Part of what is problematic to so many writers about the term "filler episodes" is that for some viewers, stories only count when they're sprinting breathless through the events of the story arc, if things aren't directly moving ahead or blowing up, which ignores the reality that those events have to have meaning to the characters, have to change them and react to them, and we can't see those changes, or understand those reactions, unless we understand the characters. This is the crucial difference between incident and story.
Incident is "the king died, then the queen died." Story is, "the king died, then the queen died of grief." There's emotional connectivity that has to be built into the story. Yeah, you can jump into sex and just do all the things without emotion or foreplay or having any idea of who the other person actually is, and for some people that's just fine, but not, I suspect for everyone.
Pausing all the Big Events to do a character story isn't "filler"...it's a part of setting the stage for the impact of those events. If someone doesn't care about the the people who these things are happening to, then there's no point to the story. Story events are things that happen to people; if you only focus on the former it's basically porn structure and empty; if only the latter, it's uninteresting naval-gazing.
You have to service both sides equally. That's why character episodes aren't filler; they're where we see consequence and understand what all this means. Some folks say that because they're "filler" they must have been easier to write. Nothing would be farther from the truth. Take a movie structure: you know how you want to start the story, and how it ends...big, easy stuff...the hard part is keeping the audience's attention through the second act when there's not as much inherently exciting stuff to work with; usually just a lot of shoe-leather.
There's a term writers of movies and novels use for the second act: "The desert of the middle." It's always the hardest part to write. Ditto TV episodes where you have to write the strong character episodes between the big explosive episodes. But if you don't have those things then you're not going to care about the big things when they happen, and for some folks, that's fine, they just want to see shit blow up. But I don't think that applies to most folks who want to relate to the characters in the story and to feel for them, the bad to fail and the good to succeed.
One last point about "filler episodes" is that the term has, or had, a very specific industry meaning only when it came to daily soap operas. Soap opera weekly structure is: Monday resolves the Friday cliffhanger and introduces a new story element or controversy. Tuesday nothing new is introduced, it's everyone talking about, repeating, or worrying about what it all means. This is a filler episode. Wednesday there's usually some small spike, a new bit of information. Thursday back to talking about, repeating or worrying about what came up Thursday. Filler. Then Friday comes the cliffhanger/story event, which is resolved Monday, rinse and repeat. (This is more relevant to old-school soaps than some of the newer ones, but even there you can see echoes of that structure.) That's how "filler episodes" were/are generally seen in the industry.
Within some of the public, it's anything that doesn't rocket forward. I remember when "Comes the Inquisitor" was described as just "filler" when it first aired because it didn't move the story along.
But would the story have been as meaningful without it? To dismiss something as "filler" is to hand-wave away the effort that went into it, and ignore the point of character-based episodes: to make the story *matter* to the characters and the audience. Otherwise, why the hell even tell it?
-- J. Michael Straczynski
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