The introduction of Fringe into the television landscape brings to the forefront one of the my favorite tropes: the conspiracy! That’s right, that age-old, Rockwell-esque sensation that just below the surface of everyday life lurks something vast and sinister. In Fringe, it’s something called “The Pattern,” started in the 1970s in a Harvard laboratory and extending from here all the way to Dawson’s Creek.

So, with this newest conspiracy-minded show on the air, we thought we’d take a look back at five of our favorite uses of this familiar narrative structure. After all, as one of the following examples would undoubtedly tell us, the truth is out there. And the people inhabiting these pop culture products have thrilled us with their search for it.

(Warning: major spoiler alerts follow. If you haven’t seen these movies/shows, for the love of God, don’t read. Also, for the love of God, go out and watch them, now. Then, come back and read. You’ll be happy, and we’ll have increased traffic. Win/win, really.)

Firefly/Serenity

The mysterious case of River Tam led Captain Malcolm Reynolds and his crew through both a prematurely canceled series and major motion picture right to the horrific secret behind the Alliance: a dead planet called Miranda. Not only did the Alliance’s terraforming yield almost complete annihilation of its inhabitants, but turned those who survived into the terrifying Reavers.

Conspiracy-O-Meter: Three Lone Gunmen. While an interesting resolution to River’s condition, Firelfy sadly remains too cultish to register on a pop culture level. Go ahead, tell a stranger on the street that they can’t take the sky from you. See if they don’t break out the mace instantly.

The Truman Show

A conspiracy of one, but a fairly freaky one all the same. Jim Carrey’s protagonist stands in for an everyman that feels everything around him is a lie, while a town full of paid actors enact a drama for the whole world to view. Truman struggles mightily to achieve something he’s never truly had: a chance at autonomy.

Conspiracy-O-Meter: Three and a half Lone Gunmen. Looking back, The Truman Show eerily predicted the current spate of insta-fame currently strewn across the plains of pop culture. Everything from reality TV to YouTube to Facebook seems to have its roots in the attraction/repulsion presented by Truman’s predicament.

The Terminator

Let’s lump in all major forms of this story (one film trilogy down, one to go, one television show on-air) and distill it down to two words: ROBOTS BAD! This is one of the seminal warning cries against losing one’s humanity, both literally and figuratively. The relentlessness of this enterprise’s vantage point is brutal: no matter what we do now, we cannot undone the path we’ve already laid down before us.

Conspiracy-O-Meter: Four Lone Gunmen. Watch commuters surfing the web on their iPhones, sticking Bluetooth headsets into their orifices, and siphoning themselves off from their fellow traveler via MP3 player and tell me how improbably this vision of the future truly is.

The Matrix

The Wachowski Brothers looked at The Terminator and thought, “You know, I like what James Cameron’s doing here, but this is all way too optimistic and wire-fu free.” This film took perception as the ultimate conspiracy, daring to draw back the curtain on everyday life and show it to be the mere byproduct of human enslavement. In this future, we don’t watch commercials with Energizer bunnies: we ARE the Energizer bunnies.

Conspiracy-O-Meter: Four and a half Lone Gunmen. Talk about paranoid: not only can you not believe those around you, but you cannot even believe in their physical existence. Most people did not like the idea of their venti mochachinos being a series of zeroes and ones, to be sure. But while this is a classic in the conspiracy genre, it still pales in comparison to the grand-daddy of them all. No shocker here.

The X-Files

For nearly a decade, Chris Carter thrilled millions with this show, showing Scully and Mulder’s seemingly neverending quest to bring a worldwide (and perhaps galaxy-wide) conspiracy to light. The fact that these two have never achieved their goal can be looked at as creative negligence, but it could also reflect the fact that there are some mysteries that are simply impenetrable in the end.

Conspiracy-O-Meter: Five freakin’ Gunmen. While I’m hardly the biggest X-Files fan in the world (or even among the Misfits, for that matter), I’d be remiss to not bow down at the altar of what this show accomplished during its run. While The Terminator and The Matrix appealed to technophobes/technophiles, The X-Files appealed to any and all who think there’s more to this life than meets the eye. And by tapping into that zeitgeist, it proved the ideal pop culture item for the conspiracy theorist in all of us.

So what did I get right? What did I miss? Talk about your favorite conspiracies below!