It's all connected?
Fans say there's evidence that ties 'Lost' and 'Heroes' together, but creators don't buy it
By Joanna Weiss, Globe Staff | March 4, 2007
Across the Internet, the screen-grabbing obsessives -- the ones who deal in frame-by-frame analysis of ABC's "Lost" -- were getting in a lather about the NBC hit "Heroes." It had to do with a brief scene a few weeks ago, when Nathan Petrelli, the caddish politician who can shoot into the air like a bottle rocket, grumbled about what might happen if word got out about his powers.
Officials could "round us all up, stick us in a lab on some island in the middle of the ocean," Nathan said. And within nanoseconds, the clarion call clanged out in cyberspace: "Heroes" mentions island! It must be a reference to "Lost"!
Yes, "Lost" and "Heroes" air on different networks, tell different stories, and exist -- as "Lost" producers point out -- in totally different time frames. (The "Lost" castaways live, after all, in the fall of 2004.) But to their most devoted fans, the shows have come to represent a sort of yin and yang of serial TV, in constant battle for the title of the Mystery Show That Does It Better.
"Lost," the word goes, is deeper and more cinematic; "Heroes" is pulpier and better-paced. And the way fans sometimes talk, there seems a cosmic cyber-wish for the shows to somehow merge -- to meld into a single supernatural drama that doles out questions and answers in acceptable weekly doses.
Indeed, some seem to believe it's already happening. One fansite,
darkufo.blogspot.com, has posted pictures of a "Gannon Car Rentals" brochure, held by Hiro in "Heroes," and Hurley and Claire in "Lost." It also shows off photos of a suncatcher in the background of a trailer in "Heroes," and a similar, fleeting image from a torture video in "Lost." Some fans have noted casting coincidences: Greg Grunberg, who plays Matt Parkman on "Heroes," had a short stint as a doomed pilot on "Lost."
And on a recent Entertainment Weekly blog, Jeff "Doc" Jensen half-jokingly floated the idea that the Dharma Initiative, a fictional company in "Lost," created the super-folks who populate "Heroes." (He added, "Oh, like they would ever admit it if this were true!")
A vast conspiracy? That would be wish-fulfillment at its most geekishly appealing. So it might cause disappointment, in certain circles, to reveal that the heads of both shows claim absolute ignorance.
"Really?" said "Heroes" creator Tim Kring in a telephone interview last week, when told about the eerily-similar car-rental brochures. Then he quickly came up with the same mundane theory that "Lost" executive producer Carlton Cuse had suggested a day earlier.
Some fictional names, Cuse explained, have been cleared, for legal purposes, for use by TV studios: Oceanic Airlines, featured prominently in "Lost," also turned up in the movie "Executive Decision." So it's not such a stretch to imagine that a pamphlet for "Gannon Car Rentals," preprinted and free of legal strings, might have wound up in the hands of the "Heroes" prop department...