Version 2.0, 16 September 2026. Extend the original three-critic panel with Joshua Alston's complete twelve-review A.V. Club series. Author and displayed letter grade checked in each original article header. Preserve retrieval timestamp, source URL, hash and grade locator. Every included outlet has exactly episodes 1–12. Discovery files include unsuccessful searches; no critic is excluded for giving a favorable score. Four retrieved complete panels are not an exhaustive census of criticism.
Predefined comparison: median grade for episodes 1–4 versus episodes 9–12; sensitivity uses episodes 9–11. Letter-grade order is F, D−, D, D+, C−, C, C+, B−, B, B+, A−, A, A+. An even-size letter median is reported as an interval between central grades when needed. We never average grades across publishers. An optional scale-free table field records the fraction of early/late comparisons where the early grade is higher, counting ties as one-half; it is descriptive, not an independent-sample significance test.
The original panel retains its known uncertainty: IGN finale grade is the current revised version, not necessarily the initially published grade; Den of Geek premiere has 3.5 in the author body and 4.0 in the footer. Main analysis uses the author's 3.5. With 4.0 the first-window median is 3.75, still above 2.25. Entertainment Fuse's maximum is not consistently established; preserve numeric grades without assigning a denominator. Verify all assertions from reviews.csv and do not infer audience opinion from critics' grades.
The main finding is the within-panel temporal difference. Existing professional reviews remain the sources for an individual critic's opinion. The contribution is collecting complete sequences and checking whether a decline persists without the finale, not an invented overall review score.
Version 3.0 adds two post-season assessments in a separate table: IGN's whole-season 5.5/10 and the Guardian's negative final-season/finale commentary. These supplement the original episode panel without being pooled into episode medians. The qualitative account of a sharp decline is supported by A.V. Club's direct finale assessment and its letter-grade trajectory; the magnitude is not asserted identical across all critics.