Friday, January 6, 2012

I’M WATCHING THE WATCHMEN?

The following first appeared on February 10, 2010, in a previous
incarnation of this bloggy thing.


Gosh darn my obsessive imagination. After writing yesterday's
comments about any possible sequels to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons'
Watchmen, and after eating too much of the pizza and turkey Sainted
Wife Barb prepared for our neighbors and us to enjoy while watching
the Super Bowl, scenes from one such sequel simply materialized in
my brain during my post-Super Bowl nap. Knowing full well probably
dozens of bloggers and columnists are doing the same darn thing, I
am, nonetheless, compelled to share these scenes with you. So, with
great trepidation, I present...

WATCHMEN 2:
RORSCHACH'S REVENGE


Interior shot. Laurie is in the shower room of the rec center where
she works out. Her crossed arms cover her breasts, but not her
obvious "baby bump." Around her other women are wide-eyes with fear
as a likewise nude Doctor Manhattan has his conversation with his
former lover.

LAURIE: Rorschach's alive?

JON: I believe so.

Cut to a baseball field. Standing in the bright green grass of the
outfield, Rorschach touches himself to confirm that he is, indeed,
alive while Dr. Manhattan speaks to him. Rorschach's mask disguises
his facial expressions, but Jon is clearly experiencing a great
many emotions as they speak.

RORSCHACH: I'm...not dead.

JON: I...remade you. With some improvements.

RORSCHACH: Am I really me, Jon? Or am I just some tiny part of you
still capable of feeling guilt?

JON: I believe you are you. However, I am not so certain that I am
precisely who I was.

RORSCHACH: I'm going to take down Veidt.

JON: I know.

Rorschach shimmers like a living ink blot; it's as if his mask has
flowed over his entire body. He vanishes.

Interior shot of the rec center locker room. Laurie now has a towel
wrapped around her as she sits on a bench. Jon also sits with a
towel draped across his privates.

LAURIE: Is it really him?

JON: As I said, I believe it is.

LAURIE: What will he do?

JON: He will try to bring Veidt to justice. I do not know if he
will succeed. Since my experience with Veidt's machine, I seem to
be more here and now than everywhere and everywhen.

LAURIE: Do you think he will try to find Daniel and me?

JON: I remade him...more aware of the dangers around him. He will
not seek allies in his quest. He will need friends.

LAURIE: And you?

JON: Those I would wish to be my friends are those I would not
expose to the consequences of such friendship.

Jon places his hand tenderly on Laurie's belly.

JON: I believe I am happy for you and Daniel.

LAURIE: Is it a boy or a girl?

JON: It is the future. Omniscient as I once believed I was, I never
realized that before.

Cut to a wide establishing shot of one of Rorschach's secret lairs.
It is dimly-lit but much neater and more organized than we would
expect. There's a large free-standing mirror in one corner of the
place.

Rorschach shimmers into existence. He looks around, but, of course,
we can't see the expression on his masked face. However, his body
language should suggest mild surprise.

Rorschach walks over to the mirror.

Close in on Rorschach looking into the mirror. His mask does that
shimmer thing again and we now see the face of Walter Joseph
Kovacs, his true identity. It shimmers again and, while it's the
same face, it's noticeably more handsome than previously. Masked or
not, Rorschach's face still shows no emotion.

Rorschach's face/mask shimmers again and now the face seen in the
mirror is that of Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias. The face still does not
show any emotion.

The face/mask shimmers one more time and now we see Rorschach has
become Edward Morgan Blake, the Comedian...and the face in the
mirror is smiling.

RORSCHACH: Hurm.

NOTES

The above is first draft with no embellishments. I didn't check
Watchmen to make sure I had the speech patterns right. But I did
check the spelling of character names and of Rorschach's "Hurm" at
the end of his solo scene.

Much to my surprise, I have a good idea where this would go if I
were actually writing the sequel to Watchmen. Which isn't at all
likely and which I'm not pursuing. I just thought my nap-spawned
scenes were kind of cool and decided to share them with my bloggy
thing readers. I hope you enjoyed them.

Thanks for spending a part of your day with me. I'll be back
tomorrow with more stuff.

© 2012 Tony Isabella

3 comments:

  1. If you were to go ahead and write this, I would buy it. Just sayin...

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  2. Of course, you could always take the "Numbers Filed Off" approach, where you transparently base your own characters on existing ones. But that never works.

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  3. I really don't want to see a Watchmen sequel — with the possible exception of one created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Even then, I'm conflicted. A nifty concession prize, though, would be — since Moore almost certainly isn't going to be writing any more Watchmen — a Gibbons adaptation into a comics story of the material in the Watchmen "module" created with Moore's blessing for Mayfair's DC Heroes Role-Playing Game.
    All that said, if DC were to go ahead and publish a Watchmen sequel, especially an actual sequel as opposed to material set in the Watchmen universe before the actual miniseries, I'd like to see a bunch of varied creative teams produce sequels, plural, each with their own take on what happened next, coordinated by a single editor perhaps but otherwise unrelated to one another, ideally even contradictory.
    You may as unlikely to be tapped for such a project by the current DC regime as Moore would be to accept such an assignment, Tony, but I'd certainly be interested in reading your take based on the above.

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