SPOILER WARNING

Who was that masked man?

In this week’s episode of “Watchmen,” the show pulls back the hood on one of the story’s most elusive figures, the brutal vigilante called Hooded Justice. A peripheral but pivotal figure in the original graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Hooded Justice was the very first masked vigilante hero in the “Watchmen” universe, responsible for launching the phenomenon that inspired all the others to don masks of their own.

The big surprise? Underneath that hood and noose, so evocative of the Ku Klux Klan, was a black cop and survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre, Will Reeves. Employing a mask and a rope that his racist fellow police officers had used to terrify and intimidate him, he turned the terror back onto criminals — including those crooked cops.

The revelation elevates a background player from the graphic novel to the status of protagonist, and in the process it raises as many questions as it answers. Does this surprising secret identity jibe with what we know from Moore and Gibbons’s original book? The showrunner Damon Lindelof — despite having made what he has called a “remix” of the book — claims to treat it as gospel. Could the racist iconography of Hooded Justice have been a ruse all along? We dug back into the source material to see if the case for a placing black man beneath that menacing hood holds up.

I unpacked the big twist on this week’s episode of Watchmen for the New York Times.

It’s wild!

No, seriously, it really is wild. It reminds me, in a good way, of some of the most far-out episodes of Lindelof’s Leftovers run—the ones where Justin Theroux near-death-hallucinates that he’s an international assassin, say, or the one where Christopher Eccleston talks to God on a weird cult’s orgy boat before God gets mauled to death by a lion. Where Moore and Gibbons’s Watchmen eased you into its world’s weirdness—which to be fair was orders of magnitude less weird than either the Marvel or DC shared universes of which it served as a critique—Lindelof and director Nicole Kassell dump you into the deep end and expect you to do the butterfly, with the aggressive and eerie music of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross blaring in the background.

I reviewed the series premiere of Watchmen for Decider, where I’ll be covering the show all season. It’s good!

Where Does the TV Show Pick Up?

The show is set roughly 30 years later; during much of that time, Robert Redford has been president. Vigilantism remains banned except under official government auspices thanks to the Keene Act, a 1977 law named after Senator Joe Keene, whose charismatic son is now challenging Redford for the presidency. And Dr. Manhattan, who despite his near-omniscience was unable to stop Ozymandias’s plot, has fled the planet for Mars, where he has lived alone for decades.

Historically and psychically, the TV series roots itself in the 1921 riot in Tulsa, Okla., in which a white mob swarmed the prosperous black part of town, resulting in as many as 300 deaths, with thousands more displaced. In the fictionalized present day, the series pits the Tulsa police force, whose members wear vigilante-style masks to protect their identity, against a militant white supremacist group called the Seventh Kavalry, which has adopted Rorschach’s lethal methods and black-and-white mask.

I wrote a quick and dirty guide to Watchmen—the comic, the show, and their shared world—for the New York Times.