Gary's Dangerous Doppelgänger
Happy Thanksgiving to you and your evil twin
Let’s talk about doppelgängers.
Doppelgänger is German for “double-walker,” and it refers to a biologically unrelated look-alike of a living person. Sometimes a doppelgänger is a good thing, like in The Princess Switch or Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties.1 More often, a doppelgänger is an evil twin. Like in Jordan Peele’s Us…
Or on Community, where you have Evil Troy and Evil Abed…
Spider-Man even has a doppelgänger named Doppelganger.
I’ve spent 25 years absolutely terrified of a storyline I vaguely recalled from an episode of Thomas the Tank Engine, where the little conductor2 has an evil doppelgänger. One of my earliest memories3 was of Mr. Conductor accidentally being destroyed instead of the nemesis. As far as I could tell, the nemesis then posed as Mr. Conductor for the rest of the run of the show, duping all of the trains every single day of their life.4
For two and a half decades, I was afraid that I would be duplicated somehow and that my evil clone would have me destroyed. It was only weeks ago that I finally sat down and googled this episode.
Guess what?
I remembered it wrong. It’s the bad one who gets destroyed, not the good one. There was no evil doppelgänger posing as Mr. Conductor; that guy was the real Mr. Conductor. So I’ve been carrying around this irrational fear for 5/6 of life for no reason.
What was the point of telling you that? First of all, to remind you to do your research. Second of all, to marvel at the longevity of the Thomas the Tank Engine brand. But most of all, it was to set up today’s One Perfect Thing. It is a tweet based on a typo based on the idea of doppelgängers. Here it is:
Have a great day, and watch out for evil twins.
I have not seen Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties
Played by George Carlin, as it turns out
In my LIFE. In my WHOLE LIFE.
Which might be okay, because it turns out that Thomas the Tank Engine is kind of fascist?