Watchmen: The World in Black and White

Throughout its first season, Watchmen creators have shown a truly remarkable understanding of the original text through a series of side stories, secondary characters, and indirect references.  Showrunner Damon Lindelof and his team thrive in the spaces that the graphic novel left empty, deepening a familiar story by exploring elements that didn’t get enough exposure the first time around.  By focusing on themes relevant to our current cultural climate, the show has so far connected with the original story without acting as a direct retelling.  

Each week has shown a steady increase in quality throughout the season, building onto the lore so brilliantly laid out by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons over thirty years ago.  The series’ sixth episode is a prime example of what creators can accomplish when they embrace their medium, take narrative risks, and acknowledge their source material without completely depending on it.  If you weren’t sure before, know now: if you are not keeping up with HBO’s Watchmen, you are missing out on the single greatest piece of storytelling that television currently has to offer.

Format

With so much to say about such an extraordinary episode, today’s review comes in two parts, the first being a discussion of the format of the show.  As a work of televisual art—discounting themes, metaphors, and content within the episode, which will all be discussed later—the episode stands high above any standard that has previously been set.  It is the definition of a raised bar.

We begin by watching Angela Abar as she descends into a comatose state reliant on memories that are not her own.  Nostalgia is a fictional drug, but the effects as depicted in this episode bring about a visceral reality. Viewers know what Angela is feeling, as clearly as if they were enduring it themselves.  A blurred and shaky camera strikes us as unfocused. Sweat dripping down her painted mask sends us hot and dizzy.  Voices and sounds are distorted, stuffy, with a faint ringing to top us all off. A tune familiar to viewers as the theme from Trust In The Law, the short film introduced in Tusla at the start of the series, begins to play on a piano that doesn’t belong in the moment, accompanied by the distant roll of a snare that grows, and grows, and grows until we finally land in a scene cast in grayscale.

This single transition sets the stage for all that is yet to come.  It’s a show of mastery, not just from a directorial standpoint, but also in all things editing, cinematography, and sound.  All senses are engaged. Audiences are fully immersed. This episode leads with empathy and drives it home throughout.

By having Angela live through her grandfather’s experience rather than simply observe it, Watchmen is able to take a story line set in the past and tie it to the present.  Angela gives audiences a reference point through which to view the story, emphasized by her occasional appearance in the place of young William Reeves. Pay attention to when she shows up.  It’s no coincidence that she delivers some of the most powerful lines. “I’m not angry,” she says for her grandfather. “My memory is fine,” she later insists to a precinct dispatcher. All of this is presented through seamless transitional editing with a cinematographic cadence comparable to the best of the West Wing Walk-n-Talks.  

The most noticeable break in this format comes when his fellow officers kidnap Will Reeves, beating him, degrading him, and eventually hanging him.  The camera shifts to a point-of-view shot, once again focusing on empathy as Will suffers through this gross intimidation tactic. When the corrupt officers do cut him down, the camera cuts to Angela—not Will—as she once again takes the place of her grandfather.  

That is what this episode does so extremely well.  Creators establish a cohesive format so that when they break it, viewers notice.  The same technique is used with color. While the majority of the story is told through black and white, Will’s memories from the Tusla Massacre are integrated into the story as the only colorful elements in frame.  It operates on the same level as the red coat in Schindler’s List. Isolated color doesn’t just draw attention to an object, but also to the emotion that an object symbolizes. It is yet another attempt to humanize the victims, to justify revenge, and to make viewers feel the same ragged anger that fuels Will’s transition into the Hooded Justice.

Everything—every last bit of skill that Damon Lindelof and his team had to share—is angled towards increasing empathetic viewership and driving emotional understanding.  And it absolutely pays off.  

Content

This attention to detail is the only reason episode six works as well as it does.  By taking the time to effectively worldbuild within the medium, Watchmen is able to confidently present a previously undiscussed origin story for an already established character.  It’s new ground for a show that has, until this point, largely focused on its original characters while only hinting at those that already exist within the universe. With a solid base, the new series is able to build.

Not only does it build, but it builds well.  The story of William Reeves already feels like it is what the entire series has been leading up to and we still have three episodes left in the season.  It so beautifully encompasses the series’ recurring themes and works with both elements that are unique to the television show and those that have long since been established in the graphic novel.  It gives more meaning to an otherwise dismissable character and reintroduces superheroes as they started off in Action Comics #1; as vigilantes with a rigid moral cause.

What’s more is that the show does this in a way that feels familiar to the audience.  The first minutes of the episode are devoted to the version of Hooded Justice that audiences think they already know.  A white man. A sexual deviant. A hardened fighter, prone to violence just for violence’s sake. It is the version of Hooded Justice that readers are told about in the graphic novel, now shown to us through a highly sensationalized, in-fiction retelling.  

This primes audiences for the story that they are about to be exposed to—the legend versus the reality.  Hooded Justice was, famously, the only adventurer not to expose his secret identity to the world, or even to his colleagues.  Episode six of the series gives us insight into why that may have been. Even among those who wanted to do good in the world, despite their own respective levels of corruption, one thing remained: a social intolerance for black men.