First season of 24. I was hooked by the amazing production, the crisp and sharp writing and acting, and the first episodes had me scratchin’ for more. Then Jack Bauer’s wife (or was it his daughter) got amnesia. I haven’t watched an episode since that plot contrivance.
While I’ll agree with Oakminster that the Battlestar Galactica finale is very problematic, he didn’t actually touch on what I thought was the biggest problem:
Which Earth was “ours”? We know that the nuked Earth is our world, because people from that world play songs written in our world, the constellations from that world all look the same as from our world, and the shape of the continents as seen from space is the same. We also know that the place they all settled as hunter-gatherers was our world, because we see a fast-forward from there to our world, a perfect match in every respect including the names of companies and news channels, and the shape of the continents is also the same. But the two worlds are out of synch by 20,000 years. OK, I could maybe accept that a ship making a random FTL jump from the close vicinity of a black hole might accidentally jump back in time, even though there’s no hint of time travel anywhere earlier in the series… But then, it should just be the people on Galactica who got to neolithic Earth, because there’d be no way any of the raptors would be able to backtrack that jump to bring the rest of the fleet along.
The X-Files episode where Mulder finds out that his sister wasn’t abducted by aliens after all, but was abducted by a human serial killer paedo and then magically - actually magically, with no attempt at making it believable - turned into some sort of starchild. No spoiler tags because I never want anyone to watch that damn episode, ever. And then they ignored that supposed conclusion anyway!
I didn’t really mind that one because I was expecting it to be really stupid and improbably tv zany, but the people involved acted like normal people would - “holy crap, dude, you need to see a doctor!”
The two Buffy episodes I came in to mention have already been mentioned.
Xander standing Anya up at the altar was out of character. It also made her continuing presence on the show kind of forced, which really sucked because Anya’s my favorite character.
The insane asylum episode I instantly hated. If none of this is “real” within the context of the shows universe, why should I bother to continue watching? :rolleyes:
No. Just… no.
[spoiler]The people on nuked-out “Earth” play the same songs and stuff as we do because that was racial memories passed along with Hera’s mitochondrial DNA. Both nuked-out “Earth” and new-primitive “Earth” were far, far in the past of our own Earth.
There was utterly no time travel either referenced or implied in the entire series. Stop reading in Star Trekisms, that black hole must automagically mean time travel.[/spoiler]
Although I adored the BSG finale, I understand the reasons why people mislike it. However, even so I cannot understand how anyone could choose the BSG finale as their sole episode to have never happened, when they had seen “The Woman King”.
Therefore, it must be that “The Woman King” never in fact happened, since none of you have seen it.
What “The Final Frontier?”
I sometimes count in my classes “1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, …” and explain that V can’t be a number because they skipped it. 
It violates established cannon like crazy.
You can’t experience anything while in transport as you are taken apart, beamed at high speed and then put back together. So, Barclay could never see or experience anything during transit.
The computer with the station member’s patterns in it was vaporized. They would be irretrievably lost, not appear in transit as worms.
I could go on like this.
You could argue that if an episode did not violate canon in at least one significant way, it’s not really Star Trek.
My theory/fan wankery:
Nuked “Earth” was Mars, Primitive Earth was “Earth”
I agree that The Woman King was awful, but it’s easier for me to forgive a bad non-arc critical episode than it is to forgive a finale that just reeks of epic fail in my book.
That’s exactly why it should have been the finale and left open-ended. I think having five ( or whatever ) seasons of a mythic, semi-epic fantasy series that ended with the possibility of all of the above having possibly been the delusions of a sick teen would have been awesome. That there never was any “show universe,” only our universe ( which is still a show universe, of course ).
Not entirely original of course. But for BtVS, with all of its huge improbablilities and silliness, it would have worked marvelously.
I really enjoy ambiguous endings. Well, not always - sometimes I like closure. But I would have loved this one. For example I enjoyed both the The Sopranos finale and the end of Pan’s Labyrinth ( granted the director didn’t think the latter was ambiguous, but what does he know ). Of course given how many people bitched about those two, it is entirely possible that I represent a minority.
Black Market was worse. Absolutely the nadir.
Black Market on BSG. Brings up stuff we never heard of before. Makes up a past that Apollo never mentioned before. He does things completely out of character. They kill off a character that could have been good for some continued tension as the two Battlestar crews continue to integrate.
Apparently, the writers thought this episode never happened too, because there was no mention of any of the events in that episode ever again.
Still re: Galactica:
[spoiler]Even if you handwave away all the cultural stuff as racial memory or whatever, there’s still the constellations. As Gaeta and Baltar (the two most scientific characters on the show) rightly recognize, knowing what the night sky looks like from a planet pins down where the planet must be, even if it’s still a needle-in-a-haystack problem to find it.
As for Oakminster’s fanwank that Nuked “Earth” is Mars, that would work for the constellations, but immediately after they discover that “Earth” was nuked into oblivion, they start searching for other habitable planets to settle, instead. You’d think they’d notice if there was one right next door.
And I don’t like coming to the conclusion of time travel, but the plot forces me into it, by having the characters visit two places, both of which are unambiguously our Earth, at different times. The fact that the finale forces one to a conclusion that isn’t consistent with the rest of the series is a large part of what was so wrong with it.
Really, what I think happened is that they didn’t have the ending in mind when they wrote the “nuked Earth” episodes, and then by the time they did start thinking about the finale, they forgot that they’d already given us proof that nuked Earth was Earth, so they thought they still had the freedom to retcon it.[/spoiler]
I had an easier time with the two earths, but I think it’s because I missed something.
Do we really know the constellations look the same? I remember a scene (on Kobol?) where they see the constellations as they’d look like from (nuked)Earth, but does the audience get a good look at them?
Same with the the continents - I remember a season finale where the camera zoomed out from the location of BSG and zoomed into (nuked)Earth, but it happened so fast I don’t remember being able to recognize the continents.
I guess it worked a little bit better for me, not having paid as close attention. 
But I agree 100% that the writers had no idea where they were going for most of the series, wrote themselves into a hole, and had a hard time getting out of it.
I know that I certainly never saw that episode…
no no, it never happened. It just didn’t. Make it go away
I’m pretty sure they showed what looked exactly like the Florida peninsula.
If you can hold out until the 4:19 mark on this youtube bit of fan tribute, it sure looks like Baja Calif on the left, Florida on the right and Mexico under high cloud cover.
That final scene of Enterprise with Trip crying, that was so sad. Yup, nothing happened after that, nosiree
The Simpsons episode where Homer starts a grunge band.
As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t exist.
The West Wing, “Isaac and Ishmael”. That was the one right after 9/11 that was Josh and Toby patronizing the audience for 44 minutes.