HBO's 'Watchmen' Episode 8: Doctor Manhattan's perception of time can be confusing so here's how it works
It is a popularly held belief that time moves in a linear fashion from past to present to future. Nothing could be further from the truth.
At least, not in the world of 'Watchmen', that is. We still don't really know how time works in our universe but we've got a pretty good idea what makes time tick in the 'Watchmen' universe.
Both the 'Watchmen' comic books and the HBO TV series deals with the concept of time and how it flows relative to our perception of things but understanding the way time is represented in 'Watchmen' might seem a little too complex. Well fear not, we've got you covered.
WARNING: Spoilers ahead for 'Watchmen' Episode 8 'A God Walks Into Abar'
There are two theories of how time works. The first, known as A-theory, suggests that time moves from past to present to future, the way we normally experience time.
Imagine your life is a TV show, each episode being a particular day in your life. According to A-theory, time moves frame by frame from one episode to the next right up until the end.
But what if you could watch the TV show of your life from the outside, the way a person watching the show would experience it. In that case, you would be able to see that each episode exists simultaneously. You could watch Episode 1 or Episode 2 or even Episode 8 and it would all still be in the present for you, the viewer.
This is called the B-theory of time and in 'Watchmen', there is one person who sees time this way. His name is Jon Osterman but the world knows him better as Doctor Manhattan.
The incident that gave Doctor Manhattan his powers sent him outside of the universe he lives in, therefore opening his mind to experience his own personal timeline as a whole.
In other words, he sees that every instant of his own life exists simultaneously and understands that it is only the human limitations of perception that keep us believing in the flow of time. To Doctor Manhattan, past and future are relative and in reality, everything is the present.
HBO's 'Watchmen' throws a bit of a spanner into this but it's not a complete break from the science established in the comics.
Doctor Manhattan isn't able to see the time he spent as Calvin Abar (Yahya Abdul Mateen II) because he was essentially not present for those 10 years. However, he can see the whole in his own personal timeline, what he refers to as "darkness".
Unlike our conception of God, Doctor Manhattan isn't aware of everything in creation, only the things that happen to him specifically.
So by turning off his memories and his ability to know what he is experiencing, the device created by Adrian Veidt (Jeremy Irons) essentially blinded him to the things that were happening to him and therefore sent him into a state of sleep, during which he became Calvin and lived out his life with his wife Angela Abar (Regina King).
Once he came out of that sleep in Episode 8 'A God Walks Into Abar', he was aware of the life he had led as a sort of memory, like knowing things in a dream without actually remembering why you know it.
Of course, we didn't get much time to see what exactly he knew about his time as Calvin and there's a pretty good chance we might never know, considering the way the episode ended.
Hopefully, we'll get some more information about this in Episode 9, which you won't be able to watch until it airs on HBO on December 15. Unless you're Doctor Manhattan, that is.