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My evil twin, bad weather friend I know someday I'll meet him But I don't know where or when
Take a popular character and introduce us to the evil version of this character. Naturally, it's a favorite Soap Opera device. It's also very prevalent in genre shows, where the events may happen in an Alternate Universe: for example, the Wishverse in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, or the Star Trek Mirror Universe. Typically the evil twin will be portrayed by the same actor as the regular character.
It's worth noting that in the overwhelming majority of cases the twin is evil; only rarely does an evil character suddenly find themselves contending with a good twin, and in those cases the good version is often simpleminded or purely comic. (See Good Is Impotent.)
Often, in science fiction, the Evil Twin is created from the original character by Applied Phlebotinum. Most of the time, this results in a "Good Twin" and "Evil Twin", neither of which are complete entities on their own. (See Starfish Character for examples of this.)
... Though other times, it is a case of "Real Twin" vs "Evil Duplicate" as in an episode of Seven Days, where Parker is duplicated. This episode distinguishes itself in that the Good Twin is ultimately killed. In a double-reversal, the Evil Twin is then split again to create a new Good Twin.
A goatee or other beard is a staple of Evil Twins everywhere. This comes from the Star Trek The Original Series episode "Mirror, Mirror", in which the evil duplicate of Spock is distinguished only by the fact that he has a beard. It is common for parodies of Evil Twin to use a beard as a distinguishing characteristic, in some cases even when they shouldn't be able to grow facial hair - for example, Flexo in Futurama or Cartman in South Park.
Sci-Fi versions usually wind up playing Spot the Imposter.
Compare Evil Counterpart and Enemy Without, and see also Doppelganger. For the situation where the original character pretends to be the Evil Twin, see I Am He As You Are He. When multiple characters' Evil Twins team up, they become The Psycho Rangers.
If they are literal twins, they might be Cain And Abel and/or Separated At Birth, but an Evil Twin need not be a relative of the original, and a separated pair doesn't necessarily include an evil one.
Contrast Evil Knockoff.
Examples:
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Anime
- Yuuna's evil twin in Maburaho was magic-derived.
- Evil robotic Angels appeared in Galaxy Angel Moonlit Lovers, after an evil robot Tact appeared in the first game. Strangely, the fake Angels were the only villains to be kept in the Galaxy Angel anime, and they only appeared for one episode.
- Gundam SEED featured Rau Le Creuset, an unstable clone of secondary character Mu La Flaga's father. While they initially don't seem similar, when Rau removes his mask, he reveals his identical face. Rau's feelings that his existence was an abomination and nihilism about humanity in general led him to attempt to wipe out all of humanity, Coordinator and Natural both.
- The entire premise of Blood Plus is of werewolf-like creatures originating from two twins who were born from the womb of the Mother, and they turn out to be Saya and Diva, the heroine and villainess. They look alike except for the fact that Saya has red eyes, and Diva has blue eyes, referencing the colors of the veins and arteries in human beings.
- Monster has the titular Johan Liebert, fraternal twin of Anna Liebert (Nina Fortner).
- Magic Knight Rayearth 2 has Nova, evil twin to titular protagonist Shidou Hikaru. Extremely bi-polar (which is putting it kindly as she switches constantly back and forth between cutesy, loving little child and homicidal psychopath personalities), and bat-shit insane. Created at the very instant that Hikaru and her fellow Knights were transported back to earth at the end of the first story, Nova is actually a small portion of Hikaru's soul given a separate existence and consciousness of its own. Hikaru couldn't cope with all the crushing negative emotions and thoughts brought on by the trauma induced by the first story's ending, and thus her body expelled them all along with a bit of her being, which was given a life of its own via Cefiro's "willpower=reality" system of existence.
- Subverted in a stand-alone episode of The Slayers. A villain uses an enchanted mirror to create dark duplicates of his victims, including main characters Lina and Naga. The clones are supposed to be the "reverse" of the originals - which, to the bad guy's surprise, means the copies are meek, modest and peaceful, not evil.
- Throughout Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle, there are sinister flashes of another Syaoran floating in a tank of water in the villain's base, who seems to be "influencing" the Syaoran who is traveling with the good guys. In the manga, the truth is revealed. The Syaoran in the tank is the "original" Syaoran, and the one traveling with them is really a heartless clone whose emotions were inspired by psychic connection. Upon the good Syaoran's release, our Evil Twin Syaoran succumbs to his programming.
- Knives in Trigun, Cain in Trinity Blood, and Aion in Chrono Crusade. Apparently, being a guy who's the hero's evil twin means being a genocidal psycho and having a brother complex the size of the Empire State Building. Knives, Cain and Aion are anime's unholy trinity of Evil Twins. The three of them are practically expies of whomever came first. Roshel/Rociel in Angel Sanctuary is very much like them too, with the difference that Alexiel is female and his non-identical twin. Also a partial subversion in that Rociel is a supreme angel and Alexiel, a fallen one.
- Subverted in Chobits. Freya, Chii's sister, at first glance appears to be Chii's dark side/evil twin/dark thoughts, The Enemy Within or just the highly-knowledgable Split Personality to Chii's innocence, but actually turns out to be looking out for Chii's safety, supplying her with information and intervening in preserving Chii when necessary.
- Evil twins of the Sanzo-ikkou were created by a demon who rationalized that the best chance of beating them was pitting them against themselves. Turned into comedy when Hakkai, Gojyo, and Goku imagine beating up on a Sanzo-lookalike. Also used as An Aesop, as when they win against their clones - who are wearing their clothes from the first season - they explain to the confused demon that they are not the same people as they were when the clones were created and they grow and learn as blah blah blah.
- Subverted in Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni: it's often impossible even for people who have watched the series more than once to tell whether Shion or Mion is the evil twin. This makes them both seem evil, or at least sinister.
- In reality, both are very nice, however Shion is Yandere at least once in all the worlds. Also, sound novel players can tell them apart.
- Averted in One Piece. Luffy and his older brother Ace are on opposing pirate crews, and Ace has a sinister air about him, but the two actually have a good relationship.
- Not that this really matters, considering that they're not twins or related by blood, for that matter.
- Fran of Franken Fran was built by Dr. Madaraki to serve as his apprentice. When one of her assistants is killed in a way that she can't prevent, she discovers the existence of her "sister" Victoria, built to serve as Madaraki's bodyguard. Unlike Fran, who will not condone a person's death if it can be prevented, Victoria will quite enthusiastically kill someone if it benefits her. Fran very quickly shoves a Restraining Bolt into Victoria's brain, and she settles into being a devil's advocate for her sister.
- Shaman King: Yoh's evil twin and the series' Big Bad, Asakura Hao (changed to Asakura Zeke in the American Translation).
- Dark Keroro.
- In Bleach, Ichigo's Inner Hollow could probably be considered this. And if that's not enough, Szayel Aporro Granz makes evil clones of Renji and Ishida to fight, though they're mindless.
- Earlier in the series, Ichigo acquires a special pill that lets him take on his Shinigami form while leaving a temporary artificial soul in his human body. The artificial soul turns out to have a will of its own, and is quite the Delinquent.
- Saint Seiya has Gemini Saga and Gemini/Sea Dragon Kanon, each of them is the evil twin to the other in different parts of the story.
- The Black Saints not only shares the same armor as the protagonists except theirs is black but for unexplained reasons also share the exact same physical appearance as their good counterparts. This is all the most jarring in the case of the Black Phoenix mooks that come in mass and all look exactly the same, that is to say like the main Phoenix. All the attacks of the evil counterparts also are reminiscent of the good ones albeit more evil. For example the attack of Black Pegasus, Ankoku Ryu Sei Ken, is similar to the Ryu Sei Ken of the main Pegasus except it slowly contaminates its victims eventually making them suffocate to death. Likewise, the Black Andromeda's attack has its chains turning into snakes feeding on the victim's blood.
- Dragonball Z: While not an actual twin, Turles looks and (in the original Japanese) sounds just like Goku. His goals are slightly more sophisticated versions of what Goku likes to do: enjoy fine foods and engage in battles. It's possible he was meant to represent what Goku would have grown up to be like had it not been for Grandpa Goahn
- Hana from Papillion Hana To Cho is glamorous, popular, and the decided favorite over her Country Mouse twin sister Ageha until Ageha discovered tiny bit of confidance after reuniting with an old (male) friend. Hana then steals said friend by using Ageha's weak stomach to get her out of the way with a little Hidden Depths sweettalk. Things get worse after Ageha gets over the guy, improves her relationship with her Well Done Daughter Mom and hooks up with another guy: Hana disguises herself as Ageha while Ageha is sick and is so irritating that he breaks up with Ageha the next day (he's a psych major and he couldn't tell Ageha was acting a bit off? C'mon, they're not Cylons!). Due to said guy being her school counselor and offlimits in the first place it's unlikely Ageha will ever know the real reason they broke up.
- Zeno from Gash Bell, Evil Twin to the title character. Angry at not being able to have a Dangerous Forbidden Technique, which was given to his Idiot Hero of a brother. Has a Redemption Equals Death moment
- In Ninin Ga Shinobuden, Onsokumaru creates an evil duplicate when he attempts to use a Ninja Clone technique. Of course, Onsokumaru being Onsokumaru, the twin isn't really any worse than the original.
Comic Books
- The entire Bizarro World in the Pre Crisis Superman mythos can be considered a form of Evil Twin by Applied Phlebotinum, though it slowly changed from "evil opposite" to "goofy opposite".
- Eh? Bizarro STARTED as a "goofy opposite". Oddly, he arguably had an Evil Twin, in the form of Bizarro-Bizarro, who looked like Superman, spoke like Bizarro, and acted like a Jerkass.
- In All-Star Superman, there's Zibarro, who's the most intelligent man on Bizarro World.
- The Marvel Comics series Exiles inverts this. The reality-hopping team of the title need to defeat the evil Hyperion... so they fetch two good versions of him from other universes.
- In the Shattered Glass
Transformers comic series, Cliffjumper is transported to a Bizarro Universe where the Autobots are evil and the Decepticons are good. In a bit of parody/lampshading, evil Rodimus even got himself a goatee, saying that he feels it makes him feel distinguished.
- Newspaper comic inversion: In Calvin And Hobbes, Calvin once made a perfect copy of himself to do his work for him, only to find out that his double was even more troublesome than the original, since he realized that he could commit any mischief and the original would get all the blame. A later storyline had Calvin making a duplicate of only his good side... who among other things starts trying to make friends with the girl next door Calvin's always trying to humiliate. Calvin confronts his good counterpart and provokes him into a fight. Angered, Calvin's Good Side decides that he's going to "tear [Calvin] limb from-", and promptly disappears with the exclamation "Oops, I had an evil thought!" Hobbes then declares: "Another casualty of Applied Metaphysics."
- The DCU has Earth-3, a Mirror Universe of Evil Twins, including Alexander Luthor, the good twin of Lex Luthor.
- It also has the anti-matter universe, /another/ Mirror Universe of Evil Twins. The main visible difference between the two? The anti-matter universe is home to the Crime Syndicate of Amerika [sic], while Earth-3 is home to the Crime Society of America.
- Subverted in the comic book Hellblazer, in which it is revealed that the series's star, John Constantine is the 'evil' twin, having strangled his brother in the womb with his own umbilical cord. He later crossed over to a parallel universe, where his brother had become an incredibly powerful and celebrated magus.
- This editor has been told that John DIDN'T kill his brother, but it was the result of his dad trying to abort the boys with a wire hanger. His dad blamed it on John.
- If I'm recalling this correctly, John also creates a "twin" by putting his negative aspects into an identical golum and sending him to hell. John later discovers he needs his bad side, but the twin, being a Jerk Ass, decides to remain an individual in hell. John goes on a quest to regain his cunning and gets... better? Worse?...in any case he gets back to "normal".
- In the comic book Gold Digger, the two main characters (Gina and her adopted were-cheetah sister, Brittany) accidentally create a clone of themselves that shares traits from both of them, including their memories, in an attempt to remove a curse from themselves. After several battles with the clone, Gina realizes that the reason the clone is trying to kill them is because the curse is inhabiting the clone, motivating its irrational desire to kill them. Her father, an arch-mage, happens to show up in time to dispel the curse, and the clone is invited to join the family and given the name Brianna (a portmanteau of Brittany and Gina).
- Later on, the Djinn Madrid uses magics to disguise herself as Gina so well she can fool empaths. This backfires though, erasing her original form, and since then, Madrid has been slowly overwritten by Gina, to the point that a future version of herself traveled to the edge of existence and beyond to save her 'baby sister'
- In Archie Sonic the Hedgehog, as well as having Shadow, and various Metal Sonics, there were the Anti-Freedom Fighters, from another dimension. Anti-Sonic later became Scourge.
- The Flash (Barry Allen version) had an Evil Twin in the form of Eobard Thawne, who had plastic surgery to resemble him, and then travelled back from the 25th century to become Professor Zoom, the Reverse Flash. A later Ret Con would reveal that Zoom was descended from Malcom Thawne, aka Cobalt Blue, who really was Barry's estranged twin brother but had completely different powers.
- In the 30th century Eobard's descendent created Inertia, a clone of Barry's (and his own) grandson Impulse, and sent him back in time to fight his counterpart.
- Pretty much every member of the X-Men has had at least one Evil Twin at some point, thanks to any or all of alternate realities, android duplicates, Skrulls and insane geneticists with a thing about cloning. Among the more notable examples...
- Beast's evil twin from an alternate dimension, known as the Dark Beast, made his way into the mainstream universe and has been a recurring villain since the 1990s. Beast also had at least two other Evil Twins, but they didn't last.
- Joseph was a much younger 'copy' of Magneto. Since at the time Magneto was villainous and Joseph was an X-Man, he counts as a Good Twin.
- At one point half the team was replaced by the shape-shifting aliens known as Skrulls (this was back before everyone was doing it). While most of them remained in captivity while their doubles were running around making trouble, the story culminated in Professor X handing a simultaneous physical and mental beatdown to his double. While naked.
- Professor X has an actual evil twin, Cassandra Nova. It's later explained that everyone has an evil twin, a psychic construct the Shi'ar call the mummudrai that they face off with before birth. Xavier killed Nova in the womb, but, because she was the Evil Twin of an extremely powerful psychic, she managed to survive as a mass of miscarried fetal tissue and reconstruct herself to the point where she could enact revenge.
- During the Marvel Crisis Crossover with the entity called the Magus trying to snuff reality, he distracted all the superheroes by simultaneously creating Evil Twins of every superhero in the Marvel Universe.
- Likewise the Avengers Forever series ends with a no punches pulled battle between every good Avenger that can exist, and every evil Avenger that can exist.
- Infinity War, the above-mentioned Crisis Crossover, had a few interesting moments in the 'crossover' issues. One issue of Fantastic Four had the Human Torch being pursued by doppelgangers of several X-men, as well as his own 'twin'. Once Torch found out that not a single one of them was human, or even truly alive, he started flash-frying them like popcorn. He ended up missing his own twin, who merely looked at him and said he had no more intention of trying to absorb him, because as he put it before he left, "You're already worse than anything I could ever make you." Thing even later yelled at him that "You ain't no flaming version of the Punisher!" The irony of this is that Torch was one of the few that ended up not being defeated by the doppelgangers in the final issue, whereas the Thing was defeated not even a few minutes later by the dark version of Invisible Woman. Rage of the New Warriors ended up inadvertantly absorbing his own twin, which had very little effect on him, surprisingly enough.
- The Excalibur villains Lightning Squad were an alternate version of the team (minus Rachel, who has no counterpart in the multiverse) from a reality where the Nazis won World War Two. Hauptmann Englande was a cold and ruthless Nazi darling, Meggan had this Baroness thing going on, and Nightcrawler was a rapist; but the most chilling reflection was Jewish Shadowcat, who was a bald, emaciated slave to the regime.
Film
- In the superhero comedy Sky High, one of the teachers tries to set up a colleague on a blind date with his girlfriend's sister. "What if I said it's not just her twin? It's her evil twin." "This Friday, you say?"
- The Movie of The Magic Roundabout introduces Zebedee's Evil Twin, the ice-wizard Zeebad who was imprisoned under the Roundabout itself. This would probably qualify it for Dis Continuity were it not for Tom Baker's wonderful Large Ham voice role.
- Evil Robot Bill and Evil Robot Ted from Bill And Ted's Bogus Journey. If nothing else, it gave us the classic line (when E.R.Ted first sees Ted's girlfriend)..."I got a full-on robot chubby."
- Carmen and Juni's robot doubles in Spy Kids.
- The Avengers. Mrs. Peel's clone, created by Sir August as his henchwoman. She is distinguished from the real Mrs. Peel by wearing a black leather jumpsuit.
Literature
- In Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan book series: After the very distinctive-looking Miles Vorkosigan claims (as a coverup for his secret identity) that he has a clone running around, it turns out he does have one. Who's been trained to take his life over. Turns out the twin, Mark, isn't necessarily born evil, just brainwashed (plus has Split Personality, with the personalities generally being pretty dark).
- Lampshaded in Mirror Dance: "Some people have evil twins. I am not so lucky. I have an idiot twin."
- In William Sleator's The Duplicate, the clone isn't really evil, just resentful of being treated as a clone (he has all the memories of the original, so he believes he is the original). However, this leads him to make another clone, who really is evil (or at least not exactly sane).
- In Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next : First Among Sequels, Thursday is asked to train two fictional versions of herself as Jurisfiction agents. One of them, being from an adaptation that emphasized sex and violence, is a scheming, sarcastic bitch.
- Subverted in Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code, where the villain of the book, Jon Spiro, is the evil twin. His brother is a normal guy used as a decoy. He doesn't even get any dialogue, he just sleeps..
- Oddly doubled variation: the twins from Sweet Valley High were menaced by another pair of twins who looked just like them, who wanted to take over their lives.
- In Matt Ruff's Sewer, Gas, and Electric, the villains attempt to replace a hero with a robotic copy of himself. His assistant is able to distinguish the two when the robot looks up and exclaims how worried he was that she'd be hurt, while the real version, despite the firefight going on outside, keeps playing a video game.
- The Star Trek Deep Space Nine novel Fearful Symmetry is all over this trope. You may want to draw diagrams for this. Back in the episode "Second Skin", Major Kira was surgically altered to look like a Cardassian and told she was Iliana Ghemor, an Obsidian Order agent who'd been given Fake Memories as a Deep Cover Agent. This was actually part of an Obsidian Order Xanatos Gambit to gain evidence Iliana's father was an anti-military-rule dissident. In this novel, the real Iliana shows up, and it turns out she did indeed have her memories and appearance altered to resemble Kira, before Gul Dukat called a halt to the operation in memory of Kira's mother. He then kept Iliana captive all this time, taking his ... confused (not to say disturbing)... feelings about Kira out on her. Iliana is now Ax Crazy with a side-order of Amnesiac Dissonance and wants revenge on anyone else who claims to be Kira Nerys. She starts off by killing Kira's other evil twin, Intendant Kira from the Mirror Universe, and taking her place. "Our" Kira, meanwhile, is being aided by Iliana's good twin; a Mirror Universe version whose father was the ruthless head of the Obsidian Order, but who defied him and joined the Terran Rebellion. Got all that? If this was the TV series, Nana Visitor would be playing four roles.
- Harry Dresden of The Dresden Files has an entity that fits the evil-twin bill (based on Harry's wiseass and slightly lowbrow nature): more cultured, better groomed, more thoughtful, goatee. The catch is, the guy's neither evil, twin, nor real-he's a representation of Harry's subconscious, who takes the opportunity to lecture Harry whenever he's really on the ropes and unconscious.
- Older Than Print example: the "false Guenevere" in King Arthur, who is the true Guenevere's identical half-sister.
- Happens literally in Rangers Apprentice, although this is something of a subversion in that Halt's twin is more petty and pathetic than outright evil, and the dichotomy is one of competent/incompetent rather than good/bad.
Live Action TV
- From Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Vampire Willow in "The Wish" and "Dopplegangland".
- And the trope was later subverted in The Replacement. A demon's spell, meant for Buffy, hits Xander instead, splitting him in two. He spends the rest of the episode tracking his twin while the twin interacts with his friends and makes various changes to his life. At the end its revealed That the blast doesn't split you into Good/Bad but only into Strong/Weak. The Xander that the audience thought was the "Good" Xander was actually the "Weak" one and the "Strong" one wasn't doing anything harmful to his life and was actually improving it. The demon's plot hinged on the fact that if one of the twins was killed, both would die. He'd planned to split Buffy into a Slayer powered version and a valley girl version, then kill the latter.
- Lois And Clark had Lois's evil twin, who was a clone. And Superman's misguided-and-sees-Lex-as-his-father twin, who was also a clone
- Data has an evil twin, Lore, in Star Trek The Next Generation, and a "stupid twin", B4, in Star Trek: Nemesis.
- As does William Riker, thanks to a transporter malfunction, although his twin was not so much evil as misguided, and was not even that in his first appearance.
- Lots of evil twins in the Mirror Universe, of course, but Intendent Kira Nerys deserves special mention for being the only one who's actually met her counterpart. And got the hots for her.
- As well as having a double in the Mirror Universe, Kirk also had an android duplicate (What Are Little Girls Made Of?) and an evil double created by a transporter accident. (The Enemy Within)
- In The Dukes Of Hazzard episode "Baa Baa White Sheep" we meet Boss Hogg's good twin, Abraham Lincoln Hogg, who dresses in a black outfit, complete with stovepipe hat, that matches Boss Hogg's white one. It helps to know that Boss's given initials stand for "Jefferson Davis".
- Similarly, Fantasy Island once revealed that Mr. Roarke and Tattoo had their own evil (non-identical) twins, who wore black suits with white ties, and had British Accents. Perhaps ironically, the 1998 reboot of Fantasy Island starred British actor Malcolm McDowell, complete with a black suit, as Mr. Roarke.
- Red Dwarf's episode "Demons and Angels" triplicated the ship and its inhabitants into normal, good, and evil versions.
- The episode "Psirens" had an evil telepathic shapechanging brain-eater take on Lister's appearance and personality. But it got it's image of Dave Lister from Lister's own brain, including his delusions. The alien was outed when he could play hot licks on the guitar (Real Lister's guitar playing is described as the work of "a ten-thumbed tone-deaf noise polluter".)
- The 1970s science fiction parody series Quark also hit this trope in an episode called "The Good, The Bad, and the Ficus". Spock-like Ficus, being a plant, had no morality to invert when the crew of the ship was duplicated.
- On a Saturday Night Live "Frankenstein, Tonto, and Tarzan" sketch, Frankenstein is kidnapped and replaced by his brother:
Tonto: Frankenstein seem different. Frankenstein's Evil Brother: Why that's utterly preposterous! Away, you inconsiderate reprobate! [Sips a sherry]
- This trope is parodied in another Saturday Night Live skit one which is titled Jay's Evil Twin, in it....Leno uses a fake moustache to determine if his date (Joan Cusack) will put out- his evil twin Wade.
Jay's Evil Twin: What's the matter, baby? Still got your clothes on? [ releases an evil laugh as he shakes the beer can ] Kate: Oh, uh.. I don't want that beer.. I.. no, thank you, Jay. Jay's Evil Twin: [ releases an evil laugh ] Wet t-shirt contest, baby? [ pulls the tab on the beer can, gushing beer all over Kate's clothes ] Kate: Why! You're not Jay! You're Wade, his evil twin! Jay's Evil Twin: [ releases an evil laugh ] Jay - that little weasel! That sniveling druid! What kind of a man would read "Our Bodies Ourselves"? I've got my own version of that book, baby - it's called "Your Body Myself!" [ releases an evil laugh ] Kate: Ohhh, that's evil! You're an evil, evil man! [ runs quickly out of the apartment ] Jay Leno: [ releases an evil laugh, as he peels the fake moustache off his upper lip ] You know.. I had a hunch that dame wasn't going to come across on the first date. You know, this evil twin thing works every time - I could have blown three hours and who knows how much dough on that girl. But, anyway.. [ checks his watch ] My God, it's still early.. I can still go to Hef's place, maybe meet somebody else there. See you later. [ releases evil laugh as he exits the apartment]]
- Knight Rider, a show with only three regular human characters, featured four evil twins; KITT, whose prototype KARR appeared in "Trust Doesn't Rust" and "KITT vs KARR", Michael, whose surgically reconstructed face was revealed to be based on the long-lost Garth in "Goliath" and "Goliath Returns", Bonnie has an imposter wearing a Latex Perfection disguise in "KITTnapped", and Devon, who had a surgically reconstructed duplicate in "Knight of the Juggernaut". A script commissioned but never produced was to introduce yet another "evil twin", Devon's unscrupulous, though not actually evil, twin brother.
- Lexx, presumably due to casting limitations, featured an endless supply of twins, some good, some evil. In a bit of Lampshade Hanging, the characters theorized that there were only a finite number of archetypes for human appearances.
- Sliders featured numerous evil twins, including one case where there is a No Ending in which one of the regulars may have been permanently replaced by his twin.
- Col. Carter from Stargate SG-1 had an evil replicator version of herself, Replicator Carter (Replicarter) who nearly takes over the entire galaxy.
- In the Alternate Universe of "Point Of View", Apophis has a goatee, ala Spock, but everyone is morally the same, except maybe Teal'c (our Teal'c didn't give him chance to talk before offing him).
- And then there's the Alternate Universe SG-1 that tries to steal the Daedalus in "Ripple Effect".
- Subverted slightly by Col. Mitchell who points out to the alternate Mitchell that "You don't have a goatee, so you aren't from the evil twin universe"
- Alton Brown's evil twin, B.A., is a recurring character on Good Eats, usually to provide contrast as Alton and B.A. make sweet and spicy varieties of the same dish. Despite that B.A. is "evil", and has been in and out of jail numerous times, Alton and B.A. seem to get along relatively well. Of course, this might be because B.A.'s also The Voiceless, and Alton provides the running commentary on anything B.A. makes.
- Smallville had a couple of Evil Twin variants - Bizarro Clark, of course, whose distinguishing characteristic was that he'd wear the opposite jacket/shirt combo (red jacket/blue shirt if Clark's got a blue jacket/red shirt, etc.) and no one noticed. Also, in the episode "Onyx", Lex Luthor is split into a Good Lex and a Crazy/Evil Lex.
- If all there is to Bizarro is swapped colors of jacket and shirt, I wouldn't call that an Idiot Plot. A Genre Savvy character might be expected to notice, maybe, but those are rare in Smallville. By contrast, when Clark starts dressing in black and leather due to red Kryponite, people do notice.
- The season-long "Family Secret" arc on Sabrina The Teenage Witch ends with the revelation that every member of the Spellman family has an evil twin. Sabrina is then subjected to a series of tests to determine whether she or "Katrina" is the evil one. ([[You Should Know This Already|Hint]]: It's Katrina). The loser is sent off to the Other Realm Twin Cities. She returned in a later episode where she took Sabrina's place while the latter took Katrina's place in an Other Realm jail. There, Sabrina met Zelda's Evil Twin Jezebelda, an evil Mad Scientist Witch who, amongst other things, created the Black Plague. For some reason, Hilda's evil twin doesn't appear, but was mentioned. Hilda was the good twin that came closest to offing her evil twin during the tests.
- So Weird: "Pen Pal": Random supernatural occurrences cause Annie to come face-to-face with a parallel universe counterpart who has fallen in with a bad crowd, and thereby turned "evil" (Well, goth and rebellious. This being a Disney show, the two are more or less synonymous).
- Popular had Bobbi and Jessie Glass working at Kennedy High (as well as their brother Rock). Bobbi and Rock were notoriously mean and unpleasant, while Jessie the nurse seemed a bit nicer, comparatively speaking. And yet, in the first season finale, Jessie plotted to kill her twin and frame all of Bobbi's sophomore biology class for the murder. Who's the mean one now?
- The Tonight Show With Jay Leno in the 90's had Jay playing different characters such as Iron Jay and Beyondo. The character of his that fits right in this trope is Evil Jay who appears at every full moon. Years before that, Jay Leno satirized the entire 'evil twin' trope when a guest on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. Leno had a marked-up TV Guide and showed what seemed like a dozen 'evil twin' themed shows for that one week. There was one on Hawaii Five-O. The bit wrapped with Dynasty, which had Crystal replaced with her 'scheming lookalike', with Jay shouting, "Scheming lookalike? Scheming lookalike? It's an EVIL TWIN!". This trope is so endemic in television that perhaps we should be asking which shows never did it.
- A two-part episode of The Incredible Hulk introduced viewers to another Hulk, created by a similar process to the one that transformed David Banner - but even more wild than the one we know, and actively malevolent and murderous.
- Out Of This World: Evie splits herself in order to attend a party while also writing a speech about the evils of school uniforms (Specifically, bright yellow dresses with blue baseball caps, and breeches for the boys). Unsurprisingly, the process results in a serious Evie and a reckless Evie. The serious Evie is portrayed as the "real" one, at least until Serious-Evie tries to give her speech and discovers that she's now in favor of the dress code. Troy attributes their eventual recombination to The Power Of Love, which is kind of Squickworthy if you think too hard about it.
- Stick Stickly, the stick puppet host of Nickelodeon's Nick in the Afternoon, had a diabolical lookalike, Evil Stick, who once tried to take over the summer programming block.
- Subverted in Farscape's third season, where a second John Crichton is created... yet is absolutely the same as the first Crichton.
- However, it was essentially played straight in the episode My three Crichtons, which featured John being duplicated into a caveman and a future-brain-man-thing. Strangely enough, only one was actually evil.
- Malcolm In The Middle had a hilarious inversion. Dewey is finding people who are just giving him money for no reason. At first he doesn't question it, but Reese finds out that there's another kid who looks just like Dewey. He then surmises that for every person there is an evil opposite. When Dewey is worried that he's met his evil twin, Reese points out the kid is virtually a saint and that Dewey is the Evil Twin. Reese then recruits Dewey to do a lot of bad things and get the other kid blamed, but by the end of the episode, Dewey tells the other kid's older brother on what's going on and gets Reese beaten up.
- Friends gives us Phoebe's Evil Twin, Ursula. Or rather, Mad About You gave us Ursula, and Friends revealed she was Pheobe's Evil Twin.
- The final Space Cases episode to air, "Trouble With Doubles":
- Third Rock From The Sun had Dick temporarily replaced as high commander by another alien who takes on the same human form and identity. This replacement (called simply "New Dick") is not only an evil megalomaniac, he is also "extremely unpleasant." Even more than the original.
- So he's a real dick then?
- Alias gives us this trope via Project Helix. Two major characters (Francie and later Sydney) had evil versions, and several minor characters as well.
- In the 2002 revival of The Basil Brush Show there's Basil's cousin Mortimer who is a criminal mastermind.
- Heroes has begun this trope as an "evil" character Sylar gained shapeshifting abilities and has begun taking on the roles of a "good" character Nathan Petrelli . (Though their good and evil roles seem to change episode by episode).
- In the Doctor Who classic series adventure "Inferno", the Third Doctor is sent into an Alternate Universe where he encounters evil-fascist-twin versions of his friends in U.N.I.T — the evil Brigadier has in fact lost his facial hair, but gained an eyepatch in response. Bizzaro Liz is a brunette instead of a redhead. Curiously enough, there's no evil version of the Doctor himself (although the Expanded Universe novels did suggest that the evil tyrant ruling this fascist alternative Britain was in fact an alternative version of the Third Doctor with a different body who went evil after his forced regeneration by the Time Lords).
- In the modern Expanded Universe comic "The Forgotten", a brain parasite attacking the Tenth Doctor takes on the appearance of an evil twin version of him, complete with beard and black pinstripe suit, and claims to be the Valeyard. The real Doctor immediately mocks the parasite's complete lack of originality.
- In the New World Zorro series, Don Diego has an evil (though not identical) twin. Also, the evil Alcalde is at one point replaced by his identical twin, who raises the suspicion of the other characters by being somewhat less evil than the real Alcalde.
- iCarly has an episode about Sam's identical good twin, Melanie. The episode revolved around Freddie thinking Melanie was fake, and his attempts to get Sam to reveal that Sam was trying to trick him. He askes Melanie out on a date, calls her hot, dances with her, and Melanie kisses him. He runs off because he still thinks it's Sam trying to trick him. In the end, Sam lets Freddie think she was trying to trick him because Sam didn't want Freddie to reveal their their secret First Kiss.
- In Lidsville the villain Hoodoo had a good twin, Bruce, the White Sheep of the family.
- WKRP In Cincinnati did it with Venus Flytrap being suspected of crimes that were committed by a pimp-dressed Evil Twin complete with the obligatory goatee.
- The renewed series of Mission Impossible had its own unique take on this, thanks to Latex Perfection. An IMF agent who'd gone insane after a head injury was carrying out murders while disguised as Jim Phelps. Naturally he had all the training and skills that Phelps had, making him an Evil Twin in all but name.
- Supernatural has had two doppelganger episodes: "Skin" and "Nightshifter."
New Media
- Magic The Gathering's official site
did a theme week where most of the weekly articles were written by "evil twins" of their usual writers. Even the writer that's supposedly a supervillain; the twin is such a Well Intentioned Extremist, he makes Light Yagami look like a Technical Pacifist.
- World Of Warcraft info site Thottbot.com allows you to switch between Classic and Evil Twin themes (white background vs. black background, among other color changes), and the loading screen when switching to Evil Twin mode says "Growing goatee..." (while the loading page to get back to Classic mode says "Shaving...").
Table Top Games
- In GURPS, Evil Twin is a disadvantage a character can take for additional points. The disadvantage makes the PC have to take the fall for things his evil twin does, as well as other characters thinking that the PC is crazy, or has a split personality. Interestingly, the Evil Twin has this disadvantage as well, and occasionally the Evil Twin will be blamed for something the PC did.
- And if you play an evil character with this disadvantage, you have to worry about getting the credit for your "Good" Twin doing things like saving orphanages.
- In Dungeons And Dragons, Hextor, the god of Tyranny and War, is the Evil Twin of Heironeous, the god of Chivalry and Justice.
- Dungeons And Dragons has a variation: There's an entire race called dopplegangers, who can shapeshift into any similarly sized humanoid-including other people.
- Fetches from Changeling The Lost. OK, "evil" is a bit of a misnomer for most of them (which the books note), and it's only the ones where the True Fae were incompetent that are bad guys, but if your character wants his life back, he's going to have to deal with his. Of course, it's possible to merge with one, and gain all their memories in the process, but that requires the changeling to admit that he and the fetch are essentially drawn from the same person...and most changelings are too cowardly to admit that.
- There's at least one example character where the Changeling is the monster, and the Fetch is pretty much the good guy.
Video Games
- In the Sonic The Hedgehog video games, Sonic has had a number of evil robotic duplicates — the number of characters involved is unclear, but at least five different bodies have been used. In addition, the sometimes-evil character Shadow is very similar to Sonic in appearance and abilities.
- Happened in the comics, too, more times than this editor cares to count. The first instance might have been in Sally's miniseries.
- The Archie comics Sonic has an evil duplicate from an alternate universe who's been in the comics for a long time. Originally referred to as Evil Sonic, he renamed himself "Scourge" after absorbing energy from the Master Emerald.
- He's in the games now, too. Not that we choose to remember that particular game.
- Devil May Cry has Vergil, who despises his humanity and does questionable things to assuage his power cravings, unlike Dante who dislikes his demonic heritage and fights demonic incursions.
- This was the whole point of the series Two : The evil one is the first to discover he has a twin, and frames him for his own crimes.
- In First Among Sequels, Thursday Next faces her fictional adaptation.
- Wario from the Super Mario Bros games is Mario's evil twin, a malicious, greedy egotist to Mario's more peaceful, fair and modest nature. His origin is not known other than him being a childhood friend of Mario, but the most commonly accepted story is that he was jealous of Mario's fame and was bullied by him as a child. Wario has since moved away from being one of Mario's antagonists and instead wants to gather fame and fortune for himself.
- Mario's brother Luigi got his own "evil twin" in the form of Waluigi. He was created mainly as a partner for Wario in the Mario Tennis games and has since taken part in many other party/all-star Mario games.
- Another evil twin of sorts appears in Super Mario Sunshine where an evil "Shadow Mario" is ruining Mario's good name by spreading graffiti and monsters with his magic paintbrush. He is shaped exactly like Mario, but his body is made of liquid and he has glowing red eyes. However he turns out to simply be a child of Bowser's in disguise.
- Speaking of Bowser, in Mario and Luigi RPG 3, an Artifact Of Doom known as the Dark Star invaded his body and copied his DNA in order to take a form of an eviler looking Bowser. Bowser doesn't like the idea of an eviler twin ruling the Mushroom Kingdom.
- The plot of Metal Gear Solid is all about this. The protagonist and his maniacal twin are the products of research into "soldier genes". The hero, Snake, was supposedly modified to have the strongest possible soldier phenotype, and the maniacal Liquid Snake was meant to be the weakest. It's subverted twice:
- At the end of the first game, it's revealed that Liquid was actually the superior twin.
- And Metal Gear Solid 2 reveals a third 'twin', also not very nice.
- In World Of Warcraft, players that use a transporter to Gadgetzan can be turned into their evil twin. Blizzard neglected to add goatees to the character models, unfortunately.
- A common theme in Zone Of The Enders: The main player's Humongous Mecha with a decidedly intelligent AI whose cockpit he ends up in is always part of a pair created for a specific purpose. Guess where the other one ends up?
- In Silent Hill 3, Heather meets and fights her twin, which appears to be incarnate Memories of Alessa, as Heather and Alessa are basically the same person (nuances exist, however).
- A bit of a reversal from the Nights Into Dreams series. The titular character is the good twin of a pair of nightmares.
- Done in No More Heroes when the well dressed Irish-brogue accented swordsman Henry says he's your twin brother...in the last three minutes of the game. Plus, considering how the Touchdown/Crystel/Whatever brothers behave it's hard to tell which one is evil. Also, it is probably the greatest parody of Dante and Vergil you'll ever see.
- Samus Aran of the Metroid series has had two, both resulting from having her suit invaded by evil alien substances: the SA-X of Metroid Fusion, and Dark Samus of the Prime trilogy.
- Technically, Samus has 12. Due to the SA-X asexually reproducing, there were 11 of them in Fusion. She never meets the same one twice.
- 15, if you count the three echoes Dark Samus had around her. Also, keep in mind that Adam is being optimistic with his estimation on how many SA-X are on the stati- dude, no wonder one of the few things we know about Other M is the total lack of doppelgängers. Samus has had more evil twins than she has blown up planets!
- Even Kirby was victim of this trope, when he and his three good twins traveled to the mirror world, they met Dark Kirby, which actually was a good guy! However, they also met Meta Knight's counterpart, Dark Meta Knight, which was truly evil.
- In the F Zero series, there's Blood Falcon, who was literally cloned from Captain Falcon, and wears the exact same clothes in a different color. In a nice touch, however, their racing machines are rather different.
- Super Robot Wars Original Generation example: Beowulf, Kyosuke's Shadow Mirror counterpart. In OG 2, he is portrayed to be pretty much identical and as heroic as Kyosuke. But in Original Generations, it's revealed that he's possessed by Einst, a total sociopath obsessing on the world's destruction and rebirth, and just plain evil, perhaps as an after effect that Kyosuke in the Shadow Mirror has no Excellen to balance it out ( Excellen was killed in the dimension and rebuilt into Lemon). Needless to say, this Evil Twin makes the Shadow Mirrors look like good guys.
- Mona Sax, the "knockout femme fatale" of Max Payne, introduces herself as the "evil twin" of Lisa Punchinello, the Don's wife. Lisa is killed by the Don near the end of the second act, and Mona shows up later during the final assault on the Aesir building, where she does a Heel Face Turn and apparently dies, only to show up again in the sequel, in which she plays a major role as Max's partner/love interest.
- In all three episodes of Apogee's Monster Bash you end up having to fight Johnny Dash's evil twin. These fights are somewhat harder than most enemies partly because the evil twin can take more damage than most monsters and partly because the evil twin uses the exact same sprite graphics as the player's character, making things confusing at times.
- Subverted in Saga Frontier with Blue and Rouge. Blue is one of the seven main characters. Rouge is a secondary character. They are doomed to fight each other to the death. Now, since Blue is a main character, you'd think he's the good one, right? Wrong. Blue is very willing to manipulate others for his own means, whereas Rouge is a friendly, personable guy who will join others on their quest.
- Played straight and inverted in the third installment of Phoenix Wright. Partway through the final case, good twin Iris is replaced and impersonated by evil twin Dahlia, though you don't realize this until later. And at the end, you learn that six years prior, Iris pretended to be Dahlia for several months.
- Also given a workout in another case in the same game, where Phoenix must track down his evil twin (nicknamed "Xin Ehop" by Maya) who has gotten a client found guilty with a laughable defence.
- Every few The Legend Of Zelda games, Link must face Dark Link/Shadow Link.
- About halfway through Up You Arsenal, the third "Ratchet And Clank" game. Clank gets kidnapped by Big Bad Dr. Nefarious and replaced by a Dr. Nefarious built duplicate, Klunk. Ratchet even plays a few levels with Klunk on his back before finding the real Clank and defeating Klunk in a boss battle.
- Banjo Kazooie sequel Banjo-Tooie had the Jinjos' evil twins the Minjos, and one of the bosses in the game was Mumbo Jumbo's evil robotic twin Mingy Jongo.
- Statesman, the resident Superman equivalent and Big Good of City Of Heroes, has two evil twins: Tyrant, the Dimension Lord of the Mirror Universe, and Reichsman, the little-seen Nazi version from the dimension where the Nazis won. Naturally, pretty much every high-profile hero in the game has an evil counterpart in Tyrant's dimension, as the Praetorians.
- In Skies Of Arcadia, actors-turned-robbers Vize, Anita, and Faina appear as Palette Swaps to heroes Vyse, Aika, and Fina, which has unfortunate results for the silhouettes on the Wanted poster (even though the heroes are already wanted as pirates, sort of). Turns out they even mirror several of the heroes' moves.
- One of Final Fantasy XII's plot twists was that Basch, a leading soldier in the home nation's army, was framed by his evil twin brother in the murder of the king, resulting in Basch's imprisonment and nationwide condemnation.
- In the Nancy Drew game Stay Tuned For Danger, actor (and suspect) Rick Arlen plays good and evil twins on the soap opera Light Of Our Love.
- In Persona 4, every single person in existance - except, it seems, the Protoganist - has an evil twin called a "Shadow" born of thier repressed feelings and thoughts. Get stuck in the TV world, and you'll end up meeting it.
- Sega's other mascot,NiGHTS has an evil twin called Reala, who was created alongside the purple dream jester to with a similar appearance, and the same abilities. After the neutral protagonist began to fight against Wiseman, Reala was granted the ability to summon exploding orbs to gain an edge over his/her/its twin.
- Mother 3 follows this literally. Lucas's twin brother, Claus, becomes evil after being reanimated and manipulated by Porky's minions.
- 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.
- Wait, you think that's "awesome"? That's...disturbing.
Webcomics
- Kid Radd features an Evil Twin as one of a Goldfish Poop Gang duo - he serves as the titular character's Shadow Archetype later in the story.
- The Sister arc of El Goonish Shive has main character Elliot get cursed to turn female, then touch a magical diamond which separates him into his normal male self, and a female version, named Ellen, who has all of the same memories, experiences, etc. Believing that she's the embodiment of his curse, and thus will disappear when it wears off, in less than a month, she goes crazy and tries to become his evil twin, in a desperate attempt to gain some sort of identity. She was wrong about disappearing, and wasn't so good at the evil twin thing. She now lives as Elliot's twin sister, joins the cast, and is accepted by Elliot's friends and family against the initial predictions of others. An extremely rare case of a "clone" getting a happy ending.
- Subverted in Pandect - Ice and a man who is like a father to him bear a striking physical resemblance, leading Ice to self-consciously dub Rocko his evil twin.
- Ginger from Sugar Bits(pictured above) is a moody, sarcastic, rather abrasive princess, who lives in a realm undisturbed by humanity known as Harmonia. She also has a seemingly malicious twin sister, Licorice, who suddenly appeared in Hansel(one of Ginger's friends)'s dream. While Ginger seems to be more calm and introvert, Licorice is dynamic and fierce.
- Good old-fashioned separated-at-birth actual twin Nale in The Order Of The Stick. He's the head of the Quirky Mini Boss Squad (but not The Dragon, oddly enough), while his good twin Elan is a comically inept bard. Further, the members of his "Linear Guild" were deliberately chosen by Nale to be "evil opposites" of the rest of the good guys. Not to mention that Elan is Chaotic Good while Nale is Lawful Evil.
- Further parodying the trope, Nale has a goatee - and his own actions have rendered Elan unable to grow facial hair.
- In Gaming Guardians, Ultima was a doppelganger-demon who was permanently empowered by Scarlet Jester with a copy of Radical's powers, which also caused her default form to become a duplicate of Radical.
- Depending on how you look at things, April in College Roomies From Hell could be considered to be her 'sister' June's evil duplicate.
- Subverted in Melonpool
, in which the duplicate, Ralphie, is the good one. Also, the Melonpool/It's Walky! Cross Over used the Dup-o-matic on an opposing army, who then immediately began fighting amongst each other. This crossover led to the creation of 'Anti-Joyce', who was the opposite of Joyce in that she was sexually active, rather than prudish. Interestingly, the storylines would have long-term consequences in both series: Ralphie joining the crew in Melonpool, while the murder of Anti-Joyce in It's Walky! would lead to serious psychological (and later, legal) problems for the original.
- Subverted in Concerned, as protagonist Gordon Frohman's twin brother Norman Frohman is a highly-effective special ops agent working for the resistance. Since Gordon Frohman is Dr. Breen's biggest fan, wants to join the Combine, and is bitterly jealous towards Gordon Freeman, that makes him...
- Cloney from Sluggy Freelance is eventually revealed as Aylee's Evil Clone.
- There's also Alt-Alt-Torg compared to regular Torg.
- Galatea in The Inexplicable Adventures Of Bob may not be so much an evil duplicate of Molly, as just an extremely angsty, volatile one. She did try to Take Over The World once, but Bob appealed to her better nature and talked her out of it.
- Megatokyo takes advantage of both the Evil Twin and Good Twin tropes with the so-called "Seraphim Triplets" story arc, in which the main character is counseled by his official conscience's two sisters without her consent or knowledge.
- Casey and Andy has an entire parallel universe of Hackneyed Opposites, most notably Quantum Crook, the evil twin and nemesis for Quantum Cop.
- The same universe also features the Mime Plumber, arguably the good twin for the Mime Assassin.
- Dinosaur Comics features an Alternate Universe where all the characters have goatees, featuring an evil (eviller?) version of T-Rex and Utahraptor.
- In Gunnerkrigg Court, the Nobodies from Zimmy's Dark World come in two flavors: faceless creeps or near flawless duplicates of people she knows. Though they are not evil (they don't even know they're duplicates).
- Basic Instructions helps us to distinguish the good and the evil twin in this strip
Web Original
- The League Of Intergalactic Cosmic Champions had interdimensional evil twins in the King's Interstellar Lethal Legionnaires, occasionally recurring group The Frank Conspiracy had a Dark Side & a Light Side, and the hero, Mr. Obvious, had a crazy twin brother, the hero, Mr. Absurd.
- Parodied in the Whateley Universe. In one novel, Jade Sinclair tries to fix her Exemplar problem that's keeping her looking like an eleven-year-old boy. She uses massively superpowered Tennyo as a model. Jinn Sinclair gets the upgrade.. even though Jinn is only a PK copy of Jade, currently inhabiting some ground chalk. In a rare Genre Savvy moment for the Sinclair girls, Jinn pretends to be a clone of Tennyo, and (of course) insists that she is real and the real Tennyo is fake. No one is fooled. She is physically composed of ground chalk at the time.
- The parody website Sev Trek subverted this in a cartoon where the crew of Voyager are duplicated by Yet Another Transploder Accident. However the duplicated crew are not evil, they're just more interesting.
Western Animation
Real Life
- In France, during the time of the Directory, a man named Joseph Lesurques was guillotined for ostensibly being the leader of a vicious highway attack on the Lyon Mail carriage––despite the fact that boatloads of character witnesses vouched for him, everyone knew him as nothing but a decent citizen, he had a valid (if not airtight) alibi, circumstances allowed for it to have easily been someone else, another criminal involved in the murders even CONFESSED HIS OWN GUILT AND DENIED THAT OF LESURQUES, and anyone with half a brain could see that all of the evidence pointed towards Lesurques being innocent. The real murderer was later caught, and he did indeed look exactly like Lesurques. (His name was Dubosq, and he was obviously no Jean Valjean.) In keeping with the "slight tweak" aspect of this trope, the resemblance was only complete when Dubosq wore a blond wig (as he did the day of the robbery).
- The Han twin murder conspiracy—Jeena Han tried to have her identical twin sister Sunny murdered.
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