The Case For The Return Of The Filler Episode
One of my favorite shows ever is Avatar: The Last Airbender. It has a heartfelt story with deep and nuanced characters, alongside a vibrant setting with years of in-universe history. It has dread-inducing, gut-wrenching scenes that keep you on the edge of your seat, right alongside light-hearted moments and tender touches of emotion. And, of course, it has 3 seasons worth of filler episodes.
The filler episode was born out of necessity. TV shows used to run on cable, where each episode's length was determined by how much airtime they purchased, commercial breaks were built into shows, and they ran an episode each week with commercially dictated breaks through seasons.
RELATED: Travelling Reignited My Love Of Let's Plays
Even if they had a straightforward story for the season planned that could be told in eight episodes, a TV show generally needed to have enough episodes to run one once a week. Hence, a 20-episode season needed filler. To distract the audience, they explored the characters' backstories, set up some goofy hijinks, deepened the world-building - anything to keep us entertained.
The way I heard it, "filler episode" was usually an insult. When my partner wanted to watch Star Wars: The Clone Wars before the final season came out, he found lists online that detailed all the plot-relevant episodes you needed to watch, so he could get the story and skip the filler.
I used to think that way too. I used to rewatch A:TLA and just put on the episodes where the g(A)ang is really focused on their goal of learning the four elements and defeating the fire lord. That is, until I realized that most of those are my least favourite episodes.
In the final moments of the show, Aang has to make a critical decision. Kill the
Read more on thegamer.com
