Brace yourselves. On the tails of a few bad-to-mediocre-at-best episodes, we’ve got ourselves a flashback episode. I have never been one for the flashback episode and they’re particularly painful when you’re condensing your series viewing into a daily process. It’s probably my own fault for watching episodes in such rapid succession, but it feels like I just watched all these episodes. So I’m not going to lie. I’m not going to watch this episode carefully because I don’t need to recap what I’ve already recapped, and you certainly don’t need to read it.

So here’s the quick and dirty: the Seavers are having a garage sale and clearing out a whole bunch of old stuff, including:

• The ashtray Ben made for Jason’s birthday, which he had to give Jason when they realized the fancy camera Ben bought Jason for his birthday had been purchased with money scammed under the guise of charity. We get 8 minutes of that episode, which if you’re counting, is about one third of the original episode. That’s a lot by any flashback episode standard.
• The running shoes Mike wrote answers on to cheat on his test, but through the process of which actually learned the facts. Again, we see way too much of the original episode, but at least we get a few glimpses of Principal Dewitt. Where has he been lately?
• The broken lamp that the kids destroyed when they were left home alone for one night. During their attempt to fix one cheap lamp, they proceeded to ruin every other piece of furniture in the living room.
• The glasses Carol used to wear before she got contacts, and which she briefly started to wear again when she thought Bobby Wynette (sigh, remember Bobby Wynette? I miss him…) was blowing her off for the winter formal.

Yes, that was the entire episode. I have to say, skipping through this was rather refreshing. It might just become my new strategy when episodes get really dire!

What I’ve learned in this episode is:

• Many Growing Pains episodes could have told the same story in 10 minutes
• Season 3 is really struggling for content