2. Crooked Sheriff?
Sheriff Judd Crawford is presented as a good guy in this series premiere. He’s comforting the wife of a police officer who was shot in the line of duty. He has a warm rapport with Angela, who’s also framed to as someone to root for (although she did torture that witness, so our perception of her may shift over the course of the season). But because this is Watchmen, we’re going to find out a lot more about Judd Crawford, and most likely, not all of it is going to be pretty.
We get a couple of narrative clues that the sheriff might not be on the up-and-up. He seems reluctant to interrogate the 7th Kavalry member that Angela captures, and later, when some of the Kavalry members are escaping in their plane, Crawford risks his life and the lives of his team to shoot them out of the sky. One reason why he might have been so driven to kill them is he may have had something to hide (is he a Kavalry mole?), and he was worried they would spill the beans.
There’s also evidence in the references to the musical “Oklahoma,” which is geographically appropriate to the show’s setting, but also foreshadows that Sheriff Judd Crawford might not be the nice guy he seems to be. The villain of Oklahoma, who is also named Jud, forms a love triangle between himself, Curly (the musical’s hero), and Laury. Jud dies at the end of the musical by falling on his knife, rather than by anyone stabbing him, which further suggests that Crawford’s death by hanging is not everything it appears to be.
