A God Walks Into Abar Explained: Watchmen Season 1 Episode 8 Review

A God Walks into Abar explained: the episode in plain terms

Watchmen is a nine-episode HBO series created by Damon Lindelof and set in the universe of the Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons comic. The eighth episode, directed by Nicole Kassell and written by Jeff Jensen and Lindelof, is the one that turns the season inside out. It aired on December 8, 2019, and tells a love story that the audience has been watching from the wrong end all season. The title, spelled "Abar," plays on both the old joke and Angela Abar's surname, and anyone searching for a god walks into a bar will land on the same episode.

The setup is a conversation. Dr. Manhattan, played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II the whole time even when his face is hidden, lands in Vietnam on VVN Day and walks into Eddy's Bar to talk to Officer Angela Abar, played by Regina King. Angela, who is nobody's pushover, points out that his plan looks like Zeus coming down to Earth in disguise to seduce a mortal. She also cuts into his story to tell him how cool it is that he can walk on water. From there the episode moves back and forth in time, which is how Manhattan experiences it.

He explains that all events are happening at once for him. That framing allows the episode to dive into the origin of the manor house, the clones and the habitable Earth on Europa, which the season has hinted at through the thread of Adrian Veidt's captivity. As a child, played by Zak Rothera-Oxley, he and his father Hans, played by Anatole Taubman, have escaped Nazi Germany and found refuge in an English manor. The people who run that house will become the clones Veidt later abuses, a detail that ties the episode's two stories together.

The pickup, the morgue and the choice of Cal

The romance is fascinating because it is slightly creepy and slightly sweet. Manhattan knows they will get together, so the whole routine at the bar is a performance for the sake of a future he can already see. The ethics are debatable. A man who knows the outcome courts a woman who does not, and the episode is aware of the unease. It recalls The Time Traveler's Wife, in which a time traveler grooms a future partner, and it raises the same question about free will: is a fated romance a gift or a trap?

His answer to why he helped in Vietnam if he knew how it would turn out is the best line in the scene: have you ever done anything you knew you would regret? He knows the future and still experiences regret, which says something about the limits of omniscience.

The scene that makes A God Walks into Abar what it is, a love story and a metaphysical puzzle at once, is the morgue. Angela explains she cannot have dinner with a blue man, and Manhattan points out that she has already solved the problem. Cut to her pulling open drawers of recently deceased men with no next of kin, slated for cremation. The logic is neat: Jon could fabricate documents for a new body, or he could take the identity of a man nobody will miss, whose papers already exist. She offers him white and light-skinned bodies, assuming he would want a match for his old appearance. Jon says he does not care. The form he takes should be one she wants. After some pushing, she chooses Calvin Jelanie, a Black man who dropped dead, possibly of a heart attack. It is a satisfying choice because it makes the body about her desire, not his.

Adrian, the ring and the cost of forgetting

A new face does not fix the real problem. The godhood is what tore Jon and Laurie apart, and this time he will not lose. He goes to Antarctica to ask Adrian Veidt, played by Jeremy Irons, how to become ordinary. Adrian is unsurprised, runs through his usual complaints about humanity, and notes that Jon's new Black form could be called appropriation in 2009. The episode leaves that thought experiment hanging, and it is a good one.

Adrian agrees to help once he learns his friend is in love. He built a device thirty years earlier to destroy Jon, never used it, and now it will let Jon forget who he is completely. He will not know he has powers and will use them only as a reflex in life-threatening moments. The price is Adrian's own wish. Tired of saving humanity in the shadows, he wants to be adored, and Jon sends him to Europa to be a god to the clones.

Back at the bar, Angela demands proof, and Jon produces an egg: he can put his powers into an organic substance and pass them to whoever eats it. Years later Angela removes the device, the blue glow returns, and the season's earlier events begin to make sense. Jon teleports to the pool, walking on water again, to move their children to safety. Angela reacts with frustration instead of awe, which is the correct reaction. Her willingness to die for him is what he was never ready for. The episode ends where it began, at the bar ten years earlier, with Angela asking why she would start something that ends in tragedy. His reply, that all relationships end tragically, wins her over.

One of the episode's neatest turns involves the season's opening. Jon explains that he visited Will Reeve, Angela's grandfather, walking straight through his door to talk about her, and the scene reveals that Angela was the person who told Will about Judd Crawford's connection to Cyclops. In other words, she started the whole show. It is the sort of loop that only a character who experiences time all at once can close, and it turns a plot detail from the pilot into a moment of tenderness.

Angela's reaction to the news that her husband was always in love with her, even at the end of the relationship, because of how he perceives time, is brisk and a little annoyed. She is in business mode, and that practicality is why the romance works. A weaker version would have turned her into a woman swept up by a god. This version makes her the one who sets the terms.

Verdict: a bad joke with a very good punch line

The title suggests a groaner, and A God Walks into Abar lands as one of the season's best. It answers the show's biggest question, who is Cal, in a way that deepens everything that came before. The performances sell it. Abdul-Mateen plays Jon with the awkward tenderness of a being who knows too much, and King plays Angela with the brisk practicality of a detective who has no time for cosmic romance.

The episode asks the audience to buy a few contrivances. A being who can see everything allows himself to be captured by white supremacists, and nobody needs to pretend that is airtight. That is the problem with writing a god, because the character will always do things that seem odd in hindsight. Jon was a mortal before he was a god, though, and the story is about the human part still in him. His creation of the clones can be read as a search for his own humanity, made in the image of what he wishes people were: selfless, innocent and loving. His willingness to give up everything for Angela completes the thought. Being human means loss and sacrifice, and also joy, surprise and love, and as Cal Abar he gets a lifetime of it.

There is also a post-credits scene on Europa. Adrian, pelted with tomatoes for refusing to stay, is jailed, then visited by the Game Warden, the original Mr. Phillips. The clones, reluctant to see him go, bake a horseshoe into his cake so that he can tunnel his way out. It is a dark comic coda to an episode otherwise devoted to love, and it keeps the season's other story moving.

Sources

• Watchmen (TV series), Wikipedia — Checked against: episode list, cast and air dates.