We begin with another dive into the past, this time in World War II-era Germany. We get a look into the life of that old man we saw at the end of last week’s episode. He was a soldier in a Black platoon in World War II when Nazi propaganda rained down on his unit. It was a paper written in English asking the Black soldiers why they were fighting for a country that treated them like second class citizens. (This did actually happen, by the way. The Nazi’s tried to demoralize African-American soldiers by lying about how the Nazis actually treated Black people in Germany.) The US still won the war, but the man held onto that piece of paper. We see his son read it in a flash-forward and he still has it as he sits under Chief Crawford’s hanged corpse.
Angela takes the man to her bakery for questioning. Despite being a 105-year-old in a wheelchair, he insists he’s the one who killed Crawford. He promises to tell her about a conspiracy a little bit at a time so her head doesn’t explode. He starts by mentioning Crawford having skeletons in his closet. This guy sounds like he’s all kinds of delusional. Still, Angela doesn’t turn him in. She wants to know who he is and what he’s about first. After giving him water to take his pills, she bags up his cup for a DNA test. Her secret investigation will have to wait, though. She has to go to the official investigation of Crawford’s death.
Louis Gossett Jr. (via HBO)
This adaptation of Watchmen works so well because of how it extrapolates from the ideas the comic plays with. It moves the action to Tulsa, Oklahoma. The vigilantes are masked heroes working with the police. Two things we accept as heroic and good, superheroes and police, are facing a threat we can pretty much all agree is reprehensible: White supremacy. In real life, most of us accept cops and praise them as heroes because they ostensibly keep us safe from bad guys. And in some cases they do. They also do a lot of other stuff we’re not so fond of. While Angela as Sister Night goes along with the cops actions here, she’s at least starting to feel conflicted about it. They decide to take out their anger on the local Nixonville – a trailer park community that probably houses some members of the Seventh Kavalry. The cops beat up anyone they can find. Even when their target is something as reprehensible as white supremacists, the cops still end up hurting the poor more than anyone.
Angela’s disillusionment doesn’t stop there. She can’t stop wondering what the old man meant by Crawford having skeletons in his closet. At his memorial service, she pretends to faint. Crawford’s wife puts her in her bed to recover. When she’s gone, Angela does some investigating. It doesn’t take long. She finds the skeleton in Crawford’s closet almost immediately: It’s a Klan robe. Even in a world where cops wear masks because they were targeted by white supremacists, white supremacist cops still exist. Maybe it wasn’t the Seventh Kavalry who killed him. Maybe, somehow, it was that 500-year-old man. That suddenly seems much more likely after what happens later.
via HBO
Angela runs the old man’s DNA through an analysis system designed to see if victims of the Tulsa Massacre are eligible for compensation. Not only does she find out the old man was there, he’s her grandfather. Angela decides to deal with him properly at the police station, but doesn’t get that far. As soon as he’s in the car, a giant magnet appears out of nowhere and carries the car upwards. What’s going on there? He did mention Dr. Manhattan in one of their talks. Angela had initially written that off as nonsense. She was sure Dr. Manhattan can’t disguise himself as a human. And besides that, he’s on Mars. After that escape, maybe the guy knows more about Dr. Manhattan than we though.
Speaking of original Watchmen characters, our time with Ozymandias just got a lot weirder. We only got one brief scene from him in the pilot. He was given a watch by one of his oddly dedicated servants and announced he’s writing a play. This week, we get to see that play. It’s a retelling of the creation of Dr. Manhattan. The script has enough linguistic flourishes to trip up his actors, because after all these years, he’s even more of a pompous ass than he was in the comic. Also, there’s a blue penis. I was wondering how far into the series, we’d get before seeing one. The play has a disturbing twist, though. When the actor playing the man who would become Dr. Manhattan steps into the wooden replica reactor, Ozymandias actually lights him on fire. It’s revealed that all his servants are clones he continually replaces. All these burned corpses he’s creating with each performance are building to something. We just don’t know what yet.
Jeremy Irons (Credit: Colin Hutton/HBO)
It was going to be hard to top last week’s pilot. It’s rare that the first episode of a series lays out exactly what a show is and what it’s trying to say so well. Instead of trying to top it, the second episode expanded on it. Because that’s what it’s really good at. The world-building was incredible this episode. We got a flashback to the White Night that sealed Angela and Crawford’s friendship. Where white supremacists targeted cops in their homes, and Angela and Crawford were the only two survivors. The horror of that scene worked so well because it immediately followed a playful and loving Christmas scene between Angela and her husband. It was such an emotional shock, that you immediately felt the need for friendship and camaraderie both Angela and Crawford had after that. That’s what made the Klan robe feel like such a betrayal.
We didn’t just get world-building through well-executed flashbacks, though. Nearly every scene told us something about this post-Watchmen graphic novel world. From the museum where Angela gets a free DNA test to the TV show everyone watches. Everyone, including Angela’s family, the masked vigilantes she works with and even the Seventh Kavalry. They watch “American Hero Story.” Given the extensive content warning that precedes the show, it’s absolutely aping Ryan Murphy’s FX fare. What’s considered must-see-TV in this world? A superhero origin story. A particularly violent one. We see a group of criminals rob a convenience store, threatening to shoot a woman if the clerk doesn’t open a non-existent safe. The hero comes in and brutally murders all of them, crushing the leader’s head with a cash register. It’s no secret that the really good parts of the original Watchmen comic were the supplemental materials that told us about the world. They went completely ignored by the original cut of the movie, and now we get to see how the show plans to incorporate them.
After such a strong pilot, it would have been easy, expected even, to have a second week slump. Watchmen appears to know it only has 9 episodes to tell its story. It’s clearly making all it’s time count. I can’t wait to see how it horrifies us next week.
from Geek.com https://ift.tt/36a20Nq
via IFTTT
0 comments:
Post a Comment