Watchmen (The TV Series, With Spoilers!)

I tweeted out my feelings regarding the finale of Watchmen and I guess I'll replicate most of them here.

The final episode was good.  Visually, the series has been great all along.  Thematically, working race into the mythos has been rewarding, and the acting has also been good.

But the writing?  Not the dialogue, but specifically the world building and plot structure?  There are just a lot of things that didn't fly with me.

Off the top of my head, Sister Night seems way unmoved by the fact that so many of her fellow police officers were just murdered with frozen squid-creature babies.  While Doctor Trieu is problematic, why do we have to take Veidt's word that she'd not help save the world from war and global warming?  Why does it take until the last episode to remind us that we're supposed to care about Sister Night's three kids?  Why is Looking Glass still a nothingburger of a character?  Why does Laurie seem to not care that much that her dildo model / past boyfriend is being disintegrated?  In a series based on the white terrorism of the Tulsa race riots, why do we so quickly gloss over the inherent racism of a U.S. occupation of Vietnam?

I never watched Lost but I get the feeling if I had, I'd have many of the same feelings.  This show was the product of some amazing brain-storming sessions, no doubt.  There are great ideas here, but also mediocre and problematic ones.  But hey, let's throw everything together and see what sicks, coherency be damned.

In a TV world of endless seasons, and a movie world of endless sequels, you can get away with this but only for so long.  Then you get shit-canned, and all those "interesting" plot threads turn into a heap of unfulfilled pretension, overnight.

The last two episodes move the dial over into "interesting but heavily flawed, and not worthy of a second season" territory for me.  I'm glad I followed through with all nine episodes, because around episode five I honestly wondered whether I could be bothered to even finish watching the series.

Make of that what you will.