DC's Death Metal Ends Early With a Dropped Watchmen Twist
Spoilers for Dark Nights: Death Metal--The Secret Origin #1 ahead!
The ending of Dark Nights: Death Metal -The Secret Origin takes its cue from director Terry Gilliam’s unused screenplay for Watchmen. The issue, a tie-in to the Dark Nights: Death Metal event, is written by Geoff Johns and Scott Snyder, with pencils by an all-star team of artists including Jerry Ordway, Frances Manapul, and Paul Pelletier. It is in stores now.
The Watchmen film, directed by Zack Snyder, finally arrived in theaters in March 2009, to lukewarm reviews and lukewarm box office. Despite changing the ending, the movie was by and far faithful to the source material. However, It was not the first time an attempt was made to bring Alan Moore’s seminal masterpiece to the screen: Terry Gilliam, a former member of Monty Python and the director of Brazil and Time Bandits, was attached to direct a feature film-version in the late 80s/early 90s. It never came to fruition, but over the years, Gilliam and his collaborators have revealed what their adaptation would have looked like. Like Synder, Gilliam had planned to change the ending, which would have seen Doctor Manhattan prevent himself from ever coming into existence, fundamentally altering their reality. The shockwaves from Manhattan’s actions caused Nite Owl, Silk Spectre, and the rest to become characters in a comic book, as opposed to being real.
A similar chain of events happens in The Secret Origin. Superboy-Prime came from Earth-Prime, a world in the Multiverse where DC characters appear in comic books; Earth-Prime is a stand-in for our world. It was destroyed during the Crisis On Infinite Earths but Superboy survived. Over time, he went slowly mad, feeling he had been robbed of his chance at being a hero. Yet after redeeming himself fighting the Batman Who Laughs, he awoke to find himself back on Earth-Prime, reading his comic books and waiting on his girlfriend Laurie to arrive. His memories of his time as Superboy are still intact, and at the issue’s end, so are his powers.
While it is unknown if Johns or Snyder were aware of Gilliam’s vision for Watchmen or not, the ending to Secret Origin is reminiscent of the ending of Gilliam’s Watchmen. Few details were provided about the context of Gilliam’s ending, but in Secret Origin, it provides a happy ending for Superboy-Prime.
Terry Gilliam is a fascinating and talented filmmaker and his vision for Watchmen was compelling. It would have remained thematically similar to the source material but was ultimately going to go in its own direction, complete with a new ending. While it never saw the light of day, elements of it continue to seep into pop culture, such as The Secret Origin’s concluding scene.