Vigilante/Detective Angela (played by Regina King).
Alan Moore described his graphic novel, Watchmen, as a “meditation about power,” with each costumed hero representing a different type of authority, all proving to be hopelessly corrupt, ineffective, or unhinged.
Watchmen is more relevant in today’s superhero-flooded media landscape than ever. While darker, edgier superhero stories (like Amazon’s The Boys) have proved massively popular, none have managed to best, or even equal, Watchmen’s nuanced deconstruction of superheroes.
Terry Gilliam once proclaimed the book to be “unfilmable,” and years later, Zack Snyder proved him right, reproducing the aesthetic of the iconic comic book without an ounce of the substance.
Thus, it’s something of a relief that Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen doesn’t try to emulate the book (can’t improve on perfection), but embraces its status as licensed fan fiction, telling a brand new story, while hopefully retaining the anti-authority themes of the original.
Watchmen’s world picks up decades after we left off, with Robert Redford having been elected president, serving as a liberal parallel to Ronald Reagan. Successful supervillain Adrian “Ozymandias” Veidt once staged an alien invasion and sparked world peace, and that deception is seemingly still in place.
But Rorschach’s counter-narrative, published in a reactionary conspiracy outlet, has since inspired the “Seventh Kavalry,” a gang of violent white supremacists who wear masks that emulate their hero. The police have also taken to wearing masks, or dressing in flamboyant superhero costumes, to protect their identities from said white supremacists.
From the outset, the pilot appears to directly contradict the message of the source material, depicting the police as righteous vigilantes, protecting the innocent from the evils of racism. The ending, however, hints that this was a misdirection.
The episode begins with a horrific reenactment of the Tulsa Race Massacre, in which white mobs slaughtered the town’s black residents; this sickening sight isn’t part of the show’s alternate timeline, but a dreadful historical event, rarely acknowledged in media.
The survivors of the massacre, a little boy holding a baby, bring to mind the imagery of Superman escaping the ruins of Krypton; clearly, this character is going to be important.
Time-skip to the present-day, to a traffic stop involving a masked policeman, and a member of the Seventh Kavalry. As the policeman realizes his suspect might belong to the violent gang, he heads back to his car and asks for permission to unholster his weapon.
In this world, police are not able to access their firearms without explicit authorization; the delay in removing the pistol results in the policeman being shot by the suspect, who proudly wears his Rorschach mask as he guns the officer down.
This sparks a backlash from the police force, who are surprised to see the Kavalry back in action, after years of silence. Detective Angela Abar seems to be our protagonist, and despite assuring people that she is no longer involved with the police, Angela is shown to be an active member of the force, dressing in a costume and kidnapping a man she believes to be a white supremacist.
There’s a lot of exposition to get through - as a fan of the comic, I was confused. But it is established that President Redford has been serving multiple terms, and has enacted reparations for the black community, mockingly referred to as “Redfordations.” It’s also made clear that the police are at serious risk from the threat of white terrorism, and one notably violent attack, dubbed the “White Night,” is what inspired the need for police anonymity.
So far, Watchmen seems like a ridiculous blend between two clashing viewpoints, Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter, an empty, Hollywood-style denouncement of racism without the structural critique. But it is soon shown that the police aren’t quite the helpless victims that the show first framed them as.
Angela’s suspect is interrogated by “Looking Glass,” a detective who wears a mirrored mask designed to intimidate and confuse. The mind-melting interrogation scene reveals one key detail; the Seventh Kavalry are aware that the “transdimensional attacks” are an elaborate hoax.
Clearly, the squids that fell from the sky in an earlier scene are being created by someone keen to maintain that illusion, to continue the world peace that rests on the imaginary threat of alien invasion. Are the police complicit in the conspiracy, and are the Seventh Kavalry the only ones who know the truth?
Angela soon takes the opportunity to beat her suspect into a confession, and learns of the Seventh Kavalry’s hideout at a cattle ranch. This leads to an intense, blood-soaked shootout, and an aerial chase which ends with the police crashing their aircraft, which resembles the “Owlship” from the comics (essentially an Owl-themed Batcopter).
The police haven’t learned of the Kavalry’s plan, but they have found a collection of old, outlawed watch batteries containing synthetic lithium, with the terrorists seemingly planning to use them to build a dirty bomb.
So far, there is barely a trace of the source material here, other than a group of flawed protagonists under the impression that identifying as a superhero justifies the use of extreme violence against their opponents. But Adrian Veidt, the billionaire who murdered three million New Yorkers in the name of the “greater good,” does make an appearance.
Veidt has grown old, and is now dwelling in a castle, though presumed dead by the rest of the world. He is being attended to by two extremely strange servants, who don’t seem to understand basic etiquette. In the comic, Veidt was known for his love of genetic tinkering; has he created these two humans, as slaves?
There’s also a brief glimpse of Doctor Manhattan, who is still on Mars, and has built a castle that resembles Veidt’s home. Manhattan is apparently being live-streamed at all times (although the internet doesn’t seem to exist in this world, and neither do smartphones).
How does it all tie together? No way to tell, yet. But during a dinner party with Angela, her husband and Judd, the only police officer who doesn’t wear a mask, the show takes the time to establish Judd as a nice man, the kind who sings show tunes to his family.
Later, Angela receives a threatening call from a stranger who claims to know her secret identity. Upon meeting the stranger, Angela finds Judd has been brutally murdered, his body hanging from a tree. Said stranger is an elderly, wheelchair-bound black man - the little boy seen surviving the Tulsa Race Massacre during the opening scene.
What are we to make of this seemingly disconnected story? I strongly suspect that Judd wasn’t quite as benevolent as we were lead to believe, and neither is the masked police force.
We watched Angela kidnap and torture a suspect, based on little more than a hunch, and it is implied that this overreach of power isn’t unusual for a group of law-enforcers who dress in cosplay. It’s also not clear what the Seventh Kavalry actually stand for - are they really white supremacists, or conspiracy theorists who have stumbled upon an inconvenient truth? Both? Or have the police falsely labelled them as a hate group?
The slogan from the comic book, “Who watches the Watchmen?” comes to mind, as it’s clear that the “good cops vs. white terrorists” narrative is false, or at least, not as simple as it seems. In the comic, a yellow smiley face stained by a blood smear was a recurring motif, one that represented the happy, cartoonish image of superheroes and the dark implications of their actions.
In the show, the final shot shows Judd’s police badge stained by a blood smear, mirroring the iconic smiley face, and hinting that the noble image of the police is hiding a dark truth.
“It’s Summer and We’re Running Out of Ice” is a bold, provocative pilot that isn’t afraid to confuse and disorient the viewer; whether or not the rest of the story will live up to the legacy of the comic remains to be seen.
If you enjoyed reading, check out my recaps of:
Episode 1 “It’s Summer and We’re Running Out of Ice”
Episode 2 “Martial Feats of Comanche Horsemanship”
Episode 3 “She Was Killed by Space Junk”
Episode 4 “If You Don't Like My Story, Write Your Own”
Episode 5 “Little Fear of Lightning”
Episode 6 “This Extraordinary Being”
Episode 7 ““An Almost Religious Awe”
Episode 8 “A God Walks Into Abar”
Episode 9 “See How They Fly”
