Our policy on Production Numbers

If you aren't sure on the production number of your entry, leave it blank. That said, our policy is as follows.

TV series and Films

This can be a knotty subject. Please read this carefully when assigning production numbers.

It is genearlly accepted that film and TV is made out of order when it comes to storyline. Strictly speaking, the Star Wars films would be numbered as such:

1: A New Hope
2: The Empire Strikes Back
3: Return of the Jedi
4: The Phantom Menace
5: Attack of the Clones
6: Revenge of the Sith

That numbering follows the production order. However, it is intended that the films are to be viewed in Episode order. Since the SFDB is an information resource, and each film has an entry space for production date anyway, it would be more useful to the reader for the films to be listed in story order. We're not the IMDB, we're SF fans, and as such the story takes precedence over the more mundane concerns of the order in which the story was made. As such, the older trilogy would be listed as 4, 5 and 6.

Similarly, for the Star Trek series, Enterprise should come first.

TV episodes

Note should be made of the fact that every television episode has it's own production number. However, there are occasions when the production order is off sync with the story order. One example is Babylon 5's season 1 finale, "Chrysalis", which was filmed as episode 12 of the first season, despite being the 22nd episode aired. Similarly, episode 3, "Infection", was the first episode filmed. For this reason, we will avoid using production numbers for TV episodes, and instead use "story order".

The conventions for this will match commonly used "production order" numbering. That is to say, each episode gets a three-digit code. The first digit is the season number, the last two are the episode number in story order. So " Infection" would be 103. Chrysalis would be 122.