HBO’s Watchmen premiered last night, and showrunner Damon Lindelof made sure to pack the episode with callbacks and references to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ original graphic novel. From the knockoff Rorschach masks worn by members of the white supremacist group the Seventh Kalvary to President Richard Nixon’s head on Mount Rushmore, the Easter eggs were everywhere.
Warning: SPOILERS below.
Van Redi/HBO
In the final scene of the episode, “It’s Summer and We’re Running Out of Ice,” we see Don Johnson’s character — Tulsa Chief of Police Judd Crawford — dead, hanging from a tree. The camera pans down to show that one of his shoes is missing. His badge lyes in the grass. Blood drips onto it.
If you’ve read the graphic novel or watched the 2009 Zach Snyder movie, that scene may have reminded you of something. As it ends up, Lindelof was very purposefully trying to invoke some imagery from the source material.
Mark Hill/HBO
At the start of Watchmen, the hero the Comedian is murdered. Blood drips onto his signature smiley face pin. Lindelof referenced that with the blood on Judd’s badge.
“Easter egg is a very cutesy way of saying there has to be an open acknowledgment of the appropriation. We have appropriated the original Watchmen against the wishes of one of its parents,” Lindelof told The Hollywood Reporter, referring to the famously disapproving Moore. “That’s OK, because I tend to identify with and get along with people who don’t listen to what their parents tell them.”
"This Watchmen had to end with a moment that’s a direct commentary on that appropriation, but also in a way that felt like it wouldn’t be befuddling to someone who didn’t know that there was a splotch of blood on the Comedian’s badge — and he calls it a badge, by the way; he doesn’t call it a pin."
And the references keep coming. In Moore’s comic, the hero Nite Owl — aka Dan Drieberg — attends the Comedian’s rain-drenched funeral. “The Comedian is dead,” he says. In the show, Lindelof made sure we heard the line “Pore Jud is Daid” from the musical Oklahoma — which Judd had seen live earlier in the episode — as we watched his body swing on that branch.
In May of 2018, Lindelof penned an open letter to Watchmen fans detailing his vision for the series:
Now, a year and a half later, he still feels the same way. “We constantly had to find ways to tell the audience, particularly the people who felt about those 12 issues the way I felt about them, that we know we’re doing this, we love this thing, we want to pay homage to it, but the way to do that is to not do the same things that it did, but to do them in slightly different ways,” Lindelof said. “If you’re going to say ‘Everything ends,’ don’t do it in the same way it was done in the graphic novel; do it in a different way. Put it in a new context, so that the audience of the original knows you know you’re playing the hits.”
Meanwhile, pilot director and executive producer Nicole Kassell talked to The A.V. Club, and it definitely sounds like she’s on board with Lindelof’s philosophy when it comes to Eastern eggs. “I think because we’re not remaking it, it was really fun to me to go back and study the book and use it as source of inspiration visually, in framing and composition and props,” she said. Like, what are the Easter eggs we can give to the fans? Because we’re not giving them the story. So I just did it as often as I could, giving visual Easter eggs.”
"There was more than one time where I would set a frame and then one of the Watchmen fans on set—one of the crew members—would run over with a screen grab of that frame, from the source that I was paying homage to. That was really fun. Or even in the pilot, when Regina [King] is cracking eggs into a bowl, I set it so that they looked like an owl. And then I saw, somewhere on the internet, someone who had pulled a screen grab of the owl ship and put it next to that frame, and that’s exactly what I wanted the fan to be able to do. It’s like, nobody wrote in the script, “She sets the eggs in the bowl to look like eyeballs, and a whisk, a nose.” But I was like, why not?"
Hopefully, Watchmen turns out to be something special. As a director, Kassell is aware that she has some big shoes to fill:
"Imagine you’re being told the show is following in the footsteps of Game Of Thrones. [Laughs.] And you have to direct an action sequence, and those shows… the action is just astonishing. The scale of those battles, it’s a hard shoe to fill. And especially in such an entirely different genre. We’re not doing a war. Honestly, I kind of got that message, whether it was said to me in those terms or not. And so that was our goal. This is HBO. To me, we are making the Star Wars of television. And to be that ambitious and bold with the big set pieces was what I liked."
“To me, we are making the Star Wars of television. That’s a lot to live up to, but we appreciate the ambition!
Watchmen returns Sunday with Episode 2, “She Was Killed by Space Junk.” We hope you’ll follow along with us as we watch and review each new episode.
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