Ryan Shoots First: Watchmen (S1 Ep1) “It’s Summer and We’re Running Out of Ice”
HBO just premiered its next big genre series in the wake of the end of Game of Thrones with Watchmen. I’m sure your first thought is the Zack Snyder Watchmen movie from 2009. That movie marked the downturn of Snyder’s fan cred as it’s attempt to recreate the beloved graphic novel panel for panel seemed to get a mixed reaction. Our very own Chris The Brain absolutely loathes that movie.
The series does take place in the same timeline but decades after the incident that demolished major cities. In the years since police have been forced to hide their identities after a group of militants sharing the mask of the former hero detective Rorschach launched an attack on multiple police in an evening called White Night. Regina King plays a police officer Angela who was attacked in that night and since has claimed to retire and opened a bakery but still goes out in the evening masquerading as a detective named Red Knight. Her bakery is a front for her Baguette Cave where she does her work.
The episode begins with a tragic event from the 1920s in Tulsa Oklahoma where a large attack on the African American population results in a young boy and a baby being abandoned outside the city. In their attempt to smuggle their son out of the mayhem a mom and dad sneak their son onto a leaving car with a note saying “Take Care of This Boy”. The boy awakens later and everyone in the vehicle is dead except him and the baby. Fast forward to current time and a routine traffic stop exposes the resurgence of the Seventh Kalvary and their attacks on police officers. After a video manifesto is released police are given authorization to use weapons which is usually only allowed in dangerous situations with approval. After a raid on a facility with some very unfortunate cattle meat shields, we visit Jeremy Irons who plays Ozymandias. The Smartest Man in the World who was behind the large attacks at the end of the original graphic novel. He lives an isolated life in a mansion with his servants who clearly are not human but I’m sure we’ll find out about that later.
Once the cop attacked in the opening of the episode wakes up at the hospital the police chief played by Don Johnson heads to check on him. The police chief is ambushed on his way to the hospital as King’s character receives a phone call from a stranger tipping her off to his whereabouts and revealing he knows who she is. Turns out it is an old man who we saw earlier in the episode staked outside her bakery in a wheelchair. He is still in his chair camped under the body of the police chief who is hanging dead. Earlier as he was leaving his home we saw a picture leading us to believe he may be behind the Seventh Kalvary. It would seem this man in the wheelchair has some superpowers and is holding the letter the little boy at the beginning of the episode was given revealing that was him.
While Watchmen isn’t the attempt to slavishly recreate the graphic novel it already does a better job of handling the big questions that groundbreaking novel attempted to ask. It wasn’t so much a superhero story with a dark twist as destructuring the super motif to reflect society. Something the show and it’s writers understand. In fact throughout the first episode, we really don’t see any people with super powers. We see the impact they have had on the world and how people perceive good and bad but it’s not the focus of the story. One thing the show does very well is exposition. There is a lot of history and details that need to be revealed to have any idea what is going on and it is a slow drip in ways that do not seem cheap. The easy thing to do would be voice over or text or some character shamelessly spewing exposition almost right into the camera but the show elects to give us what we need to keep us engaged with I’m sure more to follow as mysteries are revealed. The show seems to have a good pace to it as well and shows the subject matter of this story was always going to benefit from a series approach than a movie as previously attempted.
The show appears to be getting rave reviews and all evidence seems to point to HBO having another hit on its hands and the sneak preview for the rest of the season looks to really just ramp up from the premiere. Till then I look forward to recapping here every week with you guys and who knows maybe we’ll get Chris The Brain to chime in and check it out.
Till next week tick tock, tick tock…
