More confusion than ever. No surprise there. I think this show's real accomplishment is keeping people like me, who have no clue what the hell is going on, interested enough to keep watching despite that. But it is frustrating.
I can't figure out what they are trying to do with this show. This didn't seem to fit with the other episodes. Found it quite boring and not fitting with the previous episodes.
Har har. So he does like that meta-joke.
Timespace fun!
Hmm. I had had an after-worry that that great first episode of the season might start a path downhill for some reasons... But, at least these episodes aren't so far as being bad...
You have some episodes left. Prove my worry to have only been partially well-grounded, Damon, and I'll gift ya an autographed brick in return.
In the graphic novel, Laurie goes by Laurie Jupiter, after her mother, Sally Jupiter. During the course of the graphic novel, she finds out that her father is Edward Blake, a.k.a. The Comedian. The Comedian, it turns out, tried to rape Sally, and then later Sally fell in love with him, and they had Laurie together. Laurie struggles with this revelation. The fact that she has now taken on her father’s last name is strange and left unexplained.
From the perspective of someone who never read the original books or seen the first film, after this episode things are finally starting to make sense LOL
He’s been up on Mars for thirsty years… or has he? Heard a rumour he’s good at cloning himself too. Now, where have we seen clones? Intriguing.
Best episode so far. There's still a lot I'm not sure where it's going but that's a good feeling to have.
I feel like you gotta have a certain intellect to get this show, and I don’t have it! But this episode helped me get more context and perspective of this universe, so now I’m gonna go to wiki fan and sear who are those four vigilantes (owl, silk woman, blue man and the other one)
Uh oh, introducing a new character. Usually a sign that the writers don't know what to do with a show so they start a new thread. While being somewhat of a side trek, they do manage to move the story along and teach us a little but more about the world. Still intrigued to learn more.
i ain't the first two episodes were lackluster cause they were directed by a women but the IMDb rating for this episode don't lie
Damon you had my curiosity...but now you have my attention
Best one yet, though still not amazing.
Agent Blake: You know how you can tell the difference between a masked cop and a vigilante?
Angela: No.
Agent Blake: Me neither.
Well, that much was already clear from the first episode. The question is if it will be explored in an interesting way before the season is over.
Rather tepid so far, despite seemingly big teases, but that could always change depending on future revelations and whether they are of substance or simply of “wow” value. As for this episode…not the biggest fan of Jean Smart as Laurie. (Nor do I think her random sexual get together with Mr. Petey makes sense at the end.) And overall it’s filled with at least two too many straight lines from the comic; makes me cringe every time the show has characters reiterate phrases they’ve already iterated prior or at least heard just for reference sake, and it feels mostly shoe-horned in too, trying to get too cute with it. Also the Jeremy Irons comedy routine(s) are getting a bit long-winded, but thankfully it looks like we will be making more substantial progress on that front the next time we see him.
WTF is up with this show?
Why are all these young guys sleeping with grandmas?
Did some old lady write & direct this?
lol
Typical Lindelof... Asking questions upon questions without answering any.
This show keeps improving. Adding in the layer of opinions of those outside of Tulsa is a fascinating angle. Not to mention Jean Smart's effortlessly wonderful performance.
Owl
Brain
God
(Extra text added for 5 word limit)
Boring episode. Very slow progress forward. More confusion then entertainment. Might need to put this series on hold till it’s finished then binge watch it.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2019-11-04T04:37:07Z
[9.1/10] Jean Smart is a revelation. Her Laurie Blake has a Dr. House-like aura, far from the semi-naive young woman following in her mother’s footsteps, she is the uber-competent, seen-it-all, as cynical as she is capable representative of the old guard. “She Was Killed by Space Junk” puts a lot on Laurie’s shoulders, and a lot on Smart’s shoulders, and the result is Watchmen’s best episode yet.
What makes the character's entrance work is that she is both a bridge to the original Watchmen story in the most direct way yet, but also someone who can offer a different perspective on the main story of this new series. So far, despite our sojourns to visit Veidt and the occasional flashback to Germany, this series has treated Tulsa as the whole world, with all of the events, political intrigue, unrest, and character having their lives orbit this one community and its larger tensions.
Bringing in Laurie Blake, the daughter of the original Silk Spectre and The Comedian and the head of the FBI’s anti-vigilante task force, as the feds’ representative to investigate Sheriff Crawford’s death, helps pull back our perspective a bit.
We see someone who treats Keane Jr. (who, I’m a little ashamed to admit, I just now realized is likely the son of the author of the original anti-superhero act) with contempt for his ambition and politicking rather than admiration and respect. We see someone who cuts through the protective veneer that the Tulsa police force has erected around itself, quickly getting secret identities, “racist detectors”, and closed ranks local communities in and intuitive, almost causal way. And we see someone who casts explicit doubt on masked cops being any different than the masks vigilantes she’s developed a sincere contempt for over the years.
So much of Watchmen’s early going has been steeped in Angela’s perspective on this community, on the threat the police are responding to, and on its major players. By filtering this now-familiar world through Laurie’s perspective, someone who comes with the authority of being an original Watchmen lead character out-of-universe and her family history in it, it gives the whole situation a different spin. Like the feds descending on a town with very specific power balances and investigating a ground-shaking murder in Twin Peaks, Laurie and her junior associate arriving in Tulsa gives us one more reason to question the rightness of what’s going here, on either side of the thin blue line.
In a much more direct sense, we’re left to wonder what’s going on either side of Adiran Veidt’s property. To be frank, “She Was Killed by Space Junk” more or less stops dead in the middle to check in with him. We see our most tactile outing with “the smartest man in the world” yet, watching as he draws up blueprints, sews and severs, and eventually creates a suit for one of his automatons to “explore the great beyond.’ That is, until, the experiment fails and his efforts to rectify it leave him running afoul of “The Game Warden.”
That leads me to my (admittedly somewhat out there theory): What if Ozymandias is on Mars? What if Veidt’s “captivity” as described in the letter, is him being transported somewhere by Dr. Manhattan, the erstwhile game warden, so as not to be subject to any threats or investigations on Earth. And now, Veidt is trying to test the limits of his gilded cage and see if he can make it out of his enclosure. There’s a bizarre, separateness to every part of Veidt’s story so far, something that seems itching for a big reveal to let everything fall into place, and that’s the best stab I can make at it so far.
But apart from my grand theorizing, Veidt’s interlude still seems like a detour from the major story of the episode in the from of Laurie arriving in Tulsa, sizing up Angela, and proving herself a formidable presence in the town and in the series. Part of how the show establishes that is with some of its best action sequences and most taught moments of tension.
That comes in the early scene, where Laurie smokes out a Batman-esque masked adventurer by tipping him off to a bank robbery, having her team be the bank robbers, and then springing the trap on him. It’s a great way to establish Laurie’s take-no-crap bona fides, her ability to get into the heads of the vigilantes, and her brutal sense of justice with her willingness to shoot the target in the back (with the implication that she didn’t necessarily know his body armor would stop the bullet).
And you see it at Sheriff Crawford’s funeral, where a member of the Seventh Kavalry (explicitly made a Klan equivalent in the text), tries to hold Senator Keane Jr. hostage with a suicide vest he claims is connected to his heart. Laurie doesn't hesitate, just grabs the ankle-holstered gun she snuck in and pops the guy in the head, with the bullet inches away from the senator. Turns out the hostage-taker was telling the truth, and Angela has to drag his corpse into the grave and push Crawford’s coffin on top of it to stifle the explosion. It’s a hell of a set piece, showing the two women’s capabilities when they work together, even if their exchange later in the episode shows them at odd.
But it also shows Laurie in line with someone unexpected -- her father. The woman we meet decades after the events of the original comic has taken her father’s surname, and with it, his worldview. Like her dad, she now works for the government, calling masked adventurers “jokes” and does the bidding of the FBI. Like her dad, she thinks all of the noble-minded vigilanteism is bullshit. And like her dad, she’s seen too much, done too much, lost too much, that to be anything but caustic would be too painful.
That’s why the piece de resistance of “She Was Killed by Space Junk” is the frame element of the episode, where Laurie tells a joke (well, technically two jokes) to Dr. Manhattan through a box that’s theoretically sending the message to him on Mars. It sums up her nihilism, where no matter whether you’ve done good, done bad, or don’t recognize the distinction, everyone’s going to hell anyway, so you may as well act accordingly.
Her tears on the phone, her final laugh at the absurdity of the car that falls out of the sky, signify the ascendance of someone who still remembers falling in love with Jon Osterman, who still laments that Dan Dreiberg is (apparently) in jail, and who has assumed the mantle of The Comedian, in deed if not in name. The original Watchmen was about the toll that a life of masked adventuring would actually take on the heroes we so admired in the comics pages. “She Was Killed by Space Junk”, then, is about the toll the events of Watchmen would take on the people who lived through it. Through the character of Laurie, and Smart’s tremendous performance, we see The Comedian’s legacy rearing its ugly head, long after the man himself, and the events his death spurred, have been laid to rest.