Watchmen: Ozymandias Goes to Trial in “An Almost Religious Awe” Preview

HBO’s Watchmen has continued to blow fans’ minds, as its decade-spanning story continues to evolve in unexpected ways. This week’s episode was certainly no exception, as it revealed some game-changing new details regarding Angela Abar (Regina King), Will Reeves (Louis Gossett Jr.), and Judd Crawford (Don Johnson). There’s almost an infinite number of possibilities for where the story could go from here — but we’ve got our latest look at what to expect. On Sunday, HBO released a new teaser for “An Almost Religious Awe”, the seventh episode of the show’s season.

While details around the episode are definitely under wraps, it’s safe to assume that the “vast and insidious conspiracy” at play is set to only get weirder and more impactful. The episode’s title – “An Almost Religious Awe” – is directly from a sequence in Issue #4 of the Watchmen comic, in which Doctor Manhattan muses about the human race’s reaction to him in Vietnam. For those who have been hoping that Manhattan would finally make an appearance on the series, that certainly will raise some eyebrows.

Next week’s episode is also expected to see the return of the Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias (Jeremy Irons) interludes, which were (understandably) missing from this week’s episode.

“Adrian Veidt is a character that I’m obsessed with and I was very compelled to wonder what happens to the Smartest Man in the World after he saves it,” showrunner Damon Lindelof said in a recent interview. “What’s your follow up act? More importantly, how do you deal with the frustration of ‘I saved the world but I can’t tell anybody that I saved the world.’ What situation do you put him in that it would be really interesting to watch him get himself out of, so the obvious idea that occurred to us was that he was under house arrest of some kind. We don’t know exactly how he came to be in this house or who his jailer is entirely at this point, but the idea is doing an escape story with Adrian Veidt that’s more like Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner than it was like Escape from Alcatraz, that felt too delicious to not do.”

“What we’re learning about Adrian Veidt is that every installment that we get of the nine episodes, there’s only one episode where you don’t get a Veidt installment — the storytelling, he didn’t fit in there — but every other one you get [one],” Lindelof continued. “And a year lapses in between each episode. It’s a story told on a very, very large canvas, each installment taking place on another anniversary of another year that he has spent wherever the hell he’s spending [it].”

Watchmen airs Sundays at 9/8c on HBO. “An Almost Religious Awe” will air on December 1st.