ENTERTAINMENT | October 23rd, 2019 7:10 AM

Ever since Zack Snyder’s Watchmen hit theaters in 2009 and introduced a new audience to the gritty, hero-laden alternate reality in which the United States won the Vietnam War and Nixon served several terms as president, many fans have been itching to get another look at the grim universe. As viewers tuned in to the premier of HBO’s new Watchmen series on Sunday, they hoped to get a glimpse of what would undoubtedly be more differences between that reality and ours than could have reasonably been packed into the two-and-a-half-hour movie. However, the reality to which viewers were introduced seemed disappointingly similar to our own.

Yes, there were a few distinctions: a glimpse of Doctor Manhattan on Mars and the fact that Vietnam is the 51st state of the Union, but the contrasts end there. The rest of the first episode was a dull mirror of our mundane society: interdimensional squid storms, President Robert Redford, flamethrowing owl ship, masked men prying watch batteries into a bucket--we see these things every day. Is it too much to ask for a little creativity?

I guess we’ll just have to hope the rest of the series has some surprises for us. One glimmer of hope shone with the episode’s cliffhanger: why did that old man have a wheelchair, when we all know that wheelchairs were replaced by hoverchairs in the late 1800s?