Even when done well, the penultimate flashback sequence has become such a common storytelling strategy in television dramas that it should be abandoned altogether.
Photo illustration: Vulture; Photo: Netflix, Sarah Enticknap/PEACOCK
There is a pattern in television stories that has been around for a long time, but recently it has turned into a full-blown disaster. If you've watched virtually any streaming dramas in the past few years, you've probably seen at least one or two examples. It goes like this: Just when the story is finally getting fun, just when all the action is building towards the end of the season so that all the mysteries can be solved and all the tension can explode, the penultimate episode stops all that electric forward momentum. This episode likely follows up on the cliffhanger at the end of episode six: a secret identity is revealed, a corpse is discovered, or the person we all thought was dead turns out to be alive. And then, instead of giving the viewer the next scene in the story – something everyone desperately wants – episode seven says, “No. You won't find out who the killer is yet. You won't get the satisfaction of everyone reacting to the secret identity. You won't get to see what happens now that the dead character is back among the living. You'll have to watch a stupid, homework-like flashback about how everyone got here in the first place before you get to the good part.”
Even when done well, the penultimate flashback sequence has become such a common storytelling strategy in television dramas that it should be abandoned altogether. This has happened too many times, and the sense of wonder and curiosity that this image once evoked has long been lost. But the penultimate flashback sequence should be thrown in jail not only for being overused, but also for being a condensed expression of a particularly infuriating hang-up on television over the last few years, in which a character is not just a character, but a question with a straight answer that requires a solution. Why is this woman so angry? She is grieving for her child. What made this man snap and kill his wife? Problems with dad.
Plots are also seen not as a longer series of events, but as crises that develop because something terrible happened in the past: death, violence, abandonment, abuse. The plot itself is all about the fallout – it's just a plot to get revenge on his wife's killer – but all the energy of the series is focused on finding the original source of the damage. This structure turns the plot into an unconscious patient brought in with a gunshot wound. Nobody cares what happens when the patient recovers, goes home, and has to go back to work. Nobody cares who the patient really is or what else happens to him. The whole point is to find and remove the bullet that entered before our part of the story began. When the penultimate episode takes us back to the origin story, the message is: “Look, we've found the source of the pain! Finish this. It's time to go home.”
If this had been the penultimate episode of a streaming series, I would now be back to the moment I first noticed this structure. Maybe it was last season RejoicingWhere penultimate episode was a re-watch of the show's pilot episode, telling the story of how everyone joined the glee club. Or it could be second season Crownwhen the mounting tension in Philip and Elizabeth's marriage is paused to introduce an entire backstory sequence about Philip's childhood at a bleak boarding school. The episode is a powerful hour of television on its own, but in the context of a full season of television, it also leans into everything that's currently most irritating about that structure. Sometimes the picture changes slightly and flashbacks occur towards the end, but not quite in the penultimate episode. So perhaps my origin story for the disappointment as a flashback episode is this: Ozark the first season, where episode eight jumps back a decade to explain that the show's villain isn't just bad, she's also depressed. Or maybe it was even earlier than everyone else when I watched the final episodes of the series. West wing it's a rewind to Bartlet's childhood or how the whole gang got jobs at the White House. These aren't penultimate episodes, and the structure in a long network season isn't quite the same as the current short-season streaming model, but the momentum is the same.
Whatever the source of this initial wound, it has now become a widely accepted model for how to shape a television season across genres and styles. Agatha all together And WandaVision both use penultimate flashbacks before arriving at a grand finale of reckless superhero trauma therapy. This happens in serious prestige dramas like Escape at Dannemora And Fleishman is in trouble. This happens on HBO shows like LeftoversApple shows how morning showand big sci-fi adaptations like Prime Fall out. Only in 2025 Paradise, The Last of Us, Hunting wives, It's all her fault, And The beast in me everyone gets to the last two episodes of the season and decides it's time to go back. (And I don't even count Alien: Earth, because this flashback episode comes to No. 5 of eightnot six or seven.)
It's not that the flashback episodes themselves are bad. Like all individual episodes, some are terrible, some are mediocre, and some, like in The Last of Us And Crownare the best parts of the entire series. But when an entire season is built on a late-stage reveal that turns one-dimensional characters into nuanced people or makes it clear what specific trauma started all the action, it makes the entire show worse. Characters can be three dimensional from the start. Trauma, hidden or otherwise, can be meaningful backstory without being placed on a pedestal of narrative importance. If the story in the flashbacks is compelling enough to make it into the series, then why are they flashbacks? Why isn't the show about this?
It's all her fault And The beast in me are the most egregious current offenders, in part because this choice makes two different shows doing two very different things feel like boring repetitions of each other, emphasizing their similarities to templates rather than allowing them to feel like separate stories. Pavlina It's all her fault is, as stated by Roxana Hadadia cautionary misandrist parable about women with idiotic husbands who are so burdened by the expectations of career womanhood that they fail to see the rot creeping in their own homes. The beast in me on Netflix, by comparison, is a completely insane serial killer thriller closer to You than this It's all her fault. Matthew Rhys bites into a chicken carcass with his bare hands, someone is thrown into a secret torture bunker, and a lingering shot at the end hints that everything is going according to plan. Bad Seed.
Both of these shows, which premiered within a week of each other, build their stories around the same old boring structure. In the penultimate episode, they stop the funny cliffhanger left hanging in episode six to rewind time and introduce a new set of characters for whom viewers have no interest or affection, to give a play-by-play rundown of all the emotional devastation that led to the season's final arc. Worse, since both shows are actually based on the same traumatic incident (a child died in a car accident), the penultimate episodes mean these shows feel even more like a clumsy copy-paste job.
The penultimate flashback has become so typical that it's easy to forget that, believe it or not, the plot doesn't have to work that way. Adolescence is captivating precisely because his disposable vanity prevents him from jumping around in time and space. The memories would feel like a relief that would turn all the brooding uncertainty of this show into easy, obvious clarity. Details he manages to solve a complex noir-style mystery without ever having to think too hard: “But why did Lee Raybon want to be a detective?” retroactively. Gilded Age didn't deign to go back to why Bertha and George got married in the first place, because the contemporary account makes that clear without being overburdened with explanatory backstory. They lusted after each other, and they are ambitious monsters!
The flashbacks aren't that bad either. Pittconstrained by its hour-by-hour design, forced to resolutely move forward, yet still peppering in the tiniest hints of flashback here and there in the form of intratextual episodes of PTSD. But the origin story isn't the only theme of the season, because the flashbacks don't provide any cryptic clues to the hidden backstory. It's obvious from the start that Dr. Robbie has COVID-related trauma. The show's conflict isn't about the memories; the conflict is that it having memories. Flashbacks can exist without becoming essential forms of character development. When they appear right before the end of the season, and when this structure is repeated over and over again, all the power of the memories is lost. Any excitement it once brought has become a lazy delay tactic, a mathematical equation that promises that the entire complexity of human behavior can be explained by one neat backwards trick.
