Masks (Episodes 1-3)

There are people who believe that this world is fair and good It's all lollipops and rainbows I remember what happened to my parents You remember what happened to your parents? You and me, Topher, we don't do lollipops and rainbows. Because we know those are pretty colors that just hide what the world really is. Black and white.

Hi, my name is Craig Mazin. You may know me best as the writer and executive producer of Chernobyl, a miniseries from HBO. For that show, I did a podcast. I collaborated with Peter Sagal. And it went pretty well. I think a lot of shows are thinking about doing a podcast like this, but I can think of no show more deserving of a podcast than the one we're going to be discussing today. Watchmen, the new dramatic series from HBO.

I have a feeling there are going to be a lot of podcasts about this show, but there is only one podcast, this one, the official Watchmen podcast that features the man at the center of it all. My guest for this episode and all of our episodes to come. writer and executive producer of Lost, of The Leftovers, and most importantly, of Watchmen, Damon Lindelof. Damon, welcome. Thank you. It's good to be official, I guess. Yes, welcome to your own show. Thanks.

In each episode of this podcast, we're going to be covering three episodes of Watchmen, so I'm already panicking about the time. It's not my fault that you have made the densest, richest, tightest dramatic show I've seen in a long, long time. And that makes sense in a way, because this is a show that continues from the world in the seminal graphic novel Watchmen, of which I am a fan. Well, I thought I was a fan, and then I saw what you did, and now I guess I know what a fan really is.

That's probably the nicest thing that you could possibly say because, you know, Watchmen, I'm only sitting here obviously because of Watchmen because we're doing a podcast about it, but... It was such a seminal event in my creative life, in many ways, an origin story. I mean, I saw a lot of movies and TV shows before I read Watchmen, but when Watchmen was first put into my hands, that was really the beginning of...

oh, you can do that? And so for anybody who has a relationship with the original material, the biggest... deal for me is are we after these nine episodes going to earn the name watchman on this i mean to me it's sort of like if someone said oh i really like the show but i don't really think it's watchman that would be heartbreaking because why call it that well I've watched three episodes now.

Like everyone, this podcast has come out after the first three episodes. What if someone's listening to the podcast and they haven't seen the episode? Please stop. I should warn you right now. Don't be stupid. You need to go watch the show because spoilers galore. your way and you really don't want to ruin this for yourself and honestly the show is

quite a bit more exciting than this podcast is. But I, it struck me as somebody that is pretty well versed in the graphic novel that you absolutely have done something, like I say, that extends from that work.

So you had this almost impossible task. You had to adapt, in a sense, something that you love and respect and probably idolize. I think a lot of people do. Yes. But you also then had to depart from it completely and make it something different. It had to be of it and apart from it. How did you negotiate that? Very carefully and also completely and totally haphazardly. I mean, I think that it was...

a combination of the energy of a bull in a china shop and then trying to catalog everything that you knocked over and broke so that you could replace it. And both things had to kind of happen simultaneously because I think that we went in with... a high degree of fear and concern and delicateness. And then very quickly we were just like,

fuck all of that, let's just go nuts. And then you had to vacillate between those poles and the show sort of happened in the space where we were moving in between the poles. Because our job as storytellers is to make something feel authentic, to make it feel real.

And I wanted this... television experience because it's not a comic book where you're turning the pages where they're illustrated cartoon characters i wanted to feel real and authentic at the same time there's some true ridiculousness happening around the uh the fringes of this so the first thing that we did

And when I say we, at the very beginning of this thing, it was this guy, Jeff Jensen and I, and Jeff and I, Jeff was a reporter for Entertainment Weekly, and he would write these crazy theories about Lost under the sort of pseudonym.

is Doc Jensen. Not quite a pseudonym because his last name is Jensen. It was really just a fake doctorate. Just put Doc in front. Yes, he does not... That's fraud, actually. My understanding is he does not hold a doctorate in anything. Maybe lost. In any way, he and I... collaborated on Tomorrowland and did a lot of world building for that Disney thing. But when...

The third time they came to me and said, do you want to do Watchmen? And I started to kind of feel the beginnings of a glimmer of what it would be about. I texted Jeff and I said, I have two questions. The first question is like, should there be... a watchman tv show and then the second is should i do it and i think he responded depends and depends and then i was like well if i did it yeah would you would you want to do it together and then he came over and

He was the first person that I really bounced a lot of these ideas off of. And he and I put together this list of adjectives, almost like a recipe list. These are adjectives that we use to describe the original Watchmen.

Our version, if we can check these same adjectives against it, almost like a Mad Libs, then maybe we earn the name. And the first... word on the list was original and so now there's this paradox that we're presented with which is it's an adaptation of this thing that already exists how do you make it original and I think

the gaming of that paradox was, and I'm still thinking about, did we game it? But like, that was really the challenge in front of us, which was like, how does this thing feel like it's Watchmen, but at the same time, it could only feel like it's Watchmen. if it's taking huge risks and it feels like you're feeling nervous while you're watching it, like,

I don't know what's happening and I don't like it and I don't know where this is going to go next and I'm a little bit scared. And not just scared where it's going to go narratively, but scared that it could jump the shark. When I read Watchmen... I could tell you 20 instances over the course of those 12 issues that just took my breath away in terms of like, you... aren't allowed to do that. I can't believe that that just happened. Like my heart would be racing as I was reading those issues.

To try to replicate that emotional sensation for the TV show, that's what we were chasing. Sometimes we succeeded, other times not, but that was the brass ring we were all reaching for. So what we're talking about in many ways is the... tone of Watchmen and its ambition and its fearlessness. And when we begin your series...

Right out of the gates, it does seem like you hit those, well, at least you hit the ambition and you hit the fearlessness. If Watchmen, the graphic novel, was a meditation perhaps on the morality of heroism.

It seems pretty clear from the beginning of your show that your show is about race, period, the end. It is about race. I want to ask you how much this... emphasis on race from the start was a way for you to say, not only is this show about race, but I need you to know right now it is about race. Yeah, I'm... I apologize in advance because I'm not really able to answer that question.

articulately yet and in many ways my inability to articulately answer that question was replicated in the writer's room on a repeated basis and led to

you know, incredible conversations, you know, both difficult and sort of revelatory, certainly from my standpoint. But what I'll say is that... the most difficult question i think that a lot of writers have to answer is where do you get your ideas from or what what is a moment of inspiration like what's the flashpoint and and A lot of them answer the question the same way that I will, which is like something just happens internally.

That just like sort of clicks and slides into place. And then at least I feel compelled to get it out. And most of the time for me, those ideas don't like happen in the shower. Whereas like, oh, this would be a cool idea for television show. It happens because. I've read something or I'm listening to something or I'm emotionally affected by something. And essentially what was happening in my life was as The Leftovers was ending and I was starting to kind of feel the panic of...

I'm not entirely sure that I'm ever going to want to do this again. I'm not having any ideas. And Watchmen is just... coming at me for the third time, but it's Watchmen. For me, it's the Rosetta Stone. It's where it all began for me. Maybe not the Rosetta Stone, but more like the Black Monolith in 2001. It's full of stars. Yeah, it's full of stars.

Literally, perfect. And intimidating. And right at the time that they asked me, the third time, because they had asked me two times prior, you know, once probably in like 2011, just a couple years after Zack Snyder's movie. And then again, maybe in 2013 or 2014. And now I'm thinking it's like 2017. And I'm placing this in time around the time that Charlottesville is happening. And I read Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates' book. And I'm just going to be honest with you.

i read the book because every single white progressive liberal in the in show business was like they'd say it like this have you read between the world and me have you read it like like the shame is just like and so it's just like you have to read it right you really have to read it. And so I was like, this sounds like an astonishing piece of writing. And it was. And when I read that,

I also read Case for Reparations, which was an essay that he wrote in The Atlantic a couple of years probably before. And in Case for Reparations, which completely...

It's both wildly intuitive. It's nothing that you don't already know, but the way that it is written and the story that Mr. Coates tells just changes the way that I saw the world. In that essay, he mentioned... black wall street tulsa 21 right and the way that he wrote about it it was just i i want to say just three or four sentences or just a paragraph as you say it felt like the destruction of a world

to me and at that time also Black Panther hadn't come out yet but it had been announced that Ryan Coogler was going to do it and Ta-Nehisi Coates was writing Black Panther and I was thinking about Wakanda and I was thinking that if Wakanda actually existed in the real world

world, if there was this place of African-American exceptionalism, I guess in the case of Wakanda, African exceptionalism, but a place that where only black people lived and they were the best scientists and it was a utopia, if white people found out about this place, they would destroy it. They'd burn it to the ground. So all of those ideas were kind of like swirling around in my head. And then I bought this book called The Burning about Tulsa 21 because of...

And I was just astonished by this story on every single level, most of all because I had never heard about it. And I felt shame and embarrassment. And I would talk to other... people like I talked to people of color and they go oh yeah and I talked to white people and they go what and then I'd start explaining oh this is what happened and I would see them start to get feel embarrassed and then

And then disconnect, which is what we do when we feel like we're supposed to know something and we don't know it. And so all of that stuff was kind of swirling around in my head. And then the fundamental question that we were asking. about doing watchman is should we do it and if so why now and so i reflected back on the original watchman Set in 1985, the comic book came out in 86. And although it takes place in an alternate version of America, it was dealing with...

nuclear standoff between the USSR and America, and it's counting down towards inevitable nuclear destruction on both sides. That's what the heroes are solving for. It feels like it's a murder mystery, but... unbeknownst to us what's really going on the answer to the murder mystery the answer to who done it is someone is actually trying to save the world um and and i was like so what

what's the big cultural anxiety now when you close the comic book and it stays with you? And the answer was there's a reckoning happening in America. as it relates to race. It's not to say that that reckoning wasn't happening during the civil rights movement, or it wasn't happening in the 80s or the 90s. But right now, especially after Charlottesville, and I remember very specifically, Craig, like when Charlottesville And so that was happening at this point.

same time that HBO was saying, do you want to do Watchmen? A show about masks. And I was like, what are masks? You know, like what happens when you mix a mask with the administration of the law? That's the central idea of Watchmen. KKK wears masks and I'm starting to see protesters like Antifa is wearing masks. This was long before Hong Kong, but it's like this idea of like covering your face.

Is covering your face a justification for protecting yourself? Or are you doing something that you probably shouldn't be or both? And then all of that kind of went into the mix. And at the heart of it, in the center of it, is this remarkable character that is not... Not a carryover from Watchmen, but your invention, Angela Abar, Sister Knight. How do you know he's 7K? I got a nose for white supremacy and he smells like bleach.

So Sister Knight is kind of the protagonist. I don't know how else to put it. She's a protagonist in a story with seemingly dozens of possible protagonists. It's definitely her story. It's her story. She has an interesting history. Her own connection to law enforcement is a little muddled, a little confused. She was, I guess, what you'd call a regular cop until this terrible night that occurred. And that night is called the White Night.

It's yeah, because it happened on Christmas Eve. So it's white people. Yes. And she's sister night, which is interesting. I don't answer anything yet. Let me just line it all up. So there's an interesting possible Freudian connection in her own mind.

because she's shot and she's one of the few people that survives this massacre. And as a result, well, Senator Keene Jr., who I presume is related to the Keene Act, Keene, has... passed a law that allows law enforcement to wear masks so that they can do their jobs without being retaliated against by the seventh cavalry she becomes a masked cop, but not like most of them. So most of the cops are just regular

patrolman uniforms, blue uniforms, and then they had that iconic Watchmen yellow face mask. But a few of them have taken on Personae. like Red Scare, and Looking Glass, and Pirate Jenny, which is the greatest of all superhero names ever, and then Sister Knight. As she goes through this story, I'm kind of fascinated how you use her relationships with everyone around her to keep reshaping how I'm supposed to feel about the world.

because I want it to be cops and robbers like everybody. We all start in a very simple way. I want it to be, yes, I want it to be good guys versus racists. And then her relationship with her captain and her mentor becomes muddled because he... It seems was in the KKK. Her relationship to her own past is startling. How is it that she doesn't know who her own grandfather is? We're starting to learn. She herself is part Vietnamese.

And then there's her relationship with Looking Glass, who seems to be, I guess, maybe the purist of all those characters. He seems like the most good with a capital G and therefore somebody that she may come into conflict with. Talk about how you conceive Regina King's character and her incredible performance to serve as the hub of this wheel of a thousand spokes.

Okay. And you can do it in, you have 40 seconds. I can, okay, start the clock now. Angela Abar is definitely the central character of the season. And that doesn't mean that the show isn't heavily ensembalized. You will come to see, and this is not a spoiler, it's hopefully an invitation that some of the episodes are completely told from the point of view of characters that are not Angela. But when all is said and done, I think that we wanted to...

settle on the idea that she's at the center of this thing. And although everyone is the star of their own show, we are telling Angela's story. Angela's story does not start when Angela is born in 1978 in Vietnam. And I would also argue that she is not technically, I think, Vietnamese in the way that you mean it, which is she was born in the United States of

in a state called Vietnam, in the same way that a white person born in Hawaii is not a Hawaiian. It's not that she's of mixed race, for instance. Her parents are both... are both African-American. But she is born in Vietnam. Got it. I think I might have been slightly thrown off there because when we meet her...

In that guise, when we hear about that, she is wearing traditional Vietnamese garb because she's there to basically tell... students in you know it's a show and tell in her son's classroom and she's playing vietnamese music and playing and and serving vietnamese uh bonbia that's all it takes to send my mind down the wrong path no but it's not the wrong path it's intentional because the idea of

colonization and appropriation and the expansion of American ideals. I spent a lot of time in Hawaii on Lost. And one of the things that they don't tell you. as a white person is when you go to Hawaii, Oh, we just like, you're just basically like, everybody must've been so excited when we decided to make you a state. Um, this is just another part of the history that we are not taught. Um,

expansive history of colonization and domination and to a much more accurate extension, conquering. And just to give people a little bit of background in case they're feeling slightly lost, in Watchmen... The Vietnam War occurs. I thought you were going to say slightly lost. America in 1492 was actually not. Yeah, probably should start with that. Go ahead. Hawaii wasn't always correct. Yes. No, not. Let's start with that. Yes. In Watchmen, the graphic novel.

the Vietnam War happens, but because Dr. Manhattan, who is referenced in episode three and who, if you've read Watchmen Understand, is... essentially a deity, because he is an American, the Superman is real and he is American. He is. He assists the United States in the Vietnam War and therefore in that alternate history and in the alternate history that backs up your show.

The United States, quote unquote, won the Vietnam War. And it appears that Vietnam is now a state because of it. So she is born there of African-American parents. Right. So, yeah, she is born in the late 70s before Vietnam. achieves statehood. And yes, Dr. Manhattan won the Vietnam War because Nixon sent him over there. These questions that you're asking, why does she call herself Sister Knight? What was her childhood like in Vietnam? To me, the most compelling part of

of storytelling let alone genre storytelling inside the superhero genre is the idea of the origin story i've been obsessed with it and lost in many ways even though there were no superheroes on lost the entire construct behind the flashback was origin why did these characters behave the way that they do. How did Kate end up as a fugitive? How did Sawyer end up as a con man? How did Locke end up in a wheelchair? Those are all origin stories. It definitely...

leans much more heavily on the idea of nurture versus nature. You're not just born this way, you're made this way. The other essential idea that we kept coming back to in the Watchmen writer's room as an echo of the original graphic novel, but just such a powerful... storytelling device is the idea of legacy and fundamentally this idea of what did you inherit from your parents and their parents and so on and so forth and particularly as it relates to

Tulsa 21, which is where our story begins. Our story actually begins with Bass, a fictional story of Bass Reeves that is being projected on a screen. Right. And that may or not be, it's based on actual, an actual person, but it is. our version of Oscar Michaud's interpretation of Bass Reeves, then suddenly we're thrust into the quote-unquote real world, even though we're still watching an episode of Watchmen because the Tulsa 21 massacre did happen. So that little boy...

Who will grow up to be Lou Gossett Jr., Oscar winner Lou Gossett Jr. He's the origin. This is his story. But because Angela is his granddaughter, she is still dealing with the trauma. that was visited upon him on that day, and his parents on that day. When she catches this flyer out of the air, she doesn't realize it, but she's looking at a flyer that her great-grandfather caught out of the air.

Correct. From a Nazi propaganda plane during World War II. So that's actually World War I. That's pre-Nazis. There you go, pre-Nazis. Because we're in 1921, right? Oh, yeah, of course. And this is actual many of the African-American men who lived in Greenwood.

colloquially known as Black Wall Street, but that section of Tulsa, they were World War I veterans. And they went to go fight in World War I. And because the United States Army was not yet integrated, the French Army was like, you can fight with us. And the Germans would drop these leaflets. So the leaflet that we actually used in the show is...

100% historically accurate, the Germans were using propaganda to get African Americans to just basically leave France and walk over to Germany and just become German citizens. But I ask you boys, what? is democracy. What that German sergeant is saying, dictating, that's exactly what was on those flyers? Verbatim. Do you enjoy the same rights as the white people do in America?

Or I'm too rather treated over there as second-class citizens. Can you get a seat in a theater where white people sit? Or can you even ride in the South in the same streetcar with white people? So there's a continuation from Louis Gossett Jr. as a little boy to Louis Gossett Jr. as an old man. Angela, her, she doesn't seem to know her connection to him. Correct. Which is, that in and of itself, sometimes people...

fail to realize how negative space is information too. The fact that she doesn't know something means I know something. So... I want to punch myself in the face with how much I'm virtue signaling right now and trying to appear woke and progressive. I'll handle the punching. You punch me in the face. But I can only tell you that these were the influences that made me want to do the show. And so I'm obsessed with this show, Finding Your Root.

with Henry Louis Gates, colloquial script Gates. And if you don't watch it- And now he's secretary Henry Louis Gates. So there was an episode of the show that really stayed with me and- And again, this is all subjective to my memory, so I apologize if I'm messing it up in some way. But Questlove from The Roots was his guest. And Dr. Gates essentially reveals to him, we found your great, great...

great, great, great grandparents. And they came over on the last ship, the last ship carrying slaves. So it was like... And this is where they landed. And this is where they settled. And they were, you know, this is right before they were emancipated. And as he's telling him the story.

Questlove starts to have this incredibly emotional reaction and Skip Gates says, what's going on? And Questlove looks up at him and essentially says, I feel like I know who I am. And that's not something that I could really relate to as a white person as it pertains to the last 400 years.

years of history in america that that was visited upon people who were brought to this country against their will and enslaved and all the treasure of this country was basically born upon their backs that said i understand the idea of knowing who i am based on understanding the the trials and tribulations and trauma visited upon my grandparents. And so hearing that my grandparents just got out of Russia right before they would have been shipped off to concentration camps.

actually creates an emotional reaction in me. And suddenly I feel like that's a piece of the puzzle of who I am, even though this person died 20 years before I was born. And so suddenly I was like, that feels very Watchmen to me too. All this relates back to Angela, which is...

This is a story of self-discovery. Her grandfather says, when she says, what are you doing here? His answer is, I came to tell you who you are. And so this is something that I feel like all of us as humans are striving to do is we want to understand. understand who we are and why we do the things we do and why we feel anxious and scared and we don't

It's hard for us to separate what was inherited, what came from our parents and their parents before them, and what is sort of unique to us. And you need to know who you are before you can separate those things out. But you also provide Angela with something that drama often does that we... rarely get in real life, which is not only can I tell you who you are, but you are part of something very, very special. Because while I cannot tell you yet...

What has occurred with her grandfather and why he is the way he is and why magnets are plucking him from the ground. I know that he matters. He's important. Something's going on that's... pretty big she is tied into something large not just because of her job but because of where she comes from and so unraveling that is i'm really looking forward to how that unravels

I do want to talk about how you give us information. And I told you earlier when we were talking about doing the show that one of the things that I marvel at in this show is the way that you do so much expositionless exposition.

Meaning there's an enormous amount of information to get across. Like, for instance, in this world, there are no cell phones, but there still are pagers. But it's still a modern world, but there's no internet. Vietnam is a state. We come to understand the... truth of the Tulsa race riots through, um,

combined with exposition, about a law that leads to red forations. Red forations have been mentioned earlier. And right away, we know that red forations must be some sort of nickname like Obamacare for reparations. Right. all of this information, so much information. Not only do you have to tell us who everyone is, what they're doing, why they're doing it, you also have to tell us how this world is different from our world. And you have to do it all without beating us over the head, and you did.

Can you talk through how much attention you pay to the way you deliver information in these shows? First off, let me just say I'm immensely grateful for everything that you just said. I have to use the we pronoun because there was just a tremendous amount of thought that went into...

everything that you just talked about collectively, and there's no way in a billion years that I ever could have done it alone. And more importantly, there were a number of ideas that I presented that just didn't make it out of. the writer's room, thank God, because they were bad. And so we were sort of like, what are the clues that may have been left for us in the original Watchmen that we should pick up?

And what are the ones that we can ignore? Like Vietnam, for example, actually becomes a state. It's just a newspaper headline, but the idea of actually going there and spending time there. By doing the non-exposition exposition, again, I have to refer to the original. 12 issues.

the graphic the collected graphic novel that's how I felt when I read it I felt like I was just dropped on my head and that I didn't quite understand when I read the first issue everything that I needed to know so two cops would be walking down the street and they'd be talking about the key now And then I'd sort of go like, am I supposed to know what that is?

And then there were these ancillary materials at the end of each issue, excerpts from an autobiography that didn't exist that started to give you a window into the origin of costumed adventuring back in the late 1930s. The first appearance of Hooded Justice and the Minutemen, which we're dramatizing via this show within the show, et cetera, et cetera. And so the first rule is how I think that.

you said like you did it and I would say like for people who are listening to this podcast probably but a lot of people probably watch Watchmen and they were like this feels like the Sunday crossword to me like If I can't get like one across, three across, nine across, 18 across, I'm just going to... put it away so in a sense you and look you've been down this road before yes this is your third time down this road by my reckoning where you've created a bit of a puzzle box yeah

At this point, you're probably, you've just decided, look, I'm going to get a certain chunk of this audience and thrill them to no end. Some people are going to watch this and just go, I'm confused. Bye.

Do you just decide that offhand or do you think, no, I can get them? I'm going to say something that's just completely and totally arrogant and it runs counter to this other emotional idea. So the arrogant thing is... you have to make the show that you would want to see that's the arrogant thing right like if you're trying to make it for someone who's not you you'll never know if you're making the right show

And then the second thing is I want everybody to love it. Of course. I want everybody to love it. And I want everybody to love me. And I can say to you, I acknowledge like.

I acknowledge that the show is imperfect, but it's like when you read the first bad review, the feeling that you have inside your body is just like, I... i failed this person is completely and totally right i'm a fraud and also they're wrong you know the show is actually like all these contradictory feelings sort of like come into play and so i want to go deep

Watchmen was so dense, the Old Testament, that's how we internally refer to the 12 initial issues, were so dense that our Watchmen had to be equally dense. So when we talked about Redford Asians, we're like, at the end of the equal sign, is the word redfordations. And so...

What is the what's the provenance of that word? In the early 2000s, Johnny Cochran representing several of the victims of Tulsa 21 and their descendants sued the state of Oklahoma on the grounds of what happened in 21. And it made it all. the way up to, I believe, the Oklahoma State Supreme Court, and it got tossed for reasons of standing. That actually happened in real life. They made the argument that the statute of limitations had run out and also that the descendants were not traumatized by

By the initial trauma. And so we basically said, if Johnny Cochran did the same thing in Redford's America, maybe his Supreme Court would hear that case versus the real Supreme Court that didn't hear it. And when the Supreme Court...

court decided to hear it at that point, Congress realized if we don't legislate some form of reparations, we're about to bankrupt the country because this thing, the liberal Supreme court is going to pass. They're going to mandate. And so our compromise will, will be that we're. going to pay

reparations for specific racial violence incidents. Not everyone. We're going to designate Tulsa and the Japanese internment camps and lands taken away from Native Americans in Oklahoma and elsewhere, et cetera, et cetera. These very specific events and maybe that will make it go away. And so and that's how you ended up with the, you know, it became a tax exemption, a lifetime tax exemption for descendants of victims of the Tulsa massacre.

If you could prove a genealogical connection to them, which you start to see in episode two and beyond. Which is another example of how things meet together because you're starting to learn about redfordations. You're starting to learn about how the government is addressing. The incident in Tulsa and other and other racial crimes. And maybe that's a pretty good segue into this, which is how brilliantly.

You and your writers and your directors and your production designers and costumers planted 14 billion Easter eggs into these episodes for people who have read Watchmen and looked and studied. the graphic novel. There are so many, I'm not going to try and articulate them. I'll just mention two of my favorites, the slight dash of red on the yolks that are making the smiley face.

And my favorite is favoritist. So no one has even said Dr. Manhattan's name, I think, until episode two. And when his name first comes up, there is a blue glow coming from a coffee machine that is very Dr. Manhattan-y. But there are Easter eggs. Everywhere. Everywhere. How much time did you guys put into it? How much thought? Was it just a game to see how much you could get in? Or was each one carefully chosen? I think all of the above.

Nicole Cassell, who directed the pilot and the second episode, she was a Watchmen neophyte. So when I first reached out to her about directing the pilot, she had... bought the collected graphic novel, but hadn't read it. And so she read the script, I think, for the pilot before she read any Watchmen. And I felt like that was really important because there were going to be people who were watching the pilot who had no pre-existing relationship with Watchmen.

Perfect choice in that garden. Absolutely. And she was the one who... In the script, it would say Angela is doing these eggs and it's the form of a smiley face, but she is the one who put the little drop of red in there. She's the one who decided to put the blue light because she realized that... The filmmaking couldn't be so self-aware that it was distracting to watch, but she also understood that, like the original Watchmen, she wanted to reward...

the deep dive. There's richness in, I mean, that's one of the things about Watchmen, the graphic novel that I think you guys have brought through beautifully, is how rich each panel was, how much information and detail. You kind of have to hit pause and go back. show almost demands re-watching. And I, when, you know, my dad gave me the first two issues of Watchmen when I was 13 years old and I read...

And I read one, I read the first one, and then I read the second one, and then I read the first one again, and the first one again, and the first one again. And it was a month in between. I had to wait for a month before the third one came out. And I just read them over and over again. And every time I read them, and Craig, we had...

watchman book club in the writer's room so when we when we first came together and we're doing our world building every three days we would just our homework would be to read an issue and to come in we talk about it for three hours and some of us had read watchman multiple times and some of us were reading it for the first time

and I was still discovering stuff and also discovering stuff through others interpretation the material that's that's because this is a masterpiece it's a work of art and so we were aspiring to that and so

But at the same time, the first read is the only one that matters. If the degree of difficulty in getting through it, if it's so dense, then the experience of watching the show is like quicksand. And I hate... television that makes me feel dumb and i love television that makes me reach higher you know and the and the line between those two things is is razor thin because i love tv that like assumes that the audience is quite sophisticated because i believe

that the audience is a lot more sophisticated than most people give them credit for. And so you treat the audience like they're super smart, because they are, and then you write accordingly. That's the way you do it. And I'll just say one other thing, which is... that when we were doing Lost, people would refer to all the Easter eggs that we were hiding in Lost and sort of like, where'd you come up with this idea of Easter eggs? And I was like, first off, Twin Peaks did it. X-Files did it.

Alias did it. Joss Whedon did it on Buffy. We didn't invent it, but the internet is starting to be a thing now around the time of Lost. And so the collective searching for Easter eggs. this is something we're all doing together, felt like it was new for Lost. But I learned all of that from Watchmen. I learned it all as a 13-year-old. And so now coming back to the source is my opportunity to say to everybody,

This is where I learned this. This is what taught me how to do this. Well, you are perfecting it. And I have no doubt that there's going to be at least a few websites that do nothing but just catalog Easter eggs.

I want to get to one of my favorite things about the pilot, because it is incredibly confounding, even if you have read Watchmen and know exactly who Jeremy Irons is. I am available. at your leisure and by your grace to discuss this matter further should you wish to repeat your ridiculous accusations in person. That said, I'm pleased you enjoyed the tomatoes. All best wishes and encouragement. Adrian.

When we were preparing for this, your production sent over a list of characters and the character Jeremy Irons plays English. country lord yes and the scripts he was just referred to as the blonde man yeah yeah my ass so you know everybody who's read the book knows who he is but even so for those of us who suspect at least that we know he isn't and it turns out we were right

There are these fascinating people that live with him in this mansion. His maid, Crookshanks, and his valet, his butler, Phillips. And... You know, you chose everything. I know there's intention behind everything. It's one of the most... enjoyable things about the show is how much intention there is. Nothing feels haphazard or just thought up on the day. It's really intricately machined.

When we meet Crookshanks, she is on her knees while a naked Jeremy Irons behind a desk. And for all the world, it appears that she is fellating him. And then it turns out, no, she's just... casually rubbing his muscles and has the strangest attitude about it. And so does Mr. Phillips, who doesn't seem at all stunned by this or the fact that Jeremy Irons is naked. And you start to think something's up with these two, but I'm not sure what. By the time...

Phillips hands Jeremy Irons a horseshoe instead of a knife to cut the cake. I must tell you, I was desperate for them to be robots. Desperate. Because I had a few...

feeling something bad was going to happen. And if we could jump ahead to episode two, something bad happens. They're not robots. I don't need you to tell me who they are, but just... so that i'm sure what i saw is what i saw they're they're not robots they're people they are organic they are organic material people yes i think people is i i i i'm sure at this point people will have all referred to them as clones i'm not

I'm not entirely comfortable with that designation either. He was, you know, Adrian Veidt always had, you know, that thing where he would genetically engineer his pets. Yes. His assistants. I believe there were those three guys, right? Yeah. The Vietnamese. Yes. Assistance in Karnak. Yeah. He poisons. So he's done these things before, but it appears that the experiment isn't going as well this time.

He's amazing. I mean, it's just so much fun to watch him. Jeremy Irons, yeah. He's clearly having the time of his life. No, amazing. And we didn't reveal that he was playing Ozymandias. And obviously, in the third episode, he finally says his name, but it's like... But the question of, like, why did we hide it? Why didn't we just say, Jeremy Irons is playing this guy? The answer is that...

I couldn't say out of one side of my mouth, this is not a Watchmen sequel. And then out of the other side, say, Jeremy Irons is playing Adrian Veidt, is playing Ozymandias. So announcing that there were going to be legacy characters appearing in... we'd be sending mixed signals. Same thing with Laurie Blake. Correct. And so the nuance of, well, I guess technically it is a sequel. Like, what do we even call this thing? You realize that in the press, all that anybody knows...

before something comes out is based on these sort of like casting rumors and what location you're shooting on. And I knew that the audience would be trying to figure out what the show was. I'm not entirely sure it was the right path to take to not say that he was Adrian Veidt, especially because that's what everyone sort of assumes he is. And then he just in the third episode says his name and it's like, duh. But by not confirming it, it seems to suggest.

But that was the thinking behind it. And so as we were moving into the launch, we were sort of at New York Comic Con. He was billed as probably who you think he is. You were basically winking at it. Right. But I, you know, but... But I think that there is this sort of like, it is a mystery show. That was another part of the original Watchmen, which is...

People forget, they didn't reveal who Rorschach was until halfway through the comic book's run. And he was a guy who actually appears in the first issue as seemingly like a vagabond or a homeless guy. Holding his sign. And his Nye sign.

And of course, who killed the comedian? That's essentially the murder at the heart of the whole thing. And you don't find out until the end. Right. And so who is that? That question, who is that, is a big part of Watchmen to me too. And so we were trying to sort of replicate that.

that fundamental idea as well. And understanding that you and I are recording this after people have seen three episodes, but now the internet, like they get together and the collective... intelligence of it only takes one person it can crack any code it takes one person to just say

oh, here's what I think is really going on here. And then suddenly it catches fire and then you're done for. So you have to kind of accept in this day and age that you can't hide anything anymore. Well, let's talk about that. Because when I look at... Let's just take the Adrian Veidt scenes from the first three episodes. There are mysteries galore.

I don't know where he is. I don't know what's happened to him. He seems a little nuts. I don't know why he's made these people. I don't know exactly how he's made them. I don't know what this anniversary is. Can I just ask you a question? Yes. What makes you think that he made them at all? Well, exactly. He might not have. He may have inherited them. I don't know. I don't know what the anniversary is and the cake. I don't know what the story is with that.

I definitely don't know what's going on with his neighbor, the game warden. I don't know what he's attempting to do with Phillips or many of the Phillipses by firing them into space, catapulting them into space. It's hard to tell. And I really don't know what is going on with his reenactment of the birth, the creation of Dr. Manhattan, which seems almost sexual in its kind of, it's like...

He's way too into it. It's a lot of mystery. So, with that, and with all the other mysteries, including... including Lou Scottson Jr., who was the boy in Tulsa, who is now Angela Abar's grandfather. Right. and who says he has friends in high places and turns out literally has friends in high places with one of the craziest endings to show I've ever seen in episode two, where a magnet comes down and plucks him from the ground and into the sky.

Please tell me that you know where all of this is going. Oh, I mean, not only... Not only do we know where all of it's going, but I think, again, one of the things that was on that list that I was telling you about of adjectives was self-contained. I was like...

Coming out of that Watchmen, of course I wanted more. There were other stories that I was curious about, one of which, for example, is that the last time that we see Laurie Juspesic and Dan Dryberg at the end, she says, I think I might go get a couple of guns.

And the implication is that she's basically her first iteration of vigilantism was that she was walking in her mother's footsteps. But now she's going to walk in her father's. And I was like, I want to see this character as as the comedian. Yeah. You know, that's that. That said...

It answered the mystery. Who killed the comedian and why? What was Vite up to? Like, you know, was, you know, was John actually giving people cancer? Like, so it did feel like there was a lot of all the all the loops got closed. But it ends in this very. kind of like cool 1970s ambiguous way of Rorschach's journal in the hands of this guy and you're sort of wondering

is everything that I just saw now going to be undone by Rorschach exposing it? Nothing ever ends. Right. So there's this sort of degree of ambiguity in terms of the way that it ends, and yet it also simultaneously feels immensely sad. So all this by way of saying is...

Every question that you just asked, where is Adrian Veidt? What's his relationship with the game warden? What's up with the cakes? Where is he and what's he doing? Where do all these clones, what have you, these beings, where do they come from? Why is he obsessed? with Dr. Manhattan, all of those things are answered very, very definitively. And I will just say, let me just say one other thing, which is that...

I was delighted by the idea that in every single episode of Watchmen in these nine episodes, you got like a five minute long intermission, like the Wile E. Coyote Roadrunner cartoon. Yes. He gave you a break. because the tonal shifts in the original Watchmen is like this sort of like wacky kind of crazy adventure that Jeremy Irons is the star of. He's the star of his own show. Now, let me say after three episodes, if you are worried, A,

That's the intention. You should be worried. You should be worried as to like, why, what, what is this all for? Is it even real? Cause it feels like it might be a little bit tonally aberrant.

It's not. These are not parallel storylines. They are, in fact, converging lines that are moving towards one another. And the reason that I say this is, and I think it's just interesting for the purposes of... of of lifting up the curtain for a second the very after we we shot the pilot and hbo said we want to pick up the series we were like okay We want to shoot the Jeremy Irons thing in Wales, and the weather is going to become very, very inclement.

by the end of October so we have to write all of that first so we broke out nine episodes worth of story for him wrote it and then shot that before we even went into production on episode two so we were locked in on how he was going to converge with everybody else's story from the jump. Which I presume means you had to be locked in on everyone's story. I mean, this is a watch, right? You guys are building a little watch. It's not, the metaphor isn't lost on me that...

Now you are the watchmakers and you are crafting this brilliant thing. That beautiful symmetry is carried through in the biggest way in episode three. And I guess this will be our last topic for the podcast. And it's what I...

Think is just a gloriously perfect, polished off loop. Lori Blake. We meet Lori Blake in episode three and we find out through a very kind of entertaining way that she works for the FBI and her job is to pursue vigilantes, masked vigilantes in particular. And she is tough. And we find out that she was once Silk Spectre, that is, from Watchmen. Her father was Comedian, whose murder starts off Watchmen. And she was also once the lover of Dr. Manhattan. Gene Smart...

is remarkable. Talk me through why you wanted to pull her in as a legacy character and what her presence here means to Angela, because she is both antagonist and theoretical ally.

What is kind of going on with her point of view about masked vigilantes when she herself was once one? Okay. First off, I have woefully underrepresented... many of the writers in our conversation again i keep saying we and i can't stress enough how much of the show particularly the things that you are celebrating have nothing to do with me i was just smart enough to

to be the curator of this particular museum and say, I'm putting that on the wall. This episode was the writer of record that I co-wrote it with was Lila Bayak. who we worked together on the leftovers and she had a lot of interest in Lori kind of from the jump coming into the room. And I think that a big, I think that when we were first starting to, to.

kick the tires of what the season was going to be. One of the first questions was like, who are the, so we know Veidt's going to be in it. He's got to be in it. Rorschach's dead. Manhattan has left the planet. So he'll be mentioned and he's going to loom large. And I think that, I think that.

Going back to the write the show that you would want to see, Manhattan is going to have to appear in one way, shape, or he has to kind of roll in at some point. But when are we going to stop seeing Finn and start seeing Shark? Because if Manhattan enters the show... all of the rules change, so we have to be really careful about how big of a role he's going to play. But Laurie was the other character who felt like...

there was another chapter of her story that felt really, really interesting. And the real challenge for us was like, oh, that's the chapter that we're not going to dramatize. What happened in the 30 years between the end of Watchmen and here? So where is she now? Like if she went...

And she was still a woman in her early 40s who had another chapter of vigilantism where she took on the mantle of the comedian. How should we see her now? And I think that there are... just like there are going to be understandable and justifiable criticisms of this TV iteration of Watchmen, one of the primary criticisms of those 12 issues, not a criticism that I had at the time that I read them, is that the show under-represents people of color and

women. The novel. The 12 issues. Or that Laurie is not as well developed as a character as some of the men. And again... it's impossible for me to criticize those 12. I should be able to criticize them, but I hold them in such high regard. But I do acknowledge that, oh God, it would be really cool to put Laurie in a more central role this time around.

Laurie actually felt, maybe perhaps in the first Watchmen, that she was an adjunct to Manhattan or the comedian's daughter versus a character who had her own... raison d'etre. And so what does Laurie want? What if Laurie is going to be basically the starling as an FBI agent who's basically kind of rolling into town and is going to crack this case wide open? We were also all as a room watching Killing Eve.

it was like this is the greatest show ever right let's like how do we how do we do you know how do we do that like normally it's always two guys it's the hunter and the hunted but um but what happens if that who's going to be a good foil for Regina King? Who can go toe-to-toe with Regina King? And that confrontation they have in the...

the small little crypt where a 7th Cavalry member has tunneled in to try and suicide bomb, or at least take Senator Keene hostage. That conversation goes pretty well, and it is that. It's a duel. And Regina King doesn't let her win at the end. It's the second time, actually, in the episode that we see, and maybe I'm reading into it, that Laurie attempts to push someone around and they kind of go, hmm.

I'm going to push you back a little bit because it happens with her, you know, with this young FBI agent she's brought in where he goes, you know, actually, no, I'm not going to take your crap. Right. It's almost like people are detecting that it's an act that she's putting on a little bit of a show and that there's somebody a little bit.

more decent in there than she's letting on. Yeah, and for sure. And I think that it's interesting because when you're talking about a show where people dress up as costumed adventurers and she gets much more... And Blake gets into the very idea of what I'm about to describe in the fourth episode, so I don't want to spoil it. But she has a very specific philosophy about what masks are and what masks do and what she believes that why she thinks that people who wear them are not to be trusted.

Yeah. There's a psychological element to this, and obviously that all relates to trauma. And I think that for her, she sympathizes with anybody who wears a mask, but she also understands that masks are dangerous. And I think that in her... In her sit down with Angela, particularly because that episode is constructed where Laurie is the hero, like, you know.

Basically, we've spent two episodes sort of going, oh, Angela is the hero of the story, but now suddenly she's really only in seven to eight minutes of this one. And so we're supposed to identify with Laurie. This idea of like, if these two are going totally... to toe who do we even want to win and the answer is both of them right like you know it's a draw they're on opposite sides of these things and and and blake is quite

Quite clearly, she's way ahead of the game. She knows that Angela faked fainting. She knows that Angela took something out of Crawford's hidden compartment. She doesn't exactly know what yet. And she knows that Angela was probably at the...

crime scene and in a wheelchair is in some way involved. But she doesn't necessarily think that Angela killed Crawford because that doesn't make sense either. It doesn't add up to her. The way that we always described it in the writer's room, because you look for archetypes, is the fugitive, where Gerard is basically you know, in the contemporary retelling, it's Tommy Lee Jones and Harrison Ford, but Gerard is hunting Kimball, and he has a job to do, but midway through the movie, it became...

very apparent to gerard when kimball is like i didn't kill my wife and then he jumps off the falls it's sort of like he says i don't care but he does he of course he does and so lord and so laurie cares and we needed the audience to know by the end of this episode that I hate saying she's vulnerable too because now we're gendering it. I don't say vulnerable. She's a human being. Right. She's a human being. She does seem a little, a little dangerous.

what she does to kill the guy with the bomb is dangerous. Right. Probably not in the handbook. So I think everybody... And Angela in particular surely is looking at her thinking, I'm not sure if I can trust you. I'm not sure you can even trust yourself in that regard. And when the show comes to a conclusion, she has slept with her young partner because... She wants to, because she's a little dangerous. She carries around...

what was, I assume, a novelty dildo, or not novelty, just a dildo that was put out. A Jeff Koons limited dildo. Yes, dildo. It is very Koonsian, yes. It is meant to... It's not, I mean, we know that Dr. Manhattan had just a regular penis, except for the fact that it was blue. Right. And made of energy. Yes. But this is just a dildo that's blue. Yes. But it was marketed. Mm-hmm. What did it say? Spectre Takes Manhattan or something like that? Well, that, you know, that. I think that's a magazine.

clip of an it's an esquire magazine that she's put in i see the attache case that was not necessarily sold with that okay yeah but she it's it all it's nostalgia yes which is a big theme from watchman i'm sure it'll come back around big time But I loved that there was sexuality here because sexuality is a huge part of Watchmen as well. And it was interesting to see it return. Right. And then the very last shot, the...

car falls back out of the sky, clearly intentionally. Yes. And she looks up and maybe that's the real owl ship. Hard to say. She seems to know what it is and she laughs because she gets the joke. I have no idea what's coming next, Damon Lindelof, but I cannot wait to see it. And I'm sure everybody who's watching the show and certainly listening to this podcast, I think that's as good as a place as any to end our conversation.

Damon, any last thoughts for our listeners? Just watch the skies and beware of falling plot devices. Oh boy, we're in for it. You have been listening to the official Watchmen podcast. I'm your host, Craig Mazin. And again, I've had the pleasure of talking with Watchmen's writer and executive producer, Damon Lindelof.

This podcast is produced by HBO and Pineapple Street Studios. Please, please, if you enjoyed this, subscribe, rate it, review it. That's how people come to find it. Tell your friends, tell your enemies. You can find this podcast where you find most terrific podcasts on Apple Podcasts, as well as Spotify, YouTube, the HBO Go and HBO Now apps or wherever else you get your podcasts. Thanks so much for listening.