Nostalgia (Episodes 4 - 6)

People who wear masks are driven by trauma. They're obsessed with justice because of some injustice they suffered, usually when they were kids. Ergo, the mask. It hides the pain. I wear the mask to protect myself. Right. From the pain.

Hi, I'm Craig Mazin, and this is the official Watchmen podcast, episode two. This is the podcast that covers three episodes at a time of Watchmen, and because it is the official Watchmen podcast, we are the only podcast. That has Damon Lindelof with us. Damon, welcome back. Does this mean that I can't be on any other podcasts? Correct. Okay, good. Good to know. I hope that you haven't been stepping out. We should probably have a conversation about monogamy.

We do cover three episodes. Now, we've covered the first three in our first podcast. The ones that we now have under our belts, episodes four, five, and six, and I should caution you, if you're listening to this and you haven't seen episodes four, five, and six, Stop, hit pause, finish watching, then come back because this is going to be pretty spoilerific. The three episodes are titled, If You Don't Like My Story, Write Your Own, Little Fear of Lightning, and This Extraordinary Being.

But my personal names for these episodes are Motherhood, Trauma, and Terror. And we are gonna get into all of those things. But first, a simple question. People have seen these episodes. Do you have a sense of how things are going with Watchmen and how it's connecting to the audience? Yeah, I'm not on Twitter. And so I basically start to get feedback about the episodes the following morning.

As someone who is a consumer of recap culture for other television shows that I love, it's impossible not to visit the websites that I visit and not see, avoid the temptation of, oh, someone has written something about Watchmen. Right. So I am reading what the cultural writers that I read are saying about the show. And I'm also really interested in...

the sort of deep dive Easter egg hunting that's going on around the show. I want to see what people found. And more importantly, I want to see what they found that we didn't intend them to find. Isn't that the best? And I want to see if there was something that we thought that they would find and they didn't find. And is there something that you thought they would find and didn't find?

Yes, there are a couple of somethings that have not been discovered as of right now. And you and I are recording this before the fourth episode airs. Right. So just through the first three. But I'd say like 95% of everything has been found. And you're not going to share that extra five.

I will share it at the end of our next one. You'll give them a little bit more time to find these, the couple of deep hidden ones from the first three episodes. But something that I thought might take them a couple episodes to find, they found at the end of the pilot. And which one was that? the idea that Will Reeves was in fact hooded justice. Right.

Obviously, all the math was there. The costumer for Louis Gossett Jr. very specifically chose this bold red coat and a hood. And so he was literally wearing Hooded Justice's uniform. Holding a noose. Correct. Instantly. From the jump, people started theorizing. Oh, people. They're great, though. I mean, I think that we understood in the writer's room that...

If people weren't able to get these things on the first bounce, then we were cheating. If you don't give any clues, then when you do the payoff, it's a cheat. Correct. So people have to be able to guess it. And now because there's this hive mind on the internet, it only takes one. person to say, hey, I found this and to say, I have a theory. And then that theory starts to catch fire. Right. So you sort of have to take into account in your storytelling, they're going to guess.

Every single surprise that I have, if the original Watchmen, the 12 issues, were to just air as 12 episodes of a television show, at the end of the first episode, someone would say, that dude with the sign is Rorschach. Right. It's an interesting thing you're balancing. On the one side, you have this very eager hive mind that is devouring the show and pulling it apart and finding things that you thought maybe would take them longer to find.

And on the other side, you have people who may feel a bit confused. Now, I've always felt that the big tension is between confusion and mystery. Mystery, good, confusion, bad. You want people to feel like there is a promise that they will be made whole when they eventually get there. How do you feel you've managed that balance as you're getting feedback now?

I don't know is the short answer. There are different emerging narratives and the one that I am choosing to pay the most attention to because it delights me is that... Someone will say, I'm watching the show with my partner, and I have an encyclopedic knowledge of the original Watchmen. I've read the 12 issues, I've seen the movie, and the person that I'm watching it with, my partner, they didn't know anything about Watchmen.

We're watching it together and we're both enjoying it. Now, I don't understand how they're possibly enjoying it if they don't know who Silk Spectre was and that her mother was Sally Jupiter and that this happened with the community. I don't know literally how they can process it.

the idea of being sort of freed of all that exposition of just being able to say well i'm actually dialed in on angela and nobody knows anything about angela we're all in on that together and this seems to be her story and so but again as i as i mentioned to you the first time that we spoke, I can make a case for the fact that the original Watchmen was a sequel to a series of comic books that were published in the late 1930s, early 1940s about the adventures of the Minutemen. And so...

you're catching up on the past as the present is sort of unfolding before you. And so the question is, how important, how critical is it to that exposition to make sense of the show? And I think that confusion...

is a word that people are like i don't want to be confused i want to understand everything i kind of like being confused if at the end of the confusion there is enlightenment and so the only conversation that's really going to matter is the one that we're having after the ninth episode airs which is okay, you were lost along the way, but did you emerge from the Amazon and the lost city of gold was standing before you? Like, that's all that matters. Well, it does seem to me that if people have...

finally now, as they're listening to us caught up on four through six, episodes four through six, that answers have now been forthcoming. So if they were perhaps nervous, when they were listening to our first podcast after the end of three episodes. Maybe they're less nervous now because they have learned a lot. So let's dig into...

the first of our three episodes up for discussion. This is episode four. If you don't like my story, write your own, which my personal name is Motherhood. And it is Motherhood because this episode, at least to me... seem to be so much about women and specifically women and motherhood. We've spoken a lot about race and we are going to return to that theme again as surely as the show always does.

But here in episode four, I thought the show suddenly started to acknowledge gender in a way it had not really in episodes one through three. The opening scene is about eggs and infertility. In the beginning, we have Lady True granting a baby to a couple, their egg farmers. The woman's name is Lois Clark. That seems...

Relevant. Little OTN, as we say in the writing trade, that's on the nose. You're being really blatant about the references to Superman. At the end of this episode, we are going to see Lady True with her daughter. And we're going to get a sense that there is a connection between mother and daughter that may be greater than we suspected would be normal between a mother and a daughter. But even throughout, we have Laurie Blake.

Her mother was the victim of an attempted rape by her father. And so we have this theme of women and motherhood throughout. Am I reading more into this than you intended or am I onto something? I mean, there's eggs everywhere. Yeah, there's eggs everywhere and not just the Easter egg kind, but the literal kind. And I will say that my past experience, particularly on Lost. It was six seasons of working out my daddy issues.

And all the characters on Lost sort of had like very tempestuous, difficult relationships with their fathers. And I've actually had a very healthy relationship with my mom and had a very tempestuous relationship with my dad. And my dad had just died before Lost started. I was working all that stuff out. And so I didn't really think that there was anything rich to be mined in the mother relationship because my mom's, you know, is wonderful and we have a wonderful relationship.

anyway the idea that i would now look at the lens of motherhood is not something that traditionally occurred to me particularly as it relates to the text of watchmen but once we had Angela and particularly Blake and Lady True center stage. And because the writer's room was so dominated by female voices, it just started to percolate up to the top and become immensely fascinating. And so it is definitely something that...

that we were and are examining, not just as it relates to the character's past, but also to Angela's present because she is a reluctant mother. She did not give... clearly birthed to these three children. She inherited them and is doing her best. Obviously, the show is not parenthood.

One of the fascinating things about Watchmen is when you take the idea of superheroing and drop it into the real world, the relationships that you have with your spouse and or your children are fair game. And that never, ever happens in traditional storytelling. where it's like Tony Stark may have...

may propose to Pepper Potts, but there's a very good reason that superheroes don't have kids. They kind of get in the way when you're trying to save the world. Yeah, there is this interesting thing about characters whose job is to end the series. And in some way you can see if you go wrong, providing families to superheroes would keep them from being superheroes. And now my show is over. But in a show like this and in a world like Watchmen, it's integrated completely.

into the story. Um, there's a really interesting moment where, just, uh, to get into a little bit of the plot, we have this fascinating meeting where, um, Angela and Laurie Blake go to visit Lady True, and in that discussion... If there was an already small circle of women only, there becomes an even smaller circle of mothers only, interestingly. And it's defined by this tongue, by a language, Vietnamese.

which obviously Lady True speaks, and also Angela, since they both were born in Vietnam. Right. There's an expression about grief I remember from when I was little. I remember one from when I was little too I haven't heard that one It's quite beautiful And in that moment, we find out that Lady True is clearly allied with Will. Yes. And there's something going on with those pills. You know, one of the things I think about storytelling, but...

as it is specific to Watchmen, is that it is a bit of a mystery story. It is a yarn. And in many ways, the original Watchmen starts to sort of mimic the hard-boiled noir detectives of the 30s and 40s.

authorities, a femme fatale who you can't trust, etc. But the story itself is basically unveiled to a series of sort of interrogations and questions and answers, which inevitably leads to a character that you're talking to who is absolutely and totally guilty but is pretending is being completely and totally cordial can i feed you some lunch and etc and at the end of that scene there's an acknowledgement between the private eye and the guilty party of i know

that you're lying to me. And then the guilty party is like, yep, come and get me. The trope is that this person says, I'm going to completely and totally just admit what I did. And I'm so glad that you're here now. What are you going to do about it? While you give us that information.

you sort of giveth and taketh, because we get this important piece of information, that Lady True is in on this somehow. So that's comforting to know. But what is the deal with this clock? So this enormous thing is introduced, and it... feels like it must be connected to the first scene, where Lady True is thrilled that she's bought this house because it's on a property that has something that fell from space into it. So you continue this...

kind of thrill ride of information. And I feel like I'm not catching up. I went one step forward and two steps back in terms of what I understand. Sure. I think that you understand everything pretty clearly. And I think that, again, it bears saying that so much of this story was was broken and rebroken. And we use the word break as a verb in the, in the writer's room. Cause that's what it really feels like. when you say you're breaking story uh

You figure it out, you lay it all out, it looks perfect, and then you just break it. And then you pick up the pieces and you try to reassemble them and you repeat this process over and over again until you run out of time. And so part of this story was, we have introduced all of our central characters and all of our central themes in the first three episodes we have introduced the

primary plot component of someone has murdered Judd Crawford. Judd Crawford is not the man that he said he was. There's a Klan robe in his closet. And so, and a traditional whodunit. You want to know who killed Judd Crawford and why. That's the way the original Watchmen is structured. Someone murders the comedian. We don't know their identity. This time around, we were like, we're going to just tell you who did it. It was Will.

And we don't know exactly how he did it yet. And in fact, when he starts confessing to the crime in the second episode, we're like, he can't possibly be telling me the truth. Turns out he was. Turns out that he was. And we'll get there. What we don't know is who. Who was Judd Crawford? We're still trying to figure that out. What also starts to come out...

as we go through episode four, is the themes that we were kind of seeing are expanding. Tick-tock, tick-tock. Okay, Watchmen made a big deal about a watch and a doomsday clock. And... And the TikTok TikTok chant of the Seventh Cavalry is obviously connected. And now our episode starts with Lady True. externalizing a biological clock, literally saying, you have this much time before you either get your baby or I have it destroyed. Right. And then she's building...

A big clock. Correct. So I'm not sure how it all adds up, but just again to confirm, it's going to add up. It's going to add up. Certainly, again, I will give the caveat of, for me... a certain degree of ambiguity is is a part of my storytelling not everything is answered but the essential questions are answered the essential question that i think that you're asking is what

does the millennium clock do what is the core of lady true and will's alliance clearly some deal has been made yes what did she bring to the deal what did he bring to the deal and more importantly when the millennium clock is finally finished and i think she says a couple

days, probably at the end of the sixth episode, we're about a day away from the Millennium Clock being activated. When you turn this thing on, what does it do? In the original Watchmen, the countdown was to nuclear Armageddon. In our Watchmen...

I'm going to reveal an exclusive. Oh, here we go. The clock is going to get turned on. Um, I'm not going to like, how great would it be in the finale? If it was like some woman came up to her with a clipboard and said, lady true, we've had some difficulties, you know, contractors yeah it's gonna be like 18 months before we can activate this thing yeah boom executive producer Damon Lindelof end of season I would appreciate that on some level you would

I'm thrilled that it's going to turn on. I'm very excited to see what happens with it. Well, I can tell you that too. Oh, you can tell us what happens with it. As Beyond says, it tells time. That's all it does. All right. They turn it on. All right. A little bit more than that. Okay. Yeah. It makes very cool noises.

It is time for a little podcast game I like to play called What the Hell is Going On with Adrian Veidt. Oh. This is so much fun. So in an episode about... motherhood and reproduction, we find Adrian Veidt fishing babies out of a pond. As one does. As one does. He is fishing these fully formed fetuses.

out of a pond and looking at them like you pick fruit from a store, throwing back the ones he doesn't like and keeping a couple that he does. You give him a good squeeze. Yeah, exactly. It's like an avocado. Yeah, exactly. There's all sorts of sniff tests for these. He takes these two babies, puts them in this... fun steampunk incubator, and within a minute...

they are fully formed as an adult Crookshanks and Phillips. Yes. Who are not yet quite able to speak, and yet still he is talking to them with the understanding they can understand him. Right. You are still a few hours away from gaining... the ability to speak, but by now you should be able to understand. And he is describing, again, a brilliant bit of non-expository exposition. I'm now explaining things to people that literally need to be spoon-fed. Yes.

So thus I get to know that Adrian Veidt is attempting to fling himself through some barrier in the sky. And he flings one of the Crookshanks. Through that barrier, the body disappears. And I say, okay, this is fairly Lindelovian. We are in some sort of interdimensional space prison-y thing. And we know for sure, at the very least, Adrian Veidt. wants to get out. But throughout this, I can't help but continue to feel that there is a cruelty in him regarding these things. Even if they are...

fishable from a pond, am I getting the intention correct there? I think that you are getting the intention. The idea that Adrian Veidt views these beings as less than human is both appropriate given the fact that they appear to be less than human in terms of People have a normal lifespan where they start off as babies and they can't eat or provide food for themselves. They need to be cared for. They're helpless. These beings obviously skip all those steps.

Adrian Veidt has no emotional investment in any of these individuals. In fact, they're quite expendable to him. And one of the things that I thought about very often as we were... figuring out this story is the way that I used to play with my action figures and the way that little boys play with action figures. And the way that we play with them is there's a high degree of imagination, but also as you describe it, a fair amount of cruelty.

when i saw the original toy story for example i was like i'm more sid than andy unfortunately and i think that When we finally arrive at the point where we realize what Adrian Veidt has been doing, and by the end of the sixth episode, we have a good sense of where he is and what he's trying to do there. He's definitely not on the planet Earth. And that he is literally using these beings. as a way to escape.

and he doesn't view them as anything other than in service of him, and he disdains them for it. More importantly, let me just say that it's possible that there is some confusion, purposefully, about...

how these stories are related in time to the story that is unfolding in Tulsa. We're not... trying to play too fast and loose with cutesiness but it's clear that time is significantly elapsing between each one of these installments not just by the candles on the cake but if at the end of installment one Adrian Veidt says I have begun writing a play and at

The beginning of installment two, he is now staging that play and it is completed. Meanwhile, in Tulsa, all Angela has done is wheeled her grandfather from the tree to her bakery. You basically go, the time at which the Adrian Veidt story is moving. is on a faster treadmill than the rest of the story. He went to go kill a buffalo. He failed, but the next time I see him...

There's buffalo fur on his, so he succeeded. Correct. Somewhere along the line. Time is passing. We're allowed to do it. We're also now, we're not only trying to solve for the passage of time as it relates to Tulsa, but also how does time move?

on a moon of Jupiter, if that is in fact where we are. I do want to get into the next episode, and this one I really loved because it was about this character that I find so fascinating. Wade, a.k.a. Looking Glass. And I want to give myself a little pat on the back because... In our first podcast episode, I mentioned that I thought that the character of Looking Glass struck me as the most moral of the characters we were meeting in the sense that he seemed most certain.

in his convictions. He didn't seem to be a morally confused person. And here we are, meeting him as a young man, and he is a religious zealot. He is a Jehovah's Witness, come from Oklahoma to visit New Jersey. It looks like maybe you're at Seaside or Point Pleasant or something. It's Hoboken, baby. Oh, that's Hoboken. Oh, it says Hoboken in the beginning, doesn't it? And we witness...

through Wade's experience, the birth of his own sexuality, in a sense. And we also witness the horror of what you call 11-2. And this is the main plot event of... the watchman novel it is the arrival of the squid the big squid yes that we understand Having read the novel, Adrian Veidt has dropped onto New York, and with it, also, this concomitant psychic energy blast that does the real damage. Right. The squid does structural damage.

But it's this wave of psychic energy that kills three million people and torments quite a few more. This is very much Wade's episode, and we're gonna concentrate on him, but I wanna jump sideways to a moment that happens a little bit later in this episode with somebody else. Wade is running an AA type of meeting, but this is for survivors of 11-2 or people that suffer from trauma from 11-2. And there's an African-American gentleman who says the following. I read an article.

There's this thing. Genetic trauma. Basically, if something really bad happens to your parents, it gets locked into their DNA. So when my mom got hit by the blast, Even though I wasn't born until 10 years after 11 too. It's like I inherited her pain. Now, in a show that is so much about race.

It seems pretty clear to me that what's happening is we are knitting together two kinds of concepts. This psychic trauma of an alien squid and the racial trauma that is passed on from generation to generation and inherited. as pain, so whether it's dropping the alien on Madison Square Garden or a racial massacre in Tulsa 1921. Talk about how these things knit together. as an understanding of how we process and inherit trauma.

This idea of generational trauma as not just an emotional idea, but a physiological idea of it actually genetically being passed down from person to person basically boils down to this idea of nostalgia. When I say the word nostalgia to you, and I'm sure we'll be...

talking about it more in depth when we move on to the sixth episode nostalgia feels good you know that word just feels good it basically it's an association with the past was a wonderful thing I think of like a Christmas story when I think of nostalgia or like back to the

future like all those guys at the gas station but then like if you take a closer look at back to the future you see the black man goldie who is basically sweeping the floor in the mall shop right and and you're like that's there too Right. We're in the 1950s. If you were a white person, nostalgia means something much different to you than if you're a Jewish person or if you're a person of color in this country. And because Watchmen goes down that deeper level and more importantly.

All the characters in Watchmen who are really interesting to me are ones who have been deeply and profoundly traumatized. I think it's why Rorschach stuck the most. And it doesn't mean that Dan Dryberg isn't an interesting character, but there's no trauma in Dan Dryberg's life. sally jupiter juice clear bezik had a huge

Tremendous trauma. And that trauma passed down to Lori. There's a reason that Lori never had kids. That's because of the trauma that was visited upon her mother. And so this idea of... These things stick. Now we have this crazy idea. Like it's hard to say with a straight face. We want to make some real emotional weight out of a gigantic tentacled.

extraterrestrial landing in the middle of new york but that's exactly what we set out to do and the only way that it'll work is if you have an actor like tim blake nelson who's literally playing the pain the isolation the loneliness there's a reason that looking glass his marriage didn't work out right there's a reason that he didn't have kids and so he's blaming

the squid attack, if he were to have children, he knows that they would be dealing with that trauma as well. He has essentially arranged his life around that moment and what it did to him. When we see him at home, he's sitting on a couch watching... hooded justice making love to captain metropolis

And he's got his mask lifted up over his mouth and nose, and he's eating from a can of beans. Yes. And I half expected him to go, because this is straight-up Rorschach stuff. Right. Why the connection? Well... Of all the characters on the show, even though the looking glasses mask is not the inkblot mask, it just felt like he was the closest to Rorschach in terms of he's an isolated man of a certain age. He's not a sociopath, but he's emotionally upset.

He was traumatized as a youth. And more importantly, he's coming into direct conflict with the 7th Cavalry, who does wear Rorschach's masks. And so... although he's not a Rorschach acolyte, that they are simpatico, that they have certain things in common. And in fact...

If anyone is going down the rabbit hole of some of our ancillary materials, the PDPedia, which is available on HBO.com, we do this ad nauseum, which is like, what was the reaction to Rorschach's journal when it was actually published at the end of the original Watchmen? I have looked at it, but describe for me fully and for everybody else who hasn't seen it, what's PDpedia?

In the original 12 issues of Watchmen, at the end of every issue of comic book, illustration, etc., there was some excerpt from an in-world piece of writing in the first... Three issues, it's excerpts from Hollis Mason's autobiography, Under the Hood, which actually introduced the idea of hooded justice. And then subsequently, maybe there was an interview in Playboy magazine with Adrian Veidt or a scientific paper about the origins of Dr. Manhattan.

And so we wanted to make sure that the audience who wanted to have a slightly deeper dive on our show had similar ancillary materials to go over to help. contextualize, particularly this period of 30 years between the ending of the original Watchmen and the beginning of ours, but also to shed some light on some questions that the show wouldn't be doing the deep dive on. Like, for example...

what happened between Laurie and Night Owl between the ending of the original and the beginning of the television show. And this is online. Yeah. So we formed this thing called Peteypedia. It is written by us, the writers, but the actual author is Agent Dale Petey. who has been introduced on the show. Poor Petey. He's a historian of the Watchmen universe and is often sidelined by Blake. And so we felt like he really needed to have an open mic to drop his knowledge upon the audience. And so...

If you go to HBO.com, you can find the pedopedia for yourself and just prepare to fall down the rabbit hole. Bring a flashlight. So anyway, if Looking Glass had read it, Rorschach's journal... there would have been, at the very least, some sort of shade thrown at the idea that a conspiracy theory existed where the squid was a hoax, which would have been very freeing for him. But as we see in this episode, he actually doesn't want to let go. No.

of that idea. And I felt that was really fascinating was the moment where he throws away his His EDS machine. This is his bunker alarm because he's like a prepper, but what he's prepping for isn't a war or nuclear blast. He's prepping for the arrival of another squid. Right. And this is an idea that I've been long obsessed with and worked out most of on the leftovers, but I continue to be, which is...

If you are convinced the world is going to end, there's a part of you that actually wants the world to end. And if someone provides you with definitive evidence that the world is just going to keep on going, it's actually easier for you psychologically to believe that it's going to end. because at least there's relief coming. And when we look through Wade's experience, and you kind of hit on this, his...

belief system. The reason he does his job is all organized around this trauma that he's experienced. He also has a... He has an insistence that we've seen from the very beginning that he can tell the truth. His day job, when he's not being a costume cop, is working for a market research company to give them insights into whether people are telling the truth. When we meet him in episode one...

He puts people in the pod where he shows them things and stares into their eyeballs and decides if they're telling the truth or not. And yet, I'm not sure he can do that. And more importantly, he has missed the biggest lie of all. Correct. He meets this woman at the AA meeting. He's telling her he knows he can tell lies. She plays along. He misses the biggest lie from her, which is that this is a total setup.

Can I just... I'm not gonna take issue with that. But she never lies. That is to say, she does in fact say, I really am a radiologist. Yes, she does. I think it was an omission. I'm being quasi cutesy here, but what I will say is one of the things about superheroes is they're supposed to have weaknesses, vulnerabilities. So we all know what Superman's vulnerability is with kryptonite, right? Batman's vulnerability.

seems to be any emotional mention of his parents or his parents' death, et cetera, et cetera. That's something that I can sink my teeth into because it's an emotional vulnerability. And so when we're talking about Looking Glass and building the character... and doing his origin story you want to explain his mask that's why it's the hall of mirrors but more importantly it's the idea that he placed trust

he placed trust in this young woman. And she violated that trust. And therefore, his superpower now is an ability to find out when not to trust people. So it felt like the best narrative for him would be a story where he betrays someone else. that ends up being Angela. So those were the emotional metrics of this hour of television. He does betray Angela, but before he does that, he places his trust in a woman he shouldn't place his trust in again. Correct.

And it turns out that she is a member of the 7th Cavalry. She is, in fact, associated with the man that kills the police officer in the very beginning of the series in episode one. But she's not surprised to see that Wade has infiltrated their secret headquarters. In fact, she's happy because she wanted him to. And they have some...

to show him. They have opened some kind of interdimensional portal that can send a basketball from one place to another. As one does. What is this? This is the only way to show you the truth, Wade. But more importantly, one of the members of the 7th Cavalry has something to show him. The truth. I know who you are, Looking Glass. Are you even trying to disguise your worst senator? Shit, am I still wearing my mask? Sorry. That is just incredibly rude. This is just for them.

Senator Keene is seemingly the grand wizard, so to speak, of the 7th Cavalry. He seems to be in charge, at least. And what he says is essentially, okay, they're all bad racists. but I'm like a good racist in the sense that I'm just here to keep them from going crazy, but also to implement an important natural order of things, whatever that is. And he says, wait.

I'm gonna show you something, and after you see it, you're gonna walk out of here, and you're never gonna be afraid of big teleporting aliens ever again. Because I'm going to set you free. And he shows Wade, and this is a wonderful moment for people who haven't read the graphic novel, the truth of the Adrian Veidt hoax. And as you say...

This is a point where Wade has to decide if he's going to let go of the organizing principle of his life, the thing that has given him meaning and purpose in a way, or if he's going to accept what... seemingly is the truth. And it seems like at the end, he is incapable of doing that. But what he does do... is follow along with the one request Senator Keene has, which is to slow Angela Abar's investigation down.

And he does it by taking advantage of the fact that Laurie Blake is trying to bust Angela Abar. He gets Angela to confess that her grandfather is the one who killed Judd Crawford, knowing that his cactus is bugged. Now that she's caught. And she's got this thing of pills, nostalgia. Angela, she swallows all these pills. Each one of these pills contains a memory of her grandfather. And what she is told in the end of this episode is...

you're probably going to die because you're not supposed to have memories of other people in your system. And you have all of these memories in your system.

And what happens now is a remarkable hour of television where Angela essentially pill travels through the trauma of her own DNA to see where she comes from and who her grandfather was. really is. Nostalgia was an Adrian Veidt product, I believe. It was a perfume. Yes, it was a perfume, and now it's something else. Right.

We talked the first time about these adjectives or ways of describing the original 12 issues. And one of the things that we wrote there was just the word nostalgia. That gradually expanded to nostalgia is dangerous. And so that was just on the list. Nostalgia is dangerous. And I was like, that's an interesting thematic idea. Sounds a little artsy-farsy, sounds a little earnest. What if nostalgia is dangerous was a plot as opposed to theme?

how do we weaponize nostalgia? And the obvious answer was that it was some sort of a pharmaceutical. At the time that these conversations were starting, we already knew that Lady True was going to be a major player. in our show. And so as sort of the heir apparent to Adrian Veidt, certainly the one who had bought up his company and a genius in her own right. And one of the ways that she made her trillion is in pharma.

And so the idea that she developed a... pharmaceutical called nostalgia where not unlike the movie total recall you go into a clinic you sit in a chair they extract chemicals from your brain from your memory center and they make them into pills and then you can just relive best of the clip show of the best of Craig Mazin whenever you want nightmare and the idea that you could use this to escape

an unpleasant present, but more importantly that this would be prescribed for people who were suffering from Alzheimer's or dementia and dealing with some stress surrounding that. They would just be able to look at the best memories on a loop. But of course, people started abusing this thing. And they stopped living in the present and started living in the past. And so...

That was idea number one. Idea number two was that we had constructed this incredible origin story, a two-part origin story. Part one is obviously the way that the pilot opens, which is starting with the film of Bass Reeves. passing off to this little boy and then that little boy moving through the horrific destruction of his world. Greenwood, Black Wall Street, this exceptional world in Tulsa. And so that little boy grows up.

for a part two of the origin story and i'm going to talk about batman which is batman's origin comes in two parts origin part number one is the murder of the waynes and part two is the moment that he decides to actually become Batman, you know, as an adult. So there's a childhood trauma that doesn't really become worked out until adulthood. And so we always knew that part two was going to involve this period when this little boy becomes hooded.

This was the big idea that I cryptically referred to the first time that we talked about. The first thing that sort of came in the world of Watchmen was Hooded Justice is a character never to reveal to us.

Why? We know who everybody else is. And so in asking myself why, the answer that I came up with is what if this man was hiding under the mask? another mask it was multi-leveled what if he was hiding his race and why would a black man hide his race in 1938 if he was a vigilante well the reason is is because

if a black man was fighting crime in 1938 in New York, he'd be murdered. He would be murdered. And so we get this fascinating origin story. You've shown us Hooded Justice through the television show Inside Your Show, which... Reminds me a bit of the pirate story inside of Watchmen. Sure. They had a comic within a comic. We've got a TV show within a TV show. And what we definitely know...

is that Hooded Justice is white. And we know he's white because you show us his eyes all the time. They are blue, blue, blue. And his skin around it is white, white, white. And you even reveal his face. we have this understanding that Hooded Justice is white. But what we see in reality as Angela goes through time... is that Will doesn't just come up against racism in New York. He comes up against a full-blown racist conspiracy. There is something called the Cyclops. This is a secret society.

They have their own symbol, which is the OK sign against their forehead. The OK sign is this kind of alt-right symbol for white supremacy. So I caught that, but also noticed that in this series, there's going to be repeated connections between the big squid and racism. The big squid with its big one eye. And here's this society. They are not satisfied with simply beating him up. They need to teach him a real lesson and they nearly lynch him. And the lesson is essentially...

Don't disrupt the lives of white folk. Know your place. And he is left with the instruments of their near lynching. The ropes around his hands. which we know is part of what the Hooded Justice costume, and this mask and the rope around his neck. And he very quickly turns that into a tool of vigilantism. What I thought was so remarkable about this was not only the brilliant way you guys recontextualized this very curious costume from Watchmen the novel.

but also making a commentary about the way our pop culture and comics have always treated superheroes, which is to say they're white. They're white, white, white. And our culture kind of scams us over and over in this regard. So we think if I say to most people who came up with ain't nothing but a hound dog, they'll say Elvis Presley. But actually it was two Jews that wrote it and it was. black woman that sang it. That's what comes first.

And then there's Elvis Presley. And in this case here, once again, we see culture has scammed us. This hero that they still to this day believe is white, is not white at all, he's black, and he's just using white makeup so that he... that he can make it through even with his mask on. Which is an interesting opposite to Angela, because the two of them are so closely connected by blood and by job, they have makeup in the exact same place.

They wear this hood. They both put this makeup around their eyes. But whereas he makes his skin lighter, she makes her skin darker. Talk about this. There's a lot to talk about here because this very conversation dominated. a lot of the early days of the Watchmen writers room. The idea that Hooded Justice was a black man, you know, in the writers room, that idea of he's Hooded Justice. existed and then we started to try to discover the origin story.

Again, the writer's room, and I could name every single writer in that room, and every single one of them had a huge part of every story idea, but I'm going to very specifically name Cord Jefferson, who was the co-writer of this particular episode, episode six. As I remember it on maybe like the third day that we were all together, he sort of pitched this idea, which is in the late 1930s, let's say that we knew that he was a cop.

because angela was a cop and this idea of genetic trauma flows through the blood but also this idea of blue bloods like it's almost like one of the few um vocations where there's still like some expectation that you're going to go into the family business. So anyway, those ideas were rolling in, but Cord basically just pitched. He arrests a white man.

who is up to no good that white man beats the rap and will doesn't accept wants to know more and then these guys throw him into their car and they bring him out to a tree and they lynch him and right before he dies they cut him down and they let him know that that was a warning next time we won't cut you down And on his way home from that incident, this is a trope in every single one of these movies. You've got a guy walking by an alley and some woman screams out, help.

And that's when they, that's when Spider-Man, that's when Spider-Man first, you know, that's happens to him right after this bloodied and beaten. Right. From the near lynching. Right. And so what. he's helping these people in trouble white people by the way yes not necessarily purely out of this out of altruism but because he needs to put this

Rage. He's angry. And June, so June is the little girl that he found in the car, next to the overturned car as a child. Yes. She is now this young woman who he has a relationship with. She says to him in their first conversation. They gave you a gun and a stick. That's what I'm worried about. What you're going to do with them. Because you are an angry... Angry man, William Reeves. You're full of anger. And it is...

directly related to this genetic trauma of what happened in Tulsa. And you say, I'm not dealing with the past, and that is why you're angry. We know that he's a powder keg, we know he's ready to explode, and this is the ignition. And kaboom, he becomes this vigilante, drawing the attention of maybe the whitest man in the world, Captain Metropolis. Captain Metropolis, he sees two things that you're not supposed to see.

He sees that Will is Hooded Justice, and he also sees that Will is gay, or at least bisexual, and converts both of those things into an ongoing relationship. But just when you think you've met the one nice white guy, Captain Metropolis... And the new Minutemen are more than happy to use racist iconography to promote themselves and whatever weird promotional deal they have to, I guess, pay for the suits. Right. And more importantly, when Will stumbles on...

the truth of something huge. Cyclops is using film projectors to turn Negroes against each other. They don't come to help at all. You need to get the others and come down and help me. You said you would help me. I'm sorry, William. But this sort of thing isn't really the Minutemen's cup of tea. I'm afraid you're going to have to solve black unrest all on your own.

He is abandoned to deal with what we understand is kind of the prototype of what will eventually happen on 11-2, the use of psychic warfare to turn people against each other. In the show... There is an incident at a movie theater in Harlem where an all-Black audience has turned upon themselves and butchered each other, and Will quickly finds out.

that this is done through some kind of technology, the film projector, and planting messages into their mind. It seems to me, if we could step away from the plot for a second, that there's more than...

a little commentary here about the impact that culture has on oppressed people and what it does to them in their sense of self-worth and how it directs them to use their anger. 100%. This... season of television our story literally starts with the projected image a positive projected image of an african-american hero not a pretend a real one, Bass Reeves. That movie doesn't really exist, but the idea of there's a little boy who's being positively impacted.

by that image. And he's saying, here is someone who looks like me. Here is a positive role model. These white people are treating them with respect and as a hero. And unfortunately, all of that is fiction because meanwhile in the world around him, white people are destroying Greenwood. power of the projected image, the power of culture to basically say, you can be this. This is not just you versus what I think a lot of African-Americans were subjected to in the films and television shows.

all the way through the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, starting with Birth of a Nation the most, and if you don't, you know, go see Black Klansman because they show the power of what that movie was. It can be positive.

it can also be negative. And so the idea of going weight We call this hat on a hat in the writer's game, which is, let's be super obvious and say that as opposed to the thematic idea that a projected image could be harmful to people of color, what if it's literally the device that... promotes violence and the real the true insidiousness is not that it shoots a laser beam and it just kills everybody in the theater or releases a gas we're going to get you to hurt each other

That's the power of the moving image and the insidiousness of Cyclops' plot. Now again... One of the things that makes Watchmen Watchmen to us is this very careful and delicate balance. And again, I can't tell you right now where we were just aware that it was delicate. I don't know how well we managed it is the idea of that we're talking about. real trauma real pain a real america and also the ridiculousness of and there's a psychic squid and and there's

film projectors that are involving mesmerism. So how are these two things going to play well with one another? The challenge of that... was extreme incredibly tempting from a storytelling point of view but this isn't the kind of tempting where you go like oh if i mess it up it's only a tv show i'm not going to put a some level of import self-importance on this but but if you get this stuff wrong

It can be harmful. And we knew that I was hyper aware of it and even more aware of it in the writer's room. And thank God the writer's room was there for me to say things that could be potentially harmful. And the writer's room was there to say, don't do that. or you need to handle that with more delicacy. One of the ways that you continue to, let's say, add significance and meaning and import to the big squid.

is an allusion to another true aspect of our history, which was that in the lead up to World War II, and that's the time period that this is all taking place in with Hooded Justice, there were American Nazis... And they held a massive rally. In Madison Square Garden. In Madison Square Garden. And what happens many, many years later...

Once again, Madison Square Garden is ground zero for this kind of inflicted trauma that now is not just spreading across people who are African American, but now it's spreading across everybody. People like Wade. In the end. of this episode we see will has confronted crawford and is using the flashlight fitted with we presume the technology that is the successor to that original technology right

and essentially gets the truth out of Crawford. And the truth out of Crawford is that he is exactly like Keene. He's one of the good racists, at least in his mind. My guess was that the Klan rubbed onto his... I thought it was his father-grandfather, that's correct. But he keeps it, and he keeps it in the closet because it's part of his heritage. Heritage is a wonderful word that people tend to use for racism.

And he uses, I think, the phrase you people and I'm here to help you people and keep you. So it's this kind of, oh, I'm actually a benevolent racist that's here to protect you. And for somebody like Will Reeves, who's seen through all that and knows exactly where all that leads, he's heard enough. The sentence is death by hanging. And so we come full circle on Will Reeves and the story.

of Captain Crawford, but also now, when Angela wakes up, in the care of Lady True, I'm not sure how she got there. That's interesting. We'll find out. Maybe you will. Maybe you won't. Yes, you will. Yes, we will.

She now knows who she is. And now it's going to be fascinating to see how she moves forward with the understanding that she has not only this man's DNA, and this man's trauma in her DNA, but also she is, again, in this genetic line without even having known him, wearing a hood, putting makeup over her eyes.

and trying to deliver justice. With that, we're going to play one final game before we end of what the hell is going on with Adrian Veidt. Adrian Veidt on his magical... his mystery tour, has apparently tuned up his catapult to the point where he's ready to go. He's completed his suit, he's not gonna freeze to death, like the Crickshanks and Phillipses before.

And they launch him. They launch him, and he goes through the barrier and arrives in what we must understand as reality, and I believe this is Europa. That is correct. A moon of Jupiter. Yes. as one does, this is our phrase, and it is scattered, the landscape is scattered, kind of amusingly, with hundreds of these people. that he has clearly launched there. And he slowly, patiently arranges them to make a message. He sees a passing satellite and he spells out a message, which is save me.

D. That's as much as we see, I think, of that word. Which, I kind of want to be Dr. Manhattan. But I also wondered, hmm, we mentioned earlier Dan Dryberg, you know? I wonder if it's Dan Dryberg. He's another D. Maybe he's out there. Who knows? Maybe it's a different D entirely. Maybe it's daddy. It could be daddy. It could be daddy. And then he is yanked back.

because the game warden has arrived, and the game warden's face is revealed to be the same face that Phillips has. And the game warden says, essentially, you've violated the rules. That's terrible. And he kicks him in the face and knocks him out. And I don't know what's going to happen next. But my personal theory is that Dr. Manhattan has put him there and Phillips and Crookshanks are genetic.

copies of dr manhattan somehow i don't but this is not a good theory i don't you know what it's not a great theory here's what i'll say yeah Veidt does have a line in the fourth episode when he's dressing them. Yes. And he says something to the effect of, For while I may be your master, I am most definitely not your maker. I would never have burdened such static treatments. The gift of life. But to be alive. You have to have purpose. And you have none.

So that would seem to suggest that there's something to your theory. Dr. Manhattan did say at the end of Watchmen the novel that he's not giving up on human life. In fact, he thinks he might make some. So perhaps this is what he made. And if he made these people in his own image, as God tends to do... then it adds a specific resonance to the scene earlier in the series where Veidt makes them perform the creation of Dr. Manhattan. Because that would be what Dr. Manhattan would look like. So...

We'll find out all of that, like how did Angela get to be in Lady True's care, and what's in her veins. Episode seven. Episode seven. What crashed into the yard. Finale. And what's up with the clock? Finale. Everything will be answered and discussed and digested in the next and final and most important episode of the official Watchmen podcast. Damon. Thank you so much for all that. Thank you, Craig.

Episode 7 airs next Sunday at 9 p.m. Eastern on HBO, and we will be back after the finale, which will be Episode 9. I want to acknowledge, since we talked about Episodes 4, 5, and 6, the director of Episode 4 was Andrei Parekh. The writer was Crystal Henry. Episode five was directed by Steph Green and written by Carly Rae. And episode six was directed by Stephen Williams and written by Cord Jefferson.

This podcast is produced by HBO and Pineapple Street Studios. Please subscribe, rate, and review. That's how people find this. We're doing pretty well, but of course we want to be the most important podcast. in the universe. You can listen to this on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube, the HBO Go and Now apps, or wherever else you get your podcasts. And thanks for listening.