"See How They Fly"
Everyone's plans conclude, one way or another; Abar and Will Reeves finally have a frank conversation; Veidt and Blake settle some old business; Looking Glass reappears.
Contains examples of the following tropes:
- Adaptational Karma: Using the disk Veidt sent to Redford, Laurie and Wade arrest Veidt for the atrocity he committed on 11/2.
- All There in the Manual: The Peteypedia companion website indicates that, after the events of the episode, Petey is fired from the FBI for his insistence in investigating the deaths of Keene and Trieu. He's even profiled like a vigilante and the FBI director implies he'll probably become one.
- Artistic License – History: Veidt says that he's never given himself to a woman, "like Alexander the Great", so as not to be distracted by hedonistic pursuits. Alexander the Great was married three times and had at least one confirmed son.
- Body Horror: Joe Keene bursts into goo after he essentially microwaves himself.
- Break Out the Museum Piece: Veidt's attack plan at the climax involves him using a teleportation device that was created, and has been working constantly ever since, the 1980s.
- Brutal Honesty: When Jane Crawford says that Trieu should just cut to the chase because she obviously is going to kill all of the Cyclops people, Trieu bluntly admits she is going to and presses the "fire" button.
- Bullet Catch: Turns out Veidt can still pull this off.
- Chekhov's Gun: The horseshoe (again); the Adrian Veidt statue; the squid showers; the tape of Veidt's speech, the egg carton.
- Chekhov's Gunman: Turns out that the Adrian Veidt statue that was in Trieu's office was not a statue at all but Veidt Taken for Granite and all of the events of his sub-plot took place years before.
- Concealment Equals Cover: The frozen squids will tear through flesh like a bullet, but is easily stopped by car roofs, outdoor kiosks, and a briefcase.
- A Death in the Limelight: Lady Trieu's, to be exact. We get her backstory (or an important chunk of it), and she gets a bad case of becoming flatter than a pancake at the climax.
- Deity of Human Origin: Subverted twice (Keene and Trieu) before being played straight (Abar). Maybe.
- Deadpan Snarker: Blake, as usual (biggest example being snarking to Senator Keene about the briefs he's wearing as he prepares to enter the radiation chamber and absorb Manhattan's powers). Veidt, as usual (a small example being him explaining how he's going to use the squids to destroy the Clock).
- Death from Above: After Dr. Manhattan teleports Adrian (and Laurie and Wade) to his Antarctica lair, he has the idea to directly target Trieu's location using his squid fall machine to thwart her machinations. The normally flaccid dead squids are frozen before delivery, turning it into a torrent of tiny kinetic kill bomblets.
- Dressing as the Enemy: Tillman has infiltrated the Seventh Kavalry by wearing one of their Rorschach masks.
- Everyone Has Standards: Veidt is an utter megalomaniac and asshole, but he starts to deem Trieu as evil the moment he is unfrozen from his trip from Europa when he finds out that Trieu cloned her own mother and uses the clone as her right-hand woman, as well as figuring out that she wants to absorb Manhattan's power (Veidt himself only wanted to destroy Manhattan).
- Evil Cripple: Joe Keene, Sr. one of the top members of Cyclops, is bound to a wheelchair.
- Evil Gloating:
- Keene pulls it after Dr. Manhattan is captured.
- Turns out to be Lady Trieu's undoing, as her need to gloat to her parents gets her killed.
- Face Death with Dignity: Jane is the only one not freaking out when the group realized they've been played and are about to die. Instead, she merely tells Trieu to can it with Will's speech and just kill them already. Similarly, after realizing that her plans have failed and she's about to die, Trieu's last words are just snarling that Veidt is a motherfucker before she's crushed to death.
- Get It Over With: Aware that Trieu intends to kill all the members of Cyclops present after reading Will's speech to them, Jane's Shut Up, Kirk! to Trieu is this. It's currently the page quote.
- Glorified Sperm Donor: An unusual example in that Veidt labels himself as this (although he's correct in that Lady Trieu's mother broke into his compound to steal the sperm) to tell Lady Trieu (who just walked into the same compound expecting him to treat her like a daughter after dropping such a bombshell and lend him a few billion dollars) to go to hell.
- Gratuitous Latin: Veidt tosses a "Opus esse uno, unum cognoscendi" as he rants about how Trieu is a bitch even more megalomaniacal than he. Translation: "It takes one to know one".
- Kill Sat: Veidt's squid teleporter is used as this, in a more complicated example than usual.
- Idiot Ball: As Trieu herself says, Keene deciding to simply step into a chamber and absorb a massive blast of atomic energy without even some sort of filter was suicidally stupid.
- Impaled Palm: The first of the frozen squids that literally rains down on Trieu's parade punched straight through one of her hands and she spends a long time staring right through the hole in shock.
- Just Between You and Me: Lady Trieu makes the one mistake that her father made sure to never make: she explains her plan to her enemies before going through with it. Naturally, this leads to her undoing.
- Keene does the same thing, but he had already been outplayed by Trieu years beforehand and his monologuing had no effect on his fate.
- Laser-Guided Karma:
- Keene get liquefied in his attempt to steal Dr. Manhattan's powers and the whole leadership of Cyclops/the Seventh Kavalry (a white supremacist group) get vaporized by Lady Trieu (a Vietnamese woman) afterward.
- Trieu herself is also shortly crushed to death under her own collapsing quantum centrifuge after her plan to absorb Manhattan's power is thwarted by Veidt, Laurie, and Wade.
- And in a twisted sense, Jon Osterman is killed by Lady Trieu using the Millennium Clock — as in, he is killed by a Vietnamese woman after he was responsible for turning Vietnam into a glorified colony of the United States.
- Made of Plasticine: The first squid goes through Trieu's hand like it's nothing and leaves a visible hole she can see through.
- Major Injury Underreaction: Trieu barely reacts with surprise to a frozen squid punching through her hand.
- Male Frontal Nudity: Doctor Manhattan. As usual. Pointedly averted with Senator Keene, who undresses to the same kind of briefs that Doctor Manhattan wore when he started to get rid of wearing clothing and lampshades that walking around like a living god showing his penis to the whole world would be "overkill".
- Please, Don't Leave Me: The reason Jon doesn't send Angela with Laurie, Wade, and Veidt is because he doesn't want to be alone when he dies.
- Police Are Useless: The Tulsa Police's only role at the climax is to become collateral damage to all of the craziness that is going on.
- The Reveal:
- Veidt's side-story in Europa actually took place over his 8 or 9 year stay there after Manhatten dropped him there and the events of his rescue happened approximately a year ago when Trieu's transportation pod finally returned from Europa. She did, however, leave him frozen awhile.
- The Game Warden wasn't chosen by Doctor Manhattan to be Veidt's jailer — it was a role Veidt assigned the clone in order to stave off boredom by having a nemesis.
- Trieu is Veidt's biological daughter, thanks to her mother sneaking into the part of Veidt's fortress where he concealed his sperm samples with a syringe.
- Trieu is pretty damned evil herself — so much that Veidt can see the writing on the wall of what will happen if she gets Manhattan's powers.
- "Reeves" is not Will's original last name. He took it after the riot because he was a big fan of Bass Reeves and wanted to be just like him — a symbol of Justice. We never find out his former surname.
- That gag with the eggs of the previous episode may or may not have been Manhattan leaving behind his powers in a place where Angela would inherit them.
- Profane Last Words: Trieu calls Veidt a "motherfucker" in Vietnamese when she realizes what's going on.
- Shut Up, Hannibal!: Tillman knocks out Veidt in the middle of him ranting to Laurie about how the events of 11/2 were something he had to do to save mankind.Tillman: This guy talks way too much.
- Shut Up, Kirk!: Jane Crawford interrupts Lady Trieu when she reads Will Reeves's speech listing the crimes of Cyclops, bluntly saying that Trieu is obviously going to kill them, so she should just do it already.
- Sudden Soundtrack Stop: Played for Laughs; "Lacrimosa" (Veidt's Leitmotif) gets an abrupt stop when Tillman knocks out Veidt with a wrench.
- Superior Successor: In the end, Lady Trieu's megalomania revolves around how she wants to be this to Adrian Veidt, her (unwilling) father. And she pretty much succeeds with the fact that, apparently, Doctor Manhattan has been Killed Off for Real.
- Swiss-Cheese Security: Aside from being very far off in Antarctica, Veidt's fortress turns out to have been lacking in security even when it was fully occupied — Trieu is the result of a Stalker with a Test Tube (or rather, a uterine injector) walking around the place unnoticed by Veidt because she was "only part of the help", entering Veidt's office, and using the "Rameses II" password that Veidt also uses in his office in New York to open his sperm vault.
- Villain Ball: Trieu, for all that she is trying to be Veidt's Superior Successor and actually gets pretty damned close to it, ultimately has everything go to hell because she is holding onto this very tight. Even when Veidt's own doom was eventually sealed by making a video for President Redford gloating about his accomplishments, he still was no-nonsense enough to launch the squid attack immediately and thus the other would-be "Crimebusters" were too late to stop him. Trieu wastes a bit too much time gloating to everybody that she's about to win and spilling the goo that the late Senator Keene had turned into for the sake of being a show-off backfired on her greatly.
- Villain Has a Point: While Trieu was outright treated as a villain for her desire to use Manhattan's power to shape the world, ultimately Will does agree that Manhattan could have done more with his power. Angela apparently agrees as she accepts an opportunity to gain Jon's powers.
- Weaponized Teleportation: Veidt reprograms the squid teleporter at his base in Antarctica to deliver Death from Above in Tulsa.
- Where It All Began: The final confrontation that kills most of the villains of the season happens within a city block of the small theater we saw on the season's prologue, more than an In-Universe century ago. Will even lampshades it.
- Worthy Opponent: Averted for one more Kick the Dog act: Veidt explains to the Game Warden why he gave him the mask and put him in his role, which was to have someone to call this while he had his stay in Europa. And when the Warden asks if he was this, Veidt immediately says that he wasn't, but "[he] put on a hell of a show". He does considers Trieu this, though, which is one more reason he's okay with helping save the world.
- You Are Number 6: In the flashback where Trieu and Veidt meet, Veidt mockingly calls Trieu "(sperm) Sample 2346" at one point to showcase how little he cares that she's his biological daughter (and that he's more pissed that her mother broke into his sperm vault).
