Troperville
Editing Help
Tools
Toys
|
Kirk: ... But that's not the way it happened!
An episode consisting mainly of one or more Flashbacks.
Sometimes this is used to tell a story that takes place before the series began. Other times this is used as a variant form of Captains Log to allow the character to comment on the action with the benefit of hindsight.
When the action takes place before the beginning of the series, the flashback is often used to show how the characters met. Occasonally, it will be combined with A Day In The Limelight, showing the true depths of a character while at the same time letting the audience see what made this person be like they are.
When the flashbacks consist of previously recorded footage, you get a Clip Show.
Specific variants: How We Got Here and The Rashomon.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
- Bakuretsu Tenshi had an episode about how Meg met Jo and what they used to do before becoming mercenaries.
- Bleach had a habit of throwing these in on a semi-regular basis during the Soul Society arc. Even more so, the recent manga chapters start an entire flashback arc, showing the events occurring in Soul Society about 100 years before the first chapter of the manga.
- Detective Conan has featured quite a few episodes showing Shinichi solve cases before he was shrunk at the beginning of the series.
- In Digimon Adventure 02, Ken's flashback story in "Genesis of Evil"/"Digivice ga Yami ni Somaru Toki."
- In Dragonball GT, there was a flashback episode about Vegeta's character development as a whole. Basically about how he was always outclassed by Goku, a low level Saiyan, despite being the prince of the near-extinct race.
- The Full Metal Alchemist manga has a Whole Volume Flashback, in which the Ishval massacre is told in all its bloody horror. When the manga was adapted into the anime, the anime took several events that happened in the present, and moved them a couple years in the past.
- His And Her Circumstances or Kare Kano has this in volumes 18 and 19 of the manga to explain the past of the Arima family.
- The latter half of the two-parter "It Was A Small Wish" of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, which has Signum and Shamal reminiscing how they met their master and the events that led to the plot of the second season. There's also the supplementary manga chapter "Lightning Hearts", which has Fate, Erio, and Caro narrating the stories on how they met each other to various members of Riot Force 6.
- In Maria Sama Ga Miteru, Satou Sei (Rosa Gigantea) got one of these in both the first and second seasons.
- About half of Mermaid Saga consisted of these. Then again the main character was something like 700 years old so it was kind of inevitable.
- In One Piece, each member of the crew has gotten at least one Whole Episode Flashback to show their backstory- as the series progresses, these flashbacks have gotten longer and longer, sometimes reaching three episodes of nothing but flashbacks.
- Ouran High School Host Club had not one, but two flashback episodes, the first one being about how Hikaru and Kaoru met Tamaki, and the second one being about how Kyoya met Tamaki.
- Seirei No Moribito has two of them that explain Balsa's childhood and how she became a bodyguard.
- Roughly half of the Tenjou Tenge anime consists of these.
- Trigun had the episode "Rem Saverem", which revealed both how humanity ended up on Gunsmoke and revealed Knives, who had never been featured or mentioned in the series up to that point. It also revealed Vash's connection with Rem, who thusfar had been an ambiguous character mentioned several times.
- The Xanth book Crewel Lye is narrated mainly as a flashback, in the first person as apposed to the third person of most Xanth books.
- Elfen Lied uses one of these to explain Lucy's Start Of Darkness.
- Twin Spica has several of these, emphasizing the slice of life nature of the show, rather than the space exploration part.
- The last episode of the Hyakko anime shows the lives of the main cast before they met at high school.
- Well... there is a fan manga that I call Linux Flashback due to more than half of it being flashbacks. It's really interesting that it switches point of view ever chapter or so.
- The Slam Dunk anime is known for several flashbacks happening during the game. One of the most poignant, however, was an entire episode featuring Kogure's flashback to his and Akagi's three year history on the basketball team. An episode-long flashback that somehow managed to occur between his taking a three-point shot and said shot going in the net.
- Baccano! has only one episode that sticks to one time period: the 1711 flashback episode that reveals just why there are immortals in the first place.
- Done a number of times in Legend Of The Galactic Heroes.
- Shakugan No Shana has a multi episode flashback. Appert in story reason is to explain why Shana likes melon bread but it ends up coveing her Origin Story as well.
- The final episode of the first season of Xxx Holic shows part of Watanuki's childhood (though they called it a sidestory).
- The first episode of Yakitate Japan is a Whole Episode Flashback origin story.
Literature
- In William King's Warhammer 40000 Space Wolf novels, both Space Wolf and Grey Hunter have brief introductions and epilogues in the "current date", but the bulk of both novels is what he is remembering. Grey Hunters is presented in the same format, but as something he is recounting.
- Frankenstein is the journal of the captain, mostly recounting Frankenstein's story of how he came to head toward the north pole. In turn, for part of his narration, Victor quotes the creature's flashback story. And in said flashback story, the monster tells the story of a family he acted as a Mysterious Protector for.
Live Action TV
- The Season 4 Finale of Babylon 5 had a being from the far future looking at data archives of events from the station's near future.
- On Buffy and Angel, the fact that several important characters are centuries old provided plenty of opportunities to base episodes around looks into their complicated histories.
- The episodes "Fool For Love" and "Darla", which aired the same night, were companion pieces, showing many of the same events from two different perspectives (Spike and Darla).
- Used repeatedly in The Dick Van Dyke Show in episodes about Rob and Laura's courtship and wedding, as well as their son's birth.
- The Farscape episode "Scratch and Sniff", though with the added element that the story Crichton tells Pilot may not be entirely true. The episode "Dream a Little Dream" is another example.
- DALD wasn't written as a flashback, though; it was originally shot as the season opener. Then it was decided that it didn't work well as the opener (not enough explosions, probably), so it got pushed back and framed as a flashback.
- Firefly features the episode "Out Of Gas", which shows how the crew of Serenity first met.
- Forever Knight and Highlander, which were filmed and aired at roughly at the same time, had very similar formats (the several-hundred-years-old hero would be reminded of events from his past, either by the current situation being directly relevant to the past flashback, or the two having thematic similarities. (Highlander tended to the first while Forever Knight tended to the second.) In at least one case in each series (1966 in Forever Knight and The Stone of Scone in Highlander) the bulk of the episode is the flashback, with the modern day little more than an excuse.
- The third-to-last episode of Frasier, "Crock Tales", comprised a series of flashbacks, recreating the set-up of six previous seasons in reverse chronological order.
- Friends did several Whole Episode Flashbacks, which taken together largely explain how Everyone Met Everyone (although Rachel meets Chandler for the first time on about three occasions).
- The Golden Girls
- Everybody Loves Raymond had a few of these.
- The Heroes episode "Six Months Ago" plays with this by having one character actually going into the past. The episode serves as a flashback for all other characters. The second-season episode "Four Months Ago" also does this.
- The third season had the episode "Villains", which comprised of flashbacks of different characters at different times, including events happening at the same time as "Six Months Ago", and events taking place at the same time as the series pilot. Hiro, who in season 1 went back in time (see above) had a type of hallucination in which he went back to witness Angela Petrelli's (failed) murder of her husband.
- The entirety of Good Morning, Miss Bliss was repackaged as a series of flashback episodes to Zack's junior high days in Saved By The Bell.
- The House episodes Three Stories and The Mistake.
- Arguably, How I Met Your Mother is a Flash Back Series, but let's not go there, especially considering the prevalence of flashbacks during some episodes. In one episode, while Ted tells Robin about how he told her sister how he lost his virginity, we end up (in essence) with a flashback in a flashback in a flashback in a flashback. (The last episode before the writers strike one upped this with Future Ted talking about Robin talking about Lily talking about Barney talking about his relationship with Wendy the Waitress: that's five levels of flashbackiness! Maybe this needs its own trope...)
- A second-season episode of JAG uses the technique to incorporate an episode which was produced for the first season but never aired due to the show's cancellation by NBC (JAG was later picked up by CBS). Harmon Rabb thinks his colleague Sarah "Mac" Mackenzie looks familiar as Catherine Bell plays both Mac and Harm's murdered girlfriend from the original episode.
- Just Shoot Me had an episode where Dennis, Elliot and Nina recount how they first met Jack and how he hired them on the spot. (Nina's flashback is not of their first meeting, however.)
- Several episodes of Lost employ this trope. "The Other 48 Days", uses a sequence of flashbacks to show what the 'Tailees' (crash survivors from the tail section of the plane) were doing during the entire first season and a half, while we were all watching the folks from the front end of the plane. "Flashes Before Your Eyes" and "Meet Kevin Johnson" are almost entirely flashbacks, from Desmond and Michael respectively. Both have a brief frame story featuring only a few of the cast before plunging into flashbacks. Season five has two episodes like this, "316" (opens with Jack's return to the Island and flashes back to the night before) and "The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham".
- The Shield featured a flashback episode called "Co-Pilot" that was dropped into the middle of the second season because the makeup crew on the series needed time to figure out how to create a certain injury effect. The episode follows the formation of the Strike Team, and how all the main characters met.
- Star Trek, on frequent occasions:
- Two Guys And A Girl
- Ugly Betty skipped an early episode
 but, due to the necessary plot points in it, it was repackaged as a Whole Episode Flashback. (In overseas distribution, some countries used the edited version as the eleventh episode, some removed the repackaging and showed it as the fourth episode, while in Australia, Channel Seven removed the repackaging but kept it as the eleventh episode. No, I'm not upset about that...!)
- The West Wing
- The Wonder Years is, by default, a flashback series.
- Most of a season of I Love Lucy consisted of quickly framed frames for reruns of previous episodes. This was so Lucy could complete her pregnancy off-camera.
- The Sliders episode "Post-Traumatic Slide Syndrome" is a story told by Rembrandt. Another example is "The Last of Eden" produced before John Rhys-Davies' firing (thus, Arturo's death), but aired after it, which was introduced by Wade and Rembrandt remembering and talking about the events of the episode.
- Some of My Name Is Earl episodes, like "Frank Factor" or "No Heads and a Duffel Bag", when Earl is in jail or in a coma and can't continue with his list, feature whole episode flashbacks.
- The Fugitive episode "The Girl from Little Egypt" has Kimble recalling the circumstances of his wife's murder, and the subsequent trial that led to his conviction of the crime, while recuperating from an automobile accident.
- M*A*S*H had a number of these, as in the episodes where a character is writing a letter home or the one where Hawkeye is filling out his last will and testament.
- Dads Army was a flashback series, insofar as the first episode began in the present (ie 1968) and then flashed back to 1939.
- Ideal did this with The Past.
- Dirty Sexy Money had an episode called "The Facts" that seemed to be made up almost entirely of cut subplots from the show, aired after those plot elements were relevant.
- How have we come this far without mention of Doctor Who? The 1986 season consisted of two Four Episode Flashbacks (the latter of which was actually tampered with — we never find out what really happened), a Four Episode Flash Forward, and a two-part finalé to wrap it up.
- Sofa, the last episode of Men Behaving Badly (before it was revived for three specials) consists largely of flashbacks: at first these deal with the history of the titular sofa, but then they branch out into pretty much being Gary's entire biography (and a bit of Tony's), climaxing in the scene where Gary and Dorothy first met, which had been obliquely referred to in previous episodes (trousers on the head) but never seen.
Theater
Video Games
- Hitman: Contracts. The entire game is an extended flashback that remakes the first Hitman game (Contracts is the third) with updated graphics and gameplay enhancements, as well as retelling some of the events in a different light to reflect the unreliable memories of the protagonist or him seeing it in a different light after all this time has passed. The framing story between missions is set in the present, as well as the final mission after the flashbacks are over.
- The first case of the third Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney game is one flashback to when Mia and Phoenix first met. Later, the fourth case is a flashback to before they first met.
- Similarly, in Apollo Justice, the fourth case has you going back to seven years ago, to the very trial that got Phoenix disbarred.
- Halo ODST is mostly about the rookie finding peices of destroyed equipment, and then the flashback of how the equipment ended up that way.
Webcomics
- Gunnerkrigg Court, Chapter 16, "A Ghost Story", shows young Antimony's first meeting with The Guides, and the first time she helped a ghost move on. It's presented with the framing device of then-current-day Annie telling the story to Kat.
- Chapter 22, "Ties", shows a day in the lives of Annie's and Kat's parents (specifically, the day that group photo was taken). This time, there is no framing device.
- How I Killed Your Master appears to be setting up for a Whole Webcomic Flashback.
Western Animation
- Aladdin: The Series had an episode about how Aladdin and Abu first met.
- Numerous episodes of Avatar The Last Airbender.
- The E/I cartoon Cro consisted entirely of such eps, with a Framing Device of a mammoth named Phil telling a Hispanic scientist and some kid about the good old days with the titular Cro.
- Spoofed in the Ed Edd N Eddy episode "Every Which Way But Ed", which featured a series of flashbacks-within-flashbacks, and the Eds getting lost among them in one of the show's No Fourth Wall moments.
- The Simpsons has featured episodes about each of the children being born. In addition, a contested episode about how Marge and Homer first met and fell in love was also made.
- Every episode of Back To The Future The Animated Series was a Whole Episode Flashback, as Doc would tell the audience about past adventures.
- The Legion Of Superheroes and the Teen Titans series each had a Whole Episode Flashback regarding how the teams were first formed.
- Most of the events in the Futurama episode Where No Fan Has Gone Before are being recounted by the three main characters at a trial (a spoof of the classic Star Trek episode "The Menagerie", mentioned above). Ironically, the flashback only begins a few days beforehand and eventually catches up with itself.
- The hour-long SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Truth or Square" (made in celebration of the show's tenth anniversary) has the characters reminiscing as they celebrate the Krusty Krab's "eleventy-seventh" anniversary. Thankfully, it avoids going the Clip Show route.
|
|
