In the first CATEGORIES, I formulated seven forms of narrative, oriented upon but not confined to the medium of comics: the vignette, the short arc, the short story, the long arc, the novella, the compact novel, and the episodic novel. These formulations grew from earlier meditations on the ways in which symbolic/mythopoeic discourse arose with the sub-medium of comic strips, so the idea of mythicity was primarily my subject. I would tend to say that any of the other "domains" I've addressed on this blog follow the same narrative rules, but I don't choose to follow any of those threads at this time
At the end of the first essay, I cited one form of narrative that was somewhat outside my concerns:
Just to be clear, most serial endeavors are really just assemblages of ongoing episodes with no structuring principle, usually combining short stories and long arcs. Akamatsu's LOVE HINA is not a novel, episodic or otherwise, just because the author has in mind a summary wrap-up story.
What I simply implied in that paragraph I'll make more explicit here: such "assemblages of ongoing episodes" don't share a common "structuring principle," which I later related to such terms as "concrescence" and "epistemological patterns." Thus, I can declare a particular handful of Classic STAR TREK episodes to be mythic discourses, because each of those episodes follows the structuring principle that makes mythic discourse possible. But there's no single structuring principle uniting all of the episodes, good and bad. OPERATION ANNIHILATE is a bad "alien plague" story, and I can demonstrate how even a bad episode shares some of the some story-tropes found in a good episode on the same theme, such as THE NAKED TIME. But stories about the virtues of Federation society, whether mediocre like THE OMEGA GLORY or superior like THIS SIDE OF PARADISE, are not inherently tied to the tropes of the "alien plague" story-type. It's certainly possible to imagine an episodic novel that somehow dovetailed both themes and made them part of a greater whole. But Classic STAR TREK is not structured even to attempt such a synthesis.
Since "assemblage" is not an apt term in this case, from hereon I'll substitute the term "basic serial." The basic serial in most iterations is not meant to be structured at all; only parts of it, be they short stories, long arcs, or other forms, display the sort of patterns that can be judged in terms of concrescence.
To date, STAR TREK is the only series for which I've reviewed every episode, and oddly, it's one of the few serials that I would consider to be "mythic" not just in the epistemological sense, but in the lesser sense that a vast number of people, even non-fans, are aware of its themes. Whenever I've reviewed whole serials in a single review, like this one, I've usually given them only a "fair" rating of mythicity, though this was meant to be only a general judgment. Now it occurs to me that it's impossible to give any rating higher than "fair" to a basic serial, since greater concrescence is not tenable in that form. The only serials that I envision proving an exception to this rule would be those that don't fit the scattershot format of the basic serial-- in other words, novellas like THAT YELLOW BASTARD, compact novels like HELLSING, and episodic novels like Kirby's NEW GODS.
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