The Squid Rain on Watchmen Ties Directly To This Key Comic Event
Watchmen premiered on HBO last night.
The most WTF moment: a rainstorm of mini squids.
Here's how the Watchmen graphic novel explains the phenomenon.
After race riots, traffic killings, and masked cops speaking Latin, HBO’s Watchmen went full sci-fi as Regina King’s character, Angela Abar/Sister Night, pulls her car over to the side of the road to wait out the rain. And then—plop, plop—the rain comes: squids falling from the sky.
The squid downpour was probably the most WTF moment of the show last night. Was it biblical? Was it symbolic?
The series will likely address the rain in the coming weeks, but readers of the original graphic novel probably already have a good idea of where the calamari is coming from. In the climax of the novel, the character Adrian Veidt (also known as Ozymandias) orchestrates a false flag operation, hoping to unite the U.S. and Soviets and avoid nuclear holocaust. That event included building a synthetic squid on a desert island and then teleporting it into downtown Manhattan where it would explode and kill millions of people. Veidt hoped such an event would displace the animosity between world superpowers and refocus the anger on a common intergalactic enemy: interdimensional squids. “Unable to unite the world by conquest … I would trick it,” Veidt explains on Watchmen page 372.
The plan succeeds, millions of people die, and nuclear tensions are alleviated. (Despite the violence, the scene is beautifully rendered by artist Dave Gibbons, who gives readers seven full-page panels depicting the destruction of Manhattan: tentacles impaled across street poles, severed in gutters, people lying mangled and bloody everywhere.)
On the HBO series, which takes place almost 30 years after this event, there seems to be residual squid ink. Since the plan had been revealed to the press by another character, it’s likely most citizens know the squid was fake. Or perhaps the squid rain is part of a larger cover up to convince citizens that the world still shares a slimy interdimensional enemy.
Showrunner and writer Damon Lindelof told Esquire that Veidt’s false flag functioned as a kind of “9/11-like event”–that would be an event that changed the cultural and geopolitical landscape of the Watchmen universe. It also, apparently, altered weather patterns.
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