The Secret of Hooded Justice's Identity Remains a Great Mystery in HBO's 'Watchmen'
The ending of Watchmen's spectacular premiere episode created a fog of questions around Will Reeves, the show's mysterious old man who may or may not have hanged a police chief. Who is he? How the hell did he climb a tree? Does he possess super-strength?
We know that, in the world of Watchmen, there is only one hero capable of superhuman abilities. And that guy, allegedly, lives on Mars. So, in Episode Two, Damon Lindelof and his creative team had a lot of explaining to do. But by the time the credits roll on Watchmen's second outing, most of the questions raised in the pilot episode go unanswered. And, in the case of the wheelchair-bound hangman, things just become even more complicated than before. Lindelof and episode director Nicole Kassell do make one aspect of Reeves's identity abundantly clear, though–whoever he is, he's got something to do with Hooded Justice.
Who is Hooded Justice?
Hooded Justice is not much more than a side-character in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen comic series. The lumbering hero is known for having immense strength, with a gigantic, muscular frame. He wears old-timey red tights, with a hangman's mask, and a big, thick, noose tied around his neck. Rope is a central design theme for Hooded Justice, so when the police chief gets strung up in a tree in Watchmen's pilot, fans were quick to connect the dots. The conundrum, though, is that, while Hooded Justice's identity is not ever confirmed in the comics, it's hinted that he's likely a former bodybuilder from Eastern Germany named Rolf Müller. In the second Episode of Watchmen, we see a segment of a show-within-a-show: American Hero Story. This program appears to support the theory that Rolf Müller was Hooded Justice—opening with a re-creation of his body being found with a bullet his head in Boston Harbor.
What's Hooded Justice's role in the comics?
Hooded Justice's biggest moment in the original series occurs when Edward Blake, aka The Comedian, sexually assaults Sally Jupiter, the vigilante known as Silk Spectre. In this flashback sequence, HJ comes to Silk Spectre's rescue, beating Blake to a pulp, scattering blood all over the vigilante's costume. This vicious beating gives us the iconic image of a smiley face with a teardrop of blood through the eye.
Beyond that, it's unclear, exactly, who this dude is. The only other significant mention of him comes by way of the ancillary content that was published with the Watchmen series. Hollis Mason's autobiography, Under the Hood, appears alongside the first three chapters of Watchmen. In it, he elaborates on Hooded Justice's complex, and mysterious history.
Under the Hood describes the events of the super-market stick-up that is seen in "American Hero Story," the TV series that is shown briefly in Episode Two of Watchmen on HBO. According to Mason's book, this is the first time Hooded Justice was given his superhero moniker. Described with a black hood, cape, and noose around his neck, the hero was known to pulverize his opponents, inflicting lifelong trauma with his crushing blows. He's also known as the first ever vigilante in the Watchmen universe, and one of the original members of "The Minutemen," the series's version of The Justice League.
Though Hooded Justice is commonly thought of as the vigilante alter-ego of German bodybuilder Rolf Müller, an article in The New Frontiersman says that the strongman was found dead off the coast of Boston with a bullet in his head. The Nite Owl of 1955 is said to have killed Müller, after a discovery that Müller was a Nazi-leaning rapist who tortured children. But following Müller's death, it was discovered that Hooded Justice was not, in fact, the German bodybuilder everyone thought he was.
In the "American Hero Story" TV series within HBO's new show, Hooded Justice claims that the man found dead in Boston harbor is not him. The character in the show-within-a-show states that he faked his own death.
How does this all connect to the wheelchair-bound man in HBO's Watchmen?
So, in both the comics and the HBO show, no one seems to know the true identity of Hooded Justice. But, unlike the comic series, Lindelof's show seems to be putting the pieces together of HJ's true identity–and it's even more bizarre than the story of a German bodybuilder.
In Episode Two, we see a German plane dropping fliers out of the sky to a long line of black American infantrymen in the First World War. The fliers argue that black Americans should not fight on the side of the U.S., since America is horribly marred by racism and prejudice towards them. A black soldier picks up on these pamphlets, and becomes intrigued.
Cut to a generation later, and a young boy–assumedly the soldier's son–is reading the pamphlet. This is the same boy found alone after the Tulsa Race Massacre. The pamphlet has the words WATCH OVER THIS BOY on the back of it.
In the end of Episode Two, after the Reeves is seen floating away in a car towards what looks to be a gigantic ship of some kind, this same pamphlet comes floating down. So, we now know that this man is the same little boy who was left alone in Tulsa. And, given the rumors of Hooded Justice's Nazi past, the history of the elusive hero seems deeply intertwined with Reeves–who is also revealed to be Regina King's character's grandfather in this episode. Whew. This shit goes deep.
So if Will Reeves is Hooded Justice, then he must know some of the superheroes of Watchmen's history. When he says at the end of Episode Two that he has "friends in high places," maybe he's not lying. In fact, he might just be joining his old buddies on whatever gigantic ship scooped him away into the night in the episode's supremely weird conclusion. We'll have to wait for Episode Three to find out.
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