“If there were no thunder, men would have little fear of
lightning, although the danger is in the lightning.” - Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea
Damon Lindelof is fond of using the episodic format of
television to shift the focus to a single character for an hour at a time,
allowing what are supporting players in the grander scheme of things to become
the star of the show for one week.
These often make for strong standalone hours, but as with any tactic,
this has its drawbacks as well as its benefits. The major drawback being that the “main” serialized
plot of the season tends to get put on hold for these character detours, which means
they can be more frustrating on the initial airing and play better in hindsight,
once the urgency of just finding out what happens next has been lifted. To that end, I wouldn’t begrudge anyone who
found it galling that we got so little follow up on the already-overly-coy
hints that Trieu and Grandpa dropped about their master plan last week. These character vignettes can also make for series lowlights, if they are deployed clumsily to pump the brakes on a plot that is picking up steam too early in the season, and if the selected character can't support the narrative weight. But if we have to take time off from
progressing the main story at this juncture, I’m happy to spend it in the company of Tim Blake
Nelson, who has made Looking Glass a uniquely compelling figure, as damaged as
he is preternaturally competent in both his job on the police force and “cover”
gig as a marketing consultant.
But as much as this is an episode about filling us in on
Wade Tillman’s backstory, it is as much about filling us in on the backstory of the
squid attack on New York City. And I really have to
wonder how all of this plays to viewers that are not familiar with the comic,
or at least the 2009 film. Those that saw the film probably recall that it
ended with a major attack on NYC, and probably that Ozymandias was behind
it. But they are likely to be scratching
their heads trying to figure out how they could have forgotten a giant squid
that reached from MSG to New Jersey. Which is because the movie cut out the entire
squid of it all, and instead had Ozy frame Dr. Manhattan for the attack. While I think that overall, the movie operates more as an
object lesson in how to screw up an adaptation by being overly slavish to the
text (although it is even more hurt by a few iffy bits of
casting and getting the aesthetics just completely, 1000% wrong), I still think
that this one major point of deviation from the book was a good choice. It maintains the thorny ethical
knot of the ending, while streamlining the narrative and foregoing the more
patently ludicrous elements that make a bit more sense in comic book form, but
are frankly still more silly than things need to be. I’ve been surprised, throughout these first
five episodes, how often I’ve had to remind myself that the show is following from the events of the book and not the movie, and thus the public is more inclined
to miss Dr. Manhattan’s alien presence rather than live in ongoing fear of him.
Which is odd, because otherwise the
movie is definitely not what I think of as the “real” version of the story or
characters in my head.
 |
| Apparently properly casting a character whose entire vibe is "middle-aged American movie star" is way harder than it sounds |
But maybe we should also talk about what we mean by terms like "grounded" or "gritty" or "realistic". The graphic novel is frequently cited as a realistic take on superheroes, and I would say it is that. At the least, it is a "more realistic" interpretation. But that does not mean that it took place in a real-world setting. What it introduced was a degree of psychological realism superhero comics had never before attempted, which should be distinguished from the physical or plot-based grounding that Christopher
Nolan’s DARK KNIGHT trilogy popularized in superhero movies*. Alan Sepinwall’s
recap of this episode astutely noted that the innovation of WATCHMEN is often
misconstrued as “what if there were superheroes in the real world?”, but that a more accurate descriptiopn of what it is asking is “what
if there were real people in a superhero world?” This episode drives home more than
ever that this is not the real world, but the people inhabiting it have
the sort of problems that “real” people might, if the Cold War had been ended by
a fake interdimensional psychic squid attack.
 |
| REALISM |
Of course, the attack was only fake in its origins. As we see from young Wade’s experience, the death toll and trauma it caused are very real. His PTSD is rooted in being close enough to ground zero to witness the carnage firsthand, but it is also, we can surmise, compounded because his proficiency at sniffing out lies has left him with a nagging feeling that something about the official story is off for thirty-plus years. He is scarred less by actual squid damage than, to borrow a phrase Noah Hawley used to describe the latest season of his FARGO series, “the mental violence of finding out the world is not what you thought it was.” The squid destroyed his conception of the world as place that made a certain kind of sense, and now the revelation that it was an elaborate hoax undoes exactly none of that damage, while rendering all the coping mechanisms he’d developed over the ensuing decades transparently pointless.
It’s a revelation that leads him to wonder, late in the
hour, “is anything true?” And understandably,
as Wade’s entire superpower, his gift/curse, is that he is as adept at identifying
lies as he is unable to pin down the actual truth. He knew the suspect from the premiere was connected
to the 7th Kavalry, but can’t ferret out anything actionable from the connection until Knight
steps in. He is probably right about the
focus group covering up the fear the tourism ad provoked, but also probably
projecting a lot of the specifics about how they feel and any particular disdain
for calamari. He knows the words the
support group want to hear from him, but admits after a few beers that he isn’t
really living in the light he claims to be.
He knows which professions Paula Malcomson is lying about, but fails to
pick up on her real reason for being there.
And she is there to set up a trail of breadcrumbs to lead Wade to
her 7th Kavalry headquarters, as part of an(other) elaborate hoax
that involves rigging lettuce to fall out of truck beds and guns loaded with
blanks. Which all seems to fall into the
“too clever by half” realm Lady Trieu brought up last week. There is no readily apparent reason why the
entire dog and pony show was necessary to string him along, when they could have
just shoved him into a car or she probably could even have just told him she had something portal-related to show him and he would not have been able to say
no. Certainly Senator Keene isn’t shy about just
strongarming him into betraying Angela by promising that having her entire
family killed is the backup plan if he doesn’t play along. And then the end of the episode makes it
appear that 7K has decided to murder him in spite of his cooperation. Maybe all these machinations will make total
sense in retrospect, but right now an awful lot of characters seem to be insisting
on doing things the hardest and most convoluted way possible. Whether
that feels earned or like a bunch of TV show bullshit is ultimately going to depend
on the answers the last few episodes provide, and given that this is a Lindelof
joint maybe I shouldn’t take for granted that they will deliver. But right now, the confident weirdness and
performances of people like Nelson and Smart have me believing in spite of myself.
| Other bits, though.... |
- One thing that really irked me in this episode was the little cutaway moments to remind us of things we had been shown just a scene or two before. Were they really worried that we would think Wade’s ex-wife was referring to a different time a girl left him naked and alone? Or that we had forgotten that Wade’s hat was lined with the special foil in the space of the one scene since we were last shown it and told what it was for?
- Interesting bits of world-building: Cigarettes are banned in Redford’s America, but judging by the three pairs of identical twins staffing the pet clinic, human cloning is allowed.
- Joe Keene promises that 7K is not looking to repeat a squid attack, citing a lack of originality and desire to do something new. I’m glad that the writers feel this way, although I’d appreciate if they just showed it rather than telling it through winking dialogue.
- Each week I grow more convinced that Irons’ interpretation of Veidt is all wrong, and his appearance as the younger, pre-squid attack version just undercuts any excuse that he has just been driven a bit batty by his imprisonment. I am trying to just roll with the idea that he is playing a Bond villain, with the smarminess and Britishness dialed up to match, but having him be such a transparent dick is so much less interesting than the all-American, avuncular figure he cut in the book. That character had, or could at least affect, a legitimate warmth and humility that could almost make generically engineering a giant psychic squid for the purpose of a false flag attack to end the Cold War sound reasonable. Irons does megalomania well, but he never sounds reasonable, even when he is in his 1985 version.
- As a specific example: Using the dead bodies to signal for help calls back to the Black Freighter comic-within-a-comic from the original, and manages to do it without recreating it so exactly that it feels on the nose. Then having Veidt raise his arms and scream “I DID IT!” upon catching the satellite’s attention is also recreating a famous panel from the book. But the contrast between the accomplishment he was celebrating then, which was a decades and continent-spanning web of plots that succeeded in averting Armageddon, and what he is so proud of now, which is putting a bunch of dead bodies in a pile, is striking. And that is before he is yanked unceremoniously back to earth, and scolded in a way that just highlights how much less impressive and interesting the TV version of this character is than his inspiration in print. As I tallked about last week, I accept that the character has to be different in this new iteration of the story. But to go from the formidable, charming ubermensch of the comic to the silly old man Irons is playing remains disappointing.
- We just can’t trust Red Scare. His digging through evidence bags dress his sandwiches is highly suspect, obviously, but even more disconcerting is when he later walks through the precinct eating Cheetos with a fork. THE FUCK are you doing, man?
- The Michael Imperioli cameo in the exquisitely lame tourism ad is just about perfect. Lindelof has developed a hyper-specific skill for grounding fantastical worlds by depicting how the most completely miraculous or inexplicable events are subsumed and exploited by the same muck of late-stage capitalism as anything else. Whether it is cloning or phone booths that connect to god or transdimensional security scams, it only takes a minute before the miracle is overtaken by the marketing.
- Also low-key perfect: the use of “Careless Whisper” (aka the “Sergio sax solo”)
- The masks as a method to protect cops seems more and more an entirely pointless exercise with each passing week. Everyone knows who Sister Knight and Looking Glass are, all the bad guys definitely included.
- Keene claims that he and Judd were in charge of keeping the 7K and cops, respectively, from going completely to war. This sounds reasonable, but obviously we can’t trust Bob Benson, and Crawford was the one insisting on releasing the cops’ guns in the first episode, rather than trying to quiet things down. His real agenda remains one of the more difficult aspects of the plot to pin down.
*to be fair, Nolan tried for psychological and aesthetic realism, but it was mostly the latter, of compulsively explaining and justifying the origin of every cowl and grappling hook, that defined his style to audiences and imitators
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