Damon Lindelof Explains Why ‘Watchmen’ Turned Silk Spectre into “The Comedian”

Watchmen Episode 3, “She Was Killed By Space Junk” is the first episode of the series to really confront the characters of the graphic novel head on. We follow the former Silk Spectre, learn Nite Owl is in jail, and get confirmation that Jeremy Irons is indeed playing an older version of Ozymandias.

Really, though, the episode belongs to Special Agent Laurie Blake, aka the second Silk Spectre. As Laurie, actress Jean Smart struts through every scene with a combination of fire and sarcasm. Laurie’s job now is to hunt down masked vigilantes and bring them to justice. She is a smooth operator in her profession, planning bank heist stings to lure in caped crusaders, and cracking dark jokes. She’s also a fully realized being, who, at 70 years old, is still sexually active.

Watchmen showrunner Damon Lindelof told Decider that he was reluctant to pack the series with “legacy characters” from the graphic novel, but that he felt Laurie’s future was one of the book’s few loose ends.

“These 12 issues [of Watchmen], to me, felt so complete. As much as I loved the world, and as much as I wanted there to be more Watchmen, I also felt when I finished the twelfth issue like, ‘Okay, right, that’s the end.’ I felt so satisfied,” Lindelof said. “But Laurie says something to Dan. I think it may be the last thing that she says in the comic book in general before we leave them. She’s like, ‘I think I want to get some guns and take another spin at vigilanteism.’ And in that moment, you realize, ‘Oh, she’s going to become like The Comedian.'”

The Comedian, aka Eddie Blake, was a super nihilistic, right-wing leaning hero who cut his teeth as one of the original Minutmen. He also notoriously attempted to rape Laurie’s mother, the original Silk Spectre, Sally Jupiter. The Comedian was also secretly Laurie’s real father. She only learns of this during the events of the graphic novel Watchmen.

“She’s spent this first phase of her vigilante alter-ego as Silk Spectre, but now that she knows who her father is, she’s going to try that on,” Lindelof said. “And I’m like, ‘Oh, I really want to see what she looks like as The Comedian with that degree of nihilism and cynicism, and particularly humor.'”

In HBO’s Peteypedia — a website offering supplemental world-building material for the series — we learn that Laurie and then boyfriend Dan Dreiberg continued to fight crime as The Comedienne and Nite Owl. However, in 1995, they were arrested and Nite Owl is still in jail. It feels highly unlikely that Laurie’s new life as a Special Agent hunting down masked adventurers is unrelated to Dan Dreiberg’s fate, especially considering how much thought Lindelof and his writer’s room put into every detail of the show.

Lindelof told Decider that for twelve weeks, the writers’ room bandied about ideas for the series. “I had a lot of the kind of big ideas before we hired any of the writers, but then we had to separate the wheat from the chafe, and a lot of those ideas turned out to be shitty, and then the writers brought a lot of great ideas themselves into the room.”

“Everybody got super excited about the idea of Silk Spectre at this point in her life as someone who had gone and had a mid-life crisis and decided to be a vigilante again, but now she’s 20 years past that. And it was just as they say, low-hanging fruit. How could we not do that story?” Lindelof said.

In doing that story, HBO’s Watchmen reclaims Silk Spectre’s legacy from the graphic novel. It’s not that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ version of the character wasn’t complex, sexual, aggressive, smart, or strong. But on the page, Laurie’s story is entirely wrapped up with those of Watchmen‘s male characters. She is Doctor Manhattan’s girlfriend, Nite Owl’s fantasy, The Comedian’s secret shame… Those characters are all absent now. While Laurie is still incredibly influenced by each relationship, she stands on her own. She’s a relic of a different world, and a consummate survivor able to evolve with the shifting times. Most of all, she’s neither a hero, nor a heroine. She’s a woman who likes to tell jokes to the void.

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