It's been almost a year since I've touched this blog — but I have a good excuse! I decided to go back to school to get my master's degree, and once that all wrapped up, the limited time I had left to blog was dedicated to catching up on Impulse. It's almost like time is broken, as this issue implies. But first, the cover. This is a fun pulp-style comic by Adam Hughes, which is obviously a play on Dr. Manhattan and the Silk Spectre, and is actually a key part of the story inside. I know I've been gone a long time, but right now, I'm really finding this uniqueness quite refreshing.
The variant cover by P. Craig Russell does not bring that same level of refreshing uniqueness. It just leaves me feeling empty and bland inside. Much like the original interpretation of Dr. Manhattan by Alan Moore. The world's most powerful being was often the most dull character — never using his vast abilities to do anything interesting or explore new possibilities. A character like that works in an ensemble piece, like Watchmen, but it would be fatal for a solo series. Luckily, J. Michael Straczynski used this issue as an opportunity to do something interesting.
Dr. Manhattan has returned to the Gila Flats testing center at 1:15 p.m. on August 20, 1959, to witness the moment he should have been transformed from Jon Osterman to Dr. Manhattan. But this time — much to his astonishment — Jon avoids the accident and safely retrieves Janey Slater's watch. While Dr. Manhattan struggles to comprehend this paradox, Jon is intrigued by a minor mystery of his own: Janey's repaired watch is frozen at 1:15.
Later, Jon takes Janey back to the carnival where her watch was originally smashed. This time, Jon decides to play one of the games, while Janey oddly reminisces about a man named Hank Meadows. Despite being young and healthy, and having avoided smoking, drinking, and even working with the heavy radiation equipment, he suddenly died of cancer. Janey speculates that must have been God's will, because if Hank didn't die, then Jon wouldn't have been hired to replace him, and she would have never met Jon.
Just as she finishes that thought, Jon wins his carnival game and reveals an engagement ring hidden in his prize stuffed bear. Janey accepts Jon's proposal, and as the two of them walk away, the game operator says it's his job to provide the illusion of free will. All the while, Dr. Manhattan keeps watching in silent bewilderment, unseen by anyone else.
We skip ahead to the day of the wedding, where Jon's father is surprisingly there, helping his son get ready. The elder Osterman reveals that he had a dream a year ago where he was told Jon had died. The dream was so real that it took him days to get it out of his head. Jon assures his father that dream will never come true now that he's decided to move to Washington, D.C., to teach physics at Georgetown.
Jon heads down the hall toward his bride-to-be, encountering a small boy reading the comic book that was the cover for this issue. The boy says he wants to be a scientist like Jon so he can go to Mars and see the "blue people." According to his comic book, all the blue people had died off except for one remaining blue man. Jon doubts this is true, but he says the boy may one day get to go to Mars.
And then things get interesting. There are two doors at the end of the hall and Jon calls out to Janey, asking which one she's behind. She tells him to guess, and we see that Jon's seemingly innocuous choice creates vast differences in this world. When he opens the left door, John F. Kennedy taps the Comedian to resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis. But the Comedian's impatient, violent tendencies lead to the U.S. preemptively attacking Russia and launching a nuclear holocaust. But when Jon chooses the right door, Kennedy sent Ozymandias to negotiate with the Russians, and his diplomacy skills preserved the peace. The one constant in both of those realities was that Jon did get married to Janey, but was still unable to fix her watch.
We cut back to Jon opening the door to find Janey putting on the finishing touches to her wedding dress. She coyly suggests that she may have been in both rooms at the same time, but Jon doesn't entertain this notion and leads her down the hall, not noticing that the boy's comic book has now changed to show a mushroom cloud rising behind the U.S. Capitol Building. Janey asks Jon if he would prefer to have the first dance or the last dance of the wedding, and we're treated to more possibilities.
When Jon picks the first dance, President Kennedy is assassinated, Richard Nixon resigns during his second term, and Ronald Reagan advocates for the Berlin Wall to be torn down. But when Jon chooses the last dance, Kennedy survives his assassination attempt and Richard Nixon wins a third term, staying in office long enough to oversee a full-blown nuclear war against Russia. We then get a fun two-page spread showing how reality can be altered by so many insignificant choices made by Jon, such as accidentally pressing the wrong button on the elevator and choosing red wine instead of white at dinner.
We skip ahead to Jon and Janey having dinner with Wally Weaver and Professor Glass. They're discussing the idea of Schrodinger's cat, which involves placing a cat in a box rigged with a device that has a 50% chance of killing the cat. According to quantum physics, this doesn't mean that the cat is either alive or dead while in the box — it means the cat is both alive and dead until it is observed. This mindset is important for studying particles that are only particles while being observed but are waves when you look away. Jon then wonders what happens if you don't open the box. His professor says that the longer the box remains closed, the greater the chance that unanticipated factors could alter the results, creating more random possibilities and pocket universes, each equally real until the moment when the box is finally opened and they all collapse into one reality as perceived by the quantum observer.
Later, Jon is trying once again to fix Janey's watch. He can't understand why it won't work when all the parts seem to be just fine. Janey suggests that maybe the watch isn't broken, but time is. Jon brushes that comment off as a joke and decides to abandon the watch for the time being. But Dr. Manhattan remains behind, considering the possibility that time is broken. As nuclear missiles begin raining down all over the planet, Dr. Manhattan begins to question what he has become and what he has done. And the final panel ends on the infamous Robert Oppenheimer quote: "For I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds."
I normally don't go into that much detail on these Before Watchmen reviews, but I absolutely loved this issue. I haven't read too many Straczynski comics, but they've never impressed me as much as this one has. Maybe I'm just a sucker for alternate worlds and different possibilities, but I think it was presented in a fascinating way, especially with the scientific discussion anchoring everything. This is exactly the kind of story I wanted for Dr. Manhattan.
The Crimson Corsair backup story by John Higgins continues in this issue. It is beautifully illustrated, but still dreadfully boring. For me, anyway. Hopefully the rest of this Before Watchmen series will be good when I get read them. I guess right now, those issues are both simultaneously the most interesting and most dull stories until I open them up.
