‘Watchmen’ Recap Episode 2: The Schlocky Hero Picture Show

News you can use from Watchmen Episode 2: The score, from Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, goes full Carpenter. It’s moody, sinister wash of burbling, bassy synths—some of the most purely eerie music the prolific composers have made since, well, they covered the Halloween theme song. John Carpenter’s scores from Halloween on down are a frequent touchstone for stylish genre films and shows these days—Stranger Things‘ entire aesthetic is based on them—but I would not be surprised if some combination of the composers and the crew on this show sat down and thought “Hey, you know what other popular genre relies on men in masks committing violence?”

Throughout the episode (“Martial Feats of Comanche Horsemanship”), the meta levels are high. I think this is to be expected from showrunner Damon Lindelof, who suffers from so much anxiety of influence that it comes across like a debilitating mental illness in his interviews. But that only drives him to make more of a point of his debt to, or antagonistic relationship towards, his forebears in his work.

So when we catch a glimpse of American Crime Story–style docudrama about superheroes, American Hero Story, it’s shot in Snydervision: slowed-down-then-sped-up ultraviolent action in the vein of Zack Snyder’s Watchmen adaptation. I don’t know that this is even intended as a critique, so much as Lindelof, co-writer Nick Cuse, and director Nicole Kassell wanting to have all their influences (even if the influence was just to not do that kind of thing) out in the open.

As gruesome as American Hero Story is, it’s preceded by a content warning that lasts nearly a full minute, detailing every bit of potentially offensive material in the show that follows. This is an echo of content warnings usually found online, which try to take into account how different kinds of upsetting material beyond cussing, nudity, and violence might affect viewers. In Watchmen‘s world this is now standard operating procedure for television networks, which thanks to the absence of the internet are still the only game in town. I get the feeling we’re meant to find this excessive. Maybe it is! I think the show is calling it out as potentially bad without actually staking out a position on it. Again, Lindelof seems to be wrestling with ideas he doesn’t have a firm grasp on, which is bound to confound people who want Questions to have Answers, or who want to affix a particular political framework to this thing and judge it accordingly, or who want all art to be understandable to a child. Or maybe it’s just sloppy. The jury on this issue is out, as much fun as it might be to treat Lindelof as a punching bag. (He’s a much more interesting artist than his panicked interviews indicate as anyone who actually watched The Leftovers could tell you.)

Speaking of shows within the show, Jeremy Irons’s Adrian Veidt stages a play about the origin of his old comrade turned enemy, Dr. Manhattan. He does so using his cloned servants, Crookshanks and Phillips, the latter of which does not survive Dr. Manhattan’s transfiguration. Fortunately he can be supplanted by a new Phillips, like the one lowered from the ceiling buck naked with his body painted blue and a Dr. Manhattan mask over his face.

This provides us with insight into the one-time crimefighter and world savior Ozymandias’s current mindset: He’s as mad as a hatter, and plays with lives like a capricious child plays with toys. In so doing it says more about the ethics of how we treat people we see as less than human, and says it more memorably, than two full seasons of Westworld have managed to do. Besides, you thought we were gonna go more than an episode without seeing a blue penis? Think again, pal.

But the colors that really matter on this show so far are black and white. We flash back to an all-black unit of World War I doughboys getting leafleted by the Kaiser’s government, asking them why the hell they’re fighting on behalf of a country that treats them like dirt. That leaflet winds up being the paper on which the “WATCH OVER THIS BOY” note was written when that little boy from the pilot episode escaped the Tulsa Race Massacre without his mother and father (a WWI veteran).

It’s also now in the possession of his grown-up self, who our hero, Angela “Sister Night” Abar, learns via a reparations center DNA-testing module (presided over by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who’s the Treasury Secretary in this alternate universe instead of a guy who got arrested trying to enter his own home and then was made to suffer through a humiliating “beer summit” with his compromise-crazed president and the cop who arrested him) is her grandfather. Did she suspect this, and thus keep him in her secret base and away from the rest of the force? Does it have anything to do with why an airship scoops him and the car he’s riding in up at the end of the episode? To the tune of the Beastie Boys’ “Eggman”?

Back on the subject of massacres, we get a flashback glimpse of “the White Night,” the Christmas Eve coordinated slaughter of dozens of cops in their homes by members of the Rorschach-inspired racist paramilitary the 7th Kavalry. It’s unclear how Angela survived, but friendly police chief Judd Crawford was right there by her side when she woke up in the hospital. Her partner wasn’t so lucky, which is how she wound up adopting his three orphaned children, and paying off their racist biological grandfather to leave them alone.

The White Night certainly explains how the cops handle Nixonville, a white racist ghetto:

But let’s take a look at the costume that good ol’ Judd was hiding in a secret panel in his closet:

It’s a familiar refrain for anyone who’s participated in a street protest: Cops and Klan, hand in hand. But it sure does run counter to the anti-racist culture of the police in this fictional universe, where Robert Redford issues reparations for the descendants of victims of racist violence. Or maybe that culture isn’t quite as solid as it seems, and maybe that’s why conservative presidential candidate Senator Joe Keene Jr. is so gung ho about letting cops mask up (something riot gear de facto allows them to do in the real world, it should be noted).

There’s a lot going on here, and it’s been a while since I’ve watched a show that seems so full of conflicting ideas it might burst at the seams. It’s a good feeling.

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 2 ("Martial Feats of Comanche Horsemanship") on HBO Go

Stream Watchmen Episode 2 ("Martial Feats of Comanche Horsemanship") on HBO Now