- The Watchmen scenes of Adrian Veidt ( Jeremy Irons ) have thus far existed in a bubble.
- After episode four, though, his predicament is starting to come into more focus.
- Where could he be though? And in whose captivity? We dive into the evidence below.
From the very beginning of HBOs Watchmen, theres been something slightly... off about Adrian Veidt . Maybe its the fact that Jeremy Irons Lord of a Country Manor is being attended by cloned servants that, in the fourth episode, we finally see him harvesting out of a fetus-filled lake, before rapidly maturing them inside some sort of egg-shaped incubator. Maybe its that Veidt seems to spend his days working furiously on a series of Wile E. Coyote-esque inventions, hunting buffalo and taunting a mysterious masked man known only as the Game Warden, while spending his nights staging plays about his old friends. Maybe its that he seems to subsist entirely on birthday cake. Whatever the reason, its been pretty clear from the start that theres more to Veidts pastoral idyll than at first appears. And this week, we finally learned that hes being held there against his will.
After bringing his insta-butlers to his trusty catapult, Veidt guides them through launching the corpses of their predecessors into the sky, where they mysteriously vanish. He then begins to monologue, in his venerable, Jeremy Irons way. Four years since I was sent here, he growls. In the beginning, I thought it was a paradise. But its not. Its a prison. Soon, with your helpwith your lives, with your broken, mangled bodiesone way or another, I will escape this godforsaken place.
Where exactly is that godforsakenif still quite lovelyplace, anyway? If Veidts in prison, then who sent him there? And who would be able to provide him with his seemingly endless supply of servants? As Veidt bitterly tells the newborn Mr. Phillips and Ms. Crookshanks, While I may be your master, I am most definitely not your maker. I would never have burdened such pathetic creatures with the gift of life. So who did?
At the moment, there seem to be two prime suspects.
The first would be Lady Trieu (Hong Chau), whose history with Adrian Veidt dates back to at least 2012 whenaccording to the compiled by Trieu Industries first acquired Veidts struggling companies, right before Veidt disappeared. In fact, it was Trieu who formally announced that the FBI had finally declared him dead. And while Lady Trieu would seem at first blush to be a benevolent executor of Veidts estate, even putting a gold statue of him in her office, she also seems to have the most vested interest in ensuring he stays well out of the way. In the fourth episode, we saw how easy it is for Lady Trieu to create human life: She certainly had no problem whipping up a baby for that farmer couple as barter for their property. We also know that among Veidts holdings was his subsidiary Bubastis, a cloning technology named after his beloved lynx. Could Lady Trieu have designed both Veidts servant-clones and a posh country estate, the same way she created a miniature Vietnam inside her vivarium? And by the way, is it at all suspicious that her statue looks almost exactly like Veidt does now?
While Trieu would seem to be the obvious candidate, theres another theory floating around that Veidts old colleague Doctor Manhattan may be involved. Given that we havent actually seen or heard much from Doctor Manhattan directly , of course, this ones mostly based on speculation. In the pilot episode, we saw grainy satellite news footage of the one-man Blue Man Group on Mars, just sort of dicking around with making castles in the sandenormous castles that, according to some, look an awful lot like the one Veidt is currently living in. Granted, weve never seen Doctor Manhattan make any clones, . But in the final pages of the Watchmen comic, just before he absconds to outer space, Manhattan tells Veidt hes become interested in creating human life. Perhaps he started with a pair of obsequious, vaguely British servants, one of whom seems to share his talent for fixing old watches?
Another clue that Veidt could be trapped inside Manhattans Martian prison came in episode three, when Veidt fashioned a crude suit for one of his doomed Mr. Phillipses before launching him into the ether. That Mr. Phillips came back frozen solidnot unlike one would be in the -80 degrees Fahrenheit temperatures of Mars. So theres certainly evidence to support the idea that the cold vacuum of space lies just beyond the perimeter of Veidts paradise. The show even winks at this, dissolving from a shot of clouds glimpsed through Veidts telescope to one of the full moon.
Still, given that Doctor Manhattan was typically ambivalent about Adrian Veidts awful, necessary crime in the comics (I understand, without condoning or condemning, he said), there seems to be little reason for Manhattan to have decided that Veidt needed punishing now, all these years later. But to make matters even more confusing, Lady Trieu is obviously involved with Doctor Manhattan somehow: Trieu Industries is behind those phone booths that allow people to call Doctor Manhattan up with their best jokes . Could there be some way that these theories are not mutually exclusive, and that Lady Trieu and Doctor Manhattan are both somehow involved in creating the confines of Adrian Veidts world?
Luckilyand because all of this isnt nearly complicated enoughit seems as though Veidt also appears to be on a completely different timeline. Weve seen him presented with three cakes so far, each topped with one more candle than the last. Weve also seen Veidt grow progressively more irritated by it, going from chipperly announcing his new play, like a man whos embracing his leisure time, to angrily smashing his third cake on the floor. It certainly seems like every time weve checked in on Veidt, weve witnessed the passing of another year. So if we presume that we began with the first anniversary of his disappearance in 2013, and we just witnessed his fourth, then we must be rapidly approaching the shows present 2019 timeline. Which means we likely only have a couple more cakes to go before Veidt makes his big escape, and before we start getting some answers .