The Untold Truth Of Doctor Manhattan

For a character first introduced in 1986, Doctor Manhattan has been in very few pieces of media — really just the original Watchmen graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, a few other comics, the movie, and the HBO television series. But recent appearances in big DC Comics events and the acclaimed hit TV show have brought this big blue godlike being into the spotlight again, and new fans and diehards alike are re-evaluating the character and his relationship with the human race.

For viewers who came into the HBO show as its own thing and weren't aware of the character's history (or only watched the movie once), this can all seem a little confusing. Clearly, there's no time like the present for a look back at this mysterious character's origins, incredible past, and lesser-known exploits — and even if you're a hardcore Watchmen enthusiast, you may find a few surprises. This is the untold truth of Doctor Manhattan.

Dr. Manhattan started life as Jon Osterman. His father was a watchmaker (one of many watch-related themes in Watchmen), but pushed Jon hard to be become a scientist after he witnessed the destruction of World War II. Jon, a shy, nice enough man, grew up to become a physicist. During one of his experiments, Jon mistakenly left his girlfriend Janey's watch (which he was planning to fix for her) in the testing chamber. The door closed and locked behind him, trapping him during the test. It destroyed his body, seemingly annihilating him.

Months later, his body started to reform, bit by bit, in different areas of the Gila Flats research facility. Eventually, his coworkers realized it wasn't some grim specter but Jon himself — now blue, glowing, and naked. This new Jon was able to experience his entire life at any time, and could also teleport, grow into a giant, split into multiple bodies, and of course, explode people into bloody pulp.

After the war, Doctor Manhattan is invited by an aging Captain Metropolis (from the superhero team the Minutemen, seen in the HBO show) to meet with a new group of heroes Metropolis is hoping to collect into a new team. The meeting ends poorly and the new team is never formed, but there's a silver lining — this is where Jon meets Laurie Juspeczyk, the new Silk Spectre, taking over the mantle from her mother. He cheats on Janey (who he notes in narration is starting to show her age) with the young Laurie.

It's worth noting that Laurie is only 16 at the time she and Jon get together, while he's in his mid-30s. One of the more frustrating things about Doctor Manhattan is how he justifies every action he takes with some variation of "it was always going to happen this way, and it's already happened to me," which is certainly a disorienting way to live one's life, but doesn't change the fact that he entered into a sexual relationship with a teenager.

Doctor Manhattan's most confusing aspect is easily his powers and their limits. He isn't all-knowing; he can only know the things he has experienced or will experience. Even then, it's challenging at times to juggle these experiences in his consciousness. The Watchmen TV show also examines the pain that comes with his powers. It's not just that he can see all parts of his life at once, but he truly experiences them each time. All the terrible moments of his life, pre- and post-accident, he feels fully at any given moment. Doctor Manhattan is a paradox in that way — he feels nothing, but he feels everything.

But if Jon knows everything his life at all times, then why can't he see the moment when he comes to Antarctica and faces Ozymandias? Well, that's where tachyon beams come into play. Tachyon beams are essentially Doctor Manhattan's greatest weakness. Adrian traps him in a tachyon field when the heroes come to Antarctica, and tachyon beams are also what Ozymandias uses to hide his plans from Jon until the very end. Naturally, the use of tachyon beams also plays a major role in the Watchmen show.

Doctor Manhattan returns to Earth — specifically to Vietnam, on the anniversary of the end of the war and the beginning of it being a U.S. state. In the same bar where he watched the Comedian kill a pregnant woman in the comics, Jon meets Angela Abar, a cop whose parents were killed by anti-Manhattan radicals on this day years ago. Angela assumes his appearance is a costume, like the many other "Doctor Manhattans" out for the holiday. Insisting he's the real thing, Manhattan lays out their life together, because he can see that she takes him up on his offer of a date and they end up getting together. But Jon can only see until a point — something is blocking about 10 years of his life with Angela, and the block ends just before tragedy strikes. He just knows that they fall in love and have about ten years together before someone takes him away from her. Despite all this (and the fact that she doesn't even believe he's really Doctor Manhattan during their first talk), Angela agrees to another date — and eventually falls in love with him.

During this period, Jon takes the identity of a recently deceased man named Cal Jelani so he can be with Angela without being discovered. But this is only a surface solution; Jon's godlike status puts a strain on their relationship. Like his past girlfriends, Angela is frustrated and needs him to be in the present, but as Doctor Manhattan, he's always feeling the past, present, and future all at once.

Two years after the Tulsa attack, during the present day of the HBO Watchmen series, Angela learns from the mysterious and unnerving Lady Trieu about the Seventh Kalvary's plan to pull Jon's lifeforce and put his powers into Senator Keene, making the white supremacist a god in his own right. Rushing home, Angela removes the tachyon implant from Cal's head, bringing Doctor Manhattan's consciousness back to the surface.

While Angela desperately tries to get Jon to hide from the Kalvary while he still can, Jon does a series of things in and around their house, including taking eggs out of the fridge to make an omelet and walking on top of the water in their pool. Jon tells his wife it's important that she sees everything he's doing. Like Jon said she would, Angela gets ready to take on the Kalvary by herself to protect her husband, and he tells her that this was always the moment he fell in love with her. She gets a little frustrated that it's only now that he loves her, but he reminds her that he is in this moment at all times, just like he's still sitting in that bar in Vietnam asking her to dinner.

The Seventh Kavalry starts the machine to steal Doctor Manhattan's powers, but Lady Trieu is one step ahead of them; she takes control of their operation and reveals her plan the whole time was to take Jon's powers for herself and force the nations of the world to finally create true peace. In his last moments, Jon looks at Angela and experiences all the wonderful moments of their marriage at once. He is truly at peace and fully connected with his humanity as he dissolves into nothing.

The original Watchmen comics didn't exist in mainline DC continuity, but the enduring popularity of the story and its characters ultimately proved too tempting for the creative minds at the company to resist — and with the 2017-'19 event dubbed Doomsday Clock, they used Doctor Manhattan to recalibrate the canvas while clearing up numerous questions from DC's recent past.

As comics readers are aware, Doomsday Clock marks the third in a series of line-wide events acting as reboots of DC continuity to some degree. It started with the New 52 event of 2011, which essentially started over from scratch, ostensibly to give new readers an easy entry point into increasingly complex stories. Reception was mixed, leading the company to try again with another line-wide event, Rebirth, in 2016. Less of a reboot than a fine tuning of the stories started with New 52, Rebirth set the stage for the Doomsday Clock event, which pulled Doctor Manhattan into the main DC universe — and revealed he'd been responsible for the New 52 reboot in the first place.

At Watchmen's conclusion, we see Doctor Manhattan departing his universe in search of a simpler existence. As Doomsday Clock ultimately explains, that journey led him to the DC multiverse, where his unique abilities allowed him to see — and ultimately affect, alter, or undo — numerous critical moments in its timeline. During this period, Jon becomes convinced that Superman is the locus point for everything in the multiverse, and he comes to realize that he's actually in a metaverse, where everything that occurs has a ripple effect on the rest of the various timelines. Superman finally confronts Doctor Manhattan, but instead of fighting each other to the death, he reasons with Jon and convinces him to roll back things he'd changed in DC history. Crisis averted, Doctor Manhattan leaves the DC universe to go back to his own — and try to make it better.

In the wake of HBO's Watchmen and the end of Doomsday Clock, readers and viewers have seen a greater degree of complexity to Doctor Manhattan's connection to people and his sense of self. This spark of love and hope is what keeps Doctor Manhattan interesting — it's humanity that makes a god worth discussing, more than three decades after his debut.