Watchmen - Episode 6: This Extraordinary Being

WATCHMEN - HBO

Six hours of footage later and now two-thirds of the way through Damon Lindelof's Watchmen series, Lindelof finally delivers THAT episode viewers and fans alike have desperately waited for with what is the series most outstanding hour of storytelling yet.

This Extraordinary Being, directed by Stephen Williams, plays out much like its preceding episode, which was an original story of Tim Blake Nelson's Looking Glass, exploring the origin of Louis Gossett Jr's Will Reeves character. Much of the mystery and mysticism surrounding said role is finally answered in a tremendously profound and poignant impact. Credit where credit is due, Lindelof delivers a captivating portrayal of racial injustice marinated in a way that manages to elevate Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's original graphic novel as well as propel and weave socially conscious motifs into the material.

What Lindelof achieves here is quite magnificent and genius. It is an authentic and dynamic twist and propels this series into something deeper and more meaningful compared to other properties with the same root. This sixth episode is arguably the closest thing to the political and social underbelly that the genre-defining novella had with such bravado and gravitas.

Ironically, what helps this specific episode is how distant it is overall to the series. It is best described as a third party to the events that are slowly unfolding, adding very little to the overall narrative aside from further depth and relationship between the characters of Will Reeves and Regina King's Angela Abar — an element that has long been proposed but ignored for more story baiting and filler.

The end result is a form of compelling visual poetry and delivers on promises that the series set up in its premise, even if has taken so long to get to. To say that every second of this episode is not enthralling and invigorating to watch develop would be an understatement. This is the Watchmen all have been waiting for but the real question is: how many viewers stayed on and waited for such an episode drop?

Watchmen is released Sunday and Monday nights exclusively on HBO and SKY ONE.