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Star Trek: Episodic or Serialized?
When Star Trek began in 1966 every episode was written to be a self-contained story, neatly wrapped up in 50 minutes. It was episodic television, as all television shows were at the time. Shows were meant to be watched in any order and no knowledge of last week’s episode was required to watch this week’s episode. In truth, the viewer could go weeks without watching the show and suddenly tune in and not be lost.
This episodic style of TV writing continued through Star Trek: The Animated Series (TAS) and into Star Trek: The Next Generation. With the exception of a handful of 2-part episodes of the latter, every episode was written to be self-contained. As a side effect of episodic writing, character development was extremely limited. A character was the same in Episode 5 as in Episode 15. Each episode had a beginning, middle, and end, followed by a complete reset for the next go. Even physical injuries were non-cumulative. If a character hurt his shoulder in one episode, it was remarkably healed by the next episode. If a character mourned the death of his brother in one episode, that brother was completely forgotten in all subsequent episodes.
Episodic writing for Star Trek took a different turn in Star Trek: Deep Space 9 (DS9) where writers were given the freedom to create long story arcs that would play out over many episodes or even the entire season. All…
