'Watchmen' Season 1 Episode 5 'Little Fear of Lightning' draws parallels between 9/11 and appearance of giant squid in NY
There's something about moments of great tragedy that brings people together for all the wrong reasons. Even the worst of enemies can learn to work together at the appearance of a common threat and fear has a strange way of sealing rifts that love could never hope to bridge.
In our world, 9/11 was the defining moment of terror that changed the world we live in, creating a certain sense of fear in our cultural subconscious that is still strongly felt. The fall of the Twin Towers is a memory that has been branded into our minds, passed on from one generation to another like some sort of genetic mutation.
In the world of 'Watchmen', the date that was seared into people's minds wasn't 9/11, it was 11/02: the day the giant squid came. 'Watchmen' Episode 5 'Little Fear of Lightning' shows the immediate devastation caused by the event and the trauma it caused even to people who weren't actually in New York when the monster appeared.
Even 30 years after that fateful day when a giant teleporting squid united the world in fear, the after-effects of the event are still felt and it causes otherwise rational people to act in irrational ways. The best example of this would no doubt have to be Looking Glass/Wade Tillman (Tim Blake Nelson), the masked cop who goes to bed wearing what's basically a tin-foil hat so that he can stay safe from psychic blasts caused by alien squids.
The biggest and most twisted parallel that the show draws between 9/11 and 11/02 is the comparison between real-life groups like the 9/11 Truth Movement and the show's resident terrorist organization, the 7th Kavalry. Thankfully unlike the 7K, none of our world's conspiracy theorists have gotten fully militarized (yet) but the connections are quite obvious.
Of course, in 'Watchmen' there really was a conspiracy behind 11/02 and as Episode 5 reveals, there are only a select few, like Senator Joe Keane (James Wolk), who are aware of the full truth of what happened that night. It's a truth they cannot reveal to the world for fear that it might break whatever fragile peace they've managed to create in the years since but to the people who were killed on that fateful night, does it really even make a difference?
'Watchmen' Episode 6 'This Extraordinary Being' will air on HBO on November 24.