Anyway, there’s some perfunctory “and the moral of the story is…” stuff about masks—Ozymandias says they “make men cruel,” Hooded Justice says “you can’t heal with a mask” because “wounds need air”—the sum total meaning of which you can grasp in about the time it took you to read this sentence. It seems to me that in an episode that featured, again, Angela Abar breaking someone’s fingers one by one for information, you should probably have shown how vigilantism and unaccountable law enforcement are bad rather than just told us. It would have made it easier to believe the show meant what it was saying.
As it stands, I’m not really sure what the show means. Not that meaning is the be-all and end-all of visual narrative—like I said a few episodes ago, this is a drama, not a thinkpiece. If you were to treat all of this as an essay rather than serialized television, you’d miss how much dizzying fun Damon Lindelof’s brand of blow-to-the-head surrealism can be, or how good Regina King and Jeremy Irons and Jean Smart and Tim Blake Nelson and Louis Gossett Jr. and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Tom Mison and Sara Vickers and Don Johnson and Hong Chau were in their roles. (Seriously, that is a murderers’ row of individually vivid performances, whatever you think about the show they were in.)
But seriously, what do we have here that we didn’t have before? Watchmen the original article had a lot to say about America, the Cold War, vigilantism, the right, the superhero genre, and the comics art form. Other than opening with the Tulsa Race Massacre—a big point in its favor—did Watchmen the TV show comment on politics in general or its own medium in particular with anything approaching Moore & Gibbons’s innovation, vision, and purpose? The puzzle pieces all fit, but what kind of picture are we looking at? I’ll give you a little time to think it over. Tick tock, tick tock.
I reviewed the finale of Watchmen for Decider. I feel like in the end it was a bunch of beautiful humbug.
Tags: decider, reviews, TV, TV reviews, watchmen