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A Missing Gap in Solty

Curse you Netflix! Why must you be so awesome and yet so tantalizingly close to perfect?

For just about any sort of media you can get on a DVD these days, Netflix's service is great.  Anime however is a slight exception.  Much of western television and serialized visual entertainment is fairly encapsulated.  Each episode can stand on it's own merit.  Just about anything you catch in syndication can be watched without too much issue.  A character may come and go or a relationship may be different for example.  A few shows have overarching storylines, like Lost and Fringe.  These shows rely heavily on having a plot that continues from one show to the next.  And then there are shows that are a mix.  Shows like Babylon 5 have a beginning, middle, and end but fill the time between with stories that stand on their own.

I've found that anime is definitely in the storytelling mode of continuing plot lines.  Stories that stand out as being unrelated to the plot are clearly pointed at as filler episodes.  Seeing an anime show out of order can be pretty annoying, especially if the story is full of reveals and twists and turns like anime often is.

What this all comes down to is a feature of Netflix that can get very annoying.  When the next DVD on your Netflix queue is not available, they send you the next disk.  Each DVD of a television show is considered to be it's own movie on your queue.  So when disk 4 of Solty Rei wasn't available for me to watch, they sent me disk 5.  I, not realizing this is what happened, dutifully watched disk 5.  There had been so much time in between my viewings of disk 3 and 5 that I had assumed that my memory of the events in 3 was just especially bad.

I didn't realize what had happened until disk 4 arrived in my mailbox.  So please Netflix, treat serialized episodic content as a single entity on the queues.  Continuity thanks you.

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