You won’t see the smiley-faced logo of The Comedian—a savage, cynical, cigar-chomping vigilante from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ seminal Watchmen—in HBO’s new series of the same name. Yet his spirit hovers over the network’s superb latest, which views ideas about American nobility, altruism and gallantry—the very qualities that define classical superheroes, and their genre—as a sick joke. Like its illustrious predecessor, still the greatest and most influential comic book of all time, Damon Lindelof’s daring follow-up is a story about an alternate U.S.A. with a costumed-avenger past and a divided present, where men and women don masks to conceal their ugly, bigoted, sadistic identities from each other and the world at large—and, also, to hide from themselves, and the fear and rage that consumes them.
Good and bad, cop and crook, innocent and guilty—everyone in Watchmen thinks they’re on the side of right no matter their constant wrongness, which repeats itself, over and over, like the ticking hands of a clock. As another rogue do-gooder once famously said, “Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drum. Curtains.”
That man, Watchmen devotees will know, was Rorschach, the ink blot-faced antihero of Moore and Gibbons’ deconstructionist masterwork, whose 1980s crime-fighting was driven by right-wing extremist beliefs about how liberalism was sending the country straight into the sewer. Lost and The Leftovers creator Lindelof’s series is set 30 years after Rorschach’s manifesto found its way into the media’s hands and in this 2019 he’s become a symbol for a burgeoning white supremacist movement known as the Seventh Calvary, whose Caucasian members wear his trademark mask as their new de facto Klan hood. What’s old is always new again, and that’s hammered home by the opening of the first episode, in which a young African-American boy in 1921 Tulsa watches a silent movie about a black sheriff arresting a white bad guy, only to have the film interrupted by a legitimate massacre on the streets outside perpetrated by whites against blacks—a calamity that orphans him and provides the foundation for the ensuing action.
Poster Comment:
Wow, I think I've stumbled onto some sort of sleeper cell, anyone know the FBI tip line phone number?
Sea of Monsters – The monster is ejected into a sea inhabited by other weird monsters. ... Ringo accidentally presses the submarine's panic button, ejecting him from the submarine and into the sea. He is seen precariously riding one of the monsters, and is then chased by Native American-like creatures, resulting in John pressing another button which sends the US Cavalry