HBO’s Watchmen isn’t a direct adaptation of the famed graphic novel, but rather a sequel set more than 30 years later. Still, familiar faces abound. A couple such faces appeared in this week’s premiere, but one of them was much more mysterious than the other.
Who was that weird old guy played by Jeremy Irons? Damon Lindelof and various press notes for the show refer to him as “Probably Who You Think He Is.”
It’s a safe bet anyone watching Watchmen week to week should know everything about Ozymandias.
[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for the first episode of Watchmen, and the Watchmen graphic novel.]
The folks behind HBO’s Watchmen have tried to be cagey about it, but without complete success. Irons — who appears in the first episode of the show as an unnamed, seemingly reclusive aristocrat with very loyal servants — is playing Adrian Veidt, also known as Ozymandias, the smartest man in the world.
That makes him the future version of the biggest player in the original Watchmen, the elusive mastermind behind almost every event in the story. Arguably, the story’s arch-villain, if Watchmen could be said to even have a villain.
Even if you do know who Ozymandias is, you could be forgiven for forgetting exactly what his plan was in Watchmen, how he enacted it, and how he got away with it scot free and has lived to a ripe old age.
But first we have to understand a few things about Ozymandias’ reality.
Cold War politics
Superheroes radically changed the world of Watchmen. There were pros and cons: On the one hand, the Comedian assassinated Woodward and Bernstein before they exposed the Watergate scandal, and Richard Nixon abolished presidential term limits to remain present through the late 1980s. On the other, thanks to Ozymandias’ patent on cheap and effective charging stations, everybody was driving electric cars in 1985.
But the real salient point here is that Doctor Manhattan, as a superhero working with and for the US government, made America the clear dominant force in the Cold War, though tensions between the US and Russia remained high.
Adrian Veidt, the polymath former crimefighter known as Ozymandias, believed that not even the presence of Doctor Manhattan could calm the Cold War. He concluded that Earth was headed for irreversible destruction one way or another — either Russia and the US would create an explosive nuclear armageddon, or the ever escalating production of nuclear weapons would eventually create an environmental disaster of equal proportions. (Watchmen’s first issue was published five months after the Chernobyl disaster.)
And so he decided to do something about it. As he himself puts it in Watchmen:
“Unable to unite the world by conquest — Alexander [the Great]’s method — I would trick it; frighten it towards salvation with history’s greatest practical joke.”
He hatched an ambitious multi-year plan to amass the world’s greatest fortune and use it to convince Earth’s governments that the planet “faced imminent attack by beings from another world.”
The story behind a giant space squid
Ozymandias’ master plan rears its head all over Watchmen, and many of the comic’s events turn out to be his attempts to protect it. The book begins with the death of the Comedian, who Veidt had to kill after the former masked crimefighter uncovered his scheme by pure chance. And when Rorschach began to investigate the Comedian’s death, Veidt staged an assassination attempt on himself to create the illusion of his innocence, and framed Rorschach for murder to try and get him off the board.
Moore and Gibbons liberally and subtly pepper the rest of Veidt’s plan into Watchmen. Multiple issues have minor mentions of a obscure artists and scientific personnel who have all gone missing. Horror comics creator Max Shea, surrealist painter Hira Manish, and avant-garde composer Linette Paley are all specifically mentioned. Also, the grave of a recently deceased and famous psychic was found disturbed, with the man’s head decapitated and missing.
It’s revealed, late in the series, that Veidt promised large sums of money to these missing people to leave their old lives behind and come to a remote island. None of them knew who they were working for, but most seem to have believed that they were helping write, design and produce special effects for a very expensive, very secret, very eccentric sci-fi movie. After they completed their work, they were all killed.
Meanwhile, Veidt fabricated plausible accusations against Doctor Manhattan that pushed the already aloof superhuman into becoming fully alienated from humanity — causing him to suddenly leave the Earth entirely. This unexpected and significant weakening of America’s military firepower pushed the US and Russia closer to nuclear threat.
Over the course of Watchmen, Russia invades Afghanistan, then Pakistan, and then begins to mass tanks on its borders with Western Europe. Scenes in Nixon’s war room make it clear that his administration is willing to use a nuclear strike to prevent Russia from pushing west — despite an even chance that enough of Russia’s war machines would survive such a strike as to be able to destroy the rest of Europe and the entire American east coast.
In the middle of all of that, the “Institute for Extraspatial Studies,” headquartered down the street from New York City’s Madison Square Garden and secretly funded by Veidt, announced that it was nearing a breakthrough in its search to open new dimensions and find “extra-dimensional energy sources.”
Then, shortly before midnight on November 2, 1985, Veidt inked the final stroke of his master plan with an emphatic period. He teleported a giant, tentacular space squid into the spot that the Institute for Extraspatial Studies occupied.
“I engineered a monster, cloned its brain from a human psychic, sent it to New York and killed half the city,” he testily sums it up at one point. The key, he explains a bit more, was the psychic’s stolen head, which his scientists cloned and engineered into a much more powerful organ.
“The brain was a psychic resonator,” he tells Nite Owl and Rorschach in Watchmen #12. “It would amplify a signal pulse and broadcast it, the signal triggered by the on set of death. We coded a lot of information into that signal. Terrible information. Max Shea’s descriptions of an alien world, Hira Manish’s images and Linette Paley’s sounds. Other than those killed outright by the shock, many will be driven mad by the sudden flood of grotesque sensation, and sensitives world-wide will have bad dreams for years to come. No one will doubt that Earth has met a force so dreadful it must be repelled, all former enmities aside.”
The problem is, it worked
Within an hour of the squid’s appearance and its psychic shockwave, Russia and the US had called a ceasefire and an immediate summit in Geneva. Russia even pulled troops out of Afghanistan. All of the masked crime-fighters who failed to stop Veidt are horrified — but they agree to keep his secret, as the alternative would throw the world back into even more terrible war. The only exception is the objectivist Rorschach, who is subsequently rendered to his component atoms by Doctor Manhattan.
A few months later, peace is the rule around the world. Peace — and fear of “Dimension X.” In HBO’s Watchmen, it appears that Adrian Veidt has lived to a ripe old age, his “trick” pulled off without a hitch. Will that remain the case as the Watchmen TV series continues? We’ll have to wait and see.
