You’ll Appreciate "Watchmen" More If You Know About the Giant Squid

Ahoy, mateys.

HBO’s long-awaited Watchmen adaptation debuted last night (on Foxtel in Australia), with Regina King starring as a masked crime-fighter working in concert with the police to battle the Ku Klux Klan.

It’s a fantastic and compelling reinterpretation of the classic comic book series, with a new twist that digs further into American race relations and the accountability of law-enforcement officers, all set to a propulsive score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

But you’d appreciate it more if you knew all about the giant squid.

Huh?

That’s right, you read correctly. But we’ll get to that in a minute.

Any viewers who aren’t familiar with the comics will have to pay close attention to realise that Watchmen takes place in an alternate universe to our own; one with its own altered history. There’s no hand-holding in the pilot either, seeing as the show comes from Damon Lindelof, the brains behind Lost and The Leftovers, who’s always happy to keep us guessing and let the mystery be.

The first ep begins with a real historical event: the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, where hundreds of black Oklahomans were lynched in the streets. It then speeds forward to a fictionalised 2019, where reparations have been paid yet tensions remain high due to an underground white supremacist organisation known as the Seventh Cavalry. Police even hide their identities, wearing masks just like vigilantes, to remain safe from retribution from the KKK.

Though white supremacy, unfortunately, is very much still a fixture of our current world, other elements revealed in the Watchmen pilot highlight the differences between our two universes. For instance, in the show, President Robert Redford has occupied the White House for 30 years, and masked vigilantes are common fodder for true crime television (such as American Hero Story).

But what, you may wonder, caused a rift to produce this alternate universe?

For that, you can blame the squid.

Once again: Huh?

Okay fine, we’ll explain. First though, we should set the scene.

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen was a 12-issue comic series released from 1986 to 1987. It imagined a reality where the emergence of superheroes in the 1940s changed the course of history. In the world of the comic, set during the 1980s, America was on the verge of going to war with the Soviet Union. However, that’s halted (huge spoiler for the comics coming) when Ozymandias, a retired superhero, umm, takes drastic measures: "I engineered a monster, cloned its brain from a human psychic, sent it to New York and killed half of the city," he explains.

Turns out Ozymandias’ bonkers plan ends hostilities across the planet, with Earth now more concerned with fighting what appears to be an invading alien race of transdimensional giant squids. It’s a bleak and confronting end to the comics, left on a cliffhanger when conspiracy theorist Rorschach, another anti-hero, drops off his journals to a right-wing magazine for them to publish.

More than a year before the TV adaptation debuted, Lindelof announced that everything from that original 12-issue run "happened" before the show, saying, "Ozymandias saved the world and Dr. Manhattan left it just after blowing Rorschach to pieces in the bitter cold of Antarctica." (FYI, blue deity Dr. Manhattan is briefly glimpsed in the pilot chilling on Mars, where we last left him.) However, it’s not clear if the events of DC’s recent sequel series, Doomsday Clock, are canon as well.

This is why, in the pilot, it rains tiny squid babies from the sky.

Seeing how it’s treated as an everyday annoyance for King’s character, it’s presumably been happening since 1985, either as an aftershock, or these are also part of Ozymandias’ plan to keep the threat of extinction alive. (It's suggested that Jeremy Irons' unnamed character in the pilot is actually modern-day Ozymandias, despite a newspaper declaring him dead.)

Knowing about the squid also explains why there are explanatory infographics in classrooms…

… and why a giant squid appears behind Looking Glass (Tim Blake Nelson) in his interrogation pod when he asks the kidnapped Seventh Cavalryman about "transdimensional attacks" (pictured in the header). Otherwise, there are no outright mentions of the squid event from 1985.

If you watched Zack Snyder’s decent-but-ultimately-misguided film adaptation of Watchmen prior to checking out the show, you may have been confused by these few scattered references to squids. After all, in his movie, Ozymandias detonated energy reactors in major cities and blamed it on Doctor Manhattan, making Manhattan the common enemy for the world to unite against.

But Lindelof and HBO are keeping it freaky, bringing back the giant, many-tentacled squid clone.

Ideally, they'll maintain the impressive and weirdo standards of the comics, and its big ol' squid, beyond the first episode.

In the comics, a protestor famously carried a placard saying, "The End Is Nigh", but now, in the show, the sign reads, "The future is bright." Here’s hoping.

Watchmen airs on Fox Showcase every Monday night, and is available to stream on Foxtel Now.

Header Image: HBO