User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-1827503-20141023232658/@comment-1827503-20151025191814

SOTO wrote: Mightn't it be more sensible, though, to simply do the count based on the number of stories with separate titles? Even two-parters are composed of two individual stories. For classic Who, of course, a serial was collectively one story, and each episode was simply a part of that. The only example of one story spread out across two episodes in modern Who, though, by a certain logic, is The End of Time, which is explicitly one entity in two parts. If considering two-parters one story means us squabbling over what is a continuous story and what is a true two-parter, maybe that's not a good way of going about things. If the show runner decided in series 15 to make every episode continue on to the next directly, we would not be counting that entire series as one story, would we?

The problem with that is the First Doctor's era, which used separate episode titles for a good period of time. We don't count An Unearthly Child as four stories, do we?