This season of Watchmen has so far stayed away from depicting the era the comic book takes place in. We’ve only seen either the distant past, or 34 years in the future. So when this week’s episode began in 1985 New Jersey, it was a fun departure. We get to see some direct effects of the events of the comics. We even got to see something excised from the movie entirely.
The intro follows a group of Jehovah’s Witnesses preaching to sinners at a New Jersey fair. Among them, is a very young, very nervous Wade Tillman. A punk girl lures him into the fun house and acts like she’s going to have sex with him. When he’s distracted, she runs off with his clothes, leaving him naked and alone. Then, he hears a loud sound. All the mirrors shatter, and when Wade steps out of the fun house, everyone’s dead. The camera pulls back and we see the alien squid in all its terrifying glory. God, I’ve been wanting to see that since 2009.
This week’s episode moves the story along like I was hoping it would, but more than that, it really lets us get to know Wade. I’ve been curious about his character since we first met him. Partly because I like Tim Blake Nelson and always want to see more of him, but mostly because we know so little about Wade. He appears to be a good cop, and on the same side as Sister Night. Beyond that though, we had no idea what kind of person he is. Why he’s on the Tulsa police force to begin with. This episode gives us some of those answers, and man, are they heartbreaking.
Tim Blake Nelson, Jean Smart (Credit: Mark Hill/HBO)
As you might imagine, that experience in Jersey really messed Wade up. And Laurie Blake can see it. She correctly figures out that he became a policeman after they were allowed to wear masks. His chosen persona, Looking Glass, gives him the perfect cover to wear reflective material that blocks psychic blasts. The same material also lines his red baseball cap, and he has an inter-dimensional alarm that he constantly tests. He panics when it malfunctions and pays double to have a new one overnighted to him. He’s not a healthy man. A fantastic, affecting musical motif runs through the episode. Any time he’s feeling conflicted and really wrestling with himself, we hear a different version of “Careless Whisper.” We hear the original in the intro when the punk girl has him naked in a fun house. We hear it again when he visits his ex-wife (whom he’s still clearly in love with) for information on those pills Angela gave him. It’s just an aural punch in the gut every time. Yeah, I never thought anything could make “Careless Whisper” inspire any emotion other than laughter either.
His ex-wife reveals that the pills are an illegal drug called Nostalgia. They’re personal memories in pill form. She also tells him to find someone else: A good woman he can maybe begin to trust. And for a brief scene it looks like that just might happen. A woman shows up at his squid trauma support group and the two hit it off. They drink together, and Wade starts falling for her. Then, as she drives off, a head of lettuce falls out of the truck. He realizes it must be the truck whose driver shot the police officer back in the first episode. He follows the truck, and yeah, they’re Seventh Kavalry. Inside their facility, he finds them experimenting with a portal machine. That freaks him out enough that he tries to arrest the Kavalry members all by himself.
Regina King (Credit: Mark Hill/HBO)
That was part of the plan, it turns out. The woman, the truck, the lettuce, it was all designed to lure him out and get him to do something for them. They even hijacked his radio signal so his call for backup wouldn’t make it out. And it turns out that the Seventh Kavalry isn’t just a bunch of rednecks in Rorschach masks. When the Kavalry captures Wade, the leading member reveals himself to be Senator Joe Keene Jr. Even in this seeming utopia, a land where racial equality appears to truly exist, racism is still systemic. It’s not just a problem of ignorant yokels, the way we like to pretend it is. It’s wealthy, well-connected people with an interest in making sure society doesn’t progress too much.
Crawford, Keene reveals, was Kavalry, too. He kept up the appearance of peace in Tulsa so the Kavalry could work on this portal project in secret. His murder threatens that appearance of peace, and that’s why Keene’s here now. And that’s why they need Wade. Keene wants Wade to point the investigation into Crawford’s murder toward Angela. To convince him, he shows Wade a secret video that Ozymandias made in 1985 for future president Robert Redford. It confirms that the squid attack was orchestrated to bring an end to hostilities between the US and Russia, and to create a better world out of fear. We all knew this from the comics, but it’s chilling watching Wade learn all this for the first time. A scared, honest man just trying to be a good person turns into a pawn for white supremacists. I wonder if this is what it’s like when someone reads Watchmen and somehow comes away thinking Rorschach was the good guy.
He tears himself up about it, but in the end, Wade does what he’s told. Knowing that Laurie bugged the cactus on his desk, he tells her he wants to help. She tells him everything: That the pills belong to her grandfather. That her grandfather claims to have killed Crawford, but he’s an old man in a wheelchair. That she covered up the crime scene. That’s when Laurie calls for her arrest. Just before the other cops cuff her, Angela downs all the pills, setting up what’s sure to be a surreal, trippy episode for next week. For now though, we stick with Wade.
Jeremy Irons (Credit: Mark Hill/HBO)
Man, I was so excited when I saw that this episode would focus on Wade. I really should have guessed it wouldn’t be pretty. Turns out he was a pretty good guy until this very moment. Even after it, he’s still conflicted. As the final version of “Careless Whisper” plays, he tosses his hat away. He’s about to do the same with his new inter-dimensional breach alarm. He doesn’t, though. He pulls it out of the trash. The Seventh Kavalry got a couple hooks into him, but he’s still not entirely sold. I wish I could say that was hopeful. As he enters his home, a van full of Kavalry pulls up to his house. They cock shotguns and kick his door down. They got what they needed, and it seems they don’t want to take a chance on whether he’ll stick with them.
I honestly don’t know what to expect from Watchmen when I tune in each week, but it’s always a fantastic surprise. This show continually impresses with the stories it tells and how it chooses to tell them. As far as pushing the main plot forward, this was the episode I was hoping for after the last couple weeks. I was not expecting a melancholy character study to go along with it. We knew so little about Wade at the beginning of the episode, and the show was still able to build an effective tragedy around him.
We even got some forward progress in Ozymandias’ story, too. His assistants launched him into the sky where we find out that he’s actually imprisoned on one of Jupiter’s moons. He tries to deliver a message to a passing satellite: “SAVE ME,” written in the frozen bodies of the assistants he sent up before. That’s when the warden of the prison pulls him back inside. It’s too late, though. We know Ozymandias will eventually collide with the story in Tulsa. It’s just a question of how much worse the situation gets when he does.
Watchmen airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO
Previously on Watchmen:
- Watchmen Season 1 Episode 4 Recap
- Watchmen Season 1 Episode 3 Recap
- Watchmen Season 1 Episode 2 Recap
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