The answer that Lost failed to give, and The Leftovers still didn't.
Watchmen poster.
If a viewer had seen the former, more than a decade would have been enough for him to understand one thing: the cosmic disorder, meaning and answer are nothing more than human imaginations that help him through life.
Watchmen is a typical "post-9.11" work. This means that death is not the most terrible, the most terrible is the unknown. Believing that death is at the end, whether it is the death that erases all, or exists in heaven, hell, or reincarnation, is a comfort to the living.
When the population of the earth suddenly disappears by 2%, where will the rest of the people go? It's a myth-making proposition, and creators Damon Lindelof and Tom Perotta do the opposite.
At the end of the third season, they break down one myth after another, myth after myth, and human obsession, and finally strip away all that humanity depends on.
However, the ending is bitter but bright. It creates a new "creation myth" for hopeless people, which is small, but it is related to how people can gain a foothold and regain their lives in the unknown.
Just past the halfway point of 2017, "Watchmen" has enough weight to become the best and most important drama of the year.
Watchmen is based on the novel of the same name by Tom Perota. Perotta is also one of the screenwriters of the show.
The show is over, and the three seasons can be summarized as: Remember or Forget, The Land of Miracles, and Saving the Messiah.
The story of the first season takes place in Mapleton, a small town outside New York. The town and personal life of police chief Kevin Garvey (Justin Therox) is crumbling. His wife, psychiatrist Laurie (Amy Brunneman), leaves the family to join the cult Guilty Remnant. The members of this organization dressed in all white, smoked only and did not speak, communicated with a pen, and the purpose of the teaching was to remind people not to forget what had happened.
Stills from Watchmen.
Nora Dexter, played by Kelly Kuhn, is hired to investigate the "breakout" for the government, in which her husband and two children disappear. Nora and her brother, Father Matt (Christopher Eccleston), are representatives of people trying to find answers through secular logic and religion, respectively. The former tirelessly asked the families of the "sudden departures" with trivial questions, while the latter investigated whether each "sudden defector" was guilty or not, thus justifying God's move.
Another important character in the first season is Wayne the God Stick (Patterson Joseph). He was convinced that he had the ability to take away grief with hugs, but the key may be in just one sentence: Do you want to be immersed in this feeling forever?
No one knows the cause of the "abrupt" event, whether it will happen again. People wait for God to drop another shoe, and everyone's obsession in the anxiety deepens. Of all, Kevin symbolizes the dominant values: maintain order, forget grief, hide the unknown, and move forward.
The people who least believe in supernatural abilities are hit the hardest.
In the second season, the main characters migrate to the small town of Jarden on the shores of California's "Miracle" nature park. There is no "breakaway" here, so it is regarded as a place of miracles by the world, and there are all kinds of people living outside the town all year round. The only purpose of these people is to feel the miracle again, and they live here like hippies, like a country of China.
Somehow, it is believed that something big will happen on the seventh anniversary after the "breakaway": floods or wars, of unknown form. The unknown event is fanatically anticipated, becoming the only thing that the undependent crowd can grasp, even if it will be another, more terrible catastrophe.
People look for meaning and a sense of purpose like a drowning man. The "miracle" town became a model, and people re-tried to love each other and believe in God. At the same time, cults and people with prophetic powers are still emerging and filling in the gaps.
In the post-"abrupt" era, human beings are on the one hand reinvigorated, and on the other hand, they gradually slide into nightmares collectively.
The worlds of the living and the dead are connected again and again as Kevin comes back from the dead. He could not drown, was shot, did not die of poison, and repeatedly escaped into the afterlife world in the form of hotels, rallies, and presidential palaces.
All the dead characters were there waiting for him. People from both worlds pinned their hopes on him to save the world or destroy it. At the end of the nightmare tunnel, the answer seemed to be there.
Because of the vague hope or the innings, everyone was rejuvenated. The main characters even formed a "Save the Messiah" squad and traveled to Australia to find the "Savior" Kevin with the consciousness of an ascetic.
With metaphors and fables everywhere, logic and law missing, Watch over the World is like a long nightmare. When people think that the nightmare will eventually turn into revelation, they are wrong again.
Borges, a deep nightmare sufferer who had been haunted by several nightmares such as mirror images and enigma palaces, said: "Nightmares, this tiger of dreams." He didn't believe in hell, but had "nightmares that might be hell's premonitions." Not only Borges, but how many people are caught up in the unique, irreproducible fear of nightmares.
Poster for the third season of Twin Peaks.
From this perspective, David Lynch's Twin Peaks and Watchmen are an ode to nightmares. They create nightmare dreams, pierce the bubbles of brilliance that envelop people, and make people realize that they are in a disordered universe.
On the way to finding meaning (in search of Kevin), people's hopes are gradually dashed. The afterlife also becomes a satire on reality, and Kevin discovers that the President of the United States has decided to destroy the world. "People elect us. We give them what they want. "And in the world of the living, the hope that an indigenous song and an immortal man can save the world is also disappointed.
After the ordeal, the hallucinations dissipate, and everyone finds themselves suspended in the depths of the universe and must re-establish their belief systems.
The two screenwriters did not fall into nothingness, although this is the easiest way to go.
In the Australian desert in the third season, they struggled to point out a path. As George Bernard Shaw said, "God is in creation." ”
Abandoning the personality of God and conflating hell and nightmares, the essence of Watch over the Earth is to believe in the mysteries of the world and accept the existence of mysterious forces. But to put your legs back on the ground, you have to create yourself.
The closer to the end, the more tender this absurd work becomes.
Kevin's hard stone dad roams the Australian continent with a tape recorder on his back in search of salvation, and the tape is a conversation with his son when he was a child. Nora finally decides to go to an unknown place to find a pair of children, and Kevin returns to Australia like a migratory bird every year after Nora is gone.
After disenchantment, humans return to a deeper instinct than relying on faith. It is a return to the eternal theme of "love", but this "love" is extremely difficult to obtain. You have to follow the people in "Watchmen" to walk through it completely to know the weight.