Many believed it to be unfilmable – so much so that Zack Snyder didn’t even try – but Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen series brought the shocking ending of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’legendary comic book to life this past weekend by recreating the tragic events of November 2nd 1985 when New York City found itself decimated by a giant “alien” squid monster.
The Watchmen series had already set itself up as a direct sequel to the comic – as opposed to Snyder’s film, which swapped out Adrian Veidt’s genetically-engineered beast in favour of having Ozymandias frame Doctor Manhattan for the devastation, and teased the squid’s inclusion in the series when tiny squid rained down from the sky in the premiere episode.
Sunday’s fifth episode ‘Little Fear of Lightning’ opened with a flashback taking place in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1985, as a young Wade Tillman/Looking Glass (Tim Blake Nelson) finds himself one of the only survivors of the squid’s psychic blast and we pan out to see the creature in all of its hideous glory. And now, speaking to Collider, showrunner Damon Lindelof has revealed that it was always his intention to incorporate the world-changing event into the series.
“From the jump, before we even did the pilot, I said to everybody on the crew ‘Just so you guys know, we’re doing the squid. We’re going to do November 2, 1985, so just start wrapping your brains around that’…” said Lindelof. “We knew that we were going to do it, we knew that it would happen in the range of Episode 5 or 6, so that they’d have some time to plot it out. We knew that we wanted there to be some sort of fanfare to the reveal..”
“Obviously, there’s a silliness to saying a giant transdimensional cephelopod with one eye basically drops into the middle of Manhattan and the resulting psychic shock wave kills 3 million people,” he continued. “That sounds completely and totally absurd, but that’s the true genius of Veidt’s plan, that it had to sound absurd to be believable. But when you want to really ground the absurdity in to something that’s tangible and people will feel, I think the idea of PTSD – no pun intended, but some kind of post-traumatic squid disorder – the idea that the squid was literally genetically engineered to cause people emotional trauma so that many years after this event, they would still fear it. We needed to palpably relate that to the audience. So the question was, which character on the show is still emotionally feeling the terror of what happened in 1985? And Tim Blake Nelson felt like he was the perfect conduit to demonstrate that.”
What did you make of Watchmen’s handling of the squid? Are you enjoying the series so far? Let us know your thoughts in the comments, or on our social channels…
Watchmen stars Regina King (The Leftovers), Jeremy Irons (Justice League), Don Johnson (Miami Vice), Tim Blake Nelson (The Incredible Hulk), Louis Gossett Jr. (Iron Eagle), Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (Aquaman), Adelaide Clemens (Rectify), Andrew Howard (Truth or Dare), Tom Mison (Sleepy Hollow), Frances Fisher (Titanic), Jacob Ming-Trent (White Famous), Sara Vickers (Endeavour), Dylan Schombing (Sharp Objects), James Wolk (Tell Me a Story), Lily Rose Smith (The Vampire Diaries), Jean Smart (Legion), Hong Chau (Downsizing) and Dustin Ingram (Sun Records).
