Troperville
Editing Help
Tools
Toys
|
You don't have to ask for permission.
"I think I'll try extra hard to remember today's events and conversations, in case I someday want to recall them verbatim."
A narrative technique in which we're shown events that took place before the episode's main action.
Can be subverted with a flashback to something that didn't actually happen (e.g., the night between Excel and Ropponmatsu #2 in Excel Saga).
Often provides the added bonus of getting actors into period costumes.
Specific types of flashbacks include:
- Flashback Cut: A very brief flashback.
- Flash Back Echo: In which the past events in the flashback parallel what's occurring in the present.
- How We Got Here: The episode opens In Medias Res, then the events leading up to the episode's beginning are explained via flashback.
- Pensieve Flashback: The present-day version of the character shows up inside their own memories of the past, in order to provide snarky commentary or to inexplicably interact with the past.
- The Rashomon: Multiple flashbacks depicting one event from several different perspectives.
- Whole Episode Flashback: A flashback that takes up the whole episode. (in literary works, this would be an example of a "frame story").
See also Flashback Effects for ways of distinguishing a Flash Back from normal action, and Viewers Are Goldfish for flashbacks to events that are still fresh in the audience's mind.
Examples:
- The scenes set in the 1950s in the Angel episode "Are You Now or Have You Ever Been."
- Arguably, Angel does mention having photographic memory. How he manages to have photographic memory of his entire life is anybody's guess.
- Also used extensively in The Prodigal, Darla, Destiny and Why We Fight.
- Virtually every episode of Highlander The Series has an extensive flashback; since the series protagonist is four centuries old, there's plenty of available plotlines to choose from. Usually, the flashback shows the hero's first meeting with the guest Immortal of the week.
- Friends, with the prom video and Thanksgivings past.
- The Golden Girls did several episodes each featuring multiple flashbacks on a common theme. It usually felt like the writers had ideas for gags which were not enough for a whole episode, and was often easily mistaken for a Clip Show. There was also an episode showing how the girls met.
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer used flashbacks frequently to establish the backstories of characters like Angel, Drusilla, and Spike.
- While the new series of Doctor Who does not use flashbacks often, it has received some stick for using them to flash back to extremely obvious, memorable scenes from previous episodes. This is to help children understand what's going on as - despite its morbidly high body count - the show is aimed at families.
- Without A Trace thrives on these and sometimes includes a Flash Back within another Flash Back. To top it all, one episode featured a Dream Sequence in a Flash Back.
- And another starts at the end of the story, does a How We Got Here flashback to the beginning, proceeds to use several more flashbacks as events of the mystery are unraveled, and when it reaches the end again, it turns out it was All Just A Dream. Surreal, to say the least.
- Subversion: in the first season finale of Arrested Development, two lines that seem to provoke flashbacks ("Your father promised [the company] to me on the day he went to prison.", "We've had some great times.") are followed by blank screens captioned "Footage Not Found."
- Parodied in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode featuring Boggy Creek 2: The Legend Continues: During a host segment, Crow, Tom Servo, and Mike attempt to explain a fight that occurred minutes ago via three flashbacks, each blurrier than the last, with none of them adding any new information. Mike then realizes that he was looking for his contacts, and Servo promises his next flashback will have a car chase and explosions.
- Because How I Met Your Mother, in essence, has every episode as a flashback, along with its quick editing, it's hard to tell where flashbacks end and begin, or if a Flash Forward (such as Barney's brother's wedding) really counts as a flash forward or if the rest of the episode is a flashback compared to the flash forward. No one seems to mind, though, because everyone can still follow the storyline.
- Lost features flashbacks extensively from the pilot onwards. The show begins with a plane crash that strands a group of characters on an island. Flashbacks are used to show how the different characters ended up being on the plane in the first place. Early episodes were often "themed" around a single character, with a present conflict on the island being illuminated as their backstory showed what kind of person they were before the crash. After several seasons the backstories of most of the main characters had not only been covered very thoroughly, but some characters' lives were shown through flashback to have been connected even before they got on the plane together. (Some of these were skilfully done, but others, such as Ana-Lucia meeting Jack's father in an airport bar stank of Ret Con.) At the end of season 3, the writers subverted the viewers' familiarity with the use of constant flashbacks when the two-part season ender featured a lengthy flashback that appeared at first to show a bearded, alcoholic Jack dealing with the recent death of his father, an event previously established as having happened just before he boarded the doomed plane. While his behaviour and the reaction of people around him in the flashbacks seemed to fit the timeline, they ended with Jack meeting Kate, another island survivor. The flashback was in fact a flash-forward to a time when both characters had finally managed to get off the island, and when viewed again Jack's behaviour and his treatment by other people must be re-interpreted in the context of him becoming famous after returning home. This set up the fourth season to feature flash-forwards almost exclusively instead of flashbacks, though episodes two, six, eight and eleven still featured them.
- Season 5 started with a series of episodes that either contained no flashbacks or only had brief flashbacks at the start of the episode. After that, we had full flashbacks to how Sawyer joined DHARMA in 1974 and how Locke died. Then, characters in 1977 began to have flashbacks to their past-which happened to be 2007, making it so that we have flashbacks to events that chronologically haven't happened yet.
- Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles has a flash-forward that technically, doesn't exist, as the character who envisions it (Derek Reese), came back in time and killed the inventor of the device that will eventually become Skynet. Which means, if he did that, then the person would cease to exist, and...oh my god, I've gone cross-eyed!
- Almost every episode of Forever Knight has a flashback as a part of the case. Most of them are from Nick, the show's main character, but some come from others. The notable exception is the episode 'Games Vampires Play,' in which the spots usually taken up by flashback are used to show Nick playing a virtual reality game.
- There are many jokes amongst fans over the fact that Nick would frequently have his flashbacks while driving or midconversation. This was lampshaded once or twice by other cars beeping at him at stoplights and characters noticing every once in a while and staring at him.
- Psych beigns every single episode with a flashback to Shawn's childhood, usually vaguely related to the plot in some way.
- In The Middle Man, there's a Flash Back, sometimes combined with an Imagine Spot, used to explain what happened between scenes.
- The IT Crowd does this a couple of times in one episode regarding how one character became a Goth and subsequently lost his high position and was forced to work in a room in the basement. Contains a lot of Flashback Stares.
- The episode Trash from Firefly begins with Captain Reynolds sitting naked in the desert. Cue the fade-to-black with white text reading "72 hours earlier..."
- An even better example is the episode Out of Gas in which it jumps between two primary times (A dying Mal trying to fix his ship and how the ship got broken) and the individual events on how he picked up most of his crew (The Serenity, Wash, Inara, Jayne, and Kaylee.)
- Being Human has a beautifully simple one - as the vampire Mitchell walks down a street, internally monologuing, his hairstyle and clothes change to reflect the fashions of every decade since his turning.
- The Pretender hardly has an episode without flashbacks, generally in some way related to whatever is going on in the present.
- Used to death in the B-movie Boggy Creek 2: The Legend Continues.
- In another MST 3 K alumnus, Future War, a character in a jail cell flashbacks while exercising, covering all the fight scenes in the film thus far, including one that happened before the cut to the cell. "Soon he'll be flashing back to the start of his flashbacks."
- John Carpenter's film Ghosts of Mars use extensive flashbacks that become increasingly convoluted as the film goes on. The entire film is framed as one character recounting the events to her superiors later; nevertheless, every time she or another character meets up with someone new on the planet, that person explains whats been happening to them in their own flashback, and this repeats itself when they meet new people. This eventually devolves into the viewer watching a flashback within a flashback within a flashback within a flashback. Quite jarring if you let yourself become aware of it. Kudos to the character speaking to her superiors, though, who could remember everything she heard fourth-hand verbatim.
- Passage to Marseille was a movie in which a reporter comes to an air base to interview a Free French officer who starts telling the story of one of his men (Humphrey Bogart). Flashback to the man being recovered at sea by a ship along with four others. It is revealed that they are escaped prisoners. Flashback to them planning to escape in order to join the fight against the Germans and saying why they absolutely...
- Citizen Kane tells the story of someone who died at the beginning of the film, so a high percentage of its running time is Flashbacks.
- Airplane!: Ted and Elaine (meeting in the bar, in the Peace Corps, in the hospital, rolling on the beach), Ted's war memories. These can get ridiculous...
- The reactions to them can get a bit more ridiculous.
- Shaolin Soccer features a unique subversion: While Sing is trying to convince an old soccer coach of the value of Kung Fu, there are flashbacks to an ancient master performing techniques described, a master played by the same actor as the coach. The coach interrupts the last flashback by pulling off the old master's costume and stepping out of the character.
- Inverted in Memento, which flashes forward at intervals until the movie ends in the middle of the story.
- The Bad And The Beautiful has three, one for each character Shields alienated.
- Blue Thunder uses these as a vehicle to illustrate hero Frank Murphy's Shell Shocked Veteran Back Story, and also to foreshadow a key plot point regarding his relationship with Cochrane.
- Jay in Sky Blue has a flashback to when Shua showed her the blue sky; Shua later has one to a few minutes later, showing why he was exiled. Later still, Cade has a flashback to the same event, where it turns out he framed Shua for his own action.
- The Saw films do this extensively as a means of explaining the convoluted plots and building character development, even when many of the main characters are dead in the 'current' timeline.
- In The Dark Tower, Book One: The Gunslinger, the first quarter of the novel is devoted to flashbacks to events just prior to the beginning of the novel, and flashbacks to Roland's childhood within those. In Book Four: Wizard and Glass, the bulk of the story is a flashback to a formative event in Roland's early adulthood.
- Like the index down there says, this is Older Than Dirt: Odysseus has one heck of a long flashback in The Odyssey.
- Harry Potter has the Pensieve and Tom Riddle's diary, allowing for magical plot important flashbacks.
- In Digimon, after Impmon does his Heel Face Turn after killing leomon, there are constant flashbacks by Jeri and Impmon of him (As Beelzemon) killing him over and over again. Impmon and Jeri have other flashbacks to show how they became what they are. Jeri's mother died when she was little, her father became distant and she could never really connect with her step-mom, and Impmon gained a hatred of humans because of his abuse at the hands of his young Tamers.
- Series one and two also had flashbacks. Most of the digidestened have flashbacks of family deaths, such as Izzy and Cody, who have flashbacks about their parents' deaths, Ken has his brother Sam's death, and Tai has the time that he almost was responsible for his sister Kari's demise. Owikowa also had flashbacks, to show how and Hiroki (Cody's dad) were friends, and how alone he felt after Hiroki died. TK often has flashbacks about Angemon's sacrifice to stop Devimon, and Ken has flashbacks of his time as the Digimon Emperor.
- Naruto producers: "What? IMPOSSIBLE!" (Triumphant music suddenly starts playing! Something, somehow, poofs into smoke, having been merely a diversion, and the show's incredulous flashback addiction gets CALLED OUT ON! We zoom back to the start of the article where we are reminded, in wishy-washy greyscale-esque graphics, that the flashback is a NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE in which we're shown EVENTS that took place before the episodes' MAIN ACTION! The Naruto producers are awestruck, saying, "You.... When?!", when we momentarily flash back within the flashback to when you started this session by entering the TV tropes main page, where you clicked a link, thus enabling us to plant the lethal delayed calling-out device on you via the reverse thingamagig flip-flop technique! Then in rapid succession FLASH to when we learnt that Lost features flashbacks intensively from the pilots onward, replaying all the way through to the Blue Thunder example complete with exhaustive narration that explains in excruciating detail exactly what has been really going on, all the while the Naruto producers gape at us speechless in awestruck horror! We smile in victorious self-satisfaction as we revisit that exact second where the Naruto producers said "What? IMPOSSIBLE!", following word for word the dialogue exchange of the following forty seconds or so, plus a few crucial cameos of what has all this time been going on behind them, which has been instrumental to our ploy! The TRIUMPHANT MUSIC reaches CATHARSIS!- Signalling that we are done with recapping our complex flashback-laden explanation from last week's episode. This week's episode may now begin.
- Tenjou Tenge has an entire flashback arc, which takes up a large chunk of the anime. While it is important for establishing the backstories of many of the show's characters, unfortunately the anime didn't get far enough to really do anything with those newly fleshed-out characters before it was cancelled.
- The anime Bleach goes to town with this trope. Two characters are about to embark in what looks like an epic fight, the audience is on its collective toes expecting a good few minutes of slashing action, released soul slayers and all, and suddenly you get a flashback that explains some previously unknown details in the history between the two fighters. This wouldn't normally be so bad, but Bleach's flashbacks tend to last entire episodes. By the end of the episode you know everything on why the current situation has developed, but the enemies have yet to start attacking.
- Kiddy Grade does this right around episodes 10-12 when Eclair struggles with her repressed memories and the numerous times she's come back from the dead.
- Used many times in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, may it be to reveal the Anti Villains Start Of Darkness or to simply show what drives the characters. Played with in regards to Fate, who had a Flash Back of her days when her mother loved her to show why she's such a Love Martyr, only for her to eventually realize that those memories were not hers.
- Cluster Edge uses this constantly, to the point it conquers the series.
- Ninin Ga Shinobuden parodies this. When asked to explain how he got stuck on Miyabi's chest, Onsokumaru promptly goes into a flashback covering various events from the previous week, even though the only relevant event (Miyabi tripping and falling on top of him) occurred about five minutes earlier. The ninja are quick to point this out.
- Flashbacks are the only place where people die in One Piece.
- Unusually for the series, lonelygirl15 episode "Comfort Food" included flashbacks to Daniel's grandmother's funeral. Flashbacks were again used in the series 3 episode "I Miss Her".
- LG15: the resistance makes frequent use of these to show Maggie's past.
- Invader Zim also lampshades a common problem with this trope: In "The Fry Cook What Came From All That Space", Zim recalls a flashback of being demoted to fry cook under fry lord Sizz-Lorr, and then escaping. After Zim escapes, it shows Sizz-Lorr alone, shouting at the top of his lungs:
Sizz-Lorr: I will find you Zim, so help me, I will search the entire universe, and I! WILL! FIND YOOOOOOOOU!
(Cut back to present time with Zim and Sizz-Lorr)
Sizz-Lorr: How did you remember what I said if you weren't there?
Zim: *shrugs*
- Flashback: The Quest for Identity. In-game flashbacks.
- In Minori's route in Brass Restoration, flashbacks are used much more frequently than needed, often to recap something that happened half a scene ago. Thankfully not as prevalent in other routes.
- In Valkyrie Profile, flashbacks are often used to show the events leading up to the Einherjar's deaths.
Theatre
- The first act of Nine ends with a series of flashbacks to Guido's youth.
- Miss Saigon goes back to "The Fall of Saigon" midway through the second act
- During the song "Poor Thing" from Sweeney Todd, the story of Lucy Barker's rape is shown onstage as Mrs. Lovett sings about it.
- The Tom Stoppard play Arcadia alternates scenes between flashbacks and the modern day.
- In David Auburn's Proof, there are several scenes that flashback to when Robert was alive.
- The original version of Merrily We Roll Along had the story told in flashback, framed by Frank speaking at a graduation ceremony.
- In something not unlike a Pensieve Flashback, Prior recounts his encounter with The Angel to Belize in the middle of a later scene, and both his telling and the encounter are played simultaneously onstage.
|
|
