See How They Fly

"See How They Fly" is the ninth and final episode of the first season of Watchmen, which first aired on HBO on December 15, 2019.

Synopsis
Trieu, shown to be the daughter of Veidt from artificial insemination, visits Veidt in Karnak in 2008. She reveals her identity, and that she knows of Veidt's squid attack. She points out that the attack had stopped humanity from destroying itself, but only delayed the inevitable, even with Veidt's manufactured "squid rainfalls" he teleports out of Karnak designed to reinforce the idea of a pending alien attack. Trieu wants Veidt's financial help to build a quantum centrifuge to take the powers of Doctor Manhattan so she can enact a more permanent solution. Trieu reveals she knows Manhattan is on Europa and has launched a probe to arrive there in 2013 to visually confirm this. Veidt refuses to help.

On Europa, Veidt uses the horseshoe to escape his cell as a spacecraft lands outside the castle. The Game Warden tries to stop him, but Veidt stabs him with the horseshoe, revealing he created the Game Warden to be an adversary over the last eight years as part of his play The Watchmaker's Son. The craft lifts off, showing that Veidt had spelled out "SAVE ME DAUGHTER" to be imaged by Trieu's probe. Veidt is encased in gold for the return trip. Trieu is shown to have recovered the craft after it crashed at the Clarks' farm, and kept Veidt as a statue in her gardens since then. Trieu revives Veidt with an hour left before the Millennium Clock activates. Veidt is impressed that Trieu did build her quantum centrifuge. When he sees Bian, he noted that Trieu cloned her mother. A sphere-like object detaches from the clock and floats towards the Greenwood district of Tulsa, while Trieu and her people set up equipment underneath it.

At the Kavalry headquarters, several high-ranking politicians arrive, revealed as members of Cyclops, including the elder Joe Keene Sr. Laurie discovers that Wade has disguised himself as one of the Kavalry, having survived the attack at his house. The attack at Angela's house commences, and Doctor Manhattan is trapped. While stripping to a copy of Doctor Manhattan's briefs, Joe explains to the gathered audience about Cyclops' original long-term plan to revolt against President Robert Redford by arranging racially-charged events like the White Night. After discovering Manhattan's presence on Earth when one of its members ended up at the Grand Canyon, they changed their plans to take Manhattan's powers instead.

Angela shows up to try to stop the event, but Keene ignores her warning. He enters a booth, but just as the system is activated, the entire area is teleported to Greenwood by Trieu as her men use magnetic shields to confiscate the Kavalry's weapons. She needed the Kavalry to capture Manhattan without him detecting her own involvement. Due to the Kavalry's lack of knowledge regarding safety measures that involve filtering atomic energy, Keene is liquefied during the process and his remains spill across the area and into Manhattan's cage once Trieu opens the booth. Trieu proceeds to kill the Cyclops members on behalf of Will as Jane Crawford guessed when Trieu was reading the Cyclops and the Kavalry's offenses towards colored people. During this time, Manhattan uses Keene's liquid remains to circumvent the cage inhibiting his powers, teleporting Veidt, Laurie, and Wade to Karnak. Manhattan tells Angela he did not send her away as he did not want to be alone when he dies, as Trieu activates the floating sphere to take Manhattan's powers. Manhattan tells Angela he loves her before he is destroyed and his powers captured.

At Karnak, Veidt uses the squid rain device to send frozen squid to fall in Greenwood, which will obliterate anything in the nearby area. Laurie calls Angela in time to allow her and Bian to take cover, while the squid rain destroys the sphere and kills Trieu before the transfer can be completed. Angela takes shelter at the movie theater, where Will is waiting for her with her children. Will reveals Manhattan had made a deal with himself and Trieu, knowing this end had to happen so that his powers would not be taken by those that would misuse them.

Veidt offers Laurie and Wade Nite Owl's airship "Archie" to return to society. Laurie prepares to arrest Veidt, with Wade having the 1985 video of proof that Veidt was behind the squid attack. When Veidt asks if they are going to go after Robert Redford as well, he gets a positive answer. Veidt attempts to talk his way out of it, but Wade knocks him out and he and Laurie drag him aboard the ship.

Angela offers Will a room at her house as she takes her children back home. As she cleans up a mess of eggs from an argument between her and Manhattan earlier in the night, she recalls that Manhattan told her once that he could transfer his powers to someone else through an organic medium. Finding an unbroken egg, Angela goes to her pool, eats the egg, and prepares to walk on water across the pool. The screen cuts to black as her foot touches the water.

Production
Damon Lindelof said that from the start of writing, the plan for the season was to the finale be around Lady Trieu attempting to take Doctor Manhattan's powers for herself. A second element of the finale was to have involved a mind-control device used by Joe Keene to control both the Seventh Kavalry and the Tulsa police through their masks, of which Will would have gained control over to put an end to the Kavalry. During writing out later episodes, they came to the idea that the Kavalry was also seeking to capture Doctor Manhattan for themselves, and dropped the mind-control aspect, while modifying Trieu's plan to piggyback off the Kavalry's. The use of the frozen squid to lay waste to Trieu's plan was an inspiration from trying to capture a similar shot from the comic series of looking down at the devastation caused by the squid attack in 1985. They had struggled with what visual aspects they wanted to show here, but then recalled that in the pilot episode, they had established about Veidt's use of squid rainfall to continue to remind the world of an alien threat, and connected the dots to the finale.

The importance of eggs had been something showrunner Lindelof had placed throughout prior episodes of the show, so that viewers would be aware of the significance of the egg in the final scene of the episode. This further continued into the use of the Spooky Tooth cover of "I Am the Walrus" by The Beatles as the credits song. Lindelof stated that "I Am the Walrus" is well known to have imaginative lyrics that The Beatles themselves have not offered to explain. Lindelof and the writers found ways to incorporate many of the song's lyrics into the episode. The title, "See How They Fly", refers to the falling frozen squid, while other lyrics like "Pretty little policemen in a row" and "Yellow matter custard Dripping from a dead dog's eye" were reflected in visual elements of the episode.

Lindelof and his team had considered three possible endings of this episode: in addition to the one where Angela eats the egg and attempts to step onto the pool, they considered one where she simply crushed the egg in her hand, and another of putting the egg back into the carton and into the refrigerator. Staying with the choice where Angela eats the egg, they then debated how far they should go with the final shot, cutting the scene short to leave the implication vague. Lindelof says he does not consider the ending to be a cliffhanger, and intended to imply that Angela received Doctor Manhattan's powers by the egg, as the series had been written with the considering of what Angela would do with those types of powers, given that she would be more passionate about using such powers compared to Doctor Manhattan's passiveness.

Critical response
On Rotten Tomatoes, "See How They Fly" received a 91% approval rating, based on an average 8.62 out of 10 rating from 23 reviews. The summary of the critical consensus is "With its interconnected storylines, stellar performances, and complex themes, "See How They Fly" does the impossible and ends Damon Lindelof's adaptation of Watchmen spectacularly."

Ratings
"See How They Fly" was watched by 935,000 viewers on its first live broadcast, and had over 1.6 million viewers when combined with repeated runs and streaming, exceeding the series' pilot viewership of 1.5 million.