Even at this relatively early stage in Watchmen‘s game, summarizing the events of an episode, much less watching one, can be a dizzying prospect. Phone calls to Mars, exploding coffins, racism detectors, homemade spacesuits, dead buffalos, pet owls, Desmond Dekker’s “Israelites,” cars falling from the sky, massive blue dildos—it makes you sound like a crazy person, or at the very least the police chief from The Naked Gun.
But that’s the charm, isn’t it? Alright, I’m not asking, I’m telling: That’s the charm. Even though “She Was Killed by Space Junk,” Watchmen Episode 3, is so far the only one to make a big deal of its ties to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s epochal comic book, it is every bit as weird in its content and jarring in its rhythm as its predecessors. You thought introducing the Silk Spectre was going to slow things down? Think again.
A snakebite at the end of a climactic, no-holds-barred heart-to-heart is a perfect visual synecdoche for the entire series, which has always pitted human desire and emotion against the caprice of the universe — hurricanes, cancer diagnoses, fires, drownings, accidents of birth. What a pleasure to watch a show move toward its final hour with so firm a grasp on what has given it life.
I reviewed the penultimate episode of The Affair for the New York Times.
