'Watchmen' Finale Episode: Senator Keene's revolting grandstand in front of his Cyclops predecessors is a joke on him!
Senator Joe Keene is on cloud nine after he managed to capture Dr. Manhattan.
Just before he sets himself up to extract Dr. Manhattan's power, there is a monologue through which he brags about successfully hoodwinking the entire Tulsa population into believing that he was a sincere politician out to make a big difference in the lives of people in his constituency.
Of course, the fact that Keene was using the Seventh Kavalry for political mileage had been hinted at in the beginning. Then we saw him remove his mask, literally and figuratively, when he spoke to Looking Glass.
The Tulsa cop was lured to come into Seventh Kavalry's hideout location. He had assumed that the only one to have come up with the idea of destroying Dr. Manhattan and taking his powers.
The fact that he was played like a fiddle by Lady Trieu is something that we learned just minutes later. This only makes his cry of "Yee-Haw" as he celebrates how smart he has been all this while futile.
As distasteful and revolting as it was, Keene had to feel success within the grasp of his hands before Lady Trieu could tear him down. The synopsis of the episode titled, "Everything ends for real this time," also in a way portrays Senator Keene as a joke.
He is a caricature of a villain, or to be more accurate, a cookie-cutter villain. It is not lacking originality as one might assume. The audiences were expected to think of him as nothing more than a joke.
After his grandstand, Keene enters this pod which he expects would help him harness Dr. Manhattan's powers. Angela, who is aware that Lady Trieu has a plan up her sleeve, tries to stop Keene, but then he is too drunk on the success that he assumes he had achieved.
So when Lady Trieu enters Seventh Kavalry's hideout, she said, "Absorbing atomic energy without filtering it first is going to pop you like a water balloon every time."
Then when she opens the door of the pod, out pours a bloody dribble of a mess.
Of course, Dr. Manhattan manages to use this bloody mess to transport Adrian Vedit, Laurie Blake and Looking Glass, but Senator Keene, who until the moment he entered the pod was a strong antagonist; transforms into nothing but a racist senator in a black speedo who assumed that he could outsmart a God.
