Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-1293767-20151029072618/@comment-5918438-20160108200057

Oh yeah, I'm sure it would. It could easily be a fascinating ns:0 article on the different interpretations and inconsistencies.

Now, you say the two-part is a narrative construct, which is somewhat true, but I don't think the different is between "a story" and "part of a larger story", because story can be used quite loosely there. Every episode of series 8 is part of the larger story, but the individual episodes (barring the finale) are all standalones. I think narrative and script are something which go above story classifications.

The head writer might want a common thread through episodes, or might ask a writer to write (or write themself) the script for a standalone story which builds up to, or introduces, a two-parter, or a finale episode. Sometimes the narrative thread of the finale continues almost directly from a prior episode in the series which does not come before it (series 1 and the satellite 5 episodes, series 2 and the alternate universe Cybermen, heck, series 5 and the end of TEH, because that whole damn series takes place over the course of a day on Earth), or even one example of it following directly after the end of an episode  in another TV programme  (Utopia and The End of Days)

And then you have examples of two stories with an obvious linking narrative, but which was a story told over two or more series. The Craig Owens episodes have a narrative link, and may be considered together, compared and contrasted in the lead of the TV story pages, but they are not, together, a two-parter. All stories featuring River Song do have one continuous narrative but they are not a multi-parter. And it would be interesting to consider all these things, with narrative links, together. It really would. To consider not just the narrative, but differences in production, the progression of how much Alex Kingston was allowed to know, or what was in fact already planned/known by Moffat and what wasn't.

But, again, none of these things are two-parters. So I don't think the two-parter is an exclusively—or even predominantly—narrative thing. What a two-parter essentially means is that a lot of the same people were hired for the production, within one production block, of two episodes which comprise a singular point-A-to-point-B narrative, almost always sharing both a location and a guest character between the episodes.

Cliffhangers don't necessarily mean that, even if they're a result of build-up in the episode. Remember, cliffhangers of sorts were almost always present before the finale in RTD series, and the finale often then had its own cliffhanger leading into the Christmas special, from the very first finale, in fact. And hey, I sometimes like the idea of Utopia as part of a three-parter too. It's always nice, on a rewatch to watch Utopia first, and get a sense of the narrative build-up. But even from a script perspective, ignoring everything else, it has its own separate plot. RTD is very much doing the same thing as he did with Turn Left, which people do tend to consider a standalone, on an arbitrary unquantifiable basis of "well it seems like enough of its own thing to me".

It's also nice to watch the s9 finale and then to enjoy The Christmas Invasion and experience it as, as it was from Rose's perspective, one continuous story. But surely nobody here's claiming that The Christmas Invasion is part 3 of a three-parter, right?

Anyway, in short, what we're trying to pin down here is the classification of stories. What is its own story? Story is not a direct equivalent of narrative here. There will always be linking narratives, continuing narratives, build-ups, cliffhangers and hints along the way which have nothing to do with what is a single story, particularly in terms of production. Those choices are script choices, made by the head writer in conjunction with the writer of the episode in question.

So while it is definitely interesting that episodes like Utopia hold a strong narrative link to the following two-parter, and we could certainly talk at length about that on the article, we're not trying to find a system which accounts for the narrative here. Narrative can be divided up a bunch of different ways, presented as such, and still make sense. What we're seeing here—as separate from any phenomena of the script alone—are production choices.

It's a way of divvying up the amount of episodes they got a budget for. How many different productions do they want to make with that money? Those productions can be multi-part stories or one-episode standalones. When they chose to write/commission/produce/plan/make a two-parter, they're saying "here are two episodes which will be broadcast on television, that have a lot of the same cast and crew, will be filmed together, and, together, tell one story." Yes, they say that every time they commission a two-parter; it's BBC policy.