Watchmen Season 1 Episode 1 Recap

HBO’s Watchmen is a companion-piece to the Watchmen comics by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, set in present-day Tulsa, thirty years after the events of the comics. In Watchmen Season 1 Episode 1, Detective Angela Abar investigated the shooting of a police officer.

Tulsa 1921

The episode opened with a silent movie about Bass Reeves, a heroic African-American historical figure. A young boy watched as his mother played the piano and cried. His father, O.B., came for them as the race massacre raged in the district. O.B. took them to a couple with a baby, who were driving out of town. They claimed there wasn’t enough room, so O.B. put his son in a crate in the back with a note in his pocket to watch over him. The car drove off.

The boy woke up in a field. The car had crashed, and the adults were dead. The boy found the baby and carried her away.

Lettuce and Contraband

In 2019, Charlie Sutton, a black police officer, pulled over a white man in a truck, Carmichael. Carmichael said he was transporting lettuce, but when Officer Sutton asked to look, Carmichael had asked to see Sutton’s face, which was masked, like all police officers. When asking for license and registration, Sutton saw a Rorschach mask in his glove compartment, a sign that Carmichael was part of the Seventh Kavalry, a white supremacist organization. Back at his car, Sutton radioed for authorization to use his gun. After justifying use to Panda, his weapon was free, but it was too late. Carmichael had fired on him and thrown a head of lettuce into the cop car.

While watching an all African-American production of Oklahoma!, Chief Judd Crawford was called away. He visited Sutton, who was alive and heading into surgery. He went to see his wife, Roberta, who assured Crawford that her husband hadn’t told anyone he was a policeman.

Little Big Horn

Angela Abar went to her son’s school to talk about her bakery. A racist comment from another student caused her son, Topher, to start a fight. On the way home, Angela had to pull over for squid rain. When she got to her pager, Crawford had called a “Little Big Horn”. Angela was actually a detective and quickly disguised herself to round up a white supremacist. After a meeting where Judd authorized emergency use of weapons, Looking Glass interrogated him, and Angela used force to learn where Carmichael was hiding.

At the cattle ranch, Seventh Kavalry men were removing batteries from old watches. Carmichael killed himself during the raid, and two Kavalry tried to escape in a plane. Crawford and Marionette blasted them out of the sky and survived a crash.

At the end of the episode, a black man in a wheelchair, possibly the young boy in the beginning of the movie, lynched Crawford and called Angela to meet them.

Anniversary

Adrian Veidt came in from riding a horse. His maid, Ms. Sweetwater, massaged his thighs while he was naked and typing at a typewriter. Mr. Philips came to dress him for dinner. It was his anniversary, and he surprised him with a pocket watch. Veidt told him he had a surprise too; he’d written a play called “The Watchmaker’s Son” and wanted them to play the parts.

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