Season 1, Episode 3: ‘She Was Killed by Space Junk’

When searching for precedent on the TV “remix” of “Watchmen,” which tells an original story that nonetheless heavily references the source material, a good point of comparison is the FX series “Fargo,” Noah Hawley’s twist on the 1995 Coen brothers thriller. Both shows take place in the same fictional universe as the story that inspired them, cherry-picking bits of mythology while lifting certain visual and thematic ideas wholesale and planting Easter eggs for hard-core fans. The danger to this approach, which has affected “Fargo” at times, is that the show can devolve into shallow pastiche, reverberating like a tinny cover version of a superior work of art.

The comparison seems to have crossed Damon Lindelof’s mind, too, because he has cast Jean Smart as Laurie Blake, a.k.a. the second Silk Spectre, in a turn that is not far removed from the vicious matriarch she played on the second season of “Fargo.” The two characters are on opposite sides of the law: As Floyd Gerhardt in “Fargo,” Smart played a woman who takes control of the North Dakota crime family her debilitated husband operated for years and shrewdly asserts power at its most vulnerable time. Laurie is one of the “good guys” on “Watchmen” — though she would be the first to attach a Mars-size asterisk to that designation — but she is more than willing to ignore protocol and follow through on deep-seated instinct for violence. She may be fighting to put down masked vigilantes, but that doesn’t liberate her from her own past as one of them.

Lindelof’s determination to update “Watchmen” in order to address new, more contemporary political ills has given it plenty of separation from the source so far, and yet there’s a closeness to it that distinguishes it from the TV version of “Fargo,” too. The shared-universe idea isn’t clever window-dressing in “Watchmen”; it is actively and increasingly important in explaining how this alternate reality came to pass and what role Alan Moore’s original characters still have to play. One of the thrilling aspects of Smart’s performance as Laurie Blake is how her past experiences have transformed her understanding of heroism and justice, and have motivated her to try another path.

The Laurie Blake of Moore and Gibbons’s book welcomed the opportunity to retire after the passage of the Keene Act of 1977, which outlawed “costumed adventuring.” But in the present day, when another Keene is using the crime issue to support his political ambitions, she’s on the side of the law. (To the extent that she cares to be, mind.)