Morty: Hey, how come I was able to see those other people's memories? I... I wouldn't have been around for that.
Rick: Yeah, sometimes I gotta do a little editing, Morty. It helps the mind blowers play a little bit better upon revisiting.
Rick: Yeah, sometimes I gotta do a little editing, Morty. It helps the mind blowers play a little bit better upon revisiting.
Sometimes as a person recalls an event, we get to see what happened then... but wait, why is this person's memory showing the person who remembered it? For example, if Bob remembered a date with Alice, and we see in his memories: Alice at table, waiting... then Bob appears late and in such a messy state! If it's Bob's memory, we should be seeing it though his eyes...or at least, we certainly shouldn't see anything from before the point when he showed up.
Usually an acceptable break from reality as it's usually hard to convey events through someone's viewpoint, and sometimes because the stage cannot be recreated with the remembering character's viewpoint if it was filmed much earlier.
Another reason this could be an acceptable break from reality is for some nice visual cues or adding a Rewatch Bonus into the Third-Person Flashback. A Third-Person Flashback could be perfect for placing a Chekhov's Gun of some kind, a Brick Joke, Funny Background Event, or a bit of Foreshadowing. For example, Bob had lost something and he remembers where it was, but it was right behind him - this would be lost in a first person flashback but by showing it third-person, the viewer can observe where the item Bob was looking for is, allowing for some comedy or drama.
Anything transmitted through an Exposition Beam is likely to be this. A sign of an Unreliable Narrator.
As this is very common, only list examples that are subversions or aversions, or otherwise unusual.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Dragon Ball Super: In the "Granolah the Survivor Arc", Monaito's flashback includes Bardock meeting Granolah and his mother Muezli, an event which was not witnessed by the Namekian elder.
- School Rumble: In an episode, Yakumo has a flashback/dream to when she was a little kid that is from the first person perspective. Up to and including when the camera shakes up and down to indicate her nodding her head.
- Maria no Danzai: Kiritaka's diary entries as read and remembered by Maria are often combined with Death by Flashback, since Kiritaka describes the specific horrors inflicted upon him by a character that Maria now targets.
- One Piece: It happens in every long flashback, but in several cases, the third person scenes are really only there to enlighten the viewer with the whole picture of the past events, because the main character in the flashback often doesn't understand the whole situation, and so it would be confusing and not very good exposition to only tell the story through his/her eyes. In most cases, it's not that noteworthy because one character is simply flashing back without any other character knowing it. However, in a few cases, like Nojiko's and Jimbei's, the trope is played straight: here, the flashback is actually one character telling his/her recollection of times past, and the flashback is a Show, Don't Tell method preferable in manga instead of filling page after page with long speech bubbles. Still, the flashback should logically be told from Nojiko's and Jimbei's points of view, but there are still some scenes (especially in Jimbei's flashback) that they don't take part in and shouldn't realistically know about.
Audio Plays
- Sonic the Hedgehog Presents: The Chaotix Casefiles:
- The series uses the Framing Device of Vector the Crocodile retelling the story of how he ended up being imprisoned by Dr. Eggman to Sonic and the doctor himself. In Episodes 2 and 4, there are sequences that are focused on Espio meeting with Rouge, while Vector was busy either racing Jet in an Extreme Gear race or being caught and interrogated, and therefore not being present. This is lampshaded by Sonic in Episode 2, where he pauses the story to ask how Vector would know about Espio and Rouge's encounter, since he wasn't there for that part. Vector simply says that Espio informed him after the fact, and the story resumes from where it left off, with Episode 4 also having Vector mention during his narration that he and Espio exchanged information about what they've done that episode.
- Despite being rather consistent about the flashbacks being things that Vector could be informed about, Episode 6 has another encounter between Rouge and Espio, learning about Rouge's motivations and entertaining the idea of stealing the Astroscopic Lenses to keep them safe for herself. Given that Espio has no time to inform Vector about his encounter with Rouge and his arrival coincides with Eggman showing up to fight the Chaotix, this is a notable hole in Vector's story that can't be easily explained in-universe.
Comic Books
- Invader Zim (Oni): In issue #39, the Memory Visualizer device that Inquisitous "the Observer" uses on Dib, Zim, Gaz and GIR works on this principle, projecting the memories of the person it's being used on via screen, which shows them from an outside perspective rather than through the eyes of the person the memories belong to. Dib questions why this is, but Inquisitous hushes him.
- Man With The Screaming Brain: William had memories of himself being murdered, not surprising since half of brain was from someone witnessing his own murder.
- Superman:
- The Strange Revenge of Lena Luthor: In Lex Luthor's flashback scene, Supergirl is seen checking several files to discover the identity of Lena's parents', an event which Lex did not witness personally.
- Death & the Family: As Supergirl tells the story of the Silver Banshee, a montage shows scenes of Banshee's past which Kara never witnessed.
- The Phantom Zone: During the initial flashback sequence, Charlie Kweskill sees the memories of the criminals sent into the Phantom Zone. Justified, since they were telepathically projecting them into his mind.
- The Plague of the Antibiotic Man: As he chases Nam-Ek over the ocean, Superman has a flashback showing the events which led the Kryptonian scientist to become an immortal monster five hundred years ago... no one of which were witnessed by Superman.
- The Leper from Krypton: After being infected with an alien virus, Superman remembers what happened the last time that plague hit Krypton, several centuries before he was born.
- The Future Superman of 2965: Klar Ken, the Superman of the 30th century, has flashbacks about the accidents which unmasked his ancestors Superman IV and Superman VII many centuries ago.
- In The Death of Luthor, Jerro recounts via flashback the story of the battle between the Atlantean hero Garr Rindaz and a sea monster, which took place long before Jerro was born.
- In Supergirl's Three Super Girl-Friends, Brainiac 5 narrates his infamous ancestor's final defeat, which happened ten centuries ago, via a flashback.
- Mordru the Merciless: Mon-El's flashback narrating the prior war against the evil sorcerer Mordru includes battles he was not around for.
- When the Symbioship Strikes!: Power Girl's flashback to the final days of Krypton includes scenes featuring her father which she was not involved in (moreover, she was still a baby when Krypton exploded).
- The Life Story of Superman: As telling his life's story, Superman's flashbacks include Jor-El's failed meetings with Krypton Science Council, Argo City's being hurled into space when Krypton exploded, and Supergirl facing a common criminal. Neither of those events were witnessed by Superman himself.
- "The Super-Dog from Krypton!": As Superboy reads his father's letter left on Krypto's rocket, the young Clark has a flashback showing Kryptonians using test animals on experimental rockets, his father taking Krypto away to test his own prototype ship, and said vessel being knocked off course. Clark was only present in one of those scenes, and he had forgotten about it completely because he was only a baby.
- The Girl in Superman's Past!: Lori Lemaris tells through flashbacks the origin of Atlantis, many centuries before her birth.
- "The Super-Steed of Steel": When Comet tells his origin, his flashback includes his enemy Maldor's reaction to his transformation, and Maldor devising a new scheme against Comet.
- In The Outlawed Legionnaires!, Duo Damsel's father's flashback, which tells how the Legion was outlawed, includes private meetings between Boltax and his Cabinet, which the man obviously didn't witness first-hand.
- World's Finest (1941): In issue #166, Future Batman's flashback includes the Joker murdering his whole family during a public ceremony, even though Batman says he did not personally witness that tragedy because he was too young to attend the event.
Fan Works
- Dragon Ball Z Abridged: Frequently parodied when Freeza explains the destruction of the Saiyans. All Vegeta really wants to know is:
- Fudge's Grudge
: This fanfic based on Fudge features events that Peter explains to the reader that he wasn't actually around to see, including Fudge and Sam refusing to be near each other at their school, Fudge's attempts to teach Tootsie new concepts, and Sarah's regression.
- Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series: Lampshaded occasionally, even making fun of how Tèa was somehow able to remember something when she was unconscious.
Films — Live-Action
- The 2002 remake of Carrie restores the book's Scrapbook Story structure, but also uses this to build to a new twist ending. Sue is giving testimony to the police investigating the case, and the flashbacks are mostly from Carrie's perspective. Because Sue revived Carrie with CPR and is now hiding her from the police. Her knowing more information is justified when Carrie's psychic powers gives Sue access to her thoughts and memories.
- Pulp Fiction's flashback to when Butch is given his father's watch, with Christopher Walken telling him the story, starts in first-person but then goes third.
- Fear Street's second film is told entirely in flashback by C Berman to Josh and Deena. This is used to disguise the twist that she is actually an older Ziggy and not Cindy, showing events that neither sister would possibly know about. This does admittedly make it unclear just how much of what is shown she is actually telling, and some fans like to joke that she told the entire story in the third person.
- In Flash Gordon, as Doctor Klytus and General Kala are draining Hans Zarkov's mind, historical events are seen in third person (things Zarkov watched on television, for example), but his personal memories (like when he was fired from the university, or meeting and marrying his wife) are all shot from first person.
- In The Wizard Of Oz, everything in the land of Oz is supposedly all just Dorothy's dream. Yet there are several scenes where Dorothy isn't present that focus on other characters, and one scene, in the deadly poppy field, where Dorothy falls asleep within her dream and the focus shifts to her friends until she wakes up. Possibly justified, since sometimes in dreams, the dreamer simply "observes" a scene without actually being present in it.
Literature
- This is one function of a Pensieve Flashback in Harry Potter. The most obvious example is in book five, when Harry sneaks a look at one of Snape's school memories and spends more time following his teenaged father than Snape himself. (He does worry that if they get too far apart he won't be able to keep following James.) According to Rowling herself, a Pensice “recreates a moment for you, so you could go into your own memory and relive things that you didn't notice at the time. It's somewhere in your head, which I'm sure it is, in all of our brains. I'm sure if you could access it, things that you don't know you remember are all in there somewhere”. However, nothing was ever really done with this idea.
Live-Action TV
- In the Babylon Five Pilot show, this is notable averted when Kosh got poisoned and a telepath saw the events as seen from Kosh's eyes.
- Cold Case, a series which uses flashbacks heavily, usually plays this straight in terms of showing it from a third-person perspective, but generally sticks to only showing the parts of the scene that the character could have witnessed. More than that, it's frequently significant that they do it that way, because the thing that the witness missed ends up being an important twist later.
- Farscape: As Bialar Crais is forced to recall events on the memory probing chair operated by Scorpius, the screen shows Crais snapping his executive officer's neck when she found out that he was committing barratry.
- How I Met Your Mother:
- Played straight for most episodes when it comes to the show's Two Lines, No Waiting structure. As Ted recounting his memories is the Framing Device, he also narrates plotlines he wasn't a part of, which are events he should only know of secondhand, if at all.
- Lampshaded in an episode when, while Barney and Robin are discussing something within a closed room, Robin says how hard it is to measure any men since she and Ted broke up. Future Ted then says "I wasn't there but this is how I imagine it happened."
- During his quest for a perfect week (7 women in 7 nights), Barney is largely narrating by being interviewed by Jim Nantz. During this he does exactly the same thing, assuming that each of his friends were in love with him in various ways.
- Played for Laughs in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia in the Unreliable Narrator episode, "How Mac Got Fat". Mac even lampshades he wasn't there for some parts of the flashback, where the rest of the Gang act like horrible Strawman versions of themselves.
- Kamen Rider Zeztz has the main character develop precognitive powers which allow him to see a vision of the future. When he recounts the events of his vision to the rest of the cast, it includes all of the scenes that he wasn't in, which he explains as being things he saw but wasn't aware of until after he woke up.
- Mystery Science Theater 3000 mocked this when it happened:
Crow: He's flashing back to other people's memories!
- Unintentionally hilarious in The Star Wars Holiday Special, when Chewbacca's memories are all film clips from A New Hope. Noted by Rifftrax:
Kevin: Uh, so why are all of Chewbacca's memories from the perspective of someone observing Chewbacca?
Mike: Why do none of his memories involve his family in any way? - An episode in Touched by an Angel used this in the episode where a student was accused of plagiarizing. The flashback started with what the person remembered, and it was then extended to include something the person didn't see (his own submission being modified by a person he helped). That caused a negative reaction from the person, who wasn't present during the extended portion.
Video Games
- ANNO: Mutationem: After defeating the MI Mecha, Ann briefly experiences a flashback to when she getting a check-up by Dr. Doyle while she was resting, and gaining a perspective of seeing that C and Doyle were secretly working together.
- Justified in Chrono Trigger. During the trial, all the flashbacks of what you did are in third-person, because they were actually coming from somebody else's descriptions.
- Braindances in Cyberpunk 2077 are recordings of a person's memories that anyone with the right cyberware can view for themselves. While normally limited by the host's own perspective, a viewer is free to move around in a limited area and get a closer look at certain things that may have only been perceived subconsciously, such as the other end of a phone call someone else had in the same room.
- Persona 5: Most of the story is Joker recollecting the events that led to his current predicament, with him having knowledge of events that he wasn't present for even when scenes shift to different characters at other areas.
- Averted in all flashbacks in Silent Hill: Homecoming as flashbacks are in first person.
- The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt: As Geralt follows in Ciri's footsteps, he has witnesses recount when they last saw her, which the player experiences as gameplay in control of Ciri during the events.
Web Comics
- The Cloister: As a Fourth-Wall Observer with Medium Awareness, Boom!Sonic can see flashbacks of events he didn't witness, and even asks for those flashbacks directly, as a faster way to explain things:
Boom!Sonic: Listen. Can we just get a flashback? The artist is obviously a novice. Look! We're running out of room on the page.
- The Mansion of E: All flashbacks are shown with all characters blackened out with, sometimes with vague background. At one point, the author stated that it is possible that person doing flashback may have misremembered or imagines what have happened. Example.
- Wasted Away: Radon's memories are third-person, and represented as video tapes in his mind.
- Sluggy Freelance: When Torg flashes back to a secret mission he sent Zoë on, most of the action is naturally from Zoë's point of view. Even if we assume she briefed him on the details afterward, though, there's still a short scene occurring after Zoë had left the building, which the author, noting that it's "unknowable to Torg", helpfully dubs a "flashbatical meanwhile".
Web Original
- Cracked mocked The Eternal Mind usage of this trope.
"We're not entirely sure why all the happy memories in The Eternal Mind are from someone else's perspective, though."
- Dragon Ball Z Abridged: After Freeza gives Vegeta a flashback on how he killed his father and blew up the Saiyan homeworld, Vegeta responds with, "How did you know about the parts you weren't there for?"
Western Animation
- The first episode of Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, "Super Special Sonic Search and Smash Squad" is a How We Got Here Origins Episode in which Sonic regales Scatch and Grounder about how they first met. The flashback includes events Sonic wasn't around to see, such as Dr. Robotnik actually creating Scratch and Grounder and Coconuts vowing to capture Sonic first.
- Lampshaded in DuckTales (2017). The framing device of the episode "The Outlaw Scrooge McDuck" is Scrooge telling an initially uninterested Louie a story. When the episode briefly changes perspective Louie interrupts to ask how Scrooge could know what was going on when he wasn't there.
Scrooge: [Smugly] Look who's suddenly invested.
- Lampshaded on Invader Zim. When Zim is captured by Sizz-Lor, we get a flashback to when Zim used to work for him and then escaped; it ends with Sizz-Lor seeing that Zim is missing and vowing to bring him back. When the flashback ends, Sizz-Lor wonders how Zim could remember the part that happened after he left. Zim has no answer.
- The Rocko's Modern Life episode "Future Schlock" has an older Filburt tell his now grown-up children how Rocko and Heffer were lost into space seventeen years ago. The ensuing flashback establishes that Filburt left the scene before the main event of story, Rocko and Heffer discovering a caged monkey and trying to stop it from being shot into space, took place and Filburt should have no idea that happened.
- The Rick and Morty episode "Morty's Mind Blowers" has a series of short vignettes, depicted as being Morty's memories, that have been physically stored and erased. One memory cuts to another set of people, that Morty hadn't even met at that point. Morty questions this, and Rick explains that he edits some things together to make it flow better.
Real Life
- If you can understand this... there's a real example.
- It's generally accepted by psychologists that, when people recall episodic memories, they can experience them either in a field perspective (1st person) or in an observer perspective (3rd person). The latter is possible because memories are reconstructed upon retrieval rather than preserved exactly how they were experienced. Especially if they were preserved in photographs or video tapes, mostly the latter. When you reconstruct it upon retrieval through the tape, you remember it through the camera's perspective.
- Real Life/Literature example: In his memoir, My Mother's Sabbath Days, Chaim Grade begins with his mother having a conversation with another woman. A few pages later, Chaim Grade enters the room. (And it's in first person.)