Alan Moore’s Watchmen offered a chilling take on many of the classic superhero myths that comic book fans have held near and dear for so many decades. Each hero in the 1986 series bears noticeable resemblances to at least one beloved figure of comics lore. Though Watchmen does not exactly have a Man of Steel in the patriotic, do-good-for-good’s-sake sense, Doctor Manhattan is the graphic novel’s Superman. He’s also one of the deepest, most complex takes on a super-powered individual that the comics medium has ever seen.
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Manhattan leaves Earth at the end of Watchmen. It seems that the super-powered physicist’s mysterious absence from Earth casts a massive blue shadow over Damon Lindelof’s upcoming HBO show. Lindelof’s series picks up a few decades after the events of the original comics run. We don’t know exactly where Manhattan is at the start of the series–but based on the trailers, it looks like the quantum god will be returning to our home planet sometime soon. And though Manhattan has been a force for peace before, the megahero’s return to Earth in the world of Lindelof’s series may spell more doom than good.
Who is Doctor Manhattan?
Formerly known as nuclear physicist Jonathan Osterman, Manhattan was the human son of a watchmaker. Osterman planned to follow in his father’s footsteps as a watchmaker, but then the U.S. bombed Hiroshima. This set off a chain of events that led the young Osterman to abandon his career to study atomic physics. While working at a research base, Osterman gets trapped in a test chamber, and despite his fellow researchers’ best efforts, the laboratory generator is activated, and the physicist is blown to pieces. Months later, Osterman, using his newfound nuclear powers, would put the many pieces of his body back together to become the infinitely-powerful quantum being known as Doctor Manhattan.
What happens to Doctor Manhattan in the end of Watchmen?
The events of Watchmen leave Doctor Manhattan in an even more complicated place than before. After becoming the superpowerful blue-skinned hero, Manhattan is used as something of a war-horse for the American military. But when Manhattan is accused of causing cancer in many of his former colleagues, the stoic force of nature is driven to escape to the planet Mars. He avoids humanity for a long time, only being convinced to return to Earth when the villainous Ozymandias is revealed to be enacting a plot that would destroy the city of New York.
Manhattan faces Ozymandias with a few other vigilante heroes, but soon finds that the mastermind’s plot somehow had a benevolent end–by decimating Manhattan, Ozymandias has helped humanity avert World War III. This depraved sense of moral ambiguity leads the quantum being to, again, abandon the people of Earth. At the end of Watchmen, Doctor Manhattan decides to leave humanity to find a “less complicated” galaxy. And though he departs, he does tell Adrian Veidt, aka the super-smart anti-hero Ozymandias, “Nothing ever ends.”
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Where do we find him at the start of the new HBO series?
In the trailers for Damon Lindelof’s new HBO series, we’ve seen a lot of references to Doctor Manhattan. The character’s absence seems to be a hugely impactful phenomenon for the people of humanity, as we see masks of Manhattan, and news stories depicting the effervescent blue man walking the sands of Mars. While Manhattan said he desired to find a different galaxy, it seems, at some point in his interstellar journey, he landed himself back on the red planet in our solar system.
A very surprising shot from the trailers shows a man in black suit reach down and pick up a blue mask. The hand that emerges from the suit jacket lapel is bright blue. So, while we don’t know exactly where Manhattan is at the start of Watchmen, we can pretty much confirm that, sometime during the events of Lindelof’s show, the big blue guy is making a comeback. Hopefully he’s able to help sort out the chaotic mess of the series’ fractured American society. But let’s be honest, his return is probably just going to make things way, way worse.
Watchmen debuts on Sunday, October 20 on HBO.
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