I recently heard an interview with Lindelof that I wish I'd listened to before I ever started watching the show. In it, he said that while he was fascinated with the story of the Tulsa, Oklahoma Massacre, he felt that it wasn't his to tell, and that similarly, he felt the story of Watchmen had already been told by Alan Moore.

Therefore, he concluded the best course of action would be to tell both by "Trojan horse-ing" one into the other.

And if that isn't the single stupidest thing you've ever heard, I'm sorry you've also had to watch Watchmen: The Limited Series.

I know in my heart that the show just wanted to capitalize on racial issues for the sake of grabbing attention (or for the sake of Lindelof patting himself on the back for being so WOKE), but for some people, myself included, it actually ended up breaking ground on a lot of mental health topics. Specifically:

The feeling of losing your goddamn mind.

Or perhaps, of watching everyone around you go crazy as you quickly scan the room for anyone else who is sane… Which is apparently pretty fucking annoying to everyone else in the room, as most of my friends have had to tell me repeatedly to stop yelling about/spoiling Watchmen: The Limited Series for them… which is a hard thing to do while your estimation of humanity is rapidly declining.

After all, a lot of people think this show is an intelligent commentary on modern racism in America.

And really, how do those people feed themselves?

How are they able to hold down jobs? Conversations? What about eye contact?

How do these people tune in every Sunday and watch the HBO on the moving color-picture noise-box?

The answer is simple:

They don't. They didn't.

I did.

I tuned in every week; long after each one of my friend's middling interest faded, my blazing hot hatred brought me back. The power of love alone is not enough to get through Watchmen: The Limited Series. You need hate.

Every week, I watched. And every week, around twenty minutes into each episode, I would see something so stupid I would feel my entire being cry out to end my suffering. But I refused to take the coward's way out. Instead, I forced myself to stare at the vast vacuum that was its narrative; the void where its themes were supposed to go. Every week, I stared incredulously at the images and sounds coming from my screen, my mind genuinely not being able to process shit so abysmal, as until now I thought I'd escaped this level of quality when I stopped watching the CW channel.

The first issue I should probably talk about here will also be the most brief, and that is the topic of race in the show. It was, for me, the one element that "kept me coming back.” Each episode would play around with 'topical' racial issues like police violence and white supremacy, but in such muddled, confusing ways that I was never quite sure what it was ever actually trying to say. Finally, when I got to the last episode, the only thing I got back that resembled an answer was:

"Ha. Gotcha."

Initially I was confused; where was the commentary that the entire show was seemingly based around? What was the point?

"To get you to watch."

Did you ever have anything to say at all?

"Nah. I just needed to talk for literally nine hours straight, and it was a lot easier when you thought I was making a point."

But can't you just give me a little bit of commentary so I feel like I learned something?

"Ummm… black people scary?"

Ahhh, much better. Now those are the kind of hard-hitting racial insights I'm looking for in 2019. Move over, Colbert.

So yeah, me talking about the racial shortcomings of Watchmen: The Limited Series, or even pointing out the ways in which it's a racially insensitive piece of shit would be giving it all together too much credit. It's a show in which the daughter of a Vietnamese immigrant takes revenge against the man and nation who wronged her country, and how she's stopped by three white guys (one of which bearing distinctly Aryan aesthetics). It's also a show in which a Jewish man becomes a blue man who becomes a black man in blue body-paint.

With maybe one exception: utilizing the massacre on Black Wall Street for a superhero origin story is as morally bankrupt as using the holocaust to explain Magneto's angst.

It obscures a real American tragedy by fictionalizing it; delegitimizing the reality of it. Instead of forcing America to confront its racist past, Lindelof has managed to make it an inconsequential tragic backstory. Really, after watching the show, who's to say that white people even committed those atrocities? According to Lindelof at least, anyone Caucasian taking part was probably a member of a secret racist society known as "Cyclops".

It's essentially Disney’s Hydra all over again; “Nazis? What Nazis?”

Except this time it's: “Klansmen? What Klansmen? What you must have meant to say was actually ‘Seventh Cavalry member’; which is a person who is a part of a secret society of white-supremacists that control people's brains through mind-control.”

Because remember kids: if your villains just hate black people, that's television. Heck, that might even be real life.

But if your villains are a secret society of racists planning on taking over the world, now that's HBO.

Remember when HBO used to be synonymous with smart television dramas? Now they just market in shit new movies and the stupidest of shows.

Really, what amazes me most about Lindelof's interpretation of Moore's world is just how much dumber he's had to make it in order to simply understand it. Moore's alternate universe of intertwining parts is now just… 2019, but with some weird, abstract shit stapled to it as well. It's a less cohesive world than the fucking Purge movies.

Also less complex: every returning character.

Remember Silk Spectre? That criminally underwritten female character that Moore used to make a rape analogy? Now she just says fuck a lot.

Dr. Manhattan? He's basically "Vision" from those shit Avengers movies (a supposedly all-powerful being who does fuck all and is introduced only to be killed by some equally-powerful McGuffin).

Ozymandias? Oh, you mean that guy whose entire character begs the question: "do the ends justify the means?"

Yeah, that guy?

Total self-obsessed little bitch. Classic Narcissist.

Which is a shame. If for no other reason than someone got Jeremy Irons out of bed and wasted his fucking time (I'm sure that if someone were to ask him he'd actually be really nice, and probably even say that he was happy for the work… but goddamnit, I respect the man more than that. Either approach him with a Deadringers-level performance, or walk away and give that drivel to Joaquin Phoenix).

I would hesitate to even call Regina King's role here a 'character.' More fittingly, she's a character in the J.K. Rowling sense of the term, in that she is actually just being unknowingly manipulated by another character. From what I can tell, when Angela Abar isn't having her sense of agency hijacked, she's the typical Tough Female Protagonist™ who likes cracking open some brews with the boys and cracking off the fingers of the suspect she's interrogating. You know, just your average 2019 cop; skilled at extracting confessions through torture.

If there is anything good to come out of Watchmen: The Limited Series, it is the fact that it has shown me so great a negative, that for once the world seems to be filled with positives. I can't help but feel that after a traumatic event, such as say, bearing witness to a fiery train crash in which all passengers are consumed by the flames of hell, it becomes a lot easier to appreciate trains that simply arrive and depart on time.

In other words, it takes watching Watchmen: The Limited Series to appreciate Snyder’s Watchmen film.

Snyder's only true flaw in his Watchmen adaptation was not fully understanding the source material; an infraction that now pales in comparison to Lindelof's crimes. Sure, Zack was too dumb to understand what it all meant, but at least he knew on some level that Moore was trying to say something. His clear reverence for the source material is easily apparent throughout the film, and it affords the work a seriousness that is, while totally different from Moore's intention, badly needed for the sake of viewing audiences.

The best example I can give here is Dr. Manhattan.

In the original comic, the good Doctor is perhaps the most interesting character: simultaneously the most ridiculous of the heroes (electing to walk around sans costume) and the most powerful (his abilities encompassing the superpowers of characters we love, along with the wrath of deities we fear). In the film adaptation, Dr. Manhattan loses all sense of ridiculousness; for some reason it's really important to Snyder that you don't laugh at Dr. M's big ol' dick. So, with the dogged determination of middle-school teacher tasked with overseeing health class, Snyder forces you to stare at a big blue cock for two hours and thirty minutes, daring you to do anything but respect it.

But in Watchmen: The Limited Series?

Oh boy, now there is something truly ridiculous.

I remember taking a picture the first time I saw Dr. Manhattan's face in the show and sending it to a friend simply because the burden of being the only person to witness his terrible visage was too great.

They texted back that it looked like a porn parody.

They were being too kind.

Dr. Manhattan looks like a fully CGI Mr. Clean, except with blue skin and flashlights for eyes. Comparing any of the special effects in the show to say, those used in the film that was released a decade ago would be embarrassing and unfair. In fact, comparing its CGI to that from two decades ago would also make it come up short (and I can make the comparison directly because there's a shot in which Dr. Manhattan stops a flurry of bullets headed for him in mid-air just like Neo in The Matrix, except twenty years later, it now looks like it was done in after-effects by someone who hasn't quite learned the basics of the program). The only favorable point of comparison would be Sci-Fi channel originals.

There's this one long scene where a fully computer-generated Dr. Clean steps on top of Regina King's backyard pool just to prove that he can walk on water, and something about seeing that particular blend of bad special effects; the pool with a lazy blue light effect piled on top of it, Dr. Clean's oddly-proportioned glowing limbs, and of course, his blinding white eyes staring up at the camera…

It made me feel like I was still going to garage sales and digging through home movies.

Like I had found an old, unmarked VHS in someone's opened garage and they'd sold it to me for a quarter. Then, upon popping it into my player, I’d quickly discovered it to be a video full of alien encounter confessionals, with poorly-rendered re-creations thrown in to pad out the 40-60 minute running time.

Honestly, a part of me would love to know who found the show more apocryphal; Moore or Snyder. Sure, Moore made the fictionalized universe as a commentary on real-world issues; but I think Snyder actually wants to live there. He clearly loves the characters and their stories, whereas Lindelof just sort of seems bored and disinterested. In hindsight, it makes perfect sense that the world and history of Watchmen has been lazily continued here; it would have actually taken time for Lindelof to examine the pre-existing themes and see which ones fit with his own (and doing so probably would have helped him realize that there were none). Where as Snyder was so moved by Moore's story that he couldn't manage to fully articulate its power, it's infinitely clear that Lindelof simply didn't think much of the book to begin with. Where Snyder misinterpreted, Lindelof refused to interpret.

And that is my defense if you catch me sneaking a viewing of the "Ultimate Cut" in coming weeks. If it makes any difference, I'll probably be stoned when I do.

If you watch Watchmen: The Limited Series, the fucking terrorists win.