In 5 To Watch, five writers from The A.V. Club look at the latest streaming TV arrivals, each making the case for a favored episode. Alternately, they can offer up recommendations inspired by a theme. The reasons for their picks might differ, but they can all agree that each episode is a must-watch. In this installment, they dig into flashback outings that fill in all the gaps for viewers.
TV shows with long-bubbling mysteries, buried secrets, and withheld revelations run on goodwill. It’s the only way to convince audiences to stick with a show in a perpetual game of hot potato with the truth. Eventually, there comes a time in every series’ life when it must reveal all. At The A.V. Club, we’ve racked our brains, pored over cyphers, and collected all the clues to find episodes that laid it all—or most of it all—out. Consider this a spoiler warning because these outings are packed with them.
Twin Peaks‘ “Part 8” didn’t simply blow minds; it fed them, too. Once they’d readjusted viewers to the late-capitalist hellscape of Twin Peaks season three, creators David Lynch and Mark Frost broke format. After the Woodsmen disembowel Mr. C (Kyle MacLachlan) and Nine Inch Nails perform “She’s Gone Away,” the episode flashes back to the moment when the town’s darkness began: the Trinity nuclear test in New Mexico, 1945. Taking us inside the explosion, Lynch and Frost offer a Twin Peaks origin story sans commentary, covering a ton of ground in this black-and-white stretch. The Woodsmen infiltrate the convenience store Mike was yelling about in Fire Walk With Me; a monster inside the explosion gives birth to BOB (Frank Silva); and, in the Black Lodge, the Fireman (Carel Struycken) and Senorita Dido (Joy Nash) watch his birth and generate Laura Palmer’s goodness inside a golden orb to fight him. The installment continues into abstraction, hinting that the Palmer family’s misery begins when a frog-roach crawled into a little girl’s mouth. But Lynch and Frost’s history lesson never feels like homework because it communicates the mysteries of Twin Peaks without giving away the answer. Got a light? [Matt Schimkowitz]
Dark, “Between The Time” (season three, episode seven)
It’s a little tricky to call this one purely a flashback episode due to the extremely complicated nature of Dark‘s timeline. The German show flits between a dozen decades per installment, so past, present, and future are all very much relative. In the series, an entire town’s worth of characters (seriously—there are so many in this thing that Netflix had to make a companion site to help keep track of them all) are stuck traveling through time in 33-year increments. The show regularly jumps from 1986 to 2019 to 2052, but we never get to see what happens in the years outside of that cycle. The series’ penultimate episode serves to fill in the gaps, then, by peering at the decades these people spend aging, building relationships, and putting plans in place to prepare for the next time travel. Only Dark could present a single, hour-long installment that covers over a century of character development—full of moments that are simultaneously flashbacks, flashforwards, and even flashes to an alternate world—and make it this gripping. No title card reading “1972” has ever been more exhilarating. [Emma Keates]
Lost, “Across The Sea”(season six, episode 15)
“Across The Sea,” which goes back two millennia before Oceanic 815 crashed, is a polarizing hour. Perhaps running earlier in the series would’ve helped, but it’s an essential, confident episode that answers several questions while leaving others in its wake for us to contemplate and argue over. In offering revelations about Jacob (Mark Pellegrino), the Man In Black (Titus Welliver), and the Island’s mysterious power, the show lays bare the concepts it has tackled throughout, tying everything back to the pilot’s “Two players, two sides. One is light, one is dark” quote. The two brothers are literally swaddled in black and white cloth after they’re born, once Mother (Allison Janney) kills the woman who birthed them. Through “Across The Sea,” the show clarifies how protecting this Island has always led to destruction in other ways. Lost drills down on its larger-than-life ideas about our internal and external conflicts through the siblings’ dichotomy, proving that humanity will always struggle with right versus wrong, good versus evil, and the like. It’s not the strongest outing, but a long-overdue, well-executed flashback. And can you really go wrong if Janney is onscreen? [Saloni Gajjar]
The Bear, “Fishes” (season two, episode six)
While this one doesn’t fill in all the blanks (The Bear isn’t a show that’s fueled by WTF-inducing mysteries like some of the others here), it does color in a hell of a lot of them, particularly regarding why Carm (Jeremy Allen White) acts the way he does in and out of the kitchen. In the holidays-set flashback—which almost comes off like a film with its hour-and six-minute runtime and retro cinematography, feeling both of a piece and outside of the series we’ve been watching—viewers finally get to see the presence that’s been floating over our chef since the show began: his mom, Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis, turning it up to 11), who starts off kinda-sorta charmingly frantic before imploding into holy-shit horror-movie frantic. We also get more time with Mikey (Jon Bernthal), who goes through his own journey during the boozy yuletide chaos, beginning as a mediator for his mother (“What do you think she’s at right now? At a four? At a five? She’s not at six, right?” he consoles Abby Elliott’s Sugar during a shared smoke) before having it out with Lee (Bob Odenkirk), another new face, in what would be any other family’s worst, most traumatic Christmas memory ever—if it wasn’t for the literal car crash that soon followed. [Tim Lowery]
Paradise, “The Day” (season one, episode seven)
“The Day” is one of the most stressful episodes of television in recent memory. (The “high-pressure soundwave” on a news broadcast about the tsunami is particularly haunting.) That’s an impressive feat, given that the entire first season of Paradise was littered with flashbacks that gave context to life in the underground bunker city. We already knew that a climate apocalypse had ravaged the world and that Xavier’s (Sterling K. Brown) wife didn’t make it. Yet seeing the full, brutal reality of “The Day” in real time underscores the guilt and trauma every character carries. The episode paints aclearer picture of the tension between folks like Xavier and Cal (James Marsden) or Xavier and Robinson (Krys Marshall). Seeing the scope of the disaster prompts difficult questions: Was Sinatra (Julianne Nicholson) right to create the bunker? And what lengths would any of us go to in such a scenario to ensure that our loved ones were safe or that humanity would survive? Outside of the show’s plot, the installment doubles as an extremely sobering portrayal of a climate doomsday scenario that feels a little too real right now. [Mary Kate Carr]
