Dune

Frank Herbert’s Dune—an awesome and dense mythology of feudal intrigue in space, which meditates on religion, politics, environmentalism, and other topics—is rightfully considered one of the greatest science fiction novels. It’s also, admittedly, not the most accessible tome. From the opening pages, the prose is heavy on series lore and so full of in-universe jargon and strange names that nearly every edition ever printed has included a glossary to aid the reader (and even with that, I still read it with the Dune Wiki at the ready).

Even giving a concise synopsis is difficult, but I’ll take a stab at it: The setting is a far distant future where humans have colonized space and live in a feudal empire of rival houses vying for control of the cosmos. In this society, the most prized substance is “the spice,” a chemical which gives humans the power to navigate through space using their minds. “Spice” is only found on the desert planet Arrakis (aka “Dune,” though rarely referred to as such on film), long controlled by the cruel House Harkonnen, but coming under control of their rivals House Atreides as the story opens. The plot mainly follows the young Paul Atreides (played onscreen by Timothée Chalamet), who is plagued by visions of a future where he either dies or becomes a messiah to the Fremen, the desert-dwelling native people of Arrakis.

Director Denis Villeneuve’s film is a pretty good adaptation, for better and for worse. It certainly tries to compact the book’s lore into digestible exposition. But this amounts to little more than refresher cliff notes for the already familiar. Frankly, anyone who hasn’t read Herbert’s novel will likely be lost at sea. Those who have, however, will see as great a Dune movie as could probably be made.

It’s a beautiful film full of visual wonders. The desert landscapes are stunning in their starkness, and the look—the sets, the costumes, the starships—is truly otherworldly. Like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Blade Runner (Ridley Scott’s original or Villeneuve’s sequel), the picture knows how cool it looks and takes it slow at times to give the viewer a chance to just take in the incredible sights. When things are moving, the action is never less than exciting, and a few battle sequences are absolutely breathtaking.

Villeneuve’s style can be a little stiff for scenes of dialogue or emotion, but it absolutely fits the material in this case. Herbert’s characters know they’re important people at the center of major moments in their fictional history. This is certainly reflected in the cast, who give scenes heavy on dialogue and exposition urgency and momentum between the big moments.

As Paul, Chalamet practically jumps off the page. He looks appropriately young and green, and is note-perfect as someone who alternately knows he’s destined for something big, but is unsure and not yet ready to face it. His visions of the future and the story’s present coursing to intersect form the main narrative, and he anchors it splendidly.

This Dune is huge in scope, fairly long in runtime, and meticulous in its craft. And yet, it still isn’t big enough to contain Herbert’s tale. Even though the picture only covers the first half of the book (it’s subtitled “Part One” on film), details still get left out or eschewed to the background, characters reduced to near-cameos. Even though the cast is terrific, aside from Chalamet, most don’t get much more screentime than mere role players (Dune the book is often compared to The Lord of the Rings, and the movie could definitely benefit from the same extended cut treatment of Peter Jackson’s film trilogy).

It is, however, very faithful to the spirit and vision of Herbert’s epic. For fans of the book, seeing scenes from it come to life in all their glory and splendor is pretty thrilling. For everyone else, I can’t say for certain if it’ll provide much clarity, but it might be worth doing a little homework brushing up on the basics of Dune’s mythology, to at least try to understand what those vivid images on the screen mean. I so strongly hope we get to see “Part Two.”

The Many Saints of Newark

What more can be said about The Sopranos at this point? I’ll add this much: it gets better with age, and not just because it still stands out as one of the best examples of the long-form prestige TV that it pioneered. When I first watched as a teenager who had just gotten into gangster movies like GoodFellas, I loved the show for all the mobster action and its cinematic quality (and swearing and sex and violence), which at the time still seemed fairly new for television. Watching it again for the first time in years as a thirtysomething during last year's pandemic lockdown, the mob stuff still entertained me, but suddenly the domestic and family drama really hit home.

The long-awaited and year-delayed prequel The Many Saints of Newark, unfortunately, can’t carry such a dramatic load. It certainly has the feel of the series, with the prestige sheen (specifically, that of the show’s flashback episodes) and the structure which cuts between several players in an ensemble narrative. But it feels like catching an episode in the middle of a season, with pieces of stories and no context to what’s going on except some character names viewers of the show might recognize. Not that there's ultimately much going on here.

The film tells the story of Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola), the until now-unseen father of Michael Imperioli’s Christopher (who offers scant narration and appears briefly as an infant). In the 1960s and 70s, Dickie is a member of New Jersey’s DiMeo crime family, living large and crossing paths with several Sopranos characters in their younger days. During the 1967 Newark riots, Dickie’s Black associate Harold (Leslie Odom Jr.) flees the city to avoid a murder rap. But in the early 70s, Harold resurfaces hungry for his own criminal empire, and attempts to bloodily push Dickie and the Italians out of the city’s numbers racket. Through all this, Dickie catches the eye of the young Tony Soprano (Michael Gandolfini), who looks up to his "uncle" like a surrogate father.

Nivola makes a splendid leading man, engaging and stylish when chewing the scene or dispensing mob justice. And there are traces of greater depth which elude most everyone else. In the contradictions between the scraps of decency and humanity he shows to some and the savage brutality he’s capable of, one can see a bit of James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano in Dickie. It's a pity the character only gets a movie's worth of screen time, because there's potential for story arcs which could enrich the show's mythology that are merely hinted at.

Sadly, the same can’t be said for the younger Gandolfini. He looks convincingly like a teenage Tony, but we barely get a glimpse of the complex and fascinating powerhouse of a character his late father played. Other returning characters amount to, at most, recurring cameos, and are utterly inconsequential across the board. Though to be fair to the cast, the lack of any coherent or compelling drama doesn't seem like their fault. Rather, it’s that the script seems intent on creating moments to make callbacks to the series, less so on expanding on any of the characters or telling a new story with them. An on-paper terrific cast (Jon Bernthal, Vera Farmiga, Corey Stoll, and Ray Liotta failing to make much of an impression in two roles) are wasted doing threadbare imitations of their TV counterparts and dropping obvious references and lines viewers remember (or if they're playing new characters, are reduced to mafia stock roles). It’s barely even lip service, let alone fan service.

With little of the show's great character drama to speak of, all that's left is a pretty basic mob action movie starring Dickie. And it's admittedly some fun in these moments, if pretty inconsequential (much like the violence on the show, which usually amounted to quick bloody skirmishes and was often resolved anticlimactically if at all). Nivola plays action antihero solidly, and Odom makes for a decent foil. This much upgrades the film from a pure disappointment to an okay popcorn flick, but it only amounts to very average and ordinary, things The Sopranos never was even in its handful of lesser episodes.

Black Widow

If Black Widow had come out on time last year, it might have felt like a victory lap after Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame. But while movie theaters saw few new movies the past 16 months, the Marvel Cinematic Universe kept chugging along on Disney’s streaming arm. So, Scarlett Johansson’s heroine finally gets a movie of her own (and a solid one), but after the universe has moved on.

It would almost be a pity, except the film is already sort of a throwback, and would have been even if it wasn’t delayed for 14 months. Set in the aftermath of Captain America: Civil War (which is set, and came out, five long years ago), it finds Johansson’s title Avenger on the run and trying to live off the grid. She soon crosses paths with her “sister” from her pre-S.H.I.E.L.D. assassin days (Florence Pugh). Hunted by the shadowy organization that trained them both, the two set out to find their surrogate parents/former handlers (David Harbour and Rachel Weisz) and free countless others who have been turned into assassins via mind control.

At first, this one feels like a darker entry in the vein of Captain America: The Winter Soldier. The plot goes to some dark places. There’s less superpowered stuff, and the shootouts and hand-to-hand fights are (slightly) more real and rough. The humor is snider than Marvel’s usual banter, cutting the tension instead of setting the tone. Even the heroes wrestle with some terrible things they've done, and Ray Winstone is a terrific foil, expertly towing the line between scene-chewing comic book baddie and truly evil.

The film doesn’t sustain this, though. About halfway through, it loosens up and becomes standard Marvel fare, lighter and fun instead of heavy and dark. Mostly, that’s okay. The action scenes are a good time, and the cast is having a ball, with Harbour in particular getting a lot of laughs. The finale is a spectacle, combining some fantastical superhero mayhem with a few fun twists right out of Mission: Impossible. And Johansson carries it all well enough that one laments her character only gets to be the lead now (indeed, her character was rather underutilized prior to this, and her final fate in Endgame was dealt with a bit shabbily—but that’s another conversation).

Black Widow is the usual fun time offered by a Marvel movie, and that’s enough (being my first time in a theater in 16 months, that’s all it really needed to be for me). And yet, I can’t help but wish it had broken the mold a bit more, or at least stuck with its initial tone and saw it through. Since the film’s original planned release date last May, MCU streaming series like WandaVision and Loki have shown a willingness to be more experimental and strange, and the franchise’s upcoming film slate looks like a completely new direction. If Black Widow had done the same, it might have stood out and made more of a statement, rather than just being one last curtain call for the first era of the MCU.

Wonder Woman 1984

Though DC’s film universe has mostly moved on from the dark and gritty Zack Snyder-led era (finding its footing instead in fun lighter movies or standalone projects, both looser with the continuity), the franchise has kept intact the things most agree the so-called “Snyderverse” got right. The most obvious of which is its Wonder Woman, impeccably brought to life by Gal Gadot, and whose initial picture was easily the best DC universe movie, a lone light in that dark age. Sadly, the promise of that first feature evaporates pretty quickly in this sequel, which seems to be overcompensating in look and tone for the dark era that spawned it, and yet despite its opposite aesthetic is every bit as bad a film as Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

Maybe even worse, in fact. I’ll say this much for BvS: it had an ambitious and clear vision, and failed because it juggled too many plots and subplots. Wonder Woman 1984 is an overstretched, confused movie with no handle on what it wants to be. All at once, it tries to be a modern superhero blockbuster, a strange and goofy Silver Age comics story, an 80s nostalgia fest, an 80s parody, a straight-up middling 80s comedy, a fable-cum-PSA about everyday moral issues, a treatise about bigger issues, and several more things. None done particularly well, and all held together by a story that would barely hold together if the film just picked one of these elements and went with it. 

That story finds our Amazon hero—alias Diana Prince—in the titular mid-80s, appraising artifacts for the Smithsonian by day, saving the day at her local mall by night. In her day job, she comes across a rare amulet that appears to grant wishes…at a price. In her hero capacity, she must stop shady tycoon Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal) from using the amulet’s power to take over the world. Also, her deceased lover Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) somehow reappears in her life.

The film's barebones plot pitch has the makings of a silly and zany old school comics story, which could have made for a very different and refreshingly original superhero film if explored the right way. The picture itself, however, makes of this a narrative that's convoluted and weird in all the wrong ways, and makes matters worse by burying it under a mound of undercooked subplot points. There are around a dozen irrelevant threads that feel like the screenwriters either got bored with them but forgot to cut them from the script, or couldn’t decide whether they should be a substantial subplot or merely a background element or gag and sloppily split the difference by having them all just sit there, adding minutes to the runtime but not going anywhere. The film’s release on streaming is almost a blessing for the audience, for they can rewind to try to make some sense of what's happening. But, it’s not really worth it, because within the muddle, the standard superhero stuff is nothing to write home about.

It's too bad, because the cast is quite apparently so much better than this movie, and do what they can. Pascal and Kristen Wiig aren’t very good villains—in fact, they’re totally out of their depth when the villainous schemes come to fruition (and despite the promotional materials centering him as such, Pascal is less an imitation of the outgoing President than a general sleazy corporate 80s trope). But they at least likably chew the scenery early in the movie, and even a handful of times after everything goes south. And Pine and Gadot carry some scenes they share superbly, as does Gadot on her own. Whether in the heat of battle, giving a triumphant speech, or in her quieter moments, she’s so earnest and sincere that she at times invites comparison to Christopher Reeve’s still-immaculate performance as Superman.

Unfortunately, Wonder Woman 1984 is more like the later Reeve Superman sequels than the good ones remembered fondly today. And while Superman III and IV were so insubstantial that Reeve’s charm almost made them mildly watchable, this movie is so bloated that even if it were possible, it's doubtful that even the combined efforts of Reeve and Gadot would be able to get a handle on it. I say it begrudgingly, but this is one of the worst DC movies yet.

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm

2006 seems pretty quaint now, doesn’t it? Back then, YouTube and social media were in their infancy, pointing out George W. Bush’s grammatical goofs was considered strong satire, and the American public was still prone to moral outrage about explicit content in pop culture.

Obviously, things have changed. 14 years ago, Sacha Baron Cohen‘s antics in the first Borat could legitimately shock people, and the backwards prejudices he revealed in some of his subjects might have truly stunned more progressive-minded viewers. But his simpleton Kazakh reporter finds himself traversing a much different America in this sequel, fully titled Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.

The conceit (cover story) this time is that Borat’s first film ruined his home country’s reputation. To restore it and curry favor with the United States, Borat is sent back to America on a mission to offer his teenage daughter (Maria Bakalova) as a gift to the U.S. President. There’s more plot than there needs to be (it is merely a setup, after all), and frankly way too many scripted scenes. Aside from the closing moments—turning some of the gags about the film's fake Kazakhstan back on Americans—these are almost uniformly unfunny.

When the movie gets to what Baron Cohen is known for—that is, using his absurd character to trick real unsuspecting public figures and civilians into revealing interviews and off-the-wall stunts—he still manages to mine a few gold nuggets. There’s one “Holy shit!” sequence you might have heard about involving a certain former big city mayor that’s as uncomfortable and disgusting as it sounds (and hilarious). Another unexpected standout has one interviewee react to Borat’s exaggerated bigotry with genuine compassion, in a moment that strums the viewer’s heartstrings just the tiniest bit. And quite a few scenes where Baron Cohen or Bakalova get their subjects to say or do something outrageous, or simply document reactions to their own bad behavior, are very funny.

Others, aren’t. Simply put, vulgarity that might have shocked us into laughing back in ’06 doesn’t seem so edgy or original in an era where cruel trolling pranks and dirty cringe humor are readily accessible on the phone in your pocket. There’s also no big brazen moment that’s so daring, dangerous, and transcendently hysterical, like the naked hotel fight in the first film or the cage fighting scene in Brüno. Even a particularly gross-out scene that’s arguably trying to continue that legacy seems pretty passé.

More worrisome, though, are the failures that are not Baron Cohen’s fault. These days, the public doesn’t need much goading to reveal the ignorance and ugliness hiding underneath the surface; it’s right there on the news or going viral on the regular, and its propagators (including no less than the freaking President) aren’t shy or ashamed about it. So when Borat, say, “tricks” an anti-mask rally full of far-right gun nuts and conspiracy believers into singing about killing Democrats and journalists, it frankly doesn’t sound much different from their regular rhetoric. Baron Cohen clearly aimed to mock them, but the stunt reveals little those who even cursorily watch the news don’t know already, and he kind of just bounces off the bigots instead of righteously humiliating them. This is an unfortunate recurring obstacle, that his more partisan targets are inured to his schtick because they’ve gone so far off the deep end themselves.

Baron Cohen never drops the façade onscreen, but has struck a much more serious tone out of character in the news lately. One can sort of read his for-real commentary as a tacit admission that the world has reached a point beyond even his gutsy high-wire methods. In a way, though, that arguably still gives Borat Subsequent Moviefilm value as a cultural artifact. Not so much as a daring and revealing work of satire, but as a measurement of how far society has regressed that something that was so edgy and so absurd in 2006 isn't nearly absurd enough to take on reality in 2020.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

In hindsight, it’s fair to say that Disney’s Star Wars sequel trilogy has had an identity crisis. The Force Awakens was basically an original trilogy greatest hits package to win over fans still skeptical after the prequels while introducing the new players. It didn’t turn out to have much staying power for me, but was a blast on opening night four years ago. Next came The Last Jedi, which seemed to play like a work of fan fiction: some terrific individual scenes and thrilling moments…but with narrative connective tissue that’s admittedly a little weak. I liked it overall (and I contend that Rian Johnson’s film and the places he took his story were the work of a fan who holds Star Wars near and dear, despite the whining that he “ruined the saga” from a segment of viewers).

The Rise of Skywalker, the final (for now) chapter of the saga, is mired somewhere between its two predecessors. It’s certainly dialed up the fan service and callbacks once again. And while I wouldn’t quite say it taps the dark side of fanfic (remarkably, almost none of the fan toxicity of late seems to have bled onto the screen), it certainly does veer into the nutty and unrestrained side of it. It’s as if an overcaffeinated fan was given free reign to throw in every wild idea they could think of—A whole fleet of Star Destroyers! Force lightning taking out starships! The Millennium Falcon jumping in and out of hyperspace!—to make the massive blowout spectacle of their childhood dreams.

The picture picks up some time after The Last Jedi. The heroic Resistance is dwindling. The evil onetime Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) has returned and is on the cusp of leading the evil First Order to galactic domination. Jedi Rey (Daisy Ridley), ex-Stormtrooper Finn (John Boyega), Resistance pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo), C-3PO (Anthony Daniels), and BB-8 travel the galaxy to find a lost artifact that could lead them to Palpatine’s lair on the Sith home planet, with the First Order’s new Supreme Leader Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) on their tails in hopes of forming an alliance with Rey.

There really is not much more to it than that. The film plays similarly to the third Hobbit movie, in that the plot is simple and everything is all about that final battle. Every scene is just barreling toward the final battle. Every moment that is not an action sequence is merely putting things in motion and setting the pieces for the battle. Anyone who’s seen even a single movie can tell how the battle’s going to go down (even though this film is not based on a beloved old book a lot of people have read like The Hobbit). And when the battle finally arrives, the bombast shoots past exciting to ridiculousness a few times.

Is it entertaining? Sure, for the most part. The aforementioned spectacles are still pretty cool, and the movie offers some fun chases, space dogfights, shootouts, and lightsaber fights that are the saga’s forte. And most of the action take place in eye-catching environments we haven’t seen before, while the callbacks to series past are mostly kept small, not near re-creations like The Force Awakens. But since nearly every moment of plot or character is purely focused on setting things in place for the big finale instead of deepening the characters or mythology, the stakes never feel that high. Even some unexpected and ostensibly emotional plot turns and surprise cameos amount to little actual pathos (with maybe one or two exceptions). Also, Palpatine’s return ultimately amounts to a cheap trailer pop, as the nominal big bad is revealed immediately and gets little to do as a character besides playing final boss.

By itself, the film works okay as a big sci-fi action blockbuster. Tasked with bringing this trilogy to completion, however, it’s not so successful. Only one main character truly gets to bring their arc to a final and satisfying conclusion, while the rest feel unfinished or like they’ve barely started at all. This trilogy was mostly a fun time, but with The Rise of Skywalker as its final chapter, it ultimately feels like an insubstantial facsimile of the classic original trilogy instead of something with its own character and emotional identity.

Watchmen season 1 (and hopefully, not only)

 **SPOILERS HEREIN!**

The best praise I can bestow upon Watchmen the TV show, I think, is that I had about the same reaction watching it as I had reading the comic for the first time.

I bought it as a teenager having been told it was the greatest comic ever written, but had little idea about what to expect from it. I was all but lost for the first couple chapters, with so many different characters, subplots, and details big and tiny coming at me at once. I soldiered on. By the middle, I started to grasp what was happening, and could tell I was reading something special. By the end, I was riveted, and after I finished, I couldn’t stop thinking about it for a while (I think just about every budding comics fan who discovers Watchmen has this reaction, or something close to it).

Even though I wasn’t coming to the show as unknowing, I still had little idea what to expect, between the creators setting it in the (albeit alternate) present, my ambivalence and skepticism after previous adaptations and follow-ups, and the love-it-or-hate-it reaction to the work of creator-showrunner Damon Lindelof (I haven’t seen his last acclaimed HBO show The Leftovers, was no big fan of Prometheus, but liked Lost). And for the first few episodes, I was at a near-total loss about what was happening. However, each episode was well-done enough—impeccably shot, paced, and acted, while offering a heaping helping of in-jokes and Easter eggs and tipping just enough of its mysteries—to keep me coming back each week.

And then we found out that Louis Gossett Jr. was Hooded Justice, a genuinely shocking twist and brilliant jolt to the universe’s canon (without technically altering or contradicting it), as well as one of the best superhero stories ever filmed (and easily the best episode of the season). Whether it was the jolt of such an “Oh my god!” moment, or if it just so happened to coincide with the other arcs finally becoming clearer, that was the point things started to come together and make sense. I went from intrigued enough to keep watching to once again riveted.

And now, the season’s over, and even after sleeping on last night’s finale, I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s probably going to take some time and at least one rewatch for me to catch everything and fully form my feelings and interpretation of what I watched, just like the comic book took multiple readings to do the same (and to this day, every reread adds a little something more). But my initial gut reaction, which has not changed after stewing on it for a day: the show was a masterpiece, and the first continuation of the comic worthy of the Watchmen name.

It’s the first supplemental media that feels like the comic. The look of the show is just right, a perfect mix of the comic’s not-quite-the-world-you-know color scheme and new millennium sleekness (having artist Dave Gibbons aboard as a consultant probably helped). Alan Moore may have stayed away from the project, but its weirder touches and moments felt very much like the drifts into surrealism and existentialism characteristic of his work. The narrative structure and events often felt like reflections of the comic (a side-by-side look at the show and the comic could imaginably reveal some mind-blowing symmetry).

And yet, these callbacks were subtle enough that the show always yielded surprise each week. Not just mind-blowing plot twists, of which there were plenty, but also totally unexpected changes in tone and storytelling. Like the Hooded Justice revelation that was almost an interlude to the main plot (like some of the chapters of the comic focusing on one hero’s story), or making the reveal about the godlike Dr. Manhattan’s (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) whereabouts a beautiful and heartfelt romance right when the show was approaching its climax and things were getting tense. Last night’s finale may have been a bit exposition-heavy, but hey, I’ll admit I didn’t guess Lady Trieu’s (Hong Chau) master plan until the dialogue spelled it out. And that last scene was just perfect.

I’ll even go this far: the show may have actually improved on the comic in some ways.

Firstly, the political stuff added so much weight to the narrative. Yes, Watchmen the comic was heavily political. But while those critiques of American imperialism were mainly glancing blows in the background (save for the pervading Cold War nuclear fears and frequent shots at the Nixon Administration), the show’s exploration of race was front and center. The white power villains brought a stinging immediacy (side note: James Wolk’s closet racist Senator was an effectively off-putting slimeball, all the more so because he reminded me of some real-world Republicans who I’ll decline to name). Connecting the Watchmen continuity’s alternate history to America’s real racial past was ingenious, bringing a greater layer of both myth and realism to the characters and exploring the wounds of history (the opening sequence of the 1921 Greenwood massacre was harrowing, and brought some media attention to a real historical event the public seemed to know little about).

Regina King was absolutely fantastic in the lead. She was convincing and effortless roughing up bad guys as Sister Night, and had a rich, emotional character history as Angela. But she was disconnected enough from the main mystery that she was a perfect vessel for the viewer, an everywoman that the comic never really had (frequent comic narrator Rorschach was most definitely not a likeable everyman, despite some readers pegging an obvious psychopath as a cool badass). She was also the first hero in this universe that’s actually likeable. Some (possibly Moore among them) might argue that making a hero meant to be liked is antithetical to the point of Watchmen, but the show was no less rich or compelling for it, and King was refreshingly real and full of deep pathos without being oppressively dark and gritty.

Other new characters were similarly strong. Tim Blake Nelson was terrific as Looking Glass, showing that the tough, laconic hardass cop/hero archetype is just a shell for life-altering trauma. Chau’s Lady Trieu was a bit of a cypher (though after her lineage was revealed, I think that was kind of the point), but walked a fine line, never revealing whether she was on the side of good or evil until the very end (if we got a definitive answer at all). I already spoke for Wolk, Don Johnson was interesting enough to make us lament his small amount of screen time, and cameos and bit roles from HBO regulars were strong as ever. The show also enriched returning characters from the comic. Gossett was good at playing coy trickster and wise mentor, and Jovan Adepo was palpably seething and empathetic as the younger Hooded Justice. Abdul-Mateen was a wonderfully understated Dr. Manhattan, pulling off the achievement of the comic in imbuing the least human character’s arc with the most emotion. And Jean Smart finally gave the former second Silk Spectre Laurie Blake her due (her story in the comic serves less as a moment about her than an epiphany for Dr. Manhattan), implicitly giving her character her own identity and subtly hinting at substantial offscreen evolution. Also, frankly, she was sexy as hell in the role.

And then there was Jeremy Irons as the aging, stir crazy ex-Ozymandias Adrian Veidt. Veidt was a bit of the cypher in the comic, his story only revealed quickly before his master plan is revealed. Here, we finally saw a bit inside the character’s head. If the fact that his ruse which killed millions in the comic worked made for any ambiguity about his soul, these scenes made it clear he was not a good guy, but a cold, restless, self-righteous megalomaniac. And yet, his scenes were never dark or (too) disturbing, but strange and goofy. The Europa subplot with Veidt imprisoned in Dr. Manhattan’s new utopia, ruling over the blue man’s creations (Tom Mison and Sarah Vickers, both excellently deadpan), was probably the most out there and imaginative element of the show. And it totally worked, giving the show canvas to explore what makes Veidt tick while also instilling some surrealism and humor (of which there was little to break the dead serious realism and brutality in the comic book).

For a show so acclaimed, it’s astounding that there seems to be doubts about further seasons. This single season offered so many starting points for further stories: a police procedural starring Tulsa’s costumed finest (maybe get fellow HBO maestro David Simon involved and do Watchmen The Wire?); the fate of the clones on Europa (perhaps with Veidt turning out to be the serpent to corrupt this Garden of Eden?); potential spinoff opportunities for Agent Laurie Blake or younger Hooded Justice; just a regular sequel to the events of these nine episodes, or a prequel depicting the events between the comic and the show; or something completely different, making the series an anthology set in the Watchmen universe with a different tale every season. Hell, after the glimpse of Ozymandias’ 1985 squid plot we got this season, I’d be on board with the same crew and cast (with digital de-aging like The Irishman) doing a proper adaptation of the comic as a miniseries (sorry, but Zack Snyder’s 2009 film adaptation is awful). It would be a pity if, like the comic until decades later, Watchmen the series gets no follow-up when it offers so many potential stories to be told.

Whether or not we ever see those stories, though, this story was a great one, a worthy successor to the most acclaimed of superhero comics, and the best show of the year.