WiC Watches: Watchmen
Watchmen. Photo credit: Mark Hill/HBO
Episode 106: “This Extraordinary Being”
(Note: David is needed elsewhere tonight, so Dan Selcke is taking on reviewing duties for this episode.)
Let’s get the hyperbole out of the way first. This was the best episode of Watchmen so far. It’s the best episode of TV I’ve seen in recent memory, and may be the best of the year. Lindelof and company have taken something that could have come off as very gimmicky — most of the episode is shot in black and white, it’s an extended flashback, there are few cuts, there are arty flourishes because technically the whole thing takes place in the memory of Will Reeves, the old man played by Louis Gossett Jr. and in his younger incarnation by Jovan Adepo — and made it into something special, something that cuts to the heart of what the show is trying to say while still being completely, enthrallingly watchable.
The basics: Angela Abar has taken a bottle of Nostalgia belonging to her grandfather Will Reeves. That means she’s going to experience his memories. She sees him get inducted onto the New York City police force in the 1930s, a time rife with naked racial hatred. She sees him struggle with racists within the police force, and she sees him become…Hooded Justice, the first superhero on record in Alan Moore’s mythology, and a figure of almost total mystery up until this time. No one in the modern world knows who he is. In a bitingly funny opening, he’s played by the blithely handsome Cheyenne Jackson on American Hero Story, the show’s show-within-a-show.
And that’s the first of many satirical stances “This Extraordinary Being” takes on the past 100 years of race relations in America. One of the many remarkable things about this episode is the way this Hooded Justice reveal fits so neatly into Moore’s established mythology. Cord Jefferson, who wrote this episode with Lindelof, repurposes the noose Hooded Justice wears around his neck as a souvenir of the time his fellow officers nearly lynched him for daring to arrest a white man who set fire to a Jewish delicatessen. He paints the area around his eyes white on the advice of his wife June (Danielle Deadwyler), who knows that the city will only accept Hooded Justice as a hero — as indeed they do — if they think he’s a white man.
This story is palpably good. We feel Will’s need to do something about the rampant injustice he sees at his job, something he can’t address as a police officer because many of his colleagues are just as guilty of these injustices as the people who ransacked Black Wall Street in his hometown of Tulsa, back when he was a boy. We get reminders of that event sprinkled into Angela’s remembrances — Will’s mother playing the piano at the theater, a pair of bodies being dragged behind a police car, etc. They’re surreal touches, but they’re not distracting or out of place. Rather, they reinforce what Will is feeling and needing, and they’re justified in-universe on account of Angela having a bad reaction to the Nostalgia. They help us understand Will. They help us get close to him, as do the lengthy takes. At no point in this episode was I less than completely involved with his crusade.
If the episode has a weakness, it’s that it glosses over a few of the journeys of ancillary characters. Near the end of the episode, Will burns down a warehouse operated by the Cyclops, a white supremacist organization he’s been chasing. After he returns home, June angrily accuses him of letting his identity as Hooded Justice consume him, and declares that she is taking their son to Tulsa and that Will is not to follow. The last time we saw her before this, she was happily playing with their son in a time-lapse montage, so I would have liked to see more of how she got to that point.
Likewise, we see the development of a relationship between Hooded Justice and Captain Metropolis/Nelson Gardner. Their relationship is more textured here than in the deliberately crude American Hero Story, but only just. Gardner, played rather effetely by Jake McDorman, recruits Reeves into the Minutemen — the 1930s-era precursor to the Watchmen — and they start having sex soon after. They get one post-coital scene where we see that Gardner thinks a lot of himself and may be with Reeves mostly for the kinky thrill of it. After that, he makes it clear that his priorities don’t align with Reeves’ — he’s in the superhero game for the publicity, not the opportunity to help people like the Harlem residents being terrorized by Cyclops. Why were these two be together in the first place? “This Extraordinary Being” doesn’t give us much of an idea of this part of Will’s life.
But then again, the episode shoots for the stars, so it’s easy to forgive it for landing on the moon. This is an incisive, gripping piece of television.
At the end of the hour, we see Will Reeves kill Judd Crawford by forcing him to hang himself, using a mesmeric device picked up from the Cyclops long ago. Hypnosis machines seem a little far-fetched, but this is a world where superheroes are real and alien squids rain from the sky, so I’m gonna go with it. Does this have anything to do with Lady Trieu’s plans to save humanity?
We can find out more about that next week. This week, let’s just give “This Extraordinary Being” a round of applause.