‘Watchmen’: Whitewash

Watchmen
“This Extraordinary Being”
November 24, 2019

WAIT, WHAT ARE WE WATCHING? American Hero Story: Minutemen? Oh cool.

And according to American Hero Story: Minutemen, Hooded Justice’s big secret was somehow uncovered by the FBI: he was gay. A pair of agents bring him in for questioning, where they demand he remove his hood so that they can take his photo. He then will retrieve a stash of secret photos his boyfriend Captain Metropolis has been keeping — photos that DEFINITELY DO NOT include FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover — and bring them to them. In exchange, his identity will remain secret.

This doesn’t seem like the best deal for Hooded Justice but he removes his hood, anyway, revealing that he is one Cheyenne Jackson. But Hooded Justice does not allow his photo to be taken, and instead beats the FBI agents to death, all the while thinking how upset he is that his lover has been cheating on him.

Which is one story — but definitely not the actual story, of Hooded Justice, America’s first “costumed adventurer.”

The actual story we learn through Angela as she experiences first-hand the memories of William Reeves, her grandfather, after she swallows a fatal dose of his Nostalgia.

Locked in a jail cell, Angela slips into a fugue state before she can sign a medical release form to have her stomach pumped. And soon she is in 1938, standing in her grandfather’s skin as he is being sworn-in as a police officer for the New York City Police Department. After the Chief delivers a speech about how the uniform a man wears changes him — so be sure yours changes you for the better …

Or, as a philosopher of our times puts it:

… the Chief then goes down the line, pinning the new officer’s badges onto their uniforms and congratulating them — all for Will, whose badge is pinned on by an African-American Lieutenant. Will tells the Lieutenant that he joined the force because of him, and in exchange, the Lieutenant leans in and warns Will, “beware the cyclops,” before congratulating him and moving on.

At a jazz club after, Will celebrates with June, his wife, who is also a reporter covering his story: after all, a “negro” cadet is big news. Will can sense the disapproval in her voice, that she thinks he and his lieutenant are Uncle Toms, allowing themselves to be used by the department for good publicity. But she clarifies: he’s being given a gun and a stick. She’s worried how he’s going to use them. After all, he is an angry man. And she doesn’t blame him for that: after what he experienced in the Tulsa riots, seeing his community slaughtered, losing his parents … it’s no wonder he carries so much anger with him. But Will insists that he’s not angry and he’s not living in the past.

Will walks the beat, chatting with the newsstand guy, when he sees a man brazenly throw a firebomb through the front window of a Jewish deli. Will orders a bystander to call the police, while he chases the guy down a back alley, ordering him to “stop in the name of the law!” The man introduces himself as Fred, and insists he’s on his way home to listen to Amos ‘n’ Andy.

Will announces he’s under arrest, but Fred is incredulous even as he is walked into the station. There, Fred insists that Will, “this spook,” is accusing him of a horrendous crime. Who are they going to believe, Will or him? The officers are OFFENDED that he would insult one of their fellow cops, they demand he apologize to Will, and then take Fred off for booking, pausing to flash a signal to another cop, while assuring him they have this.

The next day, as the newsstand guy is showing Will a comic about an alien whose father put him in a box and sent him to earth just before his own planet exploded …

… when Will’s new friend, Fred, pushes past them, free as a bird.

Will marches back to the precinct and demands to know why Fred is wandering around free, only to be told that he must be having memory problems. Will insists he knows what he saw, and asks what the whole symbol against the head was about. He’s informed that it represents the hole that will be in his head if he doesn’t drop this Fred mess.

On his way home, Will is invited by his fellow white officers to grab a beer, but Will is like, ABSOLUTELY NOT NO. They drive off, only to circle around through the alley Will is using. They jump Will, beat him and drive him to a tree where they cover his head in a hood and hang him — cutting him down shortly before he can die, with a warning to keep his nose out of “white folks’ business.”

Will, walking home with the noose still around his neck, his wrists still ringed in ropes, comes across a mugging in process. He puts the hood back on, and attacks the thugs, saving a young couple who are profoundly grateful.

Upon arriving home, he admits to June that he is, in fact, angry.

The next afternoon, June shows an achy Will that his heroism has made the papers, and wonders why he put the hood back on when he saved those people. He insists that he doesn’t know, so she helps him remember: There was that movie he was obsessed with when he was a kid, the one with Bass Reeves, the Black Marshall (and the possible real-life inspiration for the Lone Ranger, so just chew on that one for a while)? The one where the black man removes his mask to reveal that he is the hero who has saved the townspeople from the evil white sheriff? The one who urges the townspeople to trust in the law and not rely on mob justice? Yeah, that might have something to do with it.

June encourages Will to continue fighting crime as this masked hero, reminding him that the white folks in Tulsa burned down his childhood movie theater, and if he wants justice, he’s not going to find it with a badge.

But June makes an edit: a mask of white makeup over his eyes to suggest that under Hooded Justice’s mask, he’s a white man. (And also a reversal of the Lone Ranger:)

HEY. WAIT A MINUTE.

Hooded Justice heads out to the streets, seeking out Fred’s market: the white cops wanted him to stay away from it for a reason. And sure enough, he spies the cops sneaking around the back making that same symbol through a speakeasy door. So he just marches up to the door and knocks. When the guy peeks through the panel on the door, Hooded Justice punches him through it. You might want to invest in a grate for that panel, boys!

Hooded Justice busts in to find a warehouse full of robed Klansmen. Fighting fighting fighting. After once Hooded Justice temporarily subdues all the racists, he finds a book on mesmerism …

… but before he can find any more clues, one of the Klansmen regains consciousness and chases Hooded Justice into the front of the store where Fred is all …

… and shoots at him with his shotgun. Hooded Justice flees, busting through the front window.

On Angela’s end, however, time pauses as she is busting through that window, and Laurie confronts her: they’ve given her a shot of adrenaline to wake her up, but she might be confused as to who she is or where or when. So they have brought in her husband, Cal, to read her a message: “Your name is Angela Abar. You were born in Saigon in 1976. Your husband is Calvin. You met in Vietnam. You now live in Tulsa. You have three children: Topher, Emma, and Rosie. The year is 2019. The president is Robert Redford. You need to come home now. You need to wake up. I love you. Your name is Angela …” but before he can get through his repetition of the message, Angela slips back into her fugue state and is back in the apartment with June.

There’s a knock at the door and in walks a well-to-do blonde man, Nelson Gardner, who wants to discuss business with Will Reeves. He explains that he works on behalf of another costumed adventurer, Captain Metropolis, who would like to invite Hooded Justice to join a new team of crimefighters, the Minutemen. Now, Nelson Gardner doesn’t think Will is Hooded Justice, of course, just that Will is feeding Hooded Justice information about criminal activities.

June is like, “wait, let me guess, Captain Metropolis is blonde and about your height …”

But Will has more pressing matters: what does “Cyclops” mean to Nelson? Gardner is intrigued: is it some new criminal enterprise? Will insists that it is, if he considers the KKK a criminal enterprise.

NARRATOR: It is.

And this Cyclops group, they’re planning something.

Gardner insists that it sounds like a job for The Minutemen, and urges Will to let Hooded Justice know that he doesn’t have to fight alone when he could have true companionship.

Soon, Will and Nelson are in bed together, and after, Will wonders when Nelson knew he was Hooded Justice. Nelson admits that he believed Hooded Justice was a white man at first, but as soon as he met Will, he knew. That said, when Will meets the other Minutemen, he needs to be sure to wear his hood and makeup: after all, they’re not all as tolerant as he is.

With that, Nelson puts on his mask for round number two.

Later that same night (?) Will is in bed with June who asks him to tell her the story about the first time he saw her, and he repeats the events immediately following escaping the Tulsa riots: he woke up in the tall grass … there was a car wreck, and in the distance, Tulsa was on fire. He thought he was the only person still alive, but then he heard a cry: it was a baby wrapped in an American flag. He picked her up and told her that she would be ok, and she stopped crying.

June warns him to not make her start again, before informing him that she’s pregnant.

Later, Hooded Justice prepares for his big debut with The Minutemen, putting on his makeup and gathering his articles on Cyclops in a tidy file. At The Minutemen press conference, Hooded Justice assures the media that he’s just an ordinary man, before announcing that he believes there is a vast conspiracy at play. He has evidence of a secret plan … but before he can reveal Cyclops, Captain Metropolis interjects that there is a new crime boss in town: Moloch the Magnificent. He plans to use his dangerous new solar weapon, and every man, woman, and child in New York City is in danger. The Minutemen have a city to save! Just like your savings at National Bank.

Time passes. Will and June’s baby turns into a toddler who turns into a little boy who watches his father become Hooded Justice night after night.

But during one of the days that Will Reeves is working the beat, he arrives at a chaotic scene at a movie theater: cops are dragging bloodied and confused African-Americans out of the building, treating them like criminals instead of victims. Will demands to know what happened and a white cop explains that it’s what always happens “when you put animals in the same cage” before saying that he’s grateful Will is there because they need someone “who speaks the language.”

Will enters the wrecked theater where he finds a stunned woman who explains that the movie began, then there was a bright light going on and off like the room was full of lighting. And that’s when she heard a voice telling her she had to hurt people … and she thinks she did.

Will spots a man slipping out of the back of the theater with a projector and follows him to the alley where he watches him load it up in a vehicle and drive away.

Will puts the pieces together and calls Nelson from a phone booth: HE KNOWS THEIR PLAN! Cyclops is using film projectors to turn Negros against each other — they just caused a riot in a movie theater. He needs The Minutemen to come down to the meatpacking district and come help him stop them.

But Nelson is not interested: Will knows perfectly well that the residents of Harlem cause riots all on their own. This just isn’t The Minutemen’s cup of tea. Will will have to solve “black unrest” on his own. Now, why doesn’t Will come over for a drink and … you know … other things.

Will hangs up furiously and finds himself face-to-face with his old friend Fred, who notes that he knows all the cops on his beat, but doesn’t recognize Will. Fred suggests that Will is there for free meat (while making a gross racist comment about Will’s “meat”) and admits that he is the owner of the warehouse that the projector was just hurried into while asking if he has met Will before. No offense, they all just look alike …

Will shoots him squarely in the head.

Will then pulls on his hood and heads into the warehouse, where he shoots all the racist cops inside. A red light above a door catches his attention and inside he finds a man recording a message over the flashing light of a projector, uring African-Americans to hurt one another and to not harm white folks. Will, out of bullets, is forced to strangle the man with the projector cord. Will then drags this body onto a pile with the others, and sets them on fire, grabbing one of the projectors on his way out.

When Will comes home, he finds his son putting on his white makeup and noose. Horrified, Will washes the boy’s face — but with an urgency and violence that terrifies his son and June intervenes. She informs Will that she can’t stand what he’s become and she and Marcus are moving back to Tulsa. Without him.

But Will does return to Tulsa as that old man in a wheelchair. He pops Judd’s tires, and then blinds him with the projector light, instructing Judd to push him in the wheelchair to the tree. When they reach the tree, Judd demands to know who Will is.

“Justice.”

Judd protests that he’s trying to “help you people,” and that Will doesn’t understand what is going on here. But Will counters that Judd has a Klan robe in his closet. Judd explains that it is his grandfather’s — he has a right to keep his legacy. But Will wonders if he’s so proud of his so-called legacy, why Judd hides it in the closet?

Judd insists that Will doesn’t know him, but Will, flashing that Cyclops signal, insists that he knows exactly who Judd is. With that, Will turns the mesmerizing light back on again and instructs Judd to hang himself.

So Judd does.

Angela experiences a wave of snippets of memory, ending with an old June telling her that she’s going to take her home now.

That’s when Angela gasps awake in a bed, attached to an IV, with Lady Trieu watching. “Oh hi there. Welcome back.”

OK, listen. We are going to get to Hooded Justice — trust me, I have plenty to say about him — but I’m going to start with our villains, Cyclops. Before I get too deep in the weeds with Greek mythology and symbolism, I should note that I believe I know where Lindelof came up with the name. From the Watchmen Wikipedia page (SHUT UP I KNOW, but I’m not some scholar on either Watchmen or Alan Moore, so cut me a break):

Moore named William S. Burroughs as one of his main influences during the conception of Watchmen. He admired Burroughs’ use of “repeated symbols that would become laden with meaning” in Burroughs’ only comic strip, “The Unspeakable Mr. Hart”, which appeared in the British underground magazine Cyclops. Not every intertextual link in the series was planned by Moore, who remarked that “there’s stuff in there Dave had put in that even I only noticed on the sixth or seventh read”, while other “things […] turned up in there by accident.”[22]

Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but considering how much Lindelof loves him some layered symbolism, I HIGHLY DOUBT IT.

Alright, so, as you certainly know, at least from that time you were forced to read The Odyssey in high school, cyclopes are monstrous man-beasts who only have one eye. That form of cyclops is actually a second-generation cyclops, one that lived in the world of men, and were uncivilized shepherds.

The first generation of cyclopes were three brothers born to Uranus (Sky) and Gaia (Earth) after the Titans. They were Brontes (Thunder), Steropes (Lightning), and Arges (Bright). They were imprisoned in Tartarus by their dick father and later freed by their brother, the Titan Cronus. But then after Cronus, also a dick, castrated their father and overthrew him, he locked his cyclops brothers back in Tartarus again.

If you will kindly remember, Tartarus is the name of the cemetery where Judd was buried.

But back to our cyclopses. Cronus, like I said, was something of a dick, and when he learned that he was going to be overthrown by his sons like he overthrew his dad, he ate them all — except for one: Zeus, who was hidden by his mother because she was SICK AND TIRED OF HER BABIES BEING EATEN. Zeus grows up in hiding, and later gives Cronus an emetic that forces him to throw up his older brothers. Zeus releases the cyclopes from Tartarus, and they forge and give Zeus his thunderbolt, Poseidon his trident, and Hades his cloak of invisibility which the brothers use to overthrow Cronus and the other Titans and banish them to Tartarus.

According to some stories, later, Apollo’s son Asclepius was killed by Zeus’ thunderbolt, and furious, Apollo killed the cyclopes, the creators of the weapon. Which seems like faulty logic, but sure.

An interesting fact that I have absolutely no sourcing for: some believe the origins of the one-eyed cyclops actually comes from an ancient tradition of blacksmiths to wear a patch over one eye to protect at least one eye while working with dangerous sparks. This source also claims that blacksmiths used to tattoo themselves with concentric circles to honor the sun, which might have given way to the one-eyed legend. We’ll come back to that point in a minute.

So according to my handy and beloved Penguin Dictionary of Symbols:

“If, in human terms, two eyes marks a normal degree of awareness and three a superhuman clairvoyance, then one eye indicates a low and basic level of the powers of understanding. One eye in the middle of the forehead betrays either the ebbing of the intellect, or its burgeoning, or a loss of apprehension of certain dimensions and relationships.

In Christian tradition, the Devil is often depicted with one eye in the middle of his face, symbolizing the domination fo the dark powers of the instincts and passions. Left to their own devices and without spiritual direction, they cannot but play a destructive role in the universe and in the human person. In Greek tradition, the Cyclopses were a primitive or regressive force, characteristically volcanic, which could only be subdued by a solar god Apollo.

… To sum up, the Cyclops evoked the force of violence of the elements, of brute strength unleashed and uncontrolled by reason.”

Irrational, regressive, dumb and violent? So, yeah, racists.

NOW! What is intriguing is that there is already a one-eyed monster in the Watchmen universe:

Right? I know! My sister pointed this one out to me and my mind was as blown as if a giant psychic squid landed in the middle of downtown Houston. She suggests that maybe Veidt gave the creature one eye to be able to cast blame on Cyclops for it if need be, and who knows, that’s as good a theory as any.

BUT ALSO, TOO, when Doctor Manhattan first agreed to be a superhero, the government gave him a costume that had some atomic symbolism on it, but he was like, “NO THANKS!” and instead burned the symbol of a hydrogen atom onto his forehead:

You know, just some concentric circles which kinda looks like a single eye.

Now, I’m not suggesting that Doctor Manhattan has anything to do with the group Cyclops, which predated his creation by about twenty years. If anything, his hydrogen symbol serves as a third eye, or as the Penguin Dictionary of Symbols put it, “a superhuman clairvoyance …” but you can’t ignore the symbolism especially when considering what happens in the next episode.

As for Cyclops’ mesmerizing weapon, the woman in the theater described it as though the room was full of lighting. One of the original cyclopes, Steropes, was literally lightning, and one of the others is Arges, “bright.”

(And I will direct your attention back to the previous episode, the one about Wade/Looking Glass, and note that the title of it was “Little Fear of Lightning,” which if you have seen the next episode, should give you a HUGE A-HA! moment.)

But about that machine. The thing is, when I take my notes on these shows, I make a list of symbols that jump out to me and in the first couple of episodes, when Judd is first approached by someone with a bright light, and then Angela arrives at the tree and is blinded by a bright light, BOTH TIMES I had in my notes “bright light” and I did nothing with it, largely because light is such a ubiquitous symbol. However, considering how much of my life I have spent deconstructing Damon Lindelof’s use of symbolism — I swear, I could get a Ph.D. in it by now — I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER. I should have known that the repeated used of that light meant something important.

I’m not going to get into a long explanation of the symbolism of light and darkness, you know it already: duality, good and evil, white and black, knowledge and ignorance, life force and death, yadda. And so, Will here has his eureka moment as to what Cyclops is up to when he sees this projector — an illumination device. He is illuminated.

And then there is the practical matter of what this thing is: it’s a movie projector light. This ties the weapon back to Will’s childhood, his last happy memory before his world exploded. And there is something very symmetrical and satisfying in Will reclaiming the projector, taking back the weapon that was used on his people and turning it on the enemy. I just wonder — and this is pure speculation, with nothing to point to as evidence — if he didn’t also use it on Angela to some end. She arrives at the tree, and he flashes it in her face. Does he give her some instructions that we don’t hear at that moment? Just a thought that is not entirely fleshed out.

I also feel like there is something going on symbolically with the projector, and that the writers are making a statement about propaganda and media. The attack on the theater takes place in the late thirties, early forties, before television sets were common in homes, and most people received their news from the radio and news films at the movies. This idea of white nationalists using a media device to warp the brains of people, to turn them against one another, to incite them to violence … it sounds awfully familiar to the particular moment we are all currently trapped in.

It also ties perhaps not so obviously or directly to one of the recurring themes of both the series and the original novel, this idea of media propaganda and mythmaking. The comic ends each chapter with a supplemental document of some sort, an interview with Vedit, or a chapter from a memoir, or something of the like, and while these things help flesh out the backstory, they’re also full of bullshit or they come from a limited perspective. It’s not the truth — media only obscures the real truth. In the show, this is best exemplified Amerian Horror Story: Minutemen, which the country appears to be — and forgive the use of this word, but it is entirely intentional — mesmerized by. Agent Petey and Laurie Blake appear to be the only people who recognize that it is full of shit.

Which brings me to the more difficult part of this discussion. OK, so full admission: I’ve really struggled with how to approach this amazing episode. In part, the sheer audacity of what the episode accomplished is intimidating, but in larger part, as a white woman, I really don’t want to fuck this up and write anything insensitive or oblivious.

But for me, the reason I found this episode so astounding is that it managed to remain true to one of the central themes of the original story — this question of who these so-called heroes are as actual people and the mistake we make when we elevate them — while also saying something much bigger and more profound about generational trauma, mythmaking and America’s racist history.

In large part, the reason this episode worked was because one of Moore’s prevailing themes in the original The Watchmen is that superheroes are actually just profoundly damaged people who happen to have maybe one or two exploitable skills: strength, ingenuity, intelligence, marketability, whatever. At root, there is something broken inside people who would choose to put on a mask and run around town doling out justice as they saw fit.

And in telling this particular story, he exposed the psychological underpinnings of all of the “superhero” characters — all but one, Hooded Justice. Moore left Hooded Justice hooded, possibly to represent the inherent mystery to masked crusading, and how when we don’t know the identity of someone, we tend to make up our own stories about who they are. One of the threads in Hooded Justice’s story in the original Watchmen is that the heroes themselves never learn who he is, and they — just like the rest of the country — create their own myths about his true identity. In fact, two different Minutemen are suspected of killing Hooded Justice (the original Nite Owl killed a child predator he thought was Hooded Justice, and later, Veidt suspects that The Comedian killed the original Hooded Justice) but in reality, no one knows who he was or his ultimate fate. Thus, everyone can cling to their pet theories and never be proven wrong.

This is not to brag (well, I mean maybe just a little), but a few entries back, I shared my own pet theory and speculated that Will Reeves was the historical Hooded Justice. It was mostly based on his costuming — I noticed that red jacket of his, which echoes Hooded Justice’s red and purple costume, as well as the hooded sweatshirt which goes along with the whole hooded thing.

But it was also prompted by Will’s insistence that he had lynched Judd, and thinking about that other part of Hooded Justice’s costume: that hangman’s noose, and the ropes tied around his wrists that all but confirmed it for me. A black man lynching a white man is such a subversion of this shameful American trope that, by extension, it made me wonder if the writers weren’t going to subvert another American trope and make the country’s first superhero secretly black.

Turns out: YEP.

But what makes this episode so brilliant is not just the reveal that Hooded Justice was actually a black man, but that most of everything that we “knew” about Hooded Justice and his origin story was a lie. There is an whole essay I could write about how the only thing we did know about Hooded Justice was that he was a homosexual (although even that is wrong as he appears to be bisexual) and that everyone assumed THAT was his big secret — even though somehow everyone knew it. In reality, the thing that is most dangerous about Hooded Justice, the thing that must be completely hidden, kept in the closet*, if you will, is not his sexuality, but his race.

The supermarket story, in particular, is the most satisfying to me in that it is a complete reversal of what actually happened. Hooded Justice did not burst through the shop window to stop a robbery, but rather, while being shot at by the racist shop keeper, Hooded Justice burst through the window to escape. He wasn’t saving white people from a dangerous criminal; he was being threatened by a dangerous racist.

This is not just a twist on Hooded Justice’s origin story, it’s a complete rewriting of it, and what that says about us and mythmaking and American history, in general, is brilliant.

Will’s singular focus as Hooded Justice is not to fight crime in some general way — it is specifically and singularly focused on exposing and stopping the nefarious activities of a racist criminal enterprise: a Ku Klux Klan plot to instigate violence in African-American communities.

And I want to talk about that movie theater scene again for a moment because it was so confusing to me upon first viewing. The movie theater looked like the site of a bombing, but the police were treating obviously injured and confused people like criminals, arresting them and roughly throwing them into the back of paddywagons. It was on my second viewing, once I knew what was happening, that I recognized that my confusion upon the first viewing was a result of my own privilege. As an upper-middle-class white woman, I would never expect the police to treat me as anything but a victim if I were at the scene of what was clearly some sort of terroristic attack. People of color are not always so lucky.

But back to Will: he is thwarted in his efforts to bring the Minutemen on the Cyclops case by Captain Metropolis, his lover and the embodiment of the Aryan ideal, who finds the crime itself unimportant, and the criminals maybe not all that criminal in the grand scheme of things. It’s a deeply personal betrayal of Will by Nelson but symbolically, it also represents America’s betrayal of African-Americans as a whole. We demanded they give us their labor for free, we ask them to fight in our wars to defend us, and in exchange, through systemic racism, we shut them out of the American dream and we deny them equal justice. (And speaking of equal justice: not to get too political, but you don’t have to look far to see that the racism in the Watchmen universe is alive and well in our own.)

This whitewashing of Will’s story is profoundly symbolic of American history as a whole, and how our own origin myths — from Columbus, to the Pilgrims, to the “genteel” South, to the taming of the West, to the creation of my great state Texas — have long been told by white voices, and as a result, it has excluded the pain, the massacre, and the sacrifice, of millions of people of color. It’s just easier for white folk to believe that America’s success and power was the result of virtuous people being rewarded for their hard work than to look at the darker more complicated truth: that an incalculable amount of our success and wealth came from the abuse and subjugation of African-Americans, Native Peoples, Latinos, and Asians.

And had Hooded Justice just been forgotten or written out of American history, that might have actually been more gracious to him than what actually happened. Instead, he was rewritten as a white hero, and the very thing that made him into the superhero he was — his blackness, his need for justice for his people, and his roiling anger at how he and his family were treated in this country just because of the color of their skin — it was completely lost, wiped away with white makeup.

RIGHT, ALAN MOORE FROM TWO YEARS AGO?

Alan Moore, never one to mince words. HBD Uncle Alan! h/t: https://t.co/ZXsXXuq3l5 pic.twitter.com/jpRc13FXqh

— Kyle (@kylepinion) November 18, 2019

So what you’re saying, Alan Moore, is that nostalgia is toxic.

Oh, Alan. I do hope you are secretly watching this series. You’d be proud.

Alright, this week’s Petey files include:

A memo from Laurie Blake about the revelations from Angela’s overdose on Nostalgia, including that Will Reeves was the real Hooded Justice, and that he has a mind control device that he used to kill Judd who was Kalvary.

Nelson Gardner’s last will and testament, in which he leaves his sizeable estate, including the rights to the Minutemen, to Will Reeves, whom he had not seen in decades. Gardner states in his will that he regrets neglecting and subverting Reeves’ work and notes that much of his wealth came from his association with and appropriation of Reeves. Ahem.

A gossipy column about Lady Trieu and her work on the Millenium Clock and her possible parentage. Something to note in the article, apparently Trieu gave every household in the “tri-county” area an HDTV as “as an apology for any inconvenience our construction efforts may cause, as well as the occasional atmospheric disruption.” OH MY GOD, THEY ARE GOING TO MESMERIZE EVERYONE THROUGH THE TVs. Also, Blake, The Comedian, is totally her dad and Doctor Manhattan totally saved her mom.

Alright! Off to the next AMAZING episode. You guys, this show is so fucking good.

*The closet imagery, like that bright light, is another Damon symbol that I wrote down a number of times and never discussed. BUT TRUST ME, WE’RE GOING TO DISCUSS IT IN THE NEXT ENTRY.

Watchmen airs on HBO on Sundays at 8/9 p.m.