Twelve Years Later, I Accuse Wild Wild West of Plagiarism

Remember Wild Wild West? I'll understand if you don't. It wasn't fantastic, and hasn't been well-recorded by history. While researching a project I came across something strange involving it - but first, a synopsis.

Wild Wild West revolved around a pair of government agents desperate to stop a science villain with a devious plan: Use a bizarre steampunk contraption to attack the joining ceremony of the First Transcontinental Railroad, and then head east, laying waste to the country before finally using it to occupy Washington DC and taking over the country!

There was more to the plot, of course, with magnetic death blades and flying bicycles, but those are the broad strokes, which I thought it important to lay out before moving onto the program I recently stumbled upon.

That show? Batman (the animated series)!

Where is the line between homage and theft?

Because I think Being Human may have leapt over it.


Over the course of the third season, the king of London's vampires has been stuck in the main characters' attic, left in a daze, not able to remember who he was. There was a general agreement that he deserved to die, but between Mitchell needing to know the secret of vampire resurrection and Nina's unflagging belief in second chances, he was left alive.

This was the result:

It Seems that the Writers of Medium Watch Criminal Minds

Yes, every story has already been told, and it’s only natural to steal a good idea here or there, and most importantly, when there’s three shows on the air that deal exclusively with serial killers, there’s going to be some overlap, but last week’s episode of Medium demonstrated a basic lack of the care necessary to avoid committing outright plagiarism.

The episode concerned a fake Zodiac Killer, and the author who had written a book about him. The author is played by Marcus Giamatti, who is Paul Giamatti’s brother, and who I always confuse with Beardo from the show ‘Bones’. This aspect of the storyline is fairly close to the true story of the Zodiac case, with Giamatti playing a Graysmith type who’d spent his life tracking down a serial killer, only to have the killer die before he could confirm the man’s identity.

When the murders start up again there are only two possibilities – 1: Giamatti’s doing the killing. Or 2: His investigation was wrong, and the real killer’s still out there.

Of course, since this is an episode of Medium, we don’t have to wait around to discover the truth, they just flat out tell us immediately through one of Allison’s dreams that Giamiatti lied, and the suspect didn’t confess on his deathbed. Which means the real killer is still out there… But who could it be?