Damon Lindelof's Watchmen

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

maybe the squid is real and the video is a hoax BAM!

Wade in talking to the Senator recaps the consensus understanding, which is that the Institute for Dimensional Studies was screwing around with teleportation and accidentally let in a creature from another dimension, implication being there could be hordes of these things which now have our address so we had better set aside our differences. I think it's ok to think 'hang on, would that even work in the long term' because the book implies not: Veidt is thrilled at what he's achieved until Manhattan reminds him 'nothing ever ends', and Rorschach's journal exists (and in the show is analogous to the Turner Diaries)

The teleportation part is real (anything alive being killed on arrival notwithstanding, a problem with the tech), but if the Kavalry are going to get anywhere with it, they need to figure out how to direct it, which is evidently going to be a while (the Senator's optimistic, however).

Like Veidt, the Kavalry has decided that killing people is justified – I'm not sure if they're an undifferentiated mass, though. Is the Senator secretly running _all_ of them? Or just the group of 'these idiots' he has working on teleportation? Given that Wade's cooperated in neutralizing Angela, why attack his house (other than to restage the Rorshach-resists-arrest scene from the comics)?

There's a little bit of grossness in the differentiation between the rank-and-file (possible) kavalry members, who are portrayed as trailer park-dwelling racists, and the senator and Crawford, who may not necessarily share those views but are willing to take advantage of the political capital their association brings

I can see where there's an attempt to parallel certain aspects of our current political environment, but if you don't care that your foot soldiers are vehement racists, then you're just as racist

weird choice that they gave a character a jehovah's witness past instead of inserting a fictionalized evangelical group

I think the show is implying that he has no ideological alignment with these guys, but I can't be absolutely sure of that. Also, why the heck _is_ he running them, or directing them? He's not freelancing by infiltrating them, him saying that Judd was in a similar position says to me that the plan was to let these groups continue to exist (maybe because the legacy of Veidt is that when you crush your opposition, your opposition goes underground and gets more extreme, so we manage these groups and not attempt to eliminate them). So him being there is part of the plan, but red-pilling them and directing them on a private campaign isn't. What's the private campaign, to attack the government which is lying to everyone?

In this world everyone has a hell of a lot of spare time - mother, baker, cop, nighttime vigilante; focus group consultant, cop, peer group therapist, nighttime vigilante; Senator, underground guerrilla commandante, double agent!

The JW thing, they might have opted for something the audience could immediately identify, rather than inventing something they'd have to kill a lot of time on in exposition for its backstory

They just haven't mentioned aloud that Redford enacted the 20 hour work week.

Shit, I'd be exhausted just maintaining the facade of a bakery in a strip mall that will open soon, promise

how many episodes before Robert Redford himself makes an appearance?

I hate to break it to you but he retired just before this started production. They did write a speech for him to read, but that never got shown to him. Lindelof's said they didn't ask him for permission, in case he refused, if I remember right

Yeah that was in one of the interviews linked above.

The JW thing, they might have opted for something the audience could immediately identify, rather than inventing something they'd have to kill a lot of time on in exposition for its backstory

in the novel two JWs try to sell the newsvendor a watchtower, after approaching riding bicycles in one of a series of cute dylan refs

So, not Mars but Europa, I didn't see that coming

i thought it was phobos, cuz fear

Planet in the sky definitely looked more like Jupiter than Mars

it was 100% Europa and Jupiter

i torrented the first five episodes of this cuz i was going on a plane trip and needed something to watch on my iPad

some thoughts:

- this show, of course, shouldn’t exist and is morally indefensible and stealing it from the internet is praxis and basically makes me a modern-day robin hood

- that said, it’s very entertaining for what it is - it’s playful and weird and cleverly-structured

- i’m still not sold at all on the ‘masked cops’ thing being a something that seems plausible in this world, but as a meta device it adds another couple of layers to moore and gibbons’ many, many watch references: the cops (watchmen themselves) are watching the seventh cavalry and being watched by them in turn, and the cavalry are themselves literally watchmen in the sense that they’re collecting watch batteries

- in other ‘watch imagery’ news, there’s a character called looking glass whose two jobs rely on closely watching people to find out whether they’re lying, but whose mask prevents people watching him (while allowing laurie to check her teeth in his reflection)

- it’s hilarious to me that some of the actors insist on pronouncing ‘cavalry’ as ‘calvary’

- speaking of actors, the cast is uniformly good, with regina king and jean smart right at the top - smart’s laurie is an absolute treat. jeremy irons is also clearly having the time of his life chewing the scenery and is every bit as smug and supercilious as veidt should be, even if his accent is all over the place. hong chau is also tremendous as lady trieu

- regina king has the most incredible copper-coloured eyes i’ve ever seen

- petey is 100% lube man, there can’t be two tall super-gangly guys in one show, it just doesn’t happen

- the couple of mentions of whether dr manhattan can disguise himself as a human seem... significant. have we seen him already? i’m guessing he has some kind of connection to lady trieu but could he be her? she has a daughter but trieu’s first scene shows that she has the ability to create life

- WHERE IS DAN DREIBERG FFS

and oh yeah, all the egg imagery, veidt growing new people in a pond, lady trieu giving a child to a couple whose eggs weren’t capable of fertilisation - i’m v curious to know where this is all leading

one more thing, speaking of creating life - if veidt is on europa, as it appears, i wonder if he’s there for reasons related to it having the potential to sustain life in the hot water springs under its ice?

maybe even... squid life?

petey is 100% lube man, there can’t be two tall super-gangly guys in one show, it just doesn’t happen

I'm assuming this will be confirmed soon, since the show has reliably unveiled the obvious stuff quickly and with minimal fuss (Don Johnson and James Wolk's respective turns for example). I also liked the cops speculating about American Hero Story and Manhattan's identity. whatever Lindelof's defects he's been around the block often enough to understand how to anticipate and play around with how modern audiences behave

WHERE IS DAN DREIBERG FFS

It's implied that he's in prison

WHICH PRISON

The Black Iron Prison.

aquatraz

(it's setting up a stingray crossover) (the only thing that could make this reboot better)

adrian veidt is rory stewart

he's fluent in dari

and like veidt’s hero alexander the great, he walked across afghanistan

anything can happen in the next half hour