Fox, and there rickety old overlord Rupert Murdoch, have been responsible for a lot of despicable things in their time - the phone hacking scandal, their news channel's shaky grip on reality, Dads - but...well, actually, this isn't any worse than that. It is pretty weird though, and the "it" in that sentence is the not one but two "foreshadowings" that Fox TV shows made to the 9/11 attacks, years before they actually happened. The shows in question? The Lone Gunmen, a short-lived X-Files spin-off which obviously dealt in conspiracies on a weekly basis, and The Simpsons, which dealt in conspiracies the one week they had the X-Files crossover. The Simpsons' part in comes from the 1997 episode "The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson" and mainly focuses on the admittedly creepy coincidence of the magazine cover pictured above. Easy to pass off, right? WRONG! Because not long after the pilot episode of The Lone Gunmen aired, with a plotline that focussed around, you guessed it, an attempt to crash a plane into the Twin Towers! An attempt orchestrated by the government and made to look like a terrorist attack, no less! So how does conspiracy come into it? Well, that's a little trickier. If you want to look a little deeper than mere coincidence - because The Simpsons has also predicted everything from a Rolling Stones tour to Siegfried and/or Roy getting mauled by a tiger - and believe instead that Fox knew that 9/11 was going to happen, then congratulations! You could be one of the nuts who insists these were actually a way of preparing us for such attacks to happen. Since we'd already seen all the clues on TV, we wouldn't think they were particularly out of the ordinary, with the government conspiracy in The Lone Gunmen acting as a sort of double-bluff. The government couldn't be behind this! That only happens on unpopular, cancelled TV shows! Look out, though, because apparently The Simpsons has been warning of the next big terrorist attack on the US. Hopefully it won't ruin the Tupac/Elvis comeback tour.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
