The Traveling Salesman Problem

"The travelling salesman problem (TSP) asks the following question: "Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city and returns to the origin city?" It is an NP-hard problem in combinatorial optimization, important in operations research and theoretical computer science."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem

So if someone took a place, like San Francisco, or New Orleans, that one or both Mavericks visited several times, and found two different episodes set in that place which had specified years, or years and months, or even complete dates, one could set up a sort of travelling salesman problem.

One could arbitrarily assume that all Maverick episodes happen between the earliest and the latest dates of episodes in that place. And then plotting the distances between various real place the Mavericks visited, and probable travel times by horse or stagecoach for those places that didn't have rail or steamboat travel, calculate the route which would have the shortest total distance and thus the shortest total travel time.

And also calculate the total travel time, and see if it would fit within the number of years that you think that the Maverick episodes should take without the Mavericks and other characters starting to look too old.

It is my theory that in a long series of episodic stories with few continuity changes, most episodes happen in alternate universes of their own, separate from all other episodes which are in their own separate alternate universes.

And since few Maverick episodes are sequels to earlier Maverick episodes, It should be possible for each Maverick brother to travel his total travel distance in any sequence of a few episodes which happen in the same alternate universe in a short enough time.

But if all the Maverick episodes happen one after another in the same alternate universe there might not be enough time for each Maverick to travel his total travel distance while aging few enough years to be consistent with his appearance in the show.