What Is In Medias Res? The 2,700-Year-Old Trick Behind Every Cold Open You've Ever Seen

The Odyssey opens with its hero already stranded on an island, seven years into a shipwreck the poem has not bothered to tell you about yet. "It doesn't start at the beginning," Pete tells Amanda in Episode 111 of Sorta Sophisticated. "It starts in the middle." So what is in medias res? It's Latin for "into the middle of things," and it means a story that opens partway through its own plot and fills in the backstory later — which turns out to be a cheat code for reading the poem without reading the poem.

What Is In Medias Res, Exactly?

In medias res is a narrative technique in which a story begins in the middle of the action rather than at the chronological start, then supplies the earlier events afterward through flashback, dialogue, or a character's own retelling.

That's the whole thing. Every cold open that drops you into a car chase before the credits, every pilot that starts with a body and works backward, every episode that flashes "72 HOURS EARLIER" across the screen is running the same play. It has a Latin name because the Romans named it, and they named it while pointing directly at Homer.

Horace Coined It, and He Was Talking About Homer

The phrase comes from Horace's Ars Poetica, written in the last decades of the first century BC. Praising Homer, Horace writes that the poet always hurries to the outcome and sweeps the listener in medias res — into the midst of things — as if the whole backstory were already known.

So the term is not a piece of modern criticism. It's a Roman poet, roughly 700 years after the Odyssey was written down, trying to explain why the Greek stuff worked better than everyone else's. Aristotle had made a related point earlier in the Poetics: Homer's genius was in refusing to narrate the entire Trojan War, and instead picking one thread and hanging everything off it.

Worth being precise about one thing, because the episode's shorthand is that the Odyssey "invented the flashback." The accurate version is nearly as good. The Odyssey is the earliest surviving work in Western literature that structures itself this way, and it's the one the technique got named after. Homer does it in the Iliad too, opening in the tenth year of a ten-year war. Whether some older story did it first, we'll never know, because we don't have the older stories.

The Poem Skips the First Ten Years and Nobody Complains

The Odyssey runs 24 books and about 12,000 lines. Its present-day action covers roughly 40 days. The events those 40 days keep referring to (the Trojan horse, the Cyclops, Circe turning the crew into pigs, the trip to the underworld, the Sirens) span the previous ten years, and most of them are told in flashback.

Book 1 opens with the gods in council and Odysseus stuck on Calypso's island, already seven years into his stay there. Books 1 through 4 aren't even about him; they follow his son, Telemachus, who has grown up without a father and goes looking for news of him. Odysseus doesn't appear in person until Book 5.

Then in Books 9 through 12, sitting at a banquet table on Phaeacia, Odysseus tells his own story out loud to strangers. The most famous sequences in the poem, the ones people can name without having read it, are a guy at dinner recounting what happened to him. It's a flashback nested inside a story, narrated in the first person by the man it happened to.

It's a Braid, Not a Line

Amanda gets to the structural point faster than the terminology does. When Pete lays out the three storylines running at once, Odysseus at sea, Penelope holding off the suitors, Telemachus out looking for his father, she says: "So it's like a braid." Braided story.

That's the second half of the cheat code. The poem isn't a straight line with flashbacks bolted on. It's three strands moving in parallel, cutting between them, converging in Ithaca in the back third. "That was novel for the day," as Pete puts it. "It didn't exist. That's not how they told stories."

Which is the part that's easy to underrate now, because it's how everything is told. Multi-perspective, non-chronological, cutting between three plot lines that will eventually collide: that's a prestige drama. That's most of television.

Lost, Breaking Bad, and the World's Longest Chain of Custody

Pete's list on the show is Lost, Manifest, and Breaking Bad, and the lineage is real even where it's unconscious.

Breaking Bad's pilot opens with a pair of pants falling through the desert sky and Walter White filming a goodbye in his underwear, then rewinds three weeks. Lost built entire seasons on the flashback and eventually flipped it into the flash-forward. Pulp Fiction reorders its own chronology so completely that the character who dies in the middle is alive at the end.

The written-down chain runs through James Joyce's Ulysses, which maps the whole Odyssey onto a single day in Dublin in 1904, and through the Coen brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which relocates it to Depression-era Mississippi and gives the Sirens a river and a washboard. Pete's actual homework assignment, if you're not going to read the poem, is that movie. Two hours, and you get the shape of the thing.

Starting in the Middle Is an Argument About What the Story Is About

If the Odyssey started at the beginning, it would be a war story. Troy, the horse, the burning city, ten years of fighting. That's the Iliad, and that poem is about rage and blood and men dying badly. By opening seven years into a shipwreck, with a middle-aged man sitting on a beach crying because he wants to go home, the poem tells you on page one that the war is not the subject. Getting home is the subject.

That's the choice every cold open is making, whether the writers know it or not. Where you start is a claim about what matters. Homer starts with a man who has already lost everything and is trying to get back, which is why 2,700 years later the story still lands with people who couldn't name a single Greek god.

Episode 111 of Sorta Sophisticated is a full crash course on the Odyssey ahead of Christopher Nolan's adaptation — the one Matt Damon stars in, shot entirely with IMAX film cameras on a $250 million budget. Also in there: the case that Homer never existed at all, and the short scene about an old dog on a dung heap that Pete says still makes everyone cry.

Hear the full episode here 👇 The Story That Invented All Stories (Episode 111)