Once More With Clarity / Live-Action TV

Examples of things not seeming like what they are explained in a subsequent view in Live-Action TV.

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• One episode of The 4400 opens with Tom and Diana pointing guns at each other. Flashbacks explain how they got to this point.
• This happens occasionally on 1000 Ways to Die. In instances where this trope is used, someone will be going through an series of activities (questionable as they might be) before suddenly dying. We then see that previous things that person did directly contribute to their death. For example, one segment sees a cemetery worker who decides to use the cemetery as a makeshift golf course suddenly get boils on his face and die. The show then reveals that he suffered from an allergic reaction to fungi, that he used a fungicide earlier, and that he had contracted the reaction by chewing on his golf tees.
• The first season of American Vandal is big on this near the end, as several key parts of the plot involve the documentarians going over old video footage they saw before, looking for new clues. The second season has this too, but it's toned down compared to the first.
• In And Then There Were None (2015), there are multiple flashbacks through each episode of Vera Claythorne running along the beach screaming frantically for Cyril—a sickly boy she was governess for who drowned (and the murder U.N. Owen accuses her of). In the final iteration of the flashback, we see the full scene. Vera tells him that he can definitely swim to the rock and back, and then sits, drawing pictures in the sand, until enough time has passed so she can pull the desperate nanny routine. All so her boyfriend, the boy's uncle, would inherit the property and therefore feel free to propose to her. (Which he doesn't, because he is both heartbroken and savvy enough to work out that a strong, healthy adult could never be outstripped by a small boy with weak lungs.)
• Why are The Aquabats! floating around in space at the beginning of the cartoon segments in The Aquabats! Super Show!? As revealed in the season one finale, "Showtime!", the entire season is a time loop. The cartoon segment for the episode ends with the Aquabats being teleported back to the events of the first episode by Time Sprinkler, and the episode proper ends with Space Monster M throwing the Battletram with the Aquabats in it into space.
• Arrow:
  • The first episode of season 4 ends with a "Six months later" scene with Oliver and Barry at a graveside mourning a friend. Nine episodes later, "Blood Debts" follows on from the mid-season cliffhanger where Felicity gets shot with a reprise of that scene (now "Four months later"). We then go back to immediately following the cliffhanger, where Felicity recovers, and the end of the episode returns to the graveside where Ollie gets in a limo and Felicity is waiting to discuss revenge on Damien Darhk for killing the person they're mourning. The death occurs seven episodes after that in "Eleven Fifty-Nine", and the graveside scenes reappear with clarity in the following episode.
  • There's an additional second level. When Felicity loses the use of her legs after being shot, the scene in "Blood Debts" implies she still can't walk due to the way she's sitting and that she doesn't move her legs. By the time the episode finally rolls around, it turns out she'd just been sitting still; she'd regained the use of her legs a few episodes previously.
• Babylon 5 has several examples.
  • We see Londo's vision of him and G'Kar dying with their hands around each other's throats in the very first episode, but it's not until the third season that we know what's really going on, and not until nearly the end of the fifth season that we know how they got there.
  • The Time Travel arc also does this: in the first season's "Babylon Squared", we see a mysterious masked figure doing mysterious things; in the third season's "War Without End", we see the same events, but now we're seeing them from the point of view of the folks in masks.
  • Not to mention the episode where Delenn has to take a drug-induced flashback to when she was at Dukhat's side when he died. When seen the first time, it reveals that she cast the deciding vote in declaring war on the Humans, while stricken with grief over Dukhat's death. A later reviewing of the flashback, combined with some research in her family records, reveals that Dukhat was also trying to tell Delenn that she was descended from Valen.
  • In the late fourth-season/early fifth-season episode "The Deconstruction of Falling Stars", we see some archival footage that shows Garibaldi in what seems to be a hostage situation, attempting to convince his captors not to go through with their plan. The clip ends with a PPG blast, implying that Garibaldi was shot. In the mid-fifth-season episode "Phoenix Rising", it's revealed that the potential shooter was the one who was shot, by the leader of the group.
  • And of course, the shot of Babylon 5's destruction. We see that same shot in different contexts no less than three times over the course of the series, with only the last shot in the series finale being what really happens.
• Bates Motel starts with a flashback where Norman Bates discovers his father's dead body and rushes to find his mother Norma. When they get to the body Norman is crying his eyes out while Norma is suspiciously calm, and she starts to comfort him. Halfway through the season we get the full story: Norman himself killed his father in a fit of Tranquil Fury only to snap back to reality with no memory of the event, leaving Norma to stage the scene to look like an accident. Her "Oh Norman..." was not meant to comfort him because his dad died; she is realizing how damaged her son really is.
• In one Big Time Rush episode, the boys are faced with the possibility that they're on the verge of a breakup due to the fact they can't stop fighting, and we're shown three such instances of them fighting: Carlos tackling Logan when the latter was using his laptop, James knocking the cereal out of Carlos' beloved hockey helmet who responded by tackling him, and James getting jumped by the other three boys when he was just simply brushing his hair. Despite Kendall's best efforts, the boys end up at each others throats at the end of the episode, until Kendall realizes the common thread behind all of their squabbles: the new video game they bought. The three flashbacks are then updated to explain-Logan was badmouthing Carlos online after beating him, James noticed the corn flakes he was eating resembled one of the areas in the game and remembered how Carlos refused to share his health packs last time they played, and the boys attacked James because they were down one player and ended up losing a match.
• Breaking Bad: In the original show's "Better Call Saul", there's a comedic sequence where Walt and Jesse kidnap Saul and take him to the desert, whereupon he immediately starts saying that "it wasn't me, it was Ignacio" and showing dramatic relief when it turns out "Lalo" didn't send them. It's all Played for Laughs and no one ever mentions it again once it's over. In the Better Call Saul episode "Breaking Bad", this scene is revisited from Saul's perspective. This time, it's shot like a horror movie, Saul's begging is milked for genuine terror, and with the full context, we now know that Saul is desperately trying to convince Lalo he had nothing to do with Nacho's betrayal so that Lalo won't kill him like he did Howard.
• In the Broad City episode "Hurricane Wanda," Abbi can't get the toilet to flush, but Ilana promises to take care of it. Later, Marla discovers poop in her shoe, and Abbi assumes Ilana put her poop there, but Ilana denies everything. The last scene reveals that Ilana created a makeshift container for the poop, smuggled it out of the apartment while the other characters were talking, dumped it down the trash chute at the end of the hall, and snuck back in while Bevers loudly took a dump in his sister's shoe.
• In the beginning of the Season 1 finale of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Jake Peralta goes to a bar owned by The Mafia drinking shots, and announcing "I'm Jake Peralta and I just got fired from the NYPD." By the end of the episode, we learn that Jake was officially 'expelled' by the NYPD because he had to become a Deep Cover Agent against one of New York's biggest Mafia bosses. The announcement was a way Jake could gain instant trust in the criminal organization, since they hate cops.
• Buffyverse:
  • Done beautifully in "Fool for Love", relating to events that involved Angel, Spike, Darla and Drusilla during the Boxer Revolution near the turn of the 1900s. In the scene Angel congratulates Spike on a successful kill, and seems to be a little bored/unimpressed. It's only in the second showing that we realize how uncomfortable Angel must have been, since his soul and conscience had already been restored. It's more compelling than it sounds, particularly because of the bizarre surprise factor; the first scene aired during an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the second version during the unrelated Angel "Darla", aired on the same night.
  • "Same Time Same Place": "Everyone's talking to me! [lightbulb moment] Nobody's talking to each other."
  • In "The Freshman": Buffy answers a phone in her mother's house, says hello twice, and the caller hangs up without saying anything. Its never mentioned again. In "City of..." (which took place at the same time), Angel calls Buffy's house, and we hear her say hello before he hangs up.
  • "Showtime": The scene where the Potentials argue around a table and the Scooby trio exchange looks and walk away, only to stare at each other silently in the kitchen, is later replayed to show that the trio was communicating an Unspoken Plan Guarantee via telepathy.
  • In the Angel episode "Release", Faith breaks out of prison to help take down Angelus. After a brutal fight, he manages to get the upper hand and drinks her blood with the intention of making her a vampire... End episode. "Orpheus" opens with a flashback that shows Faith pumping herself full of magical heroin before the fight, then cutting back to Angelus keeling over unconscious with her blood on his lips.
    Faith: Kicked his ass. [coma]
• The season three premiere of Castle begins with Beckett chasing Castle, ending up face-to-face, guns drawn at each other and firing. When we revisit the scene at the end of the episode, they're actually chasing a husband-and-wife criminal team, they're aiming at a suspect behind the other's shoulder, and both fire simultaneously to drop them.
• Season 32 of CASUAL+Y ends with Iain suddenly swerving his ambulance, crashing and causing a multi-car pile-up. The first episode of Season 33 starts twenty minutes before that, then catches up with the finale and reveals exactly what - or rather, who - Iain had been swerving to avoid.
• Coupling, being written by Steven Moffat, does this a lot. Notable examples include "The Girl With Two Breasts", where Jeff's conversation with an Israeli girl takes a very different turn once we know what she's actually saying, and "Nine and a Half Minutes", in which Susan's reaction to her first conversation with Oliver becomes more understandable once we realise she thinks he's a gynocologist, not a sf bookshop owner. Also the Spiderman episode where a drunken woman talks to two men (actually one man) and tells no one in particular that she really hates the poster on the wall of Munch's "The Scream" (she's actually looking at her own reflection in a mirror).
• Criminal Minds:
  • The episode "100" did this by making the audience think that a long tracking shot was in Hotch's point of view, when in fact, it's the point of view of Agent Anderson, a very occasionally recurring character.
  • One Season 10 episode featured an increasingly psychotic vigilante killer. At one point, he stumbles across an Attempted Rape in a back alley, and violently assaults the man before drawing his gun. The victim begs him to kill the would-be rapist, which he swiftly does. When the police interview the woman, however, we see what actually happened: the "rapist" had been her boyfriend, they had been consensually kissing, and she had been begging the vigilante not to kill him. What we'd seen the first time was merely the man's delusion.
• The Crowded Room: The segments shown from Rya's point of view reveal so many things Danny told her before weren't what actually happened. For instance, multiple people he spoke of were really just alternate personalities of his.
• CSI: NY:
  • The Season 2 premiere opens with a woman a hotel room being surprised at the sight of a man climbing the skyscraper across the street, and the woman placing a phone call, anxiously muttering "Pick up, pick up!" as the phone rang. Towards end of the episode, we see the scene again, this time with the knowledge that she had hired a man to kill her ex-husband in that same building, and the climber was just one storey away from seeing it through a window, so she was trying to warn her co-conspirator about the approaching witness.
  • Another cold-opens with a wounded Mac Taylor suddenly facing a dual-wielding character played Edward James Olmos who has the drop on him and fires. By the time the end of the episode rolls around and we get to that scene it appears that he missed, and Taylor shoots him. Only for Taylor to realize that he didn't miss: he'd shot his brother, who had been about to shoot Taylor in the back.
  • A later episode features the team trying to convince a murder suspect to flip on his partners; in addition to playing an old press conference in his presence that cons him into thinking the victim is still alive^note which would have him thinking he's facing lesser charges, at one point Jo, Lovato, and the DA walk by his interrogation room with a man wearing an orange hoodie, with a bloody bandage on his leg and crutches, with the suspect being told that it's 'Mookie', one of his accomplices. Later, the suspect is shown an interrogation video of Mookie giving a confession to the DA. This convinces him to give his own confession and rat out the third guy. However, when a third suspect is brought in, he reveals that he killed Mookie earlier. Flashbacks then show the CSIs finding Mookie's body, the hallway scene with additional footage showing it's Adam wearing the orange hoodie, and Adam mixing footage from an old interview with new footage featuring the hoodie. And to top it off, the whole conversation was filmed, with the third suspect having admitted to both murders on camera.
• Doctor Who:
  • Steven Moffat really enjoyed doing this with his episodes.
    • "The Girl in the Fireplace", "Silence in the Library", and "The Big Bang" all open with scenes from later in the show which don't seem to make any sense yet. The pre-title sequence to "The Big Bang", in particular, is thoroughly baffling until you see how it all pans out.
    • We see disjointed snippets of a recording in "Blink" that appears to be half of a conversation. Later in the episode the same recording plays, but this time the main characters are providing the other half.
    • In "Flesh and Stone", we see a dying and terrified Amy being comforted by the Doctor — which seems a bit odd, considering how erratic and busy he'd been just moments earlier (especially since there is an apparent wardrobe continuity error). He says to Amy to remember what he told her when she was seven... which makes no sense. Through the wibbly-wobbly-ness of "The Big Bang" we discover that it's a future Doctor, whose timeline is being erased, and he's trying to tell Amy how not to forget him.
      What makes it so very effective, though, is that it doesn't necessarily seem that odd the first time round. It's not so very strange that the Doctor should realise he's been too distracted, and come back to comfort his dying friend before he has to leave. As a result, the scene stands on its own merits without seeming to stand out or demand explanation, and that makes the reveal so much more surprising when it comes.
      Also proving that most Viewers Are Geniuses, since many noticed that during that scene, the Doctor was not wearing his jacket and had rolled up sleeves... something incongruous with his outfit for the rest of the episode, as well as why the Doctor was so out of character.
    • A big one occurs at the end of "The Eleventh Hour", where we see young Amy waiting and the TARDIS is heard in the background. The scene cuts to adult Amy waking up, suggesting a dream. Two and a half series later viewers finally got an explanation in Amy and Rory's final episode.
  • "Human Nature"/"The Family of Blood": After he steals it, the Chameleon Arch gives Tim Latimer a vision of himself and bully Hutchinson struggling alongside each other through a muddy battlefield at night, and it looks like they're killed by an artillery strike. At the end of the story, when Latimer lives through the events for real, his memory of the vision lets him save both of their lives by dodging to the side.
  • "The Haunting of Villa Diodati": The house's haunted status is shown by several unsettling events, including a vase suddenly moving across a hallway to break against a wall, a mysterious figure seen in a flash of lightning, and a disembodied shadow against a doorway. All of these are eventually explained as being the missing Percy Shelley, who has been rendered mostly undetectable by a Cyberman AI he found and is attempting to attract the attention of others in the house.
  • "Ascension of the Cybermen" features, between the main plot, cryptic cutaways to the life of what appears to be an Irish police officer named Brendan in the early 20th century, which gets stranger when he survives being shot and falling off a cliff without a scratch, and then, upon his retirement, gets his memories erased by his father and his old boss, neither of whom have aged since the day he joined. "The Timeless Children" explains Brendan's story as being a version of the life of the Timeless Child, recorded in the Time Lord Matrix but disguised by a perception filter to appear innocuous.
• Dog with a Blog: In "Murder of the Ornamental Dress", Avery realizes Chloe, Stan, Tyler, and Karl were the culprits of who destroyed the dress she made, accusing them of destroying it because she never got to hang out with them, and she presents a flashback scenario of them ruining it on purpose with a couple of Evil Laughs. Following said flashback, while the quartet say Avery's accusation was true, she's technically Right for the Wrong Reasons; they then proceed to tell her what really happened, presenting the same flashback, except they destroyed the dress by accident, not of their own accord.
• Dollhouse: In addition to numerous episodes that played with memories along the basic premise of the show, each season of the show had a Distant Finale. The first season's finale, "Epitaph One", was mostly set about 10 years in the future but included several flashbacks to events that happened at some point before that but after season one. Some of those happened in season two, and by now things had changed enough that those scenes' meanings were very different.
• In another Joss Whedon production, Firefly, the episode Trash opens up with Mal sitting in the desert, buck naked, dryly observing that "That went well." Get all the way to the end of the episode, and We learn that the crew was running a Xanatos Gambit on YoSafBridge. Mal had been in fact dryly observing that "That went well".
• The Flash (2014) episode "Enter Zoom" opens In Medias Res with Flash being defeated by Dr. Light. We then go back 72 hours, during which Flash comes up with an idea to fake being defeated so Zoom will come for him, Light escapes, and he instead decides to act out the plan with Linda Park, Light's Earth-1 counterpart. We then see the fight again, only with additional material now that we know it's all been staged.
• Almost every episode of Flashpoint (except for a brief stretch in Season 3) begins with a scene from later in the episode before rewinding to explain How We Got Here. In quite a few cases, by the time the episode circles back around to the moment from the opening scene, the preceding action has shown that there's more to the story than was initially apparent.
• Frasier: "Dark Side of the Moon" opens with Daphne talking with a court-ordered therapist. She had gone to Niles's house for what turned out to be a surprise bachelorette party, at which her favorite dress was ruined by her boorish brother, Simon. Various other mishaps befall her over the next couple of days, some caused by Simon and others (inadvertently) by Frasier, Martin, and her fiance Donny, culminating in her throwing someone's laundry off the balcony and causing a traffic accident (thus the anger-management therapy). The therapist sympathizes, but says she doesn't understand one thing: why was Daphne wearing her favorite dress if the party was a surprise? We then flash back to her showing up at Niles's with the clear expectation that he was going to confess his feelings for her, and she and the therapist realize she might not want to marry Donny after all.
• The Genius makes good use of this technique whenever a player or alliance gets blindsided. We'll first see things proceeding as normal, with the player(s) still believing everything is under their control, then the bombshell drops, then the show will reveal all the other players' backroom plotting and conspiring leading up to it.
• Grounded for Life: Almost every episode is a series of flash backs flashing further back each time. One character may have a flashback to a hit and run driver taking out their car door, followed by another character revealing they were the hit and run driver late in the episode.
• In the Hannibal episode "Primavera" Abigail Hobbs seems to visit Will in the hospital and talk with him about a few things like how Hannibal used his surgical skill to not kill Will. In "Aperitivo", after the audience has already learned that Abigail died from her injuries it's revealed that Will was actually talking to Dr. Fredric Chilton, giving the entire conversation a different tone.
• Several times in How I Met Your Mother, mostly due to Future!Ted being an Unreliable Narrator:
  • In "The Mermaid Theory", Future!Ted literally can't remember how of one of the subplots he's describing went apart from a few details, and in his attempts to figure out the sequence of events he gets them wrong three times (winding up deducing that Barney managed to magically levitate a beer bottle for some reason)^note he forgot that it happened while Lily was pregnant, so Barney sticking a beer bottle on her pregnant belly became a beer bottle hanging in mid air in front of her, and actually gives up, telling his kids "I'm sorry, just forget about that, this story makes no sense whatsoever", only for his recounting of the episode's main plot to suddenly remind him how the story went about five minutes later — it happened several months after he initially thought it did, which is why it made no sense in context the first times he tried to tell it.
  • In "Ted Mosby, Architect", Robin and Lily track Ted around town and learn that he's cheating on Robin. They track him to his one-night stand's apartment while the girl is in the shower, enter the bedroom and find...Barney there, who all night has been introducing himself as "Ted Mosby, architect" because girls apparently find architects hot. We then get a montage of previous flashbacks to Ted flirting with other girls and cheating on Robin, only with Barney in his place instead.
  • During his story about his 30th birthday, he keeps cutting to the goat that he's inevitably going to get into a confrontation with... only to realize at the end of the episode, Robin was living with him during the incident, so it was actually his 31st birthday instead.
  • The final season episode "How Your Mother Met Me" shows several previous episodes from the mother's perspective, and we see how those events were significant to her as well.
  • In one episode, Marshall and Lily believe they are pregnant and Marshall remarks that nothing can bring him down from the high it produces. Cut to a gynecologist's office later, and they learn they aren't pregnant, and Marshall says "That did it." The story then cuts back to the middle, and we learn that Marshall and Lily are panicking at the thought of being parents and Marshall says that nothing can calm him down from his hysteria. Cut back to the gynecologist, showing that his "That did it" was actually an expression of relief, not disappointment.
  • "The Burning Beekeeper" in season seven is entirely built around this trope, showing the same few minutes as they happen in different rooms, with each story interacting with the others only in small ways, so that the whole thing doesn't really make sense until the end.
• How to Get Away with Murder: The first half of every season features flash-forwards to something that happens on the mid-season finale. Often they seem to mean one thing on first showing, but are then replayed when their true meaning becomes apparent.
  • Episode 3.07 ends with a flash-forward of Wes in the police station, getting ready to sign an immunity deal, seemingly confirming he isn't the one who dies in the fire. The same scene is shown again after it's shown that Wes is the body under the sheet. This time, he is shown slipping out of the station - revealing that the earlier scene happened hours before the fire.
• The BBC drama, Hustle, does this very well. They'll go back and show how many seemingly disconnected incidents from the episode actually fit together as part of the plan. One of the best was in the Series 2 finale: The gang frequently play small tricks/cons on Eddie, the barman, cheating him out of a few quid and some drinks. So when Mickey surreptitiously rewinds Eddie's watch, tricking him into leaving the bar open longer than he intended, it is seen as an ordinary occurrence. However, Mickey would use the same technique later in order to create an alibi - photographs that seem to show they were at a social event (hosted by the police, and actually presenting an award to Mickey!) at the time that they committed the robbery. A flashback shows the original incident again, just to remind us that we could have figured it out (and give those who did figure it out a moment to feel smug).
• Interview with the Vampire (2022): The climax of the Season 1 finale revisits a few earlier scenes from Antoinette Brown's point-of-view where it's unveiled to viewers that she was in disguise and psychically eavesdropping on Louis de Pointe du Lac and Claudia's telepathic conversations, including a Flashback from the sixth episode where Antoinette was at Jackson Square and had listened in on Louis and Claudia's thoughts about the latter boarding a train to New York. This confirms that Lestat de Lioncourt had already turned Antoinette into a vampire by this point. There's also a clip of Claudia poisoning Tom Anderson's drink earlier that night at the Mardi Gras ball before handing the glass to him, which he eagerly sips. Tom was the first person Lestat had drained to death during the feast, so that's why the toxin is now in Lestat's system.
• Jonathan Creek enjoys doing this as part of The Summation - indeed, as a show that was by design more of a How-dunnit than a Who-dunnit, it's an innate part of the premise that Jonathan has to figure out what actually happened. For example, in "The Coonskin Cap" we see a scene which appears to be setting up a Retirony / Fatal Family Photo type moment by having a policeman proposing to his female colleague before she ends up being the villain's next murder victim. However at the end we see the scene again in flashback and it continues, showing the engagement ring-looking box actually contained a necklace he used to plant a false clue that she was killed by the villain when he did it himself, and that their relationship was less close than it seemed in the first scene.
• A few Kamen Rider shows have these sorts of flashbacks:
  • Early on in Kamen Rider Gaim, before Kouta, Kaito, and Micchy use their Transformation Trinkets for the first time, they're all visited by a mysterious woman who resembles Mai and warns them that Vagueness Is Coming. Late in the series, Mai absorbs the Golden Fruit, takes on the traits of the mystery woman, and uses her powers to try and Set Right What Once Went Wrong by warning the three not to become Kamen Riders because of all the terrible things that happened to them, but instead just says the same vague mumbo-jumbo we heard the first time around. Then we see a scene from a mid-series episode where DJ Sagara met with the mystery woman, except this time we get the full conversation, in which Sagara says that she doesn't have full control of her new powers yet and won't be able to use them how she wants, so her attempts to change history will inevitably fail.
  • Kamen Rider Drive: In episode 36, Shinnosuke is locked in a room with Detective Nira, the person who killed his father; Mr. Belt and the Shift Cars are trapped in a sack, the police think he's the one holding a hostage, and the villains' agents have kidnapped and poisoned a young woman whose death will be pinned on the Kamen Riders (and when Mach and Chaser try to save her, they find that the neurotoxin is beyond their ability to heal). Near the end, Shinnosuke seemingly snaps, laughing hysterically and lamenting that for all his power, he couldn't save his friends, and the villain shoots him dead. Later, the police are holding a press conference to discuss the case when Shinnosuke and the kidnapped girl enter the room, alive and well. In a Flash Back, we're shown that Mach and Chaser were able to save the girl thanks to outside assistance, and let Shinnosuke know by broadcasting to a monitor outside of Nira's field of vision, which is why Shinnosuke laughed. His final lament included "If I could walk through walls...", which was a cue for Mr. Belt to send him Dimension Cab, allowing him to fake his death. Even better, Shinnosuke's appearance triggers Nira and Brains's very public Villainous Breakdown, which results in Nira finally getting arrested and Brain (temporarily) losing his body.
  • Kamen Rider Build: The big inciting incident of the series is the murder of Mad Scientist Takumi Katsuragi, which is initially pinned on mixed martial artist Ryuga Banjou when he responded to a Help Wanted ad. Over the course of the series, the murder is shown several times with gradually more detail being added, until we know the whole story: Katsuragi discovered the existence of the Big Bad, an evil alien, and planned to kill him (as well as Banjou, who had been implanted with its DNA; the ad was just a ruse). The alien erased Katsuragi's memories and swapped his face with a random guy he killed, creating Sento Kiryu. He then called the police so they would show up after Banjou arrived and found "Katsuragi's" corpse, landing him in a prison where they could experiment on him.
• The six episodes of season 3 of The League of Gentlemen follow six different, interlinked storylines, happening simultaneously.
• Leverage often does the same as the Hustle example above, although the significance is usually fairly obvious the first time around if you're paying any attention at all. The Rashomon Job plays with it by showing the same heist four times as each of the thieves remembers it, with each simultaneously explaining more of the events and exaggerating others.
• Lost:
  • Throughout the first three seasons but especially in the first, we are continually shown different perspectives of the plane crash from different people. It's not until the first episode of season three that we've officially seen all of the pieces of the crash: the events within the Hatch that caused it, what it looked like for the survivors, and how the Others reacted when they saw it crash from the ground.
  • In one of the opening episodes, John Locke is shown amidst the wreckage of the plane crash. He stands up slowly and begins to walk around with absolutely none of the hysterical reaction to being in a plane crash experienced by the rest of the cast. The scene is shown again later, after it was revealed that Locke was a paraplegic before the crash, and it is clear that Locke's reaction (or lack of reaction) to the plane crash was caused by his amazement at suddenly being able to walk.
  • "Deus Ex Machina" has Boone managing to make contact with someone via another plane's radio, with the voice either saying that they were the survivors of Flight 815 or that there were no survivors of Flight 815. "The Other 48 Days" then shows us the other side of the call, revealing that it reached the Tailies; the voice was Bernard saying that "We're the survivors" of the crash.
  • At the end of the same episode, Locke goes to the Hatch and bangs on the door, only to be greeted by someone turning on a light inside, renewing his faith and desire to get inside. In "Live Together, Die Alone", we see that inside the Hatch, Desmond was on the verge of killing himself out of sheer loneliness and depression, but Locke happened to bang on the Hatch loud enough for him to hear, and the realization that he wasn't alone made him turn on the light.
  • Just before Rousseau kidnaps Claire's baby Aaron in "Exodus, Part 2", Claire gets a brief flashback revealing that she gave Rousseau the scratches she has on her arm, and the fact that she immediately kidnaps Aaron indicates that she had previously made an attempt and had been fought off. "Maternity Leave" later shows the scene in full and instead reveals that Rousseau was actually trying to save her, as Claire, while drugged out of her mind, was trying to go back to Ethan.
  • "Man of Science, Man of Faith" features the survivors first entering the Hatch; Kate disappears in a flash of light, Locke disappears too, and then Jack enters the Hatch, only to find Locke with a gun pointed at his head. The next episode, "Adrift", then reveals what happened in-between those points: Desmond locked both Kate and Locke up, Kate hid in the vent, and then Desmond made Locke input the Numbers into the computer right before Jack entered.
  • The first few episodes of season 2 feature Michael, Jin, and Sawyer having an incredibly hostile first encounter with the tail section survivors, including Ana Lucia pretending to be another prisoner to take their gun. The last few minutes of "The Other 48 Days" then show us the same events from the tail section's perspectives, showing us not only why there are so few of them remaining, but their reasoning for their distrust and the bits and pieces in between the scenes we saw before.
  • "The Hunting Party" features a climactic confrontation between several of the survivors in search of Michael and the Others who have kidnapped him. Tom Friendly calls out for "Alex", but whoever that is is not revealed. This scene is shown again in "Three Minutes" after we learn that the "Alex" in question was Alex Rousseau; she had spent the confrontation trying to ask the nearby Bound and Gagged Michael if Claire's baby had been born yet and thus didn't reveal herself to the survivors.
  • In "Dave", Hurley's flashbacks show him conversing with his best friend Dave in the mental hospital, with Dave encouraging his worst impulses and eating behaviors. Midway through the episode, someone takes a picture and reveals that Dave is imaginary; some of the scenes are then briefly shown again, only to show that Hurley wasn't actually talking to anyone. At the end of the episode, one of these conversations is shown for a third time, revealing that Libby was a fellow patient at the hospital and knew Dave was imaginary from the start.
  • "Expose" opens with a cryptic scene of Nikki charging out of the jungle, saying something incomprehensible and collapsing. The characters think she said "Paulo lies" and try to figure out why she and Paulo killed each other. Then we see the event from her perspective, and learn that she said "Paralyzed," as spider bites temporarily paralyzed them both...but the survivors can't figure this out in time.
  • "House of the Rising Sun" includes a Flash Back from Sun's POV showing Jin coming home covered in blood and snapping at her when she tries to ask what happened. "...In Translation" revisits the scene but this time the audience sees it from Jin's POV. An extra flashback beforehand reveals that Sun's father pressured him into the fight that covered him in blood, and this time the argument scene continues to show Jin breaking down after Sun leaves the room.
• Mimpi Metropolitan:
  • In episode 5, we see a scene of Bambang being disturbed by a mysterious shadowy figure at night. After the figure is revealed to be just Alan pranking Bambang, we get to see the scene from Alan's clearer perspective.
  • In episode 33, Pipin agrees with Alan to make the congee for Prima. In the next episode, we see that after Alan left, Mami Bibir tells Pipin to let Mami Bibir make the congee.
• Mouse (2021):
  • The end of episode four shows Ba-reum approaching Han Kook, giving the impression he's the kidnapper. The next episode reveals it's not really Han Kook but a decoy cast by Mu-chi, leaving it ambiguous if Ba-reum is the killer or not. He is.
  • Early in the series Ba-reum runs out in front of Mu-chi's car to save a bird. Later it's revealed Ba-reum set up this incident to make himself look good.
  • Yo-han attacks Ba-reum, leading to both of them being seriously injured. It turns out Yo-han figured out Ba-reum was the killer and was trying to stop him.
  • Episode one shows Jae-hoon standing over his father's body, implying he killed him. Episode eighteen reveals his father died accidentally during a fight with Su-ho.
• Both My Name Is Earl and Raising Hope regularly feature flashbacks from the point of view of a characters who later come to realize that things didn't happen quite the way they thought, usually with regards to a different character being responsible for something they themselves had thought to be their fault.
• Spoofed in an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, in which the characters engage in duelling flashbacks, each one blurrier than the last (in parody of a similar effect in the movie they were watching). Turns out the flashbacks were blurry because the lead character was coming in to grab his contact lenses.
• One ninth-season episode of NCIS opens with a Navy chaplain talking with the father of a missing Marine, discussing whether Gibbs and Ziva will find his daughter alive. Then Tony comes in, looking like he has something important to tell him, and the scene cuts to Gibbs sitting on a transport plane, staring at a flag-covered casket. We see these scenes again at the end, only with additional footage showing Ziva and the missing Marine on the other side of the casket, which contains the body of another serviceman who was killed while participating in her rescue; Tony is coming to inform her father of her successful rescue, not her death.
• At the start of the Red Dwarf XI episode "Give and Take", Rimmer is waiting for a lift, which is explaining that it has to go to the medbay, the sleeping quarters and the stasis booths first, and Rimmer is getting more annoyed that he doesn't take priority. Towards the end of the episode the crew travel back to the start of the episode using the stasis field, perform a kidney transplant on the two Listers, and take past!Lister back to the sleeping quarters, with future!Rimmer telling the lift to stall his past self until they've got back to their own time.
• Occurs in the Sanctuary episode "Requiem". In the prologue, we see Magnus asphyxiate, begging Will to turn on the air vents, while Will watches mercilessly from the next room, making him appear effectively evil. By the end of the episode, we realise that Magnus was actually the one with the evil incentive, and Will killed her to purge the parasite in her brain that was causing this before she killed them both.
• Sharp Objects: The series often intercuts brief, soundless sequences that Camille is recalling. The meaning or importance of some of these make more sense the second time we see them, after the viewer has more information. For example, in the first episode, Camilla shuts her trunk, revealing that it has the word "dirt" written in the dust. Later, we find out that Camilla has covered her body in scars spelling out disparaging words directed at herself. Thus, when she flashes back to "dirt" again, it's clear that she wrote this herself.
• Series 4 of Sherlock (again, Steven Moffat) features a very interesting one. "The Six Thatchers" ends with Sherlock watching a video message left by Mary, who had saved his life at the cost of her own at the episode's climax, telling him to "save John Watson", followed by a short stinger in which she tells him to "go to hell", seemingly out of spite. However, at the climax of "The Lying Detective", John watches the same video and it's revealed we didn't see the whole thing the first time: "go to hell" was actually Mary's instruction on how to save John, as she reasoned that the only way to save him was for him to have to save Sherlock, thus giving him renewed purpose.
• Star Trek:
  • An interesting variation occurs in Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Timescape". Picard and three others, returning to the Enterprise in a runabout, find it in battle with a Romulan ship — and both frozen in time. They board the ship and see Romulans who've boarded; one has taken the helm from an Enterprise crewman, another is firing at Dr. Crusher, etc. Picard's group manage to rewind and restart the timeline, and discover that the Romulans were not attacking. They were being evacuated from their ship, while the Romulan firing at Dr. Crusher was actually firing at a time-shifting alien whose race caused the time stop, and the doctor accidentally got in the way.
  • The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Trials and Tribble-ations" is a rather elaborate version of this trope, in that, by inserting Deep Space Nine characters into the original series episode "The Trouble with Tribbles", several events that occurred in the original are explained. For a minor example, the original episode had a famous moment where Kirk opens a hatch and is buried by tribbles; even after the flood has stopped, a few occasionally pelt him in the head. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine reveals that Sisko and Dax were in the compartment, trying to find one specific tribble, and throwing the others aside (unintentionally hitting Kirk) after scanning them.
  • The Star Trek: Voyager episode "Timeless" is primarily set in a Bad Future where Chakotay and Harry Kim were the lone survivors of Voyager and are now trying to fix the timeline so that they all survive. In one scene, we see Harry recording some sort of message before interrupted by the Doctor. Later, we see that this was part of a message he was sending to his past self, confirming whether he'd succeeded.
  • In Star Trek: Discovery, Michael Burnham has half a season's worth of this when she learns that Captain Lorca is actually from the Mirror Universe and was grooming her mirror counterpart from her childhood, and realizes the true meaning behind pretty much everything he's said to her.
• In Season 4 of Stranger Things, we open to Eleven massacring the other children as witnessed by a horrified Dr. Brenner. Then we arrive at the day of the massacre from Eleven and the Orderly's perspective: the Orderly was the one who killed all those children after being released by Eleven, and after rejecting his plans to rule the world, Eleven banished him to the Upside Down... arriving at the point when Brenner witnessed the event.
• In an episode of Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place, "Once Again from the Beginning," we're shown four different perspectives on the day's events in order, with each subsequent storyline filling in details that explained how and why Pete and Ashley were accosted by a mugger. The final storyline of the episode revealed that the mugger was Irene's long-awaited dad!
• Ultraman Orb: Naomi has frequent dreams of a giant of light fighting Maga-Zetton. They're actually the memories of her distant ancestor, Natasha. When Ultraman Orb regains his Orb Origin form, it's revealed that the giant of light was indeed Ultraman Orb. More importantly, her dreams are later extended to show Natasha being rescued by someone, allowing her to survive the explosion, and ultimately it's revealed in the final episode that it was Juggler who rescued her!
• The Untamed: The first episode starts with showing Wei Wuxian's final moments in the Burial Mounds, with Lan Wangji trying to save Wei Wuxian from falling and Jiang Cheng stabbing the latter so he would fall. Episode 33 replays the same scene again and reveals that not all was as it seemed.
• WandaVision features several:
  • Episode 4 serves as one for the first three episodes, showing S.W.O.R.D.'s attempts to investigate Westview and how they led to several of the strange incidents in the previous episodes, such as the voice on the radio in Episode 2.
  • At the end of episode 7, a montage shows how Agatha "Agnes" Harkness has been pulling the strings in Westview, set to her own Expository Theme Tune: "Agatha All Along". For added comedy the replayed scenes show Agatha hamming it up for the camera while she works her magic.
  • In Episode 5, Director Hayward shows Monica footage of Wanda breaking into S.W.O.R.D. HQ - specifically, into a room housing Vision's remains. As the footage ominously cuts off, Hayward explains that Wanda stole the remains and used them to reanimate Vision inside the Hex. Episode 8 flashes back to show the scene from Wanda's perspective, and it turns out that while she did indeed break in, she never stole Vision's body or hurt anyone, instead merely saying a tearful goodbye to her husband before leaving. Not only does Hayward still have Vision's corpse, but - as revealed in the episode's mid-credits scene - he is the one trying to resurrect it.
• Warehouse 13:
  • Overlaps with Artie's Heroic BSoD near the end of the fourth season when he realizes that he is Brother Adrian.
  • In the season 2 episode "Around The Bend", we see Pete talking with his police officer ex about an evil Regent, who subsequently kills her. Then we see Myka and the very much alive ex watching CCTV footage of him talking to thin air while under the influence of a paranoia-causing artifact.
• The Wheel of Time (2021): In Episode 7, "The Dark Along the Ways", when Rand al'Thor is figuring out who the Dragon Reborn is, we see several flashbacks of scenes from previous episodes but where that character is shown channeling without realizing it at the time.
• Done twice in the second season premiere of Without a Trace.
  • The first time Johnny Adkins tells the agents about the school bus hijack, he claims it was the work of two brothers, who we see toting sub-machine guns and taping Johnny to the chair where he was found. Towards the end, the agents learn it was actually an ex-lodger of Johnny's mother, and one of the lodger's friends, and we see the same events again with the true assailants. We also see Johnny getting bullied by the brothers he'd initially blamed - while the real culprits had merely bribed him to give false descriptions, he had deliberately fingered the brothers to try and get them in trouble.
  • Immediately after this, Agent Malone asks Johnny where the missing children are, and Johnny insists he doesn't know. Suspecting he's lying, Malone asks Mrs. Adkins to convince him to tell the truth. We don't hear what she says, but when she emerges, she gives Malone the location and the children are rescued. We then see the scene again, this time with sound, and learn that she didn't convince Johnny at all. She already knew the kids' location because she was in on the whole thing. Sadly for her, the whole building is wired with microphones...

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