TV Talk – Watchmen

Hello! Welcome to my first TV Talk; the prospect of delving into Watchmen lore seemed too mouth-watering a challenge to step aside. In preparation for this series, I finally got my hands on the Watchmen comic, and rewatched the 2009 movie adaptation for a third time. I’ve always really liked the Zack Snyder Watchmen movie without really thinking too hard about why – on a surface level, I guess it might be quite simply the melancholy and reminiscent tone, but also the bare brutal honesty in which the story is told. The story does nothing to protect sensitivities, having the Comedian shoot a pregnant woman at point blank, while Sally is accepting of an attempted rapist as time goes by, and Dr. Manhattan is nearly always nude. After reading the comic, the brilliance of the story is clearer – it’s really a story of superheroes, left to their own devices and making depressing realisations on how best save this crazy rat-race of a world. Some may call it nihilistic; I suppose it is, when our good characters boldly represent nobility, dedication, uncompromising determination, omnipotent hindsight and foresight, and still can’t prevent catastrophe. Watchmen is a celebration of comic book levity, and a condemnation in one. As the Comedian would say, ‘it’s all a fucking joke’. I won’t gush about the comic too much because I’m sure it’s all been said since its release in 1987; it’s easily the greatest comic book I’ve ever read, widely heralded as one of the greatest comic books of all time, and a completely fulfilling expression of the medium – it’s dense, poetic, poignant, fearless. It contains raw commentary on politics, gay rights, justice and vengeance; perhaps not ‘ahead of its time’ as the cliché goes, but with a biting clarity of the time that seems to reflect universal; as far as I can tell anyway. If you’re a comic fan and you haven’t read Watchmen – that’s like being a basketball fan and steering clear of the NBA.

Seeing this Watchmen series get nearing universal praise, and nominated for a bazillion awards, pushed it quickly up my never-ending ‘I’ll-get-to-it-one-day’ watch-list for television, that I’m sure everybody has. There’s just so much quality programming out there, isn’t there? And limited free time in the day. Yet, I sought out the comic, got myself prepared, and ready I go. I don’t envy anyone with the task of adding on to the Watchmen tapestry, since it works so well on its own. That being said, I was impressed with The Hunt, a recent movie with a great inner understanding of theme and symbolism, also helmed by David Lindelof, so if anyone can do it, I’ll back him in. The series is set 34 years after the event of the comic (putting it in the modern day). Watchmen drops us in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where there is growing unrest from a militant group called the Seventh Kavalry, portrayed with Rorschach balaclavas and white supremacist tendencies. The state government has legalised police to wear masks, to protect their identity, following on from some violent attacks. We follow Angela Abar (Regina King), a respected police detective, shocked to discover that her police chief and friend has been killed by an old man in a wheelchair, claiming to be her long-lost grandfather.

The first four episodes do a fantastic job of setting up where we are in the future and recapturing the tone of Watchmen. David Lindelof is swiftly re-establishing himself as a masterful writer in my eyes – I look at where he has been in the last decade and he has some dubious credits to his name, like Cowboys and Aliens, Prometheus, World War Z, and the television series The Leftovers, which I’ve never seen. But, before all that, this bloke co-wrote Lost, so it should come as no surprise that Watchmen excels at powerful storytelling from alternating character’s perspectives episode to episode, whilst also progressing the overall narrative as well. Episodes 3 and 5 stand out to me as my favourites; one, an intimate look at an older and grislier Laurie Blake (the second Silk Spectre in the comic, played by Jean Smart), and the other, detailing the origin story of recluse police detective Wade Tillman (Tim Blake Nelson), also known as Looking Glass. There are strong parallels between the older characters and the new ones – Rorschach’s mask was black and white in the comic, like his morality, where Looking Glass’s mirror face literally reflects his subjects back on them. In the future, the police have also incorporated Night Owl’s technology, hopefully carrying on his inventions’ noble intentions.

The call-backs in this show are masterfully done; unlike the Disney Star Wars sequels, where the self-aware references brought a moment of recognition followed by an empty search for substance, these call-backs bolster the characters and enrichen the current story further. Watchmen is recognised for being rife with symbolism, and it’s just so grand to watch a production weave all these audience nods in with purpose, to parallel, conflate or contradict the original extrapolation so competently. Watchmen is extemporary, and I ended each episode joyfully astounded, more often than not. The show reminded me of Twin Peaks: The Return for its otherworldly bent on the real world, and for the way it’s structures its plot without always providing context for the audience right away. For anyone else who is familiar with the David Lynch experience, Twin Peaks: The Return, I always felt like I was striving to keep up with that show, where here I felt like I was locked-in and in on the joke. Perhaps David Lynch’s surrealism is just too transcendent for my tiny little brain, but Lindelof speaks my language and I am grateful for it. The best example of this is the Adrian Veidt subplot, which carries on slowly and doesn’t explicitly detail itself until at least half way through the series. I had a strong hunch I knew what was going on, and watching it play out was perfection. Ultimately, Veidt turns out to be in a paradise that Gods like Ozymandias and Doctor Manhattan dream about, but in reality, it proves hollow without challenge – it’s too safe. Too many cakes and not enough squids for Adrian. I seriously applaud.

Moreover, the TV Show excels at finding the holes where the original story could be further developed and extends it. I know there have been several Watchmen companion materials before, The Doomsday Clock and Before Watchmen, and I apologise if I attribute an idea to the wrong person, but I also believe this series still had free reign on its own creation. I love that Hooded Justice is black – it just makes sense, with the hood and the noose motifs. For me, he is the only original character that could be black, since the comic deliberately leaves his backstory a mystery, and open to extrapolation. The flashback episode is pretty good, with the story borrowing a little, but not too heavily, from the original Night Owl’s origin. I think it stumbles a bit, incorporating the fact that Hooded Justice was understood to be gay with Captain Metropolis, and not really knowing how to approach their love affair considering the worthy story it wants to tell, with Hooded Justice’s wife and family lineage. At first, I didn’t understand why The Minutemen weren’t helping Hooded Justice track down Cyclops, but then it’s clear that Captain Metropolis was one of those fame hunters that Sally Jupitar mentioned in her press, who would prefer to go after the villains that would create the most sensational headlines, rather than burrow into real justice – the scourge of racism in the U.S.A. The Watchmen comic balances the fantastical and the relative realism extremely well, but I wonder to what end it serves giving the villainous operation the comical name of Cyclops, here. I think the show might’ve sought to widened the disparity between comic-book heroism and a protest against the real ignorance of racism, without the graduating policeman telling Will (Jovan Adepo) ‘beware the Cyclops’, like the Cyclops was some dramatic forty-foot squid to be feared. The TV show makes it clear, that Hooded Justice was never a superhero, but a man up against it to find a way to achieve equality – the resulting superhero fad was a coincidence.

Episodes 7-through-9 require some thinking. The Doctor Manhattan stuff is a hard sell. I have to get my head around predeterminism again. In the comic, when Laurie and Jon are on Mars, Laurie thinks that Jon is telling her she is going to cry due to conversation they are having, and she is determined not to give in. But, it’s the revelation of who her father is that causes her to weep. This demonstrates that Laurie has choice AND the future is predetermined. The same goes for Jon, highlighted in his relationship with Janey – Jon can obviously foresee he will have a relationship with Laurie, but his reasoning goes beyond what he knows; Janey is aging, Jon is outgrowing her and Laurie presents a vibrant substitute – that’s his rationale. Jon says he is a slave to time like everybody else; he has predetermined, yet spontaneous responses in the moment, to events that he’s aware are about to happen; like the information that his former colleagues have cancer that provokes anger, and his knowledge of Daniel and Laurie’s affair that is still surprising when Laurie tells him. It’s a mind-melter, I know! Conversely, in this series, Angela acts like she must obey the future, with the line “do you need me to say it?” before she tells Jon to get out. Also, what’s driving Jon to meet Angela in the bar in the first place? I understand he loves her, but why that bar and why then? It stands to reason that Jon’s perception of time could have allowed him to know he loved Angela before he went to Jupiter, before he went to Mars even, so what is Jon’s motivation to make contact with her in that moment? I’m prepared to suggest that Manhattan’s experience creating mundane existences on Jupiter is what leads him to seek out more; a human relationship again. So much of the story’s conclusion comes out of Doctor Manhattan foresight and intervention, and I wonder if I would have enjoyed the series more if Doctor Manhattan wasn’t a prominent focus. So much of the early part of the series is about the void felt in his absence, but the Ozymandias stuff is enough to fill us in to what Jon has been doing since Watchmen for me; perhaps the flashback scene of him sending Veidt away would have been enough. At one point, I thought the series was setting up Lady Trieu to be the corresponding character for Jon, since she has practically learnt to do a lot of what Doctor Manhattan could do in the span of her life and achievements; I was onboard with that – turns out, her dropping the car next to Laurie signals she is a wannabe Jon, and nothing more. Whether you enjoyed Doctor Manhattan or not, I will say that when Doctor Manhattan enters the show, Laurie and Looking Glass don’t get to contribute much more to the story, and that’s sad. It would have been great to have an ending where the newest characters were integral to saving the day, over Veidt and Doctor Manhattan.

But the show has an aptly-titled episode called “If You Don’t Like My Story, Write Your Own.” – here I am, critiquing and nit-picking the ending of this series with as much prowess as a fly on a dead carcass. Endings are always the trickiest part; anyone can have a brilliant idea and flesh it out, but where does it lead? Maybe that’s why David Lynch and Twin Peaks: The Return avoided having any; avoided bringing clarity to anything. But to focus on the potentially questionable use of Doctor Manhattan would be to overlook the majority of the show, and to be completely glass-not-full-to-the-brim of me. This show is still an unbelievable achievement and an intellectual masterpiece. Even now, days are finishing the final episode, I’m still readjusting pieces in my mind and figuring out how they fit together. Doctor Manhattan would be such a difficult character to write for, since his responses aren’t human, and there isn’t anything he doesn’t know. Comic creators, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, got around this by sneakily including tachyon particles, where Doctor Manhattan is neither privy to the cause or the source of their obstruction. The entire goal of the plot of the Watchmen comic is to get around Doctor Manhattan, where this television series embraces his foresight into the finale. I’ve also come to realise that this series finale is also going for a different, and more hopeful, tone – even deciding to put humanity back into ‘the God’ through the power of love could be a slap in the face for some; it certainly was for me initially, since a powerful takeaway of the Watchmen comic is how Jon’s powers lead him to outgrow the emotional bounds of humanity. But here, love brings him back. The story we get isn’t possible without Jon coming back from outer space – I think an angle for interpreting this story could also be seeing Doctor Manhattan understand his immortality is a blight on the well-being of humanity as well, and accepting a future without him in it, but I’m not sure yet. The death of religious ideology could be a subtext here, especially with Jesus falling off the wall at Lady Trieu’s failed efforts.

Yet, for the lack of nihilistic resonance I perceive, the show does leave it open for the viewer – I want Angela’s foot to go under, but if you want your happy ending, you can have that too. Damien Lindelof is smart enough to leave the show’s final question in the hands of the viewer. Originally, Watchmen was supposed to be an ongoing series but Lindelof has since stated that he plans to keep it as a limited series; I think that’s wise, as I don’t think I want more, and I can’t see where this story could go. Having said that, never say never, right? The possibilities are only as limited as your imagination 😉 If the Watchmen production was to continue, what happened with Night Owl? I’m sure a separate story with old Daniel Dreiberg could just be as interesting too.

I’ll state it again; I do not envy anyone aiming to replicate the Watchmen comic book, a story so powerful – both historic and timeless. I wondered how this series might approach the current political climate, which some might perceive as just as static as it was in the Cold War error. This series replaces the nuclear arms race with racism, a highly problematic and hostile topic of the current day. I loved seeing Vietnam as a state of the U.S.A, and how the mainstream locals idolise the blue man who ended the war, but there’s a rising voice from the other side who baulk at the privileged first-world dominance of their country. Personally, I didn’t need to see Laurie arrest Veidt after all this time, but perhaps that’s a win for movements like MeToo, and how the dirty dealings of the past now must be exposed for a brighter future. But just like the Watchmen comic, I think we might be able to look back on this series as a divulging comment of our time. All I really need to say is this is a truly remarkable series, worthy of the accolades coming its way and I feel very blessed to have seen it.

Is that it? Did I do it? Phew, long one, ey?

What did you think of Watchmen? Have you seen it? Have you read the comic or seen the movie and what do you make of them? I’d love to talk more about this show, so comment below.