screenshots via HBO
Sunday night's new episode of Watchmen on HBO finally introduced us to another character from the original book: Laurie Juspeczyk, the one-time Silk Spectre and Dr. Manhattan flame who has now, apparently, grown out her bangs, joined the FBI, and devoted her life to cracking down on masked vigilantes. She's moved on from her superhero past to a very different form of crimefighting, but she hasn't left the past entirely.For starters, she's taken her father's last name, Blake; makes frequent use of the Dr. Manhattan phone booths that beam messages straight to Mars; and, uh, she carts around a gargantuan blue dildo in a Halliburton case like it's the nuclear launch codes!Yes, the reveal of a massive Dr. Manhattan dong that looks like some kind of bangable Jeff Koons dog was the standout moment of an episode loaded with them—and now, thanks to a new Vulture interview with Watchmen scribe Lila Byock, all our blue dick-themed questions have been answered! According to Byock, who co-wrote the episode alongside Damon Lindelof, she wasn't particularly serious when she first introduced the idea of Laurie (Jean Smart) carting around a Dr. Manhattan dick.Per Vulture:
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Unfortunately, Byock doesn't go into detail about where, exactly, Laurie got the dildo (did she get it custom-made or is there a market for novelty Dr. Manhattan dicks in the Watchmen universe, all cancer scares aside?) but she does talk about what it means to the former Silk Spectre. Byock told Vulture that Laurie's blue raspberry wang and the Esquire cover is about her "nostalgia for her sexual past"—a moment that draws direct parallels the time Laurie caught her aging mother, the original Silk Spectre, with an old porno comic featuring her younger self."She’s somebody who is so insistent about not being nostalgic and not having any reverence for her past as a costumed adventurer," Byock went on, "and yet when she is all alone, we learn that she gets off literally by thinking about her past."According to Byock, the show's staff even made Jean Smart "a giant cake in the shape of a Halliburton briefcase" for her birthday recently, in honor of Laurie's secret schlong. Why did they miss such a wonderful opportunity to make a Dr. Manhattan dick-shaped cake, you ask? Maybe the interview didn't answer all our burning questions."I think I pitched that as a joke!" Byock says, "and Damon called my bluff, and then it was like, oh, we’re definitely doing that. Because I worked with him on The Leftovers [which made several gags about Justin Theroux’s character’s penis], I by that point had a pretty clear sense of what kind of jokes were going to land."