‘Watchmen’ Series Premiere Recap: Rorschach and Awe

A band of dysfunctional masked vigilantes fighting crime with gadgets, fists, and displaced sexual frustration. An alternate timeline in which Richard Nixon remains president for decades, and Robert Redford becomes president for decades afterward. A bright blue naked man with the powers of God who wins the Vietnam War singlehandedly and eventually goes to live on Mars. A gigantic telepathic squid that is teleported by a deranged genius into the middle of Manhattan, killing three million people. A police department obeying strict restrictions on gun use while waging all-out war against white supremacy.

Yeah, I know—some superhero stories are so outlandish it’s hard to suspend disbelief.

Less an adaptation than an extrapolation of writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons’s seminal revisionist-superhero graphic novel, Watchmen is counting on you to do exactly that. Of all the developments in the pilot episode of Watchmen, showrunner Damon Lindelof seems to know exactly which one is going to elicit the most “yeah right” responses from the audience—spoiler: it ain’t the squids, it’s the antifa cops—and he has the audacity to build the whole thing around it. To do so, he brings to bare all of the most striking stylistic flourishes from his masterful previous show, The Leftovers: bombastic music cues, abrupt tonal shifts, jarring magic-realist imagery, and an overall sense of disorientation and chaos roiling underneath the whole thing. To borrow the comic’s pirate leitmotif, Watchmen is a ship adrift on a roiling sea, and the challenge is to stay aboard.

At this early stage in the season it’s difficult to know which of the episode’s many plotlines will be central going forward, though given that the original book began as a murder mystery it makes sense to start there. Don Johnson, smiling and handsome, plays Judd Crawford, the kindly chief of police in Tulsa, Oklahoma. When a member of the force gets gunned down by a guy in a knockoff Rorschach mask—Rorschach being the original story’s most vicious vigilante, one who favored extreme right-wing politics at that—Crawford fears that the 7th Kavalry, a dangerous white-nationalist terrorist organization, has returned to plague his fair city one more time. (What they did the first time around is unclear, but apparently it was bad enough that the entire police department now routinely wears identity-obscuring masks while on duty to avoid retribution.)

Fortunately, Crawford has a few masked aces up his sleeve. His detectives are effectively a superhero team, with their own idiosyncratic masks and uniforms: There’s Looking Glass, an interrogation expert with an unnerving mirror-surface mask; Red Scare, a Russian native whose lo-fi costume consists of a red tracksuit and ski mask; and Sister Night (Regina King), our apparent protagonist, who kicks the shit out of people while dressed like a goth nun and operates out of a Batcave-esque HQ in an abandoned bakery. When the police unlock their guns and go after a 7K hideout, she takes point, and nearly gets machine-gunned to death behind a cow’s corpse before the force’s flying-saucer airship shoots the racists’ getaway plane out of the sky.

It’s Sister Night—who in her civilian life is Angela Abar, a woman with a very hot husband and several adopted (white) kids who seem to have taken her militant anti-racism to heart—who discovers her friend Crawford hanging from a tree. The only witness is a very old man in a wheelchair, carrying the note affixed to him when his parents helped him flee the brutal Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, a grueling gruesome depiction of which opens the episode. “Pore Jud Is Daid,” from the musical Oklahoma!—a recurring presence in the episode thanks to a production with an all-black cast that Crawford and his wife Jane (Frances Fisher, striking as ever) attend—plays. The credits roll.

Oh, somewhere in there Jeremy Irons shows up as Adrian Veidt, the villain of the original Watchmen, writing a play in the nude while his robot and/or clone servants look on.

It’s wild!

No, seriously, it really is wild. It reminds me, in a good way, of some of the most far-out episodes of Lindelof’s Leftovers run—the ones where Justin Theroux near-death-hallucinates that he’s an international assassin, say, or the one where Christopher Eccleston talks to God on a weird cult’s orgy boat before God gets mauled to death by a lion. Where Moore and Gibbons’s Watchmen eased you into its world’s weirdness—which to be fair was orders of magnitude less weird than either the Marvel or DC shared universes of which it served as a critique—Lindelof and director Nicole Kassell dump you into the deep end and expect you to do the butterfly, with the aggressive and eerie music of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross blaring in the background.

This is especially true of the series handling of race, specifically the role of police violence and open white supremacists. In the real world, cops overwhelmingly take the side of the racists in any kind of protest-based confrontation, serving as glorified bodyguards for fascist groups from Portland to Boston. I think some people will have a hard time getting past the show’s conception of a Southern police force as a ruthless and implacable enemy of racists, and I’m not going to spend any time blaming them for that.

I will say, though, that I think this is the show’s way of tricking you into sympathizing with the extralegal approach the Tulsa PD takes to capturing and interrogating its suspects. Liberals, progressives, and leftists in the audience would naturally recoil if the cops were on the side of the Rorschach-masked goons or the hordes of bloodthirsty white people descending on the “Black Wall Street” in the flashback sequence. Cops roughing up rednecks and having running gun battles with the show’s Klan stand-in? Suddenly our calls for due process get a little more muted, don’t they?

It’s a clever trick. It’s a clever show, with abrupt transitions from scene to scene and mood to mood constantly shaking us up. King and Johnson do fine work, as does Tim Blake Nelson as the eerily taciturn Looking Glass. (The interrogation sequence in “the Pod,” a circular room where Glass projects “racially charged” imagery in order to measure a suspect’s involuntary responses, is a killer.)

Will it be more than clever, and more than fine? Will it earn the right to work with one of comics’ sacred texts—one that has caused its co-creator Alan Moore no small share of grief over the years since the publisher snaked the rights out from under him and Gibbons—and to play with the American live-wire of race and police violence? I’ll be watching.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Stream Watchmen Episode 1 on HBO Go

Stream Watchmen Episode 1 on HBO Now