After the events of Watchmen Dr. Manhattan leaves his universe behind and enters the universe populated by the DC heroes we know and (sometimes) love. Once there he starts manipulating past events for unknown reasons. Ozymandias, his friend and sometime nemesis, follows him to the same universe, and of course Ozymandias always has a plan, and of course this plan involves the fate of mankind.
What follows after that point is really too convoluted for me to describe, and even after Dr. Manhattan and Ozymandias explain their individual plans at the end of the series I was left scratching my head, wondering if it all made sense. I'm still not sure if it does. Parts of these plans seemed very arbitrary.
The real question is whether Doomsday Clock is as good as Watchman. To this question I can only answer no, not in the slightest. Geoff Johns is a good writer, but he can't hold a candle to Alan Moore in his prime. Gary Frank is also a good artist, but he seems to ape what Dave Gibbons did a little too closely, distilling Gibbon's approach to art into a nine panel layout that continually reminds you of how much better Gibbons was at telling a story through images.
Is Doomsday Clock terrible? No, I don't think so, but as DC crossover events go it's still not as good as other series such as Crisis On Infinite Earths, Infinite Crisis or even Justice League One Million. If forced to qualify Doomsday Clock I would say that it's just OK. Not great, not that good, just OK.
And at the end of the day did we really need the Watchmen characters in the same story as Superman and Batman? I don't think we did. Leaving them alone would have made them more special, while incorporating them into something like Doomsday Clock goes a long way toward diminishing their importance.
Besides that, I think a series in which the Watchmen characters come up against the Charlton characters that inspired them would have been more fun. Let's leave Superman and Batman out of it for a moment, and have Captain Atom take on Dr. Manhattan, Peacemaker take on the Comedian, Blue Beetle take on Night Owl...
...or at least put them in a room together... with Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.. who are trying to write an outline for a comic book idea called "Watchmen..."
That would have truly been more meta for your money
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