At the risk of having yet another ancient snake-god curse put upon my head courtesy of Alan Moore (knock it off, Alan!), I'd have to say the season premiere of HBO and Damon Lindelof's Watchmen is pretty darn incredible. Building upon the inimitable foundations Moore and artist Dave Gibbons laid out in their comics, Lindelof and Co. have managed to create a living, breathing follow-up that feels very much like its own thing while also feeling undoubtedly like the broken, busted-up world of Watchmen. It also helps that the Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross score rips so hard it should be considered a misdemeanor. No other duo is better at creating music that should be playing at an underground leather-kink club in the year 2099. This is a compliment.

But woo boy, this first episode, titled "It's Summer and We're Running Out of Ice"—an Easter egg and foreshadowing all on its own—was an exercise in exposition and world-building. I certainly have a few questions, mostly pertaining to Jeremy Irons' superhumanly smooth thighs. (Put "Died hard with a vengeance" on my tombstone tbh.) You probably have a few questions yourself. We'll get through this show together, folks, week by week, thigh shot by thigh shot. Without further ado:

What Was That Horrifying Opening Sequence?

Anyone who likes their superhero stories as light and commentary-free as possible were probably a bit miffed to immediately get dropped into one of the most horrific race-related moments in America's history. It's kind've like the chaotic opening to LOST, but if a mysterious desert island was replaced with a mysterious dessert country built on hatred, racism, and the blood of innocent people. (We're havin' a good time right outta the gate, folks!) This depiction of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 is so in-your-face violent and harrowing that it'd be easy for anyone to assume it's a fictionalized event perfect for the turmoil-filled reality of Watchmen except...nope, it happened, just like that, in 1921, a casual reminder that our reality and the "heightened" reality of Watchmen aren't so different when it comes to a history of folks hating other folks for the color of their skin. The only difference is that in Watchmen a grotesque orange pus-monster landed on New York, and in our timeline, it landed in the White House.

But the opening does serve a narrative purpose as well: We're introduced to a little boy named Will Reeves who escapes the massacre in a wicker basket along with a baby girl and a note reading "WATCH OVER THIS BOY." Keep Will in mind, because he 1)  Is apparently very important to this story, and 2) Grows up to be able to lift at least 200 pounds into a tree.

What Are the Rules and Regulations of This New World?

So HBO's Watchmen picks up 34 years after the events of the comic series—for a full recap of all that, head here—in a 2019 only slighter more contentious than our 2019. Oscar-winner Robert Redford is the President of the United States and has been for 30 years, which makes that day where everyone on Film Twitter got absolutely bugfuck pissed because the youths didn't recognize this GIF even funnier. When we sat down with Lindelof, he told us that Ta-Nehisi Coates' "The Case for Reparations" was a huge influence on Watchmen, which seems to have manifested as "Redfordations", a legislation Lindelof himself described as a "lifetime tax exemption for victims of, and the direct descendants of, designated areas of racial injustice throughout America’s history, the most important of which, as it relates to our show, is the Tulsa massacre of 1921.”

Redford has served during this extended stay in the White House as a staunch liberal, which has riled up the right something fierce. We hear the following brief snippet of a radio commentator in Judd Crawford's (Don Johnson) car:

Senator Joe Keene was a real cowboy, unlike our current Sundancer-in-Chief. Now thirty years of Redford and what do we got to show for it? More land we can’t live on, more animals we can’t kill, and a six month wait to get a gun for our own protection. Hell, if Joe Junior wants to mount up and gallop into the White House I say let him ride.”

Joe Keene Sr. was the man responsible for Watchmen's Keene Act, which outlawed masked vigilantism in the United States. The people were cool with it at the time, seeing as how middle-aged men with tube-socks on their heads did look kind've silly in the wake of Doctor Manhattan and his literal dick-swinging god-powers changing the world completely. Now, it looks like this senator's son has become a beacon of political hope for a certain set of Redford opposition.

But masked crimefighting has also returned...kind of. Because of a targeted attack against police officers in their homes that came to be called "The White Night", cops in the world of Watchmen wear masks and must have an alibi for when they're on-duty. Fans of comic books might recognize this as a "secret identity", a.k.a. the thing that absolutely never stops people from blowing up Spider-Man's aunt's house like, monthly. High-ranking members of the police force basically act as masked vigilantes, carrying on entirely separate lives while they dress up in vaguely themed costumes to fight crime at night. Most notable are Tim Blake Nelson's walking interrogation machine "Looking Glass" and Regina King's ass-kicking nun "Sister Night". There's also Andrew Howard's "Red Scare", whose thing seems to be that he's Russian and very angry, and "Panda" (Jacob Ming-Trent), a man in a panda bear mask who is extremely horny for rules and regulations, who controls when police officers can and cannot "unlock" their firearms.

Watchmen is dealing with roughly seven layers of commentary when it comes to its police state, rendered with stark, butt-clenching tension in the image of a masked African-American police officer gunned down by a white supremacist civilian. Watchmen, in case you hadn't picked up on it this deep into the piece, did not come here to fuck around.

Who Is the Seventh Cavalry?

Whoops, Rorschach went and inspired a whole-ass white supremacist terrorist organization. One of the key moments of the original Watchmen is Rorschach—the masked psychopath/hero with a code of ethics set in stone more firm than Bruce Wayne's glutes—deciding to drop off a journal filled with near-fascist rantings and the truth about Adrian Veidt's master plan to a newspaper, The New Frontiersman. Fast forward a few years and those ravings about dogs and blood-filled streets have led to The Seventh Cavalry, a violent white supremacist organization that carried out the cop-killing White Night and have turned their eyes to something involving watch batteries, “the old kind, with the synthetic lithium, the ones that were making people sick.”

The Seventh Cavalry is pretty much the perfect encapsulation of Watchmen's influence over the years. It's undeniably a staggering work that changed comic books forever, but it's also on the Mount Rushmore of Things Fuckbois Understand Wrong. (It's next to Fight Club, The Dark Knight, and The Wolf of Wall Street. Right now, someone is chiseling Joker on to the back, where the butt would go.) Rorschach is a complicated character, a person so manically committed to "punishing" wrongdoers that he commits heinous acts himself and would rather get straight atomized by Doctor Manhattan than allow Veidt's plan to go unimpeded. You can discuss and dissect the character but you would need to be a second-tier psychopath to want to be the character. So, of course, real people with Rorschach avatars scream angrily into the comment section void every day—ironically, often using the phrase White Knight—proving what kind of angry loner looking for an outlet would adopt Rorschach's Journal as a personal manifesto.

Also worth noting: The Seventh Cavalry takes its name from the actual 7th Cavalry of the United States Army, who is most-remembered for getting gallantly whalloped at The Battle of Little Bighorn, also known as Custer's Last Stand. This is why Judd Crawford uses "Little Bighorn" as a code word for the group's re-emergence. It's also a pretty subtle commentary on the Angry White Male's trademark idea of what bravery looks like.

 

Why Is It Raining Squids?

Right, the squids. So one of the most uncomfortable storytelling layers Lindelof piles on is the fact that The Seventh Cavalry is right about at least one thing. In his interrogation pod, Looking Glass asks a member of the organization whether he believes "transdimensional attacks are hoaxes staged by the government." He's referring to the fact that heaps of slimy sea-beasts occasionally rain down from the sky, harkening back to the time a Godzilla-sized squid-monster fell on New York and ended the impending threat of nuclear war, an event that was...100% a hoax orchestrated by Adrian Veidt. That truth was revealed in the journal Rorschach sent to the New Frontiersman, clearly picked up by The Seventh Cavalry, and placed alongside chemtrails, Area 51, and The Snyder Cut as an internet hoax.

Now, the first episode of Watchmen doesn't reveal who is keeping the hoax alive, but somebody is responsible for faking "transdimensional attacks" on a regular basis. Which, on some level, is understandable in the context of this story. Adrian Veidt's hoax cost millions of lives, but it also kept the major world powers from nuking each other into a Mad Max movie in the process. This world is obviously a dumpster fire, but it's better than a world that realizes it was brought back from the brink of extinction because of a lie.

Speaking of!

Is Jeremy Irons Playing Ozymandias or What?

Lindelof and HBO have remained extremely cheeky as to whether Jeremy Irons is actually playing Adrian Veidt, notably bringing the actor to New York Comic Con with the caption "probably who you think he is." So like, probably, but also in some fucky Lindelof-ian way, probably not. What we know for sure is that he's introduced riding up to some glorious castle retreat looking like both parents from The Parent Trap melded into one person,  majestic as all shit and getting full-on naked leg-rubs and a busted-ass birthday cake from two servants who are maybe/definitely not real people. The American dream, basically.

It's unclear what "anniversary" this Ozy-Maybe-Ias is celebrating, but there are Doctor Manhattan shout-outs all over this strange cut-away. The watch that Mr. Crookshanks presents his master is a near-identical recreation of the pocketwatch Manhattan owned before a freak accident turned him into the genie from Aladdin's hot dad. The title of the play Irons' character is writing, "The Watchmaker's Son", is also a nod to Manhattan, who was born Jonathan Osterman, son of a German-American watchmaker who pushed young Jonathan into nuclear physics after the U.S. dropped the big one on Hiroshima.

Assumedly very important detail: The world thinks Adrian Veidt is dead! At least, that's what I gleaned from the headline that says in bold letters "VEIDT OFFICIALLY DECLARED DEAD." (Some other headlines from that same newspaper: "KKK Vandalism Forces Statue of Liberty Closure" and "Boise Squid Shower Destroys Homeless Camp, Kills 7.")

There's also a brief news update on Doctor Manhattan himself, who is back on Mars building six-story sandcastles and just generally being an outer-space god who got too powerful to remember what boxer-briefs are used for. If we're dealing with the timeline of the comics and not Zack Snyder's movie, Manhattan would be looked at by humanity not entirely as a city-leveling monstrosity, but a semi-dangerous anomaly that causes cancer. (Kind've like those batteries that the Seventh Cavalry is collecting. Hmmm...)

Who Is Will Reeves and Why Did He Kill Judd Crawford

First off, that episode title did act as a bit of a spoiler, marking the rare occasion that musical theater nerds had a leg up in dissecting a comic book show. "It's Summer and We're Running Out of Ice" is a line from the Oklahoma! tune "Pore Jud is Daid", and by episode's end, poor Judd is very, very dead. But who killed him?

The episode ends on a horrifying image, as Sister Night arrives in time to see the mysterious Will Reeves sitting beneath Judd Crawford's corpse strung up to a tree. Given this pretty damning crime scene—plus Reeves' earlier question about lifting 200 pounds—the assumption is this wheel-chair bound man somehow pulled off this heinous crime. But the "this season on" sizzle reel (which you can watch below) seems to suggest that nobody believes Reeves' confession and the search for Crawford's killer is going to fuel a lot of this season. The episode makes it even clearer that Crawford's death is filling in the mystery-startin' Comedian role from the comics as a drop of blood falls on to the sheriff's badge in an exact mirror-image of the comics' iconic smiley sticker image.

There are also a few key things to keep in mind when it comes to Will Reeves. One, his name is almost definitely not actually Will Reeves. The "Reeves" alone is snagged from a film he was watching right before the Tulsa Massacre began, a silent-era Western following the exploits of Bass Reeves, "The Black Marshal of Oklahoma." (A real person, FYI.) There's also the baby girl the boy carried from danger in the episode's opening who is never identified, but with the way this Watchmen likes to pile on information, you can be dang sure she has a role to play.

And, finally, one last horrific nugget to file away: The titular Pore Jud of "Pore Jud is Daid" was also found hanging, but he hanged himself.

For more on Watchmen, make sure to read our full review, plus interviews with Damon Lindelof and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II. Check out the season 1 teaser below: