TV Review: WATCHMEN: Season 1, Episode 9: See How They Fly [HBO]

Watchmen See How They Fly Review

Watchmen: Season 1, Episode 9: See How They Fly ends, for the moment, one of the most rewarding book-to-TV adaptations since the first five seasons of Game of Thrones aired on television. Part of the ending to this episode of Watchmen is idiotic but there is far more good than bad. The good, like the entirety of A God Walks into Abar, is what the viewer thinks about when the credits finally roll on See How They Fly.

See How They Fly does not have the elegance of A God Walks into Abar put it has a lot going for it and some things that go against it.

The Confounding Vietnamese Day Workers’ Problem

Adrian Veidt / Ozymandias (Jeremy Irons), the smartest man in the world, hires Vietnamese day workers to clean Karnak? Following the perpetration of the greatest crime in Earth’s history? Around super-secret equipment and while filming a video that can get him three million life sentences in prison?

In the entire Watchmen comic book series, the live action film, and this television series, this is the stupidest plot-point that the viewer (or reader) has seen (or read).

It’s not just a lack of common sense by Adrien (which in itself makes no sense). This plot point breaks the reality of this television series and the comic book series that it purports to continue. In the comic book, Veidt doesn’t let any of his Viet-cong servants leave Karnak. He kills them all with poison.

He kills them before he kills three million people in New York City.

After he commits that crime, keeping it secret is of paramount importance.

Screenwriter Nick Cuse wants the viewer to believe that Veidt, after committing that monumental crime and its secret being of the utmost importance, would let random cleaning people come and go as they please around the crime scene.

The entire Vietnamese cleaning woman plot-point in See How They Fly is a middle finger to the audience. Cuse thinks no one will see this complete lack of logic and consistency within Veidt.

It’s sad and disappointing that such a critical Watchmen episode is begun by something that breaks the continuity of one of its main characters. I don’t know what else to call it but terrible writing instituted to facilitate the creation of a key character in the TV series’ story-line. If you are so unskilled that you can’t come up with a credible origin story within established facts i.e. Veidt’s previous modus operandi, have someone who can write it.

Let’s not even talk about the complete lack of security around Veidt’s office and the computer system in that office (more terrible writing). It is a joke and totally unbelievable for a genius (again, breaking the continuity of this character).

The Humorous First Words

Lady Trieu (Hong Chau)’s intro in See How They Fly is beautifully shot, the perfect continuation of the Karnak sequence from A God Walks into Abar. Questions arise about snow-depth and why Lady Trieu felt the need to walk up to Karnak and not take a snowmobile or helicopter but they are quickly dismissed.

When Lady Trieu shows up at Karnak, Veidt’s automated verbal response is hilarious e.g. “and you may not use my bathroom.” It is just the right amount of levity before the scene gets down to the serious matters at hand.

The Plan Within The Plan

Lady Trieu’s plan within The 7th Calvary’s plan isn’t original (i.e. turning a plan on itself for your own ends – Heath Ledger‘s The Joker did it better) but it is entertaining to a middling degree. The most interesting part of the plan is whom Lady Trieu wants by her side when she is granted Dr. Manhattan’s power and whom she covertly conspires with (a person so weathered by the depravity of man that he sits out his masterstroke, the coup de grâce of Cyclops’ leadership).

Doctor Manhattan’s Last Connection

It is touching and sweet how caged Jon Osterman / Dr. Manhattan (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) thinks about his wife and their relationship through the years, and relates that to Angela Abar / Sister Night (Regina King), before he is destroyed. It gives a pivotal  moment in the episode heart. It also acts as the best goodbye Jon could give Angela, something that she can hold-on to and remember when he is gone. Through the pain, through his last moments, they connect, they are still connected.

Veidt Saves the World…Again

Adrian Veidt may be the most driven, pragmatic, narcissistic, unwavering, and cold-blooded person that has ever existed in the history of mankind. Only someone with those characteristics could kill his own daughter, though his complete disregard for her and anyone in his or humanity’s way explains that decision-making.

Anonymously saving the world twice would have been Adrian’s silent burden to bear if not for the intervention of F.B.I. Agent Laurie Blake (Jean Smart). The moment Blake spoke up about arrest, I am surprised that pragmatic, cold-blooded Veidt didn’t kill them both with a lethal chop to Blake’s exposed throat, a backwards kick to Detective Wade Tillman / Looking Glass (Tim Blake Nelson)’s balls followed by a grab, and neck break. Nice and tidy. No witnesses, no blow-back. Like old times. Veidt proved he still has some of his old speed when he catches a bullet earlier in the episode.

Instead of the aforementioned pragmatism (eliminating lingering threats), Veidt decides to give a speech in a hanger in Antarctica, with his back turned to an unknown quantity. Both of these missteps would have been a no-no for the younger, more ruthless incarnation of Veidt.

Older Veidt has grown sloppy and bombastic (or should I say, even more bombastic). It cost him.

The Idiotic Parts of the Episode’s Ending

1.) Death is raining down from above and instead of waiting it out in complete safety in the telephone booth with clone Bian (Jolie Hoang-Rappaport), Angela goes running out into it with a frozen-squid-proof lid over her head.

2.) Angela is a fugitive from police custody yet walks past the police, carrying her recognizable children, with her grandfather (who is wanted for murder), and not a single police officer notices her, tries to apprehend her, or arrest her.

3.)  Why doesn’t Angela try to help your fellow officers after the frozen squid rain ends? These are her colleagues and her friends and she leaves them injured, dead, and dying in the street?

4.) Angela exposes the fact that she is still a police officer to her teenage son for absolutely no reason.

5.) Angela shows her children her secret lair just to access a police vehicle that only Sister Night has access to. By driving it home, she exposes her police identity to her neighbors and everyone else. It is, to a far lesser extent, like Bruce Wayne being caught driving the Batmobile.

6.) Why not call a cab or Uber to get home?

7.) Why doesn’t Angela take her kids to stay at the hotel that her grandfather is staying at down the street for the night, thus obviating the need to use her police vehicle to get home?

8.) The true nature of Cyclops and Lady Trieu, and their plots, do not absolve Angela one iota from her charge of accessory after the fact for murder.

You’ll be considered an accessory after the fact under Penal Code 32 PC if you “harbor, conceal, or aid” a principal in a felony after it has been committed if you have the intent to help that person “avoid or escape from arrest, trial, conviction, or punishment.”

She is still a wanted fugitive. She did the crime in question. She admitted her crime on tape and in front of a witnesses…just like Veidt.

Next season, how are Watchmen‘s writers going to write Angela out of the corner (i.e. prison) they have written her into?

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