Answer: Unpacking Past Perfect

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earth2skye asked: When is the past perfect tense used?

With examples from Stargate SG-1, House, Harry Potter and Firefly.



Form
First, let's look at what "past perfect tense" is.

The past perfect tense is formed by a past tense of "to have" and a past participle. Usually it looks like this:

had + verb-ed

For example:

Jack had talked to Carter about the mission just that morning.

But the following are all also past perfect tense:

House had just lost his entire team, and Cuddy still wouldn't get off his back.

"Well," said Ron. "It would have been nice if you had asked us before you ran off to be all heroic."

Daniel's papers might have been saved if Jack had thought to warn him just thirty seconds earlier.

Carter had been working on the device all morning, but by lunchtime she still didn't even know what was wrong with it.

Maybe Simon had never been poor, but he had known desperation.

(In the fourth example above, notice that "had been working" is different from the "had + past participle" construction. This is past perfect progressive, which indicates a continuous action—rather than a completed action—in the past of the past.)



Function
Now, when is the correct time to use the past perfect tense?

The past perfect tense indicates an action completed earlier than some other past time*. I think of it as indicating the "past of the past." It can be used in present tense narrative, but I find it most useful in past tense narrative (using "she went" and "he said" rather than "she goes" and "he says"). You can use it to establish backstory, for example, by referring to things that happened before your story.

House had always found Cuddy attractive, but now that he had a chance to do something about it, he found himself curiously uninterested.

There had been that one fling with that one guy in college, but they had had sex only the once. Daniel considered himself to be straight.

If your narrative is in present tense, you can do these things with plain old past tense:

House always found Cuddy attractive, but now that he has a chance to do something about it, he finds himself curiously uninterested.

There was that one fling with that one guy in college, but they had sex only the once. Daniel considers himself to be straight.

Don't shy away from the "had had" construction. If someone had had something that he didn't have anymore, say so.

Inara had had no problem keeping her feelings professional—so long as Mal didn't have sex with anyone else, either.

Ron had had a perfectly nice life before he met Harry: no money, no respect from his brothers, no chance of being exceptional or distinguished, but at least everyone he loved was alive and well.

That's really all there is to it. Past perfect tense can feel complicated, usually because it's just difficult to keep track of all the "degrees" of pastness. But it's really very straightforward. If something happened and finished happening before a certain time in the past, use the past perfect. An event in a given period of time of the past is past tense; past perfect is used for anything that happened in a time previous to that.


Resources:
EnglishPage.com
*Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft