Spoilers. All of the spoilers.
When HBO announced that they had recruited Damon Lindelof to do a new adaptation of the seminal Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons graphic novel Watchmen, I wasn’t totally sure how to react. My misgivings weren’t so much to do with Lindelof (nerds will continue to hold the finale of Lost against him but A) the hatred for that finale is super-overblown [for fuck’s sake, have you people seen how How I Met Your Mother ended?] and B) even in his failures, Lindelof is almost always interesting, give or take a trek or two Into Darkness) but more with the very idea of anyone deciding to once again adapt Watchmen.
Setting aside the age-old conversations concerning the ethics of adapting Alan Moore’s work after he has spent years decrying the idea and crying foul over his mistreatment at the hands of the comic and film industries, there were still plenty of reasons to think this was a bad, unnecessary idea. Watchmen has been so thoroughly consumed into the very fabric of modern-day superhero stories that further adaptations of it seemed like a fool’s errand. You don’t need to adapt Watchmen directly because pretty much all superhero stories are in some way operating in the shadow of what Moore and Gibbons built. Watchmen was not first ‘real world’ superhero story, but Watchmen did codify a particular way to ground costumed adventurers and super-beings in a recognizable, often grimy reality, and it did lay bare the underlying fascistic and fetishistic elements of the superhero that had always been present within the traditional tales of caped crusaders and men of steel, but generally went unremarked upon.
But that fed into my larger misgiving, one that I felt when Zack Snyder adapted the comic into a feature film in 2009 and felt only more strongly in 2019: Watchmen is a great book, but it is also a book of and about a particular cultural moment that has since passed. The world of people and super-people as it exists today is wildly different from the one in which Moore and Gibbons set their tale, and endlessly revisiting the same narrative and thematic points of that comic only serves to highlight how much culture has left Watchmen behind. Its Cold War prophecies never came true, and its grand revelations have been widely accepted and folded into the larger understanding of superheroes and comic books. That doesn’t make it ‘bad’, it just means that Watchmen no longer feels as revelatory as it did in yesteryear. This is the brick wall that Snyder ran into head-first back in 2009, and even while that film is gorgeous to look at and often terrific (especially the director’s cut) it can’t help feel like a film hellbent on shadow-boxing with a media and political landscape that no longer existed.
But then the first trailers for Lindelof’s Watchmen hit and made it clear he was doing something entirely different. And when the show started, it was a true revelation: Bold and incisive and dense and thrilling and experimental and entertaining, working with the bones of the comic but doing something entirely new and exciting to fit the new medium and story.
Watchmen was the best adaptation possible.
Until, very suddenly, it wasn’t.
The demarcation point between Watchmen: Holy fucking shit this is the best thing ever to Watchmen: It was fine, I guess, is actually very easy to identify.
But first! Some background! For the non-nerds who for some reason have read this far, Watchmen the comic is set in an alternate 1980s America where masked adventurers and vigilantes were once common but have since been outlawed. In the Watchmen universe, there is only one actual ‘super’ hero: Dr. Manhattan, a former scientist who was transformed by a science experiment gone wrong into an all-powerful, omnipotent being. Also he’s blue and his dong is out all the time. Watchmen explores the inner lives and angsts of the kind of people fucked up enough to don colorful costumes and beat up purse-snatchers, with its central narrative spine being the investigation into a mysterious conspiracy bent on killing or exiling masked heroes. In the shocking climax, the villain turns out to be one of their own, Adrian Veidt aka Ozymandias. Adrian has determined that the human race is doomed to perish in an inevitable nuclear conflict between the USA and USSR, and so he has engineered a giant fake alien creature which he drops onto New York City, killing millions. Shaken by the existential threat of alien invasion, the people of Earth put aside their differences and begin working together. The baffled, ultimately useless ‘heroes’ agree to keep Veidt’s secret to ensure world peace, except for the morally-unyielding, psychopathic Rorschach, who is in turn vaporized by Dr. Manhattan, shortly before the latter decided to abandon Earth and all its complications to instead try and create his own kind of life.
The TV series picks up the story around thirty years later. The new world order is still going strong, with President Robert Redford presiding over a country that has pivoted hard to liberal ideals. Masked adventurers are still outlawed, but at the start of the show two costumed factions in Tulsa, Oklahoma are gearing up for war: The Seventh Kavalry, who have adopted the fascist ideology and monochromatic costuming of Rorschach, and the Tulsa police, who have themselves adopted masks and secret identities to protect themselves after a spree of Kavalry killings left numerous police officers dead. Our protagonist in all this is Regina King as police officer Angela Abar, known as Sister Night when she’s working. Just as tensions are rising between the cops and the Kavalry, an old man claiming to be Angela’s grandfather (Louis Gossett Jr.) murders her friend and commanding officer Judd Crawford (Don Johnson). It quickly turns out that Judd was himself conspiring with the Kavalry in a mysterious scheme to reassert white supremacy in America, kicking off a series of confrontations and revelations that threaten to change the world forever. Again.
So what did the TV version of Watchmen have to offer that distinguished it so from its illustrious source material? What was the big idea that made this seemingly foolhardy enterprise suddenly vital and electric?
In a word: Race.
HBO’s Watchmen didn’t begin with any of the shenanigans a reader of the comic (or viewer of the movie, which is functionally identical) might recognize. Instead it opens with the massacre of Black Wall Street in 1921, a historical atrocity painfully unrecognized by many/most Americans. If all Watchmen did was bring this tragedy into the public eye and force America to at least acknowledge, and maybe even actually reckon with, this event, that would be a hefty achievement all on its own. But Watchmen continued to dig deep, exploring the ways in which the “masked avenger” has been a part of American culture for decades, and the ways in which the permutations of that archetype have been influenced and shaped by race, from the Lone Ranger spawning from the real-world legacy of Bass Reeves, to Birth of the Nation giving the then-destitute Ku Klux Klan a boost in popularity and iconography that enabled its ongoing existence.
The Watchmen comic was ‘aware’ of race, inasmuch as you can’t really talk about the shifting face of America and its politics throughout the 20th century without factoring in the Civil Rights movement in some way. But the main ensemble was lily white (and blue) and Moore’s dissection of the costumed adventurer psyche is more rooted in notions of fetish, kink, and fractured identities than it is in power dynamics of race and social status. The show charged head-first into those topics in a way that mainstream American entertainment of any kind, let alone a superhero show, often ignores at all cost.
It was all going so well. And then it got even better.
The apex of Watchmen’s quality, and by extension the moment where the wave broke and fell back, is the sixth episode, “This Extraordinary Being”. A black-and-white, episode-length flashback, “Being” depicts the birth of the first in-universe masked hero: Hooded Justice, a vigilante who appeared in NYC one day to bash evildoers while wearing, well, a hood, and also a noose around his neck. Hooded Justice originated in the comic as a crucial piece of backstory to the universe, but Lindelof had something entirely different in mind: In this version, Hooded Justice is a revealed to be Will Reeves, a black man (played by Overlord’s Jovan Adepo). A NYPD patrolman, constantly thwarted in his attempts to protect his fellow African-Americans, the future Hooded Justice survives a lynching and then uses the mask and noose of his tormentors as part of a costume used to help him take justice into his own hands.
As we watch over the course of the episode, Hooded Justice’s example inspires a bunch of copycats, the classic Watchmen line-up: A bunch of white people who are either bored, affluent fools looking for an adventure, or perverts who get off on wearing tights and beating people up/getting beat up. The noble quest for true equality under the law gets co-opted by headline-grabbing whites less interested in upsetting existing systems in power than in striking a neat pose. That’s right: Superheroes are a bunch of fucking gentrifiers.
“This Extraordinary Being” is, well, extraordinary. Again, it’s taking the bones of the original Watchmen, but spinning off to do something new, modern, and alive, in a way that a straight adaptation could never equal. It not only tells a contained, episodic story about a man’s doomed journey to channel his inner darkness and rage into something good, but in its bracing depiction of vigilante violence brought against enactors of white terrorism and institutions of white supremacy (which are working together to subjugate people of color), it cuts to the core of American superhero storytelling and much of American media. It is an hour of television in dialogue with the whole of American culture, challenging the most basic assumptions of who the story of the 20th century belongs to, and why that story gets told in certain ways, by certain people.
I turned my TV off after that episode exhausted, stunned and amazed. With three episodes remaining, I couldn’t wait to see where Lindelof would take his masterpiece next.
And then…Doctor Manhattan showed up.
It’s not that the last three episodes of Watchmen are ‘bad’. I don’t especially like them, but there’s no sudden appreciable drop in quality. Watchmen is a TV show made by incredibly talented people operating at the height of their craft with all the resources they could ever want or need, and the result is a television program that is never less than entertaining to watch. My disappointment in where the story went in no way detracts from the skill with which that story is told.
But goddamnit am I still disappointed in where the story went.
To sum up: It is revealed that Angela’s husband Cal (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is actually Dr. Manhattan in disguise, and much of the maneuvers engaged in by both the Seventh Kavalry and the mysterious tech-billionaire Lady Trieu (Hong Chau) have been parallel schemes to capture Manhattan and steal his reality-shaping powers. The Seventh Kavalry want to use these powers to reset this futuristic, liberal America to the white-dominated land of yesteryear, while Lady Trieu wants Manhattan’s power because she is arrogant enough to believe herself better-suited to godhood.
The finale sees all these plotlines converge in a ten-car pile-up. The Kavalry captures Manhattan, Trieu wipes out the Kavalry and kills Manhattan/Cal, only to herself be killed by a returned Adrian Veidt (played by Jeremy Irons), who destroys her with a hail-storm of frozen squid-mutants (look it’s a whole…it’s a weird frigging show, OK?).
So far as narrative tidiness go, Watchmen ably wraps up its various threads and ties things off in a satisfactory fashion. The final moments see Manhattan’s powers potentially passing on to Angela, a neat “Lady or the Tiger” open-ended ending that will hopefully never be resolved.
And yet…for all that spectacle, for all the fist-pumping moments of elation you feel as carefully placed narrative tracks snap precisely into place, for all that, I cannot help but feel like Watchmen abandoned the things that made it most interesting in favor of tilting at the familiar windmills of the genre.
In hindsight, it was foolish of me to assume that Lindelof would be content leaving Dr. Manhattan on the sideline. As a writer, Lindelof’s work has always displayed a fascination with the divine in relation to the mortal, particularly in the characterization of God as an unknowable/absent/malicious parental figure (and with unknowable/absent/malicious parental figures as stand-ins for God). Lindelof’s work has always sought to interrogate God, and here is a fictional universe in which God walks around like any other schmuck, only with His omnipotent, fluorescent wang flapping around all the time.
But there are immediate problems with bringing Manhattan into the fold. For starters: Manhattan’s power-set and characterization were tailored specifically to work within the structure and confines of a comic book. Put simply: He’s a comic book character who can see the other panels. Attempting to translate his perception of time into live action fell somewhat flat with the 2009 movie, and it does so again here, despite everyone’s best efforts. There are so many logic traps and mental leaps required to make Manhattan work within a story, it’s a testament to Moore’s writing that it works as well as it does on the page. I don’t fault Lindelof for deciding that they had to take a crack at it, but no one else has managed to handle this character in a way that feels both consistent and satisfying.
It doesn’t help that Lindelof decided to anchor Manhattan, and the entire last third of of his series, in a love story that feels false the whole way through. I’m pretty sure I just heard half the Internet pegging whatever device they’re reading this on across the room, given how much positive ink I’ve seen spilled over the tragic romance between Angela and Cal/Manhattan. And, lookit, Regina King is an incredible actress. Yahya is possibly the most charming man alive. They’re wonderful together, and the big sweeping romantic moments in Watchmen are beautifully shot and played. As a writer, Lindelof’s forte has often been embedding his genre epics with piercing love stories at the very spine, so I understand why for many viewers, this material sang.
But the relationship never made sense. It doesn’t make sense with Manhattan’s characterization in the comic (in which he is aloof to the point to the point of complete disconnection, and takes on a number of romantic partners only to inevitably grow bored with them as they age and change while he stays locked in place, a context in which Angela comes across less as a one-true-love and more like his latest distraction), and it doesn’t make sense as an actual romantic connection within the show (because A) their relationship only exists because Manhattan sat down across from Angela and declares that they are destined to be in love with one another, and B) their eventual relationship involves him changing his physical appearance and inserting a completely new personality, so she’s essentially married to an entirely unrelated person). More to the point, we spend seven episodes with Angela and Cal as a couple, only to have everything we knew about them completely junked and upended with the big reveal at the end of episode seven. We are then given one (1) hour to get a sense of the newly revealed versions of these characters, and then the finale has both Angela and Cal/Manhattan stand around impotently while other people read pages and pages of exposition to explain the different machinations of plot that have brought all the pieces together. Then Cal/Manhattan dies in the midst of a big light show, and the swelling music and the tears in King’s eyes sure make it seem like an emotional crescendo has been reached, but that crescendo was never actually earned within the body of the show. It’s someone poking you in the eye with a stick, then declaring victory because yup if you poke someone in the eye with a stick, it’ll get a reaction.
But setting all that aside, the hard pivot in the final three hours into the Doctor Manhattan domestic drama rankles so severely because Watchmen abandons its own most interesting material in favor of being yet another sci-fi drama about douchebags squabbling over powers that Man Was Not Meant To Have. The Seventh Kavalry get wiped out as, essentially, a joke, and Watchmen’s interrogation of the role of vigilantism in relation to systemic oppression gets chucked out the window. The show had earlier revealed that members of the government were working in tandem with white supremacist terrorists to re-establish white racial dominance in America, then proceeds to do absolutely nothing with that.
In interviews, Lindelof was preemptively dismissive of these criticisms. “There was never going to be a version of this show where white supremacy was going to be defeated,” he said in conversation with Alan Sepinwall.
White supremacy didn’t need to be ‘defeated’ for Watchmen to have a satisfying ending. But for this to spend so much time and energy grappling with the racial dynamics of American institutions of both culture and power, for it to portray racial violence in the stark, stomach-churning ways it did as often as it did, and to then dismiss those struggles as, essentially, a distraction to what it really wants to get at, it turns race and racial violence into window-dressing for just another sci-fi/comic book yarn.
If you’re going to ask an audience to endure material as brutally upsetting as the racial terrorism both historic and imagined that filled Watchmen, you cannot then reduce white supremacy to the status of secondary villains. You cannot then relegate the white supremacist terrorists into just another moving gear in the huge clockwork of plot covered by the show. To ask an audience to endure that kind of material is to enter into a compact that you the artist are feeling that violence, historic or imagined, as deeply as your audience will, and that you will honor that shared hurt by making it foundational to whatever the story is ultimately going to say. Watchmen breaks that compact. It uses still-bleeding wounds for ink, but doesn’t have much of anything to actually say once its pens are full.
Watchmen becomes so thematically confused at the end that it presents one woman of color trying to claim god-like power as an existential threat that must be stopped at all costs, and then minutes later shows another woman of color laying claim to god-like power as a “Holy shit!” thrilling climatic twist.
My overall takeaway from HBO’s Watchmen is frustrated affection. It is simultaneously a fantastic adaptation/continuation of difficult source material, a singularly brilliant and impressive achievement in television storytelling, and a maddening sequence of missed opportunities, the failures stinging all the more because the successes are so pronounced.
I am sure that I will be revisiting Watchmen in part and in full numerous times over the years. And maybe with time my thoughts on it will shift. Lindelof has said he has no intention of doing a second season, but maybe someone else will come along with a genius pitch to continue the story and we can reconvene years from now to discuss how the new showrunner and the new story have recontextualized and expanded on what came before.
Art is messy, and art should be maddening. If Watchmen is, ultimately, something of a disappointment, that is only because it is the kind of art that is only possible coming from enormously talented artists swinging mightily at a possibly unattainable high.
