HBO Watchmen: 10 Major Questions We Still Have After Episode 9

We may have officially come out of the HBO Watchmen tunnel with the Episode 9 finale, "See How They Fly," wrapping up some of the biggest mysteries--but that doesn't mean every question we've had over the last nine weeks has been answered. Far from it, in fact.

Though we don't know if Watchmen will have a second season or if that hypothetical second season would focus on the same corner of the Watchmen universe as the first, we've compiled a list of the biggest mysteries left over from the season finale. From the origins of Lady Trieu's mom to the ending's biggest cliffhanger, these are the thoughts that are probably going to keep us up at night theorizing and diving through old Peteypedia articles for weeks to come.

And after you're done pondering the mysteries of life, the universe, and everything, check out our breakdown of the last episode's comic book Easter eggs and references to help put even more pieces of the picture together.

We know from the Peteypedia that Lube Man was definitely Petey himself, styled after a "Fogdancer" from his favorite Max Shea novel--but while that may be the "who," it most certainly isn't the "why." Did Laurie put him up to tailing Angela? Did he rehearse that slide-into-the-storm-drain move in advance? Did anything actually come of the intel he gathered or did he just never have a chance to come clean to Laurie before all hell broke loose?

We know that time doesn't work for Doctor Manhattan the way normal humans understand it, so it would stand to reason that death probably doesn't either. Sure, the machine may have "destroyed" him, but is he really gone for good? Or is he simply everywhere at once now, just waiting to pull himself together atom by atom the same way he did back when he was first given his power in the intrinsic field generator or when Ozymandias first tried to kill him?

The origins and schemes of Cyclops have us scratching our head. Where did they initially get their mind-control technology and why did they abandon it after Will burned down their warehouse back in the past? Why did they evolve into the 7th Kavalry and how did they come up with their Doctor Manhattan cage technology? We know, thanks to the Peteypedia, that Lady Trieu gave everyone in the tri-county area of Tulsa a (newly legalized) HDTV, which we had originally thought was part of a mind control or mind control adjacent scheme--but apparently, it wasn't. So what was the deal?

We know that Trieu was monitoring the phone calls coming in from the Doctor Manhattan phone booths she'd set up around the world, but we don't know why or to what end. It seemed, in Episode 7, that she was monitoring them--she knew enough to tell Angela what people had been asking him for--but why did she set them up in the first place?

Bian, Lady Trieu's mother, managed to outsmart the smartest man in the world while she was working as a cleaning lady in his compound. Was she some sort of secret genius as well? Why would she even consider having his baby in secret as a sort of revenge plot if she wasn't intending on telling him herself? How did she know that her child would also wind up being a genius?

Laurie is going to arrest Adrian Veidt for killing 3 million people back in 1985, effectively blowing the lid off of the story that has maintained a fragile sort of peace around the world for the last thirty-some-odd years. Is exposing the conspiracy, even all these years later, going to actually tip the world back into the crosshairs nuclear annihilation? Will the government crumble after Redford's presidency is revealed to be part of the scheme? Or will the government just cover everything up all over again and throw Laurie in jail?

Jon's hypothesis about transferring his powers via genetic material has never actually been tested, so we're left wondering if Angela's egg-eating is going to have an actual effect on her or not. Or, perhaps more importantly, if it does work, will she even want the abilities she's given? And what about her kids, who have been eating Jon's cooking for years--could they have been affected by the theoretical power transfer as well?

Both Trieu and the 7th Kavalry were fixated on destroying Jon before gaining his powers. It's obvious, in the case of the 7th K, that they didn't want someone else on equal footing as they acted in their white supremacist agenda, but it makes less sense for Trieu. Sure, we can assume she was raised (like Angela herself) to resent Doctor Manhattan, but why couldn't someone as smart and as wealthy as Trieu just make a new intrinsic field generator to grant herself powers without getting Jon involved? The Russians were trying to do just that, so it certainly wasn't out of the realm of possibility. Since when do Highlander "there can be only one" rules apply to Doctor Manhattan?

This is a question we're not likely to ever get a proper answer to, but we're going to ask it anyway. What are the actual details of Doctor Manhattan's powers? Why couldn't he anticipate Trieu's plan if the 7th Kavalry had a similar plan? Why is he affected by lithium and why didn't anyone seem to be aware of this? If Cal could effectively "hulk out" and activate his powers, what kept him from doing just that before Angela took a hammer to his head?

When Trieu goes to pick up her newspapers for the last time, she tells Bian to put them in the time capsule. This made us wonder if that's where all the newspapers Bian has been retrieving for her are going, and if so, what's the point of the time capsule? If Trieu really was intending on saving the world, rather than destroying it, why would she want to keep a collection of artifacts representing the world that came before her?