Wednesday, November 07, 2007
I Did It Thirty-Five Minutes Ago
Apologies to Americans and Torrenters, but I'm watching Heroes on BBC Three, so I'm a bit behind you lot. So this is unlikely to be a ground-breaking bit of analysis to you, but I have to tell someone, as it meant nothing to Meg, as she's never read Watchmen.
But my word, the Heroes people have. We found out tonight that Linderman, the shadowy yet successful businessman, and former member of a previous generation's superhero group, wants to save the world by uniting it in a time of crisis, a crisis he's not planned exactly, but certainly knows about, a crisis that will kill half of New York City.
When the most powerful character so far turned out to be an obsessive son of a watchmaker, I thought "ooh, a nod to Watchmen" but this is full blown homage. The creator of the show says he doesn't know much about comics, and any similarities are just coincidence. I call shenanigans on that.
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I've been watching 'Heroes' the after the fact way too, and have been calling 'Watchmen' quite a bit. I haven't been using kind words like 'homage' though:) Last night's was pretty shameless.
ReplyDeleteI'm still hoping the 'Watchmen' film doesn't happen, but if it does it'll probably be seen as the rip-off, sorry, homage.
The creator might not read comics but he does work with a lot of people who certainly have.
I seem to remember the "not having read comics" thing showed up in interviews early on, so it had less to do with the show as it developed as it had to do with the way it was conceived. (There were some comments by JMS at the time, noting the similarities to Rising Stars, which I think is probably closer to Heroes than Watchmen.)
ReplyDeleteThe finale might have been nicked from Watchmen (though either Moore nicked it from The Outer Limits, or it's possible for different people to come up with similar ideas independently).
The son of a watchmaker thing seems like more of a coincidence, since it's not an unobvious idea, given the villains M.O.
So, I could be wrong, but I'd say you're probably closer to being right in relation to the finale than you are with Silar. (Not trying to defend the show, since I'm not a fan, btw. Or a hater. Just haven't seen past the first half of the first season, since my TV watching time goes to Galactica and Friday Night Lights.)