Watchmen

The series is a sequel to the comic, set thirty-four years later in the same continuity, and Damon Lindelof described it as a remix rather than an adaptation: nothing in the 1986 book is retold, and everything in it is treated as having happened. Carried forward as fact:

• The squid, and Veidt's hoax, with the world still living inside the peace it bought
• Doctor Manhattan on Mars, Laurie as a federal agent, Veidt alive and missing
• The alternate history: Nixon's terms, the lost war, and the consequences of masks having been outlawed
• Rorschach's journal, published, and the movement that grew up around it, which is the show's actual subject

Filed HIGH. The series is unwatchable without the book, and its central argument, that Rorschach's readers became the thing he was, is a reply to the comic rather than a use of it.

Nolan's trilogy is the first mainstream superhero cinema built on the premises Watchmen put into comics twenty years earlier: that a costumed vigilante is a political fact with consequences, that a city would react to him, and that the villain may be the one arguing coherently. The Dark Knight's ending is the Watchmen ending. A mass deception is chosen over the truth because the truth would undo the peace, and the film leaves the audience to decide whether that was right. Ozymandias and Gordon make the same bargain. Filed MEDIUM, and the limit stated: Nolan has cited Year One and The Long Halloween rather than Watchmen.