Shoulda Been a Two-Parter

[Zeke]

Hey, I loved "Storm Front". And the Terra Prime two-parter had the Mayor from Buffy. "Bound" I'll grant you.

I must have missed this topic the first time. It's an interesting question, and not an easy one to answer. When I like a one-part episode, one of the reasons is usually how effectively it tells its story. But nobody wants a bad episode turned into a two-parter.

That said, there's one that springs to mind immediately: the BSG S4 midseason cliffhanger, "Revelations". I talked about this in the review thread, but basically it tried to cover way too much ground in one hour, and wound up glossing over some very important details. The same is true of the followup, "Sometimes a Great Notion," though to a lesser extent. I could also name any number of Farscape episodes. You have to see how fast-paced that show is to believe it.

But as a rule, I'm with comic writer Marc Guggenheim, who said this about his great run on the short-lived Bart Allen FLASH title:

It is fun to think about what might have been - honestly, I would've loved to have spent a whole issue on what I did on those final three pages of #13. That's where the real drama is. But I made a very specific decision when I started writing comics - I always wanted to be criticized for trying to do too much in any given issue than trying to do too little. I always write with all the complaints of the reader in mind - like a lot of them, I hate decompression. My goal is always to pack as much story as I can into as few pages as possible.

("Decompression" means anything by Brian Michael Bendis anything by Warren Ellis except Nextwave this.)