‘Parallels’ is a French sci-fi series based on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment and the supernatural effects it has on the lives of four teens in France. It is now streaming on Disney+.
Warning: This article contains heavy spoilers
Plot summary
In 2021, Samuel aka Sam, Bilal, Romane and Victor are four ordinary teens. Sam and Victor are brothers and have a complicated relationship. Sam has feelings for Romane.
The four celebrate Bilal’s birthday in a bunker near the LHC experiment. Right when Sam and Romane are about to kiss, the lights go out for a second. Victor, Romane and Bilal are missing. To add to the confusion, an older man shows up at the bunker and Sam flees. The man claims to be Bilal.
When he tries to reach his mother, Sofia, she refuses to believe that the old man is her own son, and he is forced to run when she alerts the cops.
He manages to convince Sam that he is actually the real Bilal, but the question beckons, where are Victor and Romane?
It turns out, the two woke up in a world where Sam and Bilal, and not them, were the ones who went missing. An officer named Retz tries to solve the case in both worlds, and he figures out the LHC caused the outage.
Victor’s parents distance themselves from him after the disappearance of Sam in their world, inherently blaming their younger son.
The old Bilal’s memories start resurfacing as he sees visions of his family, albeit not their face. Sam and Bilal come to the conclusion that there is a connection with Hugo, a kid who disappeared 10 years ago.
When Bilal talks to his father, Jonathan, it is revealed that Hugo and his 12-year-old dog went missing during the last LHC experiment, and the dog returned as a puppy, and Jonathan raised it again, thinking it was a different dog.
With this revelation, Sam and Bilal figure out that Victor and Romane must be stuck in a different time.
In the other world, four years have passed. Everybody quietly believes that Victor had something to do with the disappearance of his brother, including his own parents.
Romane is left distraught after her mother passes away and her husband, Romane’s step-father Herve, wants to take her sister to Canada with him.
When the next LHC experiment is conducted, Victor and Romane decide to return in time to save Sam and Bilal by going to the bunker. They successfully return to 2021.
They find Sofia, who believes them this time. She also finds Bilal, apologetic about not recognizing him the first time.
Victor and Romane are revealed to have gained powers due to the event. Victor can age anything, while Romane can stop time.
More of Bilal’s memories come back to him, and he remembers that he gets married to Romane in the future, much to his happiness, as he had always secretly been in love with Romane.
The plan is for all the children to be at the bunker during the next LHC experiment, even though the odds of them reaching back to their exact timeline are slim.
When Sofia experiments with keeping chickens at the bunker, she finds a USB drive. It is from the future Sofia, who explains that the experiment will fail, as Victor will make Sam old, throwing everything into chaos.
Even though Romane and Bilal will return to their teen versions, Sam will die due to aging, and Victor will go missing. She tells the current day Sofia how to avoid this, as the technology has enhanced in her future.
Victor is frustrated by how everyone treats him and detaches from the group. Sofia explains how the whole time travel and parallel universe works.
There are measures in place to ensure that the LHC test remains consistent. However, the bunker is a magnetic anomaly affected by the LHC.
During the experiment, the universe forgets the rules of parallel universes, and gambles with the different versions of those in the bunker, sending them anywhere.
Officer Retz also decides to help Sofia and the others with the plan, having figured out something supernatural has occurred.
If you still have doubts about the ending, here’s a full breakdown.
Parallels (2022) ending explained in detail: (Episode 6: H4)
It’s all in the memories
The older Sofia advises the younger version to help Bilal regain his memories, as that will be the key to solving everything.
She helps him stimulate his memories, as he gets recollections of his future. In the future, only he and Romane survived, which is possibly why they ended up together.
He left Romane and his family in the future to return and save Sam and Victor. While not all of his memories have returned, they can come back instantly with a trigger.
Sofia takes Bilal to the ERN facility under the guise of him being the scientist Omar Ayouch. While there, he remembers how to fix all the errors in the LHC experiment.
Bilal is tasked with decoding the data and sending it to Sofia right before the next experiment to ensure they all return to the correct timelines.
Sofia had asked for Sam to be locked up to save him from Victor, but he finds him after Romane tells him where he is. He takes him hostage and confronts his parents.
Fixing the timeline
Bilal remembers how Victor was the reason they failed, and quickly takes everyone to his location, including officer Retz.
Victor has never felt loved by his parents, who kept blaming him for an accident during childhood where he burned parts of Sam’s body.
His mother apologizes for not treating Victor well, and that it’s all their fault. Even so, Victor is about to self-destruct.
Bilal informs him that he is the reason Sam dies because he tries to save Bilal and Victor ends up aging him in the future.
Sam believes it’s always his fault and ages himself. When he attempts to leave, Romane stops time and reaches him. As all four hug, Victor finally lets bygones be bygones. He also de-ages back to normal.
Sofia gets the data from Bilal. The four return to the bunker in hopes of returning to the correct timelines. It’s a success! Sam and Romane finally have their first kiss without any supernatural interference.
They return to their homes. Sam stands up for Victor in front of their parents, mending their relationship.
Dang!
After the entire saga, Bilal finds a USB drive for Sofia. When she opens it, it’s an older Sofia who greets her.
She tells her everything that happened in the future and how they fixed the timeline, along with learnings from the future that would put her 15 years ahead of her peers.
Still shaken by the revelation, Sofia joins the kids during Bilal’s birthday celebration. When he asks his mother for his gift, she gives it to him.
The moment Bilal opens the gift, the memories of opening the same gift in the parallel future come rushing back to him, as well as the others. As mentioned before, it doesn’t take much to trigger a memory.
In the end, as Sofia realizes that each of the kids now remembers everything that happened, all she can say is “dang!”, her catchphrase from the show. Looks like it’s poised for season 2.
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