Surely that can't be a coincidence.
Of course it can. Coincidences happen all the time. Contrary to popular belief, it's extremely common for writers to come up with ideas that are accidentally similar to stuff other people have come up with. It's hard to avoid. TV shows and movies have legal departments that check character names to see if they infringe on something or are too similar to the name of a real person in the same profession as the character, and it's pretty common for character names to get changed because of such coincidental similarities (e.g.
Enterprise's Jonathan Archer needed a name change from Jackson Archer for that reason, and the TV version of
The Dresden Files changed Chicago cop Karrin Murphy's name to Connie Murphy because it turned out there was a real Chicago cop named Karen Murphy). Creators generally try
not to copy things, so contrary to popular belief, that kind of similarity is generally evidence that the creators
didn't know they were echoing something similar.
Okay, sometimes there are deliberate homages, sure. If they were named, say, Bert and Ernie, then you could safely reckon it was an homage to
It's a Wonderful Life or to
Sesame Street. But Burke and Samno? They're so minor that I doubt anyone would care enough about them to bother with such an homage. Burke is a very common name, so it's bound to crop up all over. And the other name is just similar to Samno, not identical. So I'd say it's more likely to be a coincidence.
