"It's Summer and We're Almost Out of Ice" – Watchmen S01E01 Review

And so the "new" HBO series Watchmen came out Sunday night. Illness and a desire to review the show in detail have delayed the review somewhat, but now we're here.

As I predicted in my Supergirl review, it was pretty unlikely Watchmen would somehow be worse than Supergirl. And... I was right. Watchmen is everything HBO promised, and quite a bit of what Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons did in the original comic book series. Granted, it's the first episode, so it's hard to tell for sure. But it's very unlikely it's going to get worse.

And yes, that means I'll probably be reviewing Watchmen rather than Supergirl for the foreseeable future. I'd be more concerned about it if I thought I was going to miss anything of consequence on Supergirl. I'll still be watching it, though.

For those not in the know, Watchmen was a 12-issue comic book series by the aforementioned Moore as writer and Gibbons as artist. It told of a world like ours, except for two differences: there was a brief fad of masked vigilantes in the 40s, and a nuclear scientist was turned into a blue-skinned god-like being called Dr. Manhattan. In the 80s, one of the surviving vigilantes is killed and a relative newcomer, Rorschach, looks for the killer. If you want to know more, read the series or check out the 2009 movie. Be warned there are some changes from the comic book to the movie.

Watchmen the TV series takes place sometime after the end of the movie and series. It also commentaries on racism in America, and features a lot of Easter Eggs to the comic books. Although unnamed in the first episode, one of the main characters is apparently Adrian Veidt (Jeremy Irons), whose character was Ozymandias in the comics. The police use an airship like one a vigilante Night Owl uses. There are references to the 40s vigilantes, the supremacist bad guys wear Rorschach masks and use some of his own words as their credo, there is a brief scene of Dr. Manhattan on Mars, and a rain of squids. If you want to know what the squids might mean, read the comic book because removing "the squid" was one of the changes made for the movie.

The main plot as established in the premiere, "It's Summer and We're Running Out of Ice", is the police wear masks because criminals used to come after them in their private lives. So while the cops are sympathetic heroes (whose guns are under remote lock until they meet all of the conditions necessary to justify firearm use), they're also scary faceless fascist figures. With really impressive masks. One of them, Looking Glass, wears a seemingly opaque silvery full-face mask which is a lot like Rorschach's opaque full-face mask in the comics.

Opposing the police are the Kavalry, a group of white supremacists who wear Rorschach-like masks, but without the moving Rorschach patterns. Presumably, there are other criminal threats, because they mention early on the Kavalry have been quiet for three years. So, presumably, the events of the TV show take place at least three years after the comic book.

The show focuses on Angela Abar (Regina King), a supposed bakery owner who is actually one of the masked police detectives, Sister Night. So far, it appears the detectives each wear their own unique costume, while the rank-and-file where yellow pull-up masks. The police chief, Judd Crawford (Don Johnson) just wears a normal police dress uniform.

Sister Night is a take-no-prisoners butt-kicker who breaks civil rights left, right, and center. We catch up to her when the Kavalry ends three years of silence by killing a cop. They then send a threatening video message to the police saying the gutters will run with blood. In a big action set piece, the cop-vigilantes attack a Kavalry base where they're stripping lithium out of old batteries, supposedly to make some kind of doomsday weapon. The Kavalry guys have a machine gun and open fire, killing a lot of cows in a surrounding field. Sister Night eventually takes down several of them, and Judd and another detective, Pirate Jennie (Jessica Camacho), bring down the others escaping in a plane with the aid of the aforementioned Night Owl airship.

In the end, an old black man (Louis Gossett Jr.) captures Judd and strings him up from a tree, then calls Angela out to witness it.

The basic plot is very simple, but this is a Damon Lindelof production. It's similar to The Leftovers, which looks at what happens to the world after some major traumatic event happens. Along the way, we get a silent movie of black marshal Bass Reeves, the Wall Street attack on blacks in Tulsa in 1921 (and a young boy who is presumably Gossett Jr.'s character in the present), a performance of Oklahoma, Angela being viewed with suspicion by school children because she's from Vietnam, which is a state in the U.S., references to Robert Redford being the U.S. President (another Watchmen reference), and a rain of small squids. As well as bits of Angela's family life with her husband Cal (Yahya Abdul-Mateen III) and their family of two daughters, and a son, Topher (Dylan Schombing).

We also check in with Adrian, who is riding outside a palatial manor on a pale horse (another Watchmen reference). He's attended by two servants, Mr. Phillips (Tom Mison) and Ms. Crookshanks (Sara Vickers), who act human but also robotic. They're very pleased when Adrian announces they'll play the leads in the play he's written, The Watchmaker's Son. Which is another Watchmen reference: collect them all and win a prize!

Overall, "It's Summer..." is packed to gills with plot. It spins out the events of the comic book series and takes a "three years later" look at the same world. There's racism, and prejudice, and police brutality, so it's all very socially relevant if that's your thing. I suppose it's slow-paced, but there's a lot to introduce and the first episode both engages in world-building and sets down the groundwork for what's to come. If "It's Summer…" is considered slow-paced, I'd like to see what TV show someone assessing it as such thinks is "fast-paced". By the end of the episode, we have a near-complete world with some room to grow, but all of the basics laid down and a lot of other things tossed into the mix. Maybe sometimes "It's Summer..." hits the ground walking instead of running, but at least when it runs it does so with an earth-shattering ka-boom.

But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?