'Watchmen' Showrunner Damon Lindelof Reveals What's Going On With Adrian Veidt

If you've been watching Watchmen, you probably have many questions. And one of them is probably, "What the hell is going on with Adrian Veidt?" The storyline informing the man formally known as Ozymandias has, so far, seemed totally unconnected from the main show. But it's all building towards something. And showrunner Damon Lindelof has some answers about the character now, too. Not all the answers, mind you. But something is better than nothing! Spoilers follow.

Are you all caught-up with Watchmen? I sure hope so, or else this post is going to be confusing. Jeremy Irons' Adrian Veidt has been an outlier on the show, spending all of his time in some secluded manor house in what appears to be a European countryside. Of course, as the episodes have progressed, we've learned that all is not what it seems. And in fact, the latest episode confirmed a popular theory: Adrian isn't on Earth at all. He's actually in space.

"I think that if Adrian Veidt is trying to escape from prison, that's not a good challenge for him," Damon Lindelof tells Collider. "He's going to do that very easily — there's no prison that's going to hold Adrian Veidt, unless that prison is on Europa, a moon of Jupiter...that felt like this was a good place to put him and throw away the key."

There are plenty of theories about who might've imprisoned Adrian in his weird space jail – the most common one seeming to be Dr. Manhattan. Feel free to speculate wildly about that!

One detail that hasn't been fully confirmed by the show yet – at least not out loud – but has been there for all to see is that every time we check in with Adrian, a year has gone by. If you were paying close attention, you might have noticed that every time one of Adrian's cloned servants presents him with an "anniversary" cake, the cake has an addition candle. The first time we saw the cake it had one candle. The second, two. And so on.

"What we're learning about Adrian Veidt is that every installment that we get of the nine episodes, there's only one episode where you don't get a Veidt installment — the storytelling, he didn't fit in there — but every other one you get [one]," Lindelof says. "And a year lapses in between each episode. It's a story told on a very, very large canvas, each installment taking place on another anniversary of another year that he has spent wherever the hell he's spending [it]."

That non-Adrian episode is likely to be the next one, which – based on trailers – focuses primarily on Angela (Regina King) learning about her grandfather Will (Louis Gossett Jr.).