TV Features

Maybe Love Is Blind—But It Doesn't Happen Within 30 Days

Can you truly know you love someone within the span of a few weeks?

Netflix

After my last serious relationship, I decided to "put myself out there" again and downloaded Tinder, Bumble, and OkCupid.

Being an active user on all these platforms solidified to me how different the dating scene is nowadays. Most of it is due to technology and our social media culture, which has definitely made us a bit more narcissistic, fake, and even cold-hearted. Romance in this day and age is pretty much dead—and, without a doubt, so is chivalry. Only two of my most recent 20 dates opened a door for me, so now I go on dates with zero expectations. Most of these guys just want to hook up, thinking a first date and a couple drinks warrants the perfect opportunity to proposition me.

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"Watch the Eggs": Doctor Manhattan Gave Away the Twist Ending of the "Watchmen" Finale

Time Paradoxes Will Come into Play for Another Reveal of Hidden Superpowers

Screenshot of Watchman S1X09 /TV Promos/ Youtube

As a child, I remember hearing the idea of God as a being who knows not just what I'm doing or what I have done, but what I will do for the rest of my life.

My reaction was to stay up at night picking at that idea like a scab. I would think of doing something spontaneous and unpredictable—throwing a book across my bedroom—plan on it, prepare the muscles in my arms to follow through, then slam the book shut in my lap instead.


God scene from futuramawww.youtube.com


But even at that age I could tell that my sudden shifts in intention were illegitimate. I had already planned to change my mind. The kind of God I'd been led to believe in would have seen right through my pretense. Free will—the freedom to follow a course other than the one laid out for me—was incompatible with such a God. Eventually I stopped picking at that scab, and the idea seemed to have healed over—until I watched the latest episode of HBO's Watchmen last night. It was like peeling back a scar to find the wound still festering underneath. Just so it's clear, from here on out there will be spoilers.

The particular wrinkle that the episode "A God Walks into Abar" has added to this old paradox is in making Doctor Manhattan both godlike and human. He has the ability to control matter at the atomic level, to create life, to exist in multiple places and to divide his consciousness across multiple times, allowing him to seemingly predict the future. But there are limits to his powers. He is vulnerable to tachyons. He cannot know anything outside of what he will experience while his powers are intact, and all it takes for him to be stripped of his powers is for his memory of them to be suppressed—by some dubious neurosurgery.

Another issue that seems to be hinted at is that Doctor Manhattan does not truly experience all of time at once. He has access to all of it, the same way that a person with cable has access to every channel, but the number of channels he can watch at once seems to be limited, and they all seem to play out at a fixed pace.

The evidence for this is in Doctor Manhattan's laughter. When Angela Abar and Adrian Veidt contradict each other on the topic of his imagination, Doctor Manhattan chuckles at the coincidence of their synchrony, and when Angela interrogates him about the other times he's experiencing, he continually uses the verb "now," in the same way a human would use it to describe ongoing events to someone not present. If he was experiencing his entire life at once, there would be none of these coincidental synchronies—no surprises or organic reactions. Each moment would be equally tied to every other.

So, while he claims not to experience the concept of "before," the truth seems to be that his "before" is just immensely more complicated than ours. His future contains moments of awareness that precede what he knows now, and his past contains moments of awareness that reach far into the future, but he is not constantly aware of everything he will ever know. Different moments play out together across time, like multiple TVs playing different channels in the same room.

So, just as we never see him embody more than a handful of physical forms, he seems to experience only a handful of separate moments concurrently, and while he can report from the future, his behavior throughout the graphic novel and now in the new series, has consistently suggested that he cannot act in a way that will alter the future he perceives. He tells Will Reeves, in this episode, that his powers to control events are limited. After all, if he changes the events that inspire him to make those changes, he erases the knowledge that allowed him to act. This is the kind of mind-melting paradox that makes time travel such a confusing topic.

But could a god-man like Manhattan navigate the mess in order to avoid catastrophe—like Cyclops gaining his powers? Has he even tried? Having been a god for so long, detached from human motivations, he may simply have lost the will to try to change things—to destroy a timeline he knows and has already experienced. Does he believe himself incapable of changing the timeline, or does he simply prefer not to take the risk of making things messy and confusing? Because that's something else we learned in this episode: It is possible for Doctor Manhattan to be confused.

With the tachyon device removed from his skull via hammer, Jon Osterman—AKA Doctor Manhattan, AKA Angela's husband Calvin—has to relearn how to live as a god, and incorporate what he's learned as a human. With all his tremendous knowledge flooding back to him, it seems he is once again putting himself back together— mentally this time. And just as the experience of physically rebuilding himself in 1959 taught him how to access his powers, coming back to his uninhibited form after ten years as a human seems to unlock new understanding for him to process. He tells Angela, "I am experiencing confusion as a result of the device being removed, and am not entirely sure when I am."

He teleports himself to walk on the water of their backyard pool, and tells Angela this will be important later, then he teleports their children to safety—anticipating the impending shootout. He operates as a walkie-talkie-through-time for Angela and her grandfather, Will Reeves. Angela, looking for answers, accidentally incepts the idea that Judd Crawford—whom Will has never heard of—is a member of the organization Will devoted his life to defeating. And this is the defining moment of the episode.

Angela's distress about having caused the event she was trying to understand sets Manhattan off on a philosophical musing on the chicken or the egg, and the nature of his unique relationship to time—the paradoxical way in which a reaction to an event can become its cause. It no doubt also sets in motion the as-yet-unseen events of the finale, but Jon/Calvin/Doctor's immediate response is to go cook waffles.

"Watch the eggs," he tells Angela as the fridge pops open in front of her. She smashes the carton on the ground. He must have known she was going to do that—that he would not be able to finish making those waffles. He might as easily have conjured completed waffles if he had wanted to. He allowed the eggs to fall as a pretense for dropping a hint that Angela will no doubt pick up at just the right moment. Now, here come the real spoilers...

I have eaten the egg. I know what's going to happen in the finale.

What exactly does "watch the eggs" mean? The egg in the beer as Manhattan tells Angela that he can imbue a mortal with his powers through food. The egg of Calvin's suppressed memory, and of Adrian's comment that a moment of instinct may unlock his powers—which prompts Manhattan to say "Thank you, Adrian, now I understand what happened." The egg of the promised and insisted dinner—Manhattan spends his whole first night together convincing Angela to have dinner with him, yet with all the time jumps we never see the dinner take place. The chicken that will hatch is whatever tragedy is about to end their relationship.

Calvin didn't save Angela from the Kavalry shooter. He didn't zap that shooter away. Angela did it herself in that moment she blinked her eyes. Whether she knew it at the time or not, Manhattan gave her his powers at that dinner in 2009, their second night together. Perhaps she still didn't believe who he was then—he says, that first night, that he prefers for her to remain uncertain. She ingested those godlike abilities, but because she doesn't realize she has them, she cannot yet use them. When she learns what her husband has made her—when she can walk on water herself, and no longer relate to the humanity of her adopted children—will she be able to forgive him?

Jon's musing about the chicken or the egg—"The answer appears to be both at exactly the same time"—inspired him to meet Angela in the first place. To set up that dinner. To drink an egg while talking about passing on his powers. To go make waffles that he'll never finish, and tell her to "watch the eggs." Even to track down Will Reeves and have him dose Angela with Nostalgia. For all we know, he supplied the bomb that killed her parents in the moment she felt inspired by a VHS tape.

It is all deeply confusing, but what has become clear is that whatever tragedy ends their relationship in the next episode, it will involve Angela coming to terms with the fact that she is a god. Perhaps a better god—for her traumatic life experiences—than Manhattan could ever hope to be. Sister Night. A god with the will to fight against evil even when events seem immutable. That moment—when Manhattan tells her that their tragedy is unavoidable and she decides to fight anyway—is the moment he falls in love with her, and it's no doubt why he chose to make her a god in the first place. For the first time in Watchmen history, a hero will have superpowers. And we will see how she flies.


Watchmen 1x09 Promo "See How They Fly" (HD) Season Finalewww.youtube.com


Of course there is someone else whom Jon has been feeding. A man with an all-consuming will to power—to reshape the world according to his vision. Adrian Veidt has been eating food that Doctor Manhattan created for the last ten years—including the cakes that Phillips and Crookshanks presumably pack with eggs. Is the horseshoe baked into that last cake perhaps a clue that the good Doctor has created more than one god? A good, humble Angela to oppose an evil ambitious Adrian? For that, and so much more—the millennium clock!—I don't have an answer. So you should probably tune in for the finale.

TV Reviews

"Dirty John" Is Too Relatable

Dirty John is incredibly frustrating, but quality actresses make an unbelievable survival story seem all too realistic on screen.

Eric Bana

Photo by Debby Wong (Shutterstock)

This week's pipeline from true crime to entertainment culminated with the finale of Bravo's Dirty John, which aired Sunday.

While the miniseries is not the first podcast to be adapted to television (HBO's 2 Dope Queens and Amazon's Lore and Homecoming are notable examples that predated it), the show marked the first true crime-turned-podcast-turned-TV-drama. Based on the #1 podcast of the same name, the eight-episode first season features Connie Britton giving a painfully believable portrayal of real-life mother Debra Newell, a highbrow interior designer and four-time divorcee in her late 50s. While she thinks she's met the perfect man online, Dr. John Meehan (Eric Bana) soon reveals himself to be a conman and unrepentant asshole with a penchant for mood swings, drug binges, and entreaties for forgiveness—which Debra grants, again and again.

DIRTY JOHN Official Trailer (HD) Eric Bana, Connie Britton Bravo Serieswww.youtube.com

Created by Alexandra Cunningham and directed by Jeffrey Reiner, the show excels in its depiction of sheltered Californian socialites. Debra is portrayed as a blind optimist who resists the reality of John's physical and emotional threats to her family, despite glaring red flags such as threats to shoot her daughter in the head and his escalating possessiveness over her—and her finances. Additionally, Debra endlessly coddles her two adult daughters, Veronica and Terra, entitled millennials played by Juno Temple and Julia Garner, respectively. Both girls are very privileged, very blonde, and very distrustful of the new man in their mother's life. Most apparent in all three women's performances is that Britton, Temple, and Garner even capture the child-like vocal fry of the real-life Newell women, whose voices feature in the Dirty John podcast.

Temple, in particular, excels as the brash and abrasive older daughter whose genuine concern is muddled with her elitist offense that a lower-class outsider has insinuated himself in her family's inner world of designer bags and luxury penthouses. In contrast, Garner's performance as the younger daughter is kept intentionally low-key and peculiarly infantile.

Spoilers ahead

However, for the finale, the show doesn't hold back in re-enacting John Meehan's knife-wielding attack and attempted abduction of Terra Newell, the family member whom we're led to believe is the weakest and most vulnerable. Here, the show's greatest gamble is hinging the entire climax on the subtleties of Terra's personality, which suddenly manifests as a self-assertive and independent survivor—who stabs her attacker 13 times in the parking lot outside her apartment, rather than be dragged into the trunk of his car. The transformation is almost unbelievable—except that part actually happened. In 2016, the real John Meehan died of his injuries in the parking lot where he attacked her. The real Newell girls even suspected that John would target Terra, believing her to be weak. In the show, Garner's nuanced performance is what makes an unbelievable survival story seem believable on TV in a triumph of fight-or-flight instinct.

As for the real Debra Newell, she wanted her story told as a cautionary tale of the perils of both online dating and blind devotion. She commented on the series, "It's a story to tell others to make them aware of what could happen to them. You almost have to remove yourself a little bit." In her personal life, Debra still calls herself "a naturally happy person," but it took the tools of time, therapy, and the removed sense of media to see her story clearly. She said, "[Therapy] had so much to do with being able to be healthy again. I had a lot of guilt at one point. I had to learn [the mechanics of] what had happened to me." But she's a fan of Connie Britton's portrayal. Debra praises, "She got my voice and my mannerisms down perfectly. I was in a dangerous situation, and there wasn't a lot of opportunity for Connie to show the lighter side of me — I'm not always that nice or serious!"

Yet, the show isn't exactly sympathetic toward Debra. To be clear, Dirty John is incredibly frustrating. But that's largely due to the incensing nature of the late Meeham's crimes and manipulations. His history of deception, impersonation, and conning every woman in his life (including his own family members) is perhaps the heaviest focus of the series. Debra, the character, is less important; her previous marriages aren't explored, while her naivety often is, and her family's Southern Californian ethos gives off plenty of Mean Girl vibes to provide comic relief. Above all, her initial refusal to doubt John is frank and infuriating, but it's primer for the show's midpoint climax; Debra's conflict foreshadows her decision to take John back even after her family presents proof of his elaborate lies, which include wearing stolen scrubs every day to allege he's a doctor and waxing morose about traumatic deployments in Iraq despite never serving in the military.

Dirty John is a concrete depiction of how unexpectedly, eerily enthralling it is to be under someone's "coercive control." One of the reasons the podcast garnered over 33 million listeners in the first place is because of how relatable Debra's experience is. Because of course, Debra didn't think of herself as a vulnerable target. "Remember," she said in an interview after this week's finale, "it's Hollywood. First of all, I don't feel desperate. I think that it's very natural to want to have a companion and to be in love." She reflected, "It really helped relieve me, to some degree, knowing that it is such a common thing, unfortunately. But I now know what happened to me and that it could happen to anyone."

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