One of the coolest things about the original Watchmen comic books was the way Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore fleshed out their fictional world by ending each issue with excerpts from other in-world media: a few chapters from one character’s autobiography here, an issue of a right-wing newspaper there, and so on. Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen TV series draws from the form and structure of the original Watchmen any chance it gets, so naturally it offers something similar: Peteypedia, a website containing additional documents relevant to each episode, ostensibly collected by the historian-turned-FBI-agent played by Dustin Ingram on the show. Past Peteypedia hits include film festival screening notes for Trust in the Law!, a Tenth Circuit opinion explaining one aspect of the world of the show, and an FBI memo about show-within-a-show American Hero Story. Like the original Watchmen back matter, Peteypedia is dense with exposition and backstory, and low on blueprints for superhero-themed sex toys.
That all changed this week, as HBO posted the schematics for the giant blue Dr. Manhattan vibrator that was featured in the show’s third episode, and explained where it came from. It turns out it has a lithium core, an electromagnetic induction node, and a contour spring! It also turns out it was designed and built by Dan Dreiberg, a character who was romantically involved with Laurie Blake in the comic books but who has not appeared on the show. He gave the vibrator—named Excalibur!—to Blake as a fuck-you-very-much gift sometime in the 1990s, after realizing that she was not over her giant blue superhuman ex. It also turns out Dreiberg and Blake briefly returned to costumed crimefighting around that time in order to foil Timothy McVeigh’s terrorist attack. It will take weeks for Watchmen superfans to map out the changes to U.S. history alluded to in the new Peteypedia documents, but one thing is already clear: Homemade gifts are never a good idea.
