We, along with everyone else who has an HBO subscription, will be watching the Watchmen come October 20, and ahead of the series premiere, Damen Lindelof sat down with Entertainment Weekly for a deep-dive into the world of the show.
Previously, the showrunner revealed that the series would not be an adaptation of Alan Moore’s graphic novel, but instead a sequel, set in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 2019, that treats the original 12 issues as canon. In this alternate reality, Robert Redford has been president since 1992, and his reign has led to the complete ban of smartphones and Internet. Meanwhile, a Rorschach-mask-wearing white supremacist group called the Seventh Cavalry has been terrorizing Tulsa’s majority-black police force.
In his interview with EW, Lindelof revealed a lot more details about the world-building, as well as plenty of behind-the-scenes decisions that led to the making of the show. Here’s some of what we learned about the details of this new world:
- The series has not done “any revisionist history” with the source material.
- Regina King’s character, Tulsa police detective Angela Abar, moonlights as a superhero named Sister Night and is investigating the Seventh Cavalry.
- Rorschach has been dead for a long time.
- Fossil fuels have been eliminated, and cars run on either electricity or fuel cells, thanks to Dr. Manhattan.
- We’re just going to let Lindelof take this one: “There’s also this legislation that’s passed, Victims Against Racial Violence, which is a form of reparations that are colloquially known as ‘Redford-ations.’ It’s a lifetime tax exemption for victims of, and the direct descendants of, designated areas of racial injustice throughout America’s history, the most important of which, as it relates to our show, is the Tulsa massacre of 1921. That legislation had a ripple effect into another piece of legalization, DoPA, the Defense of Police Act, which allows police to hide their face behind masks because they were being targeted by terrorist organizations for protecting the victims of the initial act. So … good luck sound biting that!”
There’s even more about the forthcoming show, including surprises yet to come as the series progresses, in the full interview over at EW!
