For Abar, the answer is yes for reasons the episode isn’t persuasive enough in articulating, but her goals as a justice-seeker can only be helped by the most powerful being the world has ever known. Besides, the show has invented a doohickey that makes it possible for Dr. Manhattan to exist as Calvin, a stable and supportive husband and father with no memory of his life as Jon Osterman, who can live out those 10 years as something close to a human being. And through this “tunnel of love” they go, perhaps without regret at the end of it.

Using the meet-weird between Dr. Manhattan and Abar as the structural anchor for the episode provides for a fine union of form and content. He can stay in one place and know that she is going tell him in 20 minutes about the anniversary of her parents’ death, or cite the moment from a decade later will make him fall in love with her. Yet their experiences of time create a strange discord between them: He can see enough of their future together to love her before she can even start to get to know him.

Bachelors can’t usually come on this strong at a bar and hope to succeed, but then again, never has a parlor trick been this dazzling. He ended the Vietnam War single-handedly. He can pull this off.

The warmth that develops between Dr. Manhattan-as-Calvin and Abar stands in sharp contrast with the vibe between Dr. Manhattan and Adrian Veidt, perhaps because both men are wrapped up in bigger plans. They have a chilly relationship in the book, to put it mildly, but their actions are also by far the most consequential for humanity. Veidt’s strange activities in “Watchmen” have been frustratingly removed from the rest of the show all season long, but at least this episode attempts to reel him in a bit. As it turns out, Dr. Manhattan hasn’t been exiled on Mars this whole time; he’s been busy creating a verdant new Garden of Eden on Europa, the smallest of the four Galilean moons orbiting Jupiter, and appointing his own Adam and Eve.

While it’s a relief to get some basic answers about Veidt’s situation — we know where he is now, and we know how his oft-replicated servants were created — his subplot continues to feel as distant from the rest of “Watchmen” as Europa does from planet Earth. The contrast between Dr. Manhattan-as-Calvin and Veidt in this episode makes the problem worse: Calvin is an attempt by an exiled superman to rediscover his inner Jon Osterman and turn himself into someone who can live like an actual human. That allows him to be the man who’s capable, years later by mortal chronology, of being moved by his wife’s refusal to accept the inevitability of defeat without fighting back.