Analogies For Dr M And Time

Published December 12, 2019 · Updated July 6, 2022

Hi guys,

just wanted to praise your recent deepest dive into episode 8 of Watchmen. I really enjoyed it. I especially wanted to praise Gene for tackling a complex set of ideas in a cogent manner. In particular, the idea that everyone that Dr M engages with over the course of his life are still alive to him is a great insight which made me sit up.

I had a thought prompted by the analogies that Gene used (CB radio and 2D animation) when I started to think about the notion of nirvana.

Part of the criticism of the nirvana concept was that in achieving the state, you are essentially a drop of water entering the ocean and that consciousness is considerably larger than you. The argument against this is that the critics get the notion back to front. It is the ocean entering the drop of water.

The ocean entering the droplet feels a reasonable analogy with how Dr M experiences time at the point of his creation.

If humans experience time linearly like a river flowing from its source to its destination (the ocean or a bigger river) then we can only conceive of time as the points we contribute to it. We add water to the river through our actions and experiences. We observe the river of time flowing and our interactions with it making up our memories of the past and dreams of the future.

Dr M became the river. The totality of its flow from source to destination. He can both observe and experience all his interactions with time but he can never escape them.

This feels tragic as he will never have the capacity to dream of the future or enjoy the memories that allow us to build stories about ourselves. It is truly alien despite having those human impulses for love in particular. He cannot be a storyteller. I wouldn’t want to experience that.

What a show. It keeps adding depth to my relationship with these characters that I thought I knew. Then there’s all the debate and discussion and theorising which enriches the experience further. The Shat on TV community continually sparks new ideas.

Can’t wait for the last episode. I just hope they hit this out of the park.

Regards
John Lish

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