The 'Watchmen' Reference Guide: Every Easter Egg In "Little Fear Of Lightning"

It finally happened! If any of you thought that HBO's Watchmen would not dare give us some giant alien squid, you were finally proven wrong. Not only do we get a beautiful and haunting recreation of the end of Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore's graphic novel, but Damon Lindelof and company manage to make it vital to the story they're currently telling.And that's not all: there's still an insane number of references and nods to the source material. So join us, won't you? Let's look at all the references to the original Watchmen and more in "Little Fear Of Lightning." As always, this will be spoiler-heavy.

We see a man reading a magazine with an ad for "The Veidt Method." This is a reference to a magazine with ads seen on the back cover of the "Tales of the Black Freighter" comic, as seen in the graphic novel. The magazine is a self-improvement and fitness guide published by Veidt Enterprises, and supposedly offers readers a chance to hone their minds and bodies to near-perfection, as Adrian Veidt himself did. In the graphic novel, these are a nod to the old Charles Atlas ads. It also foreshadows what Veidt will do to save the world, a "method" that will kill millions of people.

GWAR (or Gay Women Against Rape, not to be confused with the hard rock band), was a militant lesbian feminist group whose slogan was "castrate all rapists." Their symbol is the Female symbol in pink with teeth drawn in the top loop and was perhaps meant to resemble Vagina Dentata imagery. 

Not so much an easter egg as a shot-for-shot recreation of one of the most iconic images of the original Watchmen (and also a reminder that Zack Snyder's film adaptation changed this ending because the squid was deemed too weird). After teasing us with tiny squid rains throughout the show, we finally get to see the big one.It is midnight on November 2, 1985. As Wade exists the funhouse, naked and humiliated, he notices everyone around him is dead. Then in one continuous tracking shot, the camera crosses the Hudson Bay into Manhattan, where chaos reigns. Madison Square Garden (and Pale Horse) is destroyed and everyone is dead. The cause? A giant squid with a single eye and what looks like a human brain has teleported into the city, in what would later be referred to as the Dimensional Incursion Event. The whole thing is pretty faithful to the comic, including a shot of the Institute of Extraspatial Studies where the teleportation tech was housed. And if you want to know more about how the whole scene was recreated, you can head over to Polygon where I talked with some of the key people involved about the scene in all its cephalopod glory.  

The title of the episode "Little Fear of Lightning" is part of a quote taken from a longer line in Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. The full quote reads: "If there were no thunder, men would have little fear of lightning." The parallel is clear, as the show just showed us the giant squid that scared people so much it literally ended the Cold War in an instant.

In the graphic novel, we only learn of the original Minutemen through casual conversation, and the excerpts from the biography "Under the Hood" written by Hollis Mason, AKA the first Nite Owl, who wrote about Captain Metropolis and Hooded Justice having an affair. Continuing what we've seen about Hooded Justice, he never takes his mask off, not even during sex.

The purpose for the pills that William had way back in episode 1 have finally been revealed, and they sound fascinating and weird. They seem to be actual memories you can take. As pills. Is this what Lady Trieu was feeding her daughter in last week's episode? The pills get their name from Adrian Veidt's famous Nostalgia perfume, which is seen all over the original Watchmen. 

It's good to know that, no matter what universe, Steven Spielberg still wins a bunch of Oscars with a black-and-white drama in the early '90s. Only it seems that in the Watchmen universe, Spielberg didn't make a gripping Holocaust drama called Schindler's List, but instead one about the Dimensional Incursion Event. Titled Pale Horse because of the band playing at Madison Square Garden (see above), the film is still shot in black-and-white, except for a scene in which a little girl is seen wearing a red coat while stumbling around Herald Square. The important question is, did he still make Jurassic Park?

As Senator Keene leaves Wade with the choice of remaining ignorant or knowing the truth about the giant squid, he tells Wade that he'll "leave it entirely in your hands." This, of course, is the very last piece of dialogue of the graphic novel, uttered by The New Frontierman's editor Hector Godfrey as he tells his employee Seymour that the choice of what to pull from a box of correspondence to put in the paper is up to him, just as Seymour is looking at Rorschach's journal. In both instances, the phrase comes just before someone finds out the truth about Veidt's plan.