A review of this week's Lanterns, "OutKast" — with spoilers — coming up just as soon as I discuss national security at an Outback Steakhouse...
Alan Sepinwall
There's a scourge in contemporary television — which my podcast partner has written about — where intensely serialized shows devote the penultimate episode of a season to a flashback episode. Sometimes, these are good episodes (The Last of Us's flashback episode was easily the highlight of its second season). But the fact that they come right when the narrative momentum has really started to build — often in the aftermath of intense cliffhangers — is exasperating. Especially since, in many cases, everything revealed in these flashback episodes is either something the audience can tell from watching the present-day action, or something that could have easily been inserted into present-day dialogue.
Some of the blame for this can be placed directly at the feet of one of the co-creators of Lanterns: Damon Lindelof. Lost was built with flashbacks baked into the format of every episode. And the show would from time to time spend a whole hour in the past, even when major things were happening in the present — like how they followed a final season episode where multiple characters died with an episode set centuries earlier, detailing how the Man in Black became the Smoke Monster. The penultimate episode of Leftovers Season One was a flashback showing what happened to all the main characters on Departure Day, and Watchmen featured multiple flashback episodes within its compact nine-hour span. Most of the time, these worked spectacularly well (the Smoke Monster episode, much less so). And like a lot of things Lindelof and other top-tier showrunners have done this century, it's a lot harder to imitate well than it looks. When we get them now — like this episode, "OutKast," a John Stewart origin story — it usually feels obligatory.