I can’t say that She Was Killed By Space Junk it’s the best episode of the series, but if the show has a central thesis, it hangs here in this episode. It’s not subtle, but nothing about Watchmen ever was. The framing device at the opening, a one-way phone call to the show’s equally absent, equally omnipresent big blue God, Dr. Manhattan is executed so elegantly I didn’t see it for a metaphor until I started pulling the episode apart. Laurie Blake is calling God, Laurie Blake is calling her ex, Laurie Blake is calling her past, but there’s no one on the other end. The soundtrack by Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor does a lot of heavy lifting, but Jean Smart’s tragic, jaded, wise-ass portrayal of Laurie is outright hypnotic. All a man has is his legacy, Laurie tells us, before unfolding a joke. As exposition, the joke is flawless, telling us everything we need to know about the comic's heroes: for all their efforts, for all their virtues, they are invariably flawed and they can all go to hell. The phone call itself feels like a metaphor for the show and the comic and the world the show takes us to as a whole. It is a joke meted out in parts. You don’t know where it begins, you don’t know where it ends but taken as a whole, it is undeniably satisfying in ways you would never expect.
If you know who Laurie Blake is, her being there means a lot. If you don’t, the show wastes no time in defining her. She is, as inferred and outright stated throughout the episode, a former costumed vigilante who currently spends her days hunting down costume vigilantes for the FBI. She exists in the liminal space between the disgraced sheriff turned bounty hunter and the reformed criminal turned cop. We know this the moment she outsmarts, guns down and arrests the Watchmen version of Batman. Yes, she has a pet owl. Yes, she enjoys a massive blue vibrator. Yes, she is maybe my favorite fictional character of last year.
Going into a funeral, we hear the third part of the joke the episode opens with. It might be the end, it might not, but that’s part of the long game here. The show resonates with me for exactly this reason: I always want to know what happens after. I want the epilogue. I want the post credits scene. I want to see Captain America in a support group. I think the aftermath of an event is as important, as telling, as fascinating as the event itself. Lindelof’s previous HBO show, the brilliant and beautiful, if uneven, The Leftovers, suggests he shares this ideation.
There’s a side character, rookie agent Dale Petey that partners with Laurie. He’s perfectly serviceable as a narrative exposition device, but his fanboy tendencies tease out a larger theme. When his nostalgia for the golden age of heroes meets the visceral, often traumatic reality of Laurie Blake’s past, we hit a throughline for the show as a whole: There were no good old days. Every episode touches on this, from the show’s very first scene set during the very real 1921 Tulsa Massacre of Black Wall Street, to the heartbreaking truth behind the hero Hooded Justice in later episodes to the revelation that (spoiler) Dr. Manhattan's own memory was falsified. It’s only when he wakes up and realizes the truth that he’s able to reclaim his power.
The funeral Laurie attends, for Police Chief Judd Crawford, is interrupted by a member of The 7th Kavalry, a KKK offshoot known for attacks on police officers and one of the reasons masked vigilantes have become a functional necessity again. Crawford died in the closing moments of the pilot and kept a secret Klan hood in his closet, as discovered in the last episode by Regina King’s Angela Abar. In many ways, Watchmen the comic was hung on Laurie’s journey, but now we’re following Angela’s story and there’s an uneasy passing of the torch here at the funeral. Together, they’re able to take down the terrorist, but not without the obligatory friction. The exploration of fractured heroes, the question of who’s allowed to be a hero has always been at the heart of Watchmen and watching these two women team up and then spar puts them on equal footing, if on opposite sides. Laurie and Angela both know Crawford’s dirty, still Angela’s reluctant to give him up. Or rather, she’s reluctant to let herself trade the reality of him for her image of him.
We cannot discuss Watchmen without discussing white supremacy. Here, the Ku Klux Klan has traded white hoods for white masks adorned with Rorschach test inkblots in a dual progression to the iconography. The character of Rorschach in the comics was part conspiracy theorist, part urban guerilla, with his inkblot mask hinting at a deeper perspective. This is what deep state, Q Anon, alt right paranoia naturally evolves into. Initially portrayed as petty criminals, as the story progresses, we see how deep their influence truly goes: police chiefs, senators, friends and neighbors. Laurie warns Angela that men like Crawford think they’re good guys and that the people that protect them, they think they’re good guys too. This calls back the driving axiom of the comic, Who Watches the Watchmen? Amid the ongoing national conversation on police violence and abolition, I can’t think of a better time or a better question. In previous episodes, we see Crawford as Angela’s friend and mentor and we have to wonder, was it real? That’s the real terror, the disconnect where having a Black friend, a bond of genuine trust, kindness and respect, holds a real place, alongside and impervious to the full-throated belief in white supremacy.
We then, of course, come to Jeremy Irons’s Adrian Veidt and his loyal cloned butler, Mr. Phillips. As we see Veidt tinker and plot throughout his palatial estate on (spoiler) Europa, we get a sense of Lindelof himself cannibalizing the graphic novel, looking for the right arrangement of scraps and spare parts. There’s a thematic disposability to the many iterations of Mr. Phillips that recalls the abundance of white men named Chris portraying the same mold of superhero again and again. There are no white men named Chris on Watchmen.
In the visual rhetoric of classic comics, the phone booth is something transformative, a place to shed the secret identity and emerge a hero, something powerful, something immortal. This is where our episode ends, in the phone booth where it began. There’s an emotional solace here, with the phone booth acting as a kind of confessional. Here’s Laurie, confessing her loneliness, her vulnerability, to no one at all in a Russian nesting doll of metaphors wrapped up in this perfect epilogue to a joke we thought had run its course. And the joke is that much better for it. We thought the story was over, but in the context of history, as long as we keep telling it, as long as we keep listening to it, no story really ends. That’s the beauty of the episode and the show entirely, there’s always more there after the curtains, after the drum roll, after everything we’ve thrown up in the air finally finds a place to land.
Joaquin Fernandez is a recovering filmmaker and South Florida native perpetually tinkering with his first novel. His work has appeared in Okay Donkey, CheapPop, and Pidgeonholes among others. He can be found on Twitter @Joaqertxranger and on his website joaquinfernandezwrites.com.