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Tv shows, movies or books using flashforwards?

Jack Bauer

Fleet Admiral
Admiral
Other than Lost are there any tv shows, movies or novels that have used flashforwards? I'm pretty sure that that's not a new concept and has been used prior to Lost using them. But I could be wrong.
 
The best examples of flash-forwards I can think of are in the movies:

--They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, directed by Sidney Pollack;

--The Limey, directed by Steven Soderbergh;

--and Following, directed by Christopher Nolan.
 
Well, these days it's a common trick to begin with a tense or exciting moment, then flashback to "Ten hours ago" or something.

ALIAS used to do it all the time, and THE GATES did it as recently as last week . . . .
 
^Is that a flash-forward though? I thought that was classed as beginning in medias res.

Take Double Indemnity, for example. It begins in medias res, close to the end, with Walter Neff going to the Pacific All-Risk building and sitting down to dictate his confession. The whole story then unfolds as a series of flashbacks
 
^Is that a flash-forward though? I thought that was classed as beginning in medias res.

Take Double Indemnity, for example. It begins in medias res, close to the end, with Walter Neff going to the Pacific All-Risk building and sitting down to dictate his confession. The whole story then unfolds as a series of flashbacks


I could be wrong, but I think that in medias res just refers to beginning with the action already in progress. As with, say, an episode that begins with the characters in the middle of a mission . . . and then continues onward from there.

Starting in the middle, or near the end, then jumping back to the beginning is something different.
 
We probably need to distinguish between "flashforwards" and "prophetic visions." The difference being that flashforwards, in the LOST sense, are experienced by the audience, not the characters themselves.

And, yes, I realize that this means FLASHFORWARD did not feature flashforwards in this sense . . . :)
 
Yeah, that's a good point. One's a storytelling device, and the other's actually part of the story. The storytelling device method is much more common.
 
and not all the FlashForwards turned out the same anyway. Olivia's, Wedeck's, Lloydd's and Janis' all turned out different.

MI:3 also did the Alias thing of starting in the middle and going back.

MI and MI:2 however started in media res
 
Did the first Mission Impossible really start in media res? It seems like a much more traditional narrative to me--Phelps is briefed, the team is briefed, the team goes on the mission, and the movie goes from there. That's not in the middle of the action, that's straight off from the top.
 
Nip/Tuck did an episode with a flash-forward that, at the time, Ryan Murphy and the rest of the writers insisted was the actual future of the characters in the show's fourth season. Babylon 5 started doing it as well in the third season (you could even say they started it in the first season if you really wanted to...)

Apart from that, TV shows haven't traditionally used this kind of storytelling device, usually because they don't want to get locked out of future storytelling possibilities. It would be quite a show to watch if there was one, someday, that actually had written in to it's narrative and backstory what the final outcome would be so that episodes could feature flash-forwards to the future as part of the slow reveal of the series over time.
 
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