"Watchmen" is Worth the Watch (Without Spoilers)

I'm a fan of the Alan Moore "Watchmen" comic-book miniseries from the 1980s, and didn't think very highly of the Zack Snyder adaptation. However, I was willing to give the new Damon Lindelof "Watchmen" project the benefit of the doubt. This wasn't another adaptation, but what was described in the marketing as a "remix" or "revamp." I found the coyness a little annoying. The new "Watchmen" series turned out to be a plain old sequel, bringing back many of the characters from the original. And despite there being a lot of hurdles in its path, the series is far better than I could have hoped for.

In the present day, well over thirty years after the events of the "Watchmen" comic book, life in the alternate version of America where superheroes exist is still rolling along. The action centers on Tulsa, where the police force wears masks, and some officers assume hero identities, in order to fight a group of masked white supremacists, the Seventh Cavalry. Detective Angela Abar (Regina King) adopts the persona of Sister Night, and her partner Wade (Tim Blake Nelson) uses a reflective mask and the name Looking Glass. After their chief, Judd Crawford (Don Johnson), is murdered, strange folks start turning up in town - an ancient man named Will (Lou Gossett Jr.), an FBI Agent (Jean Smart) with a past, and a Vietnamese tycoon, Lady Trieu (Hong Chau), who is building a strange clock. Meanwhile, somewhere entirely different, having no apparent connection to any of this, an elderly man (Jeremy Irons) and his servants (Tom Mison, Sarah Vickers) lead a seemingly idyllic life that soon goes terribly awry.

Can you watch the new "Watchmen" without any knowledge of the book or the movie? I think so, though the learning curve will be steeper, and newbies will obviously miss out on the tons and tons of easter eggs crammed into the show. Still, the series starts out with lots of mysteries for everyone to pick apart. Thirty-four years have passed, none of the old characters are in the same places where we left them, and there are all the new characters to get to know. There's a considerable effort put toward the alternate history worldbuilding - Vietnam now being the 51st American state, communication technology being no more advanced than pagers, and periodic storms of baby squids falling from the sky are just some of the headscratchers introduced in the first episode. But don't worry - the series was written to be self-contained, so nearly every mystery is wrapped up by the end.

It helps that while everyone involved in the show clearly loves Alan Moore's "Watchmen," the new "Watchmen" has its own agenda and its own ideas. Race relations and generational trauma are big themes, while anti-Fascism takes a back seat this time out. The writers aren't afraid to muck around with the established canon to suit their own purposes, and in many cases they bite off far more than they can chew. However, the outsized ambition is part of what makes the nine-episode series so exciting. It's seeing the combination of comic-book imagery with real-world racial prejudice, police overreach, and security state paranoia. It's the way it invokes real, painful incidents from American history, including the burning of Tulsa's Black Wall Street in the opening moments of the first episode. Many of these ideas are only superficial, and certain themes get sidelined awfully quick, alas, but they do raise the right questions.

This is also an exceptionally well cast show, making great use of Jean Smart's steeliness, Tim Blake Nelson's hounddog expressions, and Jeremy Irons' wonderful comic timing and inestimable camp value. However, the highest kudos go to Regina King as the foulmouthed, soft-hearted Angela, who is trying to balance her secret life as an angry avenger with a normal home life parenting three adopted kids alongside her husband Cal (Yahya Abdul Mateen II). The show revolves around Angela and the legacies foisted on her by a tangle of different relationships and obligations. She makes for a great POV character, and is vital to helping make sense of "Watchmen's" more convoluted bits of plotting. I think the show does right by her, if nothing else.

"Watchmen" isn't perfect, and probably a little overhyped, but it does manage to be about ideas and characters over action scenes and spectacle. Like "Legion," it's a difficult series, wrangling difficult themes with not always the greatest success. But of all the superhero media we've seen this year, it's easily the best thing we've gotten. And I'm going to expand on that more in the next post, where I'm going to get into all the spoilers.

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