Vigilante cops is the new normal in this reality
Watchmen is a big, ambitious, boldly radical take on Alan Moore’s landmark 1987 graphic novel, and one that for the most part, stays true to the spirit of that book. But it’s also a departure from it, kind of the inverse of certain themes, and for anyone who ever read and liked Watchmen, you will gain much from this sequel series…but it is not, I repeat, not for the uninitiated.
Let’s just say it upfront- you can’t watch this show at all if you haven’t read the book first. You will be entirely lost, have no idea what’s going on, and nothing will ever be explained to you (even I had trouble remembering a lot of the details, since it’s been a while, and this show does not even to attempt to catch you up). Some of that is unsurprising, since this is from Damon Lindelof, former showrunner of Lost and creator of The Leftovers- I once promised myself I would never again watch anything with that man’s name on it after Lost ended (one of my most despised viewing experiences of all time), but I did end up being happy I gave Watchmen a shot, especially since Lindelof insists that he will not be part of a second season in any way. Any Lindelof watcher knows he’s a fan of unexplained mysteries, unanswered questions, baffling visuals and occasionally striking imagery. There are elements of all of that in this series, but since he and his writers are working from a thick, detailed, meticulously explained source, it helps to keep things on track and you do get most of the answers to all that this first season brings up by the finale.
Moore’s graphic novel was an overtly political, angry take on superheroes who lived in an alternate present (1985 at the time), where Richard Nixon was in his third term, fascism rose all around us, and the Watchmen were a bunch of weird, violent, angry characters who split off into dark, conflicting personalities. The politics of that book were frankly muddled (perhaps due to Alan Moore being a Brit), and the show kind of flips it on its head, taking place thirty years later in an alternate 2019. Now Robert Redford has been president for decades, and the extreme right wing environment of Moore’s original Watchmen appears to be a kind of an extreme left. Redford’s government hands out reparations for African-Americans and a white supremacist backlash has sprouted up in the form of guys who wear the Rorschach masks and name their movement after the dead vigilante (he was a racist but Rorschach was also arguably the biggest icon of the original- like I said, muddled politics).
Superhero action through the lens of America’s racist past, present and future
In response to this terrorist group the new vigilantes are now cops themselves, who wear masks and have superhero secret identities- our hero in this series is Angela Abar, aka Sister Knight, a cop in Oklahoma and played with tremendous confidence and fierce urgency by Regina King. Tim Blake Nelson is another standout as a fellow cop “Looking Glass” (his mirror mask is pretty cool). There are returning characters from the original series too, as Laurie Blake (formerly the Silk Spectre II) now shows up as an FBI agent who hates vigilantes, and Jean Smart takes on her wonderfully sardonic and jaded character with outright glee. Jeremy Irons is Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias, whose entire subplot takes place aside and apart from the main action at first but is eventually tied back in, and then there’s the whole question of what happened to Dr. Manhattan, the godlike being who could rule all if he wanted to, but fled for Mars at the end of the graphic novel.
That’s it for spoilers about the comic book material, but safe to say any questions regarding these characters are all eventually answered. But the thing that makes Watchmen special is its take on race. Despite its overtly political messaging, the original Watchmen had no direct racial conflict in its pages at all. This new series is entirely about American racism. That’s not even an exaggeration. It’s an exploration and look back at the history of it (it opens with the Tulsa massacre of 1921), up through this “alternate” present that feels a whole lot closer to current reality. It’s also a twist on Watchmen through an overtly racial lense, with revelations and surprises that change the history of the superheroes and work as a commentary on racism in the genre as a whole. It’s a fascinating examination through a light that probably never would have even occurred to Alan Moore to think about. I was with Watchmen through all of this for the most part, but towards the end of the series they started to lose me with some twists on the character of Dr. Manhattan that struck me as off limits and too far gone from the source material to accept. Moore has disassociated himself from anything having to do with any adaptations of his work, so this couldn’t really be canon anyway, but the amount of easter eggs and details filling the screen to purposely make this story a sequel to that one really wants you to think of it as such, and the stuff in the last couple of episodes took me out of it. The hardened, political messaging in this show made it difficult enough to remember sometimes that it’s still a comic book at all, and the veering back to Jeremy Irons’ Ozymandias shenanigans after an hour spent on lynch mobs and racism in America is jarring as it is. Messing around with Dr. Manhattan is a bridge too far for me.
Still, most of Watchmen is enthralling and I’d recommend it to anyone who loves the original. The acting is impeccable and the storytelling is mesmerizing and imaginative in each individual episode. That’s more than enough to make it one of the best shows of the year.
Grade: A-
Regina King is tough as nails as the badass Sister Knight
