I'm embarrassed to say that I've gotten dreadfully behind on Heroes, and am now rushing to catch up before Christopher Eccleston -- the first new Doctor Who! -- appears next week as a guest Hero when the show returns from its short hiatus. And a friend who hadn't seen the show at all is catching up with me. As we were watching the episode in which time-traveling Hiro first witnesses the future nuking of New York (my second viewing of that episode, since I graciously agreed to rewatch with my pal those installments she had not seen), I was suddenly struck by the fact that two of the most intriguing new shows of the season feature the great fear of my generation's childhood coming to pass: a nuclear mushroom cloud billowing into existence.

The other show is Jericho, which reminds us in the 'previously-on' recap that opens every episode that the series began with the nuking of Denver, distant enough to allow the town to escape immediate damage, but close enough to let its citizens see that terrifying cloud. (You may remember that I wrote rather disparagingly about Jericho back in the fall. The show took a dramatic turn for the better almost immediately after I posted that, and I'll have a lot more to say about it when it returns in February.)

Other cities have been nuked in the alternate universe of Jericho, but they happened offscreen -- we haven't seen them. And I really think the key moment of dreadfulness, the one that lingers and lends both shows desperate urgency, is the actually witnessing, by characters we can identify with, of an actual bomb actually detonating. On Jericho, it's a little kid, jaw dropping open at the incomprehensible horror of what he's seeing, and that kid is us, as little kids, convinced we were going to die in a nuclear war, as so many Generation Xers say they felt as children in the 1960s and '70s, and as was drilled into us with movies like The Day After. Here is the certainty come to pass, as we knew it would. With Heroes, it's Hiro's eyes we see through, and he is the comic-book-loving, science-fiction-quoting geek so many of us have become today ... and someone still hopeful that his vision of a nightmare can be averted. Through Hiro comes a little taste of the relief that the fall of the Soviet Union brought us, that nuclear armageddon had been averted and we could breath easy. The success of Hiro's quest is not assured, of course -- New York still might get nuked -- but it hasn't happened yet.

And then Jack Bauer watched, in numb, slack-jawed horror, as a mushroom cloud rose over Los Angeles in the opening hours of 24. Two, as they say, is a coincidence, but three is a trend, and here it is: nukes are back in the cultural zeitgeist, and within the space of a few months, we've gone from childhood nightmares to an adult sense of relief ... and then seeing that relief turn out to be a false one. Unlike with Jericho, in which the bombs are past, they continue to loom as a threat on 24 -- there's four more suitcase nukes loose in L.A., apparently. There's no picking up the pieces and moving on here: the menace is ongoing.

Yesterday, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists announced that it has moved its Doomsday Clock, which measures how much danger the world is in from nuclear annihilation (and now also measuring to a lesser degree the danger from global warming), closer to midnight. I guess they watched 24, too.

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