Two coding questions

I’ve been going over the codex and plugins section for days, but as I can’t find a fix for this I figured that I’d ask:

Problem A:

The archive template for the theme i’m using applies to when showing the archives, but not the archive list page itself. Rather than writing the list by hand, I went in and found a plugin that allows php scripts to be executed on pages and put the archive php code into the page itself. The problem is that I want the episodes to be listed by their title, not their date. Is there any way to do this?

Problem B:

The comments on the page need to have the first two or three comments on the post itself shown right beneath it, with an option to then view the other comments. I’ve tried a “recent comments” widget, but it lists the comments by author and post, not the body of the comment itself. I can’t seem to find a widget/plugin that does this, so does anyone know if there is one at all? Or else, how to rewrite the code to get it to do this?

Thanks for reading, and for any help.