Tag: the beast in me

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.