Before we review The Watch, Let’s talk about spoilers.
These days it is all but impossible to discuss the geektastic entertainment we love without sending out alarm bells. When I was a kid, I vividly remember seeing a movie like Jurassic Park, and the next day everyone clamored to discuss the film on the playground. They wanted to know who lived and who died, arguing about minuscule plot points or what we thought we saw.
Then the internet hit big in the late ’90s and things changed, spoilers began being a big concern.
Now we are well-entrenched in geek culture and everything is twisty-turny so we avoid spoilers to the point where someone wants to shout their love of a thing from the rooftops only to hear someone diving for cover, shrieking they don’t want to know the slightest thing about something they may watch someday. There is not much that is as depressing as seeing someone about to nerd out about something deflating in defeat.
Personally, I love it when people share their favorite parts of media that I haven’t experienced, and it doesn’t affect my enjoyment of said media at all.
Because I miss the playground excitement of sharing things, I won’t be avoiding spoilers for the series from here on out. I won’t recap the whole episode or ruin the big denouement, but I don’t plan to hide a character that pops up to surprise fans or if someone wakes up dead.
That tends to happen a lot in Discworld. People wake up dead (or mostly dead) quite frequently and Death has to explain how things go now that they have been shuffled off the mortal coil for the time being.
We pick up The Watch immediately where we left off – and incidentally how the first episode began – with Captain Sam Vimes talking to Death about the situation where he finds himself; Not exactly dead…yet.
Sam has tracked his old gang mate Carcer Dun down, discovering Carcer is still alive and hasn’t aged a day in 20 years. A crossbow bolt or six later, Vimes is unexpectedly alive thanks to the perfectly timed self-sacrifice of Sgt. Detritus. How a troll can be killed off by arrows is beyond me, but let’s move on.
Vimes now knows that Carcer Dun has the book and while tending to his emotional wounds, a noble dragon appears and burns a good portion of the streets of Ankh-Morpork. Vimes is charged by Lord Havelock Vetinari with finding out the source of the Dragon attack and this gives us our first peek at the magic of Discworld.
The way that the books (and series so far) handle the concept of magic sets the Discworld universe apart from most fantasy settings. Instead of it being a commodity that people can just tap into, wizards and witches are the ones to control – often poorly – the magical essences that cause havoc on the Disc.
Most people don’t want to deal with magic anyway, as it has a habit of blowing things up rather than making a rabbit disappear. Magic in Discworld more analogous to how we use electricity and wizards are typically left alone to wrangle this for the rest of the denizens.
Vimes and Co, joined by the determined and incredibly rich Lady Sybil Ramkin, have decided to do some actual investigation after the streets are set ablaze. They follow the leads to Unseen University, giving us our first meeting with The Librarian, a wizard turned into an orangutan, who ends up assisting with the reveal of this section of the mystery. There we see our MacGuffin switch from the book to a key and learn the current eventual goal of the antagonists.
We get a bit more time with Angua and Cheery of The Watch thankfully, fleshing out their characters a bit more. The camera does step back from Vimes a bit to do so and it feels refreshing. Richard Dormer as Vimes has an incredibly intense presence that tends to overshadow the more introverted Angua and Cheery characters when they share the scene.
We still don’t get to see Angua in her true full Werewolf form, but with 8 episodes to go, I expect we will get at least one major transformation scene. Surprisingly this comedy really offered some genuine emotion between Cheery and Angua, and it caught me off-guard in a good way.
There are some things that don’t work for me, such as the appearance of The Librarian, as well as leaning back into Vimes’ mostly unchecked alcoholism. It serves the story but we get the point. Let’s move on. The alcoholism isn’t played for chuckles as much as in the first episode so that gives me hope for the future.
The series has sold me so far, and I truly hope we dive deeper into the characters and expand the mysteries beyond this one situation while we explore the visual treat that is Ankh-Morpork.
As this episode of The Watch wound down, I realized I had recognized some lines and plot points directly from the books, and something clicked. It makes sense that this is taking aspects from many parts of the Discworld mythos and adapting them in a new way in 2021 rather than being a direct adaptation of the stories we know.
Since we all know how hard, if not impossible it is to recreate the books on the screen, it makes sense to go all out with the changes. (Hogfather and The Color Of Magic BBC productions excluded)
Once you are free from the burden of being strictly chained to the page, I say take it as far as you want.
We are getting to play in a new sandbox with familiar concepts, and I look forward to seeing how far BBC America can go and how many risks they are willing to take without completely abandoning the sandbox itself.
I look forward to playing in this sandbox next week. Join me, won’t you?
