Maybe for Riker. For Frakes, on the other hand…
-Joe
“Space” is certainly not one of the better episodes (the scene where the NASA woman rolls her car is particularly bad), but I’ve never quite understood why it tops the “worst” list for so many X-Files fans. It’s not THAT bad. I wonder how much of its bad reputation is due to its having a happy ending, something the show is not exactly known for.
As for Mulder’s bad explanations, how about the scene in “Eve” where Mulder, the psychologist, explains to Scully, the physician, what digitalis is? And is horribly and thoroughly wrong? Scully doesn’t even notice, which makes this one of my favorite “Scully is a doctor???” moments from the show, another being the above-mentioned scene in “Space” when she encourages the crash victim to crawl out of the car. My all-time favorite is at the end of “The Erlenmeyer Flask” when she feels for Mulder’s pulse with her thumb.
Like, oh, I don’t know…a dream?
Three episodes of FRASIER that vie for worst:
1- When Roz and Frasier hook up was I thought unrealistic and lazy of the writers. To me they never even had a chemistry or tension.
2- During Roz’s “we can’t decide what else to do with her so let’s get her pregnant” plot that the actress herself didn’t like. It’s the episode when you learn she got pregnant by a coffee shop employee half her age during a lapse in judgment and protection. They’d made many jokes about Roz’s busy sex life over the years so obviously she used birth control and condoms, plus she was 40 (or at least well over 35) when she became pregnant (an age when most women don’t conceive as easily as they once did) plus Roz is not the type to shack up with a kid about half her age without using protection and if she did she’d probably have an abortion and never mention it to him or to Frasier. It just didn’t fit the character for many different reasons. (And like most sitcom babes it didn’t hamper her life at all when it was born- no problem finding babysitters or anything like.)
3- Frasier is dating an attractive Jewish lady whose mother mistakenly thinks Frasier is Jewish (when she met him he was buying a menorah for his son) and is thrilled her daughter is dating an eligible Jewish psychiatrist. There’s some very funny mix-ups as he attempts to stop her from finding out (Niles dressed as Jesus standing in the bathroom with a Christmas tree being the funniest) but the whole thing falls apart because it never would have happened; he’d probably have just said “I’m not Jewish, my son is” and that would have been okay (it lets the mother know that if her daughter marries him he’s okay with the kids being Jewish and he himself is hardly an arch conservative Christian), and if he insisted on keeping up the charade (the girlfriend knew IIRC) then all he’d have to say was “I’m not kosher” since the mother didn’t seem to be ultra conservative herself (as evidenced by among other things that the mother doesn’t have a problem with him buying Christmas gifts in the same episode or with the fact that he’s divorced).
It was a dumb premise, but I chuckled at Niles’ Yiddish sarcasm: “Your kvetching is giving me tsuris.”
On a related note, the current Newsweek has an article in which the author felt compelled to define “putz”, which struck me as utterly superfluous.
It’s by no means my favorite series, but I can’t stand any King of the Hill episode that deals with Bill’s…Billness. By which I mean the ones that focus on how shitty his life is, how he’s depressed, can’t get a girl, etc…
Examples include:
The one where he plays Santa, befriends a woman from the orphanage/foster care, but then keeps being Santa well into February and a bunch of teenagers take advantage of him.
The one where everyone else has to watch him because they’re afraid he’ll commit suicide.
The one where he goes crazy and thinks he’s his ex-wife, Lenore.
King of the Hill is one of my favorite series and I’ll agree that Bill episodes are terrible.