Little Fear of Lightning

"Little Fear of Lightning" is the fifth episode of the first season of Watchmen, which first aired on HBO on November 17, 2019. It primarily focuses on the character of Wade Tillman, the masked police detective who goes by the name Looking Glass.

Synopsis
On November 2, 1985, Wade Tillman is in Hoboken, New Jersey when the psychic wave from the sudden appearance of a giant squid in New York City strikes. Tillman is one of the few survivors but becomes traumatized and paranoid for life.

In the present, 2019, Laurie instructs the Tulsa police to search for the church in the Seventh Kavalry videos. Laurie informs Wade she bugged his desk and overheard Wade talking to Angela about a bottle of pills and needs to know what he tells Angela. The next day, Wade visits his ex-wife Cynthia, a biomedical researcher. Cynthia reveals the pills as Nostalgia, illegal pills that let one experience the memories of someone else.

Wade is lured to an abandoned building by the Seventh Kavalry, where he finds the set of the church in the videos and the Kavalry testing a teleportation device. One Kavalry member reveals himself as Senator Joe Keene Jr. Joe explains both he and Judd Crawford led different parts of the Kavalry to keep them in check, and coerces Wade to learn from Angela what she knows of Judd's murderer. In exchange, Joe lets Wade watch a video that has been shown to only a select few. The video, made by Adrian Veidt on November 1, 1985, explains his staging of the squid attack to future President Robert Redford, and his need for the President's help in some long-term plan.

Wade's core is rocked. At the station, he brings Angela to his desk to return the pills and tell her what they are, and asks her what she knows about Judd's death. She tells him that Will, her grandfather, did it, unaware of Laurie's audio bug. Laurie comes out to arrest Angela, but Angela quickly takes all the Nostalgia before she is dragged to prison. Wade returns home, unaware of a group of Kavalry with guns following him to his house.

Meanwhile, Adrian Veidt is assisted by his clones of Phillips and Crookshanks into a survival suit tied to a lifeline, and then launched by catapult out of his prison. He emerges on Jupiter's Europa among numerous corpses of other Phillips and Crookshanks. He uses their bodies to write out a message "SAVE ME D” visible to a nearby satellite. The Game Warden yanks him back by his lifeline, and informs Veidt he is under arrest.

Production
The episode opens with the climatic scene from the limited series of the 1985 appearance of the giant squid in New York City, which killed millions from the psychic blast from its arrival. Damon Lindelof, the series' showrunner and writer, wanted the television series to bring to life some of the limited series' imagery, including the aftermath of the squid attack, before production started. The sequence ends on a pull-back from Hoboken to downtown New York City, which used a mixed of practical and special effects. The scenes set in Hoboken were filmed in Atlanta, while the rest was computer generated imagery to show the chaos of the blast. The size of the squid was not clear from the limited series as it only appears in a few panels, but Lindelof wanted the creature to be as tall as a five-story building. The effects team took much of the imagery from the limited series to incorporate into this sequence, such as tentacles from the squid appearing embedded in buildings, while keeping it to a realistic look.

With the squid sequence planned, Lindelof came onto the idea that it would have long-lasting emotional effects on people like PTSD, which would have been a necessary element of Veidt's plan to prevent the nations from regressing back to a nuclear war long after the event. This led to the creation of Wade Tillman/Looking Glass as a person that continued to suffer from the PTSD of the squid attack. Lindelof likened Looking Glass' reflective mask as someone literally wrapping themselves in a tin foil hat. Lindelof used fear as a major theme behind Looking Glass's character, not only in reaction to the squid attack, but as well as the trauma he suffered from being caught in a compromising sexual situation just prior to it, compounded by the squid attack. Lindelof created that situation based his own experiences from when he was a teenager, having been scared about sex knowing others of his age were far more confident about it.

Of the Veidt storyline, Lindelof asserted that they needed some type of "prison" for Veidt that he would not be able to easily escape from as the smartest man on Earth, and selected Europa to be the prison's setting.

The episode's title is taken from a passage in Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, "If there were no thunder, men would have little fear of lightning."

The episode features an uncredited cameo from Michael Imperioli, playing himself in an advertisement for New York City tourism.

Critical response
"Little Fear of Lightning" received positive reviews from critics, with several considering it the series' best episode to date. On Rotten Tomatoes, the episode has an approval rating of 100% with an average score of 8.89 out of 10, based on 28 reviews. The site's critical consensus reads, "Along with the Lovecraftian inspired Giant Squid attack, Looking Glass's heartbreaking story adds much-needed momentum in 'Little Fear of Lightning'."

Siddhant Adlakha of IGN called the episode "a near-perfect hour of television" by heavily tying into the limited series, the focus on Wade's character, and helping to push the series' overall narrative along. Rolling Stone Alan Sepinwall praised Lindelof's vision for the episode, remarking on how his previous work on The Leftovers helped to influence this, and that the episode "fills in a huge chunk of the mythology, while also doing that thing that both Alan Moore and Damon Lindelof do so well: looking at an utterly outrageous sci-fi/fantasy construct and wondering how a very real and fragile human being might respond to it."

Accolades
For the 72nd Primetime Emmy Awards, Steph Green was nominated for Outstanding Directing for a Limited Series, Movie, or Dramatic Special.

Ratings
In its original broadcast in the United States on HBO, the episode received 752,000 viewers, which was an increase from the previous week.