‘Watchmen’: Damon Lindelof Explains Why Laurie’s Doctor Manhattan Dildo is More Than a Sight Gag

Watchmen Episode 3, “She Was Killed By Space Junk” finally introduces us to Laurie Blake (Jean Smart), aka the grown-up version of the second Silk Spectre. No longer a masked vigilante, FBI Agent Blake is now tasked with hunting down would-be crime fighters. As much as she’s changed since the events of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ graphic novel, there’s still something Laurie likes. In a shocking scene, we discover that the now 70-year-old Laurie is still getting her rocks off with a big, blue Doctor Manhattan-themed dildo.

It’s an insanely delicious visual sight gag that Watchmen showrunner Damon Lindelof refuses to take the credit for.

“I wish I could take credit for it. I wish I could say I knew it was a brilliant idea the moment that I heard it, I got it. But if I had that idea, I never would have spoken it aloud,” he told Decider, giving all credit to the episode’s co-writer Lila Byock.

However, as funny as a larger-than-life bright blue phallus might be, the prop holds profound significance for the character of Laurie Blake.

Laurie Blake, or Laurie Juspeczyk as she used to be known as, was the lone “heroine” in the original Watchmen graphic novel. She was the daughter of the original Silk Spectre and a nihilistic masked vigilante called The Comedian. When she was a teenage crime fighter, she met Jon Osterman, a super human known as Doctor Manhattan. The two immediately started a romantic relationship which would last almost two decades. However, during the events of Watchmen, Laurie and Jon had a falling out and she took up with the gentler Dan Dreiberg, who once fought crime as Nite Owl.

In Damon Lindelof’s new television adaptation of Watchmen, Laurie Blake has been recruited to investigate Judd Crawford’s murder in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Even if it seems that she might miss a now imprisoned Dan Dreiberg — as Senator Keene (James Wolk) calls him, her “owl in a cage” — she’s still leaving voicemails for Doctor Manhattan on Mars. As Lindelof explains, Laurie’s feelings for Doctor Manhattan fall into the realm of “it’s complicated.”

“The last thing that anyone wanted to do was present a version of Laurie that was like hung up on Doctor Manhattan to the level that she couldn’t move on. But there is also something fascinating about if you were dating the most powerful being in the universe, how could you ever date someone else?” Lindelof said with a laugh.

He added, “But I never believed she and Dan would last long. That was my personal belief. This idea that all Laurie needed was someone to spoon with…did not really feel like it quite fit.”

Laurie might not need someone to spoon with, but she does need someone to fuel her most intimate fantasies. Lindelof said that the idea of the Doctor Manhattan sex toy came from one of the writers’ meetings where Lila Byock pitched it, and initially, everyone laughed. Nevertheless she persisted, and soon all the women in the Watchmen writers’ room were emphatically backing Byock up. Lindelof put it into the script.

“Many, many great things have happened to me in my career when I’ve gotten out of the way of someone else’s passion, and so there you go,” Lindelof said.

Once the Watchmen team came to grips with the fact that they were going to show off a Doctor Manhattan dildo, they had to design it. “The art department started sending different versions of it, and Lila at some point just said, ‘It should look like a Jeff Koons piece of art,'” Lindelof said. “And I was like, ‘Alright, well, you know, this is happening.'”

However there’s something else in Laurie’s attaché case that complicates who she now is. She has a vintage magazine cover that shows her as a young woman embracing Doctor Manhattan. The headline reads “Silk Spectre Takes Manhattan.” What’s surprising about this is Laurie chastises her own mother, the original Silk Spectre, for keeping tawdry illustrations of herself from the 1940s. Now, Laurie is doing the same thing.

According to Lindelof this was a nod to the fact that “we are doomed to become our parents.” He said, “For a text that is so much about generational trauma and nostalgia and complicated relationships with one’s parents, it just felt completely and totally apropos that if the original Silk Spectre kept a photo of the Comedian on her bed stand with the big lipstick kiss on it — which is very problematic given their history — that Laurie would also sort of be, I don’t want to say pining for Doctor Manhattan…”

Not pining, but as Watchmen Episode 3, “She Was Killed By Space Junk” suggests, Laurie is certainly still thinking about her time with Doctor Manhattan.

As Doctor Manhattan himself told Adrian Veidt, “Nothing ever ends.”

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