End of Watch

The author uses Hodges and Brady to explore contrasting attitudes to Death and Mortality. For Hodges, his role as a police detective is more important than life itself, particularly since he is trying to save the lives of hundreds or thousands of young people. Service to others gives his life meaning, and he therefore transcends mortality through acts of service while alive—his death is meaningless to him because his life has been meaningful. For Brady, on the other hand, his life has caused nothing but pain for others, and so he seeks to spread his pain far and wide as he manipulates the connection between Social Contagion and Identity.

In Book 1, Mr. Mercedes, Hodges lost his sense of identity when he retired from his role as a “Knight of the Badge and Gun” (21). The loss of that identity was a symbolic death, which caused a deep depression and led him to contemplate suicide. He resolved his conflict and re-shaped his identity by resuming his pursuit of his last case—the one he never closed. Finding closure, he moved on to a new role as a part-time detective and mentor to a new generation (Holly). He found a new identity (life) by uniting past and future, and his life only has meaning in this service profession. In End of Watch, Hodges again chooses meaning over mortality when he abandons his cancer treatment and instead serves the greater good in pursuit of Brady.

For Hodges, death is a lesser threat than losing his identity as a detective. Other people’s safety is worth more than his own mortality. Once Hodges completes his last job, the meaning for Hodges’s life has also ended. The line “End of Watch” (493) on his tombstone signifies not just death but permission to rest. Much as his friends miss him, Hodges finishes his life with a sense of having fulfilled his chosen purpose.

Where Hodges treats death as undesirable but unavoidable, Brady refuses to accept his own mortality because his life has had little meaning and served only to cause others pain. Brady believes (or tells himself) that he fought his way back from catatonia (symbolic death) by willpower and his own genius. Brady’s hubris leads him to believe himself to be master of death. Brady treats death as a toy. His biggest thrill is manipulating people into violating one of the deepest impulses of human nature, the instinct for self-preservation. His manipulation of others gives him the illusion of power, yet his own death is painful for him—he has his choices taken from him at the end of his life, which is a fitting irony for someone who attempted to escape death throughout the novels.

Brady and Hodges both die, but their different attitudes about death bring them to different ends. Brady, who used death as a toll for the pleasure of seeing other people’s pain, dies an excruciating death in the cold, surrounded by triumphant enemies. Having engineered so many suicides, he finally takes his own life. Hodges, having faithfully served his watch, spends his last months surrounded by people who love him. Hodges’s choices answer the question, “What makes life worth dying?”, and the answer appears to be duty and love.

Brady is fixated on causing others pain because his own life has lacked the meaning Hodges’s has had. He spreads his sorrow to derive meaning and assume power and control over his sense of identity, but his ultimate failure reveals this strategy as ultimately without merit. Brady’s methods of spreading his anguish through society is not new territory; the concept of social contagion was noted as early as Charles Mackay’s 1841 book entitled Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. The book references economic bubbles like the “tulip mania” of the 1630s in which Dutch traders could fetch a sum equivalent to 12 acres of land for a single tulip bulb, social catastrophes like the “witch mania” that gripped Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries and resulted in thousands of deaths, and philosophical fools’ errands like alchemy.

Social contagion, especially the spread of suicidal ideation, is central to Brady Hartsfield’s plan. Brady directly targets the teenagers he originally intended to kill in his failed attack on the concert in Book 1, but he uses the principle of social contagion to reach a wide swath of other people as well. Isabelle’s initial reaction to being told about the zeetheend.com website is to say that such sites sometimes encourage a few people to act on suicidal ideation, but they are mostly harmless and not a police matter. She is slow to understand the effect of Brady’s subliminal messaging. Brady knows about the principle of social contagion and anticipates that the more deaths are reported on the internet and news media, the more people will be prompted to imitate, which is indeed the case. Even the Zappit deaths trigger more deaths in people who haven’t been exposed to Zappits or the website. Hodges, Holly, and Jerome also discuss the way that self-harm tends to spread.

Brady’s targeting of the girls who attended the concert strikes at an already vulnerable group. These girls are in a transitionary phase in their life, navigating the complexities of growing up. Moving between childhood and adulthood, they lack a solid sense of identity, drawing parallels with Brady himself, who can only derive his sense of identity by spreading pain to others. Barbara, another young woman, already feels some anxiety surrounding race and peer acceptance as she grapples with the challenges of adolescence and reconciling her race with other aspects of her identity. Brady has an instinct for identifying such negative feelings and increasing them, which is why Barbara becomes susceptible to Brady’s manipulation.

Sensitive to the issue of social transmission, the author makes a point of including the number of the National Suicide Hotline both in the text and the Afterward. Just as importantly, through the characters’ discussion of social contagion, the author provides a version of talk therapy.