In the sixth episode of Watchmen the murder mystery was solved in a startling way
Looking back, the premise of “This Extraordinary Being” feels – that Hooded Justice, the original masked hero, was a black man alienated from the rotting, racist institution of the American police and working outside of it. And to be honest, some people have predicted this turn of events in the weeks in which the show aired. (When I looked through the first six episodes, I was completely surprised.) The first five episodes of Watchmen felt like watching Damon Lindelof build a precarious Jenga tower. This is the episode where everything snaps. There was a plan.
The original Watchmen assumptions that costumed heroes are psychosexual mess that turn their anger and desires into violence. Sure, that’s the perspective the American Hero Story clip takes at the beginning of the episode, classifying the Hooded Justice heroic career as sex-related, as one of the FBI agents puts it. Watchmen, the series, offers another possibility: that a capped crusader makes the decision to operate outside the law because the police themselves have large borders.
This is the genesis of Hooded Justice, the first masked hero in the Guardian world, and the costumed person of Angela’s grandfather Will – something she discovers as she experiences memories evoked by nostalgia pills. Stephen Williams, a frequent contributor to Lindelof’s The Lost Days, creates a specific aesthetic for the hallucinatory experience: aside from using black and white, to indicate that we are definitely in a retrospective, in the way that happens the episode shows much more experience: memories appear as doors in the air, Angela alternates between watching Will and taking his perspective.
HBO
As a young adult, Will graduates from the New York Police Academy in 1938 to do something good. His first encounter with the double standard of the department is that the only other black policeman in the room is delivering the message to successful cadets: “Congratulations, my son. Are we proud? Be safe out there. ”
Will does not accept the advice. Almost immediately after he became a police officer, he arrested a man named “Fred” for burning down a Jewish delicatessen. It turns out that the man is well connected with the power structure of the white supremacists in New York and is codenamed Cyclops. Although one of the cops scolds Fred for insulting Will and seems to be a good guy, he’s the one leading a group of other officers to hang Will in a tree as a warning. Nobody will stop in the name of the law. Will pulls the hood from his back on his head and discovers something: people do not stop at the law, but they stop in front of the hooded justice. At least they will sometimes.
The best moment of the episode is that Will, as Hooded Justice, agrees to join the Minutemen. He arrives at his first press conference with the Minutemen and tries to inform the assembled reporters about Cyclops – only to be shut down immediately by Captain Metropolis, who only wants to talk about the plan of crime lord Moloch, “to transform the sun’s energy into a deadly weapon , “It’s downright ridiculous, a PR stunt, a way to sell things. It is an effective subversion not only of the superhero genre, but also of Watchmen. The real evil plan is still in circulation, but it makes much more sense: Cyclops uses subliminal messages and mesmerism to trigger mass uprisings in the black community of New York. It is almost pointless to imagine a “secret” conspiracy that triggers racist violence. It is branded in the system.
The life of Hooded Justice is, if not allegorical, at least a substitute for a certain kind of political journey for Black Americans. After a fundamental trauma that has made him an orphan, Will turns to his idealized version of the law, an institution capable of working for people who suffer like him. Instead, he discovers, the American police are rotting to the core and full of racists. White man offering to help Will in his quest is more interested in money and his body. After all, Will is forced to turn to violence to practice justice, and while this is more than justified, he alienates his wife and child.
Mark Hill / HBO
Experiencing Will’s memories through Angela’s nostalgic haze explains some of the visual details and choices in the episode. In particular, a link is made for the treatment of Will’s wife and Angela’s grandmother in June. Originally, June is the architect of Hooded Justice, who paints the skin around Will’s eyes to convince the world that the hero is not black. She immediately drills into the role of Nelson Gardner’s “Strategic Mastermind”, Captain Metropolis. This leads to the funniest moment of the episode when Gardner said no to the Minutemen in June and grunted yes while having sex with Will. However, June’s relative distance from the narrative is the only slightly false note in the episode-we know almost nothing about the intervening years of Will and June’s life, which are relevant to his mission as Hooded Justice.
We should be deterred by Will’s massacre, thinking that he is now also a guy in a mask who kills a lot of people. If he murders everyone in Fred’s storehouse, it’s his. Although he is alarmed at the prospect of his son joining the family business, we might suspect that Angela’s father was a soldier – and explain why she grew up in Vietnam.
Not much happens in the last few decades, or at least Will does not want Angela to know. All this is part of the plan of Will and Lady Trieu. When we pick up with him, Will is an old man waiting with a rope on Judd Crawford on the roadside. Will uses Mesmerism technology to get the flashlight working and hypnotizes Crawford to hang himself. Crawford claims he’s trying to “help you,” but the episode has done a great job breaking the confidence that Will may have in prosecution or whites in the broader sense.
Why should he listen?
