[7.5/10] The big question for any legacy sequel/revival is simple -- does it feel enough like the original? And the answer for X-Men ‘97” is...sort of!
The animation is weird, man. Sometimes, it’s tremendous. The sequence where our heroes plummet from the sky amid a Sentinel attack, replete with last minute rescues and an eye-blast landing from Cyclops, is kinetic and thrilling as all hell. The throwdown with Master Mold and his coterie of malevolent automatons gets the blood pumping with all sorts of cool X-Men powers on display. And there are plenty of “This makes no sense, but it’s made of awesome, so it gets a pass” moments like Beast controlling one of the bots from the inside. In terms of raw octane, the animators get it done.
But hoo boy, the character animation is all over the place. Sometimes the X-Men have an expressiveness that outstrips the original show, and sometimes they feel like bizarre stiff corpses who are being electrified at random intervals. Jubilee and Sunspot’s dance is particularly jarring with the strangeness of their movements. Quiet scenes often veer into the uncanny with a strange combination of the under-animated and over-animated parts of the show that can either wow you or repel you from moment to moment.
The truth is that the powers that be were always going to have to update the animation, if only to go to a widescreen format. And despite sporting some iconic designs (which have been suitably updated), the original X-Men animated series wasn’t necessarily the peak of animation either. But this is certainly different, and not always in a good way.
The same goes for the voices and the pacing. Many of the original voice actors have passed on. The ones who remain have obviously aged in the (gulp) three decades since X-Men originally ran. Their replacements vary in quality. Ray Chase does a remarkable job replicating the original Cyclops. Jennifer Hale is an outstanding voice actress, but doesn’t necessarily sound much like her predecessor. Cal Dodd, Lenore Zann, and George Buza are all a bit off as Wolverine, Rogue, and Beast respectively, which makes sense given changes in voices and performance styles in the last thirty years. But Alison Sealy-Smith’s Storm hasn’t missed a beat.
Meanwhile JP Karliak’s Morph and A.J. LoCascio’s Gambit are able replacements for the originals, despite other new voices not quite hitting the mark. And despite playing a character who's new to the series, the actor who plays Sunspot is flat and unconvincing to the point that you wonder how the performance made it in a professional production. But the voice acting in the original show wasn’t always sterling, so hopefully things improve from here.
Likewise, “To Me, My X-Men” occasionally feels like a bunch of scenes slapped together rather than a cohesive story that builds and ties everything together. Again, that was sometimes an issue with the original show, so I can't fault its 97 equivalent too much for that. But the pacing is different, both in individual scenes and the episode as a whole. It’s hard to pin down, but there’s a certain anime vibe to the presentation, a different style and approach, that stands out relative to the 90s predecessor.
And yet, despite my gripes about the craft and the presentation, I appreciate the threads that “To Me, My X-Men” picks up. One of the long-running threads of the prior series was Scott Summers wrestling with what it means to be the X-Men, and even how it would feel to do the job in Xavier’s absence. Picking that back up, having him torn between walking in Professor X’s shoes versus leaving the X-Mansion to raise his child(!) with Jean, is a strong emotional throughline for the episode that connects with past events well.
Well, more or less. Look, it’s been more than a quarter century for most viewers. The creative team understandably wants to catch viewers up. So there’s a certain sense of “Hey, here’s everybody’s deal!” to the episode. Wolverine’s still sweet on Jean and snippy with Scott. Rogue’s still plagued by her inability to make contact with others, but has a certain amiable concordance with Gambit despite that. Beast still dispenses literary quotations with ease, and Jubilee still laments not getting to the fly the jet. If you haven't done a rewatch, or lived on the memes, there’s plenty here to introduce the characters and their dynamic.
I especially appreciate the re-addition of Morph, who was one of my favorite characters from the original series, and who adds to the team dynamic in the current one. His shapeshifting powers are a nice way to invoke everyone from Archangel to Blob to Professor X himself without having to actually include those characters. And his shit-stirring personality remains intact. Likewise, Bishop doesn’t do much beyond join the fray, but it’s nice to have such a frequent collaborator be a part of the regular team as well.
Granted, there’s a lot of exposition here. You kind of expect that, given the gap in time between seasons, so to speak. And it’s nice for the show to pick things up with Gyrich and Trask and the Friends of Humanity and the Sentinels, even if it involves a lot of “As you know”-type dialogue to get lapsed viewers back up to speed. You can pretty readily see the seams of this being a relaunch, with all the table-setting and throat clearing that entails.
All of that said, I appreciate the ways “To Me, My X-men” parallels the first episode of the 1992 series with some suitable twists and new wrinkles. We return to a conflict between the X-Men and the sentinels. They face down the same villains. They solve the same sort of mystery. They face the same sort of prejudices they did before.
Only this time, Cyclops is in charge and having to figure out how to balance principle and practicality. This time, they’re already a family that must be held together, rather than recalcitrant individuals who need to come together. And most movingly, now it’s Jubilee who’s helping to take in a lost soul struggling with their powers, speaking to what the X-Men did for her and her self-esteem when they took her in amid the prior series’ premiere. That's a nice way to mark how far Jubilee has come (in a better fashion than the original show’s Xmas special), and to start things anew in the same spirit, with her as an ambassador for what Xavier’s School for the Gifted can do for someone.
X-Men ‘97 seems to carry on that spirit. I can't pretend it gets everything right. Some of the changes are jarring, or downright strange. But this feels enough like the X-Men I knew and loved growing up. It pushes the right nostalgia buttons, while taking a few risks to move things forward and recognize the changes that have taken place, in television and society, in the last thirty years. Given the strife and prejudice of the day, the X-Men are more salient than ever, and being more than a mere tribute, X-Men ‘97 seems to recognize that. The angles aren’t always clean and the seams sometimes show, but in its opening hour at least, “To Me, My X-Men” is a quality retrofit, ready for new purpose.
[9.4/10] When I watched the first batch of episodes from Watchmen, I thought it tossed a number of interesting balls into the air, but I questioned how and if it would be able to catch them all. Showrunner Damon Lindelof, of Lost fame, is not necessarily known for delivering satisfying endings. And while his series asked all sorts of intriguing questions about the institutions of power and those marginalized by them, and while it threw in one eyebrow raising plot point after another, to answer all of the former, and tie together all the latter, seemed like too much for even the smartest (person) in the world to do in a satisfying fashion.
And yet “See How They Fly” somehow does it.
The finale of Watchmen’s first (and, blue god willing, only) season tells us what Lady Trieu’s angle is, how it fits with the Seventh Kavalry’s plot, how Ozymandias factors into it, what Dr. Manhattan’s role is, how it intersects with Will Reeves’s plans, and what Angela Abar’s place in these grand events is. It tells a story of so many people seeking power, seeking vindication, seeking adoration, and then puts it in the hands of the one person who wasn’t looking for it.
It also allows us to understand not only the plot mechanics that led to the second momentous rain of squid of sky, but the motivations of everyone who reached that point. The racist, status quo-preserving rationale behind the Seventh Kavalry’s scheme has been clear for some time now. But “See How They Fly” accounts for the consequences of Cal Abar’s moment of reflex on the White Night. It accounts for the collection of watch batteries from the pilot. And it accounts for their failure, the assumption that they’ve thought it all out and have all the right answers. The truth, however, someone much smarter is pulling the strings, and even left to their own literal devices, the forces of Cyclops would have turned themselves to mush anyway.
That someone is Lady Trieu, and in Watchmen’s last character-defining, plot twist-revealing vignette, it sets her up as Adrian Veidt’s inheritor. She is, through one enterprising refugee’s machinations, his daughter, one who has matched, if not exceeded, his genius. She is playing the Seventh Kavalry, letting them do the dirty work of capturing Dr. Manhattan so that she can dispose of them and localize him in one fell swoop. It is another instance of a Veidt being one step ahead.
But we understand, for the first time, why Lady Trieu is doing this. She claims that it’s to better the world, to use the power that Dr. Manhattan sits on to eliminate the world’s nuclear arsenals, to clean the air, to fix all that ails us. But she does not seek that goal for pure altruism and, like her father, she’s shown a disturbing propensity to use whatever means are necessary if her goals are just. Instead, the episode suggests that all of this is an effort to impress her parents, to gain their approval, to show herself worthy of the gifts that she’s been given and to prove that she can build herself up to the highest heights of human achievement on her own, as Ozymandias challenged her to do.
But it’s Ozymandias who thwarts her. He declares that she cannot be trusted because she suffers from the same sins he does: vanity and self-aggrandizement. He tells his compatriots that she has to be stopped because she’ll soon demand that everyone bow down before her, because he knows it to be true of itself. And in one of the many little bits of irony and connection in the episode and the season, he uses the frozen corpses of the veritable offspring of his giant squid to crush his daughter, must as he used the frozen corpses of Dr. Manhattan’s children to ask her for help.
There’s two ways to read that scene. The first is as a rare moment of self-recognition in Veidt, knowing what he would do with that power and why, given the hell he’s been through, where it would lead, to the point that he resolves to stop it. The second is another instance of, true to the show’s themes, a white male going to great lengths to preserve the status quo and prevent a person of color from overtaking his position and assuming his legacy.
Either way, the triumph if brief for Veidt. Whether his pronouncements are accurate for Lady Trieu, they’re true for himself. Ozymandias seeks veneration and adoration. He got to save the world, but grumbled miserably for decades because he never got to take credit for it, never got his due from the people he put in power or the lives he preserved. On Europa, he had the thing he always wanted -- endless appreciation and devotion from all those around him -- but it was given reflexively, without due, and thus became hollow and even maddening. And in the end, he saves the world once more, and gets to take credit for it, both for now and for 1985, but it’s also his downfall.
That’s the other cruel irony and the button put on the stories of Laurie Blake and Looking Glass. After everything, the two of them decide to arrest Veidt for the lives lost amid his gambit from the original comic. For Wade Tillman, it’s enacting justice against the man who wrecked so much of his life, who left him so scared for so long, in the name of a well-intentioned lie, but a bloody lie nonetheless. For the former Ms. Juspeczyk, it’s the chance for her to have agency in this story, to take charge rather than be more of a bystander to larger forces as she was in 1985, given time to reflect on what happened and her place in it. And for Ozymandias himself, it’s the price he pays for being known, the music he must face for returning home, the cost he finally has to account for instead of his gilded cage of anonymity.
But the thing that he and his daughter share is that they’re not able to thwart a god. Even though Dr. Manhattan is trapped in his lithium prison, even though he’s mentally disoriented from whatever Keene Jr. and Trieu have done to him, he still has the wherewithal to transport away the people whom he knows can stop this, and to spend his last moments with the woman he loves. If Ozymandias was sent to his own private hell, Jon Osterman spends his final seconds on this Earth in his own private Heaven, experiencing all of his best moments with Angela at once.
As much as Watchmen is a story about racism and its institutional infestation, as much as it’s about masks and what happens when people put them on, it’s also a story about love. It is, as the episode name-drops, another thermodynamic miracle in the making, of two people coming together despite lightyears of distance between them, and the way it changes the world.
That change takes a little dealmaking though. William Reeves gives Dr. Manhattan up to Lady Trieu in exchange for her rooting out and eliminating Cyclops. But Cal very probably knew what the result would be, even suggested the trade to Hooded Justice. Reeves’s plan was to stop the organization he’d been fighting for nearly a century. Dr. Manhattan had even bigger plans, ones that may have widened even Will Reeves’s aspirations here.
As the season’s penultimate episode portended, Dr. Manhattan left something behind for his wife, a piece of himself that would give her godlike powers. In the final scene of the episode, she consumes it, and while the episode ends too tantalizingly soon before she can walk on water, the implication is clear.
So many people in this episode reached toward Dr. Manhattan this season, so many aiming to replicate him or supplant him or best him. But the person who receives his abilities is not someone who sought it out. It’s someone who it was given to, who it was earned by, through her capacity to love, for her capacity to try to save what might be unsaveable, for her willingness to fight and appreciate what’s lovely and wonderful even if it’s only fleeting.
But it’s also someone who has awoken to the injustices that lie under her nose. When Will Reeves offers some comfort and commiseration to his granddaughter, it comes with one admonition -- that for all Dr. Manhattan did, he could have done more. THey’re the words of a man who seems to know what’s coming. His project, and the project of Lindelof’s Watchmen, was to show an awakening in Angela, an internal transition from someone who believed, like Reeves himself once did, that the systems could be fixed from the inside, that they could be welcoming to and changed by people who looked like them, but that the color of law was never going to supersede the color of their skin in the people who tried to hold onto the power that badge conferred. Hers is a tale of epiphany, of understanding, of an insidiousness in the institutions she risked her life to protect that was, unbeknownst to her, ready to chew her up and spit her out like it had done so many others.
So she takes the power that would never be willingly forsaken by those who possess it. It is, in its own subtle way, a radical message. It’s radical because it ties in with a moral that David Simon, who chronicled faltering institutions himself on The Wire once put it, that when those institutions have fully failed you, the only thing left to do is pick up a brick. Will Reeves couldn’t find justice from the police department or the sterling heroes that were supposed to help him, so he found it himself, often in bloody terms. Watchmen firmly suggests that these institutions retain the same debilitating stink of racism in 2019 that they did during the time of Black Wall Street, and ends with Angela Abar picking up one hell of a brick.
The way Angela’s son looks at her own mask, much as William Reeves’s son did his, suggests (as Watchmen inevitably must) that this cycle isn’t over, that the age of heroes and vigilantes and those who’ve suffered trauma finding a way to exercise it in the name of justice isn’t over just yet. Topher has suffered his fair share of trauma today, and long before. When Ozymandias kills The Game Warden, his erstwhile servant asks him why he made him wear a mask, and Veidt responds that masks make men cruel. Only time will tell whether Angela’s son will don the same type of hood his mother and great grandfather did, if he will mete out justice with the same sort of cruelty, and on whom.
But the other way that Watchmen is radical come in whose hands it puts the responsibility and the ability to obtain that justice. While superhero stories can come in many stripes, most often they are a power fantasy. A strapping hero, often one the reader or viewer can see themselves in, fights for truth and justice and the American way with a force and a level of excitement that the muddy grays and grim realities of the real world can’t match. It is, if not as radical as the show’s political message, then certainly bold, for the show to declare in Angela’s raw egg cocktail and first, tenuous step, that it’s time for a change in who gets to assume those power fantasies.
It is remarkable, then, how well this show puts everyone in place and builds, thematically and narratively, to that moment. In the end, Watchmen finds a reason to bring everyone of significance to the show’s story and themes into the same location, as though each vignette and sequence we witnessed led to this moment. It reaches its climax at the same place it started, in what was once Black Wall Street and the theater where young Will Reeves saw a black hero in a mask and borrowed his name and mission. For a show that, from its first frame, asked probing questions about who holds power, how that intersects with the color of law, and who gets to be inspired by the power fantasies of masked adventures, it answers all three with a woman of color about to walk on water.
Each setup had a payoff and each payoff had a setup. Almost every seeming loose end is weaved together by the final frame. There are still queries that can be raised, objections that could be lodged, but everything that the series set up it knocked down. It seems too easy to say -- for a show that trod into such messy territory, that tugged on so many knotted threads of both the real world and its fictional one -- but there’s only one word to describe Watchmen and its ending. Clockwork.
[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.
[7.7/10] There are three versions of the same motif in “Martial Feats”, three moments when Angela has her arms wrapped around someone, supporting their weight, before something major, and a little insane, goes down.
The first is the most straightforward. She, along with Looking Glass and Red Scare, help pull Chief Crawford down from his noose. It is a moment where she is losing a father figure, seeing someone she trusted, who was family to her, taken away from her by vigilantes. There is profound pain in her eyes when she watches the body bag zipped up, and tries to remain calm rather than immediately taking her revenge on Nixontown, even as her brutal beatdown shows how much anger she’s holding under the surface.
The second is a flashback to the “White Night”, where she’s holding her husband close, playing and flirting in the final moments before Xmas. Until all of a sudden, a man in a Rorschach mask barges in and, in a harrowing scene, tries to kill her. The result is an explanation for her closeness with Chief Crawford, a shared survival of something hellacious that hit close to home, that emboldened them to stay in the fight despite tremendous risks, that brought them together as something closer and more significant than two officers on the same force.
And the third is her lifting Will into her car after placing him under arrest. It comes not only after she has learned that her Chief, the man she trusted, was hiding a Klan robe in his closet, something to undermine the faith and love she thought they shared, but also after she learns that this man who claims to have killed Judd Crawford is her biological grandfather. It is something to tear her world apart, to rewrite everything she thought she knew about someone close to her, and a reason to take seriously someone who claims to be his killer.
What does it all mean? Well I think the key is in the opening scene, where we see the development and distribution of a letter to black soldiers fighting in World War II, asking why they fight for a country that treats them as something lesser, that doesn't give them dignity despite serving under the same flag. It seems like that sparked something in (presumably) Will’s father, a realization that despite serving with and under their white counterparts, there was a different war to fight, a level of trust and respect they were not going to get, which gave him, and now gives Angela, reason to question the justness of the battles they’re fighting.
A third of the way through, the Watchmen T.V. series is about the murky intersection of race and politics and service and our national institutions. But it also seems to be about an awakening in Angela, one that opens her eyes to realities she thought she knew, of lines between black and white she thought she understood, that are starting to become much more blurred with the light Will’s little lantern is shining on them.
Much of that falls on Regina Hall to carry, and she does an outstanding job here. Whether it’s selling Angela’s surprise at the revelation about her grandfather, her responding with determination and resolve and tremendous pain after hearing about how many of her comrades were gunned down, her reserve curdling into vengeful anger at Nixontown, or her understanding, concerned interactions with her son, all give Hall a hell of an opportunity to show the different layers and shades she brings to this performance.
It’s also an episode that helps build out the world, fill in the blanks for little questions that we might have assumed we knew the answers to, but couldn’t know for sure. We see what exactly the “White Night” was and how it affected the relationship between the police and “The Cavalry.” We learn that Angela and her husband adopted the children of her old partner who was killed that night, something the kids’ grandfather (Jim Beaver!) is clearly none too pleased with.
And we learn more details about the “Redfordrations” -- the financial recompense offered by the U.S. government in response to the violence enacted against black people in America, including the Tulsa Massacre of Black Wallstreet depicted in the opening episode. I’m apt to slate Watchmen a little for resorting to pretty raw exposition for this, but holy hell, it’s hard to complain when they have Skip f’n Gates do it, and include a DNA test to boot. It’s a revelation that helps connect the show’s political themes to something concrete, an effort to portray a right wing backlash to a left wing government trying to take steps to make amends for the abhorrent things in our country’s past, and to establish Angela’s place within that maelstrom.
We also see Veidt trying to make good on Dr. Manhattan’s suggestion that he might try to create a little life on his own. Ozymandias is trying to recreate tomatoes, emotions, people, and seems to be coming up short each time. His part of the episode seems to take place separate and apart from all the other goings on, without much of even a thematic tie. But it’s an intriguing side-story, one of obsession with his old blue compatriot, and one of trying to find passion and, yes, life in something he can create and control.
And last, but not least, we get a look at the “American Hero” T.V. show, giving us a scene of Hooded Justice’s backstory that...well...looks a lot like the aesthetic and style of 2009 Zach Snyder film. I’m not sure if there’s a broader point here, beyond vaguely slating the earlier flick. But maybe the purpose (along with the FCC’s disavowal) is to show the way that these exploits are still being lionized, still meant to inspire and give a hagiography for a form of vigilante justice that has nuts in Rorschach masks going on organized cop killing sprees. It’s a form of justice that the likes of Nite Owl and Silk Spectre once believed in, folks who may have something to do with Will getting picked up and carried off into the night sky.
They’re the other image that comes to mind when I think of two people holding one another in the way that Angela holds her husband, her surrogate father, and her grandfather here. I think of Dan Dreiberg’s dream of the two of them in the nuclear apocalypse. I think of the newsstand owner and his younger reader reaching for one another amid the squid’s blast. I think of these people reaching for one another in these horrible situations, seeking that last bit of connection amid terrible events. And maybe that’s what Angela is waking up to, a human connection that alerts her to something rotten, something ominous, waiting just beyond the horizon.
[7.4/10] Watchmen is not a carbon copy, rehash, or recapitulation of, well, Watchmen, which is to say that the most admirable thing about this introduction to the television series is that it is clearly of the world and characters brought to life on the comic book page by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, clearly indebted to their approach and their style, but is also clearly its own thing. In an age where franchise extensions are ubiquitous and even nominally original films and T.V. shows offer reheated versions of familiar tropes, that in and of itself is refreshing.
That’s not to say that “It’s Summer and We’re Running Out of Ice”, that mouthful of a title for an opening episode, doesn't take pains to remind you what its inspiration and source material is. The catch, and the thing that makes the premiere a little more admirable than other late sequels, is that those references and remembrances have a twist that reminds you of what came before while channeling it into what’s happening now.
So you have the chance to see the iconography of smiley face through a classroom baking demonstration. You have the same circular visual motifs in aerial shots that create the tableau of a clock face. With that, you have an ambient sound track of ticks to make the audience nervous, for clocks and bombs and more, at the same time some characters literally verbalize the onomatopoeia. You have police cruising around in something akin to Nite Owl’s ship. You have a crowd of Rorschach worshippers quoting his most famous speech from the comic. You have, as promised in the final pages of the original graphic novel, the legacy of a Robert Redford presidency. You have little baby squid falling from the sky and concerns that batteries from old Dr. Manhattan-technology cause cancer. If you’re a fan of the original Watchmen, there’s plenty to latch onto here.
But the trick is how those homages are used -- as a bridge to the current setting and the exploration of topics that were, at best, tangential to what the original Moore/Gibbons comic were exploring. “It’s Summer” ends in the same way as the first issue of Watchmen started, with a murder mystery over the untimely death of a member of the old guard, and his blood dripping down on his pin of choice, only now, the victim is a police sergeant, not a masked vigilante, and the blood is dripping down onto his police badge, not the iconic yellow expression that’s come to represent so much.
And therein lies the difference, and what makes Lindelof’s Watchmen admirable. It’s using the same iconography and approach to get at something different, something timely about the tenuous connection between law enforcement and race and justice in the same way that nuclear annihilation was timely in the 1980s. It represents a transformation of Moore and Gibbons approach, something that channels their spirit, without just following a cookie cutter roadmap or reconjuring the same conflict and themes in a shiny new box.
I like that approach. I like the themes that Lindelof and company are chewing on in this opening stanza. I like the character at the center of the narrative. I like the concept of police identities being hidden and every interaction rigorously authorized and recorded as something to wrestle with. I like the notion of the post-squid attack United States having to deal with Rorschach-worshipping, hard right, conspiracy theorizing domestic terrorists as the legacy of *Watchmen*s most famous character.
I am intrigued (if a bit apprehensive) about how the typical dynamics are mixed and inverted, with the conservative white vigilantes going after a police force that, in this opening episode at least, prominently features African Americans. I like the bizarre dichotomy between Nixon and Redford as opposing symbols on that axis. I like an aged, secluded Ozymandias clearly still haunted by the memory of Dr. Manhattan.
I just don’t love the execution of all of that just yet. This is HBO, so everything looks pretty damn good. There’s a slickness to the production, a fluidity to the action scenes, and an attention to detail in the cinematography and production design that let you know this is a high class production. There is style here and competence here, reflected in the quality of the shots, the construction of the world, and the performers enlisted to bring it all to life.
And yet there’s something oddly soulless about it all. For touching on such hot topics, and channeling such a well-felt story, “It’s Summer” struggles to feel like a real human story, rather than one of metaphors and abstractions finding convenient purchase in various characters. Pilots are tough, needing to introduce the major personalities, places, and conflicts of the story, and this one does it all ably, on top of drawing noticeable but not over the top connections to its inspiration. But there’s little here that grabs you with its realness instead of tapping you on the shoulder with its intriguing but strangely detached vibe.
Still, there’s enough here to chew on, and enough promise to keep coming back.# Watchmen the T.V. series gives away the game a bit in its 1921 silent film opening, giving us a cinematic throwback to match “Tales of the Black Freighter” from the comic. It’s a story about who can lay claim to being the arbiter of justice, who can rightfully wear a mask, and who can be treated and as worthy of enforcing the law in a time and place where racial tensions and disparities make that suspect. That’s what Lindelof and company want to get at in this, and their focus on the 1921 Tulsa ravaging of the black community that gets the son of one of the perpetrators hanged almost a century later, one who seems to have far more but overcome his father’s prejudices, it sets a tone for a show ready to touch a nerve, to challenge its audience, to get at the heart of current cultural divisions in this country.
It remains to be seen whether addressing those issues is enough to make up a compelling story, let alone one that carries the mantle of one of the definitive literary works of the twentieth century. Still, “It’s Summer” promises a series that takes its cues from the original Watchmen, but aims to emulate its spirit, not just its beats, which makes it worth seeing through beyond this first, solid but unspectacular outing.
