Season 1, Episode 3: ‘She Was Killed by Space Junk’
When searching for precedent on the TV “remix” of “Watchmen,” which tells an original story that nonetheless heavily references the source material, a good point of comparison is the FX series “Fargo,” Noah Hawley’s twist on the 1995 Coen brothers thriller. Both shows take place in the same fictional universe as the story that inspired them, cherry-picking bits of mythology while lifting certain visual and thematic ideas wholesale and planting Easter eggs for hard-core fans. The danger to this approach, which has affected “Fargo” at times, is that the show can devolve into shallow pastiche, reverberating like a tinny cover version of a superior work of art.
The comparison seems to have crossed Damon Lindelof’s mind, too, because he has cast Jean Smart as Laurie Blake, a.k.a. the second Silk Spectre, in a turn that is not far removed from the vicious matriarch she played on the second season of “Fargo.” The two characters are on opposite sides of the law: As Floyd Gerhardt in “Fargo,” Smart played a woman who takes control of the North Dakota crime family her debilitated husband operated for years and shrewdly asserts power at its most vulnerable time. Laurie is one of the “good guys” on “Watchmen” — though she would be the first to attach a Mars-size asterisk to that designation — but she is more than willing to ignore protocol and follow through on deep-seated instinct for violence. She may be fighting to put down masked vigilantes, but that doesn’t liberate her from her own past as one of them.
Lindelof’s determination to update “Watchmen” in order to address new, more contemporary political ills has given it plenty of separation from the source so far, and yet there’s a closeness to it that distinguishes it from the TV version of “Fargo,” too. The shared-universe idea isn’t clever window-dressing in “Watchmen”; it is actively and increasingly important in explaining how this alternate reality came to pass and what role Alan Moore’s original characters still have to play. One of the thrilling aspects of Smart’s performance as Laurie Blake is how her past experiences have transformed her understanding of heroism and justice, and have motivated her to try another path.
The Laurie Blake of Moore and Gibbons’s book welcomed the opportunity to retire after the passage of the Keene Act of 1977, which outlawed “costumed adventuring.” But in the present day, when another Keene is using the crime issue to support his political ambitions, she’s on the side of the law. (To the extent that she cares to be, mind.)
Her bravura introduction puts her at the center of a sting operation to catch a vigilante by faking a bank robbery, with a lobby full of federal agents playing the various roles. The idea is to capture a masked vigilante, but the resemblance of this particular vigilante to Batman makes a point about how the Dark Knight might fare in this reality. Stopping an armed robbery may be classic hero behavior, but the appetite for rich guys in capes is low.
Now an F.B.I. agent, Laurie is called upon to oversee the investigation into Crawford’s murder, which has currently moved into the extrajudicial-interrogations-of-racists phase. Though an independent operator in her own right — she brings along the young, bookish Petey because he seems the most harmless partner — Laurie greets Looking Glass’s operation with withering contempt. She sees through his interview pod (“So it’s a racist detector?”) and senses right away that the Tulsa police are on the wrong track. As Joe Keene Jr. reminds us, the Seventh Kavalry would likely trumpet its role in Crawford’s death if it were involved, but no one has claimed responsibility.
Laurie has already sniffed out some facts about the incident, all of them leading to a confrontation with Angela Abar. Even after Abar’s quick action saves them all from the detonated vest of a Seventh Kavalry suicide bomber — another superbly staged sequence on a show that continues to make the action beats count — Laurie picks her apart like a buzzard. She knows that the tire marks under Crawford’s body are from a wheelchair. She knows that Abar faked a fainting spell in order to poke around his closet and then walked off with whatever she found hanging on a mannequin in the secret compartment.
“Men who end up hanging from trees with secret compartments in their closets tend to think of themselves as good guys,” she tells Abar. “And those who protect them think they’re good guys, too. But here’s the thing about me, Sister Night: I eat good guys for breakfast.”
For those who haven’t read “Watchmen” — or for even those who haven’t read it recently — an episode like this week’s must seem confusing, or at least undernourished. Lindelof and his co-writer, Lila Byock, find a clever way around the back-story problem by inserting bits of a one-way phone conversation Laurie has with Dr. Manhattan, who has exiled himself to Mars for past 30 years. Her “joke” about the three dying heroes who are awaiting God’s judgment makes reference to major “Watchmen” characters — Nite Owl, Ozymandias and Dr. Manhattan — that have been explicated in only the vaguest terms on the show.
But the point of the joke is to offer an insight into Laurie herself, who has come to believe that heroes are righteously condemned in the end. She resents their imperfections and hypocrisies, and she stands ready to mete out her own form of judgment.
The episode ends with a question mark that lands like an exclamation point, as Abar’s car, the one that was whisked skyward with Will Reeves inside, comes crashing down next to Laurie. She appears to see it as a sign that Dr. Manhattan was really listening to her on the other end of the line, but serendipity like this is common in comics like “Watchmen.” Whatever the case, her scrutiny of Abar stands to increase. After all, as a reformed vigilante and the rare heroine among masked men, she knows her like she knows herself.
Tick Tocks:
Laurie’s resistance to masks of any kind underlines a theme that will likely be repeated throughout the series: Masks are a corruptive force because once you hide your identity, you lose your accountability.
Another week, another appearance by Jeremy Irons in the notes. We finally learn for certain that he is Adrian Veidt, a.k.a Ozymandias, the rich, arrogant genius who saved the world from nuclear catastrophe by dropping a giant alien squid on New York City. (His logic at the time resembled George C. Scott’s in the War Room in “Dr. Strangelove”: “Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed.”) As for his macabre experiments, his pre-tech equipment and his conflict with “the game warden”? All open questions.
Crimebusters may have failed as vigilante unit, but they might have succeeded in launching Pitchfork together, based on their eclectic music tastes. Devo’s “Mongoloid” and Desmond Dekker’s “Israelites” are not merely part of the show’s soundtrack, they’re cuts from Silk Spectre II’s and Ozymandias’s record collections.
The scholarly Petey is the inspiration for Peteypedia, HBO’s online supplement files for background information on the “Watchmen” universe. No show should require outside homework, but some answers are available for those looking for more context.
The Police Strike of 1977, a fictional event from the book, gets a mention in the episode, so it’s worth explaining. Tensions between the masked adventurers and police officers came to a head when the police staged a general strike in protest of the vigilantes, whom they argued were threatening their jobs. Silk Spectre II and Dr. Manhattan helped put the strike down when it sparked riots, but the incident also led to the Keene Act.
Funny headline spotted: “Grisham to Retire From Supreme Court.”