Earlier thread, with some interesting examples.
Another, more recent thread on the same topic.
That episode was HYSTERICAL. Marcy playing a ‘cabin boy-girl’ trying to show Steve that she was a girl, holding open her shirt, screaming ‘I’m a girl! Look at these! LOOK!’ and him squinting at her chest, lol. And Peg looked just magnificent in that green gown, a takeoff on Maureen O’Hara in the old Technicolor pirate movie of the 40’s.
Was “Sub Rosa” the one with Beverly Crusher’s ghost lover? Yeah that one was definitely a WTF episode.
Most of the examples given here are outright fantasy or science fiction elements being added to a show and then dropped immediately. There are also ones where something is established about a character that’s reality-based, but it’s dropped in all future episodes. The one that I’m thinking of is the episode of The Big Bang Theory (“The Solder Excursion Diversion”, Season 9, Episode 19) where Sheldon shows Amy the storage space he rents where he keeps every old thing he ever owned, since he didn’t want to throw away anything. No mention is made of this in any other episode. It doesn’t fit with any of Sheldon’s other mental problems. I think this has happened in other programs. Don’t expect even good programs to be very consistent.
If animated shows count as shows, Daria, which is normally set in an entirely realistic world, has the episode “Depth Takes a Holiday” where the characters discover randomly encounter the anthropomorphic personifications of holidays, who are people now. This is of course never mentioned again.
Like “Amir Tamzarian” (Principal Skinner) on The Simpsons. In fact, at the end of that episode the judge declares that he is, from then on, “Seymour Skinner” and that his true identity is to remain unmentioned “under penalty of torture.” In several subsequent episodes, “Skinner” is then portrayed as Anges’ actual son.
The Dick Van Dyke episode with the walnuts.
That was a bottle episode. They were probably having cash flow problems at the time. That episode makes the list of “examples of bottle episodes” on sites such as Wikipedia (linked above) or TV Tropes.
Admittedly, the TV Tropes list is huge, so it’s not surprising to show up on that one.
Cool! Cheers.
There was another episode of The X Files where Mulder and Scully visit a vampire village. Scully finally witnesses an actual supernatural occurrence and at the end of the episode they stare at each other dazed by the implications. I never watched the show that often but I assume Scully was back to her usual sceptical self in the next episode, so what was even the point of this episode?
Not quite as extreme as some of the shows mentioned here, but I recently discovered an episode of The Bionic Woman that is an homage (or ripoff, if you prefer) of Stanley Kubrick movies. Jamie matches wits with an intelligent computer, and when a B-52 crew is preparing to drop a bomb the dialog is taken directly from Dr. Strangelove.
There’s was a backdoor pilot episode of The Brady Bunch about friends of the Bradys who adopted three kids. That one also had Ken Berry.
I remember that one. It was brutal. Way too cloying.
Yes, and yes. There’s actually a bit of controversy in that episode and how close it was to the plot of an Anne Rice romance novel. I know that SFDebris, a fairly lauded Trek and SF reviewer, gave it a score of 0 because the former teacher in him identifies it as clear plagiarism.
The plot, for any who don’t know, is that Dr. Crusher (the main doctor on the Enterprise) goes to the funeral of her grandmother at this Scottish colony that basically lives like it’s the 1800s. She reads about this younger lover in her grandmother’s diary, and then encounters him. He turns out to be a ghost who basically brainwashes her with pleasure, leading to her deciding to leave her entire life as a doctor to live on the colony with him.
The people on the Enterprise get suspicious, both for what is happening to Crusher and a bunch of storms which shouldn’t be possible due to the colony’s whether control systems. They find some weird energy in the grandmother’s grave and exhume it, only for her corpse to reanimate (!). They wind up having to disintegrate her to stop it, as well as destroy this candle the ghost has been using as a receptacle. It’s explained as this parasitic lifeform who uses the candle to stay alive between hosts.
It’s just so utterly bizarre when you watch it.
That show was inconsistent anyway. They had the witch creatures that could make potions and cast spells. How is that a CREATURE? I mean, a werewolf is a creature, but creatures don’t evolve a magic-potion-making ability.
Eh, they also looked like decaying corpse-people in their true form, so definitely creatures. The magic potions are just their culture, man.
(IIRC, other Wessen are also shown making potions, like Rosalee)
I was going to ask if that was the one with the alien abduction in the finale but on Googling that was Dynasty spinoff The Colbys I was thinking of. IIRC the writers basically went “Fuck it, the show’s cancelled anyway - let’s go out big.”
Perfect Strangers was a situation comedy where two cousins were living together, but one was an immigrant from the old country. They did a few episodes where they recreated other things: One episode had the actors recreate an episode of “The Honeymooners”, another had the actors recreate a Laurel and Hardy short.
Not WTF - but certainly unusual. And a lot of fun.
A few things at work here. Once every season of the X-Files has a “comedy” episode, of which this was one. Also, every now and then, about once a season also, there is an episode where Scully’s skepticism/faith is tested. Sometimes she’s actually the one who witnesses a supernatural event but almost never discloses it to Mulder. That particular season, it all happened in the same episode.
The Seinfeld episode that was done from finish to start… so backwards.