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Watchmen season 1, episode 6 review: This Extraordinary Being

By Mike McNulty

Photo: Regina King in Watchmen.. Image Courtesy Mark Hill/HBO
Photo: Regina King in Watchmen.. Image Courtesy Mark Hill/HBO /
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A dreamlike trip into the past of Angela’s grandfather examines the evils and effects of racism through the origin of Watchmen’s first masked vigilante.

Since Det. Angela Abar, a.k.a. Sister Night (Regina King) learned that Will Reeves (Louis Gossett, Jr.), the 105-year old suspect in the murder of Chief of Police Judd Crawford (Don Johnson), was her grandfather, she’s been covering up evidence linking him to the crime. But in the last episode of David Lindelof’s Watchmen, Angela found herself under arrest after Wade Tillman, a.k.a. Looking Glass (Tim Blake Nelson) was forced into setting her up by the Seventh Kalvary.

Yet before Agent Laurie Blake (Jean Smart) and her fellow officers could slap the cuffs on Angela, the nun-inspired Tulsa PD detective downed an entire bottle of Reeves’ pills . The pills are what’s known as “Nostalgia,” a banned dementia drug which allows a person to relive their memories. Taking too much of it can also psychosis – especially if the memories one experiences are someone else’s and not your own. Which is what’s starting to happen to Angela as she starts reliving her grandfather’s past.

Except when the sixth episode, entitled “This Extraordinary Being,” opens, it starts with another re-enactment from the fictional docudrama, American Hero Story: Minutemen. The segment shows two FBI agents blackmailing Hooded Justice (Cheyenne Jackson) about his affair with fellow Minuteman, Captain Metropolis. Seems the not-so good Captain was secretly recording his liaisons, including one with director J. Edgar Hoover, and the Feds would like HJ to cooperate, starting with the removal of his mask. HJ does, then proceeds to kill them.

What does this have to do with the story of Angela’s grandfather, Will, you might ask? Well, it turns out American Hero Story, history, and the original Watchmen graphic novel got it wrong. Hooded Justice was never Rolf Müller, German immigrant, circus strongman, and Nazi apologist. He was really New York City police officer and Tulsa Massacre survivor, Will Reeves.

“The uniform a man wears changes him.”

Very likely, those who’ve been closely watching this series from the beginning figured out this twist early on. After all, it’s no coincidence that the elder Will Reeves wore clothing that matched the color scheme of the Hooded Justice costume. Or how the silent film depicting Will’s hero, Bass Reeves, also wore a costume reminiscent of HJ. It’s doubly fitting when you consider that Bass Reeves was the inspiration behind the Lone Ranger, even though Bass Reeves was black and the Lone Ranger is white.

It’s also been pointed out by other critics how the young Will Reeves’ escape from the 1921 Tulsa Massacre parallels the infant Superman escaping from the planet Krypton. “This Extraordinary Being” deliberately evokes this when we see the younger Will (Jovan Adepo) pick up an issue of Action Comics #1 and flash back to those riots. But while the first superhero of DC Comics was a figure of hope, the first costumed crime fighter of the Watchmen universe is a figure of pent-up rage.

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Lindelof, co-writer Cord Jefferson and director Stephen Williams effectively show us why Will is as angry as he is, and why he chooses to don a costume in the first place. Having arrested a well-dressed man (Glenn Fleshler) firebombing a Jewish delicatessen, only to see him get off scot-free, resulted in his fellow white officers stringing him up as a warning.

The hood and noose they put on him Will later uses as a disguise when helping a white couple from being mugged. Even his wife, June (Danielle Deadwyler) – who we later learn was the baby found by Will in episode one – encourages him to wear the mask, saying how “true justice doesn’t come from wearing that badge.”

What makes this episode even more unique, of course, is that Angela is the one experiencing all of this. Throughout the episode, and with some clever editing, Jovan Adepo is often replaced by Regina King. Not only does this visually show us how Angela is reliving her grandfather’s past – and confusing her life with his – but it further cements just how very much alike they are.

The episode is also, appropriately, shot in black-and-white, with occasional splashes of washed-out color, signifying the more traumatic parts of Will’s memory – or voices from the real world trying to get through to a comatose Angela. There are moments where Will walks through double doors at night which then open out into the middle of a daylit street. Or how, as the camera pans back and forth in his apartment, we see his unborn son become a toddler.

In one particularly outstanding scene, Hooded Justice leaping out a window slows down in “bullet time,” and as Laurie and Cal Abar (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) appear, the color on them slowly fades as Angela becomes more lost in memories not her own.

“You didn’t get rid of it. You just fed it.”

With racism and its consequences the central theme of Lindelof’s Watchmen “remix,” it’s only understandable that we see how this affected Will, his family, and his granddaughter. And although we see the more obvious forms of racism in “This Extraordinary Being,” the episode also does a remarkable job in showing how subtle in can be, too.

For instance, it’s not enough that Will has to wear a mask; he also applies makeup over his eyes (as Angela does) to make it look as though he’s a white man under his hood just to be accepted as a hero.

Then there’s Nelson Gardner, a.k.a. Captain Metropolis (Jake McDorman). It seems as though he accepts and appreciates Will for who he is, enough so they even become lovers. Only it soon becomes clear that the only reason he recruited Hooded Justice into the Minutemen was because it’s good PR, just like Will becoming one of the first African-American police officers was also good PR. The moment Will, as Hooded Justice, starts rocking the boat about a “vast, insidious conspiracy,” Captain Metropolis shut him down.

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The conspiracy in question is called Cyclops, a plot by the Klu Klux Klan to brainwash whites and blacks into killing each other via subliminal messages secretly recorded into movies. They’ve already tested it on a small-scale in local theater, and Will tracks the perpetrators down to a warehouse. Turns out the well-dressed man Will arrested earlier, along with some of the cops, are KKK members too. When Will calls Captain Metropolis, he’s refused back-up, as the Captain dismisses the plot as “ridiculous.” Betrayed by everything he’s put faith in, Will kills all the KKK members, burns their bodies and their hideout, and takes the brainwashing device with him.

By the time he gets home, his son is applying his white makeup and wearing his Hooded Justice noose, saying, “Now I’m just like you daddy.” This freaks Will out, who tries forcibly removing the makeup off his son, which greatly upsets June. Seeing how his being Hooded Justice has only made his anger worse instead of curing it, she takes their son and leaves him, heading back to Tulsa. As she tells Will, “You didn’t get rid of [your anger]. You only fed it.” And as it turns out, he continues feeding it into his old age.

“It’s my legacy.”

Finally, in one last flashback, we see what really happened on the night Judd Crawford died. That bright light which flashed into his eyes after getting out of his truck? That was Will holding what appears to have been a modernized version of the Cyclops device. Basically, Will hypnotized Judd into hanging himself.

But before that happens, Will and Judd have conversation, where the viewers learn that the KKK robes in Judd’s hidden closet belonged to his grandfather. What’s particularly illuminating about this is how Judd doesn’t see himself as prejudiced, even though it still lingers under the surface – especially when he says, “After everything I’ve done to help you people.” He also says he keeps his grandfather’s robes to remind him of his family legacy, to which Will says, “Is that a legacy you’re really proud of?” Thus Judd is killed, not because Will wants to stop whatever he and Senator Keene are planning, but for the sins of his family’s shameful history.

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Considering also how Will has a hold of this Cyclops device, and allied with Lady Trieu (Hong Chau), it could very well play into whatever plans the Vietnamese born trillionaire is cooking up. At least that’s the connection we assume when Angela, finally awake from the Nostalgia-induced coma, finds herself in an unfamiliar room, an IV hooked to her arm, and greeted by Lady Trieu herself. Whether this means Angela will now be recruited into Lady Trieu and her grandfather’s side remains to be seen.

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