If the revelations in last night’s episode of Heroes about the master plan of Linderman, the casino owner played by Malcolm McDowell, seemed a bit familiar to you, you may be a comic book fan…or maybe even just inspired by Time book critics to read Watchmen, the graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. You see, just as the super-powered billionaire Linderman is plotting to set off an explosion that will kill about half of New York City in order to bind humanity together towards a common cause, so too did super-powered billionaire Ozymandias set off an explosion in midtown Manhattan, convincing the world that aliens had invaded so the U.S. and the Soviet Union would put the Cold War on hold. Granted, the details diverge—the explosion in Watchmen isn’t that big; the one in Heroes is caused by a person—but the essential plot elements line up neatly. Of course, it could be seen as a circle coming back to its point of origin: Moore famously borrowed his plot twist from an old episode of The Outer Limits.
And I guess I should have written this up when I first thought of it last night: my fellow geeks at New York also noticed the matchup, adding another odd detail about how early drafts of a Watchmen screenplay were going to attribute the explosion to a radioactive man.
(Trouble reading the comic book panel? One of my favorite lines of dialogue from the series: “‘Do it?’ Dan, I’m not a Republic serial villain. Do you seriously think I’d explain my masterstroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome? I did it thirty-five minutes ago.”)