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'Watchmen' Season 1: Who is Will Reeves? Here's what we know so far

Will Reeves has been a mystery central to the series right from the start, and the next episode of 'Watchmen' promises some answers.

The mysteries of HBO’s ‘Watchmen’ unravel slowly, and one of the show’s biggest is just who Will Reeves (Louis Gosset Jr), the self-alleged murderer of Judd Crawford (Don Johnson). His history and connections have been slowly picked apart over the course of the show, as well as his enigmatic alliance with Lady Trieu (Hong Chau). Last episode, Angela Abar (Regina King) swallowed a collection of his memories, condensed into pill form, and the promo for the next episode suggests that we will finally be unraveling the mystery of who Will Reeves is. 

What we know

As Angela investigates Will Reeves’ connection to Judd Crawford’s murders, she has uncovered things about his past that we can say for certain are true. For starters, Will born in 1914, and was a child during the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. The show opens with that very massacre, in fact. In that flashback, we learn that young Will Reeves was deeply inspired by the exploits of ‘The Black Marshall’ - a masked black bounty hunter named Bass Reeves who operated in the late 1800s. While being smuggled out of Tulsa because of the massacre, the wagon transporting Will was hit by a bomb, leaving only Will and a small as survivors.

We know that Will is Angela’s paternal grandfather, though her parents have never talked of him before. Agent Laurie Blake (Jean Smart) has confirmed that he was a cop in the 1950s. We also know that he is aligned with Lady Trieu and is planning something big. Additionally, he has been faking his disability with a wheelchair and can walk just fine, despite his advanced age.

What the promo shows us

In the promo, Angela’s consumption of Will’s Nostalgia pills has her living his memories. We see Will’s life as a cop. There’s a flashback to ‘The Black Marshall’ removing his hood, from the film ‘Trust in the Law.’ We also see a woman telling him that he’s holding a lot of anger inside, although he denies it.

Watch the promo below:

What we can speculate

It’s safe to say that Will Reeves has a big part to play in the events to come. Whether or not he was actually responsible for the death of Judd Crawford remains to be seen, but he does know more than he’s revealed so far. What’s more, an alliance with Lady Trieu puts him in a very influential position, though to what end is unclear. 

Many fans have theorized that he was The Hooded Justice, one of America’s first masked superheroes, whose identity was never revealed. In the ‘Watchmen’ universe, the semi-fictional documentary, ‘American Hero Story: Minutemen’ theorizes that the first Hooded Justice was a circus strongman named Rolf Muller. Given that the Hooded Justice wore a costume that covered him completely from head to toe, though, it could have been anyone under the mask. Will Reeves is the right age, and was in the right place, not to mention his greatest inspiration was a hooded arbiter of the law. 

Will Reeves, under interrogation, said he could be Doctor Manhattan. Angela dismisses this out of hand, but given that the upper limits of Doctor Manhattan’s powerset isn’t known, this could, technically, be possible, though it is extremely unlikely. 

For now, Will Reeves remains largely a mystery, though we can expect to see some answers when the next episode of ‘Watchmen’ airs November 24, on HBO.