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The Lone Gunmen predict World Trade Center attacks

by ccManager
Commentary summary:
This pilot episode of The Lone Gunmen aired on March 4, 2001

Text Commentary:

In this edited montage of scenes from the pilot episode of The Lone Gunmen, a government conspiracy is revealed, involving plans to remotely hijack a plane and fly it into the World Trade Center towers in New York. The plot is ultimately foiled by the three protagonists of the X-Files spinoff series, with help from an enigmatic female hacker named Yves Adele Harlow (an anagram for Lee Harvey Oswald) using a super-fast processor called an Octium 4. The Octium 4 is a transparent reference to Intel's Pentium 4 processor, which was  introduced by Intel on November 20, 2000, just a few months prior to the pilot's airing. In this episode, the Octium 4 chip, which bears the slogan "Octium Inside," is suspected of compromising the security of its users by automatically transmitting data back to its manufacturer via an integrated modem. Nonetheless, the chip proves useful for breaking the encrypted telemetry being used by the terrorists to control the plane, with the goal of motivating additional arms manufacturing in a post-cold war economy. Despite the remarkable prescience and irony present in this episode (of an otherwise unremarkable and disappointing series), The Lone Gunmen was cancelled by Fox after just one season on the air.


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Copyright 2010, by the Contributing Authors. Cite/attribute Resource. ccManager. (2012, January 03). The Lone Gunmen predict World Trade Center attacks. Retrieved May 21, 2012, from Critical Commons Web site: http://criticalcommons.org/Members/ccManager/commentaries/the-lone-gunmen-predict-world-trade-center-attacks. This work is licensed under a No Copyright; No Rights Reserved.