How Watchmen Used Mesmerism to Solve a Major Mystery Around Judd and Will

By | November 25, 2019

Spoiler alert: the following article contains spoilers for Watchmen‘s sixth episode. Do not continue reading if you haven’t watched yet!


  • The concept of Mesmerism was a key to revealing Watchmen‘s biggest mystery yet.
  • It tied in, also, with Will’s memories of 1938.
  • Heading to its stretch run, Watchmen is about to start paying off in a big way.

    As Watchmen‘s stunning sixth episode, “An Extraordinary Being,” comes to a close, we’ve learned a lot about Will Reeves. First, well, he’s Hooded Justice. There’s that. We learn his past, his history, his motivations; we learn a whole lot. But what we don’t learn—until the very end of the episode, that is—is how this 105-year-old, wheelchair-bound man managed to get a middle-aged police chief to kill himself, hanging himself from a tree. But then we learn, in Will’s memory, of a projector-based plot, centered on mesmerism, and everything begins to make sense.

    In Will’s memory, the ‘vast and insidious conspiracy’ that he mentioned back in the show’s second episode turns out to also be the same phrasing that he used when discovering a similarly-malicious KKK plot back in 1938. As this plot went, the KKK was using projectors, and a form of hypnosis known as ‘Mesmerism’ to turn black people against one another—one scene in particular saw a woman hypnotized, against her will, to attack an entire theater full of African-Americans.

    Will figures this out through a series of investigative pursuits, including his seeing someone reading a fictional book on the concept of Mesmerism (titled Mesmerism for the Masses; see image below). As he gets revenge on the people who hung him from a tree and treated him less than human, he sees someone recording a video with their conspiracy’s intent. As he lights the KKK’s compound on fire and makes his escape, he makes sure to take one projector for himself, surely learning how to master the concept of Mesmerism for his own use.

    Mesmerism, in fact, is a real psychological method, also known as Animal Magnetism. It was developed by an 18th century psychologist named Franz Mesmer, and involves taking over someone or something using a trance state; where traditional hypnosis would involve some sort of words, sound, or prompt (“You are getting very sleepy”), Mesmerism uses little or no words to prompt it’s trance state.

    And this concept checks out given the way the supposed Mesmerism is used within the show; the theater conspiracy that we see the racists using isn’t prompted by any specific wording or phrasing: it’s the projector that they’re using. At the end of the episode, clearly, we see that Will has mastered the concept, as he no longer even needs to use the projector to convince Judd Crawford to fall under his control; he simply uses the flashing of a strong flashlight.

    And with this control, we hear all we need to hear from Judd. What Senator Keene revealed a week ago was true—he’s been running the Kavalry and/or Klan in an attempt to keep them under control; to what degree, we have no idea. Will, in turn, tells Judd exactly what to do: “You can hang yourself now,” he says, flashing the light in his eyes. And with that, Judd gets up, and we remember what happened from there. Mystery solved.

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