Official Watchmen site tells you what happened between the comic and the show

HBO’s Watchmen debuted on Sunday night, scoring some very solid ratings. Fans of the original graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons probably recognized several Easter eggs hidden throughout the episode by showrunner Damon Lindelof.

Taking place 30 years after the events of the comic, Watchmen tells a new story about masked police officers facing a threat from a white supremacist organization called the Seventh Kavalry. Robert Redford is president and has been for decades. Drugs are legal, and squids periodically fall from the sky. The original comic ended in the mid-80s. This new show starts in 2019. What happened in the interim?

Now, thanks to a new interactive site from HBO, fans can fill themselves in. The site is called Peteypedia — named for the US agent in charge of handling investigation on masked vigilantes — and it has all kinds of information that will be updated after each new episode. Let’s see what piques our interest.

“The Computer and You” memo:

• In the world of Watchmen, people no longer use computers or devices like cell phones and tablets because they’re afraid of causing another catastrophe like the one that ended the original comic: a giant alien squid fell on Manhattan and killed hundreds of thousands.
• Doctor Oz is the Surgeon General of the United States. Yes, that Doctor Oz.

• President Redford is now allowing the use of computers through something called The Tech Recall and Reintroduction Act of 1993. It grants POTUS the “authority to draft federal employees into the work of reintroducing technologies once deemed unsafe or illegal back into the public space according to the 30-year, five-stage plan outlined in TTR93.”
• Federal employees are just now learning about electronic mail, or “el-mail.”

"The computers, the phones, the towers that would have provided communications without wires —we destroyed it all, hoping it would save us. And yet, baby cephalopods still rain from the sky. Our fear of technology was for naught. Don’t be like me. Don’t be stupid. The future is here again. Don’t fear it. Embrace it. Godspeed."

“Trust in the Law” biopic:

If you watched the first episode of Watchmen, “It’s Summer and We’re Running Out of Ice,” then you may, or may not be wondering about the movie young Will Reeves was watching while his mother played the piano during the Tulsa Race Riots. It’s about the very real-life black U.S. Marshall named Bass Reeves.

"Born into slavery in Arkansas in 1838, Bass Reeves escaped his owner, a Confederate colonel, during the chaos of The Civil War and put down roots in the 75,000 square mile expanse of vast and lawless land called Indian Territory. He became a farmer and lived among the Creek people and other tribes, and in the process, Reeves picked up their languages and customs and earned their respect and trust.It was because of his familiarity with the region’s diverse population that, in 1875, Reeves was recruited into the marshal service by “Hanging Judge” Isaac C. Parker, becoming the first black deputy west of the Mississippi. Empowered with a ‘dead or alive’ mandate TALES OF THE BLACK MARSHAL By Marcus Long, Lead Art Curator and paid by the bounty, Reeves apprehended more than 3000 people over 32 years— murderers, stagecoach robbers, horse thieves, bootleggers, counterfeiters—and killed at least 14 of them in the line of duty. He died in 1910 at age 71 in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and was buried in an unmarked grave."

I love the fact that Lindelof is using real-life touchstones to tell his story of masked heroes who altered history in unexpected ways. It really pays proper respect to the original Watchmen.

Mark Hill/HBO

“Veidt Declared Dead” clipping:

• Billionaire industrialist and original member of the Watchmen, Adrian Veidt, aka Ozymandias, has been declared “presumed” dead by the FBI. As you know from the graphic novel, it was Ozymandias who had his scientists bio-engineer a giant squid monster. He then used the energy given off my Doctor Manhattan to drop the beast in the heart of Manhattan, killing hundreds of thousands in an attempt to unite nations on the brink of nuclear war.
• Veidt had residences in New York, the American state of Vietnam, and Antarctica, “the site of his private refuge, Karnak.”
• Since his absence and presumed death, Lady Trieu’s (Hong Chau) company, Trieu Industries, has acquired Veidt Enterprises. I’d bet dollars to donuts that those two — if Veidt is alive and well, wink wink — are working together in some fashion.
• Veidt was declared missing in 2012, and if alive, is 80 years of age.
• In 2018, Roger Ailes — that would be the disgraced former head of Fox News in our world —  is now president of Newspaper Corporation of America (NCA), and parent of the New Frontiersman, the conservative tabloid where Rorschach sent his journal accusing Adrien Veidt of dropping the squid on New York at the end of the original comic. Ailes “filed a lawsuit against Veidt Enterprises and Trieu Industries claiming a ‘systematic campaign of harassment, intimidation, and sabotage’ against him and his employees for publishing reports that the Central Intelligence Agency had killed Mr. Veidt for secrets he possessed regarding the Dimensional Incursion Event.”

"The lawsuit was dismissed and the federal government subsequently ordered NCA to either publish an apology to Mr. Veidt or pay a $100,000 fine for violating the Content Code Act. They chose to pay the fine."

• Veidt dismissed the claims made by Rorschach’s journal as “a hoax or the expression of mental illness,” and with the god-like amount of money he had, people listened.

Van Redi/HBO

Memo: Rorschach’s Journal:

• This memo is dated September 1, 2019. In it, Agent Petey writes, “Let me be plain: I wish to state for the record that it would be a mistake to terminate the search for Adrian Veidt and declare him deceased.” Ah, so not everyone in the FBI is convinced Ozymandias is dead…interesting.
•  Petey goes on to express his concern that so much weight has been given to Rorschach’s last testament. “He, too, vanished off the face of the earth, and the lingering mystery of his absence continues to nag at the worrisome lot who revere him.”

"Specifically: the Seventh Kavalry of Tulsa, Oklahoma, white supremacists who have appropriated Kovacs’ mask and see their own warped ideology reflected in the mad swirl of his ink blot face. We have reason to fear how the proverbial cult of Rorschach might respond if the Bureau quits the search for Veidt. These fogged, volatile personalities believe that Veidt is responsible for Kovacs’ disappearance. They want justice for their martyr-messiah; if we appear disinterested in that, we tempt their wrath. And we know exactly what that looks like."

• So some in the FBI are concerned that both Ozymandias and Rorschach’s disappearance could prod the Seventh Kalvary into all-out war, which we know happened before the events of the current Watchmen timeline, and appears to be brewing again.
• There are two versions of Rorschach’s journal. The First Journal was found with Kovacs when he was arrested and sent to Sing-Sing prison. It “was a modest leather journal,” with pages “filled with what is either an elaborate cipher or handwriting too cramped and eccentric to be legible.” The FBI has yet to crack his code, if that’s what you can call it.
• “On October 31, 1985, a pair of second-generation Alpha Class masks put on their old costumes and rescued Kovacs from Sing-Sing (alternately known as New York State Penitentiary) in a deadly raid,” reads the memo. “His liberators were Dan Dreiberg, aka Nite Owl (Thrillseeker/Nostalgic), and Laurie Blake (then Laurie Juspeczyck), aka Silk Spectre (after her mother, Sally Jupiter) and, later, The Comedienne (after her father, Edward Blake).” It sounds like Silk Specter came around to accepting that the Comedian was her father, and changed her name to the Comedienne at some point.

There’s also a Final Draft of the Journal. It details events from the comic, how “Kovacs and Dreiberg…visited Happy Harry’s Bar & Grill to interrogate the criminal element known to frequent the establishment. Kovacs was heard trying to acquire information about an incident that occurred on the day of his arrest, the attempted murder of Veidt by a contract killer, Roy Victor Chess, who committed suicide with a cyanide pill to avoid capture.”

"The activities of Kovacs and Dreiberg on the morning of November 1, 1985 were never thoroughly investigated, and for good reason. The very next day, November 2, 1985, was the day the world changed. Caught at ground zero of the Dimensional Incursion of Event at the intersection of 40th Street and Seventh Avenue was Steve Fine, the lead detective on the Rorschach case. In the months that followed, finding Kovacs became a low priority for an overwhelmed police department (half their employees died in the cataclysmic psychic shockwave unleashed by the E.D.B.E.). As New York began its glacial return to stability, few cared about a loose end of the past like Kovacs. Their only anxiety was the prospect of another E.B.D.E., a threat kept top of mind by random downpours of fetal cephalopods that no one with a credible physics degree has ever been able to explain. It was into this culture of fear, fogged with superstition and pseudo-science, that “Rorschach’s Journal” materialized."

After the New Frontiersman released the journal, Veidt took on a defensive posture that all corrupt rich people seem to adopt: “It is, quite literally, fake news.”

Peteypedia will keep you filled in on the world of Watchmen each week, just like Westworld’s Discover Westworld site.

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