Multiverse Fiction: 22 Diverting Examples of Parallel Universe Stories

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Written By Chris Well

Looking over stories that explore the speculative group of multiple universes that might encompass everything that exists…

“The idea that multiple, even infinite, universes co-exist has taken hold in movie theaters everywhere.”—CNN

Lately, there have been lots of references to alternate realities—and even the multiverse—in popular culture. The latest examples include the Oscar-award-winning Best Picture Everything Everywhere All At Once, as well as recent movies and TV shows adapting both the Marvel Comics and the DC Comics universes.

Of course, the idea has turned up before. Lots of times. In books, in movies, in TV shows, and anywhere else where creators and storytellers wanted to explore, well, worlds beyond worlds.

The multiverse is how (some) scientists title the concept that while we see our on universe, there are other—parallel—universes out there, too. Simply, the idea of the multiverse is that other universes—other than our own—exist. A hypothetical area of study that goes back centuries, it’s an idea that several science fiction storytellers have embraced, too.

The differences between these alternate versions of the universe can range from simple changes (you turned left instead of turning right) to big changes (instead of human beings, that version of the world is populated by geometric shapes that can talk).

Interested in exploring some of these examples? In the list below were going to look over several cases, ranging from literature (from authors like Stephen King and Philip K. Dick), television (including Star Trek and Doctor Who and even the surreal sitcom Community), movies (like Source Code and Coherence) and more.

What’s the deal with parallel universes?

So, in a nutshell, we’re talking about versions of existence that are different. From what you can see. Right now.

These differences can range from minor changes to bigger ones. In that alternate reality over there, key things we know might be completely different: the rules of law, the laws of physics, historical events, whatever.

And in these kinds of stories, its not just necessarily just one alternate world. The word “multiverse” suggests that there are lots of them.

Early examples from science fiction and fantasy fiction include Edwin A. Abbott’s 1884 novel Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions; Murray Leinster’s 1934 short story “Sidewise in Time”; H.G. Wells’ stories “The Wonderful Visit” and “Men Like Gods.” We can also point to C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia books, Harry Turtledove’s Worldwar series, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion series, Bryan Davis’ Time Echoes trilogy, Robert A. Heinlein’s 1980 novel The Number of the Beast: A Parallel Novel About Parallel Universes, and Douglas Adams’ 1992 sci-fi comedy novel Mostly Harmless from his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series.

Below are the examples we’re about to explore. Scroll down for more details, links, and behind-the-scenes info.

In the article below, we look at several examples of storytellers that showed us an alternate version of reality. We start out with what inspired this article—the Oscar-winning multiverse action-comedy-drama Everything Everywhere All at Once. We also have examples that range from other movies and classic TV shows like Star Trek, Doctor Who and Sliders, to comics (and adaptations) from Marvel Comics and DC Comics, to fiction from Stephen King—and even more examples.

Which ones of these are your favorites? Feel free to tell us your thoughts in the comments below!

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22 Examples of Multiverse Fiction: Star Trek, Marvel, Dark Tower, and more

Everything Everywhere All at Once

The inspiration for this whole article is the hugely successful 2022 multiverse movie Everything Everywhere All at Once. The sci-fi/action/comedy/drama stars Michelle Yeoh as a Chinese-American immigrant who must connect with parallel universe versions of herself to prevent a powerful being from destroying everything.

The movie was a big success at the box office and also with critics. Everything Everywhere All at Once won seven Academy Awards—as well as lots of other awards. In fact, the movie is now considered the most-awarded movie of all time!

Find Everything Everywhere All at Once at Amazon

In addition to now being an Oscar-winning actress, global movie star Michelle Yeoh is loved for doing so many great action scenes—including those that involve Jackie Chan, Star Trek, James Bond and the MCU. To celebrate her history-making win at the Academy Awards, we took a look at some of her best fight scenes ever: Michelle Yeoh: 16 great fight scenes from the history-making Oscar winner

Marvel Comics and the MCU

The most recent era of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been mining the depths of multi-universe stories. So far, we’ve seen these complications in both TV shows and movies. (And we’ve been told that these stories will expand in upcoming movies in the MCU.)

The basis for the stories we’re seeing onscreen are inspired by stories that have been told over the years in the pages of Marvel Comics. While most Marvel Comics take place in the central “Marvel Universe,” over the decades there have been examples within the comics of parallel universes.

The main continuity in which most Marvel storylines take place is said to be “Earth-616.” The parallel dimensions have been explored by the likes of Captain Britain, Exiles, X-Men, and others.

The comic book series What If has explored alternate versions of Marvel Comics stories. In the original story, one thing happened—and What If asks, What if it happened this way instead? The original version of this comic (1977-1984) featured the Watcher as a narrator, showing readers the alternate realities. In the original comic, the alternate realities explored included stuff like, What If Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben Had Lived? What If Loki Found Thor’s Hammer First? What If Captain America Hadn’t Vanished During World War Two? What If Dr. Doom Had Become a Hero? What If Wolverine Had Killed the Hulk? In 2021, an animated What If series premiered on Disney+.

Another example of a parallel universe set of Marvel Comics stories was their 15-year run with a set of comics from the Ultimate Universe. Created to allow stories that weren’t buried by years of continuity, the Ultimate comics starred younger and simpler versions of Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, X-Men, plus a version of “Avengers” actually called The Ultimates. But after 15 years, that Ultimate universe was finally buried under enough of its own continuity that Marvel ended it and brought relevant characters over to the regular Marvel Comics Universe.

As for Marvel characters who time travel—including the likes of Kang the Conqueror, Rachel Summers, Bishop, Cale, Ben Grimm, and others—it has been said that they can’t change their own timeline, but that they are actually creating or switching to an alternate timeline.

Sony’s animated Spider-Man movies point into the Marvel multiverse. In Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018), we met Miles Morales, the Ultimate version of Spider-Man, as well as other alternate reality versions of Spider-Man. When Morales came back to screens in 2023 for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, audiences saw lots more alternate Spider-People. In fact, the sequel had a blockbuster opening, pulling in more than $120 million during its amazing first weekend.

And now the live action Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is also exploring the multiverse. Examples we’ve seen so far include the TV shows Loki (2021) and the animated series What If...? (2021), as well as the movies Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022), and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023).

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Find Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse at Amazon

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Star Trek

While the Star Trek brand hasn’t spent a whole lot of time exploring multiverses, there are two specific alternate universes that have come up fairly regularly. The first is the Mirror Universe, where our good guys exist over there as bad guys. The second example is the fact that the Star Trek TV shows are set in the prime universe and the newer Star Trek movies are actually set in an alternate universe. (This got talked about especially on Star Trek: Discovery.)

The Mirror Universe is a parallel universe that is like the flipside to our regular universe. That reality has been visited several times over the years, including episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Enterprise, and Star Trek: Discovery. It’s called the “Mirror Universe” because the TOC episode that introduced it was titled “Mirror, Mirror.”

More Star Trek articles on Monster Complex:

Dark Tower series by Stephen King

Much of the fiction written (or co-written) by Stephen King take place in a multiverse created by the author. Among that ficiton is his epic Dark Tower series—a multiverse saga that includes our world, and any of the many parallel earths that Stephen King writes about in his stories and novels.

With Dark Tower as the nexus point of the time/space continuum within the context of the novels, the Dark Tower books are the pillar of Stephen King’s creative multiverse. The Dark Tower—which includes eight novels, one short story, and a children’s book—contains themes from multiple genres, including dark fantasy, science fantasy, horror, and Western fiction.

Following a gunslinger—and his journey toward a tower (which is both physical and metaphorical)—the Dark Tower series expands upon King’s multiverse. And, as such, links together much of his other fiction.

In a 1989 interview with The Castle Rock News, King explained the process of creating this massive epic—and how he wasn’t sure it would connect with his regular readers.

“It’s fun to play with a world where feelings of mysticism and wonder are taken for granted. I was interested in postulating a world where there is magic. One of the liberating things about fantasy is that you can create that kind of a world. If we talk about ghosts or demons or even flying saucers in our world, the skepticism comes built in. But if you create an entirely new, fictional world, readers or people who participate in the creation of that world say, ‘Fine. Let it exist according to its own laws.’ That’s wonderful.”

The article also examined the fact that the Dark Tower saga includes more biblical imagery and religious implications than usually seen in the author’s other works.

“I’m very interested in God, religion and the afterlife, ethics, morals, and the part they all play, how much of God and the devil come from inside us and how much of them are their own creatures,” King explains. “Above all else, I’m interested in good and evil, whether or not there are powers of good and powers of evil that exist outside ourselves. I think that the concepts of good and evil are in the human heart, but because I was raised in a fairly strict religious home, I tend to coalesce those concepts around God symbols and devil symbols, and I put them in my work.

“I’m impressed by something C.S. Lewis said about Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy: ‘As good as Tolkien was at depicting good, he was much more effective at depicting evil.’ I think that’s true, and I think that it’s easier for all of us to grasp evil, because it’s a simpler concept, and good is layered and many-faceted. I’ve always tried to contrast that bright, white light of real goodness or Godliness against evil.”

Find the Dark Tower series at Amazon

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This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

The 2019 science fiction novel This Is How You Lose the Time War—written as a series of letters—-finds agents Red and Blue traveling back and forth through time, altering the history of multiple universes on behalf of their warring empires. They leave each other secret messages—at first taunting, but gradually developing into flirtation and then love.

When Red’s commanding officer detects the interaction between Red and Blue, she forces Red to send Blue a message that will kill Blue when it is read. After Blue is killed, Red time-travels to Blue’s childhood to give her immunity to the poisoned message, allowing her to survive.

Written by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War won the BSFA Award for Best Shorter Fiction, the Nebula Award for Best Novella of 2019, and the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novella.

In an interview, El-Mohtar explained how writing the book change her understanding of time, love, and war.

“I think we were both coming to the book with a sense of wonder around the expression of time in hand-written letters—that sense of folding up a singular moment of yourself and sending it into the future to be read by a person who doesn’t yet exist, and who’ll be reading a letter from a person who no longer exists, but was preserved in the amber of ink on paper. Wonder, too, around time’s stoppages: that a letter can include someone having stopped, perhaps even mid-sentence, walked away, and returned to the letter three days later, while the person receiving the letter reads it smoothly in a sitting. Or vice versa!

“These all seemed to touch on conceptions of time travel and intimacy—the vulnerability of committing a truth of yourself to your invention of a person—that we were already talking about, already developing, but getting to explore and articulate and develop them in the book, together, was just tremendous.”

The reviewer at NPR remarked,

“The thrill of This Is How You Lose The Time War suddenly becomes not the time travel, not the war, not any of those things that no one could ever describe anyway, but just the connection between two lonely professional killers with the ability to inscribe letters on lava. After a thousand lifetimes spent fighting, the coalescent story becomes about how to finally stop. In a complicated universe where anything done can be undone before it ever happened, all that matters is simply finding a way to be together.”

Doctor Who and the multiverse

Over the decades, the scope of the Doctor Who series is to travel through all of time and space—as the Doctor and his companions can use the TARDIS to travel anywhere at anytime. In the original 1963-1989 series as well as the current (and ongoing) revival, they can go to any town, any country, any planets, any galaxy—and arrive there  in the distant past, the distant future, or whenever.

That said, the Doctor Who series hasn’t done much to explorer the idea of alternate realities. However, parallel reality was part of the current series—seasons 2 and 4, starring David Tennant as the 10th Doctor. The first parallel reality was introduced in the Season 2 episodes “Rise of the Cybermen” and “The Age of Steel,” and was revisited in “Army of Ghosts,” “Doomsday,” “The Stolen Earth” and “Journey’s End.” The Season 4 episode “Turn Left,” explored a different type of parallel reality created by a Time Beetle.

Those episodes were under the leadership of showrunner Russell T. Davies—who is returning to the series again. As we learn about his plans on his return (which will include the 60th Anniversary Special), it’s been said that the Doctor may be exploring even more parallel realities...

In fact, will Davies be creating a Doctor Who multiverse? And will there be more spinoffs? Time will tell.

Meanwhile, there are references to parallel realities in some of the Doctor Who stories in other media, including the novels The Face of the Enemy, The Book of the War, Imperial Moon, The Pit, The Quantum Archangel, and Time Zero, plus the audio adventures Faustian and Restoration of the Daleks, and the comic book stories The Glorious Dead and Who’s That Girl!

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DC Comics and the DCU

While Marvel Comics has touched on and explored alternate realities in its comics (as we talked about above), the interesting thing about DC Comics is how much bigger they’ve embraced the idea of a multiverse. (Or, one can say, multiverses.)

The good news is that it has led to some engaging crossovers and team-ups and the like. The bad news is that there are times—like every couple of years now—that the DC bosses just reboot everything and shove continuity (and beloved stories) out the door. As such, sometimes its difficult to keep track of your favorite characters and series if they keep getting rebooted into something new.

Granted, the DC Comics multiverse started out as a way to relaunch everything in a big and important way. DC started in the 1930s, and during the comic book Golden Age introduced a lineup of major comic book characters that we still know about today—including Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, plus the Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, Green Arrow, and lots more.

Following World War War 2, the superhero genre fell out of favor with the public. Most of those series were getting cancelled and those characters were put into mothballs.

But in the late 1950s—leading into the Silver Age—DC decided to bring some of them back. However, instead of bringing back the Golden Age version of, say, The Flash, they decided to revamp him. Making his debut in Showcase #4 (1956), this Flash had a new identity, a new origin, a new angle. He was starring in more of a sci-fi series.

Initially, to explain away the earlier version, they said that the Golden Age version was merely a comic book character. This new guy was the real deal. But then DC took it a step further and asked, What if the Golden Age comics took place on an alternate version of Earth? What if BOTH were real?

Which led to the classic story “Flash of Two Worlds” in The Flash #123. The new Flash finds himself on the alternate Earth—which would now be called “Earth 2”—where he meets the original Flash.

That went over so well that DC then decided to go even bigger. The Golden Age super team Justice Society of America (which had as its members many of the original heroes) met up with the Silver Age super team Justice League of America. In fact, there was a long (and very cool) period of comic book history where the two teams got together literally once every year.

And as part of those crossovers they also met with super heroes (and super villains) from even more alternate Earths—including characters that had come from other comic book companies, and therefore were officially from alternate realities. (All those crossovers are collected into these trade editions.)

Then there was the Crisis on Infinite Earths

One of the things about telling these stories across multiple realities was that there was some difficulty dealing with continuity across the board. So, in the 1980s, as DC Comics was headed for its 50th anniversary, DC came up with a way to restructure everything and start with a clean slate. So, Marv Wolfman and George Perez did the massive comic book event Crisis on Infinite Earths, which led to the idea of DC Comics being rebooted into a single, streamlined universe. And then everything from then on would took place on the same Earth.

It was a big event. It was certainly epic. It was also a lot of fun.

Jumping over to TV for a minute: The Crisis on Infinite Earths comic also inspired the wonderful Arrowverse crossover. In case you didn’t see it, the massive crossover didn’t just connect together all the CW shows—but essentially every DC Comics adaptation that had ever happened. Ever. Seriously, there were references and guest appearances connecting to the 1966 Batman series and the 2016 Lucifer series and the 2001 Smallville series and a bunch more.

As far as the comics event is concerned, it was a big deal. Unfortunately, not all the comics that came afterward followed the new continuity correctly. And over the years since then, there have been multiple times that DC hit the restart button—including Zero Hour, Flashpoint, New 52, Convergence, and DC Rebirth. And during these various events they tend to revisit or revise the whole DC Comics multiverse.

There are also “other universe” examples of DC stories that are part of the Elseworlds imprint. These are a set of literary, standalone stories that examine DC’s own kind of “What if?” Examples of these include Gotham by Gaslight (a Victorian Age Batman vs. Jack the Ripper) and Superman: Red Son (what if baby Kal-El’s rocket crash-landed in the U.S.S.R.).

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The Man in the High Castle

The basis for the dystopian sci-fi TV series, Philip K. Dick’s Hugo Award-winning 1962 novel The Man in the High Castle revolved around a world where the Nazis won World War 2. Set in 1962, the novel explores the political intrigues between Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany as they rule the partitioned United States. Robert Silverberg said of the novel, “Dick’s prose crackles with excitement, his characters are vividly real, his plot is stunning.”

The book inspired four seasons of the TV show on Amazon Prime.

Other novels set in a similar reality—the bad guys won the war (and now we have to live under their shadow)—include The Ultimate Solution (1973) by Eric Norden, SS-GB (1978) by Len Deighton, and the murder mystery Fatherland (1992) by Robert Harris.

Community episode “Remedial Chaos Theory”

Although the sitcom Community is more or less set in the real world (well, a surreal version of it), every once in a while it would poke its head in a story direction you don’t normally see on a non-sci-fi sitcom. For example, the hilarious episode “Remedial Chaos Theory” (3.4).

The group is playing a board game at a housewarming party. When the pizza delivery arrives, one member rolls the dice to determine which of them needs to go to collect. Over the course of the episode, we see multiple results—and the events of the story changes each time, based on which person is sent out of the room.

Thematically, “Remedial Chaos Theory” is showing how the group is affected by the absence of one of its members. By the time you get to the end, all kinds of different things have happened. This ranged from violence and death to happiness and dancing. It all depends on how the events unfold.

Although it was a standalone episode, there were one or two references in later episodes pointing back to one of the alternate realities.

Source Code

In an experimental government program, a soldier is forced to live and relive a harrowing train bombing with the woman he loves until he can determine who’s responsible. The 2011 SF action thriller Source Code stars Jake Gyllenhaal as a U.S. Army captain sent into an eight-minute digital recreation of a real-life train explosion, tasked with determining the identity of the terrorist who bombed it.

Source Code looks at first to revolve around simulating dead people’s memories—but it turns out the machine doesn’t simply create simulations but alternate realities. Directed by Duncan Jones and written by Ben Ripley, Source Code also starred Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga, and Jeffrey Wright.

Futurama episode “The Farnsworth Parabox”

The 15th episode of the fourth season of Futurama—the episode “The Farnsworth Parabox”—found the Planet Express crew meeting up with versions of themselves from parallel universes. Written by Bill Odenkirk and directed by Ron Hughart, the episode showed once again how the show Futurama often found off-center ways to explore familiar sci-fi concepts.

In “The Farnsworth Parabox,” Professor Farnsworth had created a mysterious box that turned out to be connected as a doorway to similar boxes in other realities. As they jump through from one universe to the next, we meet multiple versions of the characters from the multiverse. One of the weirdest—and strangest—visions of the multiverse, this is a great episode.

His Dark Materials

His Dark Materials is a fantasy trilogy written by Philip Pullman, featuring The Golden Compass (1995), The Subtle Knife (1997), and The Amber Spyglass (2000). The books follow the coming of age of two children wandering through several parallel universes. The novels have won several awards, including the Carnegie Medal in 1995 for Northern Lights and the 2001 Whitbread Book of the Year for The Amber Spyglass.

The His Dark Materials multiverse consists of many different, yet similar worlds, including our own. The trilogy also alludes to concepts from physics, philosophy, and theology. Working as inversion of John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost, the trilogy has led to complaints about its criticism of religion.

Besides the trilogy there are also two short novels: Lyra’s Oxford and Once Upon a Time in the North.

“It was 1993 when I thought of Lyra and began writing His Dark Materials,” Pullman wrote in an article for The Guardian. “There was no Facebook or Twitter or Google, and although I had a computer and could word-process on it, I didn’t have email. No one I knew had email, so I wouldn’t have been able to use it anyway. If I wanted to look something up I went to the library; if I wanted to buy a book I went to a bookshop. There were only four terrestrial TV channels, and if you forgot to record a programme you’d wanted to watch, tough luck. Smart phones and iPads and text messaging had never been heard of. Twenty-seven years later I’m still writing about Lyra, and meanwhile the world has been utterly transformed.”

In other media, there was a 2007 movie adaptation of The Golden Compass, starring Dakota Blue Richards, Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Eva Green, and Ian McKellen. There were also three seasons of the TV show His Dark Materials (2019-2020).

Fringe

The procedural sci-fi / supernatural drama Fringe followed a federal law enforcement task force investigating mysteries surrounding a parallel universe. Created by J. J. Abrams, Alex Kurtzman, and Roberto Orci, the show played on the Fox TV network (2008-2013), hitting 100 episodes.

Over five seasons, the mythology and backstory of the show expanded across a broad spectrum of recurring themes—including alternate realities and timelines. An FBI agent, Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv); a genius but dysfunctional scientist, Walter Bishop (John Noble); and his son with a troubled past, Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson), are all members of a newly formed Fringe Division in the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Based in Boston, Massachusetts, the team uses fringe science and FBI investigative techniques to investigate unexplained, ghastly occurrences.

The series was a hybrid of fantasy, procedural dramas and serials, influenced by films like Altered States and TV shows like Lost, The X-Files and Twilight Zone.

Executive Producers Jeff Pinkner talked with Collider:

“One of the challenges that we’ve had is that the idea of an alternate universe is both heavy and intellectual, but as soon as you start to experience it, you realize that it’s really emotional and easy to grasp. In Season 1, we acknowledged an alternate universe. In Season 2, we visited it. For Season 3, we really want to spend time there and get to know what the conditions are like over there, which really just reflects on our own society and what life could be like here in our own world.”

Coherence

Eight friends at a dinner party experience a troubling chain of events due to the dangerous influence of a passing comet. Director James Byrkit created a bottle drama with his debut feature, which is set around one night at one house—mostly taking place in one room.

Over the film, the eight characters wander in and out of the camera's view. But what happens when they’re off camera? It has been suggested that Coherence was influenced by Twilight Zone and the movie Primer.

Byrkit told Taylor Holmes:

“We’ve learned to try to not spoil an audience member’s personal interpretation of what’s happening. That said, there are two ways to watch the film. Two ways we intended, anyway. And debated and planned for a year. One way is to simply follow Em from the first shot to the last shot… The other way to watch it is to use the cuts to black as a signal of something much more complicated unfolding. You wouldn’t believe the amount of debate going into those cuts to black, by the way. How many frames, how the rules work, how the audio should ring out. Amazing.”

Sliders

Sliders followed travelers using a wormhole to “slide” between different parallel universes. The characters were forced to spend anywhere from minutes to months in a parallel world, often exploring the alternate world.

Some of these universes were based on alternate timelines—like dinosaurs were never extinct, or America lost the Revolutionary War, or penicillin was never discovered. There were also worlds where the laws of science were different, like the one where time flowed in reverse.

The sci-fi / fantasy TV show was created by Tracy Tormé and Robert K. Weiss, and starred Jerry O’Connell, Cleavant Derricks, Sabrina Lloyd, John Rhys-Davies, Kari Wuhrer, Charlie O’Connell, Robert Floyd, and Tembi Locke. The show lasted five seasons 1995-2000 on the Fox network and the Sci Fi Channel.

By the way, in the appendix of his book The Future of the Mind, author Michio Kaku says that Sliders began “when a young boy read a book.” Which was Kaku’s book Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension. “But I take no responsibility for the physics behind that series.”

The One

In the 2001 action movie The One, global star Jet Li plays multiple roles—including both a police officer, and an alternate (bad guy) version of himself from a parallel universe. The One features riveting martial arts and innovative special effects.

The two main characters played by Li use different forms of martial arts—reflecting their different personalities. One uses The Shape-Will Fist, characterized by aggressive linear movements. The other uses Eight Trigram Palms, with subtle, circular movements.

As the bad version travels from universe to universe to kill other versions of himself—he is gaining the life force powers of them to transform into a super-being known as “The One.” As the good one fights to stop him, the battle between the two forces the him to examine the evil hidden within himself.

Russian Doll

Russian Doll is a comedy-drama 2019 TV show created by Natasha Lyonne, Leslye Headland, and Amy Poehler. The series follows Nadia Vulvokov (Lyonne), a game developer who repeatedly dies and relives the same night in an ongoing time loop and tries to solve it, leading to her finding Alan Zaveri (Charlie Barnett) in the same situation. It also stars Greta Lee, Yul Vazquez, Elizabeth Ashley, and Chloë Sevigny.

In season 1 of Russian Doll, Vulvokov found herself trapped in a time loop, a similar concept explored in movies like Groundhog’s Day and Palm Springs. But season 2 ushers in an additional layer of complexity—one that manipulates Nadiya’s reality and leaves her trapped living amongst the past and present.

Russian Doll showrunner Lyonne explained to IndieWire how she spent decades preparing to make season 2:

“Working through the challenges of this show is the happiest I’ve been in my life. I’ve had this dream of Russian Doll in my mind for decades. Because I was in the business of the language of movies from six or seven years old, I was always cataloguing scenes or vignettes, then sort of staging them.”

Rick and Morty

Animated sci-fi sitcom Rick and Morty revolves around an infinite number of realities and universes. The show follows the misadventures of Rick Sanchez, a cynical mad scientist, and his good-hearted but fretful grandson Morty Smith, who split their time between domestic life and interdimensional adventures that take place across an infinite number of realities, often traveling to other planets and dimensions through portals and on Rick’s flying saucer.

Created by Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon, the series relies on two conflicting scenarios—domestic family drama, and an alcoholic grandfather dragging his grandson into hijinks.

Roiland told the ComicBook Nation podcast:

“When you have multiverses... that’s something that we’ve leaned into on this show, you know. And it’s sort of fun that we got to do that and still go back to what the show is, you know? Not like the standard, you know, show, but that’s still a thing we got to do. And that’s all multiverses.”

Red Dwarf

In this hilarious futuristic outer space comedy, a spaceship repairman is the last survivor of a radiation leak on his mining space ship. Everyone else was killed.

But then—wait for it—he’s not alone! Coming out of suspended animation after three million years, he finds himself on a voyage with a hologram of his unfriendly shipmate, a human evolved from the ship’s cat, the senile ship’s computer, and a fussy robot.

Over the course of the series, multiple episodes of Red Dwarf focused on the concept of parallel universes. We meet various alternative versions of the characters.

Find Red Dwarf episodes at Amazon

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Stargate

Stargate is a military sci-fi franchise involving several interconnected series. Launched by the movie directed by Roland Emmerich, which he co-wrote with producer Dean Devlin, the franchise revolves around the idea of an alien tech portal that offers instantaneous travel across the cosmos.

The Stargate franchise includes many stories in which alternate timelines, alternate dimensions and alternate realities are explored. These include the Stargate SG-1 episodes “There But For the Grace of God,” “Point of View,” “Crystal Skull,” “2010,” “Moebius” parts 1 and 2, “Babylon,” “Ripple Effect,” “Arthur's Mantle,” “The Road Not Taken,” “Unending” and the direct-to-DVD movie Stargate: Continuum, the Stargate Atlantis episodes “Before I Sleep,” “McKay and Mrs. Miller,” “The Last Man,” “The Daedalus Variations,” “Vegas” and “Enemy at the Gate,” and the Stargate Universe episodes “Time,” “Twin Destinies,” “Common Descent” and “Epilogue.”

Director Peter DeLuise talked to SciFiAndTvTalk’s Steve Eramo:

“I love all that alternate reality stuff. One of my favorite Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes is the one [‘Yesterday’s Enterprise’] in which Starfleet is at war and the Enterprise bridge is on fire and Picard jumps over the control board to fire the phasers.

“In ‘Point of View’ we stage a mini-war inside the Stargate complex. It’s a yard-by-yard, fight-to-the-death type of battle sequence featuring an all-new lighting scheme and tons of destruction inside the base.”

Find Stargate episodes at Amazon

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Lost

In the 2010 season of Lost, the result of characters traveling back in time to prevent the crash of Oceanic Flight 815 apparently creates a parallel reality in which the Flight never crashed, rather than resetting time itself in the characters’ original timeline. The show continued to show two sets of the characters following different destinies—until it was revealed in the series finale that there was really only one reality created by the characters themselves to assist themselves in leaving behind the physical world and passing on to an afterlife after their respective deaths.

“The thing is, you can’t please all the people all the time,” actor Matthew Fox told the New York Times. “We all knew that. There was a certain segment of the audience that really just only cared about answers that can’t be answered. Some of the big questions that the show took on are big, philosophical questions that all of us deal with in our lives. They’re not answerable questions. So I think certain members of the audience looked at ‘Lost’ in a way that might have been more intense than normal, because they felt like there were answers they wanted answered, that they couldn’t answer themselves. Those people will probably have to deal with that for most of their lives.”

Eureka

The sci-fi show Eureka was set in a secret town populated by scientific geniuses developing major technological breakthroughs. Each episode featured a problem or a mystery that needed to be dealt with by the town sheriff, Jack Carter.

Occasionally, there were episodes that dealt with alternate timelines. In one story, Henry Deacon travels to the past to prevent his wife’s accidental death. He creates a universe-threatening problem where two parallel realities converge on the same space-time continuum.

In another arc, Carter and other members of the cast traveled back in time to the 1940s—and when they returned to the present day, they were in a parallel timeline. And they lived there the rest of the series, dealing with having different lives than what they knew before.

Eureka creator Jaime Paglia talked to the Futon Critic about pursuing multiple timelines on the show:

“At the end of season one we did the alternate reality when we realized that Henry had tried to save Kim (Tamlyn Tomita) from the explosion and created this alternate timeline and Carter realizes that they’re in the wrong timeline and they have to fix it or everything is going to unravel. That was just a great finale and we loved the idea of it and we thought it was a really rich, emotional story and it was grounded in what was going on with our characters. It was something that was done out of Henry’s grief and desperation and it was really a love story for him and that he'd lost the love of his life and he wanted her back.

“So whenever you tell a story I think things start with the characters first and a really emotional, dramatic trauma that they're dealing with or something that they're trying to solve makes for the best storytelling. That’s still my favorite episode, ‘Once In A Lifetime,’ the season one finale. I felt like that's really when we hit our stride between the balance between the character drama and emotional and the humor, as well as the science fiction elements. That became, for me and a lot of us, the benchmark for stories moving forward.”

Chris Well

Chris Well been a writer pretty much his entire life. (Well, since his childhood.) Over the years, he has worked in newspapers, magazines, radio, and books. He now is the chief of the website Monster Complex, celebrating monster stories in lit and pop culture. He also writes horror comedy fiction that embraces Universal Monsters, 1960s sitcoms, 1980s action movies, and the X-Files.

https://chriswell.substack.com/
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