Like 'Lost' And 'The Leftovers' Before It, 'Watchmen' Was Really A Love Story (And A Great One)

Watchmen is a show that does many things right. What could have easily turned into a disaster became instead a fantastic show that reconciles the past with the present, as it tells a story of generational trauma through the lens of a superhero story. What few if any of us predicted at the beginning of the season is that Watchmen would turn into a love story.Then again, it shouldn't have come as a surprise. As Vanity Fair's Joanna Robinson pointed out on Twitter, Damon Lindelof's TV work often starts by setting up very complex genre puzzle box mysteries, only to reveal that at their core, they're wounded love stories about people trying to connect with others, just as they're fighting to put themselves together.The best episodes of a Damon Lindelof show are usually those that take a step back from the mystery, and instead tell weird yet very personal stories about love and interpersonal relationships. So, now that the first (and only?) season of Watchmen is done, we're going to look at how Lindelof's entire TV work has prepared the audience for Watchmen's story of finding community and love, even as baby squids rain down from the sky.

This article contains spoilers for Lost, The Leftovers, and Watchmen.

The criminally underseen The Leftovers has a lot in common with both Lost and Watchmen. Taking a cue from the later seasons of Lost, Lindelof's last TV show before he tackled Watchmen is all about how desperate we as humans are for answers to the greater mysteries in life, and how we find ways to cope with not getting those answers. The show deals with the aftermath of a cataclysmic event that results in 2% of the world's population disappearing. The Leftovers never fully explains what happened to those who disappeared or why those people disappeared (sound familiar?), but that's not the point of the show. Instead, the focus of the show was the ways we try to move on and the barriers we put on to avoid getting close to people after suffering a personal loss. Hence, the show dealt with deeply broken people trying to move on and rebuild some sense of normalcy in a world where "normal" disappeared years ago. The communities and relationships the main characters build through the show's three seasons is what gives purpose and meaning to their lives, which were broken way before they crashed on the island...I mean, before the "Sudden Departure."Watchmen, though not at its focus, also touches upon this quest for meaning, and morphs it into a question of how a search for meaning and healing from trauma turns people into masked vigilantes. As Laurie Blake tells Angela in episode four of the show, "people who wear masks are driven by trauma. They're obsessed with justice because of some injustice they suffered." Where The Leftovers showed the way people isolated themselves (even in a community) because of trauma, Watchmen showed how that trauma, together with a deep anger and sense of justice, results in someone wanting to put on a mask. The show also deals with the questions of faith seen in both The Leftovers and Lost. Where Lost had the character of John Lock put his entire life in service of the island he believed had given him purpose, The Leftovers had Matt Jamison go through his own crisis of faith. His entire character arc in The Leftovers echoed that of John Locke by having him witness a miracle that no one else saw, and spend the rest of his life in service of a future miracle that never came.Though Watchmen doesn't have a specific character with the same arc as Matt or John, a brief scene in episode seven does tackle the same crisis of faith. While Angela is recovering from her nostalgia-overdose, she discovers a machine that replays all the prayers sent by people over the Doctor Manhattan phone booths. Lady Trieu talks about the desperate pleads people send to Manhattan, hoping he would come down from Mars and help them, even if they never hear a reply. By the season finale, Watchmen placed this as the central question of the show's overarching mystery: why wouldn't God come down and help the people who plea for his mercy and help? If it was as easy as coming down, waving his hand around and solving all the world's problems, why doesn't he do it?Lindelof's answer to that question, at least in part, seems to be that God coming down wouldn't fix anything. The answers are instead within our ability to form communities and relationships, but only after we tear down the walls we put up in our minds and hearts. In an interview with Vulture, Damon Lindelof said that The Leftovers was ultimately a love story. He then expanded on an interview with Esquire, where he explained that the question he really wanted to explore with the show was "how could anybody ever feel stable or safe in a relationship again knowing that at any second people that they care most about would be gone."Indeed, it became clear rather quickly that the emotional focus of The Leftovers was the relationship between Kevin Garvey and Nora Durst. We see in the span of the three seasons how much the two want to be together and how much they unintentionally resist the idea that they could be happy together. They lie and fight and do everything they can in order to avoid accepting what has happened to them in the aftermath of the "Sudden Departure" that they avoid seeing each other for over a decade instead of letting themselves be vulnerable and accepting love. The very last episode of the show dealt with Kevin and Nora beginning to let go of the past.As Lindelof said in his Esquire interview "It felt like the journey of The Leftovers was ultimately going to be about people saying, "Fuck it, I'm knocking those walls down anyway, because this is not a way to live my life. I would rather love and lose than never to have loved at all."