TV meta -- hooks and game changers

Bit of random meta, mostly because I feel like rambling about stuff I love to take my mind off stuff that stresses me out.

So, again, on a bit of a Buffyverse kick at the moment, and I was thinking about trying to come up with a list of my top ten episodes or something, which made me think about what I'd consider my top episodes of any show I love, which made me think about what episodes define my favorite shows. And I realized that for me, at least, what makes me fannish about a show -- as opposed to "oh, yeah, that one's fun" -- tends to boil down to two specific types of episodes: the Hook, and the Game Changer. I need to encounter both of these episodes to want to dive into a fandom.

You all know what I mean. First, there's the Hook: that episode that really sells you on the show. Its placement can vary, but usually -- if you're watching the series in order, anyway -- it probably needs to fall somewhere in the first season, or you'll give up watching. (Alternately, it's that random episode you stumble across somewhere in the middle of the run of the show that drags you in without your actually knowing anything else about the show at all but holy jebus that was awesome, where can I find more?) It's the episode where a new show finds its footing, starts to figure out what it's really going to be about. It's the character moment that just NAILS it, or the plotline that really speaks to you personally, or just a really friggin' cool shot that makes your breath catch and you think, hey, this is nifty. And you never forget that moment.

Then there's the Game Changer. Episodic television is generally formulaic by nature, and I'm not saying that in a bad way. It has to be. That's what keeps its viewers coming back, week after week after week. We know what to expect, we know the characters, we know the types of story we're going to be told, and we're familiar enough with it to know we'll probably enjoy it. Totally cool. And most decently successful shows ride that wave all the way through the end. But the really good ones, the ones that develop obsessive crazy awesome fans, are the ones that test their own limits, push the edges of the formula, blow it all wide open -- if only for a story arc or two. The Game Changer is that episode. The one that dramatically raises or outright changes the stakes for the characters, the one whose repercussions ripple throughout the rest of the series, the one from which you can never go back. Sometimes it comes right in the first season. Sometimes it takes years before it happens. But oh, man, do we ever sit up and take notice when it does.

There are plenty of other episode archetypes, if I really wanted to sit around and come up with a few more catchy and overly simplistic labels for them. But the Hook and the Game Changer are the two episodes in any given show that will always, always, always turn up in any "best of" episode list I could ever think up. Any given TV show could have any number of Game Changers, depending on how you classify them; there are certainly degrees. For example, in Buffy, I'd consider "Passion" the first huge Game Changer -- we're shown the full extent of Angelus's evil for the first time, and our first major recurring character is killed, brutally, onscreen. But you could also argue that the "Surprise"/"Innocence" two-parter is the Game Changer, for giving us Angelus in the first place, or "School Hard", where Spike casually and deliberately kills the Anointed One, subverting all the expectations set by the first season's arc; or to a lesser extent, go back to "Prophecy Girl", where Buffy actually confronts the fact that she is going to die, which changes her personal stakes for the rest of the series (though I think that's more a logical continuation of the first season's overall story arc than a change, exactly). So, yeah, to a certain extent, the Game Changer is subjective; the Hook even more so, because that's very personal to each individual fan. But you've got to have both to really become fannish about a show. This is why I gave up on Supernatural -- I'm sure there are plenty of Game Changers over its run (and could probably list a few by sheer fannish osmosis), but I never got my Hook episode, so while I've certainly been entertained by the episodes I've watched, I never could get into it properly. My big frustration with Merlin is that while I certainly got my Hook (for me, "The Beginning of the End" -- Merlin's darker side and the Mordred reveal, oh my stars and garters), there has never been a proper Game Changer, and it started pissing me off so much it drained all my enjoyment out of the show. (While certainly there were episodes that had major repercussions, the basic status quo of Merlin's secret and Arthur and Merlin's twisted sort of friendship have never, ever changed, so even as other circumstances changed drastically, I feel like the show itself remained utterly static.)

So now I'm going to ramble on a bit about my favorite TV shows. You've been warned.

( Buffyverse )

( X-Files )

( Avatar )

( Whoniverse )

( Sorkinverse )

Stopping there because it's late and I'm sleepy, but I could do this for a bunch of other shows. (And ETA, realized I really had to add Avatar in here.) What are your Hooks & Game Changers for your big fannish loves? Is there another type of episode that you need to get involved in a fandom, or is it all about the characters and the individual episodes don't matter at all, or something else entirely? I like reading people's meta about these sorts of things. :)