The 'programmes you re-watch' thread reminded me that I'd meant to create a topic like this.
Getting the ball rolling with the specific example that's in my mind right now...
....when I started my recent Northern Exposure re-watch, I found an extensive timeline (complete with forensic, if scribbled, notes all over it) that I'd put together last time round to make sure of what the timeframe was and explain to my own satisfaction when exactly every episode occurred, and how things could be plausibly made to fit together. There's a sort of spine of things like 'this ep has to be on the third Thursday in Nov, 1992' etc. and then a whole lot of extrapolation around it about irreducible minimums for the events in episode 'x', how that affexts proximity or distance implied or stated in adjoining episodes as broadcast, and so on.
Long story short, by the time I'd finished that prevoius re-watch, I had something that had nailed it all down in a way that I could say, 'yes, it all makes sense, if it starts in June of 1990 and finishes in summer/early Autumn 1996 (despite being a 1990-1995 run as broadcast), and that seemingly contradictory statement X can be explained by re-framing context Y and so on).
I also worked out that broadcast order doesn't work for one specific episode ('Thanksgiving'), which has to be shunted a few places down the line to let the rest of the 1992 eps have enough breathing space to have actually happened in a year lasting 365 days. I suspect that ep got pulled forward to be more synchronously resonant with that year's actual Thanksgiving, but they then forgot to put it where it needs to go on the DVD releases. I also suspect that I might be the only person on the planet to care either way, and to have worked it out or felt the need to do so in order to be able to properly relax and enjoy the thing. Well, I enjoyed it anyway - but some part of me was always alert to continuity issues, and I wanted to give future (now present) me the opportunity to have a prepared timeline to hand that sorts it all out with quick reference.
Anyway, it's one of those things that, post-diagnosis, I look back on and go - 'of course, how could I have ever have thought I was otherwise?' Anybody else got this kind of obsessive mind about making fictional things fit together in order to be sure that they could have happened 'for real'?
I have that with Doctor Who and other scifi things too, of course - but the above is maybe the most niche example of where that kind of fixation took hold of me. Can anyone relate, and do you have a similar story to confess?