1x04 If You Don't Like My Story, Write Your Own

[7.1/10] Sometimes shows write their themes on their sleeves. You’d be hard-pressed to miss the ideas of life and death, creation and destruction and legacy, on display in “If You Don’t Like My Story, Write Your Own.” From the repeated egg motifs, to the family who trade their land for a baby, to breakfast table discussions of the afterlife or lack thereof, to family trees, to “milenium clocks”, to...whatever the hell Veidt is doing with his clone staff, there’s a strong throughline of what lives and lasts in this one.

The catch is that it doesn't amount to much yet. This is Watchmen at its most mystery box-ish, giving us loaded conversations with characters that offer cryptic hints of things to come, but which don’t explain anything or put the cards on the table. I enjoy a good mystery as much as anyone, but “Write Your Own” doesn't have much in the way of new developments or new details to chew on, let alone scenes that are compelling on a standalone basis, which makes this the weakest outing so far.

What do we learn here? Well, we’re introduced to Lady Trieu, which is something. Each of these episodes has added a major character to the roster, so to speak, and given that she seems like a major player, that’s not nothing. She shares Angela’s Vietnamese heritage ([spoiler]Mrs. Bloom guessed that maybe she’s another Comedian offspring?). She has the money and technology to give an infertile couple a child and the ethical looseness to do it without their consent. She has a connection to Ozymandias (though one that is also seeming less than fully consensual), and she’s in league with William Reeves.

Those are all noteworthy details and connections, but right now, it doesn't tell us very much because Watchmen still wants to play things very coy. What do she and Reeves want? What’s their connection? What’s the deal with the asteroid in the cold open and her nebulous connection to Veidt? The original comic kept a number of revelations close to the vest as well, but even when it wasn’t advancing the plot, it was advancing the characters, and here it seems like everyone else is running in place.

Angela breaks into the museum and finds out that...William Reeves is her grandfather. That’s cool (albeit pretty meaningless since we don’t really know why William wants her to know that part of her history), and the acorn/family tree sequence is pretty to look at. But we more or less already knew that from the automated phone call in episode two. And we don’t need Angela to give an emotional exposition monologue (something the episode vaguely calls itself out for) to understand how she feels about the situation.

What’s more interesting is the cat and mouse game Sister Night is playing with Laurie. On the one hand, Angela is torn up about the discoveries she made about Sheriff Crawford. Finding a Klan robe, she’s questioning her loyalties more than she ever would have done before, considering their closeness. But at the same time, she wants to keep the details from the Feds, not trusting the outsiders to play fair with what they find, even as Laurie is smart enough and good enough at the detective work to be figuring it out on her own.

At the same time, Angela doesn't want Laurie arresting William Reeves, and destroying her chance to know more about that familial connection, one she protests not to be care about but which clearly motivates her. In an episode that ties closely into notions of what it means to have children, in many different forms, the episode wants to explore how that uncovered branch of the tree affects what Sister Night has defined as her purpose.

Purpose is, on Ozymandias’s account, the thing lacking in Mr. Phillips and Ms. Crookshanks, the automaton servants that we learn are harvested from lobster traps and grown in some sort of weird, biogenetic microwave. That in and of itself is a revelation, alongside the detail that Veidt didn’t make these being himself and that they can be trained or revived rather quickly. But the more interesting part is the grotesqueness of it all.

There’s a callousness to Veidt’s treatment of his cloned(?) servants, something we saw in his play but which is driven home by the way he eats cakes and boogies while creatures that at least resemble humans cry out in pain, and the way he launches the corpses that resulted from his “rough night” into the sky via trebuchet. As Mrs. Bloom noted, there’s something vaguely Rick Sanchez like about all of this, someone who fancies himself the smartest man in the world being casually cruel to a form of life he doesn't really respect. In an episode that centers on how people see and treat their children, even a gilded cage version of Adrian Veidt has to suffer in the comparison.

That’s not the only weird, vaguely grotesque element in the episode. The show implies that Lady Trieu’s daughter is, in fact, her clone, or at least someone who carries her mother’s memories of being in Vietnam. There’s the strange “lube man” who spied Sister Night disposing of evidence and slipped their way down into the sewers. And there’s the whole egg motif, where even the opening logo card is a little drippy and gross.

The catch is that “Write Your Own” doesn't coalesce into a greater whole despite being unified with a rough motif and dose of unexplained weirdness. Instead, it’s content to coast on the fact that two-thirds of the way through the story, you’re probably going to stick around to see what happens next, and so it can take an episode to spin its wheels and drop a few fuzzy clues without having to pull the trigger on its major events just yet. At this point in the season, Watchmen has introduced its conflict and established its major characters, but can’t quite dive headlong into its endgame just yet. What results is an episode of water-treading, where no amount of ominous speeches can make up for the fact that this one feels more interstitial than propulsive, stuck between the series’ own beginning and end, as it tries to contemplate the same for the young, the old, and the world as we know it.