All right, you know the drill. Here’s some space for you to click away and avoid spoilers.
A Few Notes
Okay, so… I’m not sure how to go about this episode, because a lot of it appears to be table-setting for later plot developments. I’m not gonna do a full review this time, because I don’t have a lot to say about the episode overall, but I do have two thoughts about it as a whole:
Laurie Blake seems to have been teleported in from a completely different show. Every time she’s on screen, the dialog is worse, the pacing is worse, the plotting is worse, &c. The only bright spots are when she figures things out quickly, but her dialog seems so self-consciously Tough-Broad-ish that it drags the entire show down. She still seems absolutely nothing like the Laurie from the graphic novel, and if she’s supposed to be an echo of The Comedian, why does the show want to make her seem cool and capable? The Comedian was a garden-variety sociopath. Her motivations still don’t make a lot of sense, and if it turns out that she understood the Vietnamese exchange Angela and Lady Trieu had, I’m gonna be so mad. Additionally: if they needed this character for plot purposes, why did it have to be Laurie? So far, there’s not a good reason other than her existence in the graphic novel.
If it turns out that the Vast Conspiracy is some sort of Ozymandias gambit, but to solve racism, I will be so angry about this.
Watching the Show
There’s one other thing I want to say before I go through the episode piece-by-piece, and that’s that a lot of the discussion I’ve seen about this show on Twitter is about whether or not it will be good or bad, and not about what it may have to say (or what it may try to say, and so on). I don’t think the analysis of this show should be about Damon Lindelof and whether this show is going to be a horrible disappointment, like Lost, or a masterwork that totally transforms the landscape of television, like Lost. I’m interested in how it works as a show, and not on passing judgment on Lindelof as a creator. If that’s something I ever feel like doing, it will be after this season concludes and we all have some time to process it. Making this show about Lindelof is fine if you just want to make snarky Twitter comments (and I have made plenty of snarky Twitter comments about other things), but that’s not my aim here. As I mentioned before, I have deliberately avoided (with one exception) reading interviews with Lindelof after the show started airing. I’m not interested in what he was trying to say or what his reasons were for including things—that’s for later. I’m interested in the show as its own thing, as much as it can be.
Symbolism and Discussion
The Farmers and Their Eggs
The woman on the farm, Katy Clark, is reading Fogdancing, a book by the now-deceased writer of Tales of the Black Freighter, Max Shea. It was also turned into a movie… twice. Does its appearance here mean anything? Eh, I don’t know. The next episode seems to be about Looking Glass, and he’s apparently experiencing flashbacks to the night of the psychic bombing, which projected visions of another dimension into the minds of everyone who survived, so it has some reason to be here, at least. But I really worry that the show is over-doing the callbacks to the original, and that it’s not using most of them to say anything new, or to build its own mythology. It’s like how every Disney Star Wars actually makes the world feel pretty small in its effort to be faithful to the originals.
There’s some interesting symbolism with the eggs: later, Lady Trieu mentions that Katy Clark’s eggs were declared non-viable, and Clark spills the eggs on the porch, although her husband manages to (it seems) save one—and, of course, Lady Trieu presents the couple with a baby that (she claims) is biologically theirs. But some of the other eggs don’t appear to have been broken, and I have a feeling that Lady Trieu has been hoarding more genetic material. Angela Abar used eggs as part of a classroom demonstration in the first episode, and her children are all (unofficially?) adopted. Additionally, Will Reeves used eggs to cook something for himself while Angela had him locked up (or so she thought) in her bakery. Lindelof has already said that he thinks generational trauma is a key part of the graphic novel, so I assume we’ll see more egg symbolism.
Lady Trieu mentions wanting the Clarks’ home and the “40 acres it sits on,” and she knows they’re resistant because the land has been “in your family for generations.” I think we can take the 40 acres comment as a reference to a famous 40 acres in American history and combine that with the “generations” comment to extrapolate that the Clarks’ ancestors were Sooners or Boomers.
Of course, this makes their family complicit in the displacement (and genocide) of Native peoples. It’s not the first time the show has touched on Native imagery/history: the second episode included a reference in its title to a painting displayed in the Crawfords’ home: Comanche Feats of Horsemanship, by painter George Catlin.
This is part of what is so frustrating about the TV show: there are all sorts of clever allusions that require analysis and research, but there’s also bog-standard “Easter Egg”-type stuff that seems more superfluous than anything else, along with worldbuilding that doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense (Topher has a Bubastis plush!).
This connection to the land-grabbing that founded Oklahoma is reinforced by the name of Lady Trieu’s fertility clinic: “Sooner Fertility Partners.”
Lady Trieu
Lady Trieu says she’s a “trillionaire,” but… how, exactly? Vietnam is now a state, thanks to Dr. Manhattan winning the Vietnam War for America. How exactly does someone from a war-torn, subjugated, annexed nation end up having the financial power to amass a trillion dollars? The show seems to ping-pong between very thoughtful considerations about themes the graphic novel didn’t really explore which are ripe for use in a sequel and very vague sort of “this is just how it is” statements about how the world of the graphic novel became the world of the TV show. We can safely assume that Lady Trieu has access to advanced technologies, particularly in the field of genetics, but is that how she got her start?
The big question here is about how Lady Trieu knew that the… whatever that thing is would land on the property. Remember, though, that psychics exist in this universe, and Veidt had the technology to make a giant psychic bomb. I presume Lady Trieu is using that technological advance for her own purposes, considering her company owns Veidt’s. Also, it’s unclear how long ago this scene takes place, but it’s certainly a matter of quite a few years at the very least, considering all the development that’s taken place since then.
The Greenwood Center for Cultural Heritage
I still think it’s extremely bizarre that Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the person they picked for this, considering his role in covering up the fact that Ben Affleck’s ancestors owned slaves on his TV show about genealogy, but it’s possible that this is a scathingly ironic joke on the part of the writers’ room and Gates did not understand it at all.
The “Ances-Tree” system says that it was “made possible by a generous donation from the Legend Fund,” and I think it’s probably a safe bet that Lady Trieu is involved with the Legend Fund, and that she has access to a lot of genetic information.
I have to give major props to how cloying the graphic design is inside the center. It looks exactly like the kind of featureless pseudo-friendliness a place like this would probably have.
Bubastis Plush
This doesn’t make a lot of sense for Topher to have? I guess it’s possible that public interest in Veidt experienced a resurgence after the first season of American Hero Story, but he didn’t have Bubastis at that point, and the show isn’t for children. Ah, whatever. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this.
The Silver Lube Man
I assume this is Petey, the FBI analyst accompanying Laurie.
Laurie Blake
I know the world of Watchmen isn’t our world, but I find it hard to believe that it’s possible for an FBI agent to immediately be appointed interim chief of the Tulsa police. Also, the scene between her and Angela in the car is yet another instance of the show becoming extremely heavy-handed and obvious in its dialog and in its callbacks to the graphic novel. The discussion of “thermodynamic miracles” seems forced, as does the background information about Laurie Blake. The background information doesn’t even explain the “trauma” that led to her dressing up in a costume the first time, and she never wore a mask (at least, not during the events of the graphic novel), so this just doesn’t seem like a natural conversation.
The Clock Vivarium Thing
Yeah, okay, clocks, blah blah blah. I was initially going to complain about how it’s a vivarium, like the one Veidt had in Antarctica in the graphic novel, but they do manage to do something interesting with it when Lady Trieu says that she uses it to keep her promise to her mother. It’s still kind of annoying, but hopefully they’ll develop this further.
Lady Trieu says that her success grew from the “seed” of his inspiration, and that’s another instance of reproductive imagery in this episode, along with the eggs and the acorn. I’m interested to see what exactly this turns out to mean. I have some theories, but nothing solid enough to share at the moment.
The Final Scene
This episode is full of things that aren’t exactly clues. They’re more like cryptic statements that will make sense on a rewatch. The graphic novel isn’t exactly a fair-play mystery, but reading it does give you a sense of something vaguely nightmarish around the corner. This show tries to do that, but it mainly relies on methods the graphic novel used, so it doesn’t feel as potent. At least, that’s how I feel about it.
Lady Trieu’s daughter (or clone, or…) wakes up from a nightmare. She tells Lady Trieu that in the dream, she was in a village, and men came and forced her to walk for a long time. It sounds as if it may be referencing something from the Vietnam War, but it also sounds like the Trail of Tears.
Lady Trieu and Will have a conversation about hints, and there’s some more meta-commentary from Lindelof in here that would go down a little bit smoother if I were more certain that the show wouldn’t make some questionable choices. So far, Lady Trieu seems to be playing the Ozymandias part, and I’ve already mentioned what I’m afraid the show is building to.
I think we can pretty much confirm that Will Reeves is Hooded Justice at this point, right? What with the information about him being a New York cop in the Forties and Fifties who “fell off the grid.”
There’s one more thing that was alluded to, but not explained: Cal had an “accident,” maybe over in Vietnam. Perhaps this has something to do with what happened the night Angela was attacked? Maybe he has some superpowers of his own? Ah, well. We’ll just have to see.
So far, my biggest problem with the show is that all of the new stuff they’ve introduced is far more compelling than the callbacks to established lore, but as the series goes on, they seem to be less interested in the new things they’re doing. Hopefully the next episode puts the show back on track.
From the Episode Preview
Now THIS looks more like what I want to see. I did forget to mention earlier that it’s possible that Adrian Veidt was put wherever he is by Lady Trieu, and I also forgot to note the bit about him not needing a horseshoe “yet” was interesting, but… anyway. It looks as if he’s going to be attempting his escape next episode. The figures at the end of the episode preview may be from the visions Looking Glass saw the night of the psychic bombing, but they also look rather like Mr. Philips and Ms. Crookshank wearing the flat cap and the bonnet, respectively. It’s a little hard to tell because I can’t go frame-by-frame on Prime. Also, I suspect that the church the Kavalry are using is part of the police station, but that may be too obvious a guess. Also, there’s a weird shot of two identical-looking dogs under a dividing cell (?) on a TV. Not sure what’s up with that.
It looks as if they’re going to be doing some fun things with mirrors and reflections, so I’m looking forward to what is (hopefully) more focused symbolism in the episode.
I guess my hope for the rest of the episodes is: less Laurie, more Angela and Looking Glass.
I made an edit to this post to change a bit of the wording under the section about the farmers.