Watchmen has revealed the origin of the controversial item in Laurie Blake's (Jean Smart) briefcase. As fans saw in Watchmen's third episode, "She Was Killed By Space Junk", while she was in the privacy of her motel room after Blake and Detective Angela Abar (Regina King) stopped a terrorist attack at Chief Judd Crawford's (Don Johnson) funeral, Laurie opened her Halliburton luggage and took out a giant blue phallus. This immediately ranked at the top of Watchmen's many eyebrow-raising moments so far but now the truth about Laurie's unique sex toy has come to light.
Laurie Blake's reintroduction to Watchmen further unified the legacy of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's graphic novel with series creator Damon Lindelof's new tale set in 2019 Tulsa, Oklahoma. However, Laurie Blake isn't the Silk Spectre fans remember; now an FBI Agent with the Anti-Vigilante Task Force, Laurie has abandoned her last name, Juspeczyk, and adopted the surname of her late father, Edward Blake/The Comedian. Further, before she and Nite Owl/Dan Dreiberg were captured by federal authorities in 1995, Laurie had also dropped her mother Sally Jupiter's Silk Spectre superhero identity and became The Comedienne to honor her father. With her acerbic wit and cynical worldview, Laurie is now more like her dad Eddie than ever, but her private moments reveal Laurie's past relationships with both Nite Owl and Doctor Manhattan continue to linger - in the form of a big blue dildo.
The origin of Laurie Blake's unusually large sex toy was disclosed in Peteypedia, Watchmen's tie-in website of ancillary material filling in details from the TV series. Laurie's big blue phallus was built by Dan Dreiberg and he named it "Excalibur" (continuing Dan's childhood fascination with King Arthur's legend). But, according to Laurie, Dreiberg's unusual "gift" was literally a "f*ck you" to her because he made it out of jealousy since he was angered Laurie still harbored feelings for her ex, Doctor Manhattan. Laurie was also quick to clarify in her Q&A with the FBI by 1995, she and Nite Owl were "not lovers" (anymore, although they were a romantic item in 1995 and likely thereafter) and stopping the Oklahoma City Bombing was their "last job" together as superhero partners. The FBI recovered Excalibur when they searched Laurie's Oklahoma hotel room and they found it in her briefcase, which they took as evidence.
Thanks to a transcript of Laurie's FBI interrogation dated 4/24/1995, we now know Nite Owl and The Comedienne were apprehended after they stopped the Oklahoma City Bombing on 4/19/1995, killing the domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh in the process. While Dreiberg refused to speak to the feds (a vow of silence he maintains in 2019), Laurie willingly cooperated with the authorities (in her irascible fashion) and she confessed to a great number of things, from the truth about Adrian Veidt's giant squid hoax on 11/2/1985 to the fact she and Nite Owl received their special crimefighting equipment from a company called MerlinCorp that Dreiberg secretly owned. But during Laurie's interrogation, the subject of what was in her briefcase awkwardly came up and the dirt about Excalibur's creation came to light.
The FBI's raid on MerlinCorp recovered Dreiberg's blueprints for Excalibur, which revealed it to be electromagnetic lithium battery powered. Along with the phallus' absurd size, this was an extra detail Dreiberg was careful to include as a dig at Laurie since Doctor Manhattan was the source of the world's electromagnetic lithium batteries, which were then recalled after 1985 when it was suspected the blue super being gave cancer to people close to him like his ex-girlfriend Janey Slater and sidekick Wally Weaver. Although this wasn't true and it was part of Adrian Veidt's 1985 scheme to remove Doctor Manhattan as an obstacle to his hoax, by 2019, the world still thinks electromagnetic lithium causes cancer. But the Seventh Kavalry suspects otherwise and is stockpiling lithium batteries as part of its secret plot.
When Laurie was released and joined the FBI, Excalibur was returned to her. But it says a lot about Agent Blake that she has held onto her enormous reminder of Doctor Manhattan (and Nite Owl) for over 24 years of Watchmen's timeline and that she took her prize possession with her to Oklahoma.
Watchmen airs Sundays @ 9pm on HBO.