Continued from part 4, book 11...

Book Twelve

Scenes of the devastation begin book twelve. Dead people and the tendrils of this giant faux alien being lie all throughout the Big Apple. The end game happened at Midnight, November 2nd and no one was spared.

Dr. Manhattan and Silk Spectre appear amid the rubble. Manhattan wonders how he missed the destruction, thinking he should have been there sooner. He feels "tachyon particles" and wonders aloud if that caused his disorientation. He and Spectre teleport away, following these particles, to Ozymandias' hideaway at the pole.

Inside Ozymandias' frozen, palatial retreat, Manhattan follows Ozymandias into a lab. Here Ozymandias had a trap laid for the blue skinned super-being. It is a device similar to the radiation field generator that created Dr. Manhattan to become what he was in the first place. Once tripped it seems to disintegrate the blue man into nothingness.

Ozymandias sets out to kill all the rest of his former friends to keep his secret plot under wraps. As he starts to do so, however, Dr. Manhattan proves that he was able to reconstitute himself and stops the murder attempts.

But, as Dr. Manhattan zeros in for the kill, Ozymandias turns on his wall of TVs upon which plays the proclamations from all over the world that the war has been averted and all governments are banding together to stop the expected alien invasion. It's all just as Ozymandias predicted.

Dr. Manhattan realizes that if they reveal the plot, this new found worldwide peace would be shattered and the old ways would soon return. So, Ozymandias was going to have to be allowed to get away with it all. Or this chance, this one chance, at world peace will never take hold, never be given a chance.

Rorschach disagrees. He says that truth is the victim, not man. He feels the truth must come out and he stalks off to get back to civilization and reveal all. Dr. Manhattan destroys him in an emotional confrontation for the effort.

Dr. Manhattan returns to Ozymandias after Rorschach is killed. The smartest man in the world claims that he has made himself "feel every death." He says that he knows he "struggled across the backs of murdered innocents" to achieve this new world peace. And posits that someone had to take the "weight of that awful, necessary crime."

Ozymandias views himself as a messiah, bringing mammon to the world. He asks Dr. Manhattan, himself a Godlike being, if he had done the "right thing." And thinks that it "all worked out in the end." Ozymandias, needing dispensation for his shaky moral choice, asks the only being to which he feels inferior, Dr. Manhattan.

Manhattan's only reply is, "Nothing ever ends." He then disappears into the galaxy to go on his own search for enlightenment.

Thus we end the series on the note of a world peace orchestrated by Ozymandias, built on a lie, and paid for by the blood of unknown millions of innocents (as well as friends). Shaky moral grounds, indeed.

So, as readers we confront the morals to this question. Is it OK to sacrifice the few for the many? Is it OK to lie for that end? Certainly there are great questions that have no easy answers. But, I find the whole tidy plot to be so full of holes that it ends up untenable, anyway. If we accept that all men would band together to stop this alien threat, we certainly cannot imagine such an alliance would last for very long unless a constant threat is inherent.

Take the current Global War on Terror for instance. It has been but a few years since the horrible attacks on 9/11 and the strong, united US political stance has already degenerated into quarreling factions fighting each other in US politics. Democrats have already abandoned the war effort with the sole purpose of gaining political favor and return their Party to office. And that is just in one country. Imagine how quickly differences of opinion would cause a global alliance to breakdown. Especially in our story as time lengthens between the "alien" attack in New York and the preparations for invasion. Unless Ozymandias could engineer a new alien to appear every few years, this world peace would not last very long at all.

Human nature would far out weigh Ozymandias's false peace, it must be admitted. In the REAL end, Ozymandias would find humanity right back where it started and all his efforts would only have resulted in blood on his hands.

Thus ends our story, but not before we take a few jabs at Ronald Reagan. Naturally, in keeping with his stated desire not to attack a president he knew was popular with the American people, Moore attacks Reagan obliquely. He ends the book with a fellow saying that if Robert Redford (A name with two "R's" in it as in Ronald Reagan's by the way) ran for president nobody would want a "cowboy actor in the White House." As with so much, Moore was just plain wrong. Reagan won in victories larger than most presidents ever did.

Also on that last page, we see a newspaper office. In that office, in a pile of mail, we see Rorschach's journal. Perhaps the truth will out, after all?

Thus ends the series.

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