Even the “unpowered” people were pretty powerful. Laurie and Dan at one point singlehandedly beat up a gang of street thugs while out of practice and out of shape without so much as a scratch, and Rorschach can take on pretty much anyone who comes at him, clearly the baddest mofo in a whole prison. Veidt has honed himself to physical and mental perfection and completely outclasses Dan and Rorschach when they fight. At one point he deflects Dan’s projectile with a plate and throws it perfectly square in his nose, all without breaking a sweat. If anyone in the Watchman world can catch a bullet, it’s Veidt.
I went and looked at the panel last night, and the bullet’s “action lines” show Laurie shooting Veidt from three or four feet away right between his hands in the torso. Adrian’s line when he stands up is something close to “there’s something else I wasn’t sure would work.” All the other tricks Veidt has pulled in the past are eventually revealed to the reader, but here’s there’s no hint now or later that he did anything other than exactly what it looked like - that he caught a bullet. It’s possible that he didn’t and it was sleight of hand, but doing a magic trick while somebody three feet away is trying to kill you with a handgun is probably on par with catching a bullet.
Rocketeer, I hate to pile on, but I’m with everyone else. How does the scene make sense if Veidt didn’t catch the bullet? If it s a trick, whom is Ozymandias trying to fool?
Laurie?
She’s the one who tried to shoot him, and for her trouble gets kicked in the gut when she drops her guard. If he didn’t catch the bullet, what happened to the one she shot? Why did he have an extra bullet on her person, given that he had no way of knowing that Laurie & John were coming? Or are you saying Laurie is in on the trick? If so, what is her motive?
Dan & Kovachs? Why try to impress him? He’d already kicked their asses.
John? John’s a god. Nothing anyone this side of the Spectre does is going to impress him.
Refresh my memory. Earlier in the story, when that “lone gunman” shot Pepper Potts (or whatever Adrian’s secretary’s name was) and Adrian “almost prevented” the shooter from poisoning himself, did Adrian pretend to catch the bullet or just dodge it?
It is possible **Rocketeer ** is thinking of another shot fired at Ozy.
(Time to get my copy away from my daughter and re-read it again…)
I’m fairly sure he dodged it, as the secretary is shot and killed. Murder #2 of 7,135,908 for Mr. Veidt, since he set the whole thing up to support the “cape-killer” theory.
After Roy Chess shot the secretary, he fired at Veidt, who deflected the bullet with a large ashtray or sculpture of some kind (impressive in itself, I’d say) before clubbing Chess with it.
ETA
I also believe Veidt caught the bullet. I remember thinking he was surprised and also that he thought Jon would then kill him for what he’d done. But Jon didn’t, and that probably surprised Veidt also.
Dude, it’s your thread. I’d love to hear your reasoning.
I’ve never been happy with that last segment of the book, just because the sympathetic characters are so impotent. I’d love for Dan to be a little harder to take out. And finally they all fall in line with Veidt’s evil genius plan, except for Rorscach, of course.
(Side note: interesting how Dan and Laurie refer to what they wear as “costumes”, whereas Rorschach calls his a “uniform”. Veidt apparently likes to wear his Ozymandias get-up around the house just to bask in his own awesomeness; wonder what he calls that gold leotard.)
We never get the full story on any of their hero exploits, but my impression was that characters like Ozymandias, Nite Owl, etc. performed actual investigations to find and take down the criminal kingpins.
I apologize for being away from this thread for so long.
I’m also feeling a bit sheepish.
I dug out my issues of Watchmen and did a quick scan-through. I was confusing the earlier scene in which Adrian is attacked in the building lobby, which I’m pretty darned sure was a fake, with the scene at the end where Laurie shoots him.
But I’m not sure that the fact that I was confused invalidates what I said.
The obvious interpretation of the scene where Laurie shoots him is the literal one; that it’s real; he was shot at close range with a high-powered gun and managed to catch the bullet.
But what happened to all that kinetic energy? Handgun bullets, especially at close range, aren’t going to be stopped by flesh and , no matter how skilled at martial arts the target is.
Could we postulate that Veidt gave his guards guns filled with reduced-power rounds? After all, Veidt anticipated that a group would come to try to stop him, and an obvious thing for that group to do, especially Rorschach, would be to appropriate a guard’s weapon. It would be an obvious precaution to incapacitate any weapons that could be used against him. And what the heck, a guard would just be window dressing anyway, useless against Manhattan.
In the real world, yes, but we’re talking about a comic-book universe. In the DC or Marvel Universe, Veidt would be considered a low-level superhuman. He doesn’t seem so in Watchmen because the gap between the low & high level superhumans was far greater than the gap between the low-level superhumans and the norms.
I thought Laurie picked the gun up in Manhattan, but I could easily be wrong. As for the rest–who’d deliberately under-power guards when expecting the likes of Rorshach? Veidt isn’t a Republic serial villain, after all. Assuming he anticipated an an assault from the mad Mr. Kovachs, he’d order the guards to either (a) attack from a distance using lethal weapons, or (b) stay out of his way, as he’d simply beat them silly.
