 What's up guys and welcome to One Take, I'm Gil and today we're talking about HBO's Watchmen Episode 7. This is going to be full of spoilers so if you haven't seen the episode yet, go watch it and then check out this video. With that, let's jump into this episode. We'll start off by talking about Azimandes. We revisit him after taking a week off to focus on Will Reeves and we find out what he's been up to for another year in wherever he's trapped. We find out that he's been on some kind of trial where the prosecutor is one of the Cruikshanks clones, the judge is the Game Master and the jury is made up of a bunch of Mr. Phillips and Cruikshanks. At the end of it, Azimandes is found guilty based off the judge speaking with one of the many pigs that he let loose into the trial. It seems like Azimandes has a plan and the reason I think that is because, number one, after the prosecutor gives her impassioned speech, she sits down and winks at him. Number two, we all saw that when the defense, Azimandes, after having not said a word for a year, his only contribution to the trial is to pass gas. That was his entire defense. And that hubris where he was comfortable doing that and basically just pointing out the total absurdity of the situation makes me think that he's pretty confident he's got a way out. However, when the entire room starts chanting guilty, we do see a tear on his face and I thought that the tear was genuine. So if he truly has a plan and he's in control of the situation, why was he crying? My only thought there is that perhaps sitting there in the room, he has a mixture of A, he's been trapped there for years, he wants to get out. So he's crying and maybe there's also a mixture in there of he does feel guilty. Part of the prosecutor's speech mentioned the squid attack in New York pointing out that he's killed 3 million innocent lives. Maybe somewhere deep down, finally he feels a little bit guilty about that. It's a possibility. Number two, a couple of times now at the end of the Azimandes sequences, the camera will focus on something that gives us a clue. A couple of episodes ago, the sequence ended with the moon in focus and I thought are they trying to hint to us that Adrian Veidt Azimandes is trapped on the moon? Well it turns out that he may not be on the moon, but he might be on a moon. It looks like he may be on one of Jupiter's moons. Well at the end of this sequence, we shift focus to the Azimandes statue that Lady Tru has. I heard a fan theory out there that people think Azimandes himself may be trapped in that statue. I've heard some people speculate that maybe he's trapped in that statue and everything we see with him trapped on the moon surrounded by these clones is maybe taking place in his mind or something along those lines. I don't think that's the case, but remember that what we're seeing from Azimandes is clearly occurring on a different timeline. Every time we see him a year has gone by, so I suspect that every time we see him we're in the past and we're watching him slowly catch up to the current timeline of the show. A few episodes ago we see in the background behind Lady Tru something flying from the sky and hit the ground and she said that that, whatever it is, belongs to her. Maybe that was Azimandes and maybe now for some reason she does have him trapped in her building and he's trapped almost in a Star Wars-like carbonite form. But I imagine we'll get an answer to that pretty soon. That's all we saw from Azimandes this week, let's talk about Lori. When she was introduced in I believe Episode 3 she very quickly became one of my favorite characters on the show. She had great emotional depth in her interaction with Dr. Manhattan through the Manhattan phone booth and she was just a delight to watch with her sarcasm and overall attitude. So it was great to see her prominently featured again this episode. I loved her interaction with Senator Keane when he's giving his villainous let me lay out my whole plan speech and she genuinely doesn't give a crap and she calls them out for the ridiculousness of having a trapdoor in Judd's wife's living room. Now one thing that this show struggles with in my opinion is balancing mystery and character development or emotion. Sometimes it focuses very heavily on the mystery aspect. For example, all the Azimandes sequences to me are interesting because I want to know what's going to happen next, I want to get the answers to the mystery. But I don't feel emotionally connected to Adrian Vite or any of the clones in that scene. Then on the other side you have episodes like Episode 6 where the focus is on Will Reeves and we get some very strong character development or the moment like I mentioned before where Lori breaks down a little bit when she calls Dr. Manhattan. Sometimes I feel the show weighs a little bit too heavy in the mystery direction, I actually thought this episode was an example of that and there's not as much emotional resonance. In the Lori part of this episode, when she's talking to Judd's wife, because Lori is a character I have become emotionally invested in, when Judd's wife begins to confess and you realize that she was in on the villainous plot, I felt real tension. That scene worked really well for me. However, once Lori gets into the 7th Cavalry hideout, there is some great back and forth between her and Senator Keane and then it kind of went back into mystery mode for me. But there was a pretty amazing revelation. Senator Keane reveals that he is trying to become Dr. Manhattan or some version of Dr. Manhattan and that is something that I absolutely did not see coming. Even though the show did hint at it a few episodes ago when Senator Keane was being interviewed by the press, somebody asks him about rumors that the Russians are experimenting with intrinsic fields, the very science that turned John into Dr. Manhattan. I thought that was just a throwaway line and I really didn't think this show was going to go in the direction of potentially having two Dr. Manhattan's or another Dr. Manhattan. But if you think about it, it makes sense. In a world where Dr. Manhattan exists, if the world's powers, America, Russia, etc. are looking to develop strong military power, they're not going to focus on atomic bombs. The perfect weapon, the most powerful weapon the world's ever seen, Dr. Manhattan has been revealed to the world. So that is where science will focus. For anybody who's looking for power or military strength, of course that's going to be what they try to do. So it all made sense to me that that's the direction they're going. I also need to mention that in this scene, we find out that Looking Glass survived the Seventh Cavalry attack. He's another character that I think this show has done a great job of developing, giving us a reason to get emotionally attached. So when we saw the Seventh Cavalry coming into his home, I felt genuine suspense and genuine danger and it's great to find out in this scene at least it appears he survived. P.D. goes to check out his home and sees a bunch of dead Seventh Cavalry members with Looking Glass nowhere to be seen. It makes sense that he wouldn't want to stick around because after what he found out, once he found out that the squid was all part of a conspiracy and is being covered up by the government and all of that, I'm sure that somebody like him who generally doesn't trust anybody, now he probably really especially doesn't trust anybody so he's trying to go off the grid I presume. I will say I hope we get a flashback to his dealings with the Seventh Cavalry because I imagine it would have been a pretty badass moment for him. I'll also add I think the reason he was able to survive the attack is because he's so paranoid I think he would have seen it coming. The Seventh Cavalry wanted him to take Angela out of commission. He did that so they no longer needed him and you've got to think that he would assume if they no longer need him they're gonna try and take him out. And now we've got to talk about Angela and that's where the biggest revelations of the episode happened. Number one I mentioned before the balancing act this show does between mystery and emotion. I think most of the emotional backbone of this episode came from the revelations of Angela's backstory where we find out how she became Sister Knight, what happened to her parents. I think most of that stuff worked for me but to be honest it was almost over the top in how horribly bleak it was. Her parents were killed and on top of that when June her grandmother shows up literally moments after they meet and June is about to give Angela a better life June is killed. And I know that this is something which could happen and things like this do happen. The fact that it was just so over the top horrible made some of that emotional resonance diminished for me slightly but the rest of it up to that point I thought worked really well. But putting that aside let's talk about all the revelations we got in the Angela storyline. Number one she's been hooked up to a wire leaving her room leading down the hall to someone else supposedly to help her through the healing process from her nostalgia overdose. Our assumption and Angela's assumption is that she's hooked up to Will. Finally she gets into the door to find out who or what she's hooked up to and we see it's a large creature. At first as soon as we saw the skin of that creature my mind went a thousand directions. I wondered for a second could this be the squid? I remembered how the squid had some telepathic brain connected to it but as it zooms in a little bit further we see it's an elephant. Why the hell is Angela hooked up to an elephant? The best theory I can come up with is that right now they're trying to help Angela recover from a memory related problem. And I think we've all heard that elephants have great memory. I googled that after the show and I believe it's true elephants do have very strong recall. So I wonder if they're able to siphon something from the elephant's brain to help stabilize Angela's mind and help fix her recall memory issues that she's having right now. We also find out that Lady Tru's daughter who I think we all suspected was a clone of some kind. We all suspected that Lady Tru was downloading memories into her daughter turns out that her daughter is not a clone of Lady Tru herself but is a clone of Lady Tru's mother. The only reason she gives for this is basically that she's about to do something grand and amazing and of course wouldn't you want your parents around to see that? I have a feeling there's more to that than she's letting on. I don't think the only reason she's bringing her mother back is to get parental support. She also cryptically says that her father will be here soon too. Some fans have theorized that her father is the comedian. It's been said that the comedian during his time in Vietnam fathered many children. But I'm not sure that's the case because if there is more to why Lady Tru is bringing her mother and father back, if it's not just to have her parents there to give her support, I can't really think of a good reason why she would need the comedian to come back. I do suspect that her father is going to be somebody we've seen either in the graphic novel or in the show because otherwise what's the point of keeping it mysterious and making it a revelation later on but I don't have a theory on that yet but I'm working on it. If you've got theories make sure to leave that in the comments below so we can talk about those. And now we get to the biggest revelation of the episode which is that Lady Tru is trying to quote unquote save the world because she knows that the Seventh Cavalry is trying to destroy Dr. Manhattan and create their own version of Dr. Manhattan. Not only that but Dr. Manhattan as many fans theorized is living among us as a human. She asks Angela don't you want to know who Dr. Manhattan is? Angela walks away because she's giving the impression that she doesn't care she thinks Lady Tru is insane but then Angela goes home goes up to Cal takes out a hammer cracks his skull open reaches into his brain and pulls out a little object which is the symbol that Dr. Manhattan has on his forehead. We have a close zoom in on Angela's face and we see a blue glow so presumably she's freed Dr. Manhattan from his human form and in the background we hear an instrumental version of life on Mars play which I've got to assume is a sort of reference to the fact that Dr. Manhattan typically makes Mars his home but that scene was maybe one of my favorite of the season so far it was just incredible it was a huge reveal it was emotional for Angela you could tell and just the the confusion on Cal's face why are you calling me John that whole scene just worked incredibly and then David Bowie's life on Mars I thought was a great choice but so many questions number one what is the Millennium Clock I do believe that Lady Tru is truthful when she says that she's trying to stop the 7th Cavalry from creating their own Dr. Manhattan but she doesn't tell us what the Millennium Clock does and I still think that there's more to her plan than she lets on the way that her and Will talked about it episodes earlier the way that Will made it sound like whatever their plan is is going to be something very hard for his granddaughter Angela to accept makes me think there's got to be more to it if their plan is just to stop a bunch of evil white supremacists from creating a superhuman I don't think that would be hard for Angela so I still think there's a plan here that's on the scale of what we saw from Ozymandes back in the graphic novel something that may lead to the deaths of millions so what is the Millennium Clock and what is the rest of Lady Tru's plans that I don't think we've seen yet also the way that Lady Tru asks Angela if Angela wants to know who Dr. Manhattan is makes it seem like Lady Tru doesn't know that Angela knows that Cal is Dr. Manhattan and that's kind of odd how can Lady Tru know that Cal is Dr. Manhattan but not know that Cal's wife knows that so that's very odd anyway tons of huge revelations in this episode like I said earlier I did really enjoy this episode but I do feel like this show struggles between the mystery aspect and the emotional character development aspect of it this episode felt a little bit heavier on the mystery side and when that happens the episode doesn't work as well for me but still a pretty solid episode and I can't wait to see where the show goes from here I have to imagine that in the world of watchmen you don't really get a clean win so I doubt they're going to be able to stop the Seventh Cavalry from some sort of success I do wonder if we're going to see that second Dr. Manhattan one question I have though is how does the Seventh Cavalry intend to control Dr. Manhattan even if Senator Keane is the one to go through the process and become a superhuman we saw from John Osterman who became Dr. Manhattan that over time he let go of humanity and kind of went off on his own but to be fair for at least a short time he was controlled by the US government he went to Vietnam and won the war so maybe the Seventh Cavalry is banking on the fact that we'll be able to control him for a bit and hopefully we can get what we need out of him before he fully loses his humanity but that seems like a pretty risky gamble I also doubt that we're going to see this series end with a giant CGI battle between two versions of Dr. Manhattan so if the Seventh Cavalry is successful I believe we'll see the destruction of the Dr. Manhattan we know and the creation of this new Dr. Manhattan but we'll see there are still lots of questions that aren't answered yet but only two episodes to go and Damon Lindelof has said multiple times that he sees this as a one season story so even if we do get a second season down the road I don't expect there to be too many open threads at the end of this season so I think we'll get satisfying answers to most of these questions and I'm hopeful that we'll see a satisfying conclusion to this storyline anyway I think those are just about all of my thoughts on tonight's episode but what did you think of the episode what are your theories on what is going on with that Millennium Clock where do you think the show is going do you think we're going to get a hopeful ending or do you think the Seventh Cavalry is going to be successful leave your thoughts in the comments below and if you enjoyed this video make sure to hit the like button subscribe to this channel and hit the little bell icon to make sure you get notifications whenever we do videos like this one also make sure to subscribe to the One Take Podcast every week I'm talking to a couple of my brothers a couple of my friends to break down the week's movie and tv news we're also doing deep dives into every episode of Mandalorian we'll also make sure to do a big deep dive into the Watchmen finale in a couple of weeks when that happens anyway thanks for watching check out the One Take Podcast and I'll see you on the next video