Recently, I finally got around to Watchmen (2019), the kinda-sorta-limited series based on the comic book series of the same name. I took a bit too chew on it and now here I am with my hot take about it. In order to discuss the aspects of the show, I’ll be spoiling the whole shebang, so turn back now if you want to go in totally fresh. Also in the interest of brevity, I’m not going to recap the plot, so it probably won’t make much sense anyway.

The Good

One of the things I liked about this show was allowing itself to be unabashedly silly in a way that would fit in a comic book. The first moment that made me smile in that way was when Will Reeves said he had “friends in high places” and then is rescued from Angela trying to arrest him by a giant magnet coming down and pulling him into the sky. I also enjoyed the reveal of Laurie using a giant blue Doctor Manhattan dildo. It’s refreshing to see a comic book adaptation know that it can be silly when it’s warranted.

The most praised episode of the series is “This Extraordinary Being” which retcons the secret identity of Hooded Justice–whose identity was never revealed in the original series–as a Black man who used his costume to allow him to fight against white supremacy. He hides both his identity and his race by painting the only visible part of his skin–his eyes–with makeup so he looks white. This culminates in his son imitating him, which throws him into a fit of rage to make him take it off, realizing the psychological toll that pretending to be a different race is doing to him.

The show depicts and draws a lot of lore and plot points from the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, where thousands of Black people were attacked by mobs of white people in the “Black Wall Street”. This is a part of American history that is rarely talked about and has not truly been recokoned with, so just as a piece of mass market media talking about it is good. It also uses it as a springboard to show what reparations for Black people could look like (as well as what the backlash to such a policy would probably look like as well).

I was actually very impressed at the craft needed to tell a traditional brick joke in order to juice up the tv brick joke. I laughed a lot at that.

The Bad

The first modern day scene depicts a cop doing a traffic stop on a suspected member of the Seventh Kavalry–Watchmen’s version of the KKK but they wear masks styled off Rorshach from the comics–and he is killed. The implication in the scene is he dies because he’s unarmed due to a bug in the system that allows him to access his gun with approval from an officer at the precinct. The fact that one of the first things I see in this show is essentially an argument that we need to keep cops armed at all times puts a very bad taste in my mouth. Strangely enough this particular issue comes up approximately once more before its dropped entirely, which I guess is better than trying to make it more of a throughline, but it’s still bad.

There is however another related issue which is the shows treatment of police brutality. During most of the episodes, we see over-the-top violence perperated by police, who constitute nearly all of our protagonists, especially Angela Abar/Sister Night. This violence seems justified because they are going after murderous white supremacists, the Seventh Kavalry. I really can’t abide by the idea of using police brutality is okay as long as the people it’s being used on are sufficiently bad. Additionally, the tendancy of cops to be white supremacists themselves, just makes the idea of the whole situation ring false for me. This is especially glaring when it’s revealed that the chief of police is revealed to be a secret racist who was working with the Seventh Kavalry the whole time.

Ultimately the show seems to aspire to want to talk about issues like race and police in the US, but it doesn’t really say much about either. There’s comparisons drawn between vigilantes and police with masks, but no real consequences ever seem to come of that. Very little actual racism is depicted in modern-day Tulsa. We are simply informed that the bad guys are racists.

The Confusing

Since we never actually talk about racism, what’s the plot about then? Well, Doctor Manhattan of course! Two different people want to steal his powers, including the aforementioned racists and Ozymandias’s secret daughter. The racists want his powers so that they can use them to… make it better for white people? It’s not really clear. Lady Trieu (Ozymandias’s daughter) wants to solve the world’s problems with godlike powers. However, it’s unclear why she can’t really do anything about the world’s problems already as an incredibly rich person. It’s implied she wouldn’t actually fix the problems because of her ego, but ultimately the goal (for both) seems like fetishization of the source material by the writers. Doctor Manhattan has to be there because he’s iconic. Who cares if his presence has basically nothing to do with the stuff that we’ve talked about up until this point?

Trieu has a few other dangling plot threads that don’t really make sense in hindsight. First is that her “daughter” is actually a clone of her mother. I think the only reason for her inclusion is to make Trieu feel more disconnected from humanity, but in terms of plot reveals it means about nothing. And then the reveal of her father being Ozymandias makes the plot work in terms of his arc, but he’s also completely removed from everything else to the point where it could just as well be anything else. It feels like another attempt of the writers to shoehorn a character from the comics into their story to very little actual effect.

Speaking of Ozymandias his whole existence on Europa slowly meted out through the 9 episodes feels like it was supposed to be interesting, but the ultimate reveal of his presence there being essentially a whim that couldn’t be taken back, plus the relationship with “The Game Warden” being completely constructed just make the whole thing feel like a colossal waste of time. It effectively allowed him to show up at the right moment and that’s about it. Even then, they probably could have had his plot function be done in 1000 different, more interesting ways.

Speaking of weird plot decisions, I think Will making Judd hang himself using mind control was silly in a bad way. It was a moment that should have had gravitas but instead we had a poorly explained sciencey-magic plot device that never came up again and solved a mystery in possibly the least interesting way possible. Even rolling with this silly scene, they even put off the reveal of Judd’s ultimate white supremacy in a way that seems inconsistent with how they’ve established the mind control works in the single instance before. He simply dodges a question while obviously mind controlled which is not only tonally weird, but a confusing way to write the scene at all.

Conclusion

While there is some good craft at display and at least one very good episode, the whole never congeals and there’s a lot of things which are there just to keep you guessing so you keep watching and nothing more. If you somehow made it this far and haven’t see the show this is my suggestion you skip it.