The book begins with the death of the Comedian, who Veidt had to kill after the former masked crimefighter uncovered his scheme by pure chance. Ozymandias’ master plan rears its head all over Watchmen, and many of the comic’s events turn out to be his attempts to protect it. He hatched an ambitious multi-year plan to amass the world’s greatest fortune and use it to convince Earth’s governments that the planet “faced imminent attack by beings from another world.” “Unable to unite the world by conquest - Alexander ’s method - I would trick it frighten it towards salvation with history’s greatest practical joke.” ( Watchmen’s first issue was published five months after the Chernobyl disaster.)Īnd so he decided to do something about it. He concluded that Earth was headed for irreversible destruction one way or another - either Russia and the US would create an explosive nuclear armageddon, or the ever escalating production of nuclear weapons would eventually create an environmental disaster of equal proportions. On the other, thanks to Ozymandias’ patent on cheap and effective charging stations, everybody was driving electric cars in 1985.īut the real salient point here is that Doctor Manhattan, as a superhero working with and for the US government, made America the clear dominant force in the Cold War, though tensions between the US and Russia remained high.Īdrian Veidt, the polymath former crimefighter known as Ozymandias, believed that not even the presence of Doctor Manhattan could calm the Cold War. There were pros and cons: On the one hand, the Comedian assassinated Woodward and Bernstein before they exposed the Watergate scandal, and Richard Nixon abolished presidential term limits to remain present through the late 1980s. Superheroes radically changed the world of Watchmen. Arguably, the story’s arch-villain, if Watchmen could be said to even have a villain.Įven if you do know who Ozymandias is, you could be forgiven for forgetting exactly what his plan was in Watchmen, how he enacted it, and how he got away with it scot free and has lived to a ripe old age.īut first we have to understand a few things about Ozymandias’ reality. That makes him the future version of the biggest player in the original Watchmen, the elusive mastermind behind almost every event in the story. Irons - who appears in the first episode of the show as an unnamed, seemingly reclusive aristocrat with very loyal servants - is playing Adrian Veidt, also known as Ozymandias, the smartest man in the world. The folks behind HBO’s Watchmen have tried to be cagey about it, but without complete success. It’s a safe bet anyone watching Watchmen week to week should know everything about Ozymandias. Who was that weird old guy played by Jeremy Irons? Damon Lindelof and various press notes for the show refer to him as “Probably Who You Think He Is.” A couple such faces appeared in this week’s premiere, but one of them was much more mysterious than the other. HBO’s Watchmen isn’t a direct adaptation of the famed graphic novel, but rather a sequel set more than 30 years later.
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