Since conflict among TNG ship’s crew was forbidden by Gene Roddenberry, someone had to be mind controlled, duplicated, cloned, drugged, possessed, reprogrammed, imitated, or come from the mirror universe just about every other episode, so the main characters could fight with each other.
Someone gets knocked unconscious in just about every episode of Smallville. Maybe that’s why nobody’s able to recognize Clark when he’s Superman, even though he won’t ever wear a mask- everyone’ll have brain damage by that point.
Actually, the one episode of “Voyager” that I thought was genuinely interesting was the ep. in which Seven of Nine defies Janeway: An intelligent alien creature (one of those lame things from another universe - 'Species <whatever number>) gets onboard the ship. Another alien that is hunting it for sport pursues it. Janeway pleads for Seven of Nine to use her whatever Borg skill to send the ‘Species <whatever number>’ creature back to it’s own universe and elude the hunter. Seven of Nine refuses, and actually helps the hunter capture his quarry. Janeway chastises Seven, but Seven retorts that for all Janeway’s lofty speeches about how great it is to be an individual & think for herself, Janeway doesn’t like it that Seven acted like an individual & thought for herself.
Anyway, hijack over.
“Buffy the Vampire Slayer” - The year-long storyarcs got to be repetitive: “Big Bad” comes to town, “Big Bad” menaces Buffy & the Scoobies, Xander romance subplot, Willow romance subplot, “Bigger bad” drops out of nowhere to trounce “Big Bad” and menace Buffy & the Scoobies even more, life lesson gets learned, big end-of-season fight, cliffhanger.
Undisputed king of this shit: The A-Team
10 The A-Team stumbles across someone in distress who needed their help.
20 The A-Team refuses or returns payment for their services.
30 The A-Team brawls with the baddies and wins; the baddies skulk away promising to get even.
40 The A-Team constructs some sort of vehicle/weapon out of materials at their immediate disposal, without fail requiring some serious welding.
50 Next week, goto 10
MacGuyver did the same shit every week too, but they were usually pretty good about making different situations for him to do his thing in (other than just breaking out of captivity).
I had thought that was a preliminary script that eventually “became” The Message. I read the same script, although I don’t specifically recall the context around it.
On Star Trek TOS, there was an awful lot of:
[ul]
[li]Crew encounters civilization run by computer[/li][li]Kirk convinces computer that it is being illogical[/li][li]Computer self destructs[/li][li]Locals live in peace and harmony forever[/li][/ul]
Bit of Googling turns up: “Dead or Alive,” apparently slated to be filmed as episode 15 of the first season.
Season after season, *ER *repeatedly runs stories in which the docs and nurses are beaten, stabbed, shot or raped. The plot device got really old about seven years ago but the producers keep bringing it back.
I think Comedy Central Presents is a terrific show, but it’s always about some guy (sometimes they throw a curve ball by having a woman on) telling jokes in front of an audience. They’ve repeated this same plot consistently episode after episode ever since the show started.
I thought the Ultimate Disease was vasculitis? 