Watchmen director Stephen Williams recalls filming the Emmy-nominated episode “This Extraordinary Being,” including when the whole team broke down in tears on set.
The word “masterpiece” gets overused in reference to movies and TV shows, but in the case of the Watchmen episode “This Extraordinary Being,” it might be appropriate. For his work on the episode of the HBO superhero show, Stephen Williams has been nominated for Outstanding Directing For A Limited Series, Movie Or Dramatic Special. And that’s just one of 26 nominations Watchmen picked up, the most of any series ahead of this year’s ceremony.
If you don’t remember, “This Extraordinary Being” followed Angela Abar, aka Sister Night (Regina King) after she takes the drug Nostalgia and finds herself living the memories of her grandfather Will Reeves, aka Hooded Justice, who joined the New York City police department in the 1930s as one of its first Black officers. This episode was praised for its deft handling of sensitive themes like police brutality and racial prejudice, and its effective use of greyscale in the flashback scenes. Speaking to The A.V. Club, Williams pulled back the curtain on the making of the episode, including how the cast and crew “fell into each other’s arms in tears” while filming.
In Alan Moore’s seminal Watchmen graphic novel, Hooded Justice is known as the first superhero, but fans didn’t expect to get his origin story in the show. But Williams knew early on. He explains that he and showrunner Damon Lindelof wanted to draw parallels between Will Reeves and Angela Abar to underline the idea that trauma is generational. “We were also interested thematically in addressing concerns of trauma and how trauma is generational, and specifically in this case, the trauma that we are looking at and shining a light on is the trauma of the experience that many Black Americans have of race and white supremacy in this country and throughout this country’s history,” he said.
One of Will Reeves’ greatest traumas came in his childhood, when he lived through the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. Will curated his memories for Angela to experience, and even though they’re mostly about his time on the police force, that one can’t help but slip through.
Visually, all of this is conveyed to the viewer very creatively, with traumatic memories from Will’s boyhood bursting into the later ones he’s arranged for Angela to see. “The trauma is so present and persistent, and intrusive and influential in a person’s life, that those traumatic moments erupt, if you will, into the more controlled memory environment that he has created,” Williams said. “To demarcate those intrusions of traumatic memory and recollection, I decided to slightly color those, so that they weren’t the same color content, color quality, and color value as the present time scenes, and they obviously weren’t black-and-white, like the recollected evoked scenes of the 1930s, but were something different. They had their own kind of visual identity, and together, that was how the color palette of the episode is meant to work.”
One of the most harrowing moments of “This Extraordinary Being” comes when several of Will’s fellow officers attempt to lynch him. Did Williams have any reservations depicting something so touchy? “I mean, to begin at the beginning, there is unfortunately an over-abundance of imagery that involves the perpetration of violence against the Black body in the cultural kind of storehouse of American imagery,” the director explained. “I wanted to be very, very careful and considerate and mindful and respectful about how we portrayed this event in our episode and in our story. I wanted to make sure there was nothing gratuitous about it, that there was nothing exploitative about it, as best as we possibly could.”
Apparently, the scene was filmed in one night, and after it was finished, the team broke down in tears.
It doesn’t look like we’ll ever be getting a second season of Watchmen, but I’m satisfied with the way they ended things. The whole series is currently available for streaming at HBO.
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