It’s been the question in the back of everyone’s mind since the series began: Where is the big naked blue guy? We’re almost done with the first season of Watchmen and we still haven’t actually seen the guy. The opening moments of this episode changes that… a little bit. We’re shown footage from a documentary about the creation and life of Dr. Manhattan. Much of it is a recap of the story from the comic, but it does show us one glimpse of the man in action: Winning the Vietnam War for the United States and making the country its 51st state.
The documentary is playing on a screen at a video store Angela visits as a child. She’s trying to buy a video of what looks to be a blaxploitation movie about the original Sister Night. Her parents won’t let her watch it though, as her dad says they should be afraid of people in masks. We saw last week exactly what led him to think that way. Her dad tells her to return the tape, but before she can, a man detonates a backpack bomb, killing her parents. At this point, Will Reeves’ memories from last week’s episode start cutting into the scene. This is the treatment. We’re watching Angela’s memories tangled up with Will’s. She wakes up in a hospital bed where Lady Trieu injects her with a serum that plays an explanation of the treatment in her mind. It’s not the first time she’s done this.
Jeremy Irons, Tom Mison, Sara Vickers (Credit: Colin Hutton/HBO)
Like the last episode, this one tracks heavily in surrealism. I mean, when you’re trying to show memories untangling from one another, how can you not? It’s not as heavy as last week’s dreamlike black-and-white trip through Will Reeves’ life, though. While the Hooded Justice reveal was huge and important, it was the first of many big reveals the show has in store for us. We’re very close to the end of the season, and the story is ramping up to the finale. That doesn’t mean it’s done exploring its characters’ pasts, though. The episode just has to balance the expository scenes with ones that move the present story forward.
Angela spends most of the episode trapped inside Lady Trieu’s facility. She’s told she’s hooked up to her grandfather, but Trieu won’t let her see him. She says it’s too early, that Angela won’t know where she ends and he begins. Seems like a flimsy explanation, but I’ve never OD’d on memories so who am I to judge? Throughout the episode, we see more scenes from Angela’s childhood. We see the moment she decides to become a cop. A Vietnamese officer has her identify the man who provided the exploding backpack. When Angela asks to listen to his execution (yikes), the woman gives her a police badge to hold onto. Once again, the show doesn’t take the easy path through this story. It would be easy to glorify cops here. Turn Angela’s childhood into a quest for justice. With the single gunshot here, the show once again makes no effort to obscure what’s going on. Whether the “hero” wears a mask or just a badge, they’re still murdering people.
Jennifer Vo Le, Faith Herman (Credit: Mark Hill/HBO)
Child Angela has one brief moment of hope growing up, which makes for the episodes most heartbreaking scene. Her grandmother tracks her down and promises to bring her home. She tells her the full story of how she and her son stopped talking to each other. She even promises to bring her back to Tulsa and finally let her watch the Sister Night movie. Then she has a heart attack just as they’re getting in the cab to the airport. Man, this woman could never catch a break. At least she knows where she’s from now. We may not know how she made it back to Tulsa, but at least we know why. I wonder if she ever saw the movie.
While Angela’s in recovery, Laurie Blake is doing some detective work. She may have been suspicious of everyone from the start, but she puts everything together pretty easily. It happens too often that our favorite comic book characters become dumber in the transition from page to screen. I’m so glad that didn’t happen here. Laurie only became less trustworthy of, well, everyone. That definitely tracks. She suspects that Looking Glass turned Angela in so quickly because he’s working with the Seventh Kavalry and sends her assistant to check out his house. Thankfully, it looks like he survived the attack on his house and left all the Kavalry members dead. We don’t know where he is right now, but we can be certain he didn’t go full white supremacist.
Jean Smart (Credit: Mark Hill/HBO)
Meanwhile, Laurie questions Sheriff Crawford’s wife. She’s been listening to Angela’s nostalgia-induced ramblings and put the whole story together. She lays it all out: Hooded Justice, Cyclops, mesmerism, everything. Mrs. Crawford acts shocked until Laurie puts her conclusions forward. The Kavalry is the latest version of Cyclops. Senator Joe Keene used them to kill a bunch of cops so he could put the remaining cops in masks. Now both the good guys and the bad guys are covering their faces, and in the confusion, Keene seizes power as president. Mrs. Crawford calmly confesses everything: That was the plan, but they’ve stumbled onto something bigger. She presses a few buttons on a garage door opener, which does nothing. It’s a funny bit that adds some levity to a pretty heavy situation. Even Laurie doesn’t know what to think, which is why she falls through the trap door when Mrs. Crawford finally gets it to open.
Laurie wakes up in the Seventh Kavalry’s warehouse where Keene is waiting to explain his whole evil plan to her. Laurie is hilariously uninterested. She doesn’t care what they’re planning or why they’re doing it or how Keene became a racist. She’s thoroughly bored by the cliche in front of here and just wants him to get on with it. Normally, I’d accuse this scene of complaining about the thing while also doing the thing, but… it got me. I desperately want to know what the Kavalry’s planning. I’ll gratefully lap up the detached irony as long as it comes with some real information. Keene denies he’s a racist, while saying all the stuff about balancing scales and going back to a better time that we hear racists in the real world say all the time. His words have a twist to them. While lamenting how “hard” it is to be a white man in an America where black people are also allowed to have nice things, he tells Laurie his solution: become a blue one. (Sidenote: I do have to hand it to this show for avoiding the low-hanging fruit by not including some variation of “Make America Great Again.” That joke was old and tired by September of 2016.)
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (Credit: Mark Hill/HBO)
With that revelation, it’s time to check back in with Angela for the episode’s real big reveal. She breaks her way into what she’s been told her grandfather’s room only to find… an elephant. She’s been hooked up to an elephant. Because elephants never forget? Is that what’s going on here? Even when Watchmen is in big reveal mode, it still finds time to be so freaking weird and I love it. Lady Trieu finds her and decides to be honest, finally. The real reason she’s here is that Dr. Manhattan isn’t on Mars. He’s actually in Tulsa, pretending to be human. Trieu joined up with Will Reeves to stop the Seventh Kavalry from capturing Dr. Manhattan so they could become him.
Angela calls Trieu crazy and storms out of the facility, though Trieu notes how odd it is that Angela just learned Dr. Manhattan disguised himself as a human in Tulsa and didn’t ask who. Almost like she already knows. She breaks her way out of the parking log, crashing through Red Scare’s car in the process. As she rushes home, it becomes very clear to us who Dr. Manhattan is. Especially when we see a Rorschach mask watching her house. And still, the episode drags it out more. It turns a huge dramatic reveal into a truly sad, tragic act. At this point, we’ve figured out it’s Cal. Angela even calls him Jon at one point just to make sure everyone’s caught up. But he doesn’t know it yet. He has no idea why the woman he loves is approaching him with a hammer. Angela knows what she has to do. The world needs Dr. Manhattan, so she has to say goodbye to Cal. God, this hurts to watch.
TV shows rarely make me sit in silence on the couch long after they’re over. This one did. The reveal was so big, so tragic, that I just had to sit with it for a while. This scene is also a clever subversion of a really shitty genre trope. You know the one. Where the hero has to tearfully kill their lover “for their own good.” We saw it play out in an especially ham-fisted way in the Game of Thrones finale last spring. (Man, this show really is the perfect palate cleanser to GoT’s last season, huh?) Instead of reinforcing abuse narratives, it twists them around. Not only with the gender swap, but with the motivation and outcome. Angela is losing Cal, but this isn’t a murder. Cal was always a disguise so Angela and Dr. Manhattan could be together. She’s restoring Dr. Manhattan so he can avoid capture by white supremacists… and save the world, hopefully. That’s what this show leaves us to sit with for another week. What a strange, amazing, fantastic thing.
Watchmen airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO
Previously on Watchmen:
- Watchmen Season 1 Episode 6 recap
- Watchmen Season 1 Episode 5 recap
- Watchmen Season 1 Episode 4 recap
from Geek.com https://ift.tt/2Yan8Qg
via IFTTT
0 comments:
Post a Comment