WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Watchmen Episode 8, "A God Walks Into Abar," which premiered Sunday on HBO.
Alan Moore might be one of the most celebrated writers in comics history, but his name says off of adaptations of his work like HBO's Watchmen. At Moore's request, his name has been removed from adaptations like the V for Vendetta movie and Zack Snyder’s Watchmen film, with his artistic collaborators like Dave Gibbons simply credited as the comic's co-creator.
While Moore disapproved of many of the filmed adaptations of his work, HBO's Watchmen has earned praise for taking the spirit of the original comic into new directions and finding ways to make the book’s narrative techniques work in a different medium. While Watchmen was called unfilmable for years, the HBO series was able to effectively replicate one of the most technically complex aspects of the comic.
Thanks to his non-linear perception of time, Doctor Manhattan is one of the most complicated characters in Watchmen. In the series, the simultaneous experiences of the omniscient hero were depicted through panels that simultaneously depicted the character in different times and places on the same page. While that was something that seemed almost impossible to film, the most recent episode of Watchmen, “A God Walks Into Abar,” took a closer look at what happened to Doctor Manhattan and successfully depicted his time-shifting ways.
Starting off with a scene that takes place over 10 years prior to the main action of the TV series, we see Manhattan walk into a bar, as the episode's title suggests. This bar happens to be in Vietnam, where he’s arrived to meet and talk to Angela Abar, who he’s come to meet. Since this happens on a day when America's victory in Vietnam is celebrated by dressing up as Manhattan, Angela is skeptical, to say the least, about this man's true identity. Still, Doctor Manhattan finds ways to gauge her interest, namely that he confidently tells her that he already knows that they’ll be together, as he’s already experiencing it.
Doctor Manhattan goes on to tell Angela about his life, as well as their impending time together. He talks about being a child, when he learns about the Judeo-Christian creation story of Adam and Eve. Then, he goes on to say that this influenced him to make his own world on Europa, the smallest of Jupiter’s Galilean moons, where’s he constructed his own Adam and Eve in the image of the young British couple that took him in during WWII. From there, he talks about his relationship with Angela, their eventual falling out, his bargain with Adrien Veidt, and his troubling acknowledgment to Angela that their love will undoubtedly end in tragedy.
Throughout the hour, the episode keeps cutting to different scenes, while using Dr. Manhattan and Angela’s initial conversation at the bar as the base. Over the course of this revealing episode, we finally find out how Doctor Manhattan sent Adrien Veidt away from Earth and how Manhattan turned human and lived a seemingly healthy relationship with Angela in Tulsa. In the episode’s final third, we return to the main timeline of the TV series, where Dr. Manhattan has regained his memories and powers in modern-day Tulsa.
All of this builds up to Manhattan's inevitable end at the hands of the Seventh Kavalry, an end that Dr. Manhattan knows will happen… as it is always happening to him.
Through cross-cutting between all of these periods and letting pieces of dialogue that begin at one moment in time end in others, this ambitious episode effectively captures Manhattan's non-chronological existence. This is only possible through Jeff Jansen and Damon Lindelof’s firmly taut script and Nicole Kassell's direction, which understands the ebb-and-flow that all of these juxtaposed moments require to play off of each other.
While other comic book adaptations like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse or Ang Lee’s Hulk have replicated the looks of comics with split screens and overlaid images, "A God Walks Into Abar” forgoes any such blatant visual ideas to capture one of the most complex ideas in Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen. By using well-executed storytelling techniques to accurately portray Manhattan's point-of-view, Watchmen has crafted the best Doctor Manhattan since the original comic series.
Developed by Damon Lindelof, HBO's Watchmen stars Jeremy Irons, Regina King, Don Johnson, Tim Blake Nelson, Jean Smart, Louis Gossett Jr., Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Tom Mison, James Wolk, Adelaide Clemens, Andrew Howard, Frances Fisher, Jacob Ming-Trent, Sara Vickers, Dylan Schombing, Lily Rose Smith and Adelynn Spoon. The season finale airs Sunday at 9 p.m. ET/PT.