Watchmen Ep. 3 Impressions

The third episode of Watchmen really sets the tone for where the show is going. It introduced a character that will be instrumental in the shows future. The show is finally going to start to make more sense in terms of the overarching story. That overarching story will most likely be resolved by the end of the season.

The interesting part of all of these truths and people that we learned about this episode, still does not give us a totally clear path as to where the story is taking us. That is what I want to dive into in the impressions of episode 3 (As always spoilers follow).

The Three Heroes

This episode introduced us to Laurie Blake, for those that have read the Watchmen comic or have seen the movie would know that she is Silk Spectre.

The character is our first real connection to the original Watchmen comic. Blake spoke over the phone with Dr. Manhattan, it taught us that Blake and Dr. Manhattan had been apart up to this point.

Laurie Blake spoke about “The Three Heroes”, the three heroes being Nite Owl, Ozymandius, and Dr. Manhattan. These three in the story are faced with the fact that no matter how hard they tried in their life to do the right thing, god was still going to send them to hell.

The point of this story in my opinion is that they were all right and wrong. The truth is that there is no way to be perfect and they were all striving to be the perfect heroes in three totally different ways. One was trying to combat crime with non lethal tech, the other created a giant squid that killed millions and the other was a god.

The point is that Laurie Blake witnessed all three of these men do extraordinary acts, none of said acts could stop crime and rid the world of all its problems. While the men may have improved the world in some way, they were doomed from the start.

Don’t shoot

When we meet Laurie Blake we are shown that she is not the same character that we had seen in the previous Watchmen stories. Blake has given up on her belief that the world is better off having superheroes.

Blake is now a part of a government operation that hunts vigilantes in an effort to keep them from fighting crime. We see that she is no longer worried about the people in the world, when the vigilante runs she quickly shoots him in the back. We see

later that she did not know that the hero had armor informing us that she was not worried about shooting the man.

Thus informs us that she has adopted a belief that is far more similar to that of Dr. Manhattan. I don’t know what has brought on this transformation of her character, could it be the loss of Nite Owl or simply the fact that Dr. Manhattan left many years ago. We know that Dr. Manhattan does not worry about people and their survival. The fact that Dr. Manhattan does not care about her and the people may have resulted in her lack of empathy toward people as well.

Blake is quick and does not compromise, we see that she does not trust the people in Tulsa. Blake even takes a firearm into the funeral as a precaution of what may happen during her time there. Then whenever the suicide bomber makes his appearance and tells the people that he has wired a bomb that is attached to his heart she is quick to shoot him. This shows that she is very quick to take action even with the risk of loss of human lives.

Mars Attacks

When Blake finishes her conversation with Dr. Manhattan she leaves the phone booth and looks up at the sky. There is a red dot in the sky that seems to get bigger and then Angela Abar’s car is thrown down in front of Blake.

The general idea is that we are supposed to think that Dr. Manhattan has supplied Blake with the missing piece of her investigation. There problem here is that I do not believe that this was Dr. Manhattan and I do not believe that what we were seeing was Mars. I believe that this was the ship that we witnessed before dropping the car.

The problem with this theory is that I am not sure why Will and the people that he is associated with would want to supply Blake with information on Angela/others involved in the situation. The only thing that I can figure is that they may be trying to get the Watchmen involved in the events that are happening. To what end, I do not know. It doesn’t seem to make much sense, yet, I get the feeling that Dr. Manhattan is not yet involved in the events happening on Earth.

Conclusion

Overall, yet another amazing episode of this incredible show. I was impressed with the acting and storytelling of this show from the very beginning, however Jean Smart really impressed me with her performance of Laurie Blake.

On top of that I am constantly impressed with the overall lore of the show. It has such an interesting world that I just want to keep coming back to and understand on an even deeper level.

Everything about the world is fascinating and I must know more about Ozymandias. Ozymandias and his strange relationship with the people and the groundskeeper would be a fascinating show all in itself and there is so much more happening all around it.

Then, there is the aspect of the structure of this episode and how Blake is telling Dr. Manhattan the joke over the entire episode. It is a really great tool of transportation for the story that both informs us of Blake’s place in all of this and the fact that she no longer believes in heroes. We get to see that she still cares about Dr. Manhattan, she comes here to talk and tell him jokes, yet she has a coldness, she believes that all of the “heroes” will fail. It is such an amazing way of introducing a character and I cannot wait to see what they do with episode 4.

I hope that you have found these impressions interesting and will come back at the end of the show for my review and overall impression of the story as a whole. Until then!