As mentioned in the previous post, I was on the DC suburbs for a couple of days, and ended up spending a lot of time in my hotel room binge-watching the HBO series Watchmen, because it was free to stream from Amazon. It was generally very good in terms of the visuals and acting performances, and the subject matter is obviously very timely, but I thought the ending was an unholy mess. Which is probably worth explaining in a blog post, but first some spoiler space:
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So, there are three things about the way this wrapped up that bugged me (with some subsidiary annoyances that come with the genre trappings). From least to most specific to this particular work, those were:
1) I didn’t like that they brought Dr. Manhattan back into this. I thought the show worked best in the early episodes where it was primarily about other people trying to navigate the world and assert some agency without the benefit of actual superpowers. To be fair, I find the Manhattan stuff probably the least compelling part of the original comic, too.
This also ran into some consistency issues with the original, given that a big part of Manhattan’s shtick is that he’s experiencing everything simultaneously, which ought to mean that back when he was going through this whole wrenching break-up with Laurie in the original comics, he should’ve been fully aware that he was going to fall in love again thirty-odd years later. Which, you know, you might think would’ve been worth a mention at some point.
There’s a potentially rich story to be mined out of the “experience everything at once” aspect of the character, and particularly the way that interacts with Reeves’s bitter remark that “He could’ve done more.” That doesn’t entirely fit with the Manhattan character’s regular remarks about the inevitability of the future, and there’s probably a story to be gotten out of the tension between the (apparently) fixed timeline and the seemingly unlimited power of the character, but this isn’t that.
And, ultimately, Dr. Manhattan is just too big for what this is. I think he worked better as a distant McGuffin than an actual element of the plot.
2) Speaking of his role in the plot, the end of the evil schemes drove me nuts. One of the best little bits of the Watchmen comic (and one of the few actually captured in the movie version) is the showdown with Veidt, where he gives his evil-villain monologue, then when they ask when he thought he was going to do this, replies “I did it thirty-five minutes ago.” It’s a great undercutting of the Bond-villain speech trope.
This version of Watchmen, though, has not one but two Bond-villain monologues spilling out the whole plot (one each from Senator Keene (R-KKK) and Lady Trieu), the second of which directly leads to the thwarting of said plot. Not only is this kind of lazy in storytelling terms, they don’t even have Veidt comment on it, when it’s sitting right there. If he had said something along the lines of “And that’s why you don’t reveal your plan before it’s complete,” well, it still would’ve been stupid, but it would’ve been closer to forgivable.
(And, Lord, the plot resolution is stupid. The frozen squid bombing central Tulsa punch a hole through Trieu’s hand and demolish her apotheosis sphere, but the roof of the movie theater right across the street is bulletproof? So is the phone booth where Bian hides? None of the masked cops who show up get holes punched through them?)
That brings us to:
3) The whole Reeves-Angela plot makes next to no sense, and in particular, his final cathartic speech just seems to drop in out of a completely different series. The line about needing to take off the mask because “Wounds need air” is a lovely metaphor, but has essentially no grounding in the world of the show. It’d work a whole lot better if there was anybody you could point to as an example of someone who gave up masked vigilantism and found peace through sharing their pain, but there’s nobody. The closest example might be Laurie, and she’s pretty clearly still a mess.
And I think in the end, that’s the failing of the series as a whole, a failing it shares with the Zack Snyder movie. At the end of the day, Snyder took a book about how the whole idea of superheroism is fundamentally fucked-up and made a movie whose main take away is “You know what’s awesome? Masked vigilantes!” The movie was widely denounced for that, rightly so. In the end, though, I think this series ends up in basically the same place, but largely gets a pass because of its choice of villains. That is, the final message ends up being “Masked vigilantes are awesome, as long as they’re fighting the KKK!” and I think that’s ultimately just as problematic.
Which sort of circles back to the Dr. Manhattan thing, and especially Reeves’s comment about how he could’ve done more with that power. At the end, we’re clearly supposed to think that Angela has acquired Manhattan’s powers, and will use them to do more, and we’re expected to be rooting for that. But that’s kind of diametrically opposed to one of the key themes of the original comic, which is that anybody having that kind of power is a Bad Thing.
There is some potential there for a story about that, with Angela discovering that the seemingly unlimited power in fact comes with tight limits, and that you can’t just fix the world. That could be interesting, but would be a hard turn from where this seems to end, and boy, it wouldn’t be a fun watch.
So, as I said, it was an enjoyable series (modulo the usual genre-imposed silliness), and Regina King and Tim Blake Nelson turn in great performances. Jeremy Irons as Veidt is a lot of fun, too. Ultimately, though, the end is an unholy mess and ends up in a thematic place that’s just wrong.