Season 1, Episode 4: ‘If You Don’t Like My Story, Write Your Own’

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Or, to put it more aptly: Which came first, the weird clone fetuses pulled up from a lobster trap at the bottom of the lake or the mechanical egg that develops them into confused, rudderless servants?

For once, we know the answer to these questions, because the lives that are created in this episode of “Watchmen” are unnatural, born as means to mysterious ends by two characters with the boundless resources to play God. But the show has been hitting the egg theme consistently since the first episode, when Angela Abar cracked eggs in a class demonstration and the yolks spilled out in a smile that cheekily evoked the Comedian’s badge. Eggs turned up again when Will Reeves did some cooking on Abar’s underused bakery stove, and once more in the closing credits of the second episode, set to the classic Beastie Boys’ track “Eggman.”

The Beastie Boys put the symbolism plainly enough in the lyrics (“The egg, a symbol of life”), but “Eggman” is about destroying eggs, by tossing them out the car window or loading up a slingshot. That particular part of the song comes to mind when Adrian Veidt and his servants load the bodies of dead clones onto a catapult and launch them at various trajectories. Until now, Veidt was so isolated from the other action on the show that all we could do was observe his actions with curiosity and horror, wondering when his story might intersect with the others. That’s still an open question, but his bloodless creation and disposal of cloned drones finally gives him a clear thematic connection to rest of an episode.

Enter Lady Trieu (Hong Chau). The superb opening sequence, set to Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers’s karaoke-ready duet, “Islands in the Stream,” details the domestic bliss at Clark Acres Farms, where the Clarks have settled into a pleasing routine: puzzle-solving, flossing, snuggling — all in wordless harmony. When Trieu turns up on their doorstep in the middle of the night, she gives them precisely three minutes of her time to answer a life-changing ultimatum. She needs their property immediately, and she can give them “legacy” in the form of a child, created secretly from their own sperm and egg — leftovers from their failed attempt to conceive 10 years earlier, in a fertility clinic owned by Trieu.