'Watchmen' Showrunner Damon Lindelof Talks About The Giant Squid Attack, Plus: Watch A Trailer For The Next Episode

The infamous giant alien squid made its onscreen debut during last night's Watchmen, and it was quite a stunning reveal. During a flashback sequence to 1985, we see the aftermath of the squid being dropped onto the Big Apple, with its aftershocks rippling all the way to Hoboken, New Jersey. In a new interview, Watchmen showrunner Damon Lindelof talked about bringing the squid into the show, and how "post-traumatic squid disorder" still affects certain characters.

Plus: watch a trailer for the next episode, which promises to answer questions and be mind-blowing at the same time.

Zack Snyder decided against using the alien squid in his Watchmen movie, but the Watchmen TV show always planned to let the cephalopod have its day. "From the jump, before we even did the pilot, I said to everybody on the crew 'Just so you guys know, we're doing the squid. We're going to do November 2, 1985, so just start wrapping your brains around that,'" Damen Lindelof told Collider.

Lindelof adds that while the concept of a giant alien squid "sounds completely and totally absurd", that's kind of the point, adding:

"That's the true genius of Veidt's plan, that it had to sound absurd to be believable. But when you want to really ground the absurdity in to something that's tangible and people will feel, I think the idea of PTSD — no pun intended, but some kind of post-traumatic squid disorder — the idea that the squid was literally genetically engineered to cause people emotional trauma so that many years after this event, they would still fear it. We needed to palpably relate that to the audience."

Meanwhile, over at Polygon, visual effects supervisor Erik Henry talked a bit about how the squid was created. "We were very careful to try and not over light the squid, not because we wanted to hide anything, but to give the feel that maybe a drone or helicopter could have shot the scene," Henry says. "We did our best to try and translate the iconic colors from the graphic novel, but in the end it's got to look real and in the kind of natural lighting we went for with the moon and the fires, it was not going to be conducive to see those sort of nuanced colors."

This week's Watchmen ends with Regina King's Angela downing an entire bottle of Nostalgia pills – literal memories in pill form. The memories are those of her long-lost grandfather Will, and as we learned from this new episode, the pills themselves were pulled off the market for causing psychosis. With that in mind, it was safe to assume the next episode would have Angela going on quite a trip, and this new trailer confirms that. It also makes it look as if we're finally going to get answers to a lot of questions.