User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-44988386-20200625144019/@comment-6032121-20200625152407

Never Forget The Day The 456 Arrived wrote: But it still stands out like a sore thumb. Plus, we don't do stuff like Spyfall Part One, The Twin Dilemma Part Four, and the like, so why just for the early Hartnell titles? But it doesn't tell them which part the information came from, which is a bit rubbish. Why make them wade through a humongous plot summary when we have a perfectly good method for precise citation?

Plus, there is the factor that the collective titles of Hartnell serials are subject to debate and are, to an extent, post-hoc. You'll still find people to say "the second serial" is called The Dead Planet rather than The Daleks, or even that The Myth Makers isn't an individual serial but rather part of a monster of a thing which they call The Daleks' Master Plan but which includes everything from "Mission to the Unknown" to "Destruction of Time".

Citing individual episode titles, which were actually broadcast back in the 1960's under that title, thus allows us to stick closest to the actual sources and remain as agnostic as possible on the matter. Of course, we still had to make our own half-arbitrary decisions about how we split and title these, but we don't have to push for our choices harder than we need to.