Reasoning

Okay, first the science bit… (feel free to skip halfway down the page if you’re allergic to maths).

My thinking is ideally for every pair of episodes, you can decide either episode ‘A’ should go before episode ‘B’ or vice versa.  We have 21 episodes (counting A Voice in the Wilderness as a single episode) – which means there are 210 pairs of episodes to figure out (20 pairings for the first episode, then 19 pairings for the next, then 18, etc…)

If that seems like a lot of work, fortunately we can use the transitive property to cut it down a bit, for example:

  1. If Believers must be followed by Signs and Portents (the Raiders are active in Believers and are put out of business in Signs)
  2. And Signs must be followed by Eyes (in Eyes Ben Zayn refers to the Minbari hand-picking Sinclair, which Garibaldi discovered in Signs)
  3. Then Believers must also be followed by Eyes

For any particular episode, as we work out more of its relations to other episodes, its position in the season will emerge – for example if an episode has seven others which must go before it and eleven after it, then it must belong in slots #8, #9 or #10.

And once all 210 of these episode relations are decided then we’ll have our complete episode order.  Should be easy… right?

As I go through I’ll be using the below lines of reasoning to figure out which way around a particular pair of episodes should go:

  1. Plot continuity – for example, if an event from one episode is referred back to in another, then it’s obvious in what order they should go.
  2. Character development – this can be more subjective but if a character’s behaviour or attitude changes over the course of several episodes, I’ll aim to order them so the changes happen progressively, rather than swinging back and forth.
  3. Intent of the author/showrunner – although I won’t be a slave to this, if there are public statements from the writer(s) about episode ordering I’ll take them into account.  I’ll also look at the order in which the episodes were originally written and produced.
  4. Overall pacing – as well as getting the episode-by-episode ordering to make sense, I also want the season overall to be an enjoyable and engaging experience.  More detail on this later…

So with all that in mind, the reasoning in detail starts here.