Seconded. I cry everytime I see it (the song at the end… gaaahh:(:(:(). There are quite a few later episodes of Futurama that are melancholy.
I remember taking a science-fiction unit as part of my freshman English class in high school (1976/77); our text was a smallish (only 300 pages or so) anthology of SF stories. IIRC, none of them were what we today would consider “classics” of SF.
A few years later, when I was in college, the 80s TZ version came on – every episode I saw was taken from one of the stories in the anthology, including “The Cold Equations”.
No way. I might get misty at Luck of the Fryrish, but it’s more because you get to see how much the brothers love each other. You also get to find out that Yancy moved on, lived his life, had a son who was a great success, etc. With The Sting, you get to see how much Fry cared about Leela. You also find out that Fry and Leela are both OK.
With Jurassic Bark you get to see how much Seymour loves Fry, but there’s no happy ending for Seymour.
Fryrish and Sting are like crying at a wedding, Bark is like crying when the bride is run over by a truck.
Yeah, and we saw them all in Season Three.
There’s a lot of sad stuff in *Magnum, P.I. * I mean, there’s always that vague feeling of “easy slick drama” about it, but when you do the “if these were real people” thing in your head you realize how tragic and screwed up Magnum and TC are, particularly.
A couple more Trek nominations:
Data uses part of his own circuitry to create another Soong-type android, which he intends to raise as his daughter, Lal. Lal, surprisingly, quickly becomes her father’s better at least one: she has honest-to-goodness, no-two-ways-about-it emotions. An admiral decides that Lal is too valuable a resource to leave on the Enterprise; when told that she is about to be separated from her father, Lal panics and breaks down. At the end of the episode she dies, and I’ve always thought we were meant to take it that the emotional upset before she was ready for it is what killed her.
TOS: A Private Little War, aka Gene Roddenberry’s apology for the war in Vietnam & Korea.
Returning to a planet he surveyed as a lieutenant, Kirk & Co. discover that, as part of their cold war with the Federation, the Klingons are arming the village-dwelling faction of a planet’s society so they will conquer another faction, the hill people. If this happens, the Klingons will then have a client state on the planet, a foothold that will bring them one sector closer to Earth, Vulcan, and so forth. To keep this from happening–and, not incidentally, to avert genocide on either side–he decides that he must arm the hill people with comparable weapons to the villagers; this will, of course, lead to generations of war. McCoy points out that Kirk’s pacifist friend Tyree will be one of the first people to die in the coming conflict. But he’s wrong–as Tyree’s wife is murdered by the villagers, causing an uncommonly bloody skirmish (for Trek, anyway) in which Tyree beats one of their opponents heads with a rock in for a long, long time; Kirk ultimately has to take the stone away from him. Tyree then tells Kirk that he wants many weapons, as he intends to lead the hill folk in a war against the villagers; thus the natives embark upon a war as pawns, in an issue that has not a damn thing to do with them. In the final scene, Kirk doesn’t ask to be beamed back tothe ship; he asks to be beamed home.
How were they screwed up? I’m not contesting; it’s just that I never watched the show with any regularity (the only episode I ever watched from beginning to end was the finale), so I wouldn’t mind more details.
You should watch Bender’s Big Score if you haven’t yet. There’s a bit with Seymour.
I dunno man, I think it’s pretty sad to live to your mid twenties and never know how much your brother loved you.
Flower’s death on Meerkat Manor
There’s always that ER episode where one of the doctors dies because his head hurts or something. You know, the bald guy? The nice one, not the angry little pissant.
Oh, same here! One of the networks (TNT, maybe?) is showing the old ERs and I caught that one too…devastating! Man, I’ve got to find a new job, soon!
The first episode of [i}Archie Bunker’s Place*; taking place about a month after Edith died of a stroke. I only saw the thing once, and am not particularly interested in seeing it again. Sad, sad, sad, sad, sad.
Battlestar Galactica’s “Exodus Part II”. First Tigh has to kill his wife Ellen for collaborating with the Cylons – beautiful writing, acting, and music. Then at the end, when everyone’s cheering Adama’s victory and the fleet is reunited, Tigh comes limping off a raptor with a cane, a missing eye, the past year of fighting, and the weight of his wife’s death on his conscience. Adama comes over to him, proud and beaming, and says, “You did it, you brought them home, Saul.” And Tigh grits out, “Not all of them,” and then limps away from the celebration.
Quite a few of the “very special Magnum” episodes deal with the cast’s time in Vietnam; in addition to general PTSD stuff they had spent some time as POWs and Magnum had married a Vietnamese girl only to, uh,
have her die in an explosion before he could take her home, but then she didn’t turn out to be dead after all and it was a two parter.
There’s a lot of bad stuff going on behind Thomas Magnum’s happy go lucky exterior. It almost makes me want to write fanfic. Slutty slash fanfic.
Explaining to Big Bird that Mr. Hooper isn’t coming back.
Is this the one containing the scene of Archie clutching one of Edith’s slippers and beginning to cry? I have vague memories of that episode, but that particular scene is as clear as day.
I’ve never seen Futurama, including the Jurrasic Bark ep, but just the descriptions I’ve read make me tear up. Anything with animals hurt or in jeopardy (but not onJeopardy!) gets me every time.
StG
Was the first ep. you mentioned the one where Dr. Franklin tried to save the young boy by performing surgery against his parents’ wishes–and then they ended up killing their own son to try to save his soul?
I was bothered by that for days.