Gates to meet God and, in each turn, she reveals that the heroes — meant to be Nite Owl, Ozymandias, and Doctor Manhattan himself — are all three sent to Hell by God for various reasons. However, at the end of the “joke” there’s one more person present, a woman. The woman is one that God doesn’t know, but she reveals herself to be the girl from the first joke with the brick — and now that brick falls and kills God, sending him to Hell. With the joke over, Laurie continues the last of her message to sadly and defeatedly suggest that Doctor Manhattan never even listens to these messages, though she finds some sort of weird comfort in them. She also talks about maybe human beings and Earth really aren’t worth the time just as he himself felt when he left Earth for Mars.
There’s an emptiness and a brokenness to Laurie’s message and it’s one we see in the rest of her appearance as well. With Rorschach dead, Ozymandias/Adrian Veidt believed dead, Nite Owl apparently in prison, and Doctor Manhattan on Mars, Laurie is the only one of the “heroes” remaining and hers appears to be a lonely existence. She works for the FBI’s Anti-Vigilante Task Force and hunts down costumed vigilantes now and is shown as being a hard and almost bitter woman. When Senator Keene visits her at home, she’s sharp and no nonsense. When she arrives in Tulsa, she’s abrasive even as she begins her own investigation into the death of Chief Judd Crawford. However, her previous life still matters to her. Doctor Manhattan remains an important figure for Laurie — and that’s evidenced not just in her phone call to Mars. In the episode, she’s seen with a locked briefcase a couple of times that is ultimately revealed to contain a large, bright blue, anatomically correct Doctor Manhattan dildo that Laurie has presumably used during lonely nights over the years. The pair were in a relationship for years before she ended up getting involved with Dan Drieberg/Nite Owl and Doctor Manhattan left to Mars.
Doctor Manhattan may no longer be on Earth and three decades may have passed, but his presence — and his absence — clearly still matters.
And Doctor Manhattan may end up having an even more significant role in things as Watchmen continues. After a sad and lonely Laurie wraps up her message to Doctor Manhattan via the special blue phone booth, she steps outside into the Tulsa night only for Angela’s car — the one that was lifted away with Will Reeves inside of it by a giant magnet last week — crashes down in front of her. Laurie looks up into the sky and sees the planet Mars shining especially bright and laughs. Maybe Doctor Manhattan got the joke after all.
Watchmen airs Sundays at 9/8c on HBO.
