Damon Lindelof Discusses That Big Flashback Event Scene in WATCHMEN and There's an Episode 6 Promo
If you haven’t had a chance to watch HBO’s Watchmen Episode 5 yet, you might not want to read this because it gets into big spoiler territory. So, before we go any further I’m gonna throw this out there…
If you watched the episode then you know that it started off with a 1985 flashback sequence where the giant squid made its big onscreen debut! I had heard that the Squid would show up, but I didn’t know exactly how that would play out in the series.
Well, the giant squid aspect of the Watchmen story was handled great as we see the aftermath of the squid being dropped onto New York City killing half of the population. Watchmen showrunner Damon Lindelof recently talked about bringing the squid into the show and discusses how “post-traumatic squid disorder” still affects characters in the story.
While talking to Collider in an interview, Lindelof said that he was always planning to use the squid, which is an element that Zack Snyder ditched in his movie for some reason.
“From the jump, before we even did the pilot, I said to everybody on the crew ‘Just so you guys know, we’re doing the squid. We’re going to do November 2, 1985, so just start wrapping your brains around that.’”
Lindelof went on to say that while the concept of the giant squid is completely absurd, that’s the whole point:
“That’s the true genius of Veidt’s plan, that it had to sound absurd to be believable. But when you want to really ground the absurdity in to something that’s tangible and people will feel, I think the idea of PTSD — no pun intended, but some kind of post-traumatic squid disorder — the idea that the squid was literally genetically engineered to cause people emotional trauma so that many years after this event, they would still fear it. We needed to palpably relate that to the audience.”
I really did like how they handled the effects of the squid event all those years later. When talking about the creation of the squid and the crazy look in an interview with Polygon, visual effects supervisor Erik Henry said:
“We were very careful to try and not over light the squid, not because we wanted to hide anything, but to give the feel that maybe a drone or helicopter could have shot the scene. We did our best to try and translate the iconic colors from the graphic novel, but in the end it’s got to look real and in the kind of natural lighting we went for with the moon and the fires, it was not going to be conducive to see those sort of nuanced colors.”
I liked how they handled the design aspect of the squid. Watchmen is telling such a fascinating story. I love the characters that have been introduced, and at the end of every episode, I’m excited to see what happens next. I’m totally hooked!
Thanks to HBO, we have a promo sport to share with you that teases what we can expect to see in Episode 6. It looks like we’ll be getting answers to a lot of our questions.