WATCHMEN (S1E4) “If You Don’t Like My Story, Write Your Own”: Raises The Stakes

If anything can be learned from Watchmen, it’s that nothing can be taken at face value. It’s obvious throughout the previous three episodes that Lindelof’s way of presenting information isn’t entirely straightforward, and that each mystery isn’t always immediately solved. The cookie continues to crumble this week, and with the introduction of Lady Trieu (Hong Chau) bringing new factors to the table the results are as tense as ever. From the shifted ways of perspective to the brilliantly cryptic writing, Lindelof continues his hot streak.

Acorns & Tree

This episode takes Angela, Laurie, and Trieu and crosses their storylines to see where the intersections lie. Let’s take the ending of the last episode, for example. Angela’s car falling from the sky, a place where it didn’t begin, mashed with Angela’s storyline following the episode two cliffhanger and how she reconciles with her family tree leads to two possible answers to one singular question. Where we enter Angela has broken into a he cultural center where she found her familial origin, trying to piece together where Will fits into the grander scope of things. When given her family tree in a lovely hologram model, she talks to a picture of the old man’s younger self in a maddened, slightly cheesy, attempt to reach him. End the conversation and cue a falling car.

Enter Laurie, laughing in a frenzy of hysteria, where we left her last week. Angela meets her outside the center to see her car, wrecked beyond belief. This is where the question arises. Where did the car come from? Did Laurie’s transmission to Mars send off a chain reaction? Did Angela’s manic conversation with a hologram reach something bigger? It’s the type of line of questioning that isn’t achieved much for binge-able shows, ’cause the next answer isn’t right around the corner. Not the lame cliffhangers, baiting people to watch week after week, it’s questions born from naturally inquisitive storytelling, something Lindelof seems to master in. It’s fun, and frankly it’s good to have a little bit of it back.

Fishing For Fetuses

Veidt’s strange cloning procedure, in which he fishes for fetuses in a lake and then puts them in a machine that grows them into mostly functioning adults, a replacement procedure easy enough to replace his servants after a mysterious massacre of them. And by the time you clean up the mess you’ll be able to shoot them out of wherever you’re located. Will Veidt’s storyline ever fully make sense? Who knows, but seeing corpses disappear into the sky and seeing Irons going on a rant about how he’ll be freed from the paradise he now thinks is a prison is and always will be fun. In similar fashion to last week’s Laurie episode and in similar fashion to next week’s Looking Glass episode, there’s a possibility we see Adrian here get the same treatment, maybe one where things might start making sense.

One of the more interesting details present in every episode of the show is how the titles connect to the given episodes. For example, the first episode is named from lyrics from the song that plays at the end. The second episode is named after a painting displayed within a household. And this episode, “If You Don’t Like My Story Write Your Own”, is name after a quote from Chinua Achebe’s novel “Things Fall Apart”. It’s a given that the book is shown in Cal’s, Angela’s husbands, hands and is used as a conversation starter. This connects to the novel, in how Moore would name his chapters after a quote or a set of lyrics from a famous poet or lyricist, and put from where the title came at the end of each episode. Lindelof’s recreation of this is surprising, but welcome all the same.

Clocks In The Sky

This brings the point back to the opening paragraph, Lady Trieu’s introduction and contextualization into the greater Watchmen universe, combined with Hong Chau’s stunning turn as the character, even further layered with Lindelof’s class distinctions, pull something even more out of this, something beyond what it appears to be on the surface.

The opening, in which the trillionaire buys a couples house and land with five million dollars and a baby, is a cool and quick display of class disparity and influence of the wealthy. There isn’t much to speak of beyond the sequence’s ending, where a mysterious object from the sky crashes onto the property and Trieu happily declares that it’s hers, but the snappy dialogue and subtle means of information give us enough of a clue in, and enough engagement to shoot us straight back into this world.

She isn’t seen for most of the remaining episode, but is brought back near the end to tie up some loose ends. It’s given light that she’s been housing the old man since the carjacking, and that she was the one who jacked the car with her own flying machines. Before either of these things are revealed, there’s a scene with Laurie, Angela, and Trieu all in a room doing nothing less but passive aggressive backtalk between all three, each thinking they’re better than the others. It’s sass born out of characters fed up at top of the mysteries, but one that knowingly develops them in a way that’s fun as hell.

Conclusion

Watchmen is shaping up to be possibly the finest show of 2019. It has hit a little under the halfway point, the pins are being set up and knocked down at the bat of an eye, and it just keeps getting more and more clever every week. The rabbit hole continues to deepen and the ways this connects to the comic that revolutionized everything 30 years ago furthers even beyond references to characters and settings that Moore brought to this world.

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