Beware of spoilers!
This week's episode of Watchmen, This Extraordinary Being, took Angela on a very literal trip down memory lane after she recklessly downed a potentially lethal dose of Nostalgia last Sunday. The pill, designed to help people relieve memories in real-time, was never designed to be ingested by other people once the memories are harvested--but that warning, as well as the looming threat of side effects like psychosis--didn't even slow Angela down as she poured the entire bottle of Will's Nostalgia down her throat rather than hand it over to Laurie. The end result was eye-opening to say the least, as we learned tonight. It turns out some of our long-running Will theories were right on the nose, but more complicated than we could have ever imagined. Thankfully, the answers seem to be coming at a fast and furious pace now and the mysteries are all beginning to unravel. That also means that Watchmen is piling on the Easter Eggs and references, both to earlier episodes and character moments and real-life history. Here are 13 different things we picked up on in Episode 6. Let us know in the comments what you noticed and what you think they might mean.
1. Moloch
During this episode of American Hero Story, the corrupt FBI agents namecheck the villain Moloch, a villain who makes an actual appearance in the Watchmen graphic novel was one of the victims caught in Ozymandias's web.
2. J Edgar Hoover
The notorious first director of the FBI became famous for selectively going after organized crime and later for an insidious abuse of power using the information networks of the FBI to gather potential blackmail-worthy information on American politicians.
3. Kristallnacht
The destruction of the Jewish deli is meant to invoke Kristallnacht, or the night of broken glass, an event in Nazis stormed Jewish-owned business and destroyed them, terrorizing their proprietors.
4. Trust in the Law
Trust in the Law is, of course, the movie from Episode 1 that little Will watches the day of the Tulsa Race Riots.
5. The domino mask
It's certainly not an accident that the makeup Will wears to hide his skin around his eyes while he wears his hood looks like a classic domino mask, and it's also reminiscent of the makeup Angela now wears as Sister Night.
6. The market scene
It turns out American Hero Story's idea of how events went down wasn't that over the top after all. The fight Will has in the real-life market with the KKK is a mirror of the fight Hooded Justice has in the store during the clip shown in Episode 2. Will even bursts through the glass window, this time to escape rather than to break in.
7. The lettuce
The connection between the KKK, 7th Kavalry, and heads of lettuce dates back to the 1940s, apparently. Will gets thrown into a display of lettuce during the fight.
8. Nelson and Will
Nelson and Will's sexual relationship was, apparently, also very real--though it certainly wasn't as romantic as Hollis Manson made it seem in his book, Under The Hood.
9. June's origin
It turns out Will's wife was the baby he rescued in the first episode. Later in the episode, we learn why Will was absent from Angela's family history for so long--it turns out she and Will had a less-than-amicable separation that led to June completely removing Will from her and her children's lives.
10. The sign of the cyclops
The sigil Will uses to identify his Cyclops casework looks almost exactly like the eye of Ozymandias's squid.
11. The national bank poster
Captain Metropolis unveils a National Bank poster that the 7th Kavalry had in their headquarters back during Episode 1.
12. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
The movie playing in the theater attacked by the KKK was The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty, originally made in 1947 and then remade in 2013 with Ben Stiller. It's about a man who fantasizes about being a hero.
13. The hanging
One of Watchmen's most bizarre mysteries had an unexpected solution this week: Judd hung himself after Will hypnotized him. Will did it because he was convinced Judd was part of the Cyclops conspiracy.
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