Much like poor, stranded Adrian Veidt on his little wooden boat, I too pull theories out of the murky depths only to toss them back like discarded clone babies when they turn out to be mostly, if not completely wrong. Four episodes down andWatchmenremains an impenetrable mystery box filled with deity dildos and mysterious lubed-up vigilantes where it’s kind’ve impossible to tell what’s a red herring and what’s true. Or, you know, what’s Trieu.
“If You Don’t Like My Story, Write Your Own”—named after a line fromChinua Achebe’s novelThings Fall Apartwhich has since become shorthand for “I refuse to admit I made a shitty movie”—introduced a lot of questions, but it also introduced a major new face inHong Chau’s Lady Trieu. A trillionaire visionary and leader in advanced pharmaceutical technology with the power to just up and make a dang baby from scratch, Trieu is responsible for the Millennium Clock, a towering time-teller jutting its way out of the Oklahoma landscape that looks like London’s Big Ben had sex with one of those alien tripods fromWar of the Worlds. Folks, it’s an eyesore, and it’s also probably at the center of a nefarious plot to do something…nefarious, considering all the spooky talk coming from a suddenly-very-mobile Will Reeves.
You probably have a few questions about all of that. I most certainly have more than a few questions about all that. So, without further adieu…
What’s The Deal With Lady Trieu?
The most important thing to know about Lady Trieu besides the fact she’s an impossibly rich mogul who apparently owns Carrie Fisher’s entire wardrobe fromStar Wars: A New Hopeis the fact that Trieu Industries owns and operates Veidt Enterprises while the actual Adrian Veidt is up on probably-but-maybe-not Mars butchering entire dining room’s worth of clones. And the process of how Trieu absorbed Veidt is the kind of utter corporate shadiness that could only mean something truly sketch is afoot.
Here’s the gist, mostly via thePeteypedia: Trieu Industries purchased Veidt’s companies at thesame exact timeAdrian Veidt went missing. The dude’s board of directors actually traveled to his remote Antarctica hideaway, Karnak, to get his thoughts on the deal, found it deserted, and just sort’ve went “huh” and continued to finalize an agreement to sell away his life’s work. That is…objectivelysuspicious. That’s like if a billionaire who owned a private crime island and had access to dirt on the world’s most powerful people mysteriously killed himself in a guarded cell and society just accepted it. LuckilyWatchmenis fiction and we don’t have to worry about such silliness in the real world.
Anyway! Trieu Industries officially started managing Veidt’s estate in 2017, two years before he was officially declared dead. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair,” Trieu said shortly afterward during the groundbreaking process for the Millennium Clock as a “shout-out” to Veidt, which—given the themes of hubris and crumbling power in the poem that line originates from—could be construed as a wanking motion in the general direction of the missing Veidt.
But we still can’t be sure whether Trieu is on the side of or opposed to the still-very-much-alive Veidt. The opening to this episode with the extremely wholesome egg-farming Clarks seems to suggest that whatever “advanced pharma and bio-medical tech” Trieu has access to—or at least a crude version of it—it’s also responsible for the human life being created over on Veidt’s villa/prison. Which would mean Doctor Manhattan is not the creator, as I predicted last week like an absolute freaking doofus. And he might not even have been the glowing orb in the sky Laurie saw last week, as it’s pretty darn obvious that one of Trieu’s flying magnetic whatchamacallits picked up Will Reeves. Laurie was cackling wildly at nothing, which is actually shockingly on-brand for someone related to The Comedian.
What Is the Purpose of the Millennium Clock?
“It tells time,” Trieu’s daughter Bian (Jolie Hoang-Rappaport) tells Laurie Blake and Angela Abar, which is the kind of vague fuckery you’d expect an FBI Agent and professional vigilante to ask a follow-up question on. I can see it’s a clock, you extremely eloquent child, why is it ten thousand feet tall and built to withstand a nuclear blast?
With that in mind, this certainlyisstarting to feel like a “thermo-dynamic miracle” where everything’s connected, man. A clock that shares a name with Adrian Veidt’s plan to usher humanity into a new superpowered utopia. A fringe terrorist organization that is collecting lithium material madedirectlyby Doctor Manhattan. Even that odd throwaway line about Russia developing an intrinsic field generator, which was the device that turned Jon Osterman into Doctor Manhattan in the first place. I know I’m like one piece of string away from a full-onPepe Sylviasituation, but that big ol' clock is starting to give off vibes similar to Magneto’s mutant-making machine from the firstX-Menmovie.
A Brief, Veidt-Al Update on Ozymandias
Less a question, more of a statement: This week, Adrian Veidt finally confirmed what we’ve been dancing around for weeks, the fact that his idyllic country estate is a prison he was brought to against his will and is now trying to escape. It’s also mostly a facade, as the corpses Veidt is catapulting into the sky disappear into nothingness like they’ve reached the border of someCabin In the Woodssimulation.
Again, the dude is probably on Mars, but I’m extremely open to some left-turn swerve where he’s like, trapped in the snow globe from the end ofKrampus, tying back into my long-held belief that all movies and TV shows would be improved by the involvement of Krampus. The most intriguing update we get from Veidt is a timeline. He notes that it’s been four years since he was “sent” to this prison. So, assuming Watchmen isn’t dealing with some non-linear trickery—and wouldanyonebe surprised if it was?—the the increasingly suspect sequence of events played out like this:
Where was Veidt in those three years between his disappearance and incarceration? Is Lady Trieu a helper or adversary in this situation? Most importantly,whydoes Mr. Phillips keep trying to hand Veidt a horseshoe?
What Are These Mysterious Pills?
It’s unlikely we’ll learn the full purpose of the pills that Will Reeves left in Angela’s car until we also learn the identity of Looking Glass' ex, who I genuinely hope is some obnoxiously obscure figure fromWatchmenhistory for no reason. Looking Glass dated, I don’t know, Mothman’s daughter. Stink Bug.
Either way, we can look to the way Will and Trieu talked their way around the pills for an idea of what the heck they are. “Passive-aggressive exposition,” Trieu calls them, an extremely round-about way for Will to let Angela know who he really is. Will, who straight-up hung a man from a tree as a way of introducing himself to his granddaughter, really likes taking the round-about way of doing things for a man who was using a wheelchair as of one episode ago. Interestingly enough, though, Will fires back an accusation that Trieu is doing “the same thing” to her daughter.
Whether that statement is literal or not, Trieu is certainly doingsomethingwonky to her daughter. We see Bian is hooked up to a medical-ish machine while she sleeps, right before she awakes with memories of unsettlingly vivid dreams. “I was in a village. Men came and burned it," Bian tells her mother. “Then they made us walk. I was walking for so long. Mom, my feet still hurt.”
Trieu’s response? “Good.”
See, I’m not a parent and the bio-medical tech I have access to could hardly be described as advanced, but to me that does not sound good. That sounds like memories of a Vietnam that young Bian couldn’t possibly have. If you hooked 100+-year-old Will Reeves up to that doo-dad, what past could you see? And could he somehow make Angela see it, too?
What Fell Out of the Sky This Time?
While trading a baby for a few acres on the Clark Family Farm, Trieu just happens to see a glowing white object fall out of the night sky and crash land a few miles away. This marks the third thing to plummet into Tulsa on Watchmen, together with Angela’s car last week and the deep-rooted spirit of institutional racism, which crash-landed into Oklahoma pretty much the second Oklahoma was founded.
“That’s mine,” Trieu says, the most common saying among billionaires. This strange occurrence takes place a few years before the events of HBO’s Watchmen series, seeing as how downtown Tulsa and Trieu’s Doctor Manhattan payphones later sprouted up near the crash site, and the Millennium Clock appears to have been placed right over it.
That…seems pretty important, no? In my limited experience, an orb falls from the sky and then a mega-corporation builds a gaudy structure over it, something peculiar is most definitely afoot. Here are my theories for what’s falling out of the sky this time, in order of plausibility:
Who Is the Mysterious Lube Man?
Keep your murders and your Mars prisons because the only mystery inWatchmenI care about now is this alien-looking motherfucker who straight up doused himself in lube and slid into a sewer grate like something out of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle stories you may only find on the deep web. I can’t even begin to guess who is under all that glistening chrome, but there is one very important thing to keep in mind: Lube Man (official name pending) witnessed Angela dumping the remains of Will Reeves' wheelchair, and in the very next scene Laurie Blake needled Angela about Reeves. “You know hold hundred-year-olds tend to get around.Wheelchairs,” Laurie says. Isn’t it possible that someone who works for the Anti-Vigilante Task Force might have access to a few low-level, low-friction vigilantes? Honestly, after the events of last week, I could probably even tell you how they met.
Either way, I’m just glad Red Scare nicknamed this guy “Lube Man” and not “Lube Boy.” It’s bad enough I’m watching aWatchmenshow, I don’t need to be reminded of anythingelsefrom my high school days.
