So with my expectations appropriately low I have begun watching HBO new series Watchmen. In this review I will fullyspoil both the comic and 2009 adaptation of Watchmen.

Why am I setting expectation low for this alternate history super hero series? The answer is one name, Damon Lindelof. Lindelof has been a writer if television and feature for a number of years and his name is attached to some major projects, Star Trek: Into Darkness, Prometheus, World War Z, Cowboys and Aliens, and the recently delayer and/or canceled feature film The Hunt. With the exception of that final entry which I have not viewed, all of these projects not only left me cold but I felt assaulted by intelligence with gaps in logic that no suspension bridge of disbelief could span. Given that history as a writer I expect very little from a Damon Lindelof project.

However I am a fan of Watchmen  both the original comic and the Snyder feature adaptation and I heard enough about this set up and premise of this series to genuinely intrigue me.

Watchmen  is in an alternate time line where costumed heroes began appearing in the streets sometime in the 1940s. For both the comic and the 2009 feature this leads to a radically different 1980s, Nixon is never forced out of office by Watergate, a god-like being Doctor Manhattan transforms science, technology, and world events by being a patriotic ‘superman,’ figure, and the US Constitution is amended to allow unlimited terms for a president. One of the more revered heroes, Ozymandias, convinced only he can save the world from impending nuclear annihilation fakes a catastrophic event to create species wide unity. In the comic he stages an inter-dimensional attack on Earth from giant squids, and in the 2009 feature he frames Dr. Manhattan for the attack. In both cases half of metropolitan New York is killed. The remaining, having failed to stop the attack, commit to keeping the secret giving Ozymandias’ plan a chance of success except for the manically committed Rorschach. In order to maintain their conspiracy Dr. Manhattan murders Rorschach but a by Rorschach journal detailing his investigation into the plot is published and the world continues to teeter on the brink of global nuclear war.

The series Watchmen  take place 30 years later in a parallel 2019 but it is not clear if it has followed the comic’s reality with monstrous being from another dimension having ‘attacked’ the Earth in the 1980s or the 2009’s Dr. Manhattan hoax timeline. Given Manhattan’s known presence on Mars and a rain of tiny squid in episode one I am inclined to believe that Lindelof is extrapolating from the comic’s history.

Episode one opens with a heinous event that tragically is not part of some dark alternate timeline but rather a part shameful American History, The Tulsa Race Massacre, when rioting white slaughter the residents of the Midwest’s ‘Black Wall Street.’  We follow the survival of one young boy as the rioting and murders exterminate the town around him. The story picks up some ninety-odd years later with our lead character Angela Abar. Angela is a police detective but following an earlier terrorists campaign police are masked adopting like super heroes secret identities. The terrorists that waged their war on the police were the Kavalry, a virulent racist organization that idolizes the murdered Rorschach. When the Kavalry resurfaces Angela’s world is turned upside down and she quickly becomes entwined in a new conspiracy with roots stretching back to the 1921 massacre. Simultaneously on a distant English estate Ozymandias lives in retired seclusion pursuing his own unrevealed plots that involve genetic engineering and artificial people.

There is a very strong moral ambiguity to the show. The Kavalry are presented in a no redeeming method but the police, our protagonists employee torture to achieve their means and that is never good.

Watchmen  the series in its first two episodes presents a number of interesting and compelling character but also displays a few typical Hollywoodisms that usually mar action sequences with events that simply defy any understanding of how the physics of the world actually work but so far nothing that has dissuaded me from watching further episodes.  All in all Lindelof’s show is interesting, complex and may still prove that more than The Fonz can jump a shark.