Damon Lindelof Explains the One Line in ‘Watchmen’ That Almost Ruined Their Hooded Justice Backstory

Watchmen Episode 6 “This Extraordinary Being” finally explains the backstory of legendary Minuteman Hooded Justice. As the in-Watchmen universe show American Hero Story illustrates, the conventional wisdom is that the mysterious Hooded Justice was a super strong white guy, played in the episode’s cold open by Cheyenne Jackson.

What Damon Lindelof‘s Watchmen suggests is that Hooded Justice — the first masked vigilante in this alternate version of history — was in fact the mysterious Will Reeves (Louis Gossett, Jr.). Since Angela Abar (Regina King) has swallowed a whole bottle of her grandfather Will’s Nostalgia medication, she spends the entire episode in a dream-like fugue, living out his memories in black & white.

Angela discovers that young Will (played by Jovan Adepo) became one of the first black police officers in the NYPD, but that his pursuit of justice was foiled by an insidious alt-right group operating within the police force under the code name “the cyclops.” When Will runs afoul of them, he is almost lynched to death in retaliation. That same night, still wearing the noose around his neck, he overhears an attempted mugging and murder in an ally. Will puts on a hood and rescues the couple in need. By covering his face — and his race — he becomes Hooded Justice.

As Hooded Justice, Will is allowed to finally target the racist crime syndicate thriving in almost plain sight in the city. He also attracts the attention of fellow would-be crime fighters. Most notably, Nelson Gardner (Captain Metropolis). As Nelson recruits Will to join a new team called the Minutemen, the two become lovers. (It should be noted that Will is also married to the grown up version of the baby he rescued during the Tulsa Race Riots in Episode 1.)

However, Nelson and Will butt heads over Will’s determination to combat racism, fascism, and the looming threat of the Nazis. Eventually, Will takes matters into his own hands and invades the Cyclops’s base, where he discovers they have created a form of light-based mind control that causes Black people to viciously turn on each other. It’s also revealed to Angela that Will used this technology to hypnotize the secret Klan member Judd Crawford (Don Johnson) into hanging himself.

All in all, it’s a bold twist for an already audacious show. As Damon Lindelof told Decider, it’s a “radical retcon” of one of Moore’s most mysterious characters. Lindelof and his writers took the imagery of the noose on Hooded Justice’s costume and drew a connection to the unjust epidemic of lynching. Since Moore is largely mum on the character’s background, this retcon mostly lines up with what’s in the canon of the graphic novel — except for one notable line.

It’s noted in the original Nite Owl Hollis Mason’s memoir, Under the Hood, that Hooded Justice said complimentary things about Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party. The Hooded Justice in HBO’s Watchmen is depicted as being vehemently against racism, fascism, and Nazism. So how did Lindelof and his team justify this?

“There are probably about seven pages of writers’ rooms notes struggling with exactly that question,” Lindelof told Decider. “There’s a number of things that Hooded Justice says in Watchmen —  not just attributed to him in Under the Hood, but in the panels — that he doesn’t want to get involved in ‘razzle dazzle’ or that he doesn’t want to get political. We tried on a number of ideas, all of which felt like a level of retcon too deep.”

Finally, Lindelof said they justified this by looking at how Will’s costume doesn’t just cover his identity, but his race. “Part of Will Reeves’s camouflage in terms of hiding his true identity required making statements like that in the presence of the other Minutemen so as to throw off the scent of who he truly was,” Lindelof said.

However, Lindelof added there was a personal element to Will’s comments, too. After all, Will Reeves’ personal politics are depicted as a point of content between him and teammate/lover Nelson Gardner.

“I imagine some of the things he said were actually digs at Nelson. We had a whole scene where Nelson and Will get into a fight about the Bund Rally that took place in Madison Square Garden. And Will wanted to go with the Minutemen and knock some heads around and Nelson made a comment about how we don’t want to get involved in that political razzle dazzle,” Lindelof said. “So the idea is that Hooded Justice was quoting him in the way we dig at people we get in fights with, we throw their own words back at them in a slightly catty way.”

However, Lindelof says this scene was edited and removed when the writers room realized “the pretzels we’re twisting ourselves into just to solve that nitpick.” Still, it’s definitely something that the Watchmen writers still care about as HBO’s supplementary “Peteypedia” references that very depiction of Hooded Justice in Hollis Mason’s Under the Hood.

As Lindelof told Decider, “We really care about this and we were like, ‘People are going to care!’ Especially for retcon this radical, we have to really try to dot our i’s and cross our t’s to the best of our abilities.”

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