Recently, for reasons that would be otiose to explain*, I have been watching the very worst of the Star Trek spinoffs, Voyager.** The series started out well, I’ve always thought, but quickly devolved into an embarrassment that actually, at some points, made my eyes bleed to watch.
Except for a few episodes, that is. One is “Deadlock,” a second-season episode in which the Voyager is duplicated, attacked by a malevolent race, and faced with an awful choice. Though the episode, taken in the context of the entire series, shows all the flaws that made the show the stinking pile of donkey vomit it was, judged as a stand-alone it’s an absolutely compelling hour of television.
What other series and individual epsisodes would you say this is true of?
*Hey, I’ve got a new girlfriend. What do you WANT me to do, tell her that her taste is execrable?
**Persons wishing to argue that the aforementioned honor belongs to Enterprise, please sit on the left.
Personally, I was a big fan of any episode of Voyager that involved Tom Paris’s “Captain Proton” holonovel. That was just fun.
Also, there’s another episode I liked where aliens had taken over the ship, brainwashed the crew, and locked them in holodeck simulations of various races’ histories (most of the crew were members of the French Resistance during WWII, Neelix, amusingly enough, was the leader of a Klingon hunting party. IIRC, Chakotay was a US Army company commander who shows up on D-Day just before the To Be Continued ending of the episode).
I know this isn’t suppose to be about Voyager alone but mine is about Voyager. I watched that stinking series for 5 seasons because my various roommates enjoyed the show and the only episode I liked was Think Tank.
The show Arli$$ was legendarily bad. But there was one episode I really liked involving a dogged NCAA official investigating a good ol’ boy football coach for giving money to a player. One might have expected that the coach would turn out to be a complete win-at-all-costs dirtbag who gets off the hook thanks to Arliss’ devious abilities. But it turns out that the coach gave the money to the player for a pretty noble reason, and he doesn’t wind up getting off the hook. As a final twist, we discover that the NCAA official is satisfying a need for vengeance years in the making – he had once been a pretty good runner at that very school, but his scholarship was yanked so it could be given to the all-powerful football program.
There were quite a few Voyager episodes that didn’t suck, though the hit rate was rather low. This one: Counterpoint won a TV poll here a while ago, ahead of TOS, NG and DS9 episodes.
Another couple that come to mind: Thirty Days (which starts with Tom Paris in the brig). And the one where Seven gets to fight The Rock. That might have more to do with silver cat-suits than the plot
I don’t watch shows I don’t like, so I would never see a stand out episode of (say) Charmed, if such a thing exists. I may once have seen a few minutes of Malcolm in the Middle that didn’t force me to turn off the telly, but not a whole episode ::shudders::
As a non Buffy fan I found the musical episode fun.
I don’t think I have ever stuck around with a sucky series long enough to see if there was a good episode in there. One series that didn’t suck but I was disappointed with was Millennium. The only episode that sticks in my mind is a Christmas episode. This was one of the darkest, most depressing Christmas episodes in the history of TV. It should be shown next to It’s a Wonderful LIfe every year just to balance things out. It starred the great Darren McGavin as Frank Black’s father.
one memorable Voyager ep was the one where the ship lands on a planetoid of some sort, and they encounter a biomimetic glop that duplicates the ship and crew
the twist was that the show opened and ran like a normal Voyager episode until about halfway in when the crew started falling ill and the ship started malfunctioning, eventually the crew realizes that they’re dupes of the original Voyager crew and they have to return home to the planetoid to survive…
the episode ends with the Dupe-Voyager self destructing and all the crew dying, the real Voyager finds the remnants of the ship and can’t figure out what it was…
David Cross played Donnie three times so your chances are increased. I don’t remember if I saw all three episodes so I don’t know if the other two sucked.
Ah. I guess I saw two. I saw the original one where what’s-her-name finds out he’s faking, then I saw the one where he gets found out. I guess I conflated them into one episode. The two I saw were both really funny.
I rarely watch Everybody Loves Raymond (all together now, “No we don’t! We have zero empathy with any of these characters!”), but there was one episode where the yucks-a-minute deftly turned on the Mom’s comment of “That’s all right, Debra, we know that we aren’t as good as you”, and Marie gave an embarrassingly frank monologue about how she was fully aware of her complete and personal inadequacy when compared to her daughter in law. It was a breaking of the fourth wall of comedy, showing that in order to play the fool one must first of all be a fool.
Unfortunately the scriptwriters saw that it worked and tried it a few more times in that season. Sorry folks, it looks cliched the second time around.
I just remembered another one. Again it was not a show that completely sucked, because why would I watch it. Murphy Brown was OK but not real memorable to me. The one episode that stands above the rest is the one where Wallace Shawn gets elected to congress and then gets interviewed on live TV.
Donnie ep 1- Maya finds out Donnie’s secret. He reveals himself when he can’t take Jack’s stupidity.
ep 2- Donnie tries to make a living as an insurance salesman. Maya suspects another scam when Donnie claims he needs money to pay off loansharks. A lucky blow to the head allows Donnie to go back to pretending to be retarded.
Ep 3- Donnie has a business selling inspirational signs made of driftwood. A beautiful woman is set to marry him. Maya suspects another scam.
