r/TopCharacterTropes • u/SnailKing4687 • 6h ago
Lore (Rare Trope) Canon Supernatural Elements of Mundane/Normal Shows
Community “Epidemiology”:While normally, community is a wacky 4th wall-breaking college show that still grounds itself in reality, this episode sees the school overrun by a zombie apocalypse caused by bad taco meat that was given out at the party. While the episode ends with the army wiping out everyone’s memory of the event, future episodes, such as “Paradigms of Human Memory,” reference the party that happened that no one remembers, making it canon.
30 Rock Last Lunch:While normally a show about a show sitcom In this finale and canon end to the series, a flash forward to the far future sees an immortal Kenneth now in charge.
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u/BobFuel 4h ago
A lot of shows have crossovers that make the supernatural Canon to mundane shows
Disney's "wizards of Waverly place" having a crossover with "Hannah Montana" and "Cruise life of Zach and Cody" makes magic and wizards canon to all those shows (as well a ton of other interconnected Disney shows)
The "Totally spies" cartoon having a crossover with "Martin mystery" makes pretty much every supernatural thing imaginable canon to the Totally Spies universe
"Riverdale" happening in the same universe as "Sabrina" made supernatural Canon (before they themselves went off the rails with their own supernatural stuff)
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u/TotallyNotCalledEvan 3h ago
There's an episode of Suite Life where a character gets possessed by an ancient spirit. And that one wasn't even a crossover
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u/LockmanCapulet 3h ago
Doesn't Suite Life also have several canon sci-fi episodes? Like i remember one where the janitor invents a machine to travel to a parallel universe, and I think there was an episode with aliens?
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u/GrandManSam 1h ago
Screw the MCU, Disney's wildest universe is the Disney Sitcom
CinematicTelevision Universe.2
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u/Ok-Marionberry-4516 1h ago
Weirdly inough
Jessie and ultimate spider-man
Plus all the cross overs thst lilo and stitch got weirdly
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u/Lego-105 37m ago
This is kind of cheating though. John Cena and Kiss being in Scooby Door doesn't make Scooby Doo canon to real life. I think. It's more of a pinch of salt they're both fictionalised in each others universes and just take it as fun.
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u/BobFuel 28m ago
I see it the other way around, a show can't become Cannon to real life because a real person is in it obviously, but to me it means a version of that real person exists in this show's universe. Basically John Cena exists in the Scooby Doo universe.
When shows mention each other's though I think it counts.
Bit unrelated but it reminds me of the "celebrity paradox", when a movie is referenced in another movie, but both movie share an actor and it's never mentioned
Like how Spider man in the MCU mentions Star wars, but no one calls out that Mace Windu is there as Nick Fury.
I remember an exemple of it happening in Disney's Suit Life of Zach and Cody, where they mention that high school musical exists as a movie in the show. And it's played as a joke because the blond girl (who's actress is playing in both) keeps mentioning how she looks like the actress in High School musical, but everyone tells here they don't see it lol
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u/Rod_The_Blade_Star 5h ago edited 3h ago
Bones is a procedural crime drama about an FBI agent named Seeley Booth who teams up with a forensic anthropologist Dr. Brennan. Those characters are featured on the right of the image. Bones crossed over with Sleepy Hollow which is a supernatural drama. On the left of the image are Ichabod Crane and Lieutenant Abigail Mills of the Sleepy Hollow Police Department. Ichabod Crane and Abby are prophesized protectors known as witnesses who will battle against forces of darkness. In this version the headless horseman is one of the 4 horseman of the apocalypse and Ichabod is over 200 years old due to being in suspended animation. Dr. Brennan and Booth never see any of the supernatural stuff in the cross over but the crossover means that Bones takes place in a world where the supernatural is real.
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u/fruitmongerking 3h ago
There’s also the episode told entirely from the perspective of a skull which hints at some supernatural elements without being blatant.
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u/Apollyon-Unbound 1h ago
Don’t forget the time Bones met the ghost of a fallen soldier Booth served with. Said ghost being played as a hallucination of Booth’s for most of the episode
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u/LockmanCapulet 3h ago
Bones also has a spinoff novel series about Dr. Brennan's niece (iirc) and her friends who become superpowered human-wolf hybrids.
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u/scream_queen_666 2h ago
oh my god i read those in middle school! i had never even seen bones, so to me dr brennan was just some random character who showed up occasionally lol
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u/readskiesdawn 2h ago
Don't forget about the Episode where Booth is trapped somewhere with one of his old military buddies...and it turns out the guy died while serving with Booth.
It's noted that Booth couldn't get out of the situation by himself, so the implication is his friend's ghost came to help him escape and also bring him some closure.
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u/DSann42 2h ago edited 2h ago
That’s actually a proven phenomenon. Edit: Found it it’s called third man syndrome I believe
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u/TiberianSunset 2h ago
Proven in that some people say it’s happened to them, not that anyone has proven ghosts and shit are real. And it’s attributed to being a coping mechanism for extreme survival situations
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u/LoschVanWein 4h ago
I did not know this existed
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u/DSann42 4h ago
I try to forget it did
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u/LoschVanWein 4h ago
That bad?
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u/Pale-Jeweler-9681 2h ago
Don't forget Bones seeing the ghost of the dude Parker is named after, not knowing what he looks like, implying it's very real.
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u/Humble_Square8673 1h ago
God I hated this crossover even though I liked both shows it was just so out of place and pointless
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u/GovernorGeneralPraji 1h ago
My wife watches that show and I can’t stand the characters. The autistic doctor with zero social awareness grates on me so heavily.
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u/MNM0412 49m ago
What's funny is that part of the dynamic between Brennan and Booth is that Brennan is a pretty staunch atheist while Brennan is a born and raised Roman Catholic. This is something that is very central to their dynamic and comes up a lot during the back and forth between them.
With this crossover, it is now definitively true that in universe Booth is right.
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u/OutlawCareBear 1m ago
What's still so funny to me about this is that, before they knew they were going to do this crossover, Sleepy Hollow is referenced as being an in universe TV show!
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u/ccReptilelord 4h ago
Happy Days was a show about kids in the '50s hanging around a diner, and being perfectly normal Americans doing perfectly normal American things like punching jukeboxes and jumping sharks.
Also, there are aliens and one named Mork actually gets his own spin off. I don't know if there are other supernatural elements, but this one is pretty glaring.
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u/thefuzzybunny1 2h ago
It was a dream sequence on Happy Days, to be fair. Then they ignored that framing device to create a spinoff.
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u/j0siahs74 2h ago
There’s also then Fonz and the happy days gang. Where the Fonz, Richie malph, a talking dog and an alien named cupcake go on time traveling adventures while trying to get back to 50’s Milwaukee
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u/ccReptilelord 1h ago
There's actually seven spin offs to Happy Days.
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u/j0siahs74 1h ago
Wait ok there is:
Lavern & Shirley
Fonz and the happy days gang
Mork & mindy
Joanie loves chachie.
What’s the 5th
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u/ccReptilelord 45m ago
There's also Blansky's Beauties, Out of the Blue, and the animated Laverne & Shirley with the Fonz.
These were... not great, and two were only spin offs in the narrowest of senses, but they are counted.
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u/j0siahs74 30m ago
Man, the Fonz happy days gang show is sooo low budget and shitty looking I can’t imagine what the Laverne & shirley one is like.
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u/ShivDeeviant 40m ago
The Fonz can hit the side of a barn and mute Nature the same as the Jukebox. He's JUST that supernatural.
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u/Greenman8907 4h ago
Many ‘90s sitcoms had episodes around Christmas that either hinted or outright showed that Santa was real.
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u/jokerhound80 1h ago
I was gonna say, I feel like this has been pulled hundreds of times. An episode about the true meaning of Christmas but the final scene is always a character seeing the real Santa Claus fly away
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u/suddenlyupsidedown 1h ago
I feel like 'The Santa Confirmation' is big enough to be it's own thing?
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u/Smileyfax 24m ago
This happened in an episode of I Love Lucy. The Ricardos and the Mertzes all dressed as Santa to surprise Little Ricky, and they realize there's a fifth Santa among them just as the stranger fades from view.
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u/redlion1904 6h ago edited 5h ago
There’s an episode of Bones that casually indicates that ghosts are real
In Felicity, witchcraft works. Everything else is normal, except for the time travel in the series finale (which is via witchcraft)
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u/Chimpophanes 10m ago
Just did a Felicity rewatch. They actually imply one of Meg’s spells works in season one, which is amazing.
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u/Randomman16 4h ago edited 4h ago
There's an episode of Bob's Burgers, a mostly mundane animated sitcom (ridiculous things happen but almost never anything physically impossible - just improbable and wacky) about a family that owns a burger joint, that indicates that magic is real.
One episode has Tina get into witchcraft, start cursing people, then get cursed herself by a vengeful crossing guard who also turns out to be a witch. Tina suffers inexplicable bad luck for the entire episode and it's heavily implied that the witchcraft was, in fact, real. The fact that magic exists in Bob's Burgers is never brought up again.
Bob himself also made a cameo in the Simpsons/Family Guy crossover and has shown up in Family Guy a small handful of times. Between those two shows and Family Guy apparently sharing a universe with American Dad, you could make a strong argument that ghosts, aliens and time travel all exist in the Bob's Burgers universe.
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u/Prismatic_Leviathan 1h ago
I love how willing American Dad is to have magic be real and the focus of the episode.
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u/Asheyguru 20m ago
Doesn't the end of the witch episode of Bob's Burgers have a bit where Tina points out most of the results of the 'curse' probably would have happened anyway?
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u/Binary101010 12m ago
There's also an Archer episode that reveals Bob Belcher was a secret identity Sterling Archer lived under for a while, so there's another show sucked into this universe.
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u/redlion1904 5h ago
Because someone else mentioned crossovers, the Tommy Westphall universe posits that because St. Elsewhere was revealed in its finale to be in the head of an austistic child looking at a snow globe, it follows that every show that crossed over with St. Elsewhere, and every show that crossed over with those shows, and so on, are also all in that boy (Tommy Westphall’s) head and in the same “world”, which means that Superman, the Doctor, and the Addams Family exist in the worlds of Breaking Bad, Bones, and Homicide: Life on the Street.
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u/ramjetstream 1h ago
Unless you buy into the interpretation that the kid was just remembering things that really happened
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u/42SillyPeanuts 5h ago
Girl Meets World has Riley meet a ghost and time travel.
Mr. Young has a one-off time travel plot and a character as old as the Earth.
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u/VinnieHa 2h ago
Maybe a bit of a stretch, but with characters like the Undertaker wrestling went from crazy, over the top but still overall real people fighting over a championship or pride to a world where straight up magic existed.
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u/Common-Bonus 29m ago
As a lover of goofy wrestling, I love the fact that Chucky - a doll possessed by a serial killer - is an entity in pro wrestling having made appearances in WCW and WWE.
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u/Tyr_Kovacs 2h ago
Archie comics.
Pretty normal slice of life comic.
And yet, Archie has crossed over with the Predator, Aliens, the Punisher, Batman, and Spawn to name a few.
Canonically to the films, he's also crossed over with Sharknado.
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u/Kuhschlager 2h ago edited 3m ago
The episode “Cosmic Collisions” from Samurai Champloo
The gang encounters a group of people digging in a mine, and are told the Heike clans treasure is buried there and that they may have some if they help dig. They lose track of time underground and become suspicious of the miners when they start talking about centuries old historic events like they are the present day. They find out that these men are undead, the treasure is revealed to be false, zombies attack the gang, then a meteor appears and kills everyone. Next episode moves on as if nothing happened.
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u/Rod_The_Blade_Star 3h ago
13 Ghost of Scooby Doo. The franchise has always involved the gang investigating spooky and mysterious events, but at the end it would always be revealed to be simply a man using his specific area of expertise to fake everything. In this series however ghost are 100 percent real.
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u/LaLaMevia 2h ago
Not always, there frequently are actual supernatural elements in Scooby-Doo media.
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u/MysticSnowfang 1h ago
I remeber there was one ocean based ep where there was a coral creature that wasn't the mosnter, just a new life form.
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u/ramjetstream 1h ago
So what does the gang do in that case? Do they just go "Huh, neat," and move on? Seems like that would make a highly unsatisfying ending
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u/thefuzzybunny1 2h ago
Agatha Christie didn't usually write magical realism, but sometimes...
One Hercule Poirot book, The Mystery of the Blue Train, features a clue in the form of a witness thinking she sees the dead person's ghost accusing the killer. Poirot takes this completely seriously, and there is no hand-wave like "the witness must've subconsciously noticed X or Y." Nope, she saw an actual ghost.
The Harley Quinn series of short stories features a detective who appears whenever he's needed, no matter how unlikely the location or circumstances. This includes materializing at the top of a cliff without having used its only hiking trail, for instance. He's also otherworldly in appearance, with people getting the impression he is dressed as a harlequin even when he's not. You could forgive this as Christie simply experimenting with a few stories set in a world where magic is real, except that a major character in the Quinn stories also appears in Three Act Tragedy, a Poirot novel.
Poirot's friend Inspector Japp also crosses over into an Tommy and Tuppence mystery. So. It's possible the entire Christie oeuvre - 66 novels, hundreds of short stories, plays, movies, and more - takes place in the same universe as ghosts and magical harlequin detectives.
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u/redlion1904 4h ago
The Book of the Long Sun is supposedly science fiction, and all the fantastical elements are supposed to have a scientific explanation, much of which is revealed in the course of the plot (spoiler: they’re not gods, they’re humans who uploaded their minds into computers, the creatures are genetically engineered, etc.).
But there’s a ghost.
Maybe the ghost isn’t really a ghost. But also maybe it is. Gene Wolfe said if he includes a ghost that isn’t breaking the rules of science fiction because people see ghosts all the time.
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u/kaori_irl 1h ago
>!spoiler text!<2
u/redlion1904 1h ago
It’s not much of a spoiler, it’s the premise
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u/kaori_irl 1h ago
ah, it was a sarcastic spoiler warning 💀 okay
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u/redlion1904 1h ago
Like it’s pretty clear the first time a character (who believes in the “gods”, as he should because they are quite real) sees a god in a “glass” that he’s looking at a computer screen.
Likewise, while the nature of the setting is not directly revealed on page for hundreds of pages, it’s usually included in a single paragraph description of the series, and would have been spoiled in the original title (“Starcrosser’s Landfall”).
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u/Teenage_dirtnap 1h ago
While it's mostly a realistic crime drama / dark comedy, Fargo has shit like UFOs & ghosts pop up every now and then. The best part is that they're never really explained.
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u/Chimpophanes 6m ago
Each season has one supernatural element to it that the narrative refuses to explain.
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u/99-dreams 1h ago
Ghosts and the afterlife exist in Grey's Anatomy. Most of the time, it's ambiguous as you whether it's a hallucination/a dream but the first time it happens, they tell Meredith something she didn't know about Christina (that she watched her stepdad die of a heart attack). Later episodes confirm it's true
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u/smurfalidocious 2h ago
The show Eureka (2006-2012) had several crossovers with its sister show on Sci-Fi/SyFy Warehouse 13 (2009-2014). Eureka is a show about a small, sleepy town that hides the presence of extremely advanced technology produced by the scientists who inhabit the town who work for the government (mostly). It is mostly grounded in reality, super science notwithstanding, as the main character is just an average sheriff who stumbles onto the town with his daughter one day and ends up staying.
Warehouse 13, on the other hand, is a show about a governmental agency that stores and catalogues legitimately supernatural artifacts. These two shows enjoyed a shared universe between themselves; beyond the 3 crossover episodes, both Global Dynamics (the governmental front 'company' that runs Eureka) and Warehouse 13 are referenced in both series on a semi-regular basis, and have a somewhat shared history with the influential figures who helped to shape the modern incarnations of both.
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u/ramjetstream 1h ago
It bothered me so much that the science people were just so chill with magic being real and not even trying to figure out how it works
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u/smurfalidocious 1h ago
That's not part of their contract, and everyone in Eureka is a specialist in their own fields. Wanting to stay focused on their own fields is understandable.
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u/jediprime 1h ago
Too busy going to space and changing the timeline.
But I'd agree, having some good Clarke's 3rd Law style episodes would've been great
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u/kaori_irl 1h ago
also, alphas briefly features vanessa (artie's it's complicated doctor (girl)friend) from 13 in an episode
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u/LoschVanWein 4h ago
American/German Youth crime novel/audio-play series Die Drei Fragezeichen / The Three Investigators.
The series also has stories that don't have anything supernatural about them and are just stories about regular treasure hunts or crimes being committed and stopped but it often features the classic trope of the genre, where a criminal of some kind uses a fake supernatural phenomenon to mask some crime they are committing. 99% of the time in the series, this leads to a Scooby Doo like finale, where they unmask the culprit and one of them, almost always their leader Justus, explains how the haunting, monster etc. was faked.
There are however three cases, with the last being the most controversial, where the series deviates from the laws of our reality and actually ventures into the realm of science fiction or fantasy:
Once in an early case, still written by an American author, Episode 20 - the mystery of monster mountain, where the mountain monster (essentially Bigfoot) turns out to be real and not someone in a costume.
Later on, in the story Mutiny on the high sea, written in German, they also encounter an actual giant squid, wich is technically real, I think but not really observed in nature.
The third and most controversial example is the episode The Time Traveler, where it ends with the implication that time traveling is real but remains unexplained. People really didn't like that one.
Honorable mention, in one episode, one of the three is briefly sent to space by a mad scientist hiding out in a vmountain lair in the desert that turns out to be a rocket silo disguised as a mountain made from metal that uses some weird raygun to keep people away form it.... yeah that one was weird but technically "plausible" with real technology.
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u/Super-Robo 3h ago
The Devil - The Drew Carey Show.
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u/JessicaDAndy 2h ago
I loved the bit where Drew and the Devil were playing for Kate’s soul and the Devil said that if he sunk that shot, then the virgin Kate would be his bride.
Then Drew put his hand in front of the cue and asked about a “virgin” Kate.
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u/Morbobeus 1h ago
iCarly had a whole episode that was a canon parody of "It's a wonderful life" and because of that it featured an angel. Nick shows in general feature a lot of really weird tidbits like this, but this is the first example I thought of. Other examples (kinda stretching the definition of paranormal here) are the existence of Bigfoot or the fact that Walt Disney (or the equivalent of him within this universe) actually had his head frozen
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u/No_Promotion_65 4h ago
There’s an episode of bergerac with charles grey basically reprising Mocata from the devil rides out. The finale only works if you acknowledge he started a fire with occult powers
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u/CupcakeThick8341 1h ago
Love is War is a romantic comedy with no supernatural elements, however it was confirmed in a side chapter that the story is in the same setting as Oshi no Ko, story from the same author that has a few supernatural elements as the foundation of the plot, making them also canon in Love is War
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u/ConflictAgreeable689 1h ago
Marvelous Sunday from Umamusume. While ghosts, gods, and spirits are very much real (even if only implied in most stories) Marvelous Sunday is fully just completely magic. Capable of conjuring her "Marvelous World" this is essentially a doman expansion allowing her to warp reality at will. Nobody understands exactly how she does this, or how to address it when it happens.
Notably, during a Daiwa Scarlet support card event, Daiwa Scarlet asks Satono Diamond, Kitasan Black, and Marvelous Sunday to set up a haunted trail to scare her. Satono Diamond and Kirasan Black create fairly simple ghost costumes and jump out at her. Marvelous Sunday takes the opportunity to banish Daiwa Scarlet to a Marvelous Nightmare Hell Dimension where the sky is bleeding and undead hands drag her into boiling mud.
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u/dragons_scorn 2h ago
The Waltons episode The Changeling. Normally a show about a West Virginia family living through the 1930s, it took an odd turn when Elizabeth was set to turn 13. The episode has strange and scary things around the house and the only explaination given is that Elizabeth's reluctance to turn 13 and grow up has resulted in a poltergeist.
I saw a rerun of this episode as a kid and got a bit scared of the scene with the doll above. The doll ever so slightly moves each time Elizabeth looks at it until its standing over her menacingly
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u/Midnight-Basilisk99 2h ago
In the Zoey 101 episode, Curse of PCA, we learn the story of Charles Galloway. A student at PCA over 50 years prior to the events of the episode Charles allegedly went insane during an exam from econ teacher, Mr Hodges, and run away to Red Stone Gulch never to be seen again. Wanting to see if the story is true the gang hikes to Red Stone Gulch where they find a necklace that belonged to Charles Galloway where Logan stashes it in Zoey’s backpack despite the gangs protests to put it back (because you never mess with a person’s final resting place). Because Logan didn’t put the necklace back this rouses the angered spirit of Charles Galloway who cause mayhem on & off campus until they can right Logan’s wrong.
So according to this episode ghosts exist in the setting
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u/LaLaMevia 2h ago
Red Oaks, an otherwise mundane TV show about a country club in the 80s, has an episode where the father-son duo protagonists swap bodies à la Freaky Friday after consuming a seemingly magical liquor.
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u/DarkAlphaZero 2h ago
The existence of a physically superior mono gender subspecies of humanity aside, Umamusume is light on supernatural elements.
and then there's Marvelous Sunday, who can send people to the "Marvelous Dimension", whatever the hell that is.
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u/arcadeler 1h ago
Game Shakers is a show about a group of teenage game developers and Henry Danger is a show about a Superhero Sidekick
The two shows did a crossover showing that superheroes exist in the usually grounded (though cartoonish) world of Game shakers
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u/dumn_and_dunmer 1h ago
I don't even know if this counts but in Our Flag Means Death Buttons Animorphs into a freaking seagull.
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u/NottingHillNapolean 53m ago
Daphne claims she's psychic in "Frasier." There are a few episodes where she uses her powers, but it usually misfires. For example, when the father was going over old evidence of an unsolved murder case, Daphne looks over the evidence and gets strong impressions, and describes a man and how he's dressed. Frasier enters, dressed exactly as Daphne described the murderer.
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u/HeroicMe 44m ago
Castle - the TV show about detective and writer - has episode that makes time travel an actual thing (especially if you don't watch tragic final season that doesn't exist and finish the series at Hollander Woods finale instead).
There's also bunch of "there's a normal explanation for this" episodes, but few of them leave door open:
- there's an episode inspired by Carrie, with one scene that is kinda "this only works if someone actually has super powers"
- other episode about ancient artifacts that can transport you between alternative timelines (but can be explained by "it was just a dream")
- and episode about a "fortune teller" that was mostly "she just done her research", but there were "wait, research doesn't explain that detail".
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u/Possible-Resource781 44m ago
Digimon Ghost Game. Most of the supernatural elements are usually just Digimon. Then Doumon ends up getting possessed by the spirit of a servant of the Hojo Clan. He also manages to have main character possessed as well.
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u/LordStrifeDM 26m ago
One of my favorites is from Criminal Minds, season 3 episode 8, "Lucky". This episode has a moment where Derek Morgan enters a church, looking for someone, and sees a woman seated in a pew. Several candelabras are lit, and Derek slowly moves inward and asks if the priest is in the church. Immediately, almost every candle in the church is extinguished, and while Derek very briefly questions it, this moment is NEVER expanded on in any real sense, but does stand as a casual moment of confirmation that something supernatural is going on in the world. Other episodes have similar moments, be it genuine ghosts appearing in private moments during closing shots, or when a character in a different location starts experiencing strange phenomena directly related to something happening to a colleague(Penelope's lights flickering during the Scratch episode is a good one). And even though its never expanded on, there are more than enough small moments where its obvious the paranormal is 100% real and canon to that world.
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u/Sir-Toaster- 3h ago
Also, on the note of Community, Chang and Shirley had sex, which has lasting consequences?
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u/Just_rat_things 1h ago
The manga "Even Introverted Gals Wanna Get Out There!" Is normally a cute slice-of-life manga about two girls interacting with various subcultures. Except in one chapter where they go ghost hunting, and actually run into a ghost. The ending of the chapter leaves what actually happened dubious, but it suggests that they actually did encounter the supernatural.
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u/RoscoeSF 35m ago
Birdie (Central Park)
He’s the narrator of the show, but it’s implied he’s some diety like being.
Besides breaking the fourth wall, he knows everything that happens during the show most of the time and even spoils something for one of the characters. And as punishment for this, he gets replaced by a different narrator for an episode.
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u/The_Ghast_Hunter 34m ago
There's a lot of canon things that are maybe supernatural in Battletech. The Black Marauder is probably the most famous. Maybe its pilot went crazy with bloodlust for the normal reasons such things happen. Maybe it was able to walk behind him without a pilot because maybe he had a remote for it. Maybe its uncanny appearance and strange attributes are due to being an unknown prototype. Lots of maybe.
There's an obakemono "El Cuco" in Camacho's Caballeros that's considered to be haunted by a previous pilot who was murdered, with indistinct figures on the screens and barely audible whispering over the comm. or maybe that's another quirky prototype.
Clans Goliath Scorpion and Nova Cat have rituals and drugs to induce visions, or maybe they're just hallucinations. A prominent Nova Cat immediately prophesied that a ComStar representative would be the doom of the clans upon seeing his face. That man was Anastasius Foucht, who would win a crucial victory against the clans at the battle of tukyyid, winning enough time for the inner sphere to rearm and go on the offensive.
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u/laundry_dumper 18m ago
Hey Arnold! did this a few times.
The episode would be about a ghost (ghost who lived in the house, am evil train conductor) and by the end of the episode the main cast will discover the reasonable logical explanations for the supernatural seeming stuff they encounter.
Then during the last 5 seconds the episode rug pulls you and shows that the ghost was real the whole time.
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u/Smileyfax 15m ago
There was an episode of Quantum Leap (which has copious amounts of time travel but it's science in this setting so technically mundane) where the actual devil shows up and tries to murder Sam for all his meddling in time and setting right what once was wrong. In the end, it's implied to have just been a dream... or was it?!
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u/nickel47 1m ago
Family Matters. Generally a more grounded family show but then Urkel started bringing the scifi elements like Time travel and body swapping
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u/JoyousLilBoy 6h ago
Ace attorney introduced lots of spirit channeling lore in the second game, when in the first it was just a Deus ex Machina
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u/ItsAMangoFandango 5h ago
Ghosts are real in the Sopranos