Damon Lindelof's Watchmen

The way people are talking is piquing my interest for sure, my tired brain revolts at long tv tho so it will be a while before I get to it I think (by which time everyone may have decided they hate it)

yeah I mean it's only a nine-ep season so it shouldn't take long to see how it's shaking out

Lindelof's line about only doing one season or potentially not handling it after s1 is a total lie of course

I think I’ll watch the other thing you were bigging up before this tbh

i read sepinwall's recap and he included a whole bunch of superhero-like alias names for the cops that they probably didn't mention in the pilot? like tim blake nelson's character is named 'looking glass' and regina king is named 'lady night' or something. did anyone catch people referring to them by these names?

These were in the captions of the episode fwiw

1.5mm ppl watched the premiere, across HBO's various platforms.

(Kill 'em all with a squid! Lol)

In short: NO MORE MOORE FILM ADAPTATIONS KTHANXBYE

― Deric W. Haircare, Tuesday, June 20, 2006 11:38 AM

5 minute Future Shocks on the Cartoon Network. ANIMATED BY MY BROTHER!

― Tico Tico, Thursday, October 23, 2003 7:41 PM

a lot of the shorts Alan Moore did for Doctor Who Monthly & Weekly could be readily de-Doctor Who-ised and turned into interesting horror films. I'm thinking that one about the plastic toy factory, or the one about the Deathsmiths Of Goth.

― DV (dirtyvicar), Friday, October 24, 2003 7:48 AM

two years before The Time War became the inciting incident for a Dr Who reboot, four years before said reboot gave Time Lords lighting-shooting powers

I started out hating this, then being kind of haunted by its extrapolation of where the story left off, now I'm perversely intrigued. It's such a bizarre project, I don't really know what people who aren't obsessively familiar with the source material (raises hand) experience this as. Maybe in some way it's a little like the experience of the original - you're in a world that is mostly like ours but differs markedly in large and small ways and you want to understand how all this came to be. I kind of can't stop thinking about it, it's a bit dreamlike to actually be watching a sequel.

I know there is a whole lot of world-building and exposition yet to come, and I've read the pdfs on HBO's site so I got some additional details, but there were a couple of too-odd moments among all the odd moments for me:
So the feared interrogation technique of the day is to reenact The Parallax View inside the meditation pod from Empire? And you obtain useful information by doing that?
You have Night Owl's ship for some reason, and instead of preserving it you decide to trash it - which evidently is fun for everyone? - because that's what you need to do to kill - not apprehend - two people fleeing a shootout? You probably don't have more of these things, because technology development ceased for a couple of decades.
Police go masked, because not that long ago there was some mass attack on cops - but you also prevent them from being constantly armed in a world in which everyone else is?

Thinking about it now, this is Lindelof's second Parallax View reference

Do they explain why technology development ceased?

Technophobic backlash as a result of Dr Manhattan iirc

There's a (potentially spoilery) summary of the supplements here

https://birthmoviesdeath.com/2019/10/21/watchmens-official-companion-site-fills-in-some-notable-gaps

Thanks, interesting (tho I don’t really understand why the squid incursion was blamed on technology)

No, the backlash was caused by the perception that Manhattan-derived technology was causing cancer.

I had no idea what was going on but i liked the vibe and look of this show.

I got the impression it wasn't Night Owl's ship, but that in the intervening years, the police departments have adopted some of the ways of the now-gone heroes

So to the kids in the series, superheroes are something that appear on the ubiquitously-advertised television show. Veidt has been hiding and now presumed dead, and the racists using Rorschach masks have tried to organize at least once and been pushed back by law enforcement, with the caveat that they've adopted masks to guard against reprisals.

Irons is a great casting choice, seeming decadent, degenerate, and still believing he was in the right. I got the impression that the lesson he's learned isn't that a disaster is the wrong way to bring humanity together, but that he just didn't do it quite right the first time

xxp That FBI memo says:

+ This electronic device does not contain Manhattan-made components and does not emit D.I.E.-grade radiation. Surgeon General Oz maintains you will not get cancer by being exposed to this device and you will not damage the (hypothetical) dimensional membrane by using it.

I liked that the white supremacist Tim Blake Nelson was interrogating was actually correct that the "transdimensional attack" was a hoax, but wrong about who was behind it.

But isn't he asked about the continuing squid showers from the sky, which are probably government conspiracy?

Ah, I hadn't considered that those might be termed as "attacks".

I might be wrong. Anyway, I thought it was a really funny detail.

I think I'm still a bit blown away that this is appears to be a very carefully studied sequel to the graphic novel and only that. This is the first HBO show or really any serialized TV show that I intend to watch a second time to pick up what I missed initially.

The same but I need to rewatch this time a little less high I think

I loved this; the world building really does remind me of the Leftovers, the scene with the squid rain really had the same feel and tone. I haven't read Watchmen in probably 25 years, I should go back and do that.

" I don't really know what people who aren't obsessively familiar with the source material (raises hand) experience this as…"

My wife doesn't know a thing about Watchmen '86, and she watched the first EP last night with me (I first watched it Sunday). Perhaps it's because she keeps up with modern story telling processes (books mostly, but also TV) as a component of her job, but she was immediately able to infer what was going on, understood it was an alternate timeline…I told her she should ask me what was going on if she needed to, but the shots of Jon on Mars and the MInutemen TV show didn't merit explanation as far as she is concerned and seems like fan service to people like us, so far at least… the only things she didn't pick up immediately that were intergral to what was going on was redfordations and the shot of the poster of the presidents in the classroom, which is stuff that even hardened Watchmonkeys must process just like them like my wife…

Which is to say: It seems like this could have been just as or nearly as successful if Lindelof (I have never watched Leftovers and Lost was immediately off-putting to me) presented this as an original concept, and trumpeted his fealty To Watchmen without going against the wishes of Moore. He could have even done what Moore did, and had characters that people like us know are supposed to be Laurie and Veidt and Kovacs, but have different names and character designs, vis-a-vis Nightshade/Phantom Lady, Peter Cannon and Question. whether or not some of you guys dislike him or his projects, he does seem to know what he's doing, has generated original concepts (by which I mean projects that are not based around anywhere from 30 to 80 year old IP) with mass appeal, and thus has a track record of not needing the crutch of the geekiest of geekbait corporate brandnames to be successful.

I will say that I've been uninterested in revisiting the original work in the ten years since the Snyder film…I always sneer "well then, grow the fuck up, your attachment to your childhood totems is too fragile, this shit enacts corporate prerogatives" at people who say "this new adaptation ruined my childhood," but that shitty movie affected my perception of the work.

whether or not some of you guys dislike him or his projects, he does seem to know what he's doing, has generated original concepts (by which I mean projects that are not based around anywhere from 30 to 80 year old IP)

except... watchmen and the leftovers are both based on other people's ip

and so are promethus and star trek into darkness and tomorrowland

yeah, but leftovers was a collaboration with the original author and seasons 2 and 3 had zero to do with the first one, which was actually based on the book.

mh, I dig the Irons choice as well - I wasn't expecting him to be camp and mounting his own pantos in a castle, though!

veronica, I like where you're going, that's where I ended up as well after some thought - reading the original in 85, you were being confronted with an alternate timeline and had to wait for its weird details to be explained to you. So like the Star Wars sequels, this show functions as a reboot of the IP for people starting fresh, as well as having an elaborate backstory (the original) which sets the stage for the new people, and is a callback for the people familiar with the original. It's an interesting way of rebooting something instead of remaking the same story in a different style, and I thought Abrams was smart to do it that way (whether the films are any good intrinsically is another question).

That said he is introducing a parallel narrative - race relations, the lynching orphan - which runs chronologically alongside the original, that's a peculiar complication I'm confused by as well as curious about. The guy isn't Hooded Justice, which some people have wondered. Also he's yet to develop the plot of this particular stage of Watchmen - right now we're just stepping off the dock and looking around at where we are. I doubt it'd be something too beholden to the original, like Veidt being revealed as a mass murderer or Manhattan coming back (though why is he back on Mars still knocking buildings down after 30 years? Also, Veidt is obviously still thinking about him) .... I think Lindelof is thinking 'what are the conflicts and battles that would be happening right now in this world and what's our new story?' And the answer has something to do with hero-deconstruction again, this time involving race, also with conflated masked vigilantes and police confronting a resurgent populist right wing, and probably also involves something a bit weirder.

I want to clarify here that I'm not hating Lindelof, he's one of my favorite people working in TV, even the stuff of his that didn't work is interesting to me (caveman storyline in Leftovers, anyone). His 'thing' is to confront you with very strange material and then build a story out of it that gradually - I'm sure most of the odd notes will be found to have some reason for being.

Perfect Strangers storyline was the best part of leftovers. Hope ALF makes a cameo in Watchmen. Maybe Doc Manhattan blew up Melmac?

lol I forgot about the perfect strangers thing

I'm sure there will be an incongruous scene or cameo to work in some 80s nostalgia since that is such a requirement these days.

The thing Manhattan was knocking down was vaguely Assyrian or Sumerian, I wonder if he's still working through his recreating-humanity plan and he's up to city-states and agriculture

hoping for cousin larry appearance in Watchmen

I should have seen this on the first watch, but the structure Manhattan's destroying is of course a duplicate of Veidt's castle

And if I'd thought about it for a bit I could have answered my own question regarding cops and guns - this is after 30 years of a liberal regime which restricted access to deadly force and everyone's as frustrated with and contemptuous of the regulations as you'd expect after all that time

A fun classroom detail - there's a poster of the 'Squidfall Cycle' instead of the water cycle. Evidently something is done with that mass of squid carcasses but I can't imagine what

Sushi

Like, are they evaporating and, and ... are clouds now just giant fluffy masses of wriggling squid tadpoles. At some point you're breathing and drinking squid – I'd rather be irradiated by lithium batteries

The only other hit for 'Squidfall Cycle' is a review on a Twin Peaks site which gets waaaaaay into the world-building weeds and might be a bit much for some

That site is great if you love super deep dives (to which I can attest as a TP S4 essay-reading obsessive)

(I mean S3, lol... obviously I’m a true fan)

Ok, so after reviewing some in-world documentation, the OG NYC Squid wasn't able to be forensically analyzed as it ... dissolved into water. So yeah, everyone is breathing, drinking, and bathing in aerosolized telepathic engineered squid now, and will be forever more.

Which given that everyone is, what, 50–70% water, is really fucking annoying. When someone's in the sauna, are they extruding squid?

Imagine the smell of gyms.

Pilot was fine but the Trent Reznor soundtrack felt very intrusive, almost Murray Gold-ishly so. The direction wasn't dynamic enough to match it.

A friend of mine had a similar complaint but it didn't bug me; I really liked the industrial noise strk accompaniment to the 1921 sequence especially. Also Reznor/Ross going full early-90s NIN (as opposed to the more subdued textures of other soundtrack work they've done) makes sense for a world where technology is lagging.

Maybe it's the mixing, then? Like a lot of recent shows, the music always seems like it's mixed too high over the dialogue.

There were lots of good things about this, although (at least for this first episode) I couldn't shake the sense that I was watching a more polished and interesting version of "Heroes".

Lindelof's great (and underrated IMO) strength isn't his twisty plotting but his ability to write about misery and miserable people without producing misery porn. There was some heavy (maybe flippantly heavy) imagery in this but also lots of narrative momentum and good gags - the rifle-behind-the-bed bit was almost ZAZ-worthy.

The ethics of it still stink, though! The DC logo in the end credits left a bitter taste.

I’m still not sure where this is going, but I’m reminded of something I said when I found out the movie adaptation of Watchmen was coming out:

The comic was meant as a commentary not just on the medium and conventions, but also the history that shaped those norms. Any adaptation should do the same, whether it’s a movie deconstructing current box office trends in the context of historical antecedents, or an HBO miniseries examining its peers.

idk, it’s a lot to ask and a comic in the 80s had a more encapsulated task

some cringey dialogue this week but also more humor, which I definitely appreciated. and I liked that there was a comically long trigger warning for American Hero Story that no one in-world bitched about.

How is Don Johnson?