Who watches the Watchmen? The exact sort of people they don’t really want watching them, it turns out.
HBO just dropped a brand new trailer for Damon Lindelof’s sequel-take on the seminal graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. It, like our prior looks at the show — set in a world after the original comic, a world turned strange and even more grimly dystopian by Ozymandias’ destruction of New York City — examines how, after eschewing masked vigilantism for decades, society has returned to embracing the mask… and not in great ways.
Masks hide identities, they hide intents, they hide traumas. And this new trailer wants you to know that, as Regina King’s Angela Abrahams takes on a vigilante identity of her own to hunt down a mysterious group of terrorists calling themselves the Kalvary, donning ink-blotted masks of their own akin to the one worn by Rorschach.
It’s a gentle skewering of our own superhero fascination of the moment, as for all the cool costumes these self-made heroes and villains don, it can’t help but all look deeply, deeply messed up. Which is the point, in the end.
Watchmen comes to HBO on October 21, and will air on Fox Showcase in Australia.