Watchmen (HBO)

It's not that he can not do it without consent, its that he said he would not.

So Doomsday Clock also concluded. Someone should do a compare and contrast because WOW.

So okay, there did end up being some similarities in the last episode / last issue of Watchmen and Doomsday Clock:

• Doctor Manhattan dies and ends up passing his powers to someone else (although it's more ambiguous in Watchmen).
• Adrian Veidt ends up arrested for the shit he did.

There were also, interestingly, some interesting opposites:

• While Watchmen had Rorschach becoming a symbol for white supremacists, in Doomsday Clock, the new Rorschach is a black man, Reggie Long.
• An old member of the Minutemen ends up being of great importance: in Watchmen, it was Hooded Justice, while in Doomsday Clock, it was Mothman.

However, both stories were wildly different in their plots and what they were about. Watchmen was about generational trauma and black America and white supremacy. Doomsday Clock was about, uh, Superman and how an entire generation of heroes was inspired by Superman.

Finally caught up on the whole season.

On the whole I'd call it a very strong, uncompromising vision, as bold as Moore's original one, so a worthy successor. If it works on the same level as the original is kind of a open-ended question but I enjoyed it as an exercise of "what if". Phenomenal production values, script and directing.

Looking Glass was my favorite character when this started and he remained my favorite character to the end. His A Day in the Limelight is for me the strongest episode of the show and the point the show really kicks into high gear with its plot. To the point I was mildly bummed we didn't see him fighting off the Seventh Kavalry and that he didn't play a larger part in the final showdown. Another highlight was Will and his episode is another I found very strong, particularly since Hooded Justice has always been my favorite Minuteman. The show really plays with the whole Anachronic Order and Stable Time Loop thing well.

Now, the season ended and I still don't very much like the way Ozymandias and Laurie were characterized. With Ozymandias I felt they were clouded by the fact he's a mass-murderer (and so decided to make him pathetic every scene he shows up) and with Laurie I felt they clearly didn't know what to do with her so just decided to make her a copy of her father. Both cases seem to me like completely missing the point of the characters. I found it even stranger when Lady Trie just outplays Veidt in every aspect. Her inheriting his genius (tenfold as it so appears) In the Blood was bizarre, since Veidt's parents weren't particularly smart.

Veidt being taken out by Looking Glass was equally bizarre to me since Veidt was a unstoppable fighter in the comic and seems to still be in somewhat top shape since we're shown in the same episode he can still grab bullets (and this time from a rifle, while in the original comic he just grabbed one of a pistol).

I also wish for this to be a single season, to be honest. This is hard to top and they burned off a lot of fuel to make this (Rorscharch's legacy, white supremacy, Manhattan, Veidt). It's a Tough Act to Follow of sorts.

As I watched it the thought struck me I'd probably have done the Manhattan arc as the last season of this hypothetical tv show. Leave that just out of the picture until the very end and have each season deal with the deaths of each of the surviving original main characters of Watchmen (so Nite Owl, Ozymandias, Silk Spectre and Doctor Manhattan), with Doctor Manhattan being the last one to go in the series finale so we can also have more build-up and retain this Ambiguous Ending, rather than going out in the season finale of the first season.

I wouldn't say Veidt is outplayed as he's not even in the game until literally the last minute, and even then he thinks up and executes a plan to wreck Trieu's decades-long scheme in the space of about five minutes.

The whole mass-murder thing was a weird direction to take though, and it definitely seems the show backed up his view that clones aren't actually real people.

Edited by jakobitis on Dec 27th 2019 at 1:40:40 AM

Barack Obama considered Watchmen as just as powerful as the best movies he enjoyed this year. (The other two TV shows on his list were Fleabag: Season 2 and Unbelievable, which was just super hard to watch.)

Edited by alliterator on Dec 29th 2019 at 5:05:47 AM

So I take it no one else was irked by Trieu's treatment, especially in light of the GOT finale?

I wasn't, particularly, because she's already introduced as being incredibly ruthless from the word "go", as her initial scene basically emotionally blackmailing a young couple already makes it pretty clear for me that she's a nasty piece of work. The later reveal that she cloned her own mother to raise as her daughter doesn't help either.

Nor me. The idea that anyone who willingly and deliberately seeks out that kind of power is probably not someone you actually WANT to have power is right in line with the shows approach - notably even at his most murderous and deranged Veidt never seems to have considered trying to take on Manhattans powers himself.

Angela is excepted as she never actually wanted to be that powerful, if it happens it was as part of Jon's plans/vision not her own desires.

I suppose I get that but it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I think it wouldn't if Ozymandias' insistence that she's surely go mad with power (that we have to accept as fact) wasn't also done in a racially-charged manner but... it was.

Finally finished the show with my boyfriend. Loved it, if it was about as strange as comic books tend to be.

I had a question though...

Who dropped the car for Blake? The episode kind of seemingly implied Manhattan did it as a response to her phone calls, but that's impossible as Manhattan is currently Cal and very much not aware he's Manhattan. So... Who dropped it?

The following episode shows shows that Regina's car got picked up by a gigantic magnet on a helicopter to rescue her grandfather. That helicopter dropped the car, and the fact it coincided exactly with Laurie's joke was just blind happenstance.

Ooooooohhhh. Ok. I knew that the Helicopter took it using the magnets but I misunderstood that it also dropped it off for Blake to find. It felt a bit strange with the set up symbolic nature of it seeming that Manhattan was throwing her a bone.

Was it blind happenstance? I assumed Trieu did it on purpose since the point of the boxes is that she can listen in on people.

The person who just happens to control the magnet and who just happens to listen to the Manhattan boxes just happening to drop the car by their owner to coincide with what she said in the box seems like way more coincidences than "the Manipulative Bitch who held all these pieces did it for the lulz."

A public service announcement from the cast of Watchmen. Or should I say "Washmen".

I'm presently tinkering with a blog post about the WATCHMEN series vs. the original. Unfortunately, my inner academic is interfering. Rather than talk about the show its ending up discussing the fact Alan Moore created a world where superheroes and vigilantism is fundamentally silly thing that white people engage in.

There's not many black people in Watchmen (aside from the psychologist) because Alan Moore draws associations between superheroes and Radical Right ideologies (the Comedian, Rorshach). The exceptions are rich millionaires and fame seekers (plus one blue god).

Hooded Justice, for example, is the first superhero and he's inspired by KKK imagery and a Nazi sympathizer. This is because Alan Moore series vigilantism as something that has a very nasty history in the United States and was just an excuse for organized murder on racial lines. It's not an uncommon view.

Lindelof, however, makes Hooded Justice an ironic superhero. He's a black man wearing a Klan outfit to terrify them and subject racists to the same unaccounted justice. He also recognizes minorities can't trust cops at various times in history and must make their own justice.

I wonder if this is because Alan Moore is not an American because the reason this works versus other Watchmen adaptations is because it is also based in RL history. Black Americans have their own history of vigilante justice and groups organizing outside the law for community protection. Often called criminals (and sometimes were).

Fundamentally, I see the television series having a completely opposite view of superheroes/vigilantes than the comic. Ironically, it's perhaps the reason why its the only Watchmen spin-off with any value.

A bit of a compare/contrast between this series and Doomsday Clock.

Edited by AyyItsMidnight on Jul 20th 2020 at 6:43:05 AM