To quote one of modern philosophy’s most esteemed thinkers: “Fuckin’ magnets, how do they work?” A sound question, Mr. 2 Dope, and one of many I’m left with following the second episode ofWatchmen, titled “Martial Feats of Comanche Horsemanship”, which ended with an Unidentified Flying Whoziwatzit descending from the night sky and carrying Will Reeves (Louis Gossett Jr.) off to freedom. This, after brutally violent flashbacks, shocking familial revelations, meta stories-within-stories, and formerSleepy HollowstarTom Misonfinally providing the vital Blue Dick Energy that any worthwhileWatchmenadaptation must deliver. A lot to take in here, folks. Just two episodes intoDamon Lindelof‘s vigilante mindfuck-a-palooza and this story has already become [extremelyJeremy IronsinDungeons & Dragonsvoice]AS IMPENETRABLE AS THE GORDIAN KNOT ITSELF.
I certainly have some questions. You, I assume, probably have a few questions. And the perfect place to start, I think, is with the question posed by Angela Abar (Regina King) herself…
What the Fuck?
So yes, sitting dead center at the middle of this widening mystery is Will Reeves, the supposed murderer of Judd Crawford (Don Johnson), despite the fact that common sense and context clues would dictate that A) A 100+-year-old man could probably not lift Judd Crawford into a tree, no matter how gracefully Don Johnson has aged, and B) Will Reeves is probably not even actually named Will Reeves. That latter point is something the show itself is telling us, given the fact that when we met Will as a young boy, he was watching a movie about “Bass Reeves” inside the “William Dreamland Theater.” I’ve drunkenly told enough movie theater security guards my name is “Regal Stubs” to know how this process works.
Basically, we know very little about Will Reeves at this point, and the old man isn’t telling, either. Not all at once, at least. “There’s a vast and insidious conspiracy at play here in Tulsa. If I told you about it, your head would explode. So I have to give it to you in pieces," he tells Angela, which is exactly how it seems Watchmen is going to peel back its many layers. So here’s what wedoknow:
Something important to keep in mind is that while it might not be Doctor Manhattan himself flying that thing at the end—although what a genuinely hilarious imagethatis—it is some Manhattan-esque tech. Note the toys that Topher Abar (Dylan Schombing) is playing with in his bedroom, floating magnetic LEGO-like pieces called “Magna-Hattan Blocks”.
But Also, What the Fuck?
Folks, I know you probably landed on this page looking for answers, but I genuinely have no idea what in the name of Tom Mison’s painted-blue scrotum is going on inside Adrian Veidt’s theater camp for wayward clones. Part of me thinks it would be delightful if these cutaways never tied together with the main plot. Like, season one ofWatchmenjust ends without ever explaining why Ozymandias is living in a posh countryside villa and barbequing identical housekeepers. I’d choose to see it as a commentary onAlan Moore, mostly because I firmly believe Alan Moore is hiding the secret to clone technology in the Northampton wilderness.
But no, here’s a little explainer for anyone who came into HBO’sWatchmenwithout reading the source material. The play Veidt ostensibly wrote and is watching with the giddiness of a schoolchild is pretty much word-for-word the actual origin story of Doctor Manhattan. Physicist Jonathan Osterman was granted the powers of a god because he left a watch belonging to his girlfriend, Janey Slater, inside a testing chamber and then let the doors lock behind him like an absolute freaking dingus. (An apt metaphor, honestly, for the type of people America likes to elevate to superhuman status.) The big change Veidt made here is adding the line “Nothing ends…nothing ever ends,” which is something Manhattan said tohimmoments after Veidt dropped an oozing squid monster onto New York City, killing millions.
Again, I can’t yet say what (orwhy) is going on here, but it does speak spades that Adrian Veidt is still so obsessed with his former big blue pal, who assumedly hasn’t been back on Earth in 34 years. Also, the reveal that all these helpers are, in fact, clones, brings up questions about this version of Veidt. The world believes he’s dead. Are they even wrong?
Was Judd a Part of the Seventh Kavalry or Just Super Racist?
Or maybe both? Or maybe neither! It turns out that the usually-cryptic Will Reeves was speaking as literal as humanly possible when he told Angela that Judd had “skeletons in his closet”, only “skeletons” in this case meant “a possible history of ingrained racism, bigotry, and bias.” Faking a fainting spell at a memorial for Judd—where we also learn that Jane Crawford (Frances Fisher) used to work for ultra-conservative presidential hopeful Joe Keene Jr. (James Wolk), which youhaveto assume will be important—Angela dons some extremely Nite Owl-ish specks to discover a Ku Klux Klan hood hidden in Judd’s closet.
Now, a couple things: For one, the entire sequence mirrors the events that kick-started the Watchmen comic story, in which Rorschach discovers the Comedian costume in a murdered Edward Blake’s closet. (Easter Egg Alert: The Comedian, much like the KKK, was a racist POS.) But does this automatically mean that Judd was a secret KKK member or, worse, involved with the much-more-recent white supremacist group The Seventh Cavalry? Maybe! But over two episodes, the camera has made a point to linger on the black-and-white photo of a young boy—presumably Judd—posing with an older man inside Judd’s bedroom. Someimpressivelyeagle-eyed theorists have pointed out that the man in the photo is sporting a similar facial mole to another man we saw in the premiere…carrying a rifle in the Tulsa Race Massacre. That hood and all it stands for might run in Judd’s family, but does the legacy trulybelongto him?
Either way, our eyes are also pointed directly at the painting hanging in the Crawfords' house, the same that gave the episode its title: “Comanche Feats of Horsemanship”. On a symbolic level, it clearly contains four horsemen, an image the Bible and by far the shittiestX-Menmovie both equate with the apocalypse. Remember how Judd classified his post-dinner conversation with Angela back in the premiere? “Just the end of the world. Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock.” And speaking of tickin' and tockin', consider that painting’s name. Then keep in mind that “Comanche” was thename of a horsethat miraculously survived the disastrous Battle of Little Big Horn, the military clusterfuck carried out by…General Custer’s Seventh Cavalry.
How Did Angela Survive the White Night?
There’s a lot that makes this episode’s flashback to the White Night terrifying. There’s the “two minutes til' midnight” imagery, a portent of doom that runs throughoutWatchmen. There’s the quick, efficient, remorselessness of the violence. There’s the horrific slowed-down version of “Santa Baby” that miraculously renders a song about being too horny for Santa Clause to go to sleep even creepier than it already is.
But more than all that, there’s the implied question: How the hell did Angela survive in the first place? She knifed the first Rorschach-wearing gunman good, but a second assailant clearly catches her with a shotgun and points the weapon directly in her face. That image fades to black, and the next thing we see is Angela recovering in a hospital bed, Judd at her side. The first time through, this scene read as devastatingly sad, especially Judd’s solemn “I let ya' down”.
But a few rewatches definitely hint that something is fucky in the state of Oklahoma. Judd and Angela are the only two officers to survive the White Night. But again, Angelashouldbe dead. “I reckon there’s someone up there looking after ya,” Judd says, and the delivery is just a littletooknowing. The number of hoops a police sheriff would have to jump through to hide the fact he’s secretly taking part in a white supremacist terrorist act is mind-boggling, but here’s a depressing stone-cold fact to just completely ruin your Monday morning:It ain’t that far-fetched.
Who’s This Asshole?
That asshole is, assumedly, the grandfather of all three of the Abar kids, who it took me far too long to piece together are not actually Cal (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and Angela’s biological children. Episode 2 filled out a bit of the backstory for these three kids, and woo boy is it tragic. During the White Night, the Seventh Cavalry successfully slaughtered Angela’s partner and his wife while they slept. Topher, their oldest child, took his two younger sisters—one just a baby—into the closet and hid until the violence was over. In the aftermath, Angela adopted Topher and his siblings as her own.
Unfortunately, seeing as how this episode’s un-named Bearded Porch Racist told Angela it was “his day”, it seems there is still mandated time spent with grandpa, presumedly in the white supremacist haven, Nixonville. Like a lot of the bigots thatWatchmenhas peppered its story with, this guy has a lot of thoughts on Redfordations, which explains why the sarcastic use of the term set Topher off in episode 1.
Is This ‘American Hero Story’ Thing Gonna' Be Important?
Looks like it! Episode 2 gave us a glimpse into the premiere episode ofAmerican Hero Story. (If its anything like its real-world counterpartAmerican Horror Storythat means we also saw the only good episode before things go totally off the rails.) Before we even dive into the plot, there’s a lot of commentary at work here, not the least of which is theveryin-depth content warning from the “Federal Communications Division” that deems American Hero Story “emotional harmful”. Together with the fact Rorschach’s journal inspired an entire white supremacist movement, Lindelof’s Watchmen loves to play with the idea that Watchmen was more than just a story. It had power. Weight. In the wrong hands (or wrong minds) it was dangerous art. The episode doubles down by immediately revealing that everyone—children, cops, The Seventh Cavalry—is tuning into the same show.
Also, the ultra-violent slo-mo style was such a delicious subtweet to Zack Snyder I’m genuinely shocked it wasn’t titled “American Horror Story: Dawn of Hooded Justice.”
Ah, right, Hooded Justice. In the source material, that masked man from the television program was the very first vigilante, the person who kicked off the craze of putting on Target pajamas and punching muggers to death. In the comics, his real identity is also never revealed; he simply disappeared off the map after the Keene Act was passed. But the main theory regarding the man under the hood is a disturbing one: Hooded Justice was largely believed to be Rolf Muller, a circus strongman from East Germany who toured under the name “The Mighty Mueller.” He was also, unfortunately, a pretty prolific serial killer of children. Muller’s body eventually washed up on shore with a bullet hole in his head—which we see inAmerican Hero Story—but as the HBO show’s voice-over says, it’s never definitively proven that The Mighty Mueller and Hooded Justice were one and the same.
In the interest of tying everything together in grandWatchmenfashion, here’s a bit of a twist: The name of the German woman asked to type up the propaganda at the beginning of this episode? Fraulein Mueller. An Easter Egg or something more? Hard to say right now, but the words on that page did make its way from Mueller’s fingers to the small hands of Will Reeves. And you can’t ignore the overlapping imagery: Hooded Justice, as you probably noticed, wore a noose around his neck.
