Watchmen ‘Episode 6': A Look Back at a Time-Capsule Worthy Episode

I've was hesitantly following HBO's "Watchmen" series, unsure of whether it would amount to anything, but I want to comment on this episode, "This Extraordinary Being," because it's some of the best TV I've seen in a while. It's a shame, really, that something this cinematically self-reflective can’t be counted as a “movie”, but this is the so-called current "golden age of television" we live in. Regardless, the episode’s 61 minutes contain unusually smart superhero genre scenes, all shot in a sumptuously desaturated (35mm?) black-and-white look.

Alan Moore's "Watchmen," and later, Zack Snyder's movie adaptation, were always hyper-contemplative of reality, at least relative to other superhero fare. In HBO's follow-up series, a radically different beast to Moore’s original, it's mostly reflective of race in America. Up until Episode 6, I wasn’t necessarily taken by the new series either. Many of the episodes up to that point felt a little too convoluted for my tastes. The brilliant aspect of this particular episode is how well it integrates things that are so singular, but universal that even a viewer who hadn’t seen the previous five episodes could easily get sucked into 6’s groove.

The surreal state the episode dives into starts off when our heroine, Angela (Regina King), ingests the memories of her grandfather (don’t ask) and, consequentially, falls into a coma. The doubling of characters sharing memories, while related genetically, is brilliantly rendered to us when Angela starts inhabiting her own grandpa’s masked vigilante days. Angela's grandfather, who it turns out was the superhero Hooded Justice, was inspired by another, actual real hero, Bass Reeves. A fake 1921 silent film within the TV series, "Trust in the Law," playfully shows us Reeves in action.

The Superman comics are purposely referred to in a couple of scenes as well, because, like Superman, Hooded Justice grew up to put on a cape and fight the Klan, too — but he wasn’t white. In this "Watchmen" episode, the Klan likewise employs cinema to attack African Americans — albeit in more convoluted fashion resulting in Black people being “mesmerized” into attacking each other and themselves. It's a “Get Out”-style metaphor about becoming one’s own worst enemy.

Hooded Justice ends up taking care of fighting racial corruption by himself, wearing a noose around his neck, as part of his masked costume. This implication regarding the history of lynching in America does get delivered in a thick and over-wrought fashion, ditto the fact that our superhero ends up also being gay. This leads me to the main reason why creator Damon Lindelhof’s “woke” Watchmen had bothered me up until that point: Lindelhof never missed a beat in trying to lay down his political messaging thickly. And yet, Lindelhof’s heavy-handed approach works beautifully in “The Extraordinary Being” because he tells his story during a time and place, the 1920s bible belt, where violent discriminatory acts against African Americans were happening on a regular basis