“This Extraordinary Being,” the sixth episode of HBO’s Watchmen releases much of the show’s core project. The full-length retrospective of the 1930s and 1940s shows Hooded Justice, the world’s first superhero, the young Will Reeves, a black police officer, and the grandfather of Angela Abar, the protagonist of the television series.
The decision to blacken Hooded Justice is thematically very useful, but interpolating a whole life within what we know about the cartoon character is a daunting task. Polygon spoke with Cord Jefferson, who wrote “This Extraordinary Being” with the series creator Damon Lindelof, about this writing challenge, Will’s sexuality, and the parallels between Captain Metropolis and Batman.
Polygon: How was the concept of Hooded Justice for you and what was it like to develop it?
Cord Jefferson: Damon’s original idea was that Hooded Justice should be a black man, but we then had to work our way back from that premise to find out exactly which black man that would be, how he would become Hooded Justice and what would motivate him to do so on this secret Identity. I first accused it of being an act of racist violence that spurs Will on becoming Hooded Justice. In thinking that we are thinking of the 1930s USA, it makes sense for a colored person to seek justice from outside the courts or the police.
And if you look at Hooded Justice’s costume with a noose around her neck, in the 1930s I can not look at a costume with a noose around my neck without immediately thinking about lynching. We started at the point where we thought Hooded Justice was a black man, and it was relatively easy to fill in the gaps from there to develop a compelling story of how Will Reeves could have become the first superhero.
Was this backstory originally a separate thread from the Greenwood massacre?
When we started writing, we knew that the Greenwood massacre would be part of the pilot for the show. We did not know for a fact that Will’s story would be directly linked to this massacre when we started writing Watchmen, but it became clear to us when we started with the construction of Episode 6 that the Greenwood massacre played an important role in it should. There was no way to get through Episode 6 without acknowledging what an enormous part of Will’s life was. But when we first moved the massacre to the first episode, we did not know exactly how it would connect with Episode 6, but we knew it would somehow connect. It’s such a big moment in Will’s life and such a big moment on the show.
Mark Hill / HBO
We get Will’s backstory from Angela’s perspective after taking his nostalgia pills. How has your portrayal of Will’s life story changed in the sequel?
Some of the pops in Angela were made for practical reasons, so you remind viewers that this is a story in which Angela takes the nostalgia pills and experiences them the way her grandfather experienced them. But much of this television season – and this episode in particular – is the idea of generation violations and how the wounds of our past haunt us and how we tend to pass them on to our children and grandchildren. Beyond that, if we’re not careful.
I think a perfect example of Wills and Angela’s shared trauma is the moment June talks to Will and she says, “You’re angry.” And we go back to Will, but it’s Angela, and she says, “Me I’m not angry. “We wanted to convey the idea of a generational trauma, and that Will’s life was lived so that he passed on the anger and anger that he felt to future generations, and now he’s in Angela’s life to try, to correct the mistakes of his past.
Another thing to note is that nostalgia in this world has been made for people with dementia and Alzheimer’s. Normally one would think that people want to put good memories from their past in these pills. You would not believe anyone would put the memory of the lynching or the memory of the time when her wife left her into a nostalgia pill. But we put Will in the pills for Angela because it’s important for Angela to understand who her grandfather is, why he made the decisions, why he made the mistakes he came up against. It will concretize his life and hopefully help her to understand her life a bit better.
How has the focus on what memories Will wants to hear from Angela changed what moments of Will’s life have you highlighted?
I wish June had been a bit more involved. The two things that were cut back mainly for time reasons were June and more time with the Minutemen – more time to understand what the Minutemen were doing and more time for their daily fight against crime. But writing, producing, and editing made us realize that this was really a will-forward story, and that story was as powerful as the other actors and actresses who played the rest of the Minutemen. Focus on Will and Will’s experience instead Spending time with other characters. It became very clear to me that this had to be Will’s journey.
Did you consider capturing the comic scene in which Hooded Justice prevents The Comedian from attacking Sally Jupiter?
No, that was never in our plans or outlines or anything. For me, I would not want to include. Zack Snyder did it, almost picture by picture like the book. It’s a famous scene, people know about it. When I thought about the episode, I was much more interested in the lesser known parts of Hooded Justice’s story, the parts that people had not really touched before. Not that a lot of people went into it, but I think that’s what everyone knows about Hooded Justice. If you know something about Hooded Justice, you know this scene, and for me, I was more interested in exploring the parts of the figure I studied.
What parts There is so little information that you really know about it coming from the book.
His sexual identity was interesting to me, his relationship with Captain Metropolis. It’s in the book, but it’s only incidentally mentioned that these two had a sexual relationship. And then the stuff we invented for him was interesting to me – his racial identity, which made him do it the way he did and put on the makeup under the mask. These things were more interesting to me than the comedic attack.
Mark Hill / HBO
What was it like to find out the relationship between Captain Metropolis and Minutemen? The scene with the press conference highlights how absurd the whole thing is. Will is about to discuss this very real conspiracy of the White Supremacists, and Captain Metropolis interrupts him to warn about Moloch’s solar weapon.
This episode is mainly about a man trying to heal the wounds of his childhood, especially the head wound of his childhood, when his family and his entire community were destroyed by racists. He tries to do so by joining the police – he believes that if he becomes a lawyer like his hero Bass Reeves, he can in some ways obtain justice for the injustices done to him as a child. But he answers and realizes very quickly that putting on a badge and a blue uniform will not help him. In fact, within the police there will be more injustice against him.
So he puts on another uniform, with a hood and white make-up around his eyes, and thinks he’ll find justice that way when he joins the Minutemen. We wanted to show that the Minutemen were as silly and racist and dubious as the police. Trying to join these so-called allies to gain justice for what had happened to his family decades ago was wrong – he would not be able to achieve justice by putting on uniforms and teaming up with racists to to fight racism.
Tell me more about the relationship between Captain Metropolis. It feels like it’s connected to the comic “Sex stuff.”
As I thought about this character and thought about this episode, I thought about how ridiculous the idea of Batman is – the idea of a heterosexual white billionaire who is unable to achieve justice and dress with traditional means need a costume. This is absurd because rich, heterosexual white men get justice the way they want it. They can buy dishes, they can buy police forces, they can buy presidencies. The idea that a billionaire, a white man, is stuck in the street in search of justice because he can not get it elsewhere is absurd. Captain Metropolis is a good proxy for Batman.
Captain Metropolis is a dilettante. He is someone for whom costume adventures, as they call it in the book, are just a kind of game. He makes it fun. He does not do it because he feels he does not get justice, or because he cares about the city’s crime rate. He does it because he has certain fetishes, passions and fantasies, sexual and others, who go along with dressing a costume and going out against bad guys. He does that as a hobby.
When comparing his motivation to Will’s motivation, one sees how frustrated Will is, even though he is sexually attracted to Captain Metropolis and may even have romantic feelings for him when it comes to his sexual identity and idiosyncrasy. He is somehow repelled and finally reaches the breakpoint when he realizes that none of his Minutemen colleagues really care about fighting crime. They deal with the commercial aspects and advertising contracts while he is actually involved in the fight against crime. Of course, the first superhero was a person of color, because you have to think about who would seek justice in this unorthodox way. When Will arrives there, he realizes that the justice he seeks for is immediately available to Captain Metropolis. Therefore, he has to reckon with the fact that his colleagues do not care, and he is the only one who takes care of it.
I want to go back to Will’s uniforms. At the end of the episode, Will comes closest to achieving justice when he kills all the white Supremacists in the camp. He is wearing the police uniform, but with the mask of hooded justice. Was that a deliberate decision to mix these two things?
For me, I never thought about how to dress like that. It was a decision to take him to a place where he wore the mask all the time, so that the mask had become such an important part of his identity and reality that he kept it in the back pocket of his police uniform. In many ways it had become who he was and how he felt. Much of his strength was based on the knowledge that he was nearby. The melding of mask and police uniform is interesting, but I do not think we’ve tried to say anything about these costumes – we’ve been trying to say that the identity of hooded justice has become so essential to his sense of justice as human, that he always had to have it with him.
This centrality of Hooded Justice’s identity translates into the next scene in which Will’s son tries to put on the mask and make-up.
For me, that moment is the moment when Will has to face the reality of his generational trauma, and he’s sharing his wounds with his offspring in a way that could harm them. He realizes that his life has not become what he wanted, that he lies to all, that he did not deal with the trauma, that he did not get rid of the pain and the anger he had over what had happened is to him when he was younger. He understands that he could not get rid of those wounds, even if he did not admit it. Although he has killed a warehouse full of racists, it still has not brought back his mother and father, it still has not brought Greenwood back, he still suffers. After doing this, he comes home and sees that his son is exactly what he was and who he is, and he has to face the idea that he only gets another person to follow in his footsteps , And he does not like his steps.
Mark Hill / HBO
Also for June it is a difficult moment. She originally encouraged Will and has this kind of strategic role in his work as Hooded Justice, even in the first Captain Metropolis scene.
June has done what I think many people do when they love someone. That means you try to support their efforts. She says that if it looks like you have to do it to drive out his demons, then it should be like this. But in the end, she says, “I thought this would help you get rid of what you’re feeling, and instead, it just nurtured it.” She realizes that she should not have done that at all. that she was involved in creating this man who still suffers so much, who has undermined so much of his identity and dignity in the pursuit of justice, and who has only found more injustice along the way.
It feels like she has all this trauma in her background as well. They were together in this experience, but they do not respond in the same way.
She was a baby when it happened-we did not talk about that in the room-but she does not really remember, or her parents. She understands abstractly that this bad thing has happened, but she does not have the actual pictures Will does. And we did not go into that much later, but in the first cut, June was a reporter for a black newspaper that focused on the civil rights movement and, for want of a better term, on stories of social justice and stories about the civil rights of the black community in a way that made her happy and proud and fulfilled, in a way that felt effective and did a good job. We tried to say that June had found something to help her cast out her demons, which was a little more social – well, much more social – and helped her overcome the trauma she felt.
How did you go about presenting this trauma as part of the episode? We spend a lot of time with the remnants of Will’s past.
We began by understanding that there were those spirits that followed Will throughout the episode, and we needed a way to describe what spirits were and what real things in the world everyone could see. We originally talked about making the spirits sepia-toned, which everyone disagreed with. Then we thought that the spirits might be blurry and everything else sharp, but we did not like that either.
Damon had seen The Wizard of Oz with his son and called up the scene where they opened the door for Oz, and the film, which was originally shot in black and white, was in color. So we played with the idea that the episode would be in black and the spirits in color. At first it seemed kind of crazy, but then we started to get into it, with the music and period jazz that we wanted to include, and it made more and more sense that this would work. It also referred thematically to the idea that Will leads this run-down, callous life in which he wants to pretend that the past does not exist. So everything else is in black and white, while the true trauma that kept him busy the whole time was in color and he remembered it bright and fresh.
Was this episode intended as a parallel to the comic “Fearful Symmetry”? There are many structural similarities. If not, what was especially important to you to get it out of the book?
There was nothing of “Fearful Symmetry” that we took for this episode. Important to me was the sexual relationship between Captain Metropolis and Hooded Justice. I think that makes the character much more complex and difficult to understand that he sleeps with an racist and has an affair with him that is openly racist and racist. I think a lot of people may not understand that – and it’s hard to understand – but it makes Will complex and interesting, expanding and deepening his character in a way that I thought was important.
There was some discussion in the room that it would be difficult – nobody ever said we should not do it, but there was some discussion about how it would be incredibly difficult to pull it off and make it credible and do it authentically Act. But I feel that it is and was an important part of Hooded Justice, and I felt that I really wanted to include it in the book.
