It’s only when the episode reaches its conclusion that it starts to trip over itself. First, it indulges in a cheap and easy Terminator-style temporal paradox: Angela tells Dr. Manhattan that her grandfather murdered Judd Crawford for being a closet Klansman and member of the Cyclops conspiracy, facts of which he goes on to inform her grandfather years earlier, causing him to commit that very murder in the first place.
Alan Moore wisely avoided these chicken-and-egg brainteasers when he wrote the character. Instead, he emphasized the way Dr. Manhattan’s quantum-physics experience of life would affect him emotionally. Passing messages backwards and forwards in time until reality becomes a loop is a lot less interesting than the idea of a man constantly adrift in an endless sea of memory, experience, and anticipation. One is a parlor game; the other is a story. It doesn’t surprise me to see the co-writer of this episode is Jeff Jensen, the former TV critic best known for his elaborate and always incorrect theories about what was really going on on Lindelof’s Lost. (Apparently Lindelof appreciated those pieces a lot more than I did.)
I reviewed this week’s episode of Watchmen, about which I had mixed feelings, for Decider.
Tags: decider, reviews, TV, TV reviews, watchmen