Next station, Balestier? 1997 supernatural series Shiver appears to have predicted future MRT stops

What if the world around you were different from what you remembered, but only in minor ways?

This is the premise of an episode in the 1997 local supernatural TV series Shiver, and one eagle-eyed netizen recently shared an interesting finding that suggests the show may be creepier than it already is.

In the episode titled Last Train, former actor Andrew Seow plays Evan, a regular office worker who daydreams about a better life — owning a sports car, learning to fly a plane and getting together with an attractive colleague of his (played by Diana Ser).

He finds a mysterious scratched-up MRT card and boards a train with it. After alighting and looking at a map of the train lines, he realises the stations are different from what he remembers.

Instagram account Mediacorpse90sfashion, which describes itself as "passionate about old SBC/TCS Dramas for the scenes of old Singapore and 80s-y2k aesthetix [sic]", noticed that some aspects of the mirror universe presented in the episode have since come true in reality.

"Interestingly, some of the stations now exist! Tai Seng, Bras Basah, Havelock, all didn't exist back then," the self-proclaimed "Mediacorp historian" wrote.

Tai Seng MRT station opened in 2007, Bras Basah in 2010 and Havelock just last year. None of them had been announced when the show aired.

The account was also amused by a hyphen in "Seran-goon", but we think that could just be due to a lack of space on the diagram.

The episode also features ads promoting "Air Singapore", instead of Singapore Airlines, and a Singapore-made car (ahem Proton).

Where James Lye was on a magazine cover as "Singapore's sex symbol" in the original universe, he now notices a woman reading the same magazine with comedian Hossan Leong on the cover.

Despite the minor changes, things seem to be better for Evan in this dimension. His frumpy girlfriend (played by Michelle Goh) has become hot, he's a wealthy businessman and has flown solo around the world.

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But everything soon comes crumbling down as he's rejected by Ser's character and sees on the news that he's made a loss of $50 million due to a poor investment.

Maybe it's better to live a humble life in your own universe.

The phenomenon utilised in Last Train actually has a name. The Mandela Effect was coined by a paranormal researcher who misremembered that former South African president Nelson Mandela had died during his prison sentence in the 1980s, when he was in fact alive until 2013. Others point to the children's literary franchise The Berenstain Bears, saying that they remembered it being spelt "Berenstein" instead.

While the general consensus is that it's a matter of multiple people having similar false memories, others think it's proof that they've been whisked into an alternate universe, where events unfolded slightly differently than in theirs.

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drimac@asiaone.com

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