A mishmash of abject nonsense about global elite cabals, deep state operatives, and pedophilic child-sex traffickers who consume babies' fear for its rejuvenating power, QAnon's belief system is so absurd that it would be laughable if it wasn't so popular—and thus so dangerous.

Shot over the past three years, Cullen Hoback's excellent Q: Into the Storm (March 21 on HBO) is a complex story about free speech, social media, anti-establishment fury, white nationalist intolerance, crackpot fantasy, and anarchist villainy, all of which contributed to the rise of the infamous conspiracy theory, which during Donald Trump's presidency took hold of factions of the GOP, and helped fuel the insurrectionist January 6 Capitol riots. Part on-the-ground journalistic exposé, part sociological study of corrosive internet culture, and part whodunit, the six-part affair shines a spotlight on one of the darkest corners of contemporary American life.

[Spoilers Follow]

What it locates in that gloom, among other things, is the apparent identity of Q himself: Ron Watkins.

Hoback's docuseries focuses on a collection of out-there individuals, beginning—in the premiere's opening scene—with Watkins, the administrator of 8chan, an everything-goes message board that was owned by his father Jim Watkins, and hosted on servers located (as Jim himself was) in Manila. Jim made money via a pig farm, local retail shops, and by hosting websites in places like the Philippines, where they weren't beholden to other nations' laws. One of those platforms was 8chan (now 8kun), which Jim purchased from Fredrick Brennan, a smart, talkative young disabled man who created the site when he was 19 years old before selling it to Jim, who promptly hired Fredrick as its maiden administrator and relocated him to Manila.