I Am the Walrus

 “Watchmen,” Streaming Series, 2019

“I am the Eggman, I am the Eggman, I am the walrus, googoogajoobe!”  This 1-season series is based on a D.C. comic written by two Brits. But just as comics sometimes describe a crooked reality, this series has a base in real history from which it leaps into outer-space and among fun-house mirrors.  In a sense, this is post-modernism – scramble, scramble, shake. (Plot reveals ahead…)

Take the horrific racist slaughter in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921 and add a boy who survives while his parents die.  Layer-on a political change somewhat similar to the Biden administration, but this time with Robert Redford as President and Henry Lewis Gates as Treasury Secretary.  Gates administers restitution payments for the Tulsa pogrom through DNA samples.  Add a Vietnamese trillionaire, Trieu (True?) who is aiming to ‘save the world.’  She comes from Vietnam, which has become the 51^st State - conquered for the U.S. by a giant blue god named Dr. Manhattan. (Manhattan Project and Blue Man Group together.)  This guy walks on water and created the first “Adam and Eve” in his own spacey Garden of Eden on a distant moon.  Sounds familiar! 

Add Dr. Manhattan’s homicidal friend Adrian / Ozymandias (Jeremy Irons or Pharaoh Ramses II), who is also Trieu’s father.  Dr. Manhattan sends an unhappy Adrian to a manor house on Europa, a moon of Jupiter, where he might enjoy himself.  As the brilliant ‘master’ of the manor he repeatedly slaughters servants he grows in a pond. Evidently a typical English lord. Dr. Manhattan himself has left earth for Mars, but is really hiding on earth and has become somewhat human, marrying Regina King, aka Angela. She is a type - the strong ‘black’ woman who holds up the world. Like the elf queen in Lord of the Rings, the good Doctor gives up godliness for 12 years to be human.  Angela is the ‘ground’ on which this mish-mash rests – while everyone is looking for her powerful hidden husband - a husband who does not use his power.

Angela is a masked and caped crusader who helps the yellow-masked police in Tulsa solve crime and especially crush the KKK-like ‘7^th Kavalry,’ which earlier slaughtered all the cops in Tulsa on a ‘white night.’ They are shades of the Nazis, wearing Rorschach masks. As a result, every cop adopts masks to hide their personal identities, including an aggressive Communist in a red mask who has a small hammer and sickle flag on his desk at police HQ.  Also included is a smart, drawling cop who was traumatized by the giant ‘squid fall’ that hit New York City and killed 3 million people in 1985.  He wears a silver mask and liners to protect himself from a future squid attack.  This massacre in New York was organized by Adrian from Europa to prevent nuclear war between the U.S. and the USSR.  Adrian periodically sends small white squids in ‘squid hail storms’ to remind earth of their real enemy in outer space – to keep the peace you see.

A cynical, nasty FBI agent (Jean Smart) is sent to deal with the death of the secretly Klanish chief of police (Don Johnson) and organizes a hunt for who hung him.  Was it the 7^th Kavalry?  Was it Angela’s grandfather?  Was it?  We get a nice, liberal Senator who is hiding his links to the 7^th Kavalry, and who wants to transform himself into a white-supremacist version of the god-like Dr. Manhattan.  His minions are collecting dime batteries to do just that.  Just as trillionaire Trieu wants to turn herself into an Elon Muskite version of Dr. Manhattan.  She’s a malignant narcissist who made her fortune in medicine, energy and micro-tech, while reincarnating her mother as her daughter.  Yeah.

The search for the killer of the chief is first carried out by the Communist cop, who organizes a raid on a trailer-park full of white working class people suspected of being 7^th Kavalry. (Or Trumpers!) Nada.  A bad reflection on the Communist, but then...

Tulsa 1921 - They even dropped bombs from a crop-duster

Time flies back and forth – nonlinear-like.  Time travel and teleporting is taken for granted, as are attempts at changing the future. Religion takes it on the chin. A brain implant plays a role.  Songs from the ‘60s and ‘70s pop up, including “I Am the Walrus” as a fitting finale. Ultimately it devolves into a family story, like so many, as Angela finds her grandfather’s nostalgia pills.  He is the little boy left after Tulsa, who became the first black ‘masked avenger’ vigilante while a cop in New York.  He discovers some New York cops are racists, connected to an organization called “Cyclops.”  There is an elephant’s memory; an attempted coup by the 7^th Kavalry (1/6/21) and a possible new goddess out of an egg. 

As you can see, this series is a mish-mash.  Watchmen the series borrows from everything, riffing off of pop culture, history, religion, sci-fi, super hero tropes, current politics, family stories, monster movies, vigilante fantasies – though most will just see it as a convoluted but entertaining head-trip.  It’s culture in a hopper. Is it left-wing?  Kinda, as the heroine is a dark-skinned woman who was born in Vietnam and the villains are fascists, ‘masters’ and billionaires.  But some of the cops and FBI are heroes, Vietnam is absorbed and 3 million die in a half-assed attempt at world peace. The absent ‘god,’ the blue-man crew member, is a stand-in for a Jesus who also crushed the Viet Cong years before.  It is really a sort of anti-racist liberalism that survives; an anti-Trump parable for our times.

Watchmen was originally a comic series published in 1986-1987.  This series is somewhat watchable because of acting, music, humor and Angela’s toughness, but its comic-book quality and ridiculous plot turns can be a real turn-off.  A product of the fantasy-industrial complex.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14-year archive:  “Black Panther,” “The Real Red Pill,” “The Jesus Comics,” “Impeachapalooza.”

The Kulture Kommissar

August 10, 2021