Recap by Audit

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When the past events of the episode or series are revisited via a looking over of damages and expenses. In short, a common Framing Device for a Clip Show. Often played for laughs.

I just wanna see the scene where Bruce has to explain his goddamn expense report! —Noah Antwilter, The Clones of Bruce Lee review.

Examples of Recap by Audit include:

Anime and Manga

• Used explictly in the anime Speed Grapher episode "Audit the Wicked".
• In one episode of Excel Saga, Il Palazzo justifies his decision not to include Excel on the current mission by showing her a Clip Show of all her mission failures from previous episodes.

Comic Books

• The Avengers has done this a few times. The story "Lo! And There Shall Come an Accounting!" was about this. In the end, the money-counters let the super-heroes off the hook. Who's going to rag on Captain America for saving them?

Film

• Played with in Slumdog Millionaire.

Literature

• Gateway by Frederik Pohl does this; In the "present", the hero is obscenely wealthy, plagued by guilt, and going through therapy with a computer-generated psychologist. Most of the actual plot of the book is in his explanations to the computer of where the wealth (and guilt) came from.
• The book Borders of Infinity by Lois McMaster Bujold is actually a thinly disguised short story collection, with an audit as framing device for the stories.

Live Action Television

• Night Court did this plot once.
• The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Trials and Tribble-ations" is told via flashback as Sisko explains what happened to the Department of Temporal Investigations.
• The Clip Show episodes of Stargate SG-1.
• In Angel, Doyle asks Angel to snoop around his ex-wife's new fiancée, leading to an awkward scene where Angel spots the beau with a knife and tackles him through a plate-glass window. The next day, Angel grouses that Richard belongs to a family of a harmless restauranteurs "with some pretty expensive windows."
  • The episode "Time Bomb" had a suit, Marcus Hamilton, reading off a list of damages caused by Angel's flunky during a rescue mission.

"Illyria destroyed 11 torture units before she found your man; 2 troop carriers, an ice cream truck, and 8 beautifully maintained lawns."

Radio

• The radio drama Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar used this as the show format. Each of Johnny's adventures was narrated as he went down the list filling out his expense report.