Time Jumps Revealing Character Insights

I don’t think it’s a very big stretch to say that Breaking Bad is one of the best TV shows currently on the air. Critics and audiences love it, two groups which have been known to disagree to disastrous results – The Black Donnelly’s anybody? Breaking Bad manages to be technically excellent without giving up an inch of audience engagement to what some might see as overly ‘artsy’ elements. But what is it exactly that keeps people coming back every week? What makes us all so willing to plug back in to a show that we’ve watched at least once before?

I think that the wild and free sort of timeline style is definitely a huge contributing factor to the love of the show. The writers obviously rely heavily on the element of suspense to drive the plot forward but take it in an interesting direction by making the question not “where are we going next” but rather “when are we going next.” After that first shift in the pilot episode, it’s clear that this show isn’t going to be just a run of the mill ‘good guy falls in with a bad crowd and hijinks ensue’ sort of plot. When the first episode ends, we see the characters one way. When the second begins, we see them a hop, skip, and a jump away from where we last left off in the slice of ending we are given, just one tasty bit of where their development is going, and then we’re put back where we left off. From there we can see the things that cause them to develop in to the person we saw at the 'end' of the episode.

It’s rough and it’s a bit dirty sometimes, but the jumping around really makes the show work. The grittiness is what the viewers want not because it’s new and spectacular, but because it’s real. We see real character progression in each episode and people can relate to that, can find a piece of themselves in how the characters on screen react to situations, even if they themselves would never end up selling drugs to provide for their family (or maybe they would, who knows, this is a no judgement blog). 

Anachrony in S.3 Ep.5

While watching Season 3, Episode 5 of Downton Abbey, I found myself focusing on the ways in which the episode related to Gérard Genette’s piece, “Order in Narrative”.  As Genette explains, there is the time of the story and then there is the time of the telling, which he calls narrative time.  The writers’ use of anachrony, or chronological inconsistencies, stood out to me from the very beginning of the episode.

While the narrative lengths of breaks between episodes are always seven days, the lengths of the gaps in the time of the story have varied a great deal.  Gaps between previous episodes have ranged from a few days to many months.  Since the length of the gap in “story time” between episodes is always different, I look forward to seeing how much time the creators will write-in before continuing the story in the next episode.  In this instance, while the break in narrative time was seven days, the gap in “story time” between Episode 4 and Episode 5 was only a couple of days, as evidence by the death of Lady Sybil at the end of Episode 4 and Lord Grantham saying goodbye to the visitors paying their respects at the opening of Episode 5.  I was happy to see that not much time had passed between Sybil’s death and the beginning of Episode 5.  This use of time gave the writers a great opportunity to develop characters and character relationships in the context of Sybil’s death, which was a highly emotional ordeal for most characters in the story.  For example, with Sybil’s death still fresh in the minds and hearts of the characters and audience, the writers were able to more fully develop the issues in Robert and Cora’s relationship.

My favorite example of anachrony in this episode occurred during the scene in which Daisy tried to teach Alfred how to do the foxtrot in the servants’ hall.  I assumed that this scene would simply be another goofy example of the awkward tension between Daisy and Alfred, but a short line from Daisy changes the feel and purpose of the entire scene.  When she shows Alfred how to hold his arms, she pauses and says that it reminded her of when Thomas tried to show her how to dance the grizzly bear.  This internal analepsis, as Genette would call it, takes the audience away from the present moment in the story and causes one to think back to a seemingly insignificant moment from Season 1.  Then, a close-up shot of Daisy is used as she says, “It was a long time ago.  A lot has happened since then”.  And in that short moment, the viewer is reminded of the many events that have occurred since Daisy and Thomas danced in the servants’ hall.  Personally, I thought of the war, William’s death, Matthew’s injury, Sybil and Branson, Lavinia Swire, and Bates’ trial, just to name a few.  In the tradition of a serialized narrative, all of these stories and events came together at once, connected by the common thread of Daisy’s memory.

There are numerous other examples of how the writers used the discordance between narrative time and story time to develop the plot.  Which were your favorites?