Damon Lindelof's Watchmen

Watching Jean Smart play Laurie is at the very top of the pleasures of this show. She makes 'sassy' as large as the world and as varied

"Three episodes in, and I think I'm done with this show. It might be fantastic for all I know, but I don't because the way the audio's been mixed has rendered it p much unwatchable."

I'm not having this issue at all. Are you sure there isn't something amiss with your AV setup? How are you watching this?

I just caught up last night. I liked the first two episodes a lot; the second two not as much. I am not a fan of the show still introducing major characters in episodes 3 and 4. It's not fatal for me, but if there are still new major players

The sequences with Jeremy Irons might be my favorite thing so far.

Time for speculation (n.b. I have read no articles about this show):

I suspect there is some sort of time warp/dislocation element to be revealed based on Trieu's comment that her tower is designed to "tell time." I wonder if this is a call-back to *SPOILERS* the fact that Dr. Manhattan experiences past, present, and future simultaneously and that Veidt used tachyon generators to cloud the future from Dr. Manhattan's knowledge.

I would not be surprised if some part of this show (Jeremy Irons?) is taking place on a Mars with beings set in motion by Dr. Manhattan.

*if there are still new major players being introduced in a another episode or two, that will be a bad sign.*

Irons is absolutely my favorite element. He looks like he's having a ball.

expecting to see Dr. M and Night Owl at least though

I read a fan theory about what Trieu and co. are up to that is almost certainly more fun/satisfying than what's actually going on.

I am really hoping Lube Man isn't just a weird throwaway detail but there's a reason for him to be stalking while lubed

He lubed himself as he was being chased, he pulled two squirt bottles from his belt and doused himself just before he ditched the belt and slid into the sewer. Still weird through.

I assume lube dude is the skinny FBI dude.

I listened to Lindeloff's podcast. The story seems inspired a lot by TNC's A Case for Reparations, and the idea of inherited trauma. Trieu and her daughter making that pretty explicit.

I listened to that too. The reasoning for keeping Veidt under wraps was just as half-assed as I suspected, lol

I love how they kept that 'under wraps' so much, lol

under wraps as in who he's being played by?

under wraps as in 'who he is playing' I think.

huh I thought the promos made that clear

He lubed himself as he was being chased, he pulled two squirt bottles from his belt and doused himself just before he ditched the belt and slid into the sewer. Still weird through.

I didn't really mean 'why is he lubed' or 'what happened in that scene', but more 'who is this guy, what does he want, why follow her', etc. I wasn't very clear

Keyes, the idea that he's Petey is hilarious and given The Law of Conservation of Characters is probably true. Laurie's disgust with him and herself will be epic

I would not be surprised if some part of this show (Jeremy Irons?) is taking place on a Mars with beings set in motion by Dr. Manhattan.

Yep yep - I think this is the past ('four years'), episode one shows us Manhattan destroying that paradise/prison. I think Trieu is actually how Veidt 'escapes', he remakes himself into her. It could be that she's meant to be 'the new villain' or a 'Veidt type' and that she's not literally him ... but I think she's literally him

Another possibility is that she's so like-minded that he put her in charge of his (rebranded) empire before being imprisoned by Manhattan (though he says initially he thought it was 'paradise'; it sounds like he was lured there, not put there and told he couldn't leave; he may have actually asked Manhattan to whisk him off given how many people were keeping his name in the papers as a 11/2 suspect), then when he does manage to escape, she's there to meet his arrival (the meteor)

I think it's more likely based on the timeline that Trieu is the one who imprisoned him.

That's true. He disappears in 2007, declared missing by Trieu in 2012 when she takes over the Veidt empire. We know she likes tech and clones, so it's possible she created the environment to contain him (maybe by telling him it was the perfect retirement village). I still think creating a bubble of Earth-temperature and atmosphere on Mars (assuming this is on Mars) is a mighty big ask, though, that might be beyond anyone who's not Manhattan. But I take your point that we're meant to think Manhattan's involved, or is around, when he might not be, at least in this 2007-2019 period

I still think creating a bubble of Earth-temperature and atmosphere on Mars (assuming this is on Mars) is a mighty big ask, though, that might be beyond anyone who's not Manhattan.

https://i.imgur.com/U7FBz6N.jpg

whoops i mean

https://i.imgur.com/U7FBz6N.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/y5LYN5g.png

(downton abbey master-and-servant fantasyland both someone's nostalgia and someone's prison, same as the tropical bubble must've been for veidt's frozen vietnamese "servants")

(same as an egg is?)

I just remembered, watching this most recent episode, I kept thinking, "The actress playing Lady Trieu sounds just like whoever voices Pickles on 'Bojack Horseman.'" Turns out, same person.

good catch!

I think when Veidt was using his body catapult, the bodies were disappearing as they hit the cloud layer in a way indicating they weren't just out of sight, indicating there's a ceiling to the place

Not just a ceiling though, otherwise they'd presumably be bouncing back down.

ceiling as in the weather/cloud sense, although meaning that it's artificial

Yeah, that's how I read the frozen Philips – he gets tossed, or walks, out of the bubble, freezes cos Mars, gets reeled back in

It's one thing to build a vivarium, but another to have a huge sphere of simulated Earth in which everything's engineered (clones, tomatoes, bison, etc), so I'm still thinking Manhattan for this. Good idea on time possibly passing at a different rate inside the 'prison', we shall see

I think right now he's just trying to figure out the circumference of the environment, in which case I guess nobody could walk up to the periphery, or he'd already have done that. So egress must only be possible by flinging, or flying, so next up is some kind of rocket

RIP Tom Spurgeon:

Twenty-One Not Exactly Original Notes On More Watchmen, Written At A Slight Remove

3. [...] As a whole, it's very unlikely they will have much to do with the original project or, by virtue of being derivative works, come close to matching it in terms of quality or ambition.

4. More Watchmen is something of a perfect Internet-era story, and as such serves as a reminder of how much we're driven by and limited to the nature and form of the way news stories develop now. You couldn't build a story like this in a laboratory. The More Watchmen story is about a product; people like products. It's about the hype for a product, which in many ways and for many fans has become the best part of any arts-product experience. Because the work itself doesn't exist yet, arguments can be made on its behalf positing an ideal outcome or a disastrous one -- your choice. [...] The story has been simmering as a depressing eventuality for months now. More Watchmen brings to the fore a bunch of issues about which people have virtually no agreement, and it plugs right into culture-wide developments in terms of our attitudes towards money, the role of corporations versus individuals and the value of art.

5. [...] Part of why the buzz is so important now is that reducing art to brands and product makes the state of the brand as something moves through the publication process way more important than it used to be. Part of why the PR has achieved primacy is that projects like More Watchmen exist on a parallel track to their real-world status: they're strategies employed by people at corporations, collectively and individually, to further their status within the corporation or in the wider corporate world as much as they're ever comics in stores.

6. [...] On the other hand, this doesn't speak well to our ever seeing a project from this group that in 26 years will have grown to the point it can be exploited the way Watchmen can now be exploited. When we talk about companies managing brands instead of making things, we focus on the brand-part and not enough on the managing-part. That has long-term implications, too.

10. I don't buy the line some are peddling that the shape of rhetoric after the announcement is partly due to our giving corporations the benefits of personhood. Frankly, we wouldn't stomach DC's actions over the last 26 years towards Alan Moore from a person. We don't give corporations the same rights we give people; we privilege them over people.

14. [...] The absolute and frequently expressed inability of people from comics fans to fellow comics creators who should know better to realize that a creator might not hold making as much money as is possible the ultimate goal of art is astonishing to me, and distressing. [...]

16. That More Watchmen represents the triumph of brand over literary content, I think is more true than overly facile. Watchmen the work doesn't require a sequel and never did. Watchmen the collection of cool characters and isolated story moments and licensing opportunities demands one. It may really be that simple.

17. I'm also not certain how you can see this as anything but a step away from the wider cultural message of Watchmen back in the 1980s: that authors matter, that original work can be rewarded on the same level as reworking someone else's ideas, that comics have literary and culture value for their ideas and expressive force above and beyond their value as entertainment product. I might call DC foolish if they were touting these sequel books as a match for Watchmen's artistic achievement, but that this idea isn't even on the table may be scarier. This is a toy line. This is a happy meal. This is "based on." This is product.

18. [...] I know I'd rather work with Eric Stephenson than Dan DiDio right now. Wouldn't you?

19. [...] I'm at fault for taking a lot of cheap shots at people the last couple of weeks for the joy of seeing my anger reflected back to me in a lot of right-on, right-back-atcha statements from my peers. For all the fun writing that's been put out there, I'm not sure we're any closer to seeing this doesn't happen again. Alan Moore's statement that he just didn't want to see this happen remains for me the most painful moment in this whole matter, and I'm not sure we've found a way yet for it not to happen to the next guy.

20. So what should we do? I think it behooves us to talk about these matters, even if part of maintaining the status quo is that extended discussion about serious issues be characterized as boring and lame if it goes on for more than a day and isn't expressed in language that makes us feel good in fuck-yeah ways about our own positions. [...]

21. Ten days or so past the official announcement, I'm thinking More Watchmen may be best understood as a blow to comics' dignity. It's product, not art. It's a limited, small series of ideas derived from a bigger, grander one. It's sad. One thing that Watchmen did a quarter century ago was to underline certain values of craft and intent and creative freedom that have helped to yield enough equivalent expressions -- to my mind even grander expressions -- that we may now see this follow-up project for what it is: nothing special. Not Moore. More.

Thanks for posting this sic - Spurgeon OTM. I genuinely find it quite upsetting to see so many ilxors not giving a shit about creators' rights and merrily watching this fucking thing.

Oh no
We’ve done a terrible thing

aw man, what a way to learn that tom spurgeon died :(

Great intro to this episode

Also good to see Trixie!

who was Trixie?

Good episode but it was also fairly confusing. Ok, so, these Cavalry sorts are like 9/11 truthers, but in this instance they appear to be .... right in so far as it's admitted that the squid was a 'hoax' but what about it is a 'hoax'? It clearly happened and people died. Is the revelation just that Ozymandias was behind it? Why does that make this any less of a threat?

I thought Nostalgia was... perfume?

xp the woman Glass meets played Trixie on Deadwood

have you read the GN akm?

the hoax was that it was an interdimensional being that popped into their world because they were experimenting with teleportation or w/e

so all the people scared that there are other dimensions that are going to fuck up their world are wrong -- it was a completely man-made thing. there might not even be other dimensions!

it'd be like detonating a nuclear weapon near the large hadron collider and then blaming the explosion on the scientific experiments

Veidt's 'trial' is up next, and Lindelof and co must intend this to be a question on the minds of the audience who haven't read the book, not spelling out explicitly yet what went on and eliding when the audience should be curious about the 'hoax''s implementation details

I need more about Oppenheimer, the musical, whose promotional image looks suspiciously like a central nervous system which might be walking around

So, not Mars but Europa, I didn't see that coming. Now I'm really confused by Manhattan's Mars castle duplicate. Terrific sequence, Veidt's steampunk spacesuit is brilliant. 'SAVE ME D_' ... DAMMIT? DAN? I see Cary Elwes when I look at the Gameskeeper, but I don't think it's him

If Nostalgia (yes, using the same name as the successful perfume, confusingly, probably because Trieu now holds the trademarks) was a known product, and Reeves had said he was taking pills to 'get my memory', wouldn't she have made the connection then? Would spoil a good reveal, but doesn't quite work. She'd have to forget the famous case of the memory pills being withdrawn after making people psychotic – relatedly, I'd forgotten that Bian was on an IV drip and seems to be remembering things from someone else

Clones really need to start a civil rights campaign stat

Re Veidt, I'm not sure I buy he would make a video announcing his responsibility after going to so much trouble to eliminate knowledge of the plot, and I'm also doubtful that Redford would think it was a smart idea to allow everyone in the Senate to know this information

"have you read the GN akm?"

yes but in 1993

"the hoax was that it was an interdimensional being that popped into their world because they were experimenting with teleportation or w/e"

ok I get that. but then what's the point of them experimenting with teleportation now?

the hoax was that it was an interdimensional being that popped into their world because they were experimenting with teleportation or w/e

Haven't seen this week's ep yet so don't know where the info comes from that it's a hoax but it can't be Rorschach's Journal because he posts it before he knows any of this.

Also -- how would that have diffused the Cold War? I thought the point of Veidt's scheme was for the U.S. and Soviets to both think that Earth was under attack from extradimensional beings. If both sides thought it was "experiments with teleportation" that summoned the squid, wouldn't they both just blame each other?

(pls sub. "defused" for "diffused")

the point of experimenting now is that teleportation is very useful (and cool) and the entire reason they stopped that branch of scientific progress was based on a lie?

the squid was also teleported from that remote island to the middle of nyc, so it's possible that 7k is planning their own squid like attack