While HBO’s take on Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ classic comic Watchmen is still pretty mysterious, now that it’s begun shooting we’re getting morsels of information that are starting to add up to a pretty interesting picture. Yesterday, we reported on a leak from the set showing a newspaper declaring Adrian Veidt aka Ozymandias dead (and also two possible Easter Eggs about a ‘squid shower’ and ‘Intrinsic Chamber’ talks).
That seems to have been confirmed with these latest shots which appear to show a funeral procession that’ll apparently be for Veidt. If this is taking place as a kind of sequel to the comic, the character having a funeral with a police escort seems to indicate that he’s still held in very high regard by the public and government. And if that’s the case, then you have to imagine that his plan to create world peace by faking an alien attack on New York City was never discovered, as it’s doubtful anyone who’s known to have that much blood on their hands would escape justice.
The thing is, we’ve also recently had confirmation that Jeremy Irons is playing Veidt. That’s some pretty big casting, so he should be spending a decent amount of time on screen, which gives us two possibilities.
One is that the show will feature a lot of flashbacks filling in the gaps between the end of the comic and where the show picks up. Who knows, perhaps the events of the series could kick off with Veidt’s mysterious death in the same way the comic began with Veidt throwing the Comedian through a window? The second, meanwhile, is that Veidt has faked his own death, which would be entirely in character to do.
Either way, Watchmen is walking a very interesting course. With any luck, we’ll get a full synopsis soon that’ll shed some more light on the matter. But in the meantime, I’m quite enjoying playing detective with these leaked set pics, so whoever’s sneaking around there with a camera has my thanks.
