4 HBO's Watchmen Theories From The Season 1 Premiere

Promising. That's a 1-word review for HBO's latest prestige drama, Watchmen. The series premiere on October 20 was the highest rated debut for a new HBO show since Westworld. It ended on a cliffhanger, ensuring that those initial viewers will continue tuning in moving forward.

Unlike Game of Thrones, HBO's Watchmen is not a direct adaptation of the original work. Rather, it takes place in the same world as the comic book--one in which all the comic book's events happened, and now we see what happened in the aftermath.

We're meeting brand new characters (and a few familiar faces). And already the "question everything" ethos of the original comic is rearing its ugly head. One man, who we assumed to be a sympathetic main character, is dead. Another man, who we assumed to be a helpless old man, apparently killed him. These twists, and a dozen smaller mysteries, are fuel for the scrutinizing fan communities on Reddit and social media.

Here are 4 theories about Watchmen's first episode, "It's Summer and We're Running Out of Ice."

It's possible to enjoy Watchmen regardless of whether you've read the graphic novel or not. But although it's not a necessity, it does help to have a little context. Devoted fans have a theory that the old man is Hooded Justice, the original, masked superhero whose identity was never definitively confirmed in the comics. There's a few visual clues, the most obvious one being that Hooded Justice wore a noose around his neck, and the sheriff was killed in the same manner. What's he's doing back (he was long rumored to be dead) is another question entirely.

This would also create a fitting origin story for the Minutemen team member; Because Watchmen is a commentary on superhero narratives (while also still very much being a superhero story itself), the Tulsa Race Riots might be Hooded Justice's origin story. Superheroes are typically born out of tragedy; in Batman's case, he lost both his parents, and in Spider-Man's case, his parents weren't even in the picture when his story began. The Tulsa riots seem like the sort of traumatic thing that would cause a man to wear a noose around his neck--a symbol of the indignities his people suffered--as he goes out to fight crime.

Sheriff Judd Crawford is presented as a good guy in this series premiere. He's comforting the wife of a police officer who was shot in the line of duty. He has a warm rapport with Angela, who's also framed to as someone to root for (although she did torture that witness, so our perception of her may shift over the course of the season). But because this is Watchmen, we're going to find out a lot more about Judd Crawford, and most likely, not all of it is going to be pretty.

We get a couple of narrative clues that the sheriff might not be on the up-and-up. He seems reluctant to interrogate the 7th Kavalry member that Angela captures, and later, when some of the Kavalry members are escaping in their plane, Crawford risks his life and the lives of his team to shoot them out of the sky. One reason why he might have been so driven to kill them is he may have had something to hide (is he a Kavalry mole?), and he was worried they would spill the beans.

There's also evidence in the references to the musical "Oklahoma," which is geographically appropriate to the show's setting, but also foreshadows that Sheriff Judd Crawford might not be the nice guy he seems to be. The villain of Oklahoma, who is also named Jud, forms a love triangle between himself, Curly (the musical's hero), and Laury. Jud dies at the end of the musical by falling on his knife, rather than by anyone stabbing him, which further suggests that Crawford's death by hanging is not everything it appears to be.

The old man in the wheelchair is almost certainly the young boy who is snuck out of the Tulsa race riots that open the film. He's old enough to be (the riots took place in 1921), and the note in his lap, which reads "Watch Over This Boy," seals it.

At first blush, it seems to be a request from the boy's father, who wrote the note, to whoever ended up caring for his son. But some theorists have speculated that the note should actually read "Watch Over This, Boy." Thus, it's a request of the son to take care of the paper, which might have some importance we don't know about yet.

Although the show plays coy about it, Jeremy Irons is definitely playing an old Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias, who's the biggest antagonist and returning character from the comic book. When we first meet him, he's in a decadent castle, having apparently faked his death (we see a newspaper headline earlier in the episode which says he's dead. Plus, HBO posted an obituary for Veidt on their website, which gives all sorts of fascinating information about his forward-facing persona after the events of the comic book.

The servants he's with are especially odd. One of them massages his naked thighs with no apparent reaction. They both speak with a flat affectation. One of them confuses a horseshoe for a knife. Perhaps they're enhanced artificial life of some sort; Veidt had a widespread reputation as a futurist. Or maybe, the servants are imperfect clones of prior, dead humans; the obituary notes his interest and investment in pet cloning.