This article contains spoilers for Watchmen Season 1, Episode 6.

At the start of Watchmen Episode 6, Agent Laurie Blake leans in closely to get through to a hazy Angela Abar. Portrayed masterfully by Regina King, Abar has just ingested a lethal dose of Nostalgia, and she is close to slipping into a coma.

You shouldnt have swallowed your grandfathers pills, Angela, Blake says, before explaining how the capsules work. Nostalgia was intended for the elderly and people with dementia. Her grandfathers memories had been harvested and turned into pill form. With these edible memories, he would never forget his past and would pass the memories on to his descendants.

Who wants to be in the present when you can live in the past? Blake (Jean Smart) asks incredulously and, perhaps, rhetorically. For Abar, living in the past means reliving several life-altering events experienced by her grandfather Will Reeves (Louis Gossett Jr.): the horrors of racial terror, white supremacy in the police force, the abandonment of family and a near-death encounter. For the Watchmen audience, it also means being transported back in time to finally see the great reveal, one that many fans saw coming. Reeves is Hooded Justice, a Black superhero who assaults and kills criminals, racists and rogue police officers in the streets of New York City. Abar is continuing her grandfathers crime-fighting legacy and she didnt even know it.

Watchmen has asked a lot of its viewers to parse through storylines that leave questions unanswered, to relive traumatic moments from our nations history, to confront racism in the guise of a superhero series. In doing so, the HBO show treats white supremacy as a villain of a not-so-distant past, one embedded in present-day institutions and familial histories that inform our day-to-day lives. Sundays episode, in particular, is a brilliant and timely look at how generations of Americans have confronted this countrys ugly history with racism and how Black families today have been affected by the racial terror of generations past.

The series reimagines the 1986 graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Where the protagonists of that iteration fought against the threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, showrunner Damon Lindelof and executive producer Nicole Kassell turned the focus of this version to race. That backdrop was immediately clear in the premiere, in which Lindelof and Kassell re-staged the Tulsa Race Massacre, when hundreds of Black residents were killed in 1921 by white mobs in the Greenwood neighborhood, a bustling Black community. The scene introduced millions of viewers to the tragedy.

To me, Watchmen is a story about America, and its about self-proclaimed heroes fighting an intangible enemy that is almost impossible to defeat, Lindelof wrote on Instagram. In the 80s, that enemy was the pervasive threat of nuclear Armageddon between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. In 2019, that enemy is the long overdue reckoning with our countrys camouflaged history of white supremacy.

Episode 6, titled The Extraordinary Being, is rendered in mostly black and white. Under the influence of Nostalgia, Abar is first transported to 1938, when her grandfather was inducted into the New York Police Department as one of the few Black officers on the force. Several of his fellow officers are members of Cyclops, a KKK conspiracy group, who flash an OK sign reminiscent of the salute for present-day white supremacists. Reeves arrests a white man named Fred for setting a Jewish delicatessen on fire, only to find that his white colleagues later released him. The white officers quickly realize Reeves is on a mission to call out wrongdoings on the force.