Doctor Manhattan - The Greatest Superhero

Someone asked me today who my favorite superhero was. I had to think about it for a minute, because while I have been mildly entertained over the years by the mass production of comic book movies, I can't say that many of the powerful individuals in any of them stuck out in my mind.

But then it hit me.. Doing a bit of reverse thinking led me from my favorite superhero movie, The Watchmen, straight to the greatest hero of all time in Doctor Manhattan. Doctor Manhattan used to be known as Dr. Jonathan Osterman before he had a run in with a Intrinsic Field Subtractor. Know what this is? Me neither, but the end result was his body blowing into millions of atoms and then resembling itself within a few months after the incident with a few upgrades attached. His newly created powers included telekinesis, the ability to see the future, teleportation, control over matter at a subatomic level, and little to no physical weaknesses. In essence, he became a perfect godlike being.

The question becomes though, what does a man do when he is unaffected by illness, violence, and the ultimate killer, time itself?

There are only so many things and a certain amount of times you can do anything in this world before you become desensitized to it all. Take for example the excitement you felt each Christmas morning as a child. Presents that seemed endlessly piled underneath the tree and in your stocking. The potential for gifts to change your whole week, year, or even lifetime was right there every December 25th! Was there anything that could get better than this?

But as the years role on, you grew less and less excited about the potential of the day. You learned that the whole holiday is nothing more than a sham from corporations, hiding behind the birth of Jesus Christ to get people to purchase useless items for one another. The material things you received were used for a time, sure, but you knew their lifespan was limited before the next invention was forced down your throat. And so it goes, with the discovery of the hidden evils behind Christmas and the ghosts of happy memories you tried to recreate each year, it just never felt the same as those first few experiences.

And this brings us to the sad story for Doctor Manhattan. What can a god do on Earth for all eternity without growing tired of it's repetitiveness? He hears, sees, and knows all even before it has happened, so where is the adventure for a man that already has lived out every possible outcome in his mind? Isn't apart of the excitement in life experience new things and testing unknown waters?

Remember that first time you asked a girl to dance with you how nerve racking that felt? You were nervous because you were excited by the potential of the dance. As you put your arms around her waist and began to sway to the rhythm of the music, thoughts of holding her hand the next day at school floated through your mind. This was the beginning you thought. The beginning of a relationship that you would end each day with a kiss on her beautiful lips.

What does Doctor Manhattan have to lose when put in the same situation though? If the girl had told him no, would it have bothered him? He could have simply spent the next few thousand years going through the same motions, asking an infinite amount of girls to dance with him and surely had a lot who would oblige. But why even ask the girl who would say no when he can already foresee her answer anyway. With that knowledge already in place, where is the excitement of the whole activity of asking? Is the excitement just in the act of holding a girl in his arms while they dance? How long until that activity grows old?

We can even think about the difference of cultures Doctor Manhattan faces with each generation. What does a man think who experienced life in the 1970s compared to that of today? Would he be as disgusted by the mind numbing reality programs we watch today? Or the physically beautiful but mentally hideous people we celebrate in our society? Is it that much different from his time? Perhaps we are just rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic in his mind and so he grows more and more frustrated but our true lack of progress.


In my mind, it's a beautiful but tragic paradox we have in Doctor Manhattan. Living forever with the power of perfect clairvoyance would be any child's dream superhero, but when does the mightiest of all superheroes stop wanting to help others and simply help himself?

Understanding the meaning of life might become his only true goal. Why was he put here? Why was he given such great power and responsibility, but no one else? Perhaps this is what the perfect superhero was built for; to help humans or more importantly himself to understand their true purpose in this universe. Whatever it maybe, helping humans to simply live cannot be his true goal, because what good does that do a man who can save anyone he loved before harm hit them anyway.

"While I am standing still, I prefer the stillness here. I am tired of earth, these people, I'm tired of being caught in the tangle of their lives... They claim their labors are to build a heaven but their heaven is built with horrors" - Doctor Manhattan