"The Rift has been featured in episodes of "Doctor Who" and is central to the spin-off series "Torchwood", which concerns a branch of the Torchwood Institute created to monitor activity around the Rift.The Rift acts as a plot generator, providing a wide and potentially unlimited array of possible plots for the series, much like the Hellmouth in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and the Bajoran wormhole in "".