Continuity Audit

Find one continuity failure in a studied franchise, prove it is a failure, and trace it to the production decision that caused it.

Due: 22 March 2027 · Weight: 25%

The brief#

Find one continuity failure in the MCU, the CW Arrowverse or LEGO Ninjago, and trace it back to the production decision that caused it.

A continuity failure is a place where the story stops agreeing with itself. Week 1 sorts them into three classes: a contradiction (two established facts that cannot both be true), an orphan (a setup the story never paid off) and drift (a character or a rule that changes with no cause in the story).

An audit does three things, in order. It locates the failure: both sides of it, pinned to a title and a scene. It classifies it, and argues for that class over the next most likely one. Then it traces it: what happened in the writers’ room, the schedule or the contract that made the failure the cheapest option at the time. Failures are rarely accidents. Someone usually chose them.

Choose something small and exact over something famous and vague. “Ninjago’s timeline is confusing” is not a failure. A line in one episode that a later episode makes impossible is.

What you submit#

An audit of no more than 1,200 words, as a PDF, with a source list that doesn’t count towards the limit. Cite screen texts by title and scene, episode or timestamp. Cite production sources by publication and date.

Keep your audit. The Retcon Proposal asks you to repair a failure, and yours is a good candidate.

The Mandarin reveal in Iron Man 3 is the worked example in week 1, so it cannot be audited. Neither can any failure worked through in a seminar before the due date.