Parallels (French: Parallèles) is a French sci-fi web-series that premiered on Disney+ on March 23rd 2022.
The show is centered around four lifelong teenage friends - Bilal, Romane, Samuel, and Victor - living on the French-Swiss border, whose lives are turned upside down by the activation of an experimental particle collider. They find themselves on different worlds and must make their way back home and to each other.
This show provides examples of:
- Abusive Parents: Victor certainly thinks his parents, Arnauld and Alice, are this. The truth is that they are just strict but well-meaning parents who are genuinely at a loss about how to deal with their gifted-but-disruptive younger son.
- Childhood Friend Romance: In the future that Adult!Bilal comes from, he and Romane found solace in each other after the death/disappearance of Samuel and Victor, fell in love, got married, and had children.
- Dimensional Traveler: Romane, Victor and arguably Bilal. Almost certainly what happened to Hugo Moreau in the prologue as well.
- Funeral Cut:Vanessa confronts her husband Hervé, a compulsive gambler who dug into the household's money in 2026. She then suffers a heart attack and, soon after being carried by paramedics, the camera goes to her funeral.
- Kid from the Future: All the teenager's parents encounter older versions of their children at some point during the series.
- Love Triangle: An understated one between Bilal, Romane and Sam. Bilal and Sam have both long had feelings for Romane, though unlike Bilal, Sam actually tries to act on those feelings just before all hell breaks loose. However, in one of the future timelines, it is Bilal and Romane who end up together, albeit in a world where Sam is long dead.
- Married in the Future: Bilal and Romane are married in the future timeline that Adult!Bilal comes from.
- Sofia is seemingly married to (or at least in a relationship with) Lieutenant Retz in the same future.
- Mental Time Travel: A bizarre inversion Adult!Bilal's body travels back in time but his mind remains that of his teenage self (though he gets occasional flashes of his future memories). It is later explained that Adult!Bilal lost his memory due to the trauma of time-travel and mentally regressed to his teenager self.
- The Multiverse: Sofia and Adult!Bilal directly reference Everett's many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, suggesting the existence of an infinite number of universes.
- Ominous Message from the Future: Future!Sofia sends one back through time to present-day Sofia, revealing that something happened that affected her attempt to return the teenagers to normal—leading to Victor's disappearance and Sam's death.
- Parallel Universe: Romane and Victor end up transported to one due to the activation of the collider. Sofia theorizes that Adult!Bilal comes from yet another one.
- Rapid Aging: Victor reflexively uses his powers to do this to Romane's stepfather Herve when the latter attacks her, aging him by three decades in an instant.
- Reset Button Ending: Sofia, with help from Adult!Bilal, succeeds in sending the four teenagers back to the night of the party at the bunker, thus erasing the events of the series.
- Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: At the very end of the show, after the timeline is reset, the four teenagers start to remember everything that happened, much to Sofia's consternation.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Romane and Victor travel back in time from 2025 to 2021 in an attempt to prevent the disappearances of Bilal and Sam. In Romane's case, she also wants to prevent her mother from dying of a heart attack in the future and ensure that she breaks up with the compulsive gambler Herve.
- In the finale, we learn that this was Adult!Bilal's motivation for traveling back. In his future, Victor caused Sam's death and then disappeared—an event which Adult!Bilal wants to prevent.
- Stable Time Loop: Adult!Bilal traveled back in time to 2021 in order to prevent Sam's death and Victor's disappearance, which were the culmination of a chain of events caused by his arrival in the past.
- Start of Darkness: Victor's happened when he ended up in a reality where Sam disappeared and he felt that his parents blamed him for what happened to their "favored" son.
- Time Skip: Four years pass in the universe Romance and Victor end up in, as they continue to cope with the consequences of Sam and Bilal's disappearance.
- Timey-Wimey Ball: It's never made entirely clear whether the collider causes the characters to actually Time Travel or simply jump parallel worlds. Romane and Victor definitely traveled to a Parallel Universe (or more accurately, their original universe was split and they ended up in one branch). However, Adult!Bilal seems to have traveled back from a possible future of the original universe with the intent of changing history. And following the Reset Button Ending, the kids start to regain memories of their experiences in the previous timeline, implying that they are the same people and not Parallel Universe counterparts.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: We never do learn the final fate of Hugo Moreau, the child who disappears in the prologue during the 2011 collider experiment. Presumably, he ended up in another dimension but his fate is never discussed by the characters after episode 3.
