Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-1293767-20151029072618/@comment-24894325-20161209175059

Some (potentially) not-very-helpful musings.

I think I understand where the difficulty stems from. What I and many others (judging by their wording) would like to see is a numbering/multiparter definition that respects narrative continuity. And such continuities do exist in pure form, giving us a clear idea of what we want. A typical example is a story where the Doctor loses the TARDIS at the beginning, stays in one place, resolves the problem and then leaves without looking back.

But this vision meets a rude awakening at the more subtly interconnected stories. The blurred boundaries between narratives in the recent years rightfully lead to the idea of not using the narrative as a determining factor at all. Thus, appear the suggestions based on purely formal criteria, e.g., name, production specifics, "to be continued" ending, etc. While different in shape, they all share one thing in common: they necessarily go against the narrative feelings many of us have, sometimes very strong feelings. I say necessarily because production is affected by things not related to narrative, for instance, "to be continued" was clearly added to end-of-season episodes a couple of times as a marketing device.

So the tension is between undefinable vague subjective ideal on the one hand and deterministic bureaucratic approach on the other. Perhaps, a simple deterministic criterion can be adjusted to approach the general ballpark of the ideal sufficiently to gain consensus from the idealists (SOTO got me agreeing), but the price is the complexity of the adjustments and adjustments within adjustments.

How can we bridge the gap? Maybe we can't and then the name of the story seems the best simple bureaucratic approach (given that both parts of The End of Time are on the same page). But if we are to bridge the gap, I see only one way: by approximating it from both sides. If a rule is too simple, one needs to come up with a clear example why this simplicity goes against the narrative common sense. If a rule is too complex, it is a reasonable idea to try and simplify it.

Let me try. If an episode ends with "to be continued", then it's a two-parter is a simple rule but I want to argue it is a bit too simple. One of the examples I see as bad is The Name of the Doctor, mentioned at the beginning of this thread. It has "to be continued" leading into The Day of the Doctor. But both are specials, so no continuous run, and there is barely anything narratively in common between the two. To my mind, it goes against the common sense to combine them into a two-parter.