Watchmen writer on that Hooded Justice reveal, generational trauma, and more

The most recent hour of HBO’s Watchmen was among the better episodes of TV I’ve seen this year. In “This Extraordinary Being,” hero Angela Abar falls back in time to experience firsthand the long-ago exploits of her grandfather, Will Reeves. The episode is trippy, ambitious, and very powerful. Speaking to Vulture, writer Cord Jefferson — who wrote the episode with showrunner Damon Lindelof — explained the thought process behind this extraordinary hour of television.

Let’s start with the big reveal. In Alan Moore’s Watchmen, the 1985 comic on which HBO’s series is based, there’s a character named Hooded Justice, who’s considered to be the first-ever superhero. (In Moore’s world, that pretty much means a guy who puts on a mask and takes it upon himself to fight crime, not someone with actual superpowers.) We never learn the identity of Hooded Justice in the comic, but the show reveals it to be none other than Will Reeves, Angela’s grandfather. “From the outset, Damon knew he wanted Hooded Justice to be black,” said Jefferson. “We came into the room, day one, with that knowledge. How he decided to become Hooded Justice and what his relationship was going to be with Angela — all of that stuff came later. But on day one, Damon wanted Hooded Justice to be a black man.”

"My thinking about it was, in the 1930s, who would be seeking justice outside of a courtroom? The most ridiculous superhero is Batman because the idea that a billionaire white guy can’t find justice and so he needs to take to the streets in a bat costume is crazy, right? ’Cause a billionaire white guy can pretty much do what he wants. I was thinking, Who’s the kind of person that would want to be a superhero? Who would want to be a masked vigilante? It made perfect sense that that would be a person of color. So, I came in with the idea that he was lynched by his fellow police officers."

In our world, where superheroes are the products of the imagination, most people consider the first superhero to be Superman, something Jefferson’s script references. But in Moore’s world, superheroes are real, so superhero comics aren’t really necessary. One of things that impressed me most about “This Extraordinary Being” was how neatly it retrofitted Moore’s original story. The 1985 comic was all about subverting the norms of superhero mythology, and the show keeps it up by making the first superhero a black man, a police officer who felt he needed to go outside the bounds of the law to get justice. By unflinchingly depicting the naked racism of the time, racism that permeated the halls of power, the episode does a great job of showing us why he felt there was no other way.

"One of the great tragedies of Will’s life, up until we meet him in episode six, is that he has spent his entire life believing he’s going to be able to right the wrongs of his childhood. That he’s going to be able to eliminate this trauma that happened to him. He had been told if you put on a badge, you’re going to be able to finally enact the law and you’re going to be able to get back what was taken from you in Tulsa all those years ago. And so, he puts on a badge, he puts on the blue uniform, and he’s trusting in the law just like his hero Bass Reeves. Then, he realizes that life isn’t the movie that he watched when he was a kid, and that trusting in the law doesn’t always work for people of color. That’s when he realizes he needs to step outside of the uniform. If he’s going to get justice, it’s going to be extrajudicially. He needs to abandon his trust in the law."

And the episode is unflinching, something uncomfortably so. One of the most memorable shots shows us Reeves’ point of view as he is strung up on a tree by his colleagues on the police force. “What was important was that we weren’t casually using black trauma for entertainment value,” Jefferson said. “Hopefully, people see that we included those scenes not to be frightening for frightening’s sake, but because we wanted people to understand the awful nature of it and confront it head-on.”

"An important theme of this season, but particularly an important theme of this episode, is generational trauma. The legacy of trauma and our ancestors can carry on, and it’s trauma that we then hold in our lives and try to hopefully not pass down to the people who come after us. That scene when Angela says, “I’m not angry,” when she takes the place of her grandfather in the bar, we felt was an important scene. Angela is a person who denies a lot of her emotions in order to put on this front. Having that mask slip a little when she says, “I’m not angry” — and Will was saying the same thing just 80 years before — it was an important moment to switch back and forth between the two characters. We felt like Angela and her grandfather were sharing these same wounds."

Generational trauma is also at play when Will sees his young son putting on face paint like his father, playing the superhero. “He realizes in that moment, ‘I actually don’t want you to experience this. The way that I’ve been living my life is a way that I’m not proud of.’ Seeing so clearly that he already has passed down some of his trauma, that is very devastating to him.”

The white face paint Will wears under his mask — done so people will think he’s a white man, knowing that New York City won’t treat him as a hero if they know he’s black — is another fascinating touch in an episode full of them. “I’m very, very happy that we did that, because as you pointed out, he’s wearing two masks,” Jefferson said. “The layers that he’s wearing also suggest the layers that he’s hiding, right? Because not only is he black, he’s also queer. He’s hiding things from his wife, he’s hiding things from his colleagues at the police station, he’s hiding things from his colleagues in the Minutemen. He’s wearing all these masks to block who he actually is from everybody in his life. And so, it makes sense that underneath his one mask is another mask entirely.”

Another thing I loved about “This Extraordinary Being”: the layers of irony. We already mentioned the Superman reference, an important touchpoint when discussing the origins of superhero culture, real or imagined. There’s also American Hero Story, the show-within-a-show that depicts the origins of Hooded Justice and the Minutemen in a campy, over-the-top way that contrasts markedly with the grounded, painful realism of the episode itself. “We wanted it to feel like the opposite of what we were doing,” Jefferson explained. “We wanted it to feel cheesy. We were also very, very serious about making sure that they got Hooded Justice wrong, and that they, like everybody else, assumed that Hooded Justice was a white man.”

"For readers who haven’t read the book, the original Watchmen speculates that Hooded Justice was a German strongman who operated in secrecy, one day disappeared, and then was found dead. American Hero Story doesn’t say that it’s a German strongman, but says that it’s a different white man. They were getting it dead wrong the way that everybody else got it dead wrong. The actual Hooded Justice is this 105-year-old black man in a wheelchair in Tulsa, Oklahoma."

The episode opens with the American Hero Story segment, and for a second I thought that the episode was actually going to indulge in that kind of cheese for the entire now. But in context, that bit is hilarious.

There’s a lot more to discuss, including the way the episode incorporates people like Bass Reeves and Samuel Battle, real-life black pioneers who’s accomplishments are largely forgotten today, which of course is the point: that the contributions of black Americans are often obscured or erased by history, even as their legacies are coopted. Reeves, for example, was a U.S. marshall who inspired the creation of the Lone Ranger, but I’d straight-up never heard of him before this show.

I’m already going off on a tangent. You can go here to read the full interview. For my part, I’m just going to hunker down until the next episode of Watchmen airs this Sunday…

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