Over the past few months, Watchmen has provided fans with a television experience unlike any other, as the world of the iconic DC graphic novel was updated for a new era. The series’ eight episodes have had their fair share of twists and turns, especially with regards to some of the show’s legacy characters. Next week, the narrative of the show is expected to come to a head in a profound way, and we have our first look at what that will look like. On Sunday, HBO released a preview for “See How They Fly”, the ninth episode of Watchmen‘s debut season.
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The episode is sure to play off of this week’s heartbreaking cliffhanger, that Cal Abar/Dr. Manhattan (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) has been tragically kidnapped and possibly destroyed by the Seventh Kavalry. This week’s episode showcased the evolution of Dr. Manhattan and Angela Abar’s (Regina King) relationship in a pretty poignant way, which arguably completely changed what people thought they knew about the show.
“I started this whole journey from the perspective of a fan — what would I have to see in a television show daring to call itself Watchmen? Doctor Manhattan was near the top of that list,” showrunner Damon Lindelof previously told The Hollywood Reporter. “But even higher was that we needed to tell a new story with a new character at the center of it. Once we landed on Angela Abar as that center, the new rule became that any legacy characters we were using (Veidt, Laurie and Hooded Justice) could only be used in service of Angela’s story … She was the sun, everyone else needed to be orbiting around her. So how could Doctor Manhattan, a man with the power of God, be in service of Angela’s story as opposed to the other way around? Based on his past (and all the tropes of Greco-Roman mythology), the answer was intuitive … love. We knew this relationship could only work if Manhattan took the form of a human, and so, the idea of Cal was born. And yeah, it came early. Almost from the jump.
There’s also the question of whether or not this might be the final episode of Watchmen, as Lindelof has expressed that the story he wanted to tell exists within these nine episodes.
“[It’s] not my story, right? I appropriated it,” Lindelof explained. “And so the idea that someone else could come along and do another season of Watchmen, that’s really exciting to me, too. I would watch the fuck out of that. These nine episodes are sort of everything that I have to say at this point about Watchmen, and then we’ll kind of go from there.”
