This article contains Watchmen episode 2 spoilers.
The first episode of Watchmen focused primarily on establishing the 2019 of its world, and making certain new characters got sufficient introductions, and as unencumbered by the legacy elements of the comic as they could possibly be. But with Watchmen episode 2, the larger history of this universe starts to get explored, primarily through an excerpt from the American Hero Story: Minutemen docudrama series.
The first episode of American Hero Story: Minutemen (it appears to be the second season of the American Hero Story show, by the way) puts the spotlight on Hooded Justice, who is canonically the first officially recognized masked vigilante adventurer in the Watchmen universe and a founding member (alongside the original Nite Owl and Silk Specter, Captain Metropolis, a young Edward “The Comedian” Blake, and others) of the Minutemen, the first superhero team.
According to Hollis Mason’s “autobiography” Under the Hood, chapters of which appear as excerpts in the original Watchmen, the first time Hooded Justice was brought to the world’s attention was when a masked man stopped a mugging in Queens, NY in 1938. But it’s the character’s second public appearance which is dramatized in the American Hero Story segment of HBO’s Watchmen.
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Here’s how it’s described in the book…
“A supermarket stickup had been prevented thanks to the intervention of ‘A tall man, built like a wrestler, who wore a black hood and cape and also wore a noose around his neck.’ This extraordinary being had crashed in through the window of the supermarket while the robbery was in progress and attacked the man responsible with such intensity and savagery that those not disabled immediately were only too willing to drop their guns and surrender.”
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They certainly got the “intensity and savagery” part right. Hooded Justice’s almost erotic love of violence is noted several times in Watchmen, so his overwhelming rage is played for maximum dramatic effect on screen here. As the story in the book goes, Hooded Justice never revealed his identity to any of his teammates, other than presumably his secret lover, Captain Metropolis. In 1955, the Minutemen were called before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee and told to reveal their identities to the US government. Hooded Justice refused, and was never seen in public again.
The American Hero Story segment opens at the theoretical end of the character’s life, when a badly decomposed body washes up on the shores of Boston with a bullet hole in its head. According to the book, this was about three months after Hooded Justice’s “retirement” in 1955. However, the body was never positively identified as Müller in the Watchmen world. That connection was drawn by right wing publication New Frontiersman in a 1956 article, paraphrased in Hollis Mason’s Under the Hood book excerpts, reproduced here:
“The author mentioned the disappearance of a well known circus strongman of the day named Rolf Müller, who had quit his job at the height of the Senate Subcommittee hearings. Three months later, a badly decomposed body that was tentatively identified as Müller’s was pulled from the sea after being washed up on the coast of Boston…The inference of the article was that Müller, whose family was East German, had gone on the run for fear of being uncovered by while the Communist witch hunts were at their most feverish. The piece also implied that Müller had probably been executed by his own Red superiors.”
While New Frontiersman isn’t presented as a reputable source of information in the world of Watchmen, there’s one thing worth noting: they tend to get their conspiracy theories fairly close to the mark. Even before HBO’s official “Peteypedia” supplemental materials for the show revealed that they published Rorschach’s journal excerpts and believed the underlying truth that Adrian Veidt was responsible for the deaths of millions in New York on Nov. 2, 1985, they had inadvertently put together a piece of the puzzle long before that. A New Frontiersman article from Oct. 31, 1985 (and “reproduced” in the Watchmen comic), three days before the giant squid event, had speculated that a number of seemingly disparate disappearances of individuals from a variety of fields were somehow connected. They were, as it turned out, all instrumental in Veidt’s plan. So perhaps their 1956 speculation on the identify of Rolf Müller shouldn’t be dismissed.
read more: Watchmen Episode 2 Review
But even that is open to interpretation depending on how deep into Watchmen lore you want to go. If the only “official canon” you want to acknowledge is the original book, then other than that bit of speculation in Under the Hood and New Frontiersman it remains unclear whether or not Müller was Hooded Justice at all, and the reasons for his death are never officially revealed. However, if you take DC’s Before Watchmen: Minutemen prequel into account (note: this writer does not, and it’s not clear if these books are canon in the world of the HBO series), another story emerges. In it, Hooded Justice (whose identity is still never revealed) is killed by the original Nite Owl, believing him to be responsible for the deaths of several children, while the actual perpetrator of those murders was Rolf Müller, a Nazi on the run who is ultimately killed by the Comedian (who had helped engineer the case of mistaken identity in the first place as revenge for the beating Hooded Justice administered to him after he raped Sally Jupiter in 1940, which led to his ouster from the Minutemen team).
DC’s Before Watchmen prequels are generally regrettable exercises, though, and even the legendary Darwyn Cooke couldn’t really make the convoluted story presented in that Minutemen story work. Still, the “Hooded Justice” narration of American Hero Story indicates that this corpse isn’t really him, which could very well be a reference to Rolf Müller and HJ not being the same person.
read more: How HBO’s Watchmen Was Brought to Life
But there’s one more detail that isn’t present in the original comic, the Before Watchmen prequels, or the American Hero Story segment on HBO. This episode opens with a “Fraulein Mueller,” fluent in English, typing a piece of German propaganda during World War I. As the text of that flier is taken directly from an actual leaflet dropped on African-American troops during the First World War in 1917, that places this episode’s opening in that year. The names “Mueller” and “Müller” are essentially interchangeable in German. If we assume that Hooded Justice was indeed Rolf Müller, and that he was in his early to mid-twenties at the time of his first adventure in 1938, this young woman could be a mother or older sister, tying his German roots to the speculation of that New Frontiersman article. In any case, there’s little to indicate that Watchmen writer and executive producer Damon Lindelof would allow anything this accidental to slip by, which means that the mystery of Hooded Justice, or perhaps a parallel to it (note that Müller’s corpse only wears one boot, much like Judd’s) will play a larger role as the season progresses.
Mike Cecchini is the Editor in Chief of Den of Geek. You can read more of his work here. Follow him on Twitter @wayoutstuff.
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