A majority of fiction is focused around the concept of Good
vs. Evil. Every hero has a villain and vice versa. Usually these two forces are
evenly matched and diametrically opposed, so much so that they could be swapped
and the two sides would be evenly matched. In fact, there is an entire subset
of hero tales that deal with the hero having an evil doppelganger (I always
find it weird that there is an actual word for this) who is everything the hero
is only aligned with the forces of evil.
The most popular representation of the evil twin comes from
Star Trek. So popular was their portrayal of the evil twin that it has been
parodied multiple times. The episode was titled Mirror, Mirror and it involved
Kirk, McCoy, Scotty and Uhura swapping places with evil duplicates of
themselves from another dimension due to a transporter accident (honestly,
those transporters never seem to work right). The evil Enterprise is not part
of a United Federation, but instead part of the Terran Empire. Spock has a
beard (which jokingly becomes the symbol of evil twins in any parody of this
episode, or parody of evil twins in general).
While Star Trek may be the most popularized version of this,
it is by no means the first or last. The entire concept of multiple dimensions
has given many writers the means to portray versions of their characters that
have an opposite alignment to their normal version. My favorite evil opposites
are The Crime Society from Earth-3 of the DC Multiverse. For those unfamiliar
with these characters they are basically the evil version of the Justice
League. They consist of Ultraman (evil Superman), Superwoman (evil Wonder
Woman), OwlMan (evil Batman), Power Ring (evil Green Lantern), and Johnny Quick
(evil Flash) with a couple of other evil versions of good heroes sometimes
rounding out the group.
Essentially on earth three all the heroes are villains and
all the villains are heroes, with evil always winning over good. Part of the
appeal to me is that I’m always curious what would happen when good heroes go
bad. Granted these characters were always bad, but the idea of someone with the
power of Superman being a bad guy is intriguing. One of the reasons why the
Justice League always wins the day is because they so outgun any villain they
encounter. No one is stronger than Superman, smarter than Batman, or a more
skilled fighter than Wonder Woman. So what happens when they’re evil?
And it doesn’t always take an evil counter dimension to
create evil versions of heroes and good versions of heroes. Sometimes it is
just the result of an alternate timeline. An alternate timeline is similar to a
parallel dimension, only more based in what has already been established in the
main story. A parallel dimension can be completely different from the main
world (such as the evil earth of the Crime Syndicate), whereas an Alternate
timeline is different due to only one or a few significant events (see the
world of FlashPoint, which I examined here).
Alternate timelines seem more interesting than parallel
earths because it all comes down to a matter of choice and change. The idea
that everything we are is due to the choices we make in life and that if any
choice is changed we, and the world around us, become completely different
people. Marvel comics had a long running series titled “What if…” where the
object of each issue is to explore that very issue (whereas DC was much more
fond of putting out comics called Elseworlds which each depicted parallel
worlds where everything in the DC Universe was different).
Now this issue started out wondering about the idea of Evil
Twins. But here is the problem one has when considering the idea of evil twins.
Real people aren’t evil. Nor are they particularly good. Real people have
multiple shades of gray. They can be noble one minute and cowardly the next. It
is the true difference between real life and fiction. Fiction has the ability
to depict worlds where there is clear-cut good and evil. Characters can be
complex and layered but at the end of the story we usually know for certain who
the heroes are and who the villains are and what would be necessary to switch
their roles. But in the real world, who is a hero and who is a villain can many
times be up to the point of view of an individual.
In many ways this is the reason why I love comic books and
science fiction so much. Because they look at the motivations behind human
behavior and what makes us strive towards greatness or what makes us lash out
in anger. Sometimes it can be a traumatic event that pushes us, sometimes it is
the just the realization that if we don’t work towards making the world a
better place, no one else will. 
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