[quote=Marik]
I’ll probably try and watch it on a weekly basis then. I’ve only been really tuning in to re-watch Gurren Lagann, and I’ve also been following One Piece since it’s so close to a point that I haven’t seen yet. But yeah, I’ve never stuck with Ghost in the Shell because whenever I’d tune in it’d be somewhere in the middle of the show and I’d have no context.
[/quote]

There's two kinds of episodes, 'stand-alone' and 'complex' (not to be confused with the 'Stand-Alone Complex,' a condition of copies or imitations of an original which does not actually exist). The 'Stand-alone' episodes often actually have no context at all, and contribute to character- or concept-development rather than plot. If you keep up with *all* of them, you're rewarded, but they're not strictly speaking essential to anything. It's like, 'What if we had a show about cybercops, but one episode we just look at this random joe instead and see the world through his eyes, and then maybe the cops show up eventually but who cares.'