User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-1293767-20151029072618/@comment-26469787-20151029092241

Bwburke94 wrote: There is precedent for non-consecutive weeks being a two-parter, but that was only a two-week gap between The Sontaran Stratagem and The Poison Sky, and the gap was not a deliberate production decision.

What there is not precedent for is a story sharing no elements with a traditional two-parter to be called a two-parter. Both A Good Man Goes to War and Let's Kill Hitler had previously-on segments, but unlike the traditional two-parters of the era, the previously recapped the entirety of Series 6 rather than the previous episode.

As a sidenote, Utopia had its next-time trailer after the credits similar to other two-parters, so it can be inferred that it is Part 1 of 3.

TSS and TPS may be the only problem for my proposed basis. However, if we extended it to "consecutive weeks or stories within a successive run of the show", or made some similar such adjustment, the distinction between AGMGTW/LKH (two episodes with a break of several weeks) and TSS/TPS (two episodes with a break of a single week) would be obvious.

And yes, we can infer that Utopia is Part 1/3, as we and most other groups do. But it has been stated that this is not true by the writer, whereas no such statement has ever been made about any other two-part stories classified as such in DWM. Our current policy seems to support the 1/3 assumption, but if a user chooses to debate this point, it would be a valid argument, whereas if somebody stated that TSS/TPS was not a two-part story, they would not have any backing by authorial intent.