WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for the seventh episode of Watchmen, "An Almost Religious Awe," which premiered Sunday on HBO.
HBO's Watchmen takes place more than three decades after the events of the seminal comic series by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, and centers on a new protagonist, Angela Abar (Regina King), a masked police detective known as Sister Night. However, the television sequel has also introduced characters from the source material, such as Jeremy Irons as Adrian Veidt, Jean Smart as Laurie Blake, now an FBI agent, as Louis Gossett Jr. as Hooded Justice. And, in this week's episode, we learned that Doctor Manhattan has been hiding in plain sight from the very beginning.
But if the clues dropped in the latest episode are any indication, we could see the return of a fourth: Eddie Blake, aka the Comedian. Yes, he was murdered in the comic, but bear with us.
In "An Almost Religious Awe," Angela Abar spends most of the episode recovering from at Lady Trieu's facility following her overdose of Nostalgia pills. There, the eccentric trillionaire reveals more clues about her past -- as well as about her family. As many fans suspected, Trieu's daughter, Bian, isn't who she appears to be. She's actually a clone of Trieu's mother, who's being fed her own memories by IV injection. As Trieu explains, she's on the verge of her greatest accomplishment, and she wishes her parents to be there with her when it occurs.
But the real hint that another vigilante from the comic may be returning comes when Angela asks Trieu about her father. The trillionaire replies that he will be here soon. We don't have confirmation of who Trieu's father is, but the HBO series' own Peteypedia files have heavily teased he may be Eddie Blake. The Comedian spent a lot of time in Vietnam during the war, where he impregnated a local woman. Although he later shot and presumably killed her, it's now theorized the woman may have survived.
If that is the case, then Lady Trieu might be planning to bring back the Comedian, who was murdered by Veidt in the Watchmen comic in order to keep his plan a secret. Someone as resourceful as Trieu would have no trouble acquiring the DNA of the late Eddie Blake. She may not have his own memories to feed back to him, like she has done to her mother, but perhaps she has enough to bring back at least a version of him.
What's more, such a return would not only allow Lady Trieu to finally meet her father, it would also permit Laurie to reunite with -- or else confront -- hers too.
Developed by Damon Lindelof, HBO's Watchmen stars Jeremy Irons, Regina King, Don Johnson, Tim Blake Nelson, Jean Smart, Louis Gossett Jr., Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Tom Mison, James Wolk, Adelaide Clemens, Andrew Howard, Frances Fisher, Jacob Ming-Trent, Sara Vickers, Dylan Schombing, Lily Rose Smith and Adelynn Spoon. The series airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET/PT.