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Or at least, I understand the challenge.
I have beenfightingalargelySisyphean battleagainstbottle-episode semantic driftfor years, to no avail.
Its a stand-alone episode!
Ive been yelling into an unfeeling, uncaring cavern of bottle-episode misappropriation.
First, some brief bottle-episode history.
Worse, it flattens a whole lovely proliferation of types of TV episodes that do some version of this!
Theyre all variations on the way TV can use episodes to break from a shows normal rhythm.
Why erase the connection between all of them?
Why squash all that interesting narrative differentiation into one ill-fitting term?
It suggests that an episode can be viewed on its own, separate from the rest of a series.
And yes, sometimes these episodes do exactly that.
Sometimes theyre a musical episode where everyone sings all the feelings theyve been burying for the whole season.
Stand-alone, long though I have tried to defend it, just doesnt encapsulate all that breadth.
I thought about rogue episodes, although that makes them sound like devilish knaves whove done something wrong.
Very Special Episodes is silly and already means something else, anyhow.
Ive landed on departure episodes.
And its a nice bonus thatThe Leftovershappened to be exceptionally good at departure episodes.
These kinds of episodes are worth celebrating!
Departure episodes are a way to let narrative epiphanies spring out of a formal shift.
Departure episodes are a beautiful feature of TV storytelling.
hey do not shove their light into a tiny, restrictive bottle.
