Bilal’s mother has worked out how to harness the particle collider to get the friends back to the same place in time and space, but Victor has gone missing and is out of control.

There are all sorts of things wrong with the conclusion to Parallels. I’m not entirely sure the time looping logic quite holds water. Some of our heroes have developed special powers along the way, but it’s all a bit random and there isn’t really any kind of explanation or payoff to this. Then there’s the small matter of the child who disappears at the start of episode one. Is it a spoiler to say, if you are waiting for a resolution to that, you will be disappointed? Let’s just say that the poor kid has been thrown into the narrative wilderness, seemingly never to return. As for Bilal, the sacrifice he makes is monumental, but it is barely acknowledged. And, yes, some of the sciency stuff is decidedly hokey.

However…

There are all sorts of things wrong, but there is an awful lot that this show gets right. Parallels has genuine heart. It’s really more of a YA ‘rites of passage’ ‘adolescent struggles’ drama than the sci-fi parallel universe genre piece it presents as. I like the characters hugely, so much so, that when they resolve their emotional differences, this reviewer had ‘something in his eye’. But then again, this reviewer cries at the John Lewis Christmas Ad so perhaps that’s not saying very much.

Kudos to Quoc Dang Tran who created the show, and wrote a good deal of it. It’s simple, familiar in many ways, but hugely watchable and emotionally truthful, and it uses its honesty to cover a multitude of genre sins.   8/10

Martin Jameson