This article contains frank and open discussion of Watchmen season one, episode six, titled “This Extraordinary Being.” If you haven’t caught up, now is the time to leave.

Early in his process of adapting the beloved graphic novel Watchmen for HBO, Damon Lindelof made a promise to both fans and the book’s creators, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons: He would not rewrite or unwrite anything that happened in the comic. “Those original twelve issues,” he wrote, “are our Old Testament. When the New Testament came along, it did not erase what came before it. Creation. The Garden of Eden. Abraham and Isaac. The Flood. It all happened. And so it will be with Watchmen. The Comedian died. Dan and Laurie fell in love. Ozymandias saved the world and Dr. Manhattan left it just after blowing Rorschach to pieces in the bitter cold of Antarctica. To be clear. Watchmen is canon.”

Still, that promise left Lindelof and his writers a narrow loophole that they took full advantage of in episode six. The true identity of Hooded Justice—a hero of the early Minutemen era of Watchmen—was never revealed on the page. The HBO show posits that under that hood was a justifiably angry black man, Will Reeves (Jovan Adepo/Louis Gossett Jr.), who, having had his dreams of becoming a heroic member of the police force dashed, turned to vigilante justice. This conceit, episode six director Stephen Williams says, was “part and parcel of Damon’s initial construction of the architecture of the series.” And once this intent becomes clear, the whole season—which opens in the manner of most superhero origin stories, with the death of this vigilante’s parents—starts to solidify around Angela’s (Regina King) mysterious grandfather.

Speaking with Vanity Fair before the season premiere, Lindelof tipped his hand that this slow burn of an origin story was very much on his mind: “All over the country, and all over the world, children are watching their parents get murdered in front of them. Only one of them decides to become Batman. So we have to leave the alley and start looking at other parts of his life.”

To pull off the big reveal of this episode, Lindelof turned to at least two tried and tested collaborators. For young Will, he cast Adepo, who starred as Michael Murphy in Lindelof’s The Leftovers. And to direct the episode, Lindelof tapped longtime Lost collaborator and Watchmen executive producer Williams to translate Angela’s dreamlike trip into a dazzling visual and technical feast for the eyes. The result is a bravura hour of television and a real calling card even for a veteran of the industry like Williams. Angela’s dive into her grandfather’s memories is shot as a continuous journey, with seamless transitions hidden by flashing lights or bodies crossing in front of Williams’s roving, floating camera. The director spoke with Vanity Fair about both the technical challenges of shooting “This Extraordinary Being,” as well as the personal connection he felt to the episode’s material.

How Williams Landed the Episode

Lindelof had a few options when it came to who might direct episode six, but Williams says that the decision for him to take it on happened organically: “I remember really, really early on, before a single syllable had been committed to paper by Damon and by Cord Jefferson—the cowriter of that episode—having a meeting...and experiencing an avalanche and cascade of images.” Williams says he couldn’t even begin to count the moments in this episode he connected with on a personal level: “I’m a black man in this culture, so all of it felt relevant, and all of it felt like something I could connect to.... I’ve known love, I’ve known fear, I’ve known injustice, I’ve known compassion, I’ve known kindness. I’ve known all of those things, and hopefully all of those colors exist in one form or another in Will’s journey.... By the time it was proposed to me, I was already all in.”