List of Fiction Employing Parallel Universes - Television

Television

• The Twilight Zone 1963 episode "The Parallel", was one of the earliest examples of parallel universe as a key plot element on American television.

• Dark Shadows, the 1960s fantasy/horror soap opera, introduced the concept of "parallel time" when the main character, Barnabas, witnesses unexplainable changes in a closed off part of his family's house. During one of these changes, he becomes trapped for a time in a parallel world.

• Star Trek featured the recurring mirror universe, a dark reflection of the normal universe in which the regular characters are twisted, self-serving and more than willing to resort to torture and murder to achieve their goals. The mirror universe was introduced in the original Star Trek, and it also appeared in Enterprise, but was featured most often in Deep Space Nine. Other Star Trek episodes featuring parallel universes outside the Mirror Universe include "Parallels" and "The Alternative Factor".

• Doctor Who occasionally featured parallel worlds. Examples include "Inferno" (1970), where Great Britain has been a republic since at least 1943 (the Royal Family having been executed after a military coup) and is ruled by a totalitarian regime led by a figure reminiscent of Oswald Mosley who uses the title of "the Leader". The 1980–1981 "E-space" trilogy of episodes ("Full Circle", "State of Decay", and "Warriors' Gate"). The second series of the 2005 revival of the show made frequent use of the concept beginning with "Rise of the Cybermen" and "The Age of Steel", postulating a parallel world with yet another Republic of Great Britain, Zeppelins filling the sky, and an alternate race of Cybermen are created. Since the Time War, travel between parallel universes is supposedly near-impossible, but a breach between the universes makes frequent visits easy in the second series finale "Army of Ghosts"/"Doomsday". These visits cause increasing damage to the universes and the breach is permanently sealed.

• Sliders dealt with a group of mostly-unwilling travellers who ended up "sliding" between various parallel Earths in an attempt to find their way back to their own universe. Plots included an Earth in which the population is controlled through a lottery, an Earth where most of the males were killed by germ warfare, an Earth where dinosaurs are still alive, and an Earth in which the population have been turned into flesh-eating zombies. According to a main character Quinn, there were an infinite number of universes where different single decisions were different and even a world where the Earth formed differently and rotated around the Sun slower, slowing down that timeline.

• Futurama has included some parallel universe episodes like "I Dated a Robot" which features a universe where everyone's a cowboy/girl and "The Farnsworth Parabox" features boxes which hold a variety of universes inside them.

• Spellbinder series is about a group of teenagers who discover a gateway to a parallel universe, in which one of them becomes trapped. Its sequel "Spellbinder 2: Land of the Dragon Lord" features some of the same characters, who now have a trans dimensional "boat" with they use to travel between worlds.

• Stargate television franchise (Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis and Stargate Universe) have had several episodes dealing with parallel universes. The first had Daniel Jackson finding a mirror looking device, known as the Quantum Mirror, where by touching the "mirror" he was taken to a parallel universe in which things hadn't gone so well compared to his reality. Another episode has a Samantha Carter and a character killed off in the second episode of the show come through the mirror to request help from the show's normal reality. With the end of that show the Quantum Mirror was destroyed. The next episode, "Ripple Effect", dealing with alternate realities has a lot of different SG1 teams coming through the same Gate. The latest episode, "The Road Not Taken", had Samantha Carter travel to an alternate reality where martial law was in effect.

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel have featured both parallel universes, such as Pylea, and alternate realities, such as one where most of the regular cast were either dead or vampires. Also mentioned, but never seen, is the hypothetical World Without Shrimp and the confirmed-real World With Nothing But Shrimp. Episodes of this type include "Doppelgangland" and "The Wish."

• Charmed, there exists an alternate dimension where all the evil are good and all the good are evil. The reason for this given that there has to be balance in the universe, so there can never be an area where everything is all good and one where it is all bad as this would affect the grand design of life. So for every good thing that the Charmed Ones do for good in this world, it is done for evil in another to keep things balanced. Mostly, everything occurs exactly the same way, mirroring the real world. Some differences are that all Whitelighters are Darklighters and vice versa, and that The Underworld is a Garden of Eden-like paradise. The Demon of Fear is the Demon of Hope, and Wyatt Halliwell faces a future in which he turns good one day as opposed to one where he turns evil. Some figures, such as the morally ambiguous Gideon, remain largely similar.

• The Jimmy Timmy Power Hour, the main characters move back and forth from the respective universes of The Fairly Oddparents and The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius.

• In Smallville episode "Reckoning", Lana Lang is killed in a car crash while being chased by Lex Luthor. Clark Kent journeys to his Fortress of Solitude where he uses a Kryptonian crystal to go back in time and save Lana (creating an alternate timeline to the original events); however the universe 'finds a balance' and Clark's father Johnathan Kent dies instead. More recently, the season 10 episode "Luthor" explores a world where Clark was discovered by Lionel Luthor rather than Johnathan and Martha Kent.

• Charlie Jade describes three parallel universes: Alphaverse, Betaverse, and Gammaverse.

• Red Dwarf offers several humorous takes on the concept that don't involve an evil twin joke, including one episode where women are the dominant gender (Nellie Armstrong was the first person on the moon, and Wilma Shakespeare wrote great plays such as Rachel III and The Taming of the Shrimp), and another where Arnold Rimmer becomes the far more dashing and debonair Ace Rimmer.

• Kamen Rider Decade, the Japanese tokusatsu show, features ten parallel worlds, nine of which feature alternate versions of Kamen Riders from 2000–2008.

• In The O.C. episode "The Chrismukkah-huh?", Taylor Townsend and Ryan Atwood venture into a parallel universe in which they never existed, in order to set things straight to get back to their own world.

• Fringe has a recurring subplot in its first season about a terrorist group called ZFT who seek to prepare 'warriors' for a coming conflict between parallel universes. The final two episodes of the season deal with recurring villain David Robert Jones attempting to travel into a parallel universe in order to kill the mysterious William Bell. Series protagonist Olivia Dunham experiences visions of this other world before traveling there and meeting Bell in the South Tower of the World Trade Center. Background details show that in this universe, the White House was destroyed in the 9/11 attacks rather than the Twin Towers. In season 2 the main plot is manage to stop warriors from the other side, the shape-shifters. At the end of the season, the three main characters cross to this parallel universe. A character from the other side attempt to create a machine to destroy our universe, in order to save his own world. The main character, Olivia, remains trap in the parallel universe by the end. In season 3, in odd-numbered episodes the episode takes place with Olivia, in the parallel world, while the other characters are in even-numbered episodes. In episode 8, the two story arcs collide, resulting with the end of the appearance of the parallel universe, but the upcoming war remains.

• Once Upon a Time uses a premise in which characters from various fairy tales are transported to a present-day small town called Storybrooke, Maine, where they look like normal people and have no memories of who they were, thanks to a powerful curse that was put on them by the Evil Queen from Snow White. Their pasts will play an important part in the series, as the only characters who know their true identities are a bail bondsman and her son, who carries a book of fairy tales to aid them in their attempt to return them back to their fantasy worlds.

• The miniseries The 10th Kingdom concerns a parallel world in which the fairy tales of Grimm are historical events.

• An Englishman's Castle

• The X-Files episode "4-D"

• The Day After Tomorrow

• The Justice League episode "Justice Lords"

• The pilot episode of Awake

• The Community" episode "Remedial Chaos Theory"

• 'The Family Guy episode "Road to the Multiverse"

• The South Park episode "Spookyfish"

• The Hercules: The Legendary Journeys episode "Stranger in a Strange World"

• The Simpsons episode "Treehouse of Horror VI"

See also: List of science fiction television programs#Parallel universes