Reddit 'Watchmen' theory solves a huge mystery about Jeremy Irons' "Veidt"

Watchmen finally showed us Jeremy Irons in his Ozymandias supersuit during Episode 3 of the HBO series, but there’s still a bigger mystery at play. Where is Adrian Veidt and what is he up to? However, maybe the real question we should be asking is when is Veidt? And one fan on Reddit may have cracked the mystery by picking up on a pretty subtle clue in the first three episodes of HBO’s Watchmen.

Possible spoilers for Watchmen below.

Pretty much everything about Jeremy Iron’s character on the show is confusing as hell, but one running joke may hold a pretty huge clue. In each episode, Veidt’s assistants (who seem to be clones?) present him with a birthday cake covered in some very on-brand yellow and purple frosting. At first, it seems the clones are simply programmed to bring their master a cake every day, but maybe that’s not what’s really happening…

“Each Veidt scene in each episode is a year after the last one,” writes redditor u/u/disposableacct987. “First episode, cake had one candle. Now, in episode 3, the cake he knocked over had 3. Likely anniversaries of his imprisonment.”

This actually makes a lot more sense, and it feels like the exact kind of thing an HBO show like Watchmen might do. Remember when Westworld revealed its multiple timelines at the end of Season 1? That’s exactly when Damon Lindelof could have planned for the Watchmen series finale as the Jeremy Irons plotline finally catches up with the rest of the show.

However, there’s a catch. As another fan noted, according to an earlier scene, Adrian Veidt’s last public appearance was in 2007 and he was reported missing in 2008. With the main plot of Watchmen set in an alternate history version of 2019 and the series running for nine episodes, that means if this theory is correct, Veidt’s story won’t quite catch up with the rest of the show.

Of course, it’s possible that Watchmen could get around this by jumping forward and increasing the number of candles on Ozymandias’ cake by more than just one in the final episodes. It might also turn out that Veidt really is dead by the time the main story begins, and what we’re seeing in these scenes is the character setting some new plan in motion that could finally come to fruition in 2019.

Either way, we’re curious to see what Veidt is planning in Watchmen, and this theory goes a long way to explaining how both the character and his mysterious actions connect to the rest of the story.

Watchmen airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO.