WATCHMEN 1.07 - "AN ALMOST RELIGIOUS AWE"

Schwartzblog returns to the world of WATCHMEN this week, after a brief nuptial hiatus that coincided with Angela and the series quick dip out of the present day storyline and into the past of one of its side characters.  Luckily, it’s not like the episode was any sort of standout hour, or that it was fraught with complex racial dynamics that would cry out, all but demand really, a thirtysomething white guy still riding the high off the happiest night of his life to properly unpack and assess them. 

I talk flippantly about my unfitness to tackle the racial elements of WATCHMEN, but I do waffle about how much to engage with those elements, which made it especially hard to crap out a quick take late last week just to plug the gap in the episode review order.  The forcefulness with which this show confronts its racial themes, especially in last week’s examples, can make me feel remiss to sort of skim over the top of them and focus on story construction and presentation, which is more or less the default setting for this blog.  I have never been very interested in the overtly political/sociological approach to media criticism that has risen in prevalence over the last decade, nor do I think I would be particularly good at it.  There are a few reasons this might be the case, chief among them a Catholic upbringing that left me with a cordial distaste for being preached at even when I agree with the sermon, and that there always seemed to be something faintly narcissistic about purporting to review a work of art and then spending most of the space talking about your own political opinions.

Now (only a tiny bit) updated for 2019!!

It is of course much more complicated than that, especially in a case like WATCHMEN where the politics of the work are so front and center that consistently brushing past them starts to seem pointed in its own right.  But the upshot is that I am generally more interested in using this space to talk about structure than theme.  There is an old Roger Ebert quote I was going to reference to justify this approach; that “it is not what a movie is about, it is how it is about it.” I have always remembered that line, because it makes an interesting point even if it is a bit of an oversimplification (a great movie has to have some “what” to support even the spiffiest of “how”, imo).   But as I was googling to confirm he was actually the one that said it, I came across another Ebert quote, that goes “It is not enough for a movie to be righteous.  It also has to be watchable.”  And that perhaps hits more squarely on why, while I don’t exactly make a secret of my political leanings in these posts, I try to avoid criticism that puts political righteousness front and center.  Self-righteousness is cheap, nowhere more so than on the internet.  And I cannot think of a cheaper form of righteousness than waxing moralistic on a blog focused popular television shows.  The only thing that can justify this thing (which no one really asked me to do)’s existence is if it is not just "correct", but also readable. And to me that means that each post needs to say at least one thing, point out one connection or make one dick joke that you wouldn’t also get from any of the hundreds of other, more popular outlets posting about the same topic on a more timely basis.   That’s fairly hard, since as it happens the internet is a big place with lots of people talking about the same thing simultaneously, and I certainly can’t get there by summarizing plot points, nor by rapturously praising the most progressive thematic points I can find and hissing those that might be a touch regressive.

Or even just appear so at first blush.  Because to circle back to the “how it is about it” quote, I think that if this blog has any sort distinctive “lane”, it is probably my developing fascination with how the how influences or distorts the what.  The medium inexorably shapes the message, and if that is true of episodic television, it is also true of blogging about it.  Another reason I don’t like episodic recaps as a political soapbox is that the nature of the beast, of having to weigh in every week, forces one to stake out ideological positions on a work before being able to see the completed picture.  And the repeated and public nature of judgments rendered early on make it harder to reverse course or develop a more nuanced interpretation with the addition of more context, because it creates an inescapable psychological need to justify those earlier positions.  As a lawyer by trade, its my preference to have all the available evidence before rendering any judgment, but that is a fundamental impossibility within the recap format.  The medium pushes the message in certain directions that I think make for less interesting, less thoughtful criticism (I’m sure I wouldn’t be the first to point out the absurdity of approaching a book or a play in the same manner, publishing separate reviews of each chapter or Act prior to seeing how they all tie together in the end), and there is a degree to which I consciously push back against that.

I know, I'm a true inspiration

All that said, I’d like to talk to you some more about structure and presentation.  I find it interesting that Angela has been our primary protagonist from the beginning, but we are only now getting her origin story, after several other supporting players have all had their own spotlight episodes that filled us in on who they are and what makes them tick as crimefighters. You can certainly classify the last stretch of episodes in LOST-esque character terms, i.e. we had the “Agent Blake episode”, the “Looking Glass episodes”, the “Hooded Justice” episode, and now we are circling back to Angela just as every LOST season would return to Jack and Kate flashbacks multiple times.  But in the background of that shifting focus, there has a parallel shift in the world-building, with each subsequent episode serving to highlight a different aspect of how the alternate history of this world differs from our own.  The first couple episodes introduced us to the unique culture of the Tulsa PD and their war with the Seventh Kavalry, as well as the increased political polarization resulting from three decades of Nixon seesawing into three decades of left coast liberal “tyranny”.  The third broadened the scope to give us more context for how unique the masked cops situation was within Robert Redford’s America, and how vigilantes are still part of the fabric of that larger world outside of Tulsa, but in a different way.  The fourth brought more focus to how the sci-fi elements have advanced some technologies beyond real-life 2019 levels (genetic engineering), while regressing others (smartphones = not a thing).  The fifth highlighted how the squid attack of 1985 had reshaped this world, while the sixth reached further back to the introduction of masked crimefighters as the branching point away from actual history, and now the seventh explores how Dr. Manhattan’s intervention in Vietnam drastically reshaped how those countries developed.  It’s a thoughtful and interesting approach to one of the more sneakily difficult aspects of this project, which is explaining just how strange and complicated this ostensibly-“realistic” world really is.

If you want a comparions to a show that stumbles and flails at explaining its strange and complicated setting in any
sort of organic way, HBO helpfully airs HIS DARK MATERIALS the night after WATCHMEN each week

But if the world-building is elegantly done, the dialogue at times flounders to match it.   This episode especially leaned hard on characters suddenly speaking as though they know they are characters on a TV show.  And that is something I can almost always do without, as I have mentioned in passing in prior weeks.  The annoyance that Trieu affects when she recites the expository “script” of her interactions with Angela during her rehab process, or when Laurie rolls her eyes at Petey “helpfully” repeating their last offscreen conversation back to her verbatim, only tends to exacerbate my own annoyance with that exposition, rather than somehow allay it.  If you consistently need to have your characters treat the scenes and plots they are in as tedious impositions, then maybe you should just find less tedious scenes and plots to put them in.   

This winking commentary is at its peak in Laurie’s scenes, as she bluntly recites the subtext of last week’s Hooded Justice flashbacks (which was mostly text already) for the cheap seats, and Mrs. Crawford responds with a full Scooby Doo villain turn where she basically compliments herself and the script for not drawing the reveal out any longer.  It works better in her scene with Keene, at least, since he has a real twist to drop on her and us, that takes the wind out of her jaded “let me guess…” posturing, and also when Trieu casually reveals the nature of her daughter/mother/clone to Angela, while keeping other cards pointedly closer to her vest. 

Honestly, I think I'd be relieved at this point to know that our actual tech billionaires were only trying to insert synthetically harvested memories of their parents into illegally cloned surrogate bodies. 
Particularly if it meant they were actively working against the white supremacists trying to take over the government.

Actually, one of the savviest things about the episode is how it wheels off a half dozen of these reveals, severely underplaying some of them, en route to the giant WTF twist at the end.  We’ll get to that in a moment, and how it may have permanently broken my ability to engage with the show going forward, but first in the spirit of the recently passed holiday, I’d like to give thanks that shortened episode orders have become more common on cable shows.  I can too easily imagine a longer season that spun out entire episodes leading up to the shocking-but-not-all-that-significant twists that Trieu cloned her mother (and by implication, Veidt is her father), and that the Crawfords were in league with Keene to orchestrate the war between 7K and the police (although I feel like that particular nefarious plan was missing a few dots between “cops put on masks in Tulsa” and “…OK Senator becomes president!”), and Keene’s true plan being to become Dr. Manhattan 2.0, and Looking Glass actually escaping the hit squad (and disappearing with one of their masks, so I think we know how Laurie will be making her own escape).  Thankfully, we are spared the wheel-spinning and the plot keeps moving toward the long-delayed reappearance of Dr. Manhattan.

I do generally like how the stage has been set for the big blue guy, don’t get me wrong.  Capturing him and recreating his power for a venal politician is an appropriately grandiose nefarious plan for the bad guys, and represents a sufficiently apocalyptic threat to motivate Lady Trieu to some similarly extreme acts of heroism/villainy as her father’s scheme to prevent nuclear armageddon.  The idea that he could hide in plain sight is well within his power set, even if it will take some explaining to justify why he would want or care enough to do so. 

The problem I have with the reveal is what it does to the character of Angela, and our relationship to her.  From the start, she was our protagonist and POV character, our most intimate window into this strange alternate world.  That we were invited to trust and empathize so closely with someone, while it was being kept hidden from us that she was harboring the biggest and craziest secret in the entire world, the type of thing that would have defined her entire life and mindset throughout every step of everything we have gone through with her, feels like a rather egregious cheat.  You can pull this kind of thing with side characters (like Agent Petey’s sideline as Captain Astroglide), but Angela’s perspective always seemed to be what the show was the most earnest about.  If we can’t trust that, it doesn’t feel like we can rely on anything else it tells us either, certainly not about any of the characters that we have not spent as much time with (which is everybody).  At that point, I just sort of lean back and cross my arms, waiting for the next “shocking” twist.  What that twist is stops mattering as much if I’m not emotionally engaged.  Looking Glass could have a sassy ghost sidekick we haven’t met yet, or Laurie could have a split personality that is a serial killer, and all that would mean is that they were not the characters I had come to care about in any meaningful sense.

"Do you...do you even remember what the fuck we were doing last year?  I think
maybe you were reincarnated from someone we never met. Or something."

But like I said before, I don’t really want to fully commit to trashing the Manhattan reveal this week until I see how it plays out next week.  So let’s look at what’s going on with Veidt, and some other random notes:

• I know the show has sort of committed to the whole bit of each check in with Veidt occurring a year after the last one, but a full 365 days of mock trial just seems pointlessly silly.  Symmetry is not worth putting that sort of strain on the fourth wall, imo.

• The Crookshanks prosecutor’s wink at Veidt suggests that his petulant flatulence (or flatulent petulance, if you prefer) is all part of his plan.  Presumably, the whole “Watchmaker’s Son” acting exercise was to slowly develop the clone’s ability to actually play her part convincingly (while also stockpiling test/SOS sign material).  Veidts’ own tears at the verdict suggest things are not going according to plan, but remember he also coached her specifically on the use of “real tears” back in episode 2. 

• The Dr. Manhattan puppet show in Saigon is a nice subtle allusion to his memorably succinct explanation of the difference between his omniscience and actual omnipotence; that “we are all puppets, Laurie.  I’m just a puppet that can see the strings.” 

• With Cal having undergone a claw hammer lobotomy, Angela is going to need a sitter next week.  It will be good to have Jim Beaver back for the first time since the premiere.

• Something that drove me absolutely crazy about last week’s generally stellar episode: “Beware the Cyclops.”   Dude, if want to warn the guy, warn him, don’t tell him riddles.  There is absolutely no reason for the Lieutenant to be playing coy about the nature of the conspiracy he evidently wants Reeves to know about, other than being on a Damon Lindelof show.

• The reveal that Angela’s synthetic memories were being fed back to an elephant rather than her grandfather is a quintessential Lindelof moment.  The setup is grounded in just enough esoteric detail to suggest some sort of underlying logic, but the exact parameters of that logic remains opaque.  It manages to be eerie and unknowable while also feeling more scientific than supernatural.  As I’ve mentioned before, you can trace this sort of tone back to LOST, where it was often ill-served by existing within the potboiler nature of its plotting (this elephant does not demand  explanation in the same way as tropical polar bears). But he really honed that precise balance on THE LEFTOVERS, and its paying off nicely on this show.

• Red Scare and Pirate Jenny remain completely underused as characters, and Red CONTINUES TO EAT CHEETOS WITH A FORK LIKE SOME SORT OF DERANGED FREAK.

• But also, they did draw attention to Scare’s appetite, and along with his aggro demeanor, I wonder if it’s seeding something, like he is juicing with some sort of Trieu-brand, sci-fi version of steroids or whatnot.

• It’s been weird on Sunday nights to flip over directly from Lady Trieu’s Millenium Clock plot thread to MR. ROBOT, which also features a mysterious Asian villain claiming their secret project to build a giant sci-fi machine for nebulous purposes will ultimately benefit mankind in a vaguely dystopian alternate-reality.