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Twin. Doppelgänger, with an umlaut, is the German word for a ghostly double of a living person or more commonly simply a word for someone looking exactly like someone else, i.e. an impostor or double. It means "double (walker)", in the original.

Typically Doppelgängers have strange, supernatural origins, unlike twins which usually have more natural explanations. A Mirror Universe, Cloning, alien intervention, and magic are all possible sources of a Doppelgänger.

See also Evil Twin, Identical Stranger, Mirror Universe.
Examples:
  • In the 2000s Battlestar Galactica, each Cylon model has a potentially infinite number of doppelgangers.
  • Supernatural has had two doppelganger episodes: "Skin" and "Nightshifter."
  • Dungeons And Dragons has a variation: There's an entire race called dopplegangers, who can shapeshift into any similarly sized humanoid-including other people.
  • Played with in Sealab2021, where a pair of characters gets displaced in time, and Captain Murphy is convinced they are doppelgangers.
    Captain Murphy: Tell it to Queen Doppelpopoulis!
  • In Tomb Raider & Tomb Raider Anniversary, Lara's Doppelganger has no skin. In Underworld, she gets better, blows up Lara's mansion, kicks her ass inside of her burning mansion, & kills Allister.
  • In Space Ghost Coast To Coast, Space Ghost's Doppelganger, Chad, takes over, but he won't tell Zorak how he killed Space Ghost.
  • In The Colbert Report, Stephens Doppelganger takes over during one of his Better Know A District Segments.
  • "Playing With Fire" and "Up in Smoke" by Katie MacAlister feature a doppelganger of a nymph. All kinds of weird things happen to her because she is an exception to well, about everything.
  • It Came From Outer Space (1953). The aliens can copy human form; naturally this only serves to freak out those humans they're trying to reassure about their peaceful intentions.
  • Sev Trek: Puss in Boots (the Australian CGI spoof of Star Trek The Next Generation). The shapeshifting pus-alien imitates Captain Pinchhard (Picard), leaving Lt. Barf (Worf) to come up with a simple solution ("The alien will revert to its natural form when dead. We simply kill them both!"). Fortunately Pinchhard is able to expose the imposter himself, but insists on taking it on hand-to-hand, to which Commander Piker responds: "Go ahead, Captain. Knock yourself out!"
  • .hack//G.U. has this in the form of a Boss In Mook Clothing, the Doppelganger. He appears whenever you've stayed on an overworld map for too long, and is always 8 levels above you, even when you hit the level cap of the particular game, and has a unique weapon that mimics, you guessed it, protagonist Haseo's weapon that's out at the time. This means that if you have the scythe out and he finds you . . . Oh Crap. The fact that the game has a driving, terrifying synth theme for him that gets louder as he gets closer, does not help things any.
  • In Gunnerkrigg Court, the Nobodies from Zimmy's Dark World are capable of imitating people she knows.
  • In an episode of Stargate SG 1, the rogue Asgard scientist Loki creates a clone of O'Neill that is supposed to take his place on Earth while Loki runs experiments on the original. The fact that Loki sent a fifteen year old clone to impersonate a forty-five year old man proves to be his undoing.