Spoilers?

[Sage]

I recently joined an awesome Livejournal community Fanficrants and frequent cause for complaint are spoilers. Which got me wondering about them in the context of CS.

I suppose spoilers are a concern for NCS, as many people haven't seen one or both series.
It would never occure to me with OCS though. As the series is nearly forty years old, well known, one season long etc, and I can't see any revelations that would truly detract from someone's enjoyment of an episode.

So in the interests of discussion ...
What would you consider to be a spoiler?
Do you feel it necessary to put in warnings for anything?
How would you go about avoiding spoilers?

Also as a slight tangent ...
With episode guides; do you prefer them to be comphrehensive (as in 'the complete book of CS) or really short and not give away the ending, why?

[Marion]

Spoilers are anything done to deliberately ruin someone else's enjoyment of the show/story/whatever; at least, so it seems to me.
It can be difficult to discuss episodes - as in NCS recently - if you don't refer to incidents in the story. Maybe the solution is to try to keep it vague: so that someone else who saw it would know what you were on about, but someone who hadn't seen it would not?
I know that as I rarely saw the NCS episodes when they were broadcast - because I was at work - I often saw the forum responses and comments before I watched the video and it didn't spoil it for me (who, it has to be said, pretty quickly stopped expecting much and - before I get beaten up - was grateful to sometimes be mildly and pleasantly surprised!)
Comments like - Wow! This is best episode ever - repeated after every week's show soon become fairly meaningless anyway.
I would expect most fans reading a 'review' of a show or book, would expect some details to be referred to - and 'leaked', if you haven't seen or read it yet - and if that concerns them, they should steer clear of that thread. If the author knows what they have to say will reveal all - so to speak - and divulge something that prior knowledge of will ruin the enjoyment for those who haven't seen it - a warning would be polite.

Episode guides - oh yes - details and lots of them!
I never saw every Classic episode and when the BBC repeated them in 1993 ( ? ) they replaced 'Inquisition' with the snooker - or some equally banal event. I had never seen that episode and all I knew was it revolved around Captain Blue being kidnapped. It was a year before the Beeb showed it... extremely frustrating!
I have seen one MSN site - I think it is Captain Indigo's or Scarlet Lady's - apologies if I am wrong there - where there are 'potted synopsis' options with links to detailed analysis of every episode - so you can take your choice. Great idea!

What irritates me more than genuine debate about an episode/story/whatever, is the assertion that it has to be viewed with your critical faculties switched off because it is almost blasphemy to dare to point out it has any faults at all. And that applies to any fandom.
Classic CS has been around for almost 40 years; it has been watched and dissected under a microscope by generations of fans. We laugh at the inanities, roll our eyes at the plot gaffes and love it - just the same.

[Scarlet Lady]

That's Captain Indigo's. I'm not that clever or patient.

[Captain Indigo]

Yes, they're mine. I'm currently working on getting the whole lot online. My 'spoilers' work on the basis that I don't like to find out the ending myself before I've seen something, but a quick overview of the episode is sometimes helpful. Admittedly, mine are VERY brief, but if I've seen an episode, there's often a big long review hidden behind the synopsis so that you can't accidently stumble across it.

I'm not sure that spoilers would be an issue for OCS, and I've not read that much NCS fic to really comment, but I think that for the CS fandom as a whole, knowledge of the episodes is pretty much a given for anyone reading the stories. I am well aware of the fact that there are people who haven't seen S2 of NCS (not least because I'm one of them), but even so, most fic doesn't rely on the plot of an ep so heavily that it gives the ending away.

For anything that relies heavily on S2, maybe there should be a warning in the 'blurb' or foreword to warn readers, but I think that OCS and S1 should be quite safe.

And, just to finish with a shameless plug, my episode guides have been moved to geocities now. The new URL is http://www.geocities.com/supermarionation_forever and follow the links for the Spectrum Database (you can use this link for the next couple of weeks or so, but not for very long now... ).

[Mary]

In newsgroups devoted to TV series, posters often put the word SPOILER in caps in the header, then also leave a significant amount of space in their post between the beginning and the "spoiler" part of the post. This is essential with shows that are broadcast in different time zones in the US, let alone rebroadcasts in other countries.