Watchers Fun Facts: Episode Lengths Edition
-Despite mostly, theoretically, fitting into an hour time-slot, Watchers episodes varied wildly in actual length. Both the longest and shortest Watchersverse episodes are “Restoration” stories. At 36 pages, “Prices Paid” is the shortest episode, while, at 147 pages, the movie-length episode “Unbound” was the longest.
-If only “Watchers” episodes are accounted for, the shortest episodes were “Red Herring” and “Real World”, both from Season 2, at 41 pages. The longest episode was the double-length Season 5 Finale “Unto the End”, at 141 pages (unsurprisingly, as along with “Generations, Pt. 3” this was one of only two “Watchers” episodes to stretch to eight Acts).
-The longest “regular” episode of “Watchers” (i.e. structured as a Teaser and four Acts) was the Season 3 episode “Rule of Three”, at 103 pages. Ironically, both this episode and “Ouroboros” from later that year came in longer at four acts than the actual season finale “Megiddo”, which has six Acts.
-For whatever reason, “Watchers” episodes consistently got longer overall as time went on. More than half of the episodes of Season 1 are under 50 pages, but the average for Season 5 is somewhere around 70. At 54 pages, “Tainted” is the shortest episode of the final two seasons of the main “Watchers” series.
-Watchers did several stories that were spread over multiple episodes, but of these only “Ragnarok”, “Generations”, and “Special Assignment” are actually designated under the same title (Part 1, Part 2, etc.). Of these, “Generations” is of course the longest, coming in at 298 pages.
-“Generations” was originally supposed to be only a two-parter, and “Special Assignment” was originally supposed to be a single, movie-length episode. However, as each episode got longer and longer, the decision was made to split off a third part of “Generations” and a second part of “Special Assignment”.
