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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cthulhudrew" data-source="post: 1841063" data-attributes="member: 4090">As far as the writing credit goes, I imagine that's just what it is. The whole story was likely plotted out by the entire writing staff, and given to one writer to write up, with changes and suggestions made by the producer. They only credit the main "writer", however (for union purposes), but the story has actually been gone over very thoroughly by all involved. It's a very common practice (happened on Buffy a lot), particularly on weekly shows (where there is a lot of work to get done in a short period of time).I think you'll find it's actually fairly rare for the alternative to happen- where a multi-episode arc is credited as being written by the same person.As for the different directors, I'm not quite so certain what the rationale is, but I think it's probably similar- due to time demands on directors during the production of episodic television, they split the directing duties between two or more directors. In a situation like this one, I'd wouldn't be surprised if there were two directors shooting out of sequence for all the episodes back to back at the same time (sort of like what is called a "second unit"), so that there are 2+ directors working at the same time, dividing the usage of the actors.</blockquote>