Spike Lee’s documentary NYC Epicenters 9/11 → 2021 ½ was, when I watched it via preview links sent to me by HBO, eight hours long in total. Seven-and-a-half of those hours were, I felt, an exuberant, maximalist, mad rush of a love letter to New York from one of the city’s greatest artists.

I don’t know how long the finished version will be. The fourth episode is now being reedited in advance of its airing on September 11; it has been pulled from HBO’s press screeners app, and Lee sent a note via publicists to journalists that read, in part, “I Respectfully Ask You To Hold Your Judgement Until You See The FINAL CUT.” While I personally hold Lee and his work in extremely high esteem (I gave Chi-Raq five stars!), this incident feels notable enough to me to disregard his request.

At around the 75-minute mark of the episode’s original cut, the film’s panopticon approach to the city’s twin crises of COVID and terrorism went down an unusual rabbit hole. As first noted in an interview in the The New York Times, then in a pointed column in Slate, the initial cut of Epicenters didn’t merely touch upon conspiracy mongers and so-called 9/11 truthers—it exalted them.

If someone wanted to be generous, they could maybe say Lee intended to “show both sides” by including the conspiracists’ perspective. But this would be a fib. The purpose of the film’s 30-minute detour was to get viewers in the grip of the “jet fuel doesn’t melt steel beams” narrative—to see the group Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth as principled warriors, and join their public push for a congressional reexamination of 9/11.

In the original cut, Lee uses all his extraordinary directorial panache to achieve this. For starters, the segment comes soon after another sequence in which first responders, led by tough-as-nails Noo Yawka John Feal, is forced to go down to Washington to fight for the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act. With commentary from Jon Stewart, who has long used his invective to fight for first responders, and Senator Chuck Schumer in hoppin’-mad mode, this section really does anger-up the blood—paving the way for the next section, where people accuse the Powers That Be of creating barriers to righteousness.

Earlier in the episode, we meet the surviving family of a young man who died in the towers. As Lee does time and again with anyone remembering a loved one during this project, he then slams the brakes on the narrative to say, hold up, tell me something about this person you lost. (Now is a good time to reiterate that most of what I watched was quite extraordinary.)

We learn about Bobby McIlvaine, one of the few undergraduates at Princeton University who took Toni Morrison’s graduate-level class. We read a letter Morrison wrote to his family when she learned he was “among the missing.” We’re totally in love with this kid and ache for his parents. Then, after a lengthy stretch in which many of the fringe architects argue that the towers actually came down because of a controlled demolition, Bobby’s father comes back to say that he is convinced his son was actually killed by a clandestine explosion. Who wants to be the one to disagree with that guy?

The primary voice demanding “9/11 Truth” in the original cut is Richard Gage, and in Lee’s film, he does not look like a nut. He’s a sharp, serious man in a suit, and he knows how to behave on camera. Still, as the Slate article notes, Gage is “responsible for peddling some of the most pernicious and long-running lies about the 9/11 attacks;” the story argues that much of his rhetoric is just one small step away from typical 4chan-level anti-Semitism.

In the original version of the film, we see footage of buildings on fire that don’t come down, then controlled implosions that, on the surface, certainly look similar to what happened at the World Trade Center. It all zooms by rather quickly, but the images are striking. Other members of Gage’s group appear, and are similarly eloquent. (Only demolitions expert Tom Sullivan has the Dr. Johnny Fever look you’d expect from a conspiracy theory guy.) When Gage shares that his devotion to his cause cost him his marriage, and Lee compares Gage to Richard Dreyfuss’s character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (then cuts to that film’s most emotionally charged scene), you’re primed to feel bad for him.

There’s no mention, meanwhile, that journalists have been debunking 9/11 conspiracies since at least 2005.

For “both sides” bona fides, Lee instead turns to Shyam Sunder, who led a study for National Institute of Standards and Technology that tore down the conspiracy claims that Gage and his pals bandy about—even the so-called smoking gun of WTC 7. The problem—and one can hardly fault Lee here—is this: Comparatively, Sunder is an absolute bore. I did not even realize, until very far into this 30-minute sequence, that his whole purpose is to provide a counterpoint to what Gage and his group are saying, as his monotone was going in one ear and out the other.

Maybe that’s just because I’m an idiot; I’ll take that hit. But if Sunder’s contrasting message didn’t land with me, that means it probably wouldn’t have landed with a lot of other people either. Indeed, when Sunder ends one of his statements, he asks Lee if it answers his questions. The director laughs, responding, “no, not really.”

Luckily, Lee is hard at work right now cooking up a new version of this episode. It’s unknown what of this conspiracy talk will remain, if any of it. But still, it’s terrifying to think how close HBO was to broadcasting the original version on such a wide platform. For just one inkling of where we could have gone, here’s Slate’s Jordan Weissmann showing what happened when he merely shared his colleague’s work.

What’s most striking about this debacle is how aware the rest of Lee’s movie seems to be of the times we live in now, and how promoting fringe ideas isn’t as harmless as it may have once been.

The documentary’s first episode focuses on how New York City responded to COVID. When Waka Flocka Flame, early in the pandemic, is shown in a radio studio saying, “minorities can’t catch” the virus, Van Jones is there to contrast him, saying that such conspiracy falsehoods “killed more minorities than the KKK.”

The second episode segues into the summer of 2020’s national referendum on racial injustice after George Floyd’s death. It includes a clip of Donald Trump condemning hatred and violence on, as he later put it, “many sides” after the 2017 white nationalist protests in Charlottesville. “You also had people that were very fine people,” says “Agent Orange” (as Lee and Busta Rhymes call him), over images of David Duke and other neo-Nazis parading in the streets.

There is also footage of the January 6 insurrection, and clips of frothing rants by QAnon lunatics. It is perplexing that Lee could see the dangers of conspiracy theories in one instance, yet seem so eager to share similarly dangerous conjectures in the next. Then again, Lee was fairly blunt in his New York Times interview: “I mean, I got questions. And I hope that maybe the legacy of this documentary is that Congress holds a hearing, a congressional hearing about 9/11,” he said, before adding, “people going to make up their own mind. My approach is put the information in the movie and let people decide for themselves.”

Episode three rewinds 20 years, for a step-by-step analysis of September 11, 2001. For a New Yorker like me who can still recall the putrid, unnatural smell of the city at that time, this footage again brought back an array of long-buried emotions. There are moments in the series, like that one, that I am eager for other people to watch. A marvelous section details the seldom discussed boat evacuation of Lower Manhattan, which was “bigger than Dunkirk.” There’s the important reminder that many people who “looked Middle Eastern,” particularly Sikhs with their visible turbans, were violently and senselessly attacked after 9/11. Rosie Perez tells a harrowing story of deescalating a bias crime in a bodega.

Naturally, Lee can’t fit everything here, not even in a film that runs eight hours. There’s nothing in the documentary, for instance, about the absurd conspiracy theory that Jews were all warned not to go to work on September 11. (See Marc Levin’s film Protocols of Zion for more on that.) So it’s a little weird to see what did get a half hour of attention.

Or, I guess I should say, almost got it, before early critics said something. It is to Lee’s credit that he did not tell HBO it’s his way or bust, and that he is adjusting the fourth episode at all. I’ll be tuning in to see the new version—not just out of editorial curiosity, but because this project remains, in total, a remarkable piece of work.

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