After purchasing a television season on DVD years ago, I was immediately disappointed with the attachment of full recaps prior to each episode; why watch recaps when you have all the episodes? Similarly, when archiving off-air recordings, I once excised those seemingly redundant recaps to save disc space. Recaps like these for Lost and Battlestar Galactica, however, increasingly challenge that assumed redundancy. As Alan McKee stressed, recaps manifest their own unique textual forms, innovatively condensing expansive narratives into bite-sized "snacks" that reorder old scenes within new sequences, relationships, and meanings. But recaps are also inexorably bound to the episodes they precede—not just summarizing the past, but essentially shaping episodes to come as part of those texts. Excised recaps change episodes. The recap shapes audience expectations for the Lost whodunit "The Long Con.". While investigating alongside the castaways after someone assaults Sun and steals all the guns, we can actually draw additional clues from the preceding recap. Charlie flies under the radar throughout this Sawyer-Jack-Locke episode, but the recap recalls Charlie's previous conflict with Locke to provide motive for upcoming treachery. The recap cements Charlie's importance to the subsequent episode, despite his lack of screen time, cluing us in on his inevitable involvement in the scheme before his reveal as perpetrator. Despite the "previously on Battlestar Galactica" claim, some characters and arcs—the like engineer Gardner discussed here by Tigh and Adama—are "recapped" before ever appearing or being mentioned in prior episodes. Though not quite amnesiac, viewers will likely integrate such new elements with what they think they already saw. As a storytelling device, the recap makes the sudden appearance of the high-ranking Gardner character seem less out-of-the-blue. Moreover, in the aftermath of several episodes that fell short of producer expectations and required extensive re-editing, this recap allows producers to augment and alter memories of recent episodes after they air. Thus, recaps shape audience expectation, but also serve a craft utility, allowing producers to frame, retell, and modulate seriality. The question before practitioners and critics, therefore, is how to use recaps skillfully to inflect aggregate narratives without them becoming an expositional crutch.