Regained Memories Sequence

"I remember. I remember it all."

— Wu, Ninjago, "Saving Faith"

After struggling from Easy Amnesia or Identity Amnesia for some time, a character is snapped out of it by Trigger Phrase or another Memory Trigger, regaining all memories at once. This is generally shown to the audience by a montage of visions (shots from previous scenes) quickly flashing through character's mind.

Compare Epiphany Therapy, "Eureka!" Moment, Exposition Beam, Eye Recall, Flashback-Montage Realization, and My Life Flashed Before My Eyes. Can be caused by listening to a Memory-Restoring Melody.

As this trope often comes at a later point in a story, spoilers will be unmarked.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Death Note: In "Revival", Light Yagami regains his memories of being Kira after laying his hands on his original Death Note after a very convoluted Memory Gambit.
• In Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, near the end of the series, when Nezuko undergoes the process of turning back into a human in her way to the final battle against Muzan, she regains her mental maturity which promptly acts as a rush of memories coming back to place in a sequence of events montage, with an added bonus where Nezuko recalls all the experiences and friends she made as a demon, feeling like memories of an infant but now Nezuko can process them properly thus she instantly likes all of her new friends, and feels the remainder rage she had for Muzan killing her family.
• Digimon Adventure tri.: In Confession, the heroic Digimon lose their memories as a result of the Digital World being rebooted to its original state. They finally remember their former lives in Our Future, which is represented by their traveling through a white void while static images of their past adventures are displayed in the background.
• My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! begins with Catarina Claes regaining her Past-Life Memories. In the Animated Adaptation, this is presented by a montage of events of her past life.
• Negima! Magister Negi Magi: Yue suffers amnesia from a poorly timed memory loss spell (she was practicing), and while she regains some of her memories, there's still a large gap that more or less consists of the story's events. She finally confesses her feelings for Negi and triggers the gaps in her memory after she says he should wait until after graduation to give a reply (exactly what she told him to do about Nodoka much earlier in the story). Manga panels depicting various story events occur and she finally regains her entire memory.
• Sailor Moon: It happens to Usagi in the first episode of the second season when Luna restores her memories of being a Sailor Guardian. It happens again in the very next episode when Luna restores the memories of the rest of the Inner Guardians.
• Transformers Victory: Victory Leo regaining Ginrai's memories and truly becoming his reincarnation is established when images of his past life flash on the screen.
• Zombie Land Saga: Happens twice to Sakura. First after she's hit by a truck which triggers her memories from life to return, but at the cost of her undead memories. Then during the Arpino concert, all of the time she spent with Franchouchou returns, completing her memories in their entirety.

Asian Animation

• BoBoiBoy:
  • Early in the show, the titular hero couldn't use his Elemental Split for too long should he risk becoming forgetful. The villains Adu Du and Probe utilised this by kidnapping one of the elementals. His memory worsened to the extent that he easily believed the enemies were his friends. They trick him into attacking his actual friends, which works until Probe says BoBoiBoy's catchphrase: "Awesome!", which triggers the rogue elemental to recall every time the hero had said that word, thus restoring his memory.
  • In season 3, Adu Du desperately tries reviving his Robot Buddy Probe and eventually succeeds. However, Probe doesn't seem to remember him anymore, acting like an apathetic battle robot on default settings. It's when Adu Du throws a mug at his head, something that he always did when Probe screwed up, that Probe regains his memories, complete with a flashback montage of various instances where a mug was thrown at him, while Probe's voice from past scenes played in the background.
• Happy Heroes: In season 2 episode 2, Careful S. is fighting with the other Supermen due to having developed amnesia and being convinced he is working for the villains. Mid-battle, Careful S. collides with a wall inside his Car Knight and some connectors inside his head are brought back together, leading to him remembering who he really is and causing a number of frames of the other Supermen and Doctor H. to quickly flash by the screen for a few seconds.

Comic Books

• Disney Mouse and Duck Comics: In I Am the Phantom Blot, the titular antagonist seeks to regain his Villain Cred by dousing all of Mouseton in rain tainted with an amnesia-inducing concoction. After the Nebulizzatrice Turbine is stopped, it's shown how everyone in town gradually regained their memories.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics):
  • After the first Genesis Wave reboots the universe, Sonic has a sense something is off. When he grabs Nicole, for whom the effect was different, his mind is flooded with memories of the way things were before the wave hit, including Sally being trapped in the World Roboticizer before it went off. Whenever he touches any of his friends in the end universe, they get treated to the same flood of old memories. This becomes a problem when they all realize that succeeding in their mission to restore their world means they might not like the world they're left with.
  • Happens again after the second Genesis Wave hits, but as this one was company mandated by Sega, the old memories fade and are replaced by ones more in keeping with the new universe.
• In Superman story arc The Phantom Zone, after going back home, Charlie Kweskill is put through a series of visions which remind him that he used to be a Kryptonian scientist and (framed) criminal called Quex-Ul. Nonetheless, Charlie convinces himself he is merely getting insane.

Fan Works

• Amalgamate: The Flashback Lights can trigger these; however, these "restored memories" are not always reliable. Or real.
• The Beast Of Gusu: Upon reuniting with Lan Wangji in Unstoppable, Wei Wuxian rapidly regains several significant memories of their past together, helping him remember his own identity and return to his human form.
• Danganronpa: Paradise Lost: Around halfway through Chapter 5's Class Trial, Shion Nanashi eventually remembers that she used to be none other than Monaca Towa. Afterwards, a quick flashback to some of Monaca's more despicable and manipulative actions ensues.
• Facing the Future Series: During the climax of Hearts and Minds, Danny and Sam regain all of their memories of their past relationship in this fashion, complete with lines from both the original show and past entires in the series.
• Done in the Red vs. Blue fanfic we've already done that joke. After having his memories erased by alien technology, Grif's memories are restored when Simmons tells him his name. Grif promptly panics, since he revealed his massive crush in Simmons while he was amnesiac.
  Simmons.
  Simmons.
  Simmons.
  Ohhhhhhhh fuck.

Films — Animated

• Doraemon: Nobita in the Wan-Nyan Spacetime Odyssey has Hachi the andromorphic dog regaining his memories in a quick series of flashbacks after both him and Nobita crashed into a stream — that Hachi is actually Ichi, the first generation of the dog people, having time-traveled a thousand years into the future in an attempt to locate his former master Nobita, only to accidentally hit a time warp, regress into a baby and get adopted by a family of cats.
• Finding Nemo: Dory gets separated from Marlin and forgets their adventures together, but then she finally meets Nemo and suddenly remembers everything.
• Kung Fu Panda 2: Throughout the film, Po has flashes of traumatic memories from his infancy, which he cannot identify. Finally, when he is told what happened, he stops to meditate and regains his memories of Lord Shen's genocide of his people and how his mother gave her life to ensure he escaped. The sequence ends with him achieving inner peace by coming to terms with his past.

Films — Live-Action

• At the climax of Dark City (1998), the Amnesiac Hero John Murdoch gets injected with a syringe containing his missing memories, conveyed to the audience as a rapid-fire montage of flashbacks. Complicating matters is that these memories, and John's entire past, is completely fabricated as part of the Strangers' vast experiment, and even John knows by this point.
• In Spider-Man 3, when Harry regains his memory of Peter being Spider-Man, whom he blames for his father's death, all his memories of discovering this and acting against Peter come back to him.

Literature

• In the Warrior Cats book The Forgotten Warrior, after Cinderheart realizes she's a reincarnation of Cinderpelt, "long-buried memories surged through her like a river in full flood", and she relives them one by one, speaking her internal thoughts on each memory aloud.

Live-Action TV

• In the penultimate episode of the TV series adaptation of 11/22/63, Sadie tries to help Jake regain his memories lost as a result of injuries from his attack in the previous episode. When the two visit Lee Harvey Oswald's apartment and talk to Oswald, memories from Jake's observations of and interactions with Oswald flash through Jake's mind, restoring his memory.
• Arrowverse:
  • Crisis on Infinite Earths (2019): In Part Five, after the multiverse has been destroyed and recreated, J'onn J'onzz returns several characters' memories of the original multiverse via Exposition Beam. In all of these cases, the character remembers the events of the previous episodes of the crossover event, involving the crisis which ended in all earths being destroyed.
  • The Flash (2014):
    • "Flashpoint" first has an inverted version of this, where Barry loses memories in bursts because he's living in a timeline that's not his own. When the timeline gets fixed at the end of the episode, a montage of moments from the previous two seasons is shown, though it's possible this is meant to represent the timeline restoration in general and not specifically Barry's memories coming back to him.
    • In "Cause and Effect", the team gives Barry amnesia in an attempted Memory Gambit to prevent a certain future. When an emergency calls for Barry's superhero knowledge, Iris snaps him back by recounting a childhood memory of her comforting Barry the night his mother died, resulting in all of Barry's memories flooding back to him at once.
• Avataro Sentai Donbrothers: During the show's last two episodes, Taro's memories of the past year have been progressively resetting; his mission as Don Momotaro considered complete. The finale sees him forgetting everyone bit-by-bit until Kaito gives him a copy of Haruka's manga and asks him to read it. In the final battle later, Don Momotaro re-appears and orders everyone to start a role call. When his turn comes up, a period of tense silence follows before the memories return in-full; symbolized by text retroactively appearing on the manga he'd read earlier.
• Doctor Who: In "Mawdryn Undead", the Brigadier has forgotten his entire history with the Doctor from the shock of accidentally meeting his future self years ago. After the Doctor jogs his memories, they come flooding back as a Continuity Cavalcade stretching back to "The Web of Fear".
• Jane the Virgin: When Michael comes back after his supposed "death", he is amnesic due to San Rosa/Rose and he can't remember Jane. When his memory returns in "Chapter Eighty-Four", a montage of his falling in love with Jane and memories that she tried to trigger in him earlier flash before his eyes.
• Supernatural: In "The Born Again Identity", Emmanuel's memories of being Castiel return as he gets back to smiting demons, even though he has no memory of how to do so.
  Dean: I'm sure it's just like riding a bicycle.
  Emmanuel!Cas: I don't know how to do that either.
• In the last episode of WandaVision, Wanda's magical construct of Vision unlocks the repressed memories of the real Vision (now repurposed into an emotionless weapon by S.W.O.R.D.). A brief montage of Vision's memories plays as this happens, using footage from Avengers: Age of Ultron, Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War.

Manhua

• The ending of My Beloved Mother, where Sinbell remembers his past back when he was 4 years of age, and how he lost his mother, Aya, in a gas explosion when she uses her body to shield him from the blast.

Tabletop Games

• The Magic: The Gathering card "Flood of Recollection" depicts the formerly amnesiac Jace regaining all his memories at once, depicted in the card's art as phantoms of his backstory. Notably, this includes memories that he'd forgotten before his current Amnesiac Hero stint.

Video Games

• In Enigmatis: The Ghosts of Maple Creek, the player character suffers from mild amnesia throughout the game, thanks to a car crash. Throughout the game, she periodically regains a little memory of how her investigation was progressing and what happened prior to the crash, but not enough for her to really make sense of things. Only when she locates the place where she was almost murdered do all of the memories come rushing back and she remembers what happened and how she escaped.
• Final Fantasy VII: Good old Cloud Strife thinks he's a 1st class SOLDIER, then thinks he's a puppet. It's not until Tifa and the Lifestream get involved he realizes he's just a guy who never made it, and his powers come from being Hojo's experiment for 5 years.
• Knights of the Old Republic: When the Player Character regains their memories late in the main storyline, they see several scenes from before and after their memory loss, culminating in a flashback of Darth Revan removing their iconic mask to reveal the protagonist's face underneath.
• In a Solstice playthrough of One Shot, the main character Niko remembers nothing about previous playthroughs except for the player's name. When instructed by Proto to imagine what the top of the Tower looks like, a brief flashback plays out showing Niko going through the latter half of the Tower as they regain most of their memories of past playthroughs.
• Resident Evil Survivor: The first game follows its Amnesiac Hero, Ark Thompson, who for most of the game assumed he was a villain due to losing his memories from barely surviving a helicopter crash. But near the end of the game, Ark finally meets his contact, the child Lott Klein, who told him who he is, at which point Ark remembers everything — he was a government agent investigating the T-Virus outbreak in Sheena Island, and the villain is actually Director Vincent Goldman, the Umbrella Branch Leader overseeing operations in Sheena Island.

Visual Novels

• In the Atonement Arc of Higurashi: When They Cry, Keiichi gets a variation of this. Technically, the memories aren't his, but those of a Keiichi in a different timeline, but the result is that he remembers his actions in the Demoned Away Arc (i.e. murdering two of his best friends out of paranoia). What's more, the memories that this Keiichi has are shorn of the hallucinations that Keiichi was dealing with (e.g. the "syringe" he's threatened with is shown to have been a marker). He has a quick emotional breakdown upon remembering this.

Web Comics

• Schlock Mercenary: The Toughs agree to have their memories modified by the UNS in exchange for liberty rather than be pursued and killed by them (fortunately, Schlock manages to keep the knowledge of the memory wipe itself, who did it, and why due to his Bizarre Alien Biology and later eats the man responsible to follow up on a threat/promise he'd made). Petey later restores them all (via simulated approximations of the actual events), with the fake memories being modified to black and white (including in-universe) so the Toughs can tell the difference. It hits the doctor and the reverend particularly hard when they discover the memory of their wedding was faked, although ironically they did get married (by the Admiral who struck the deal with them just before the wipe), but Petey had no way to know that.

Western Animation

• The Amazing World of Gumball: At the end of "The Nobody", an amnesiac Rob is inadvertently reminded of what happened to him when Gumball suggests he be "the villain", accompanied by a montage of Rob stuck in and escaping from the Void during a previous episode.
• Codename: Kids Next Door: In "Operation: Z.E.R.O.", Numbuh One decides to try to recommission his father after discovering a hidden room in his treehouse. It works and while Monty regains his memories of being a member of "Kids Next Door", rapid-fire images of various places, events and items associated with the organization flash in his eyes.
• Invincible (2021): In "We Need to Talk", Immortal flashes through various points in his life, including the time he was Abraham Lincoln, as he is brought Back from the Dead by the Mauler Twins.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • In the two-part episode "The Return of Harmony," the villainous Discord corrupts all of the Mane Six except Twilight into their opposite selves through Mind Control—the honest Applejack becomes a liar, the kind Fluttershy becomes cruel, and so forth. Twilight eventually perfects a memory spell that she uses like a laser beam; when it hits one of her corrupted friends, they see flashbacks of all of the events of Season 1, which cures them.
  • In "Magical Mystery Cure", Twilight accidentally causes her friends' cutie marks to swap, thus altering their lives entirely and making them forget who they are. During the song "A True, True Friend", she helps her friends get their memories and cutie marks back one by one. Each time one of them returns to normal, there's a close-up shot, showing rapid-fire images of themselves flash in their eyes.
• Ninjago:
  • In "Saving Faith", the ninja and Wu are being shocked with electricity by the Dragon Hunters. Wu, who is currently a teenager and who has been steadily aging throughout the season, suddenly recalls all the memories of his original elderly self, accompanied by some of his own words of wisdom playing in his mind. This gives him the motivation to break out of his chains and take on all the Dragon Hunters at once.
  • In the season 11 finale, "Awakenings", Zane finally breaks free of his Criminal Amnesiac Ice Emperor persona when he hears the word "protect", which reminds him of his father's words, "You were built to protect those who cannot protect themselves", a recurring staple of Zane's character throughout the series. He then flashes through his memories of the season.
• Phineas and Ferb: Zig-zagged in the series finale "Last Day of Summer". Isabella and Baljeet regain their memories of Phineas and Ferb when they are sucked into the alternate dimension. Buford expects it to happen to him, but it doesn't.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: In "Friendiversary", Squidward is unpleased when SpongeBob is celebrating his (one-sided) friendship anniversary with him, and erases his memories of him as a last resort; however, this also erases his memory of the combination to the Krusty Krab safe which holds the secret formula. Squidward tries in vain to get SpongeBob to remember him by reenacting their past times, and when he brings out the pain device from "Life Insurance", SpongeBob finally remembers Squidward, which in turn treats us to a close-up which shows flashbacks of SpongeBob's times with Squidward flashing through his eyes.
• The Venture Brothers: "The Invisible Hand of Fate" is a Whole Episode Flashback prompted by a Regained Memories Sequence in the Cold Open. After slipping in his bathroom and falling, Billy Quizboy recovers several lost memories, revealing events that transpired in which Billy took part but also others that were happening or were a result of those events.

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