Hi. This post is part of my ongoing series examining HBO’s Watchmen, although calling it a “series” implies something far more polished. This is where I collect (almost) all my current thoughts about the show. It’s kind of like a tidied-up and fleshed-out version of notes taken in class. It can be kind of long and inconclusive, which is why I’m changing it up today. Today, I’m going to review the episode first, mentioning some symbolism where appropriate, and then including all the symbolism discussion below. That way, if you’re looking for something more structured and analytical and less descriptive, I’ve handily extracted it for you from the longer chronological breakdown of the episode.
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Episode Review: “She Was Killed By Space Junk”
There’s a sort of spectrum of “ways this show could proceed,” and for the first two episodes, this was kind of up in the air. This third episode does not bode well, in my opinion.
So here’s the three options for how this show could work, and there’s gradations between each option:
It could be a sequel to Watchmen but barely reference any of the events of the graphic novel and instead try to tell its own story, maybe addressing similar themes, or using a similar tone, or maybe it’s just “what if we tell another story about ‘what if superheroes were in the real world?’”
The show references and uses certain symbols and characters from the graphic novel, but looks to say something new and interesting by doing so, either about our world in 2019 or the original graphic novel or—secret third option—both: maybe it examines dark corners in the original story and uses them to address aspects of American life, for instance. It should also develop some new symbols and characters in the process, of course. Essentially, this approach repurposes some of Watchmen in order to have a similar overall purpose as the graphic novel had in its time. This is one possible reason for Lindelof to use the word “remix” to describe the show.
The show is essentially (uninspiring) fanfiction about “what happened next” and is slavishly devoted to repeating all the hits from the original graphic novel, often shoehorning them into the story, and is obsessed with revisiting the characters and symbols from the graphic novel because hey, guys, don’t you know who/what that is? Yeah, it’s the guy/thing from the thing! (This often has the side effect of making the universe seem extremely small.) This is… the other possible reason for Lindelof to use the word “remix” to describe the show. It’s the thing you like, but with a sheen of newness on it to justify its own existence.
To me, the ideal approach is something along the lines of option two. Option one is an approach that means the Watchmen-ness of the show is more of an afterthought, and that there’s no reason for the show to use the branding (except, of course, for marketing). Option three is too devoted to the original to be fun for anyone except the people making it and people who just want “more Watchmen” without thinking about what that might mean. It’s a bit like listening to someone describe the dream they had: it means something to them, but you’re unlikely to get much nourishment from it.
I think the first two episodes showed glimpses that the approach would be close to option two. The graphic novel doesn’t have a lot to say about race, and using the relative absence of a discussion of race to examine both the graphic novel and our society (by way of this alternate one) is a great idea. And then the third episode happened, and it’s a bit like going from The Last Jedi to The Force Awakens (for the record: I like The Force Awakens well enough, and it succeeded where other attempts have failed, but it is definitely essentially A New Hope again).
Where to start with this episode? It’s hard to lay it all out in a coherent order because so many of the frustrating things about it overlap with all the other frustrating things about it at various points.
Core Issues
To start with, the episode pulls focus from the dramatically more interesting/compelling Tulsa narrative. It’s as if the writers don’t have confidence that the new things they’ve come up with are good enough, so they have to go back and get some parts from the original. The Tulsa story proposes some different reasons as to why people may wear masks; this one settles for the psychosexual interpretation that is all throughout the graphic novel. Laurie Blake doesn’t make a lot of sense as a character and she mainly exists to be a Cool Tough Person (the episode’s only real bright spot for me was when Angela isn’t impressed by Blake’s warmed-over “I eat guys like you for breakfast” speech). It’s unclear how Laurie Juspeczyk became Special Agent Laurie Blake. Her worldview is murky, just like almost everyone else’s on the show so far (which is particularly apparent in the bomb vest scene).
Too Many References
Maybe an even bigger problem is that this episode also makes all of the repurposed symbolism from the graphic novel look less clever and more like the more relatively subtle peak of a giant, tactless iceberg. Partially because of its focus on Laurie Blake, this episode had almost nothing novel in it: it was all pieces of the original song, just rearranged. That’s a particularly unrewarding kind of “remix.” For instance, Veidt is listening to some sort of dub music, which is just the kind of music he said he enjoyed in the original graphic novel. Hasn’t he moved on to some other kind of music by now? His interest in dub music was really a sort of pretentious and racist “anthropological” one.
I find it hard to believe he is genuinely such a huge fan of dub music that it is STILL his go-to work music. But it’s the music he mentions in Watchmen, so that’s the music he has here.
Remember how Watchmen had Rorschach’s Pagliacci joke, a version of a “sad clown” joke format that had been around forever? What if there is a joke in this episode, too, and it’s a brick joke, like they used in BoJack Horseman, except the way it relates to the story is extremely clumsy and the payoff isn’t worth it? But, you know, it’s like the meme everyone loves from the graphic novel. Laurie even says “good joke” at the end, like Rorschach does when he tells his joke. Does… is she consciously referencing Rorschach’s journal?
In this episode, they’ve even gone back and explained things that were (a little) subtle in earlier episodes, such as the secret compartment in Judd’s closet. Laurie tells Angela that she found Judd’s closet because “my father, the Comedian from the graphic novel, had a secret compartment in his closet where he kept a COSTUME, so I always check every closet for a secret compartment, like the one that was in WATCHMEN, the graphic novel, which I HAVE READ.” She looks right into the camera and gives a thumbs-up when she says it, too, which is very off-putting. Story “echoes” such as this can be fun and interesting when they aren’t so labored. This is, if anything, most like the part in The Phantom Menace where Anakin spins around in the Naboo Starfighter, and it’s a fun little reference to him (being a mass murderer who is trying to kill his own son, but who ends up) spinning in a TIE Fighter in A New Hope! Does it actually mean anything? No. But is it fun? Not really.
The town square featuring a newsstand and a silhouette graffito was an interesting touch in the previous episode, but now that it seems as if it is going to serve the exact same purpose in this story as the newsstand corner did in the graphic novel (more or less), it’s a lot less interesting. Oh, it’s… the thing. From the graphic novel.
If this keeps up, I can just stop making these posts because every episode will spell out all of the callbacks in the previous episode and they’ll stop trying to add anything new to them. We get it: this exists in the shadow of the source material. But why is it so desperate to stay there?
Laurie Blake
So, we’ve got to talk about Laurie. When we left Laurie Juspeczyk, she had forgiven her mother for not telling her about her father and she and Dan Dreiberg were living under assumed identities, with the stated intention to keep being costumed crimefighters. She actually seems pretty happy. Here are the things we know about Laurie now, and apparently all of them are true.
She wants to get Dreiberg out of prison. She even takes care of his owl. She (?) named him “Who,” and this is really the one piece of information that doesn’t contradict anything else we learn, since we learn from her brick joke that she is not funny.
She does not believe in vigilantism or the vaguer concept of “masks” anymore, for… some reason? Disillusionment? She suggests it’s because they aren’t accountable to anyone, but she thinks nothing of gunning would-be crimefighters down in cold blood, and she tells a Nixonville inhabitant that she’s just kidding after she asks if his civil rights are being violated. Maybe she just thinks masks are corny? And that people who wear them… deserve to be shot?
She casually references the Comedian as her “father,” and she has assumed his last name. She works for the federal government, now, just as he did.
She suggests that Nite Owl (Dan Dreiberg) didn’t kill enough people, but Ozymandias killed too many people, and Dr. Manhattan killed people, but the real problem is that he didn’t care about people at all, and also that we should… kill God? (It’s a bad joke.) Presumably Rorschach may have killed closer to the right number of people, and he clearly had what he thought were non-negotiable principles (although he’s not as pure in his principles as a lot of people seem to think), but she absolutely despised Rorschach, the one most wedded to his mask, and she doesn’t mention him. Wait… has she read Rorschach’s journal?
She is still hung up on Dr. Manhattan: she has a platinum membership for those “Call Dr. Manhattan” phone booths and the Pulp Fiction suitcase with a blue glow turns out to hold an Esquire cover with her embracing Dr. Manhattan and a large Dr. Manhattan dildo. Neither object glows blue: there is a light inside the suitcase which reflects off the blue metal of the dildo.
She has sex with Petey, who wears his mask in bed.
If she has nothing but contempt for vigilantes and is hung up on Dr. Manhattan, despite his lack of, well, any kind of personality, why does she care about getting Dreiberg out of prison? What made her do a complete about-face from her trajectory at the end of the graphic novel? She asks Angela what the difference is between a masked cop and a vigilante, and says that she (Laurie) has no idea, but aside from being an absurd statement to begin with (one operates with the approval of a government; the other one goes to jail), Laurie herself shows a disdain for regulations (refusing to surrender her firearm), civil liberties, and level-headed decision making (for instance, shooting the Kavalry member wearing the bomb vest). She’s just being a vigilante without the mask. That would be all right if the show knew she was a hypocrite, maybe, but I’m not sure that it does.
The only other reasoning she offers for hating vigilantes is that they’re “a fucking joke.” This, of course, calls to mind her father, the Comedian, who used a “life’s a big joke” attitude to justify his sociopathic nihilism and his contempt toward those who didn’t “get” the joke—until something truly horrifying emerged from the vacuum and exposed his quotidian sadism for what it truly was. But I don’t buy that this is a path Laurie would follow, at least with the information given. Right now, her entire character and her presence in the story is a complete mess. And she’s not the only one with murky motivations: the Seventh Kavalry seem determined to attack cops, but they have a racist ideology that has, so far, resulted in no violence which specifically targets people of color. In fact, they use the tools and symbols of racial violence against white people when they lynch Judd (if, indeed, they were responsible).
The Attack
The murky motivations of the characters and groups come together in a very uncomfortable (from a storytelling-coherence perspective, not an emotional one) way during the attempted kidnapping of Senator Keene. For one: people refer to “Redfordations” and the “Libstapo,” but they aren’t attacking any Democratic politicians (that we know of): Senator Keene is a Republican who… also… wants to destroy the Seventh Kavalry? Is it just because they hate cops, and the racist rhetoric isn’t a factor? If the Democrats are so heavy-handed about censoring media, why are they not the party pushing for more police action against hate groups? Well, the early scenes of the episode suggest that they are, since they identify “supremacist-adjacent” people and take their guns. But Keene tells Laurie that his career is built on the idea that masks save lives, and the Kavalry seem to view him as a particular threat. Is the sole disagreement between the two American political parties about whether cops should have masks, and not about how they should operate? “I think the cops should do what they are already doing, but with masks” is not a great campaign platform, in my opinion. These questions can have satisfying/logical answers (for instance, it could turn out that both parties aren’t really interested in protecting people of color), but so far, it doesn’t seem as if the show realizes that this is something it needs to iron out. The writers (or at least someone in the writers’ room) seem to have done research on the history of racism in America, but as of now, there’s not a lot of evidence to suggest that they’ve researched the way white nationalism operates.
Now, about the Veidt scenes. First of all, why did they avoid naming him for so long—including having him interrupt Miss Crookshanks so that she does not finish the salutation in the Game Warden’s letter—if it’s just gonna be that he puts on a suit and says he’s the guy who everybody assumed he probably was? Second of all, okay, he’s being held captive. Presumably he’s in some sort of terrarium jail, placed there by Dr. Manhattan, maybe on Mars. Maybe the servants are not clones that he has created, but some of the life Dr. Manhattan thought he might create. Third—sorry, I just… I can’t get over the dub music thing.
Adrian Veidt was supposed to be on the cutting edge of society (to a fault) in the original graphic novel. He looks to the past only as a kind of sourdough starter for his narcissism: he literally manufactures and exploits “Nostalgia” for profit because he thinks the public are dumb sheep who want to be reassured—and that he can deliver them from this ignorance, for their own good. Why the hell would he still be listening to dub music other than “that’s the music he mentions in Watchmen, the graphic novel”? What about this story makes his presence in it necessary? This is part of what I don’t like about reviewing a series episodically: there’s a chance that some of the questions I ask will be answered. But after this episode, I’m much more skeptical.
I mean, I’m rewatching the Veidt scenes right now, and he literally says that he’s not “a Republic serial villain,” that thing he said at the climactic moment of the graphic novel, although he apparently doesn’t realize that at all. Oh, and he’s going to hunt at midnight, like the time the watch is counting down to in the graphic novel.
I Guess We’re Talking About Dildos Now
Apparently people are upset about the dildo, or think it’s silly or juvenile. I’m inclined to agree, although people weirdly seem to be focusing on its shape and detailing? Look, design-centered sex toy companies exist and gimmick sex toy companies exist, and even if they didn’t—and I did not expect to be typing these words when the show started airing—the quality of the dildo is not the issue here. And I don’t think that’s really the issue that people have with it. The weirdness of it is that the dildo has a special suitcase with a light in it that Laurie takes everywhere and learning this information is almost the final reveal of the episode. (Also, the idea that she’d still be interested in Dr. Manhattan in any way seems to me to be a misjudgment of her character.) I don’t have a problem so much with the idea as I do with the bizarre way the show handles it, especially as the end to an episode that seemed to exist more as an obligation than anything else. It’s just… anti-climactic.
I’ve been trying not to read any interviews with Lindelof about the show, because right now, I don’t really care what his intentions are: I just care about what the result is. However, I did go looking to see if I could find out who in the writers’ room suggested the dildo (the female co-writer of the episode), and I found this article from Decider. Lindelof says this:
Is that really the reasoning, here? Watchmen certainly deals with generational trauma, but nowhere in it, at least in my interpretation, is the idea that “we are doomed to become our parents.” That kind of just seems like an excuse to recycle story points. And it’s a depressing thing to do to Laurie, especially without (so far) any real logic to it. What’s she going to do next in order to reference the things her father did—shoot a pregnant woman? “She’s becoming like her dad” is an idea for a story direction, not narrative justification for it. You’ve gotta build the infrastructure to support it. Maybe they did! But I didn’t get a sense of it in this episode.
Speaking of steps backward, if Dr. Manhattan is going to play a large role in the plot, why even have all these new characters who are going to fight for focus with Dr. Manhattan, Laurie Blake, and Adrian Veidt? And we know Nite Owl is still around somewhere, and Rorschach’s imagery is everywhere. So is Hooded Justice’s. Where is there room for some other villain? Where is there room for any new ideas?
The Car
I assume the car that fell from the sky is Angela’s, although if Dr. Manhattan is the one who rescued Will, why did it look as if a machine were doing it? And this ending tries to suggest that Dr. Manhattan may now have a sense of humor, but this is maybe the first appearance of it, ever. Of course, he may not have been the one who dropped the car, which might actually be kind of clever. It may turn out to be Trieu who spirited away Will.
Episode Grade
Surprise! Grading individual episodes of a heavily-serialized TV show is usually even less helpful than grading films.
I Said I’d Discuss the Symbolism
Honestly, I already discussed most of it in the “review” portion. There’s a bit more symbolism/callback stuff to discuss in the episode, but I need to take a break from talking about Watchmen for at least an hour. Although I will note that the graphic novel featured a semi-public attack on a public figure that turned out to be a false flag.