As for Lube Man, followers of Peteypedia got this final update tonight:
Importantly, if you open the PDF for this Peteypedia entry, there’s a hidden link under the words “canola oil”.
https://www.hbo.com/content/dam/hbodata/series/watchmen/peteypedia/09/memo-dale-petey.pdf
I’d say Lube Man’s secret identity is pretty unambiguous.
There’s a lot wrong with the shrimp. Cooling them to 22 degrees for a moment wouldn’t freeze them, and making the temperature exact is bullshit techspeak. We also see constant streams of them going through Veidt’s teleporter, but in usual dumb fake suspense they fall down one at a time at first, only gradually becoming a constant rain, totally unlike the way they fell in a sudden downpour in the earlier episode. Veidt says anybody within five blocks would be obliterated, but very little actual damage was shown. The biggest problem is that he didn’t know where in Tulsa Trieu was yet managed to pinpoint her exactly, even to allowing for wind and Coriolis force effects. Ugh.
When Angela talks to him about Uncle Miami Vice dying. This was what I was referring to, but on 3rd viewing (!) the structure was hovering over a blue mat and he was sat next to a Manhattan-blue box that said ‘Manhatten’ on it so… not Topher’s abilities at all.
My critical faculties clearly not as acutely tuned as many on here.
MiM
Good catch on the Manhattan tech. I didn’t see it either. (I had assumed such earlier in the thread, but wasn’t sure.)
Because she must not be as smart as she thinks she is 
Also, I didn’t mention it in my post about last week’s episode but I liked when they did a reference to this line.
Something else about the previous episode: I would not be shocked if they have her character the surname Abar just to have that pun in the title of the episode.
Loved this series and enjoyed the finale. Some thoughts:
I am fine with assuming the frozen squid are deadly projectiles. It seems realistic enough to me as comic book physics if not real life.
I don’t know if we have a second season but I could live without ever knowing whether she sinks or floats.
The projectile Trieu acquired was definitely Veidt. She had no idea when he would launch so there would be no way for her to fully control exactly where it would land. Much easier for a trillionaire to just buy where it lands.
The problem with this is that she already had the baby ready to go, that had to have taken a long time to prepare. I agree that it was Veidt but that entire situation made very little sense.
I don’t think Trieu had control over where it lands. The return trip was a ballistic trajectory, so after the fuel ran out it was going to land where it was going to land. Maybe they only calculated where the landing would be late in the process.
And then whipped up a baby for a couple who had already tried and failed to do so in no time and brought it to term and had it ready to be delivered on the very date of the crash? That makes no sense, she had to know the spot years in advance.
Who says no time? Maybe it was months out. Or maybe it was years in advance and she didn’t make her pitch until it was born which happened to be close to the crash.
Lady Trieu probably knew the general area where the capsule would be landing and undoubtedly had contingency plans for each of the farms in the area. Once she knew exactly where Veidt would land, she only needed to implement one of those plans.
Finally saw the finale, and I thought it was terrific. Fantastic way to tie everything together. A perfect ending… I hope they hold off on another season unless they have some really great ideas. Hard to write for characters with godlike powers.
I liked the subtle hints of Dr Manhattan being in Cal all the time. The floating castle. Angela surviving without explanation, when she was in effect dead. When they said that Dr M. was already there, I knew who it was already.
I do wonder what new information can be gleaned from watching the whole series again, with the knowledge that Sister Night wasn’t the innocent and uninformed one she appeared to be.
The message on Europa stopping at a the D was a great trick too.
I thought Veidt was sent to Europa as an exile, but then it appears he’s stuck there by mistake, because Dr M. has changed to be human. Seems to be a bit of a plot hole, this cleverest man in the world getting stuck there, despite knowing that Dr M., his means of escape, was gone now, by Veidts own hand. But still there’s so much in there unanswered (buying the farm to in effect get Veidt’s statue back, seems a weak spot).
USA Today reports that because Damon Lindelof, who created the series, doesn’t want to do a second season that HBO isn’t going to do another season (presumably not even with someone else running things).
Just a FWIW and bit of an aside … I’ve recently been streaming Netflix’s German language production “Dark” (watch it subbed not dubbed) … and either there are some big coincidences or these writers cribbed from each other.
It not just that a major theme is the version of time in which the future causes the past just as inevitably as the past causes the future, but the same “chicken egg” metaphor explicitly used and the same “tick tock” ominous muttering by various characters.
Still even if Lindelof cribbed some ideas the execution and novel application of them was great!
Well, I’ll be the one to say that I think they really bungled the finale. There’s been a current of the futility of human striving going through Watchmen, with Dr Manhattan embodying that. A ‘normal’ superhero universe has a range of individuals of different powers, but in the Watchmen, all the power is concentrated within a single, god-like being—there’s not a gradation of ability, there’s a bunch of zeros, and a single one. This parallels a Lovecraftian theme—humanity doesn’t, ultimately, have any power over the universe, which is an uncaring absolute. Dr Manhattan represents that absolute—‘the world’s smartest man poses no more threat to me than does its smartest termite’.
Except now, humanity can build a gizmo capable of overcoming Dr Manhattan after all. That means Veidt, in the original watchmen, simply wasn’t smart enough; if he’d built a quantum centrifuge, he could’ve taken out Manhattan. So Manhattan isn’t an absolute, compared to whom all humans are essentially nothing; a really, really smart termite can take him down. He’s on the same scale after all, just a thing with more power; there’s no fundamental gulf between him and humanity.
I think that basically undercuts the whole point of Watchmen, and I’m a bit saddened that the series’ developers didn’t realize this.
I just binge watched the series because we’re getting HBO on a free preview (clever marketing team). Love the original comix and followed the monthly Usenet conversations dissecting each detail as they came out. Like the movie, not great but better than many people thought.
I loved the series, with a few exceptions. Still some open questions, but that’s to be expected with anything based on the Watchmen. A good story arc, lots of interconnected strands and poignant callbacks, mirror imaging, and deep symbolism. Overall I’d give it an A-, mainly because I didn’t like the use of the Madame Trieu character or the Ozymandias plot of Europa. But lots of great new characters and a few updates on old ones.
I hope there’s a season 2, but it could go anywhere from here.
Jean Smart played a similar role in the first two seasons of Legion, and while she’s great in both roles I wish the characters were a bit more different.
That was my main qualm with the show: whenever anything mysterious or weird happened, I just tended to shrug and say “I guess Doctor Manhattan used cloning or time travel or something silly like that”. I liked the Hooded Justice stuff, though.
100% agreed. I absolutely loved The Leftovers starting with the second season, and was really excited to see this, after hearing all the critical buzz. But I can’t afford to subscribe to more than one streaming service at a time, so I decided to wait for HBO Max to launch before getting a chance to binge-watch this.
Aaand…wow was I disappointed! It took me three efforts over the space of nearly a week to slog through it, and I had no enthusiasm to watch any more. I think I’m out, although there are a lot of mentions of episode 6 as a stellar standalone ep, so maybe I’ll check that out.
FWIW, I had not ever read the comic but went to see the movie in 2009 with a friend who was a huge fan. He thought the movie was absolutely fantastic, I did not dig it at all (although I pulled my punches out of respect for him). But then I saw that a lot of other people who loved the comic thought the movie was a misfire, so I read the graphic novel. I liked it better than the movie (hard not to), but I didn’t love it.
The Watchmen got a record 26 Emmy nominations.