Watchmen – This Extraordinary Being Review

The past is something we tend to cling to like a security blanket. When we discuss something awful, we hold it up as a clear mark, a blemish, a black spot on the soul of humanity – something that we won’t do ever again. Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it and all that. When it’s something positive, we laud it as a monument of humanity’s greatness – it’s enshrined in gold and becomes aspirational. Nostalgia for those beautiful days gone by, where men were REAL MEN and women were REAL WOMEN. Where youngsters respected their elders. Where the right people were in power and everyone knew their place. Wasn’t the past so much better than the now?

Well, sure, I guess it was, but only for certain people – and those rose-colored glasses you’re wearing might be obscuring a whole lot, argues this week’s stupendous episode of Watchmen. In “This Extraordinary Being” every element of this season of the series comes into sharp focus.* We learn almost everything there is to know about William Reeves, we gain an understanding of the original American masked avenger team the Minutemen that even the graphic novel didn’t offer, and Damon Lindelof and Cord Jefferson lay all their cards on the table regarding just what we’re supposed to be taking away from this new iteration of Watchmen – and it’s a hell of a message.

*We didn’t get an Adrian Veidt interlude this week, which felt right considering the tight character focus of the episode. So, I suppose that aspect of the story is still a tad murky (mostly in the sense of trying to figure out just who is going to save him from where he is). But the emphasis on nostalgia and looking to the past of “This Extraordinary Being” certainly reflects on Veidt’s arc as well – if this man gets back to Earth, he will open up a can of worms (and a link to that not-so-rosy past) that I suspect at least one of our main characters would like to just forget.

I had assumed the American Hero Story interludes were simply providing a look into the past of vigilantism in America, a way to let us in on just how long this has been happening and how people in the present are still just as obsessed with those historical heroes as we are with Batman. What I never expected was that it was a way to prime us all into making assumptions about Hooded Justice before pulling the rug out from under us and giving us a completely new origin story. But that’s exactly what it was, and what a masterful bait and switch it turned out to be.

I suspect this episode will be dissected by many a film student in the coming years, and rightfully so, as it was a master class in melding writing, performance, and direction to tell a story that transcends the characters and speaks on a universal level. What we thought we knew (and what the entirety of the show’s characters – save a few who knew the truth – knew) was not right. Will Reeves, a black cop who survived racist attacks time and again, was Hooded Justice, the man who inspired other masked heroes throughout the years (including Rorschach, the inspiration for the Seventh Kalvary – in a lovely bit of irony). A man forced to take pains to hide his identity twice (thrice, if you consider that he cannot be open about his sexuality and his relationship with Nelson Gardner/Captain Metropolis), because he knows that the racial tensions of the era will not allow a black man to be a hero, mask or not. That’s a lot of repression just to put your life on the line to try and stop the Klan.

The idea of masks and hiding something has already been brought up multiple times in the first five episodes of the series (from Laurie Blake directly telling Angela that people wear masks to hide from something in their childhood to spending nearly all of “Little Fear of Lightning” delving into the trauma that resulted in Wade’s vigilante identity), but this look at the origins of Hooded Justice gave us the largest dose yet of just what it takes to create a masked hero. It takes a whole lot of trauma and a desperate need make a difference. For Will, there’s the lingering survivor’s guilt (he keeps his father’s note in his pocket for his entire life, trying to earn the sacrifice his parents made for him). There’s the deep-seeded trauma of what he witnessed during the Black Wall Street Massacre. Throughout the episode, the only color in Will’s memories come from moments in Tulsa – his mother playing the organ in the movie theatre; Will finding baby June in the field; the flashes of the massacre itself. Everything else is in black and white, lacking the fire, the extreme emotional upheaval of those moments that defined who Will became. His real origin story.

That Hooded Justice represents a man who survived a lynching makes complete sense when you read his costume through the lens of “This Extraordinary Being.” Of course that is what it refers to. When you realize that Will took his last name from Bass Reeves, the first black deputy US marshal who spent a lot of time working in the Oklahoma territory, it makes complete sense. For a young boy who lost everything, taking on the name of an American hero whose story meant the world to him rings true. That little Will was watching a film about Bass Reeves when his world exploded around him just adds a bit more to the layers of trauma wrapped around Will.

And then there’s the fact that it’s Angela experiencing these memories, this nostalgia, in place of her grandfather. Angela, who like the grandfather she never knew, has taken on the mantle of a masked hero. Who went into law enforcement and suffered a devastating attack by a gang of Klan affiliated racists that led to her putting on a mask. But, unlike her grandfather, Angela paints her face black, rather than white. She doesn’t need to wear gloves to hide her race from those out in the world, but she does want to blend into the darkness. Angela, like her grandfather, must hide herself from those who would wish to hurt her simply because of what she wants to do. The parallels are striking, which, of course, is the point.

There’s a reason these dangerous pills are called Nostalgia – because nostalgia itself is dangerous. When we look back and see a time of American exceptionalism, we’re not seeing the whole picture. When Angela experiences Will’s past, she’s not seeing the whole picture either. Will walks through a door of the precinct and out into the middle of the street. Will dives through a wall and the image freezes Angela in place. Will uses the Klan’s mind control device to make Judd hang himself, but we (and Angela) never see what made Will decide Judd deserved to die. When we remember that wonderful memory – that wonderful Thanksgiving dinner with the entire family together, laughing, talking, joking – we tend to selective edit it to ignore the crying baby or Uncle Tim drinking a bit too much and saying the thing that made Aunt Joan cry. Memories can be wonderful things, but burying yourself in the warm blanket of nostalgia tends to leave one thinking the past was better than it really was.* And that’s just as dangerous as forgetting the past.

*A pertinent lesson in today’s age of making America great again. That world from the past was one filled with inequality, racism, sexism, and a general lack of civil rights for those who didn’t fit within a specific mold of cis straight white men. But nostalgia has a way to make that particular subset of the population forget about that – or, even worse, not even care.

“This Extraordinary Being” will likely anger those who hold the Watchmen source material to be sacrosanct. It might anger those who cling to the past and hold it up as the mirror we should emulate in our current world. But that’s fine, because the episode isn’t meant for them. Instead, it’s meant to let us know just what this adaptation of Watchmen is all about. It’s not trying to shit on the past. It’s simply saying, much like the source material did, that it’s dangerous to stick our heroes on a pedestal. That it’s equally as dangerous to wistfully look to the past as the “good old days.” Those days might have been great for you, but that doesn’t make them good. Don’t be nostalgic for the past. Learn from it. Or, as the saying goes, you’ll be doomed to repeat it. Just like our characters are.

Final Thoughts:

— I would be remiss if I didn’t call out the wonderful direction of Stephen Williams. From the use of black and white film to the hints of color (for which we certainly have Lindelof and Jefferson to thank as well), the episode was visually stunning. The interlocking sets, the doors opening to the middle of another set, and the general confusion of time and place helped set the stage for just what Angela was experiencing. And the cuts, which replaced Jovan Adepo (Young Will) with Regina King? Flawless and so effective.

— Speaking of Jovan Adepo, what a marvelous performance. Fans of The Leftovers (which you should absolutely watch if you enjoyed this episode) will recognize Adepo as King’s character’s son on the series. So, he went from being her son to being her grandfather. What a range.

— While the episode shows the rest of the Minutemen blurred, it doesn’t give us any additional information about the group. Readers of the graphic novel will know that Laurie Blake’s mother (Silk Spectre) and father (the Comedian) were part of the group. They’ll also know that the Comedian’s attempted rape of Silk Spectre happened moments after that scene. We already know Laurie spent years essentially repeating her familial history as a masked vigilante, and now we know Angela is doing the same. Another interesting parallel.

— I’m still amazed at the identity of Hooded Justice. Not only did the show take a character deeply intertwined in the mythology of this world and give us a completely unexpected origin story (not completely unexpected – it was pretty clear where the episode was leading with the reveal, but unexpected within the world of the series until this moment), but it blackwashed that character, which is nothing short of extraordinary. A black man under the hood, as we saw, made the character so much more interesting and layered. This decision was smart, well-thought out, and just plain works. I loved it.

— While many of our main characters largely took the week off, the flashes we saw of them were excellent. Jean Smart continues to kill it. Louis Gosset Jr. was prefect in his brief scene. Don Johnson is having a hell of a career resurgence this year and I’m here for it. And then there’s Regina King. Each moment she stepped into a scene as Will she completely inhabited the character – particularly when mimicking Gosset Jr. in that wheelchair. I literally said, “Regina King deserves an Emmy for this” while watching that scene.

— We learn that the Klan robe is not Judd’s, but rather his grandfather’s. Which means that his grandfather almost certainly participated in the Black Wall Street Massacre. So, was this simply and instance of the sins of the father being laid on the son (or grandson), or did Will know something more? After all, Judd says the robe is his legacy. Which dovetails nicely into the idea of the past and nostalgia. Judd might see that robe as part of his family history, but he also recognizes that it’s something that should be locked away. Perhaps it’s simply a metaphor for the feelings Judd locks away inside (his comment about the all-black Oklahoma still strikes me as important – “Their hearts weren’t in it”). Or perhaps it’s linked to that plan Senator Keene Jr. mentioned last week and there is something more sinister at work here. Maybe the past is repeating.

— Another prominent link to the past in the series is the Greenwood Center for Cultural Heritage, where Angela learns that Will is her grandfather. Again, it’s a link to the past, albeit one presented as a positive – this is where people learn who they are and can receive reparations for past wrongs. While the intent is good, it also opens the door to things that might best be left unknown (think of the stories you hear today about a kid sending in for a DNA test and discovering that their father isn’t really their father – sometimes looking deeper into things only ends up making them even worse).

— We also briefly meet Angela’s father as a young boy – who tries to emulate his father by putting on his costume. Does this mean that he continued to do so in Tulsa, or did June manage to keep him away from the world of vigilantism? We seem to meet an old June late in the episode, moments before Angela wakes up (or does the older June cause her to wake up . . .).

— The last bit of plot that we received: Lady Trieu’s company made the Nostalgia pills. So, that seemingly sets off a bit of a cascade of information/assumptions. Her daughter Bian’s strange dreams – a result of taking Nostalgia? Is Bian even actually her daughter? If Lady Trieu is involved in Veidt’s captivity, perhaps Bian is a clone? And now Lady Trieu has Angela in her possession (and saved her life). I’m intrigued to find out where she fits into the story (and see more of Hong Chau, who has been just wonderful so far).