TV's 10 greatest time-jump sequences

Time skipped: One minute—and a lifetime There’s a trope that happens on TV sometimes, where the characters experience years’ worth of time in one episode only to revert back to their original ages. Sometimes this is purely speculative (’s “Do You Know?”, when Cristina imagines her possible futures Sliding Doors-style) and sometimes it’s timey-wimey magic (’ “A Life In The Day,” when Quentin and Eliot spend their entire lives on one quest only to be brought back to the present by a loophole). Riverdale saw this trope and, as with most things Riverdale ever did, said “Hold my beer.” In the sixth-season finale, with a magical comet hurtling towards the town, Tabitha Tate (Erinn Westbrook) uses her chrono-kinetic powers to have one final date with Jughead (Cole Sprouse). The date is one minute long, but also an entire lifetime: as lights flash and emotional music soars, Jughead and Tabitha grow up, have kids, and get old together all from the comfort of their favorite booth at Pop’s Chock’lit Shoppe. It all happens in one brief sequence in an otherwise —and before the entire town gets sent back into the 1950s for the final season, which is a whole other epic and ambitious time jump in its own right. [Mary Kate Carr]

Time skipped: Roughly three years Based, as it was, on the lives of real people across long periods of their actual lives, Showtime’s often had to play with its timeline a bit to keep up with reality. But it never did so more bluntly, or audaciously, than in season two’s which elides past large chunks of a down period in the working relationship between William Masters and Virginia Johnson with almost confrontational flair. The most notable scene, for our purposes, is a running conversation between Caitlin FitzGerald, as Masters’ wife Libby, and Anneleigh Ashford as sex-worker-turned-receptionist Betty, which sees Ashford deliver rapid-fire patter about their new offices—even as we round a corner in a stairwell and see Libby is suddenly toting two kids, instead of just one. “Asterion” ultimately runs through three years of real-life history across its run-time, but that single half-second jump covers a decent swath of it—and underlines the ways life just sort of happens, sometimes when you’re not entirely paying attention to where the time goes. [William Hughes]

Time skipped: Eight months was never really about football or getting that W. And the last minutes of the show’s finale, “Always,” remind us of this, as East Dillon’s quarterback Vince (Michael B. Jordan) makes a hail-Mary pass at State. The last-ditch play is caught in slo-mo, set to Explosions In The Sky’s gentle feedback, and as the crowd of Lions fans wait with bated breath, the ball flies through the night. Only, instead of witnessing that last inspiring, against-all-odds feat, the kind a sports movie would spend most of its runtime building to, the show cuts to another football mid-air, coming back to Earth to show that we’re in decidedly un-Dillion environs. And then we’re hit with the time-jump title card: “Philadelphia. Eight months later.” Coach (Kyle Chandler), at last, chose Tami’s (Connie Britton) career over his—she’s now the dean of admissions for a prestigious-looking college—to drive home that it was the everyday drama and relationships that, more than anything that happened on the field, always kept us hooked on this series. [Tim Lowery]

Time skipped: One year It takes just minutes for freshly elected Colonial president Gaius Baltar to realize he’s completely unsuited, or equipped, for the job he’s schemed and campaigned so hard to steal in ’s status quo-smashing —that being about how long it takes for the first crisis of his tenure to hit, in a devastating blast of nuclear fire. (It doesn’t help that Baltar, never the most subtle of lovers, gifted the nuke in question to his Cylon ex not long before cutting off ties with her. Whoops!) But the failures of the Baltar Presidency are brought into stark relief as a grief-mad and weary Gaius rests his head on his desk … only to raise it back up again a year later, austere presidential vehicle Colonial One having been converted into Baltar’s personal party yacht and humanity having sunk into the mire of in-fighting on barely livable crap-planet New Caprica. Battlestar Galactica would play with time even more as it jumped into its harrowing third season, dragging humanity into a horrifying Cylon occupation (and the equally horrifying spectacle of ). But that “one year later” jump underlines the sense of moral decay at the heart of Baltar’s victory: Sometimes, the bastards really do win—at least, for a time. [William Hughes]

Time skipped: One month … and then three years There’s a cute little misdirect in ’s , as Amy Poehler’s Leslie Knope skips forward a month as she prepares to take over a new gig for the National Parks department—and then almost immediately jumps forward again three whole years, i.e., long enough for the empty office to be suddenly filled with bustle, hustle, and, briefly, Jon Hamm. It’s a bit of a message that Parks And Rec wasn’t just interested in the illusion of change as it headed into its final season, as well as a broad acknowledgement that the unstoppable juggernaut the Leslie character had become couldn’t be restrained to simple small-town politicking for any longer. It’s not the most ambitious time jump in Mike Schur’s TV output—more on that one in a second—but it’s still a huge shake-up for laid-back, fun-focused sitcom. [William Hughes]