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A story told in reverse order, from end to beginning, revealing effects first, and working towards a climax which reveals cause and motive. Difficult to do, but very effective when done well.
An interesting thing to ask yourself when you see this is whether or not the story would have been interesting forwards.
Also see How We Got Here (where the last scene comes first and everything else is in order), Anachronic Order (where scenes are presented out of any chronological order at all).
Examples:
Newspaper Comics
- There was a Krazy Kat strip that started with Ignatz in jail, proceeded through Officer Pupp dragging him there, arresting him, Pupp hearing the brick impact, Ignatz throwing the brick at Krazy, and ending with a brick.
Film
Live Action TV
- The backwards episode of Seinfeld entitled "The Betrayal."
- "Zig Zag", an episode of the Outer Limits revival.
- Thirtysomething used the device to good effect to dramatize a character's pregnancy.
- A variation on the theme was Red Dwarf's "Backwards", where the characters encounter a world where time moves backwards. A mysterious ache in Lister's ribcage and back, which appears when he first lands on the planet, is explained when a backwards Bar Brawl — or more accurately a barroom tidy — breaks out.
- An episode of The X Files ("Redrum", #167, or S8-6) made use of this, but the central character was aware of it. He woke up in prison, not understanding how he got there. He goes to sleep that night, and wakes up the next morning to discover that he is going to trial, for the crime he was incarcerated for "yesterday."
- The Star Trek Voyager episode "Before and After" has Kes living her life backwards. It even foreshadows episodes in the next season (specifically "Year of Hell"), though events proceeded differently since Kes had left the ship by then.
- An episode of CSI started at the end of the shift and kept showing one case being worked, then jumping backward to the case just prior to it, showing how incidental characters in the later case were affected by the prior one, and at the end tying all the cases together in various ways.
- The episode of China Beach with Ricky Lake's character getting pregnant and having an abortion.
- A hilarious episode of Malcolm In The Middle showed an escalating sibling feud between Reese and Malcolm in reverse, each time showing the provocation for the last scene.
Western Animation
- Sealab 2021, the "Shrabster" episode. It also parodied the Superfriends narrator, who would describe the temporal relationships of the scenes with glib prepositions. "Meanwhile!"
Anime and Manga
- Touka Gettan keeps this up over the course of a full 26-episode anime series, airing the episodes in reverse order.
- Osamu Tezuka's seminal manga Hi no Tori ("Phoenix"), which was also adapted into an anime series, starts at the dawn of humanity, then skips to the end of the world in the second chapter, then back to early history, and skips back and forth from there, with half told Back To Front, and half proceeding slowly forwards from the beginning. Regrettably, Tezuka died before getting to the chapter in present-day Japan that would have tied everything together.
Theater
- The Harold Pinter play (and film version) Betrayal chronicles a broken marriage in reverse, over a period of several years.
- In the 1931 Kaufman & Hart play Merrily We Roll Along, each scene takes place in an earlier year than the previous one, opening in 1934 and ending in 1916. Merrily We Roll Along was loosely adapted into a musical by Stephen Sondheim and and George Furth in 1981, with a Setting Update; voices from the Greek Chorus count the years of The Seventies and The Sixties going backwards during the scene changes.
- The musical The Last Five Years chronicles the doomed courtship/marriage of Jamie and Cathy, employing this trope selectively: her songs and side of the story go backward in time, while his go forward. They only sing two duets in the entire show. The first is at their wedding when their timelines meet, and at the end, where Cathy is saying goodbye at the end of their first date while Jamie says goodbye for good.
Literature
- Orson Scott Card's Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus involves a group of (future) scientists who study the past using machines that can look directly into it; one of the scientists was noted for always watching stories backwards, from a person's death to his birth.
- One of Louis Sachar's Wayside School books has a chapter whose sentences are in reverse order.
- Sarah Waters' The Night Watch is in three sections, starting in 1947, then moving back in time to 1944, and finishing in 1941 as most of the characters meet.
Comic Books
- An issue of the comic Midnighter tells the story backwards. Apparently it makes sense and is still good whether you read it front-to-back or back-to-front.
- There was a Simpsons comics story that did just this.
- Tear Jerker example: Star Trek Annual #3, which traces Montgomery Scott's relationship with his ex-wife in reverse order, from his notification of her death to their first meeting as children.
- Issue #71 of the Sonic The Hedgehog comic book did the entire issue like this, with the letters page coming first, then the backup story, and then the main story. Incidentally, this was the issue where they provided an explanation for Sonic's makeover for Sonic Adventure.
- Roger Zelazny's short story Divine Madness chronicles a man being forced to relive in reverse his mourning for his dead love.
Web Comics
Web Original
Music
- The video for Coldplay's The Scientist runs backwards; it took Chris Martin a while to learn the lyrics backwards so they would sync up when the film was reversed. Quoting the website, "Everytime I see Simon Pegg he teases me about it, so now I [Chris] can't watch it. He wonders why someone after a car crash would go into town and have a nap. He can f*** off."
- The events of All Along the Watchtower (yeah, that song from Battlestar Galactica) start with the approach of the riders in the 3rd verse, followed by The Thief's reaction to that in the second verse, and end with The Joker's reply in the first verse.
Video Games
- Braid ends with "Level 1", which plays completely backwards, ending (starting) with rescuing the princess which, considering the fact that you're going backwards, is revealed that in real time you are who the princess is running from to begin with.
Advertising
- The Mini advert "backwards
 " plays... well, backwards, starting with the line "Man eats hat. The end. It's a MINI adventure" and runs from, or rather to, there.
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