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Tag: all her fault

  • Death to the Penultimate Flashback Episode

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    Even when done well, the penultimate flashback episode has become such an endemic storytelling strategy in TV dramas that it should be abandoned on principle.
    Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Netflix, Sarah Enticknap/PEACOCK

    There’s a pattern in TV storytelling that’s been hanging around for a long time, but it’s recently proliferated into a full-blown scourge. If you’ve watched almost any streaming dramas in the past several years, you’ve likely seen at least one or two examples. It goes like this: Just as the story finally gets fun, with all the action careening toward the end of a season so all the mysteries can get solved and all the tension can explode, the second-to-last episode halts all that electric forward momentum. The episode probably follows a cliffhanger at the end of episode six — a secret identity gets unveiled, a dead body is discovered, or a person we all thought was dead is revealed as alive. And then, instead of giving the viewer the next scene in the story — the thing everyone desperately wants — episode seven says, “No. You don’t get to know who the murderer is yet. You don’t get the fun of everyone reacting to the secret identity. You don’t get to see what happens now that the dead character is back among the living. Before you get to the good part, you have to watch a stupid, homeworklike flashback about how everyone got here in the first place.”

    Even when done well, the penultimate flashback episode has become such an endemic storytelling strategy in TV dramas that it should be abandoned on principle. It’s happened too many times, and whatever sense of surprise and curiosity this trope may have once engendered has been long since lost. But more than for overuse, the penultimate flashback episode should get thrown into TV-writing jail because it’s a condensed expression of a particularly infuriating hang-up in so much television from the past few years, one in which a character is not just a character but a question with a straightforward answer that requires solving. Why is this woman so mean? She is grieving her child. What caused this man to snap and kill his wife? Daddy issues.

    Plots, similarly, are treated not like longer series of events, but crises developing because something terrible happened in the past: death, abuse, abandonment, bullying. The plot itself is the aftermath — it’s all a revenge plot to get back at his wife’s killer — but the energy of the show all goes toward locating the original source of the damage. That structure turns plot into an unconscious patient brought in with a bullet wound. No one cares what happens when the patient heals and goes home and has to go back to work. No one cares who the patient is, really, or what else may be going on with them. The whole point is to find and remove the bullet that entered before our part of the story even began. When the second-to-last episode flashes back to an origin story, the message is “Look, we found the source of the pain! Wrap it up. Time to go home.”

    If this were the second-to-last episode of a streaming series, I would now flash back to the first time I noticed this structure. Maybe it was in the last season of Glee, where the penultimate episode was a revisitation of the show’s pilot episode, telling the story of how everyone joined the glee club. Or it could have been season two of The Crown, when the gathering tension in Philip and Elizabeth’s marriage is halted to provide a whole backstory episode about Philip’s childhood in a dismal boarding school. That episode on its own is a striking hour of TV, but in the context of a full season of television, it also leans into everything that’s now most exasperating about this structure. Sometimes the pattern gets shifted slightly and the flashback happens near the end but not quite in the penultimate episode. So maybe my flashback-episode frustration origin story is Ozark season one, where episode eight jumps to a decade in the past to explain that the show’s villain is not just bad, she also has depression. Or maybe it was even earlier than all of those, watching the end-of-season episodes of The West Wing that rewind to Bartlet’s childhood, or how the gang all got jobs at the White House. They aren’t penultimate episodes, and the structure isn’t quite the same in a long network season as it is in the current short-season streaming model, but the same impulse is there.

    Whatever the source of this initial wound may have been, it’s now become a widespread model for how to shape a season of TV across genres and styles. Agatha All Along and WandaVision both use penultimate flashbacks before arriving at a grand finale of superhero trauma-therapy derring-do. It happens in serious prestige-style dramas like Escape at Dannemora and Fleishman Is in Trouble. It happens in HBO shows like The Leftovers, Apple shows like The Morning Show, and big sci-fi adaptations like Prime’s Fallout. In 2025 alone, Paradise, The Last of Us, The Hunting Wives, All Her Fault, and The Beast in Me all get to the final couple episodes of the season and decide that it’s time to go backward. (And I’m not even counting Alien: Earth, because that flashback episode arrives at No. 5 out of eight, rather than six or seven.)

    It’s not that the flashback episodes themselves are bad. Like all stand-alone episodes, some are abysmal, some mediocre, and some, like in The Last of Us and The Crown, are the best parts of a whole series. But when the entire season is built around a late-stage reveal that transforms one-dimensional characters into nuanced people or clarifies which specific trauma kicked off all the action, the whole show is made worse because of it. Characters can be three-dimensional from the start. Traumas, buried or otherwise, can be meaningful backstories without getting put up high on a pedestal of narrative significance. If the story in the flashback is exciting enough to be in the show, why is that the flashback? Why is that not just what the show is about?

    All Her Fault and The Beast in Me are the most egregious current offenders, in part because that choice makes two different shows doing two very different things feel like boring retreads of each other, highlighting their cookie-cutter similarities rather than allowing them to feel like distinct stories. Peacock’s All Her Fault is, as Roxana Hadadi has argued, a cautionary misandrist parable about women with idiot husbands who are so burdened by the expectations of career femininity that they can’t see the rot creeping in their own homes. The Beast in Me on Netflix, by comparison, is a fully deranged serial-killer thriller closer to You than it is to All Her Fault. Matthew Rhys rips into a chicken carcass with his bare hands, and someone gets thrown in a secret torture bunker, and in the end a lingering frame suggests the whole thing is playing on The Bad Seed.

    Both of those shows, which premiered within a week of each other, shape their stories around that same old boring framework. In the second-to-last episode, they halt the fun cliffhanger left dangling in episode six to rewind the clock and introduce a new set of characters the audience has no interest in or attachment to in order to give a beat-by-beat rundown of all the emotional devastation that led up to the concluding arc of the season. Even worse, because both shows actually rest on the same traumatic inciting incident (child died in a car crash), those penultimate episodes mean that these shows look even more like an awkward copy-paste job.

    Penultimate flashbacks have become so ho-hum typical that it’s easy to forget that, believe it or not, plotting does not have to work this way. Adolescence is captivating precisely because its one-shot conceit prevents it from skipping around through time and space. A flashback would feel like relief, which would collapse all of that show’s thoughtful uncertainty into easy, obvious clarity. The Lowdown manages to solve an elaborate noir mystery without ever wallowing in lengthy “But why did Lee Raybon want to be a detective?” hindsight. The Gilded Age didn’t deign to go all the way back to why Bertha and George got married in the first place, because current-day exposition makes that plenty clear without over-burdened explanatory backstory. They were hot for each other, and they are ambitious monsters!

    Flashbacks aren’t entirely bad, either. The Pitt, constrained by its hour-by-hour design, is forced to march resolutely forward but still peppers the tiniest hints of flashback here and there as in-text PTSD episodes. But the origin story is not the sole thrust of the season because the flashbacks aren’t providing some mysterious clues to a hidden backstory. It’s obvious from the beginning that Dr. Robby has COVID-related trauma. The show’s conflict isn’t what’s in the flashbacks; the conflict is that he’s having flashbacks. Flashbacks can exist without becoming load-bearing forms of character development. When they arrive right before the end of the season, and when that structure happens over and over again, all the power of the flashback gets drained away. Any thrill it once carried has deteriorated into a lazy delay tactic, a mathematical equation that promises all complexity in human behavior can be explained with one neat backward-looking trick.

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    Kathryn VanArendonk

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  • All Her Fault Is a Misandrist Masterpiece

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    The rich white mommy drama sets its sights on the patriarchy in Sarah Snook’s first live-action TV series since Succession.
    Photo: PEACOCK

    The men in All Her Fault never utter the titular three words. But you know they’re thinking them when a young boy goes missing from a playdate his mother set up (all her fault), when a husband has to rearrange his work schedule because his wife has a meeting (all her fault), and when a teen’s overspending sends her boyfriend into a life of crime (all her fault). These women exist to their partners primarily as an inconvenience, and the Peacock adaptation of Andrea Mara’s novel of the same name hammers home the inequity in their relationships, family dynamics, and workplace over and over again. And yet it doesn’t get monotonous. Rather, All Her Fault gathers fury as it goes, particularly for anyone who would dare dismiss women as the fairer sex. And that “anyone” — well, it’s mostly the guys, because beneath the motherthriller shenanigans, All Her Fault reveals itself to be a misandrist masterpiece.

    Created by Megan Gallagher and starring and executive-produced by Sarah Snook in her first live-action TV role since Succession, All Her Fault is compulsively watchable, worthy of the type of binge that carves a dent into your couch cushions. With sprinting momentum, it introduces and amplifies an overlapping series of mysteries that begins with the disappearance of the young son of a very wealthy couple, Marissa (Snook) and Peter Irvine (Jake Lacy). The inciting action is a bit convoluted: Marissa goes to pick up Milo (Duke McCloud) from a playdate, but the woman who answers the door has no idea who Milo is. She is not Jenny, mom of Jacob, who texted Marissa to set up the playdate, nor is she Jenny’s nanny. The phone number that texted Marissa claiming to be Jenny is now out of service, and the real Jenny (Dakota Fanning) says she never sent the text. She’s only hung out with Marissa once. Why would someone use her name to kidnap Milo?

    All Her Fault lays out this information at a rapid clip in the premiere, using detectives Alcaras (Michael Peña) and Greco (Johnny Carr) to sort through the details and bring other characters into the mix: Peter’s younger sister, Lia (Abby Elliott), a recovering drug addict with a persecution complex; Peter’s younger brother, Brian (Daniel Monks), who uses a cane and lives in Peter and Marissa’s guest house; and Marissa’s business partner, Colin (Jay Ellis), who steps up to run their wealth-management firm after Marissa’s family life explodes. Each has their own secrets, of course. But All Her Fault’s visceral entertainment value is driven less by the reveals of these characters’ hidden motivations than the unexpected friendship that grows between Marissa and Jenny, who are discouraged by their husbands from communicating after Milo disappears but find in each other not just confidantes but allies.

    Marissa and Jenny are very different women with very similar problems. Fanning is in the clipped-and-icy mode she recently perfected in Ripley and The Perfect Couple, all placid smiles and unbroken eye contact, while Snook keeps inventing new ways to manipulate her face into expressions of adrift, devastated distress. (Snook’s eyebrows are so raised at each new revelation they sometimes seem as if they’ll levitate off her face.) The two actresses’ contrasting energies gel when they find common ground in the increasingly curtailed nature of their lives. Even as they meet their professional goals and find joy in raising children, something’s missing. A husband who acts like an adult, perhaps? A scene in which Marissa and Jenny drink wine while hiding in the bathroom during a school fundraiser has that chummy feminine quality that makes their friendship so familiar and this genre such a comfort, even as its ultrarich, ultrawhite characters navigate unrelatable scenarios, like tending to an Olympic-size pool or realizing the nanny’s been lying to you for months. Although Marissa Irvine is a far more conventionally likable character than Succession’s Shiv Roy, it’s fun to see Snook allude to her work as Waystar Royco’s most complicit woman, peppering little “yeah”s and “hey”s at the end of her sentences that transform innocuous lines into conversational challenges. Snook’s talent is playing women who seem like the only thing preventing them from falling apart is their gritted teeth, and Marissa is another well-rounded entry in that canon.

    Zoom out on the past year’s mountain of TV, and All Her Fault is one pebble in a cairn of series positioning their female characters against abusive lovers or uniting them against a common enemy. (Bad Sisters, Sirens, The Better Sister, and The Hunting Wives qualify here.) All Her Fault puts its own twist on that formula by dissecting Marissa and Jenny’s comparably frustrating marriages: how both husbands call their wives “amazing” whenever the women make sacrifices the men would never consider making, or how their domestic labor never ends, despite the means to pay for assistance, thanks to their husbands’ talent for removing themselves from things like dinner planning and schedule coordination. All Her Fault allows the two women to lament this normalized condescension and consider whether they’ve shrunk themselves in order to please their small men, then renders their husbands so selfish and negligent viewers can’t help but root for their riotous downfalls. (Jenny’s husband sabotages her meeting with an important client because he can’t figure out how to put their son to bed. Jail.) Once Marissa and Jenny finally confront them, All Her Fault revels in the husbands’ evisceration and their wives’ lack of guilt. “All her fault,” then, takes on another meaning: Marissa and Jenny’s payback is their responsibility, but the surprise of the series is their complete lack of remorse, how brusquely they wash their hands and move on, eyes open and resolve set.

    Not all the men in All Her Fault are terrible. Peña does well playing against type as Alcaras, who intuits that Marissa and Jenny’s bond is based on more than just the shock of Milo’s disappearance. Of the men who are terrible, Lacy is exceptionally hatable as Peter, a less bro-y spin on his character from The White Lotus. An early scene when Peter asks Marissa why she didn’t double-check any of the details of Milo’s playdate, and Alcaras turns the question around on Peter as Milo’s other parent, has a delicious let-them-fight charge. But really, the men in All Her Fault are ancillary, little more than obstructions yelling for attention, figures whose fall from grace delivers operatic melodrama before the show settles into a story about the dignity women can find through determining their own identities as individuals, rather than through the magnanimous terms like team or partners used in modern marriage. All Her Fault’s short-term gratification is in those big tell-off scenes, the moments Marissa and Jenny get to rip apart men who refuse to take any ownership over their actions. Its larger contribution to this specific subgenre, though, is the way it elevates and celebrates women who choose to reject the expectations of house-baby-mommy heternormative society. Who could blame them?


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    Roxana Hadadi

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