WiC Watches: Watchmen
Mark Hill/HBO
Episode 105: “Little Fear of Lightning”
We’re at the halfway mark for the first season of Watchmen. “Little Fear of Lightning” lets us in on two points of view: those of Wade Tillman/Looking Glass and Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias.
Let’s start with Veidt, who it appears is being kept on sort of extra-dimensional pocket on the moon. (Or one of the moons of Mars?) It was fun to see him use all the body parts of his Mr. Philips and Ms. Crookshanks clones to signal for help, but we still don’t know who or what the Game Warden is. Now that Veidt has been caught trying to escape his prison, I look forward to seeing what his punishment will be.
Adrian Veidt. Mark Hill/HBO
But the real star of tonight’s show is Detective Wade Tillman, aka Looking Glass. For those of you who’ve only seen the Zach Snyder’s Watchmen movie, that giant alien squid from the opening appears at the end of Alan Moore’s original graphic novel.
Image: Watchmen/HBO
We get a ton of insight into Tillman here. Like the heroes in Moore’s story, he wears a mask not necessarily because he wants to fight for good, but because he’s broken and scared and messed up in some way. In his case, he puts reflective tape over his face to protect against psychic blasts of the kind the squid monster set off on that fateful day in ’85. As Agent Blake pointed out last week, superheroes are born in trauma.
Let’s walk through Wade’s origin story:
- Although Wade was the main focus of “Little Fear of Lightning,” I very much enjoyed Agent Blake’s constant sarcasm. She’s already stood toe to toe with Angela Abar, and “Mirror Guy” is not spared her withering insights.
- Paula Malcomson’s character was talking about a Steven Spielberg movie called Pale Horse with Wade, and mentioned a scene with a little girl in the red coat wandering through a scene of devastation. She’s talking about a famous scene from Schindler’s List, but in a reality where a giant squid monster wipes out a few million people in the space of a minute, not even movie history is unchanged.
- The Nostalgia pills Angela asked Wade to get tested are created by Veidt Enterprises in the comic.
- Senator Keene is a bad dude, but you probably already suspected he was.
This was a great transition episode that it helped bring together some story points from earlier episodes — Veidt trying to escape his prison, the pills Angela’s grandfather gave her — while giving us some insight on a character who had, up to now, been largely flat. Let’s all hope Wade can survive this attack from the Seventh Kavalry. Way to leave us hanging at the midway point, Lindelof.