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Notes -
Man, spoiled kids these days and their arc-plots. A few decades ago we had a special term for a television episode where the main characters interacted with guest characters who were only there for the purposes of that week's plot, would never be seen again, and wouldn't affect the show's setting or future episodes in any way: we called that "a television episode".
I'm not sure what changed that, exactly. There are lots of technological developments that made an arc-plot easier to follow, but the change greatly postdates VCRs and predates streaming services. At some point we went very quickly from "Star Trek: The Next Generation" (where seeing the Borg again was a Big Thing and IIRC seeing Picard's flute a second time started a writer's room debate) to "Babylon 5" (where if you missed a block of episodes then God help you with the next one). But B5 was always on the verge of cancellation; maybe it wasn't until DVRs became popular that shows started safely assuming their viewers never missed an episode.
You're forgetting X-Files. They literally had a term for it: Mytharc.
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