Review: Dune: Prophecy, "Sisterhood Above All" | Season 1, Episode 3
What percentage of a season can feasible be flashbacks before it all falls apart?
While Disney’s choice to cancel The Acolyte with some degree of prejudice will no doubt lead to it becoming a footnote in the Star Wars franchise, it’s been on my mind a lot as I consider 2024’s television as a whole. I don’t think it was one of the year’s best shows, admittedly, but its use of flashbacks was the start of a larger narrative of how and when we explore relevant backstory within increasingly shrinking season orders.
Just this past week, Shrinking did an extended flashback, which I thought going in might be an entire episode. It wasn’t, it turns out, but in a 12-episode season I think that would have been pretty sustainable. The rewards of a flashback episode—new details about characters and situations, parallels with established story, worldbuilding—always come with the risk of disrupting the momentum of the primary narrative, and so it’s important that you have enough runway to build up to and then unpack the relevance of the events from the past. It also helps…