‘Watchmen’ Viewers Thoroughly Enjoyed HBO’s Extremely Blue, On-Point Tribute To Doctor Manhattan

Even though HBO’s Watchmen sits in the superhero realm, the series largely revolves around costumed vigilantes, and there’s really only one superpowered being who exists in the entire first season. That would be Doctor Manhattan, who’s not even on the scene. He’s on Mars, and we only see news coverage of him along with occasional memorabilia without him actually appearing in the flesh, but he’s also (as that contemporary cliché goes) living rent free in the head of Adrian Veidt, a.k.a., “Ozymandias.”

Jeremy Irons plays an aged version of Ozymandias and, before the series launched, he sort-of admitted (although he couldn’t say much) that his character is still obsessed with Doctor Manhattan, decades after the events of Alan Moore’s graphic novel. Sure enough, during the first season’s second episode, we see the gleefully-homicidal Ozymandias order the performance of a play (“The Watchmaker’s Son”) for his eyes only. For the production, he orders his servants, Mr. Phillips (Tom Mison) and Miss Crookshanks (Sara Vickers) to reenact the inception of Doctor Manhattan, who was once a mere mortal named Jonathan Osterman that unwittingly turned himself into a radioactive, blue-penised juggernaut during a lab catastrophe.

Yes, HBO went for the blue-penis effect with Mr. Phillips seemingly becoming incinerated while reenacing the lab incident before appearing above in full-frontal, body-painted glory. Ahead of this TV event, however, Mison preemptively told TV Line, “That is not my penis.” He then added, “I might need to rejoin Twitter and have #NotMyPenis up there.” Indeed, Twitter very much enjoyed this portion of the episode, which paid tribute to the most famous anatomy part of the Watchmen canon.

In other words, yeah, people very much enjoyed the blue-penis looming in the room, which as Damon Lindelof recently told Hollywood Reporter, was a huge request from friends, family, and the public at large once people realized he was making a Watchmen series. Behold some reactionary tweets:

https://twitter.com/DelValGal/status/1188637772724211712