Rewatching the Watchmen (Patreon)

A quick note before we begin: WHY WAS THIS MADE? WHY DID YOU HAVE TO DO THIS AAAAAAAAA WHY DID YOU HAVE TO MAKE A WATCHMEN SEQUEL WHY WHY GOD WHY AAAAAAAAAAA

Okay. With that out of the way - Capitalism recuperates all subversive media and cannibalises anything remotely popular so that eventually the blood ritual of remakes, adaptations, reboots and sequels must be sated. The beast hungers always for more, and it must be fed. It must be fed. IT MUST BE FED. IT MUST BE FED.

And to that end we were always going to get a Watchmen sequel, and overall I think we can imagine getting worse ones or better ones, and the one we got, from popular creator Damon Lindelof who made.. Wait what else has Lindelof done?

Oh god please no…

Rewatching the Watchmen

Written by Eric McAllister and Sarah Zedig

You probably want my take up front so you know where I’m coming from with this. Well, I like to examine the positive or interesting messaging that can be extracted from media, and in the case of Watchmen 2019 there is a whole darn bunch to do that with. Just for a start the show represents the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre in its opening moments, a historic event that many Americans just don’t ever learn about. The show talks about reparations for the history of systemic racism and shows reparations as a real political possibility, which is an exciting step not much other media would take.
The critical response has seized on a lot of positives too. It has been hailed across the board as a brave and well-executed work of art that is an essential representation of our time. It is, rightfully, praised for its largely black cast, its approach to visual storytelling, and - again - its depiction of historical events that otherwise have not been depicted at all.

My brother said he watched the opening of the show and thought “this is a bit much” and then he went away and found out it was a real historical event.

But what I find it really hard to ignore - what’s been really holding me back in trying to engage with this show - is that it is also a massive fucking mess. I’m here trying to piece together the useful and good messaging that the show has, and I just can’t ignore some basic and glaring oversights here, and I don’t really know how to write about these kinds of problems, especially when they’re finicky, and nuanced, and there’s also a lot of good stuff to talk about too.
And that’s when my good friend Sarah Zedig offered up Watchmen 2019 is a Dazzling Failure an unfinished script for a video she wasn’t going to record, and I was able to blend together my script desperately trying to be optimistic about this show with her scathing takedown. And that’s kind of the video you’re watching now I guess.

One of the most fun things about the original Watchmen is the use of these superheroes who are similar enough to mainstream superheroes while also being different enough to alienate you from caring too much about them. It’s a fun exercise in creating these wacky-yet-believable versions of recognisable superheroes specifically so you can make a particular point.

It means that the context we need to talk about the show is less in the actual events of the comic and more in the themes. So to give ourselves the appropriate context to talk about Watchmen 2019, let’s do a bloody-minded and simplistic run-down of Watchmen (the book).

A Bloody Minded And Simplistic Run-down Of Watchmen (The Book)

The original Watchmen is really laden with themes. There are, being a little bloody minded and simplistic, six main themes in Watchmen, just as there are one two three four five six main characters wowee look at that isn’t that neat.

First symbolism: The Penis. More specifically, the impotent penis. Dan Dreiberg is an impotent character, both in his general life and literally sexually impotent. On the other hand, Nite Owl is cool Mr. Gadgets, and can do anything - yes, even that. There’s a colloquial sexual use of the word “fetish”, but the original meaning has more broadly to do with the human tendency to imbue objects with a sort of supernatural power. In the case of Nite Owl, his fetish is a metaphor for his fetish. He can’t keep it up if he isn’t wearing his superhero gear, because he sees himself as only having power, authority and worth when he’s got his special outfit on.

The Silk Spectre is a great name for a character whose mother was the original version of the same hero. Laurie has a silk spectre hanging over her, both living in her mother’s shadow and simply being the token woman in this male-dominated team in this patriarchal world. It’s no great leap to point out that both Silk Spectres and women in general are treated like total shit in Watchmen. When Sally is nearly raped by the comedian, her boyfriend at the time, Hooded Justice just tells her to “cover herself up”. The only other woman on the original team was a lesbian who was outed by Sally’s agent and later killed in a homophobic attack.
When Laurie meets Dr Manhattan he’s there with another woman who he abandons for her. Laurie will later be stuck in a loveless relationship with him because she’s his only humanising connection, with nobody to turn to except Dan fuck-me-in-my-owl-mask Dreiberg. Especially in the case of Dr Manhattan but really with every man in Watchmen, the silk spectre reminds us that these guys may talk big, and act like they’re ideologically driven and pure, but ultimately they’re still men, and if they were such infallible high-level ideas machines they probably wouldn’t keep treating women like shit.

Ozymandias Himself is an emblem of a theme, which is kind of the point. He’s a sell-out. There are action figures of Ozymandias on his desk. Ozymandias has obviously been named this way by a british anarchist who sees the wealth-hoarding of this american businessman character as futile folly, and therefore named him after the poem, which ends of course with the acknowledgement that nothing lasts forever.

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

However the name also provides a really fantastic character revelation. In-universe, Adrian Veidt named himself Ozymandias, because he believes he can prove the poem wrong and create a legacy that does last forever.

The Smiley Face, the emblem of the Comedian, is a symbol that more or less represents the softening of fascism and authoritarianism - the manufacturing of consent. It’s literally a happy face slapped onto a violence loving maniac as a brand. His smiley face - his edgy “all a big joke” nihilism is a handy excuse not to do the work of confronting his complicity in a horrifying system. 

The Ink Blot on Rorschach’s mask, in stark black and white, represents a black and white conservative worldview. Ironically, the original psychological inkblot test from which he takes his name is all about the extreme subjectivity of human experience, and even more ironically a lot of people seem to look at this character and read into him what they want to see… More on that later.

Alan Moore wrote Rorschach as a conscious parody of Steve Ditko’s self-published Objectivist hero Mr. A, a right-wing libertarian who rants about money and parasites and productivity. It sure is hard to see why this guy didn’t catch on as a popular kids comic book character.

“Money is the tool of exchange, a tool that must first be made before it can be used, begged, stolen or earned! And it has to be made by the productive abilities of men!”
Is it time for the roads clip? I think it’s time for the roads clip.

https://twitter.com/EricDJuly/status/1146141619546140673
Asked later, about Rorschach, Ditko acknowledged that he was “like Mr. A, except insane”

The Clock is very prominent throughout, most obviously referring to the countdown to nuclear annihilation. The clock also ties in with the play on words, that the Watchmen are the successors to the Minutemen, but they watch as in watching you you see. It’s all very clever.

The urgency of the clock symbol - time’s running out - is juxtaposed with the hydrogen atom Dr Manhattan uses as a symbol, which incidentally looks like a minimalist clock with both hands on 12. The reason for this juxtaposition ties back to Manhattan’s total apathy for the life-or-death urgency everyone around him is feeling.

Where everyone is saying “we’re seconds away from total annihilation” Jon is saying “Not sure about that one chief. Time isn’t as linear as you think”.

Manhattan is an interesting political metaphor - he simultaneously is an analogue for the nuclear bomb, but also by being a person with all that power he reminds us that the bombs aren’t the real issue - the issue is the fallible human beings ready to drop the bombs at a moment’s notice. Being a nuclear physicist himself who gains this massive amount of political agency, he could be seen as representative of the age of the expert in politics, and the liberal fetishisation of intelligence.

Who was “Alan Moore”? Today, we all remember Moore as the father of modern society, who rose from the grave, declaring “I am the immortal yog’seltrath. Share your wealth or perish” and quickly refigured the whole world order into gay space anarcho-communism before revealing his resurrection to be a clever hoax, but many of us may be surprised to learn that before all that, Moore was a humble comic book writer. He crafted many classics such as V for Vendetta, Watchmen and The Killing Joke, all starring unhinged terrifying characters that would serve as a useful litmus test for women on dates with comic book fans for decades to come.

It’s quite well known at this point that Alan Moore surrendered his rights to Watchmen, which is why his name doesn’t appear in the credits of adaptations of it. His name is therefore absent from the credits of the TV show, which might be a scathing condemnation. But even if it is, is Alan Moore right about everything all the time?

NO. WHAT A STUPID THING TO SAY. GET OUT OF MY HOUSE. 

One crucial place where I think Alan Moore is not right about everything all the time is in his recent statement where he said that superhero media is vapid commercial capitalist propaganda. I think some of it is. 

I think a good chunk of Marvel movies are more or less that exact thing. I think the gritty realism anti-superhero media produced by DC Comics, or Amazon’s The Boys is an even more vapid and cynical bunch of trash that’s just an attempt to control both sides of the competition, like how Coca Cola owns both Cherry Coke and Dr Pepper, and I think The Boys is mean-spirited trash that hates women on top of all that. But I think that some superhero media continues, as it has always done, to convey genuinely good, and interesting, and systemically critical messages.

Captain America was invented to increase popularity of anti-fascism in America and encourage America to join WWII. The X-Men were created as a civil rights allegory and later helped draw attention to the AIDS crisis. And I think there are some really solid and good things worth pointing out about the Watchmen TV show.

Let’s start by talking about something the TV show does pretty damn well. In the world of the show of course, Rorschach’s journal has been published by the far-right rag The New Frontiersman.

Rorschach’s journal is basically a manifesto by an angry violent loner who hates everyone and blames every problem in the world on some kind of “degenerate filth” who are making society worse and I wonder what the publication of that could possibly lead to oh boyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee it’s white nationalist terrorism.

The thing about Rorschach is that everything about his ideology is in the framing. When you read his words in the book, you do so in a neutral voice. “This city is afraid of me” is up to your subjective interpretation. When he appears in on screen he is given voice by an actor and stylised by a director, so he sounds like Batman when he says “and I will look down, and I will whisper, no”. However, when you meet someone like Rorschach in real life, they sound like this:

https://soundcloud.com/user-546964481/leaked-audio-richard-spencer-reacts-to-the-death-of-heather-heyer-explicit 

I can't believe I need to point this out in the Year Of Our Lord [CURRENT YEAR] but Rorschach is in fact kind of a bad guy.

When Adrian rightfully points out that The Comedian was a bit of a fascist, Rorschach defensively declares that he “might as well call me a Nazi too” and then two pages later, reflecting on the encounter wonders whether Adrian is A Gay™ because he's a Liberal snowflake who likes nice clothes.

I mean unless he meant something different by “Possibly homosexual? Must remember to investigate further?” Oh… Oh Mr. Rorschach…

When he goes to see Laurie he defends The Comedian from allegations of rape and then immediately backs down to admitting it probably happened but dismisses it as a “moral lapse” all the while calmly unwrapping and eating a sugar cube he stole from Nite Owl’s kitchen. The book couldn’t be trying harder to make it clear Rorschach doesn’t care.

And all of this is in issue 1.

All this before we even talk about how Rorschach beats the shit out of people just for information, has no qualms killing people he has ruled morally bankrupt, and generally acts based on his own feelings of paranoia, rage, suspicion, fear, or rage, and then rationalises his actions as morally pure in an incredibly juvenile ethical framework after the fact.

When he says “I'm not locked in here with you, you're locked in here with me!” it's actually pretty clear he's shitting his pants terrified and wants to make himself look tough. I mean, he has just literally done the “attack the biggest toughest guy on the first day in prison” thing. 

In Rorschach’s world view there are good guys and bad guys, and nothing in between. His philosophy is inherently hyper Conservative. He believes the world is absolutely kill-or-be-killed. His only option in life is to be the biggest, toughest, scariest creature he can, in order to be the predator, not the prey.

If all this wasn't clear enough, Watchmen has a comic book within the comic book, which serves a pretty clear parallel to Rorschach. Tales of the Black Freighter tells the story of a man whose ship is raided and crew killed by the demonic Black Freighter pirates, and then, shipwrecked and convinced the pirates will go after his family next, he constructs a raft out of debris and dead bodies and sails to his hometown, all the while losing his mind and talking to his dead crewmates. Eventually he arrives home and finds that his beloved town has been overrun by the pirates, so he sneaks his way in and slaughters the evil Black Freighter crew, only realising far too late that he has actually murdered his young family. Stricken with grief he swims out to sea, and joins the crew of the Black Freighter.

It's pretty clear what the message is here: Rorschach is a pirate.

Okay, no. But Rorschach is the protagonist from the comic. The text of his journal is often put on the page preceding or succeeding the internal narration from Tales of the Black Freighter and it creates this uncanny effect where you think you’re still reading the same voice, and then you realise the change. This story about a guy who joins the evil that he set out to destroy, through grief, horror and loneliness, is what’s going on with Rorschach. When you compare the part of Black Freighter where the protagonist kills a couple he thinks must be conspiring with the pirates, and then hallucinates that a scarecrow is an evil pirate sentry with earlier in the book, where we see an attempted mugging/rape from Rorschach’s point of view, you start to realise that not only is Rorschach’s Journal unreliable narration, but his actual perception of reality is too. The line “sometimes the night is generous to me” is infinitely chilling.

Watchmen has always made comparison between superheroes and other forms of law enforcement, both the superhero team The Watchmen and their predecessors The Minutemen are named after pre-standardised forms of law enforcement. Even before the TV show just canonised cops-as-superheroes, this situation with Rorschach was an examination of the mind of the kind of person who gets into law enforcement. He didn’t go in expecting it to all be sunshine and roses, and he wasn’t unhinged by the death of a little girl. He was looking for any excuse to let loose.

The show, in one of its bolder and better moves, gives us a white nationalist gang directly inspired by Rorschach - his journal is their domestic terrorist manifesto. It gives us a police chief with a klan robe in a secret compartment in his room. It gives us the police from the 40s as widespread corrupt racists who are pretty much all klansmen behind the scenes.

This brings us towards the first big comparison I’d like to make between the show and the book, because for whatever weaknesses the show might have it has one very clear advantage: hindsight.

The show gets to look back at the fan reaction to Watchmen from the last 35 years and say “hey… people uhh really don’t get it when you lay out your ideas ambiguously, do they? If you give them an inch, they sure do take a mile.”

I think this is why the TV show holds the audience’s hand through so much of its messaging, and furthermore deliberately eliminates so much of the ambiguity in the messaging of the book. Rorschach is a bad dude, and a racist, and a fascist specifically. Dr Manhattan being a big smart logic man is a bad thing and he will eventually give it up. What Ozymandias did was bad and he should go to jail. Thanos did not have a good point.

Rorschach, we’ve already covered, and he’s a pretty serious case, but in general Watchmen is notoriously misread and misunderstood.

It’s understandable that the book is so often misunderstood considering its essential philosophical and character richness, the layers of symbolism and the interplay between them, and the subtlety of some of the finer points, but also just the incredible knack the book has for inspiring you to think about other cool concepts. This book is accelerant on the fire of teenage imagination, and that’s a good and a bad thing. In my memory, Dr. Manhattan is a powerfully queer character - in the book, he’s one of the straightest characters ever written.

That’s a much more me way to misread the character, but I think other people misread Manhattan as a neat smart dude who has all the facts, and that’s really not the point of the character. He’s apathetic and distant. It isn’t an incidental part of his genius, it’s the point. Dr. Manhattan is so distant and apathetic that when Laurie finds out that The Comedian is actually her father, he just makes the moment all about him and starts talking about… uh.. Thermodynamic miracles? As if that’s a thing.

And I don’t want to disregard the fact that a lot of the misreading of these characters comes down to the fact that a large fanbase of the original comic were a faction of comic book fans people would identify as neckbeards. Chuds. Gamers.

Who were, “Gamers”? Though originally referring to people who engaged in a hobby known as “video game”, the word Gamers, especially when denoted with a capital G, came to have a second meaning some time around the mid-2010s. Sources suggest that Gamers became a subculture within society, not unlike H.G. Wells’ Morlocks, with their own specific rituals, tradition and even language.

The following is a recreation performed by professionals. Please do not attempt this at home:
“cuck.”
“cuck.” 

In the first moments of the show, we see a silent film called Trust in the Law. This is going to be a basic assumption that the show is telegraphing it will challenge later on: Trust in the law. In the silent film a black-clothed cowboy chases a white-clothed white cowboy, and pulls him off his horse. Villagers ask “what are you doing to our sheriff” and the black-clothed cowboy pulls down his hood revealing he is also a black man, and then reveals that he is the state marshall, and that the white sheriff was actually a crook. The short silent film is challenging our basic assumption of coding villains and heroes with black and white clothing, and societally doing the same with black and white people, and the movie is in black and white and the TV show is telling us, about as loudly as it can with a silent film, THIS SHOW IS GOING TO BE ABOUT BLACK AND WHITE.
Will, the young boy watching the film, is taken by his parents and put on a cart to save him from the horrifying racial attack known as the Tulsa Race Massacre, or the Burning of Black Wall Street. He’s put in a capsule as his home burns and sent away alone, because there’s only room for him. Later, he will become the Hooded Justice, the first superhero, after white cops and secret klansmen he works with attempt to lynch him.

This opening to the show is retelling the story of Superman - something the show later points out - which in comic book media, is essentially retelling the story of Jesus Christ. Even besides Superman being a Christ allegory on his own, Superman isn’t the first heroic person but is the original superhero in the same way Jesus isn’t the first god-fearing person in the bible but is the first Christian.

Will Reeves will go on to become a NYC cop and discover a vast and insidious conspiracy of white supremacy and can I just say for a second that when the police did the cyclops symbol I sat bolt upright in my seat. I felt like I had been literally electrified. It is so amazing seeing media that recognises and shows off the creepy and obsessive way white supremacists make secret codes and symbols to operate their conspiracies with - this one obviously being a parallel with the MAGA dudes’ OK symbol.

Will’s arc concludes with him trying to take down Cyclops, the white supremacist conspiracy, and the white heroes he’s teamed up with refusing to help because they simply don’t care. Ultimately Will will give up being Hooded Justice after defeating Cyclops and it’s strongly implied that Captain Metropolis replaces him with a different guy of a similar build.

Will’s story is also paralleled with Angela’s, which we learn in the next episode. Her parents are killed in an attack as a consequence of the shittiness of America too - only in this case killed by people resisting the shittiness.. Specifically the freedom fighters against the fictional annexation of Vietnam.

Angela is inspired by the Vietnamese police who find her parents’ killers and becomes a cop herself, although by later adulthood it’s pretty clear she at least understands the anti-american sentiments.

All in all Angela’s arc has many of the same beats as Will’s - her parents die, she is attacked by racists and becomes a masked hero, she becomes disillusioned with heroism after defeating the Big Bad.

The show really spends a lot of time examining one question:

From what does heroism arise? 

The Minutemen TV show that pops up repeatedly throughout the series is a pointedly absurd and trashy telling of the story of the Hooded Justice. One character intimately familiar with the history of the Watchmen universe calls the show “garbage” and we obviously get to see just how wrong it is when Angela takes Will’s special pills.
The show uses this absurd hyper-glorified violence in its fight scenes that reads as like, a Zack Snyder fight scene. You can’t see it and not think of 300 or like Batman vs Superman, and it feels like an almost pointed roast of Snyder’s gritty realist macho slo-mo action scenes built to worship at the temple of ultraviolence.

The situations to which superheroes are a response in the show are deliberate parody - four men with guns go into a grocery store to rob the shopkeeper’s safe. Are we supposed to believe this is such a commonplace, nightly occurrence that it is worth donning capes and tights and patrolling the streets for baddies to bash? No. Of course not.

From the Tulsa Race Massacre to the fictional occupation of Vietnam, to the modern day mess of corruption, racism, politicking, internal fighting and basic incompetence in the police, Watchmen (2019)  tells us that heroism arises as an answer to systemic injustice. People get hurt, and afraid, and they fight back.

Canonising Hooded Justice as a black man, and as a response to the existence of the Klan and police corruption is, for my money, pretty fucking cool. The secret identity of Hooded Justice in the book is himself a racist, and the hood and noose do have a sinister implication because of that - he basically does just look like a klansman - and I think it kinda fucking slaps that the writers of this show took that and completely subverted it. Then they showed the white folks co-opt the heroism and turn it into a marketing opportunity.

BUT the show is really messy with its messaging about cops, and we need to talk about that. On the one hand, it is undeniably trying to engage in some kind of criticism of the police, and on the other hand it really does just valorise the police, both in its storytelling and basic assumptions, and on the extra other hand it clearly isn’t coming to its criticism of the police from a particularly leftist perspective.

One of the masked hero-cops is a hammer-and-sickle wearing russian who beats the shit out of a journalist while shouting “I’m a communist”. Okay, google it with me here children: “What Is Communism”

Like police deadly violence, for example, is an issue that Watchmen 2019 has a really weird relationship with. In the opening 15 minutes of the first episode a police officer can’t get his gun out fast enough because of liberal gun control, so he gets shot. At two different points, the show uses the same trick of having big mr racist bad guy doing a racism monologue and then BLAM he gets shot by the hero cop and in both instances - the past, and the FBI - the hero-cop is someone who isn’t restricted by the liberal anti-gun thought police.

What can I say here except that in the real world American Police not being able to get enough gun is the exact polar opposite of the problem.

Repeatedly the show fails to question its starting assumption that the institution of the police is fine. The problem is the racists. The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre exists in the show to be Hooded Justice's Krypton, a comparison literally made in the show itself. So, Will Reeves named himself after Bass Reeves and went on to become a police officer to be like his idol, only to eventually be confronted by racists within the police, but he remains an officer and moonlights as a superhero to track down the organization. Then his granddaughter becomes an officer and a masked vigilante for much the same reason, and by the end she remains a cop it seems. Trust in the Law doesn’t go wholly unconfronted by the end, but it doesn’t get questioned enough throughout.

See, every time a character is unmasked as a member of the 7th Kavalry, they undergo a transformation into a sort of cartoon villain, in one case literally involving a trap door under the sofa like Dr fucking Evil.

The problem with all of this is that it draws a hard line between "good people" and "bad people." It says that deep down, white supremacists are doofuses and villains who deserve what's coming to them, WHICH TO BE CLEAR I AGREE WITH. It’s trying to say White supremacy is systemic but what it actually communicates is White supremacy is these guys, and we should just get rid of them.

For all that Watchmen 2019 fixates on racism in America, and despite its acknowledgment of generational trauma, it never once recognizes the fact that racism isn't just a thing that exists. Racism isn't a political affiliation, it's a thing you do for reasons, and those reasons affect all of us. You do not fix racism by getting rid of all the white supremacists, because white supremacists don't exist in a vacuum. They are a predictable result of political and economic forces that are far beyond the scope of any individual human person's ability to refuse or influence.

I think the real issue here is a lack of intersectionality. Watchmen 2019 shows us for sure that there are no good billionaires. It also, as we’ve discussed at length, confronts the history - and modernity - of racism in America. It is reasonably anti-capitalist, and it is pointedly anti-racist. But it isn’t both. If it were looking at the problem at the intersection of anti-capitalism and anti-racism, one of the most vital issues first and foremost would be the problems at the heart of policing as a concept and the history of police. The history of the first few hundred years of law enforcement in the UK and US basically reads as a laundry list of times that some pink-faced piece of shit factory owner wasn’t paying his workers enough, the union held a strike, and then the police were called in to hand out strict tellings-off and skull fractures.

So it’s trying to make an arc from the assumption of Trust in the Law and the question From What does heroism arise and it’s not just that it doesn’t stick the landing, it’s that the whole way through the protagonist hero-cops are still basically telling us that cops are cool and good.

Now getting really charitable:

Will’s line near the end, “You can’t heal wearing a mask” is an examination of the consequence free existence of specifically police in American society. Although it might feel muddled at times, this show really is trying to be critical of policing in general.

As with Captain America being written to promote anti-fascist sentiments (because antifa is a good thing, because being an anti-fascist is something everybody should do) the basic form of heroism shown in the show is a reaction to injustice. It comes from a pain that comes from an inability to find justice. 

But, does the show want to tell us that everybody in a mask is bad? This may be another example of the nuance that will fly over the heads of the audience and need to be addressed in the Watchmen VR Experience sequel in 35 years’ time.

The starting point of the show takes cops and puts them in superhero masks, because it is saying that in its purest form policing is heroism. It then asks from what does heroism arise and concludes that heroism is a response to the absence of justice, and therefore is a stop-gap solution and the only real solution is not to respond to the absence of justice but to create its presence.

The show has some truly amazing elements, even ones that warrant their own individual deep dive analysis - like Looking Glass, what an amazing character. He’s almost like Alan Moore’s take on the Joker in The Killing Joke, except that his “one bad day” turned him into a weird neurotic nerd obsessed with conspiracy theories and mirrors - oh, and a cop, of course. He’s terrified and alienated and wants to keep a barrier between himself and everyone else, and whether he “gets over it” or not his life will never not be shaped by the worst thing that ever happened to him. He’s just so incredibly human.

I love Wade so much and when I think about him putting tinfoil inside his baseball cap to protect against psychic attacks I just wanna give him a hug.

It’s the ending though, really, that I think needs the biggest, closest, hardest look. Lots of other things can be written off as Trying to create the generic feeling of Watchmen or Damon Lindelof doing a Lost again or more simply character development rather than thematic meat, but the cliffhanger ending of your show is not a time for you to fuck around when it comes to subtext.

The last few episodes, at least on first blush, dissolve into hyper-comic-booky nonsense. Dr Manhattan is Angela’s husband, but he doesn’t remember, and the Rorschach Klan kill him so that a racist senator can gain his powers but then Lady Trieu, the world’s first trillionaire, wants to get his power instead, but then they stop her, and then Angela eats an egg containing the Manhattan powers and becomes the new Dr Manhattan.

Dr Manhattan, as I already said, is the folks in charge. He is in a sense, more the president than the president. In the original comic a political pundit says “Superman exists, and he is American” and years later lies and tries to claim that he said “God exists, and he is American”. It’s pretty simple to see a reflection of the very American glorification and deification of the presidency in this. Manhattan is the people in power who have been elevated so far beyond the concerns of ordinary people that nothing is even remotely real to him. Not even time itself.

And then, he comes back, as a black man. Yeah, I’m saying Dr. Manhattan is Barack Obama. Only I’m not saying that, the show canonised him as Obama. Will Reeves says right at the end “he was good man, but considering what he could do, he could have done more” and then he winks at the camera and high fives you, and everyone claps and Obama was there, and he was huge and naked and blue.

In the show, Dr Manhattan is suddenly and shockingly destroyed by white supremacists - and to be clear, white supremacist doofuses. Absolute dipshits that we did not expect to be able to do this. Do I have to walk us through what the show could be getting at with these ignorant white racists suddenly destroying the Obama-allegory in an attempt to seize his power? The man who would be their new Dr. Klanhattan says to Laurie Blake “It’s hard to be a white man in America right now”

So then, this is all superceded by a billionaire who wants to seize the power because she has noble intentions of fixing the world, but Adrian tells us straight-up “anyone who seeks to gain the power of a God should be stopped at all costs”. Lady Trieu’s - the spacefaring billionaire genius who claims to have good intentions but will definitely become a tyrannical monstrosity - her logo looks like this:

It’s um…

Did you know that in Lost the Jesus allegory lead protagonist’s dad is called Christian Shephard and the gang also include John Lock and Desmond David Hume--

After Lady Trieu is stopped, the show delivers some exposition about how Dr Manhattan hid his powers inside an egg and Angela is going to gain his powers now by eating the raw egg. Yum. The show takes us right up to the moment of Angela testing her powers and then cuts to black.
To me at least, this is presenting Angela as political allegory for liberals on the side of historic racial justice. She’s married to the previous liberal leader, she’s going to reclaim the power that the white supremacists took away.

And then Angela is going to get Dr Manhattan’s powers. This is either a proposed solution or being presented as an inevitability.

The real cliffhanger here isn’t whether Angela gets the powers - she very clearly obviously certainly definitely does - it’s about what she might do with the powers. Will she reject heroism and/or being a cop? Will she try to bring about justice or simply try to defeat injustice? Well, we don’t know.

It’s just that with the mess of the whole everything in the show, it isn’t clear what Angela will do next. Is she disillusioned with being a cop, does she still “Trust in the law”? Who knows. The show’s aesthetics repeatedly run counter to its messaging here. Everything good Angela does is something she does while acting outside of being a cop, but ultimately she’s still a good-guy-hero-cop, so the aesthetics of the show valorise the police while the messaging critiques them.

Two perfect microcosms of the aesthetic/thematic dissonance are the opening of the show, and in Angela’s memory travels. In the opening of the show, they depict the Tulsa Race Massacre, which I cannot say enough is a bold and fantastic and important move, but they also actually underplay it a little. Because they want to start with this Trust in the Law assumption, they don’t show the white cops during the massacre who were - in uniform - taking part in the riot and lemme tell ya, not helping the black folks.

In Angela’s memory sequence when she experiences her parents’ death again the show parallels it to the massacre, which… is, as I said, the same story beat…. But it kinda draws a line between the vietnamese resistance and the… KLAN? Like, a line I know the show doesn’t want to draw because a minute later they show a deliberate parallel between the police execution of the vietnamese man and the scene where the white cops try to lynch Will.

This is exactly why it feels impossible to know what the ending is exactly trying to say. What is Angela’s position on all of this? What is the show’s position? I can see what I think they’re trying to say but I can also see what the show plainly communicates.

All in all there is a lot to love with this show - a lot where you can pull out interesting ideas to examine and interrogate, and those ideas are absolutely not the ideas that are going to be what the majority of people come away from this piece thinking about. You can get really interesting and positive messages and deep systemic critique from this show, and some of those ideas are even the intended messages - but people won't come away from the show with these messages at all... and in that way it's kind of the perfect sequel to Watchmen, isn't it