Question about episode order...

[adamant_turtle]

I've been reading quite a bit lately about this show's episode order being different from how it was originally filmed/intended to be aired. So, my question is this...regardless of the reason, how does the order it's aired affect canon? I can't recall this happening so much in any other series, so I don't know if perhaps there is some sort of "rule

Comments

[atatteredrose]

It's a good point that the casual viewer won't know a lot of things. It really comes down to how we define 'canon.' A good analogy might be a television. I'm not exactly sure how it works, and I couldn't build one from scratch, but there are still specific facts and information available such that I could learn how it works and how to build it.

And such is canon - a theoretical construct which, unfortunately, might be at odds with general knowledge (I'm not the only one who can't build a tv, I presume most people can't). Also note that even if something is established in canon, and on the show, many casual viewers (and even harder core fans) won't necessarily remember it, or have watched that episode.

Academics and the industry define fans on several levels depending on how committed to a show they are, from the casual fan to the 'superfan.' Considering 'canon' wrt this construct takes some of the confusion out of it, I think, because it allows for different individuals to have different relationships to the same body of knowledge.

As to things that might or might not be canon - I'm not sure when the term 'canon' was coined, but I presume the original intention only really encompassed a single-media-narrative (ie, through tv, or books.) Once we've entered into a multi-media age, the notions of 'canon' fracture to encompass them. Ie, the television show 'Firefly' has one canon. Add the movie and canon has changed, though not too confusingly as it's still linear and very similar to the show. But then we get the comic books. Are these canon? Not the original canon, surely, but they have a canon of their own. Or take Sanctuary, which had the webisodes, then redid them as the start to the television show.

Aha - this indicates that 'canon' isn't so much a static truth, but rather a description of a bounded set of information and facts and understandings, where the set can be fluid within a larger landscape of related truths. --> This lets us add the term 'fanon' without having to create another description, as fanon is a set of facts that range farther from those which are incontroversial.