Watchmen on HBO: news, episode recaps, analysis, and comic book Easter eggs

As far as I (Vox critic at large Emily VanDerWerff) am concerned, “See How They Fly,” Watchmen’s first (and perhaps only?) season finale, was a near-perfect way to end a near-perfect season of television.

Like the season it caps, “See How They Fly” begins with a heady dip into both the past and present, filling viewers in on the backstory of Lady Trieu and Adrian Veidt’s eventual escape from Europa. The two are linked — Trieu is Veidt’s daughter, though he had no idea she existed until she showed up at his doorstep in Antarctica. (Sidebar: The way the show’s directors have used lighting to highlight Hong Chau’s eyes in a way that makes it seem almost as if Lady Trieu is wearing a mask herself, is a nifty visual reference to Ozymandias’s look.)

“A God Walks Into Abar” (get it??) is essentially TV critic catnip.

A complicated love story that spans many years, told in a disjointed fashion that requires viewers to pay close attention, with several moments that ask whether we can ever really know someone we love? Yes please! Can we possibly have seconds?

This article contains spoilers for Watchmen’s seventh episode.

Sometimes HBO reminds us, in the best way possible, that its take on Watchmen is a comic book show after all. Episode seven is a prime example of how a well-executed plot twist can change everything that we thought we knew and make us re-watch and re-think everything all over again.

“It’s time to come out of the tunnel,” Angela Abar says, pushing an already great episode of Watchmen toward the transcendent.

She’s talking to her husband, Cal, who is deeply confused by what she’s saying. But the audience by now has hopefully caught on to what’s happening: Cal, somehow, is Doctor Manhattan in disguise, and the Seventh Kavalry is coming to take him away and imbue his powers into Joe Keene.

Watchmen’s sixth episode, “This Extraordinary Being,” unleashed a barrage of twists and turns that turned the episode and the world of Watchmen inside out. But amid the hypno-gun hanging of Judd Crawford, the reveal of Hooded Justice’s secret identity, and Angela Abar experiencing her grandfather Will’s memories, there might have been one blistering reference subtly woven into the episode: a possible nod to Fred Trump, the father of sitting president Donald Trump.

The possible Trump “reference” happens partway through the episode during a memory of when Will was just starting out as a cop and encounters a man named Fred. Will witnesses him break a window and set a Jewish deli on fire on Jamaica Avenue in Queens. Will approaches him, asks him what his name is, the man replies with “Fred,” and Will promptly arrests him.

This article contains spoilers for the sixth episode of HBO’s Watchmen.

Watchmen’s sixth episode, “This Extraordinary Being,” is one of the most explosive episodes of television this year, and it’s all wrapped around one nuclear revelation: Will Reeves, a.k.a. Angela’s grandfather, a.k.a. the mysterious man in the wheelchair, is the superhero known as Hooded Justice.

I’ve never seen a TV episode quite like “This Extraordinary Being.” And I’ve seen a lot of TV over the years.

It darts and weaves through American history, real and imagined, to create a portrait of a country that never once lives up to its ideals, while cruelly displaying those ideals on the horizon, a beacon of what could be true if not for the forces of racism, hatred, and greed. It’s also a gigantic attempt to fill in one of the single biggest pieces of Watchmen lore from the original comic, with its own clever answer to a big question about a secret identity. And it’s an integral part of this season’s narrative, recentering on Angela Abar’s quest to untangle the conspiracy surrounding Judd’s murder after a couple of weeks in which the story has drifted away from her.

The fifth episode of Watchmen, “Little Fear of Lightning,” takes us back to the ’80s — the age of hairspray, leather jackets, Howard Jones’s hit “Things Can Only Get Better,” the Cold War, and, in this universe, a psychic squid attack.

The 1980s-era of the Watchmen world is seen through the eyes of Looking Glass, the stalwart police officer with a mirrorball face and the uncanny ability to tell when people are lying. We meet him as a teen trying to promote the good word of Doomsday, how the end is near, and how God has pandas in heaven. To Looking Glass’s chagrin, the apparent apocalypse comes sooner rather than later, and he plays witness to mass death, destruction, and disorder in the form of a genocidal squid storming his local fair.

After playing footsie with the original Watchmen comic for four weeks, the new TV show’s fifth episode — “Little Fear of Lightning” — dumps us straight into one of the comic’s most famous moments: the “interdimensional” squid attack on New York that kills 3 million people and does grave psychic damage to even more.

The event, as those who’ve read the comic know, is a plot cooked up by Ozymandias to avoid nuclear war and maybe bring about world peace. Known to the public as an “attack” by beings from another dimension, it manages to bring the US and USSR closer together, leading to the version of America we see in the series, where the Robert Redford administration is nearing its 30-year anniversary but where the tensions of the Cold War no longer seem relevant to the world at large.

There’s all over the place, and then there’s Watchmen’s fourth episode, “If You Don’t Like My Story, Write Your Own,” which is all over the place. That’s probably a compliment coming from me (Vox critic at large Emily VanDerWerff), but the first time I watched this episode, I definitely wondered if the show had any idea where it was going, especially after the relatively contained and controlled narrative of episode three.

“If You Don’t Like My Story, Write Your Own” doesn’t just start with something out of the ordinary — it starts with yet another new, incredibly important character, whose existence has been kept from us to this point. That character is Lady Trieu (the always welcome Hong Chau), a woman who’s so rich that she can simply grow a baby for an infertile couple whose land she wishes to purchase, handing over the infant in exchange for the right to destroy their family farm. But the couple gets a son, so ... it all works out in the end?

For a brief moment in the third episode of Watchmen, a show where anything can happen, a very big something came out of the blue or, rather, a big blue something came out.

After a long day of investigation — which included a funeral disrupted by a suicide bomber — FBI agent Laurie Blake (Jean Smart) finally retired to her hotel room. Finally alone with time to herself, the rough and gruff agent opened a briefcase she’d been lugging with her throughout the episode. With a squint and scrim of desire in her eyes, Laurie pulled out a colossal cerulean vibrator from the luggage.

Every TV show has one episode where its core audience goes all-in, where the show goes from merely “promising” to one that fans will watch every episode of, if only for a few seasons.

That episode will differ for every single audience member, but I (Vox critic at large Emily VanDerWerff) am totally unsurprised that “She Was Killed By Space Junk” is the episode where so many of my fellow TV critic pals, regardless of whether they’ve read the comics the series is based on or not, went from guardedly optimistic about Watchmen to all in on Watchmen. After two episodes featuring only slight ties to the world of the Watchmen comic, “Space Junk” brings in Laurie Blake, as played by the wonderful Jean Smart, and the episode goes for it, unveiling a significant portion of the series’ larger picture.

Two episodes into HBO’s Watchmen, the show is already brimming with mysteries. Among the unexplained: What kind of powers, if any, does Will (Louis Gossett, Jr.) possess to hang, as he says he did, Police Chief Judd Crawford (Don Johnson? Is Will even telling the truth? What other skeletons are in Judd’s closet beyond that Ku Klux Klan outfit? And what else will Angela (Regina King) find out about him and her family? Is Angela ever going to get a day off?

And there’s an even more stupefying one: Is Jeremy Irons even on the same show?

There’s absolutely no need to read Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s 12-issue graphic novel to understand what’s going on in HBO’s new Watchmen series. It’s set in 2019, decades after the events of the novel, and it doesn’t focus on those characters (at least so far). In fact, most of the graphic novel is equally homaged and spoofed with Watchmen having its own show within a show, called American Hero Story.

But knowing what happens in the source material makes the viewing experience much richer, weirder, and more intriguing. Spotting the references to the original Watchmen challenges viewers to fill in the missing details of the decades that passed in between the comic book and the TV series.

Watchmen’s series premiere, officially titled “It’s Summer and We’re Running Out of Ice,” is a slick piece of television. The episode skillfully blends real-world fears — the specter of white nationalism is invoked more than once — with the comic book trappings of the show’s source material. The Nite Owl ship from the comic (well, probably not the Nite Owl ship, but a lookalike) makes a brief appearance. And people talk about how Doctor Manhattan lives on Mars.

Yet if you’ve never read the comic, you’ll be able to follow along just fine. And even if you have read the comic, the events of this first episode take place well before and after the story told in print. The show pulls off the difficult feat of telling a story that stands on its own, while being informed by another story entirely. (Weirdly, it also helps if you’ve seen the musical Oklahoma!, whose story is woven in more thoroughly than you might expect.)

The opening 10 minutes of HBO’s new Watchmen series — not a straight adaptation of the acclaimed 1986 graphic novel but a companion to it — are a statement of purpose rarely seen on TV: “Here is what this show is,” they say. “If you’d rather not watch this kind of show, we wanted to let you know up front.”

Watchmen is set in 2019, but these opening 10 minutes depict the Tulsa, Oklahoma, race massacre of 1921. The massacre was pure malevolent violence committed on Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street,” undertaken by white citizens who killed dozens and wounded even more (exact totals are unknown) while burning black property to the ground. It is widely considered one of the most shocking acts of racial violence in American history, and it’s core to what Watchmen is saying about America today.

How do you update Watchmen for 2019?

That might sound like a question with an obvious answer: You just do Watchmen. After all, the graphic novel, which has been consistently in print since its 12-volume run ended in 1987, is pretty terrific, and a TV miniseries version could restore much of the material that had been cut for time in Zack Snyder’s 2009 film adaptation.