Another week, another flying car's worth of questions following Watchmen episode 3, "She Was Killed By Space Junk", a title that's possibly a reference to the Devo song "Space Junk", but having seen the contents of Laurie Blake's briefcase, might also just be a way of saying someone had sex with Doctor Manhattan.

Laurie Blake! (née Jupiter) Here at last, played by the always-incredible Jean Smart, who is making a habit of showing up to inject weary grief into trippy superhero series. (See also: Legion.) "Space Junk" largely pushes the mystery of Judd Crawford's murder and the mystical flying wheelchair-bound Egg Man who says he committed it to catch us up on Laurie's life and woo boy, it hasn't been an easy one. Thirty-four years after she watched an ex-coworker murder millions of people with a fake squid-monster—and 24 years after she and Daniel Dreiberg were arrested for illegal superhero stuff—Laurie works for the Anti-Vigilante Task Force, a branch of the F.B.I dedicated to making sure no middle-aged men are out here ninja star'ing cat burglars in their free time. She's damn good at her job—we see her absolutely bamboozle a dollar store Batman doing a C+ Bale at best with a fake bank robbery—but she's clearly carrying years of hard memories by the time she's assigned to the Tulsa case. (Along with Special Agent Dale Petey, the dude compiling all that saucy supplemental material over at the Peteypedia.)

And then a Toyota hybrid almost falls on Laurie's head.

You've probably got a few questions about all that. I know for damn sure I've got plenty of questions. And like each and every week here at the Watchmen guide, we're going to start with the most important query...

Would You?

Don't lie to yourself. It's 2019. The Shape of Water won an Oscar. Live your truth.

But seriously...

Who Is Laurie Blake?

I actually have to appreciate the moxie of Damon Lindelof and Co. for the way they handled Laurie's introduction. If you've read Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons graphic novel you understand, but anyone taking the plunge blindly into this TV series is missing several devastating layers of subtext. So, deep breath, here we go:

Laurie is the daughter of aspiring model Sally Jupiter. (Changed from Sally Juspeczyk in 1938). But Sally found her true success under a mask as Silk Spectre, a founding member of the OG vigilante crew, "The Minutemen", along with Hooded Justice, Captain Metropolis, The Comedian, Silhouette, Nite Owl, Dollar Bill, and Mothman. The central theme of Watchmen is that each of these colorfully named heroes was either slowly falling apart from hiding a personal secret, a roaringly unpleasant asshole, or a spandex-clad combination of both. Sally Jupiter was nowhere near a bad person but she did have a vain streak, so much so that she didn't mind when the Silk Spectre became as much of a sex symbol as a superhero. Young Laurie, already dealing with a parent who roundhouse kicks criminals in the throat as a career, also grew up listening to the various ways criminals wouldn't actually mind her mother stepping on them.

Naturally, and extremely healthily, Laurie eventually adopted the Silk Spectre mantle and joined up with a modern crimefighting crew, the adorably named Crimebusters, alongside Rorschach, the new Nite Owl, Ozymandias, the old-timers Comedian and Captain Metropolis, and—most importantly—Doctor Manhattan, a legit superhero with the powers of a god. Laurie and Manhattan became romantically involved, which is a bit like working at a nuclear power plant and hooking up with the uranium core at the Christmas party. Shortly afterward, two events rocked Laurie's life forever. 1) Doctor Manhattan realized living among humans mostly bored him and fucked off to literal Mars for some omnipotent peace and quiet, and 2) Laurie discovered her biological father was, in fact, Edward Blake, The Comedian, the man who—in probably the most controversial scene from the comics—sexually assaulted her mother. Later in life, Edward and Sally had a complicated but consensual encounter, and from there Laurie was born.

So just think about the mountains of mental health issues HBO's Watchmen has mounted upon modern-day Laurie Blake. She not only took the surname of her mother's predator, but according to the show's companion site, also briefly adopted the vigilante named The Comedienne. In the 34 years since the events of the comic, something inside of Laurie sided with her father, a cigar-chomping psychopath who gleefully used his crime-fighting position to prey on the weak. She's also clearly still working through the scars left over from a time spent loving a living deity who realized he couldn't relate to her on a molecular level. Imagine getting ghosted by, like, Galactus. Fucking Uatu the Watcher leaving you on read. The sheer tragedy of it.

Laurie Blake is not doing great, is the point here, but she's a stone-cold professional badass all the same, coming into Tulsa and immediately dad-dicking the local vigilantes like Sister Night and Looking Glass. Jean Smart's Laurie Blake is a wonderfully heart-breaking amalgam of the character's parents—the tough-as-nails resilience of her sex symbol mother and the ice-cold toothy cynicism of her father—who can't help but laugh at something as ridiculous as a car dropping from outer space.

Right, The Car, What's With the Car?

You may recall that last week's episode ended with a flying magnet swooping in and carrying Angela Abar's car, with Will Reeves inside, off into the night sky. "What the fuck?", asked Angela, echoing the general audience reaction, but the car that lands right in front of Laurie Blake definitely appears to be the same one—unless this happens a lot in Tulsa, I don't know, I've never been to Oklahoma—minus the mysterious Will Reeves in the passenger seat.

So who is picking up and tossing cars around the south-central United States all willy-nilly? The obvious answer is Doctor Manhattan himself, especially given the bright light Laurie sees flare among the stars. (A light that looks mighty similar to those two Watchmen panels to the right, which comes during a moment of Manhattan comforting Laurie. "Dry your eyes," he says.) There's also a really lovely small detail that hints at Manhattan: The Trieu Blue Booth tells Laurie her message will "reach Mars in approximately 40 seconds.” The car lands in front of Laurie just about 45 seconds later.

Assuming Will Reeves is not A) Actually Doctor Manhattan himself in disguise and B) Lying about literally every single thing he's said, Watchmen is going to have to fill in dozens of blanks to explain how the enigmatic Egg Man of Oklahoma went from escaping the Tulsa Race Massacre as a child to becoming space-buds with Earth's only superhuman, who then provides the perfect punchline to an ex-girlfriend's joke told thousands of lightyears away. That's maybe the strangest part, actually. On the list of things Doctor Manhattan enjoys and understands, both shenanigans and tomfoolery are right at the bottom above boxer briefs and vocal inflection.

 

Who Is the Game Warden, Ozymandias' "Adversary"?

I think by now we can just assume Adrian Veidt isn't on Earth anymore, or at least not any Earth we're familiar with. And as this episode makes clear, the former Ozymandias is being kept in this strange manor against his will, under the terms of captivity he made with an unknown "adversary". Even clearer, Veidt is trying to escape, a process that involves crafting a homemade space suit and, if I'm not mistaken, quite literally catapulting his test-clones into outer space, where they've been promptly freezing to death. "We're going to need a thicker skin," Veidt says, and that's literal. We see him prepping his latest launch using what appears to be pig skin, but the failed test leads him to hunt the much sturdier buffalo grazing nearby. Unfortunately for Veidt, The Game Warden, a strange silent guardian dressed like Jonathan Hyde in the original Jumanji, puts a warning bullet right at Veidt's feet.

I'm not gonna' sit here and pretend I have any concrete statement on all this other than the fact that repeatedly launching Tom Mison into space using medieval siege weaponry is objectively hilarious. But we can get an idea of what road wants you to head down by noting that The Game Warden comes accompanied by the insignia from Tales of the Black Freighter. Tales is the story-within-a-story that pops up throughout Watchmen, brutal, bloody pirate epic that acts as a metaphor for, in Alan Moore's own words, "the story of Adrian Veidt." HBO's Watchmen is pointing to that being the case once again—these odd Ozymandias cutaways are basically Damon Lindelof's Tales of the Black Freighter—not only with that black-and-yellow skull flag, but also subtle like this one:

The story in the comics tells the tale of a castaway whose ship was destroyed by the horrific Black Freighter, leaving him the sole survivor stranded on an isolated island. He builds a raft using the bloated body parts of his dead crewmates—much like Adrian Veidt is currently crafting an escape route essentially pieced together with limbs—and races home before the Black Freighter can reach his family. Sadly, traversing a vast ocean on a boat made from your old friends' internal organs has a way of getting to your head. The lone man makes it home but he's been driven quite mad, and mistaking her for an invading pirate, he accidentally murders his own wife. It's...not the happiest ending. It's pretty much the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie if it was based on a bath salts trip instead of a Disney ride.

But Jeremy Irons' Adrian Veidt is essentially living out the same reality. Stranded, trying to build an escape route using the various parts of the dead bodies around him. Trying to get back to a place where he thinks he should be seen as a hero when in reality he's both murderer and monster. One of the most flowery lines from Tales of the Black Freighter is pretty much Adrian Veidt's self-aggrandizing motto: "How had I reached this appalling position, with love, only love, as my guide?"

 

Okay But Where Is He?

Mars? Let's start with Mars, if only because sharp-eyed viewers might've noticed that the brief news clip of Doctor Manhattan from episode 2 seems to show the big blue guy building the castle in which Veidt is currently living.

Again, this would (kind've disappointingly) mean that the easy answer is Doctor Manhattan. Doctor Manhattan is like the Force in Star Wars; some unexplainable meta-physical fuckery happens, you can just be like, "Ahh, you know, Doctor Manhattan." But it would explain why Veidt, an insane person, is spending his time carefully crafting and then repeatedly watching a play about the worst moment of Manhattan's life. It also opens up a few interesting questions about all those clones, which we've been assuming Veidt has been making himself. But at the end of the comics, Manhattan does decide to leave our galaxy for good, and Veidt asks if he's finally regained his interest in human life. "Yes, I have," Manhattan answers. "I think perhaps I'll create some."

And then Manhattan tells Veidt that "nothing ever ends" and it made the dude so freakin' mad he's still writing it into revenge-theater three decades later. Yes, in fact, I do think these two psychos are the type to be throwing passive-aggressive Nextdoor posts at each other over tomatoes and eternal imprisonment.

What's the Deal with Joe Keene Jr.?

The big non-Laurie-or-Veidt development this week came during Judd Crawford's funeral, in which Angela sang a bit of Gene Autry's extremely depressing "The Last Roundup" and then a Seventh Kavalry wearing a bomb vest emerged from a mausoleum to try and kidnap Senator Joe Jeene Jr. Laurie puts a bullet in the Kavalry member's head, Angela dumps Judd's body on the bomb, and generally, everyone makes it out okay. But I suppose my big question for Joe Keene Jr. is whether he thinks nobody has seen literally any movie or TV show before? Come on, Joe. A very public attempted kidnapping where you call the cops "the real heroes" afterward is like, chapter 3 of the I'm Secretly A Bad Guy handbook. You're pulling from the amateur stuff, Joe! At least Ben Linus let himself get roughed up a little bit.

The question becomes whether the son of the man who made masked vigilantism illegal is in cahoots with the Kavalry or just making deals with some devils to boost his presidential polls. The jury is still out, but something that's definitely going to come back into play is the question that Keene pushed aside during that press conference: “Can you comment on the Russians building an intrinsic field generator?”

An intrinsic field generator is what zapped Jon Osterman into nothingness until he returned as Doctor Manhattan. Adrian Veidt later built one himself to try and kill Doctor Manhattan but only ended up taking the life of his own very good lynx, Bubastis. (#Justice4Bubastis) Essentially, Watchmen is casually suggesting Russia is trying to make their own Manhattan or prepare themselves an anti-Manhattan precautionary measure.

Or, extremely plausible third option, Russia is mass-producing those Doctor Manhattan dildos and wants to make them as realistic as possible. In which case, godspeed, comrades.