I have watched HBO’s “Watchmen” twice, from beginning to end, and both times, I could never get comfortable. I loved the actors, loved the message of the show (I genuinely learned a lot about American history through this show, so bravo there), of course I was over the moon for the music, and I was dazzled by its bravura interactions with its source material. But despite all that, I kept hearing this voice in the back of my head say: something’s not right here.
After two viewings, I’ve isolated what I think are the two main reasons I had a negative gut reaction. I’m going to describe them, then I’ll provide examples when both happened. The first section is Spoiler-Free, the second obviously is not.
QUALIFIERS:
-I’m not saying “Watchmen” is bad or that I don’t like it. I’m saying it’s admirable but significantly flawed.
-The episodes “This Extraordinary Being” and “A God Walks Into Abar” are nearly unimpeachable, and almost none of this applies to them. And “Little Fear of Lightning,” now that I think about it.
SECTION ONE: THE PROBLEMS (SPOILER-FREE)
1. LOGICAL LAZINESS. “Watchmen” is fond of breaking its own rules, making its characters do dumb things that don’t line up with their goals/personalities, and leaving plot lines unfinished. The viewer can feel this stuff as they’re watching, even when they can’t articulate why. It’s like standing in a house where the foundations are shaking; you feel something is wrong long before you know what’s causing it.
2. INCOMPLETE CHARACTER ARCS. “Watchmen” has great characters (both those originating in the comic and the ones they invented), who are cast perfectly and played by great actors. But many of them don’t really go anywhere or grow in any interesting ways. At first, that assertion may seem wrong, because SO MUCH happens to them over the course of the show. But peel back the sound and fury a little bit, look closer, and what you discover is that the fundamental things that make a story go, the key pieces of what good drama is, are often absent. Lindelof and company are constantly going for the dunk and the three-pointer, and they hit a few of them, but in the process they keep forgetting to dribble the damn ball.
SECTION TWO: PROVING IT (SPOILERS FROM HERE OUT)
1. LOGICAL LAZINESS EXAMPLES:
- THE WHEELCHAIR. When Angela Abar encounters Will Reeves for the first time (outside her shop), and again when he’s under the tree after killing Judd Crawford, he’s in a wheelchair. A big deal is made of this: how can an old guy in a wheelchair kill a healthy chief of police? A few episodes later, in a move that is disastrously cliche at this point, we see Will Reeves again, and… dun dun dun, he’s walking around with no need of a wheelchair. He’s a little creaky (he is over 100, after all), but save for flashbacks, he never uses a wheelchair again. So why was he in it in the first place? The show never says. If he specifically chose to be in a wheelchair when he meets Angela, that needed to be explained. If he needs it some times and not others, it’s not clear why he needed it then, when he was more physically active in other scenes. I suspect the reality is that he was in the wheelchair because it made for a cool image (police chief killed by man in wheelchair how??), and he stood up out of the wheelchair because THAT was a cool image too (he can walk!). But the character had no reason to behave that way, or if he did, the show did not come close to adequately explaining it. The guy either needs a wheelchair, or he doesn’t, or he needs it sometimes and not others, but he can’t need it when it makes for a cool shot and then not need it when another cool shot pops up, especially when the logic of the scenes he’s in wouldn’t align his usage of it that way. And frankly, I’m not even inclined to give them the benefit of the “Lots Of People Use Wheelchairs Non-Exclusively” argument, because they chose to make his not needing one a reveal, and once they pulled that reveal, they never put him back in it (except during flashbacks).
- WILL REEVES’ PLAN. While we’re on the subject of this guy, his plan for his granddaughter makes not one iota of sense. Every part of it is just a character being cryptic for cryptic’s sake, and you can get away with that while the audience is in the dark, but eventually the light comes in. Let’s look closely at his actions: right before the imminent, violent death of his granddaughter’s husband (why wait until now??), Will decides to arrive in Tulsa and announce his existence to his long-lost granddaughter by slaughtering a good friend of hers, then refuses to explain why he did it even though he easily could have with no negative consequences on any other part of his plan. He has no way of knowing how she’ll react to this (more on that later), and for all he knows, he’ll be arrested and never have a chance to tell Angela anything. Then he doesn’t tell her who he is, even though he has no reason not to and his ultimate goal is for her to know, which means her knowing can’t harm any other plans he might have. Will/the show justifies this cryptic nonsense by insisting that if Angela knew the whole truth, it would blow her mind, so it had to be fed to her piece by piece. But that doesn’t square. Will knows at this point that his granddaughter is married to Doctor Manhattan, knows she lost her parents in a violent accident, knows she’s a cop/crime fighter in Tulsa, and it’s likely he knows she survived the White Night massacre. Does he really think a person with these credentials can’t handle “I’m your grandfather?” Especially after Doctor Manhattan assured him Angela wanted family in her life. Come on. And then it keeps getting worse. Will wants Angela to know his “origin story” as he later puts it, but rather than write his experiences down, or find some proof he can present to her, he leaves her a jar of pills which he knows are so dangerous that they’ve been pulled off the market. He leaves her no instructions for what to do with/make of them, even though there’s no reason he couldn’t say, “These are Nostalgia pills. You should take them!” Also, taking someone else’s Nostalgia is dangerous! He could be harming his granddaughter by telling her to do it, which doesn’t feel like something a grandfather would do when he probably has other ways of explaining himself. The more you look at it, the more nothing Will does makes sense. He’s a textbook example of writing to the moment to the detriment of the bigger picture.
- ANGELA’S REACTION TO WILL. My final note relative to Will and his plan. At the end of the pilot, Angela gets a call from someone summoning her to the tree where Judd has been murdered, and she finds an old man in a wheelchair there. It’s a great ending to a great pilot episode. But almost immediately, things go haywire. Angela’s reaction is to roll Will back to her secret lair, lie to her superior officers, and cover up crucial evidence in the solving of her close friend’s murder so that she can get to the bottom of it on her own. Why on God’s green Earth does she do this? Some people might answer, “She’s trying to protect her grandfather!” But she doesn’t know Will is her grandfather yet. Others might say, “She’s suspicious about Judd!” But she isn’t yet. See, this is the problem: Angela starts behaving like she has information before she has it. Once she knows who Will is and/or discovers suspicious evidence about Judd, these actions would make perfect sense, but before that point, they’re totally out of step with her character. She’s taking huge personal and professional risks for no reason. At this point, she wants to solve Judd’s murder, so why is she making it harder for the police to do that? Another defense could be, “She’s mad about Judd and wants to get revenge!” But even that’s wrong. The show gives us plenty of examples of Angela’s willingness to use–ahem–enhanced interrogation to find out what she wants to know, but she doesn’t here. She’s tentative with Will, as if she already knows he’s important, but she has no way of knowing. The phone call was weird, sure, but nothing in it was incriminating or suggested there was a deeper layer that was personally relevant to her. The first time I watched it, I remember thinking, “She’s acting weird. Why is she doing this stuff? Why isn’t she angrier that Judd’s dead?” I just could not square Angela’s decision making during these scenes, and that disconnected me from the story at a crucial moment.
- ADRIAN VEIDT’S OBVIOUS ISOLATION. This is a smaller one, but I would like to point out that Adrian Veidt is supposed to be about as brilliant as anyone ever born, and it seems odd that he asked Doctor Manhattan to teleport him to Europa right after giving him a device that he knows will nullify Doctor Manhattan’s abilities, but gives no thought to whether he should have a way to get back or some kind of backup plan. I mean sure, he thinks he’s going to paradise, but still! This one didn’t bug me until the second viewing, so I’m kinda letting it go, but the burden of “brilliant” characters is they really shouldn’t do stuff like this.
- DOCTOR MANHATTAN’S DISGUISE. This one in particular frustrates me. “Watchmen’s” big twist is that Doctor Manhattan, who appears to be on Mars, is really Angela’s husband, Cal, in disguise and using a device to intentionally obscure his powers and knowledge of who he is. That’s fine, but the problem is, early in the season, Angela and Cal have a discussion where they emphatically state that Doctor Manhattan CANNOT pose as other people. Period. It’s not stated as an opinion, or a theory, but as fact, cold and hard, as declarative as ANY rule stated on the show. And it was utter BS, not just Angela lying to Cal, but the writers lying to us. This is a cardinal sin of twists. You’re supposed to FOOL the audience, lure them into an assumption you never actually stated outright, then pull the rug. The pleasure of a good twist is almost always “why didn’t I see it??” But there’s no art in just saying, “Here’s how it is… PSYCH!!! WOW YOU’RE STUPID.” Let me put it another way: imagine a version of “The Sixth Sense” where the twist ending remains as it is. But, midway through, Bruce Willis goes to the doctor, and the doctor says, “Congratulations, you are a healthy, definitely ALIVE person.” How lame would that be? I mean, no one would see the twist coming, but that’s because it would now be IMPOSSIBLE to see it coming. That’s why what “Watchmen” did was cheap. The writers were SO DESPERATE to not get out-gamed by the internet hive-mind that they essentially shouted “look over there!” and moved the chess pieces around. They cheated, plain and simple.
- WHAT WAS LADY TRIEU WAITING FOR? At the top of the fourth episode, Lady Trieu buys a farm from a middle-aged couple because she’s eagerly awaiting something that crash-lands right on their property. Of course, you don’t see what it was, but you assume you’ll find out later. Nope. Never do. The show leaves that thread completely dangling, after going to exhaustive lengths to set it up. Lindelof has confirmed in interviews that it was supposed to be Veidt’s ship, but why the hell does his ship crash? How were we supposed to know that’s what it was? And even letting that go for a moment, Lady Trieu would not need to buy someone’s house to get her own crashed ship back. That’s just inane. If NASA crashes a satellite in my front yard, do you really think NASA has to buy my house to get it back? Also, the notion that Trieu would go to the trouble of cloning a baby for two strangers rather than just, I don’t know, snatching the damn ship and hiring some lawyers if she gets sued is exactly the kind of hazy, non-rigorous decision making that drives me CRAZY about this show.
- I HAVE MORE, BUT I’M GOING TO STOP HERE. YOU GET THE IDEA. And before you say it, no, this isn’t nit-picking, and it isn’t true that all superhero shows have flaws like this (they don’t). This isn’t me gut-checking “Star Wars” for having sound in space. I’m not Neil deGrasse Tyson. What I’m pointing out is moments where the story fails to be consistent with itself. Characters say they have one goal, then do something that is opposite. Rules are established, then broken. And look, I get that a lot of you didn’t notice this stuff, or don’t care about it now that I’ve laid it out, and that’s fine. If it didn’t bother you, then it didn’t bother you. But it bothered me. Some of this I noticed right away, some occurred to me when I sat down and thought about it, or when I watched the show again. But both times through, I had this nagging sense that the math wasn’t adding up with what I was seeing, and that made it hard for me to trust the writers, believe in the world, and engage in the story. You cannot dismiss that as nit-picking.
2. INCOMPLETE CHARACTER ARCS:
- ANGELA. Angela is the heart of the show, and a fantastic character, wonderfully played by Regina King. I’d watch five more seasons of Sister Night roaming the streets, doling out justice. And yet, even though the show throws TONS of plot at her, they fail to move her from A to B in any interesting way. She arrives at the end of season one basically identical to the person she was at the beginning. Sure, her husband is dead, she might be a god, and she’s got a grandfather now, but these are circumstantial, external changes. It’s like moving a character to a new city and saying “Wow, they’ve grown!” Inside, at her core, she hasn’t been challenged, evolved or pushed in any interesting way. Also, I was frustrated by how passive and reactive she was forced to be at the beginning of the show, fumbling around inside her grandfather’s overwrought “origin story” with no interesting drive of her own. And I was even more annoyed when she was relegated to the passenger seat for the entire climax of the show, while Lady Trieu, 7K, Adrian Veidt and Doctor Manhattan duked it out. She seriously just sits there and watches for the entire last episode, and the few moments she is allowed to get active are contextualized as meaningless except for how they emotionally affect her husband. Nothing that happens to her is a challenge to anything about her. Having a grandfather who was the first superhero is just information, it isn’t really good or bad. Ditto for Judd being a white supremacist; it’s terrible, but it has no effect on her other than momentary shock. Angela is the best character on the show, but she’s rendered frustratingly unimportant by a plot that turns entirely around Cal/Doctor Manhattan. She’s basically just collateral damage in her own story. That’s why her final scenes with Will are so uninteresting to watch. They have nothing to really talk about. Don’t believe me? What are Will’s last lines to Angela about? Are they about her, how she’s changed, or how a choice she made had ramifications, or their relationship? Nope. Will’s last lines to Angela are about… you guessed it… her husband. Will and Angela have nothing to say to each other besides, “Boo! We’re family.” Finding out your granddad was Hooded Justice would’ve been cool if you were, say, an anti-hero FBI agent, or a civilian with no interest in hero life. But what does it mean to someone who’s already a masked avenger? Angela takes the Nostalgia pills and learns… what, exactly? Does a woman who lost her parents in a terrorist attack, who was shot in her own home on Christmas Eve, really need to be told how dangerous policing white people is? There’s something faintly patronizing about how the show thinks she needs to learn her some knowledge about what Will went through. And while we’re discussing them, I really struggled with how quickly Angela forgives Will for actively participating in Cal’s murder, even if it was “his idea” (which is such a cop out). It’s nice to see a family reconciled, but Will’s behavior towards Angela is borderline psychopathic. He strong-armed her into covering up a crime, successfully poisoned her, lied to her, manipulated her, and then gave up her husband to be murdered. I don’t care what his reasons were, this is not behavior you reward.
- LAURIE. I absolutely adored this show’s take on Laurie Blake: cynical, eye-rolling, embarrassed of her past and eager–maybe over-eager–to correct it. Jean Smart’s performance, especially on second viewing, was my favorite on the show: she could feather-touch a line of dialog with the perfect amount of sarcasm. BUT, yet again, another female main character is all dressed up with nowhere to go. There’s no satisfying arc for this character. She’s sent to investigate a murder, she discovers that white supremacists are really evil (not a shocking development), she vaguely participates in stopping them and a crazy trillionaire (the rich are also bad!) from doing some stuff with Doctor Manhattan, and then she’s done. Her big moment of closure is that she… sees her ex boyfriend for a second? I honestly wasn’t even sure he noticed her there. And then she arrests Adrian Veidt because of his crimes in the past, but this is a problem too. Adrian points out that she’s kept his secret for decades, so why is she changing course now? Laurie replies, “People change, Adrian.” What? What the hell are you talking about? The show barely even addressed that Laurie knew the squid was a hoax (although readers of the comic would know). Now, in the climax of the whole she-bang, Laurie has suddenly reversed course on a decision many of the viewers won’t even know she’s made, and none of the viewers had any idea she was reconsidering. And based on what? What made this change happen? She started off the show arresting masked vigilantes, and she ended it doing the same exact thing. Nothing she’s seen has forced her to reconsider her past, or her views about heroes, or her feelings about Manhattan, or anything. She is stuck in stasis, and that’s why the last scenes with her aren’t satisfying.
- CONTRAST. To further drive home my point, I’m going to show you what it looks like when “Watchmen” does give its characters an arc, so you can see what it should look like and how it’s missing. Consider Looking Glass (wonderfully played by Tim Blake Nelson). He starts the show as a cipher, a man so crippled by PTSD that he wears a tin-foil hat at all times, lives in an emergency bunker, and scuttles any possible relationship. He’s a good man, but broken. Over the course of the show, he’s asked to confront his fears and make difficult choices, and by the finale, he’s thrown away his emergency systems, and he doesn’t need his tin-foil hat anymore. THAT is an ARC. Or let’s look at Adrian Veidt. He begins the show bitter and resentful, wanting to be adored by the people he “saved.” But when he’s transported to a world of mindlessly adoring creatures, he nearly loses his mind, and he returns to Earth with a new appreciation for humanity and a desire to save it again (which he does). But! He’s also finally made to face the consequences of his actions. He’s disastrously low on empathy, and the show humiliates him for it. His final moment isn’t the triumph he expects, but a reckoning for his sins. Again, THAT’S AN ARC. That’s satisfying, emotional, rich. I’m so disappointed the show would craft narratives like that for Wade and Adrian, but leave Laurie and Angela out in the cold. I’d also like to point out–again–that Wade and Adrian got to be active agents in the climax, while Laurie and Angela were forced to sit around.
- THE VILLAINS. In the original “Watchmen” comic, everyone was complex, to the point that it was kind of hard to say who the “villain” was. “Watchmen” the TV show is way less rich. Joe Keene, a politician who is introduced as a nice guy but might as well have a “Heel Turn Incoming!” sign on his forehead, is lazy, underwritten, and uninteresting. His plan to become a super-powered god so he can restore white people in America might be sadly accurate to real attitudes, but he’s still a cartoon. He actually yells something like, “Yee-ha!!! Let’s get blue!!” before entering a chamber to become Doctor Manhattan. He monologues his plan with unearned smug satisfaction constantly, and it never gets more enjoyable to listen to, because he’s bland and unsurprising. Jane Crawford–wife to the murdered Judd–is also unsatisfying, both because the Heel-Turn is obvious (again) and, like Joe, once she turns, she’s a full-blown mustache-twirler. Part of what made the comic so haunting was how compelling the villains were: Ozymandias was insane, but his plan worked; the Comedian was a rapist and war criminal, but his cynicism about heroes and America was spot-on. Joe Keene does not belong in this company. He’s a racist moron, and that’s it. Granted, I’m not interested in/asking for a nuanced, even-handed defense of white supremacy, and I recognize that when you tackle that topic, it behooves you to make clear where your sympathies lie. But consider how much better a job Spike Lee’s “BlacKKKlansman” did with this same subject matter. Their Klansmen were repugnant, but also human (which made them even more repugnant). Keene and company are essentially narrative strawmen.
IN CLOSING
Again, I like “Watchmen.” It’s got great characters, a wonderful message, and it’s full of the kind of ambition that every show should aspire to. But I’m a little bothered that it’s getting away with so much narrative tomfoolery. I absolutely think they should do a second season, with Angela at the center, because that will give them a chance to tighten up on some of this stuff while dialing up what made the show so good.
Many people are saying “Watchmen” is a masterpiece. It’s not… yet. But it really, really could be.