My wife has been watching a show called Murdoch Mysteries as background noise. It’s a long running medical/police procedural from Canada set at the turn of the century (20th century). Most episodes are murders and stories like that but one episode features an alien invasion of all things. The characters are all taken over by body snatching alien insects who in the end take over the entire town. It’s not revealed to be a dream or story. As far as the viewer knows this is a regular episode. Then the next episode everything is back to normal. It was clearly a Halloween treat but it was just really weird and out of nowhere and then forgotten.
What are some other examples like that and do you like when shows stretch themselves that way?
Not as bad as alien invasion, but Magnum PI had one WTFer: they apparently wanted to do a version of Body Heat, but have the down on his luck PI win in the end. In order to keep the plot of BH intact, every regular cast had to act way out of character. The excuse was the “Kona Winds” made everyone a bit crazy.
There was an episode of CHiPs that was intended as a backdoor pilot for a team of ninjas that performed secret missions for the police department.
I don’t recall any WTF moments from MASH, but there were a couple of interesting experiments: One episode was shown entirely from a patient’s point of view. Another episode had the ghost of a dead patient wandering around the camp.
The Six Million Dollar Man was not exactly known for gritty realism, but I remember one episode that involved a pair of psychic twins, and a gypsy fortune-teller who might have been the ghost of the twins’ mother.
The last episode of The Prisoner (Fall Out) left a lot of viewers angry and confused:
[The final episode] resulted in bafflement and anger among the show’s viewership to such an extent that McGoohan had to leave the country and go “into hiding” for a few days as dissatisfied viewers stormed his house.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer had both the amazing musical episode (Once More, With Feeling) but also the very, very divisive WTF? episode (Normal Again) where the entire Buffyverse was a figment of an insane Buffy’s mind.
Oh. My. GOD! I must have missed that. A series like that would have been…something. I’m not sure what, but something!
The Wild Wild West lived periously close to fantasy land even on the good days, but they had two episodes with Victor Buono who used real magic, I mean like Samantha Stevens not David Copperfield. I think that’s on the wrong side of the line.
Plus they had Ricardo Montalban who could time travel by the power of his mind. Not only was that a WTF episode, but it didn’t even make sense!
I think that a large number of the episodes people are going to cite were backdoor pilots or springboards that broke. The ST:TNG above is a great example. It was meant to serve as an introduction to the Borg, but a writer’s strike screwed up the development,
Michael and Denise Okuda elaborated in their Star Trek Chronology (rev. 1996, p. 290): " At the time the episode was written, this was apparently intended to lead to the introduction of the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation’ s second season. The Borg connection was dropped before ‘Q Who?’ (TNG) was written, and the truth about the parasites remains a mystery. "
There was an episode of Bones that as far as I could tell, confirmed (in universe) the existence of the supernatural, and I mean ghosts and witches. It was some kind of send-up of The Blair Witch Project, IIRC, which is why I watched it.
I didn’t watch Bones regularly, but from what I gathered the two main characters had and on-going feud about rational/irrational, with the irrational meaning the church, and the religious character wasn’t interested in the supernatural as it related to witches, psychic phenomena, and so forth-- he was strictly about Christianity.
To confirm the existence of the far-outliers, as far as most people are concerned-- the ghosts, the goblins, the mind-readers, to me seems to necessarily capitulate on religion as well, but it seemed that the show still kept up the volley between the two characters. I wasn’t sure how it could work anymore after the witch episode, but I haven’t seen every single show, so maybe I’m wrong.
An episode of ‘The Sopranos’ where, in a dream sequence, has a neighbor ( or some non-mob acquaintance of the family ) where he sings the entire Commodores song ‘Three Times a Lady’ to Tony’s wife Carmella. The entire song: pointless and boring.
I was going to mention that episode as well. It was my least favorite episode of an otherwise outstanding show.
Similarly, there was a Married with Children episode that served as a pilot for some other soon-to-fail show, Top of the Heap. Matt Leblanc was in that episode. Again, it was one of my least favorite MWC episodes.
What I first thought of from the thread title is the various shows with backdoor pilot episodes. Especially the ones that have very little screen-time for the main cast. The Top of the Heap pilot in Married With Children and the Mayberry RFD pilot in Andy Griffith, for example.
SG-1 had 'Worm hole extreme". The whole episode was a fourth wall breaking episode wherein the characters make fun of the writers and basic sci-fi tropes:
"If I’m “phase shifted’ and can pass through walls, why don’t I fall through the floor”
Producers: “Uh… we’ll have to get back with you on that”
Grimm had an episode where the monster of the week instead of being the standard human animal hybrid from folk tales like every single other episode was a golem created by jew magic. Even the friendly werewolf that was usually the Grimm’s source of knowledge about all the other creatures was like “I dunno wtf that is”.
the Hercules episode that said Kevin Sorbo was a modern disguise of Hercules and the show was a biography …it even had other Olympians playing themselves…