On Sunday night HBO’s Watchmen delivered what may have been its most powerful episode to date. In “This Extraordinary Being”, the series took viewers into Angela Abar’s (Regina King) past by having her experience the memories of her grandfather, Will Reeves (played as a young man in this episode by Jovan Adepo) but while the episode revealed the truth about one of the most significant heroes in the world of Watchmen — Hooded Justice — the episode also used its fictional, alternate timeline to hold up a mirror to our own, difficult past as a society. It’s that element of things that may have offered one of the most intricate and powerful references to our world in what may have been a nod to the father of sitting president Donald Trump.
In “This Extraordinary Being” Angela, having taken a full bottle of her grandfather’s memories in the form of Nostalgia pills last week, begins to experience those memories for herself. She “travels” to New York 1938 and picks up in Will’s life as a black police officer in the city at that time. While on patrol, Will crosses paths with a man who throws a Molotov cocktail into a Jewish deli. Will arrests the man — whose name is Fred — but when the white officers take Fred to be booked, they make a symbol on their forehead with their hands. The symbol, which looks eerily like the OK gesture that has been acknowledged as a hate symbol used by modern day white supremacists, ends up being the symbol of the KKK-related group that calls themselves “The Cyclops” and while that itself is interesting, what happens with Fred becomes more so.
Fred ends up released without any charges and when Will tries to find out why, he ends up kidnapped and lynched by a group of his white colleagues. They cut him down, sparing his life as a warning, but in that moment Hooded Justice is born. He later finds out what his colleagues are doing, tracking them to a clandestine meeting of the Klan/Cyclops that’s taking place in a storeroom of one Fred’s grocery store. We haven’t seen the last of Fred, though. Later in the episode, Will uncovers the Klan’s insidious plan to use mesmerism to get black people to attack one another and tracks the projector devices used for these attacks down to a warehouse belonging to “F.T. & Sons” — The “F” in the name belonging to Fred, as we soon learn.
This is where that potentially gets interesting. Watchmen never uses Fred’s last name, but we know his last name begins with a T. He owns a grocery store in New York and is associated with the Klan. It’s a series of connections that may subtly add up to a real-life figure: Fred Trump, father of Donald Trump. Here’s what we know for sure: early in his life, Fred Trump did business with his mother under the name “E. Trump & Son”. Among those business was one of New York City’s first supermarkets, known as The Trump Market. We also know that on Memorial Day in 1927, a man named Fred Trump was arrested along with six other men during a KKK riot, with all seven men in that arrest being described as wearing Klan hoods and attire. Additionally, the address given for Fred Trump at the time of the arrest is one that is associated with Donald Trump’s father.
A market owner with the initials F.T. who has Klan associations. It’s quite a parallel and while Watchmen never comes out and claims that “Fred” is Fred Trump, it’s an addition to the episode that would be fitting with how the show uses its world to explore and comment on our own society, culture and politics. This is show that opened with the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, a horrifying chapter of American history of violence against its black citizens that has gone woefully unknown on a large scale, after all. That is also what makes the Cyclops hand gesture interesting as well with its close likeness hate-oriented version of the OK gesture. It’s chilling to see, but it allows the story to draw a line from the past to the present — and hopefully give viewers a lot to consider about the future.
Watchmen airs Sundays at 9/8c on HBO.