Showrunner Damon Lindelof has been clear about his thematic intentions, explaining that the series was partially inspired by Ta Nehisi Coates article The Case for Reparations and was designed to explore race and policing in America.
Watchmen Has a Violence Problem
While the majority of HBOs Watchmen carries on with copious comic Easter eggs and tiresome, overt social commentary , one storyline remains abundantly in-line with the comic : the violent, bizarre, inexplicable, and perfect adventures of Jeremy Irons ' Adrian Veidt. Veidts been having a lonesome ball at his countryside exile, putting on plays , smashing corpses, and catapulting clones into the stratosphere. But Veidt's scenes are a tonal minority, and at times, the rest of the Watchmen story continues to stumble over what it wants to beand what it's trying to say.
'Watchmen' Has a Violence Problem
That intent alone sounds ambitious, and when one then uses a literary source material with its own political bent (Watchmen was, in many ways, a parody of superhero worship and Cold War bomb culture), things get really ambitious. Because of the ensuing thematic juggling act, Watchmen can feel weighty and cumbersomeLindelof attempts to stuff so many references into an hour-a-week episode that it can become unclear both what's going on and what viewers ought to take from this chaos.
'Watchmen' Has a Violence Problem
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And then there's the violence supposedly carrying these serious and ironic messages. Veidt's violence, humorous robot/clone killing, plays out in a sharp contrast to the racially charged violence in Tulsalynchings, assassinations, cop-killings. Irons' scenes are designed, tonally, to inject the episodes with a bit of darkly comic levity. The problem is that such moments of good-natured violent fun don't quite feel earnedand when matched up with the violence we're seeing in Tulsa, the tonal difference almost feels inappropriate.
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In seriocomedythats humor contained within seriousness or vice versatopics of race and race violence certainly arent off limits. (Films like Blackkklansman have succeeded balancing these tonalities.) But with Watchmen, the balance seems shakier. (And here, the stakes of getting this balance right, with a writer, Lindelof, who is, well, white, seem higher.)
That isn't to say that Watchmen and Lindelof fall short on the humor and drama departments. A spandex-filled chase sequence earlier in the episode feels as bizarre and fun as Irons' bizarrely fun scenes. And the series' depictions of historical events such as the 1921 Tulsa Race Riots and treatment of black soldiers during the Second World War are important diagetic (and real world) momentsones that do feel earnest and dramatic and effective.
'Watchmen' Has a Violence Problem
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But these moments are more specific to Lindelof's independent vision. It's when Lindelof tries to bring viewers back into the Watchmen universe (that other grand ambition), that the strengths start to turn into weaknesses.
Lindelof's reverence for source material tends to conflict with his ambitions of extending the themes and attitudes of the comic into the current social and political moment. He wants to both faithfully adapt the spirit of the Watchmen graphic novel, poking fun at the superhero genre and social anxieties, while also providing more serious reflection on things like race and law enforcement in America. But the ambitions feel too grandiose and cumbersome, and they leave the show with the worst of both worlds: its neither weird enough to warrant fun, nor serious enough to warrant fulfillment.
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As Veidt says to his artificial butler Mr. Philips after growing him: Do you know what you are?? Well do you, Watchmen? Do you?
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