WATCHMEN 1.03 - "SHE WAS KILLED BY SPACE JUNK"

Jean Smart takes center stage in “She Was Killed By Space Junk” as special agent Laurie Blake, aka Laurie Jupiter, aka Laurie Juspeczyk, aka Silk Spectre II, and she wears as many narrative hats as she has accumulated aliases over the years.  She is the “hero” and POV character of the hour, while also operating as an immediate antagonist to our previously established “heroes”, and our first window into the larger world of the story outside of Tulsa.  While also providing the first really direct link to the source material, making the show into more of an actual sequel, where previously it seemed more like a vaguely-inspired riff on some of the visuals and motifs from the book. The Rorschach masks were the most overt connection in the first two episodes, but given that Rorschach is embraced unironically by the most racist and misogynistic portions of comic fans in our world, having a hate group co-opt his look would probably make as much sense as if they had picked, say, a sad cartoon frog.   She’s a new character for the show, played by a new actress, but also an old character from the comics, but one that has been aged up and reimagined for a new story, in a new medium in a new era.

She’s also, in a way that perhaps is only interesting to me, a spiritual twin of Lindelof’s prior leading lady on THE LEFTOVERS.  In fact, the whole hour felt very close to an episode of that show.  That show could be a frustrating experience, but was made watchable and often extremely compelling by Carrie Coon's turn as another brittle, jaded skeptic that functioned as the chief investigator/interrogator of the its central genre conceit.  The easy way Laurie strolls into Tulsa and promptly punctures the distinctive aesthetics the show has just established, with Smart’s pitch-perfect delivery of “cool” in response  to the cops nicknames, or quick, unimpressed read on Looking Glass’s intimidating Pod as “a racist detector”, was very similar to how Nora Durst would operate in this world.  And the oddball touches like a giant blue dildo or phone booths where the public can pay to leave God a voice mail also feel like they came straight out of that show.  Not to mention the resolution of a doubter being confronted with something so strange and coincidental that it can really only be interpreted as a passive-aggressive nudge from some sort of supremely unhelpful deity. 

I know no one watched that show, but they should have, if only for the lion sex boat cruise

But as I mentioned with prior episodes, Lindelof’s earlier series acted as a training ground for deploying this brand of matter-of-fact surreality.  I think that WATCHMEN finally presents a perfect bowl of structural porridge for these sensibilities, though.  With LOST, the sudden and crazy turns often felt like a crutch being deployed to hastily zig away from any of the (frequent) plot points they stumbled into without any idea of how to resolve.  That show constantly struggled to navigate the fine but crucial difference between a twist that makes the audience ask “what was that?” versus “what could that mean?”.   THE LEFTOVERS deployed the strangeness to greater, more consistently unsettling effect, but that show also struggled to produce an investment in an overarching narrative outside of its character focused, novella-of-the-week structure.  This was largely because it became apparent rather early on that what plot there was would be driven by characters continually searching for answers that the show would never, thematically, be able to allow them to figure out.  And so it was entirely reliant on brilliant performances and making the individual bits of weirdness unique enough to keep thing compelling week by week, in spite of the creeping predictability about how in the end, the characters’ endless howling at the void would always end up producing only the most maddening glimmer of an unintelligible response.

Details like, and I feel this bears repeating, a lion sex boat cruise

What WATCHMEN the graphic novel provides is a template that actually includes an obtuse, barely-engaged deity as a character, who can be howled at directly. And as we see here with Laurie doing exactly that, it allows for existential angst to remain better tied to a plot that grounds it in a feeling of immediacy and forward momentum.   At the same time, the source has a sense of structural experimentation and heavy philosophical bent baked in enough to (hopefully) avoid the reverse issue that plagued LOST; of feeling like an adventure serial that only ever becomes a theological treatise when the adventure serial stuff is stalling out.  So far, this balance is working a treat, at least for me.

But getting back to Laurie specifically, while I don’t really think I’ll ever view these characters as actually the same people as those from the book, I immediately loved Jean Smart’s ability to be somehow playful and no-nonsense at once.  She is funny, and she is immediately formidable and highly competent in spite of her damaged and self-destructive tendencies.  A lot of this is obviously Smart’s quickness and measured intelligence that she brings to every line of dialogue, but there is also some deft writing at work that allows her to get herself fully up to speed on everything we learned in the first two hours. plus a little more, almost entirely offscreen. We don’t see how she figures out the civilian identities of Night and Looking Glass, because we don’t really need to and its actually more impressive if she just knows.  And even after spending most of the episode with her she is still able to backfoot us (and Angela) by casually dropping in that by the way, she found Judd’s secret compartment immediately, with a single visit and no hints from homicidal grandfathers to clue her in. 

"THE EGGS!!! ITS ALL ABOUT THE EGGS!!!  Or something.."

I also appreciated how she allowed us to see some of the world outside of Tulsa,  which gives us some context that we really need to ground us in this alternate reality.  What is apparent, or if not exactly apparent then at least discernable to those familiar with the source material, is that this is a world where masked vigilantes are fairly common and have been rather influential culturally.  That’s not the hardest thing to explain, but it is complicated by the setting of our story being a unique case even within this alternate reality, in that it's the only city where the cops are wearing masks too.  That is a tough thing to establish organically, and “Space Junk” does stumble over itself trying to do exposition and direct references to the source material at times, even as it excels at the nuanced character work.  For every bit of wonderful, precisely rendered character detail – from Smart’s perfectly delivered “cool” in response to the cops’ codenames, to her correcting Keene’s grammar or Angela correcting her own in the eulogy – there is an entire scene of an FBI director giving a 101 level summation lecture on the most infamous events in recent history to a roomful of experts that must surely know all about them already.  Or Veidt making awkward, elbow-nudging references to “Republic Serial villains”, because hey, he said something about that once in the book!  Or the entire framing device of Laurie telling a joke to Dr. Manhattan, which evokes the Pagliacci joke, but seems to miss the whole part about it being an actual joke.  When she ends with “Roll on snare.  Curtains. Good Joke.”, she’s quoting Rorschach's journal, maybe intentionally in character, but it is probably not supposed to make me think “uh….not really though?"  The Pagliacci joke, like the one that Alan Moore used to close THE KILLING JOKE, has an actual punchline that is amusing on its own and picks up added resonance and poignancy from its context.  Laurie's was pretty much just a direct dump of backstory about the old characters, along with some not-so-subtle foreshadowing that she will be the one to finally “kill god” (i.e., off Dr. Manhattan) at the end of the season.  It went straight for the subtext, and forget to install the surface.

But that’s a relatively minor gripe, in what was overall my favorite episode yet.  It was probably wise to hold back Smart and Laurie for a couple episodes, given how close she came to just blowing all our new characters out of the water.  Angela holds her own, though just barely. I’m sure those two gals will be working together soon enough, so for now lets look at some random notes and conspiracy theories:

 

 RANDOM NOTES AND CONSPIRACY CORNER

• This week was a little slower and sloppier than usual; family was sick Monday and there was less time for TV shenanigans.

• Tartarus is basically Greek mythology’s version of hell, a place of monsters and eternal torment.  So…”Tartarus Acres” is about the worst fucking name for a cemetery imaginable.  At best, it reminds people of tooth decay.   Or a writer mistaking classical allusions for actual depth.

• I don’t know if it was intended as a gag, but the little puff of the smoke bomb the Batman guy used before leaping out in the bank tickled me with its pointlessness.  If anything, it only drew more attention to his entrance and hurt his element of surprise. 

• There are four main mystery/twist areas I have my eye on:  what Veidt is up to, who is a potential Dr. Manhattan in disguise, Judd’s secrets, and Joe Keene’s real agenda. Well, five when we factor in Angela's grandpa, but their whole thing didn't really factor in directly this week.

• Veidt appears to be a prisoner rather a recluse, which is interesting I guess.  It’s hard to imagine who his captor could be, to hold the World’s Smartest Man in check, if not Dr. Manhattan.  I find I don’t have much real interest in trying to figure this out in advance, since it is so disconnected from everything else and so esoteric in all its particulars, that I just kind of think oh well, that will sort itself out whenever it needs to, I guess.  Two things I did note – there appeared to be a design for some sort of crude catapult in Ozy’s workshop, and going by the anniversary cake, we seem to be jumping forward a full year each episode, which means the whole thing is likely way out of sync with the main show, temporally.

• Keene is clearly not to be trusted (he’s played by Bob Benson, fer Chrissakes), but the obvious conclusion that he is working with the 7^th Kavalry is a little too pat.  I think the show tipped his hand when he brushed off a reporter’s question about the Russians building an intrinsic field generator, saying that he didn’t care about them and 7K was the real threat.  The intrinsic field generator is what made Dr. Manhattan, so I imagine that Keene is stoking the conflict in Tulsa to distract from his working with the Russkies to build a new superman/god. 

• Though I suppose there are some holes in that theory.  If the graveside kidnapping was a false flag that Keen orchestrated himself, it is an unnecessary risk to have the bomber actually have a functioning suicide vest and dead man switch.  But naaaaah.  I mean, American politicians would never stoop to collaborating with hostile Russian actors to stoke up racial resentments within the US just to serve their own venal political interests, right?

• As for Judd The Secret Racist, it’s still super confusing that he is so committed to his friendship with Angela from beyond the grave as to force her to sing at his funeral.  This must be working to one hella-racist payoff in the works, if it is going to make all these years of actively and publicly fighting against racism worth the deception. Though I guess it is just possible that Judd was more or less innocent, and its his wife with secret klan robes and ties to Keene that is coordinating the brewing race war, for the benefit of his political ambitions? 

• Agent Petey is our Dr. Manhattan suspect of the week, I guess.  He has more knowledge than humor or personality, sleeps with Laurie, and most pertinent from a visual cue department, is shown returning to his motel room at night when her voice-over joke describes god finishing his day and packing up to go home.   I really hope they just reveal this soon one way or the other, so I don’t have to look at every character side-eyed the entire season.