I’ve heard a lot of people say they hate “The Fly” from season three of Breaking Bad, but I love it. IMO it has some of the best dialogue in the series. The basic premise is Walt finding a fly in the lab, and refusing to do anything until its gone.
Here’s an example of that great dialogue. Walt’s trying to tell Jesse about the “contamination,” and Jesse finds out it’s just a fly.
Jesse: When you said contamination I thought we had an ebola leak or something, not a fly…
Walt: Ebola? (Sarcastic tone)
Jesse: Yeah, it’s a disease on the Discovery channel where your guts just sorta fall out of your butt
I’m a big Buffy fan, but have no love at all for The Zeppo. I just didn’t like it. It bewilders me that people use this episode to introduce the show to people who don’t know it. So yeah, I’m one of those who hate it (don’t know if it’s the majority though).
Right, I couldn’t imagine using it as an entry to the series, simply because it is so clearly designed to play off the established themes of the series.
With that said, while not my favorite ep ever, I like it quite a lot, because it’s an interesting inversion of audience expectations and the convention of the loyal, permanent sidekick.
The Twilight Zone episode with the two headed Martians. I laughed my ass off watching that recently. It was cheesy, but deliberately so and funny. The ending, with the two Venutians was perfect.
I’ve always been surprised to see people expressing dislike for “A View From the Gallery”, one of my favorite episodes of Babylon 5.
I’m also a fan of “Spock’s Brain”, but that may be because I read the James Blish adaptation before I ever saw the episode, and the concept works better on paper than on film.
I also love the final episodes of Roseanne and St. Elsewhere, but sadly not the final episode of Quantum Leap.
How do you figure this one is hated by most fans of the series? The ratings at TV.com are quite good, and better than most of the episodes that season (and that was one of the classic Landau/Bain seasons, when they were racking up acting Emmys). Heck, isn’t it the one the producers later chose to show on the big screen overseas, figuring it was good enough to pass as a feature film?
Well, at least for an honorable mention, since it was a movie spinoff that only got shown on television and not a theatrical release as planned, I’ll say: G.I. Joe: The Movie.
The 1987 animated version, not the 2009 live-action one.
I don’t think I’ve met or read of a single other person who liked this one. Even the screenwriters had problems with it. I always thought it was awesome.
(Though, for the record, the only thing Lt. Falcon was good for was having an action figure that I could pencil a mustache on and use as Saddam Hussein when I was a kid, and being in that later Very Special Episode where he got hooked on cinnamon-flavored cocaine.
There doesn’t seem to be a lot of respect for a TNG episode called “The Royale” but I thought it was clever in a way only a handful of Trek episodes are, across all the shows. As with “A Piece of the Action” and “The Arsenal of Freedom”, the characters are stuck in some goofy seemingly-intractable situation, and the solution doesn’t call for moral arguments or bullshit sanctimony - but just going with it and playing by the situation’s own rules until you reach the conclusion.
Well, plus I first watched it with a bunch of Ottawa Trek fans, and when Riker, Data and Worf tried to leave through the revolving door and simply kept coming back into the lobby, somebody in the back said “A wise guy, huh? nyuk-nyuk-nyuk-nyuk…”
I’d also like to go on the record as liking The Principal and the Pauper, That '90s Show, Saddlesore Galactica and Threshold.
The Doctor Who episode Love and Monsters is widely regarded as the worst post-revival episode, but I enjoyed it for what it was - a comedy piece about the Doctor as seen from an ordinary Joe, which doesn’t take itself seriously and has a monster-of-the-week as designed by an elementary school kid.
If I may draw from the world of music, It’s Hard is considered to be the worst of the Who’s albums, but I personally love it - the musicianship isn’t very Who-ish, but the songwriting is sublime.
Love and Monsters is what I thought of when I saw the thread title. Like a lot of the episodes mentioned here, I think it’s more polarizing than simply unpopular. I think it’s one of the best Who episodes ever, and I remember other people saying the same thing when it came out (at the same time that others were hating on it).
I also liked The Principal and the Pauper, though I agree that the idea is better than the execution. I was surprised to learn years after it aired that some people, including Harry Shearer, apparently, hated it.
I’d mostly stopped watching the Simpsons by the time of That 90s Show and I didn’t see the episode, but I also didn’t understand the hatred of that one. The rolling timeline had been an ongoing gag for the Simpsons for over a decade at that point! For some reason, no one had a problem with Homer being in high school from the moon landing through to the “clear foods” fad, but as soon as they crossed into the 90s people couldn’t take it.
I wonder what the average age of viewers of the Simpsons is. It blows my mind that the vast majority of its viewers probably weren’t alive when it premiered!
I’d be quite surprised if a majority (let alone a vast majority) of Simpsons viewers were under 22. I’ve tried to check this, but current demographic info is hard to find.
Well put me down for loving the last episode of The Sopranos. Then I started hearing from my friends that hated it, thought their cable went out, didn’t think it proved that he died, etc etc. I don’t want to rehash it here, but I thought it was flawless.
Yeah the Zeppo episode of Buffy definitely doesn’t count. It’s one of my favorite episodes. Everyone I know who likes Buffy likes the episode. It’s consistently considered one of the best episodes of Buffy.
Fans of a show have a lot invested in the canon. So when writers mess with that canon in ways that fundamentally alter what has been established it tends to upset the fans. One of the reasons Harry Shearer dislikes the episode is because he feels as though it was an insult to fans.
Even the current writers seem to hate it. A 2010 episode where The Simpsons go curling (“Boy Meets Curl”) includes multiple references to Skinner being Agnes’ biological son.
Wait, you honestly really expected the series finale to be the final triumph of the Cylons as they exterminate the last human beings? That’s what the show should have been about?
I always thought it was awesome.