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Set 34 years after the events of Alan Moore's landmark comic book series, HBO's unauthorized (by the author) sequel to Watchmen is dense with alternate history world building, playing out the consequences of an earlier age of masked vigilantes and the Dimensional Incursion of Event. In the premiere episode of Watchmen, "It's Summer and We're Running Out of Ice," we learn that actor Robert Redford has been president for multiple terms, people still use pagers in 2019 and, occasionally, "fetal cephalopods" rain from the sky—a likely side effect of the D.I.E., during which a building-sized squid appeared in New York City, killing thousands with the psychic shockwave unleashed by its death.
While the events of the Watchmen premiere lead to more questions than answers, supplementary documents posted to an online database known as "Peteypedia" reveal a lot of additional context for the decades since the D.I.E. and the events of Moore and artist Dave Gibbons' original Watchmen. There are many strange revelations to be found in the online fictional resource, including the survival of Elvis Presley, the fate of Watchmen character Dan Dreiberg — a.k.a. Nite Owl — and the aftermath of the publication of Rorschach's diary, which reveals the true origins of the D.I.E. in a false flag attack designed by industrialist Adrian Veidt. It also provides a little more insight into that squid rain.
Watchmen's Squid Rain
In a memo provided on Peteypedia, Special Agent Dale Petey urges the FBI to continue the search for Veidt, even just for the show, rather than declaring the billionaire dead after seven years of searching. In summarizing his reasoning, Petey provides a survey of the aftermath of the D.I.E., describing exactly what happened on November 2, 1985, when the Dimensional Incursion of Event took place. Known as the Squid by Watchmen readers, the creature is referred to as the E.D.B.E. in the FBI memo.
The memo reveals that the "cataclysmic psychic shockwave unleashed by the E.D.B.E." killed half of the New York Police Department, suggesting a catastrophic death toll, likely in the millions. The fear of another E.D.B.E. appearance remains a strong cultural undercurrent, "a threat kept top of mind by random downpours of fetal cephalopods that no one with a credible physics degree has ever been able to explain," the memo says. We also learn that the E.D.B.E., just like the squids raining down in the first episode of Watchmen, dissolved into water, erasing all evidence of its true nature.
The memo outlines President Redford's response to the national trauma: "warning labels on entertainment and prohibitions on depictions of the D.I.E. that might trigger those with 11/2 PTSD or stoke paranoid thinking about it."
Rorschach's Journal
The Watchmen comic series ended in uncertainty, with the vigilante Rorschach's journal dropped in "the crank file" at the hard right tabloid New Frontiersman. We now know, thanks to both the premiere episode and a Peteypedia FBI memo, how the world reacted to Rorschach's account. On Watchmen, the conspiracy theorists are right about the true nature of the D.I.E., which is explained succinctly in the memo: "The D.I.E. was a false flag operation financed and designed by Veidt; the E.B.D.E. was a sophisticated suicide bomb built from material cloned from the stolen brain of a dead psychic."
Readers of Watchmen know that account to be true, but in the world of HBO's Watchmen it's been dismissed as conspiracy theorizing from Rorschach's deranged mind, amplified by a right-wing press who saw the false flag attack as an excuse to solidify a liberal global order.
The memo outlines elements of a cover-up, or at least the desire for the Rorschach journal account to go away. It also doesn't help Rorschach's account that Veidt was still alive to deny it.
"I knew Rorschach. I worked with Rorscach. And while we had our differences, he had my sympathy, because he was a damaged human being, and he had my admiration, too," Veidt says in an interview quote reproduced in the FBI memo. "If we are to remember him at all as we move into the future, let us remember him for those qualities, not this fabrication bearing his name. It is, quite literally, fake news."
Nite Owl's Fate
At the conclusion of Watchmen, only a handful of people know that Veidt was behind the E.B.D.E., including Doctor Manhattan, Laurie Juspeczyk (a.k.a. the Silk Spectre) and Dan Dreiberg (Nite Owl). In the first episode of Watchmen, we see Doctor Manhattan, still experimenting on Mars and remaining out of human affairs. Future episodes will feature Agent Laurie Blake, who changed her last name from Juspeczyk to that of her father's (The Comedian, Edward Blake) and now works for the FBI. We will see how the truth of the D.I.E. weights on her.
But while Watchmen includes a flying police vehicle that takes after Dreiberg's Nite Owl technology, nothing has yet been revealed on the HBO series about what happened to Dreiberg after the events of the comic series. The Peteypedia memo makes clear his fate: "Dreiberg, now in federal custody, has steadfastly refused to speak to the Bureau about 'Rorschach's Journal,' or anything, for that matter."
Other documents released to Peteypedia include background on the fictional silent movie that opens the Watchmen premiere, an article on the disappearance of Veidt (widely presumed to be the character played by Jeremy Irons) and insight into the slow readoption of technology in the world of Watchmen, which is blissfully unburdened by social media. Similar to the supplemental material offered with every issue of the original Watchmen story, we anticipate new documents appearing on Peteypedia after future episodes. The site's namesake, Special Agent Petey, will also appear in Watchmen, played by Dustin Ingram (The Magicians). Watchmen airs Sunday nights at 9 p.m. Eastern on HBO.
