ozmissage | Fannish Five & Torchwood (Reply)

Man, I really shouldn't have joined that community. I like making lists way too much.

fannish5: Five best uses of flashbacks or non-linear storytelling. (Spoilers for Lost, Firefly, Dollhouse, HIMYM, and The X-Files.)

1. Out of Gas, Firefly. This episode kills me every time. It’s a love story, you see, about a man and his spaceship. The use of flashbacks to show how the crew came together is simply amazing. Out of Gas will always be about family to me, and how every family needs a home.

2. Ji Yeon, Lost. I could have picked pretty much any episode of Lost for this, but I love what they did with Ji Yeon. You think it’s just a normal Lost episode, nothing out of the ordinary, and then they sucker punch you. It’s a flashback and a flashforward. I’ll never forget the moment I saw Sun kneeling at Jin’s “grave”, and realized what was happening. Four years in and they’re still changing the rules. This is one of the many reasons why I love this show.

3. A Spy in the House of Love, Dollhouse. Dollhouse is still trying to figure out what it wants to be when it grows up. I hope it decides to be a dark, challenging program that doesn’t shy away from breaking your heart, just like it was here. This episode is told in pieces, and it’s not until the end that you realize the pieces fit together to form one complete, heartbreaking story. The structure is gorgeous, but it’s what the episode does for the characters that really makes it a standout. This is the episode where I started to hate Paul Ballard a little, and the episode where I fell madly in love with Adelle Dewitt.

4. Three Days of Snow, HIMYM. HIMYM is the Lost of the sitcom world. It plays with structure and time in every episode, so it’s not easy to pick just one. Three Days of Snow is a perfect example of what this show can do with narrative. It leads you to believe that the events unfold over the course of a day, only to reveal that it was actually three days. The whole thing builds to one of the most romantic moments I’ve ever seen on television. It makes me cry every single time.

5. Bad Blood, The X-Files. The he-said/she-said vampire episode of The X-Files. There’s Luke Wilson, vibrating beds, and one really hilarious autopsy scene. It’s all kinds of brilliant.

I cried so much I gave myself a headache. That was insanely hard to watch. The idea of that many children being handed over for something so evil was absolutely gut-wrenching. When Frobisher killed his family, I almost changed the channel. It was just too much.

This was certainly good television, but I never want to see it again.

Also, if the point of this mini-series was to make me hate Jack, mission accomplished. Man was I glad to see him leave at the end.

In my head, Gwen and Rhys go on to have an awesome life and an adorable kid and they invite Ianto’s family over for tea on Sundays.