Note: contains major spoilers for Watchmen season one and Saw 2
In a bizarre tale plucked from the pages of cinematic history, it turns out the finale of HBO's Watchmen was actually a homage to Darren Lynn Bousman's Saw 2. While it might be hard to connect the comicbook caper and Boyseman's torture-porn sequel, Watchmen showrunner Damon Lindelof has explicitly stated this is what he was aiming for.
After an epic season of Easter eggs, giant blue penises and nods to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen comic, Lindelof rounded off with an epic swansong that's seen the all-star series branded one of 2019's best shows.
As both Doctor Manhattan and the Seventh Kavalry were brought to their knees, Lady Trieu's 'true' intentions were revealed, and Angela Abar, aka Sister Night, came to save the day with the help of some familiar Watchmen faces.
Just when fans thought Watchmen had played all its cards when it comes to shocking reveals, jaws were on the floor when 'See How They Fly' confirmed Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias had been in Tulsa the entire time. While most of the season had Veidt playing Master on Europa, it was always likely he was going to escape his intergalactic prison and play a part in Lady Trieu's complicated endgame.
But instead of Trieu erecting a statue of an aged Veidt in Tulsa, she'd actually put her gold-plated father on display for the world to walk past. Although Trieu rescued daddy dearest from Europa, she went full Jabba and had him preserved in carbonite gold.
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So where does Saw 2 come into it? There was a similar(ish) twist where the son of Donnie Wahlberg's Detective Eric Matthews was revealed as having been locked in a safe right next to him all along.
Speaking to the official Watchmen Podcast, Lindelof told Craig Mazin: "Essentially, at the end of the story, the big payoff is that Donnie Wahlberg's son gets locked in a box that he will suffocate in and then you realise that that box has been sitting next to Donnie Wahlberg the entire movie and his son was quietly dying inside and that everything we saw as an intercut had actually happened days earlier, and I was just like, 'Oh god, we'll just do that with Adrian Veidt'."
Ironically, this isn't the first time Lindelof has homaged the 2005 horror. For those who watched his work on Lost, it's hard to forget the iconic season-three finale and that huge, "We have to go back!" moment.
Speaking to BuzzFeed about one of the biggest twists in television, Lindelof explained: "The divine inspiration of Saw 2 led us to the inevitable conclusion that the best way to do this would be to make our first flash-forward LOOK like yet another flashback.
"And then, in the final scene, we drop the hammer. Boom. You're in the FUTURE, BITCHES!!! TAKE THAT, DONNIE WAHLBERG!"
The first season of Watchmen was a suitably topsy-turvy adventure as Lindelof and the writers played with a complicated timeline of masked vigilantes and superpowered beings. Fans were right on the money that Jeremy Irons was an older Veidt – whose story was told through a series of clever flashbacks. Even if it was easy to spot the similarities between Watchmen and Lost, you might not have noticed the Saw 2 Easter egg (quite literally) hiding in plain sight.
Who knows, maybe Watchmen season two (if there is one) will take a leaf out of Saw 3's book?
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Tom Chapman is a pop culture-loving writer and NCTJ-accredited Broadcast Journalist with over seven years of experience covering the small and silver screen.
Starting his career with a post at Movie Pilot in Berlin, Tom took on freelancing full-time with regular stints at Digital Spy, Screen Rant and Comic Book Resources.
These days, you can still find him covering all things Marvel and Star Wars at Digital Spy, while dipping his toe in bylines at Yahoo! and IGN.
Tom likes to think his spirit animal is a cross between Gale Weathers and Olenna Tyrell.
