The Single WORST Episode Of Your Favourite TV Series

Cafe Society
61

Though it did have some good bits at the beginning: The alien, “My food is problematic”, and Jayne’s hat. I’m not actually disagreeing with you, that was my least-favorite episode, too, but “worst episode of Firefly” is still pretty good.

Fenris, are we also agreed that the third-worst episode of B5 was the one with the organic technology doohicky that turned the archaeologist into an unstoppable killing machine? Though I think that was the first or second episode after the pilot, so we can maybe make allowances for the show not yet having hit its stride.

62

Blackadder the entire Season 1, sorry, just can’t get into it, none of my Cunning Plans seem to work

Farscape;
Season 1; Jerimiah Crichton - John gets stranded on some backwater planet for 3 months, when he’s rescued, Rygel is seen by the native population as some form of “God”, which Fluffy tries to exploit to the fullest, but fails as is normal for him

Season 2; Taking the Stone Not even the comely presence of Gigi Edgely’s Chiana character could save this one, pity, as it had a strong opening and lots of potential (plus, I just frelling love Chiana :wink: ), the scene opens to an obviously visibly distraught Chi, sad, heartbroken about something, she needs someone to talk to, she hopes that Crichton (whom she’s secretly been carrying a torch for) would be able to talk to her, spend time with her, make her feel better, help heal her broken heart, crichton, however, is arms deep in Moya’s control hardware and he gives her the cold-shoulder brushoff

Heartbroken, abandoned by her closest freind, she steals Aeryn’s prowler and storms off to a nearby planet, populated by drugged-out “space hippie” teenagers who turn out to be adrenalin-junkie-suicide-fanatics

the rest of the episode consists of Chi being a spoiled brat and wanting to live with the Space-Hippies, even though they live in a cave with radioactive rock that’s slowly killing them…

watch the first few minutes, up to Chiana nicking Aeryn’s prowler, then forget the rest…

Season 3; can’t think of a one, S3 was pretty frelling solid

Season 4; hmm, what to choose, there’s so many, could it be the “Vomit-O-Rama” episode Coup By Clam, or the frelling stupid “Aeryn gets religion while being tortured by the Scarrans” Prayer, or even “I hate it only because it was the last episode of the series even though it was a great episode” Bad Timing

Let me set things up here, imagine, you’ve spent four years with John Crichton and the crew of Moya, you know them well, they’re your “friends”, your “family” (for lack of a better term), they’re more than actors and animatronics playing roles onscreen, they feel like real, actual people…

Aeryn is pregnant with John’s child
Chiana has been blinded (possibly permanently) by using her “Bullet-Time” vision to help the crew escape to this point in the series, she is also madly in love with John, even though John is unaware of this (watch her expression seamlessly shift from joy to sadness as she realizes what’s happening with John and Aeryn, joy for him getting married to Aeryn, sadness when she realizes she’s lost him… (3:15 to 3:40)
D’Argo has forgiven Chiana for her infidelity, and they look to be getting back together
D’argo and John have become more than freinds, D actually considers him a brother, something Luxans never do to non-Luxans
Pilot and Aeryn have shared DNA (through the efforts of a mad-scientist trying to create a Sebecean-Pilot hybrid) and think of each other as family (extended family)

keep all that in mind when you watch this… and keep in mind that at the time, Farscape had just been cancelled, and there was no provisions for the Peacekeeper Wars miniseries, this ending sequence was the final episode of Farscape for all we knew…

63

My Worst Episode of The X-Files was “Eve” until the very last season managed to top it (bottom it?) with “Scary Monsters”. Not a great idea to start with and VERY badly executed, with everyone behaving in ways that made me want to kick them, and the established characters behaving badly in ways that were out of character.

The two worst scenes (I’m not sure which was more appalling): Doggett gratuitously terrorizing the “villain” when he could have just cold-cocked him and gotten the same results; and Scully opening her door to a midnight visitor who just shows up unannounced at her apartment, carrying a box that for all she knows contains the head & genitals of the last woman who was dumb enough to open her door to a total stranger in the middle of the night. (This was supposedly the same Scully who in a first-season episode greeted an unexpected midnight caller with a drawn pistol.)

64

Roseanne may not be my favorite show but it’s on the short list (the number 1 spot varies). The single worst episode was in the final season when Roseanne and crew are flown to Europe by a prince played by Jim Varney; if winning the lottery (which could have worked) hadn’t already made them jump the shark that most certainly did. The writing was ridiculous and silly (a European prince from a tiny country falling in love with a middle aged American woman he sees in a news clip), you never got over the fact it was Ernest speaking in an English accent, and it set in motion a long series of increasingly dreamlike and absurd episodes.

65

Are you kidding me? That’s a great episode! Not only did we get to see more Arzt, but they killed off two of the most hated characters of all time by burying them alive.

And I third Stranger in a Strange Land being the worst, for all reasons mentioned. Plus that Other’s Sheriff character that never appeared again. Lost is normally pretty good about minor characters coming back, but that didn’t happen.

66

There was no daughter on Top of the Heap. Are you maybe thinking of Unhappily Ever After?

67

I actually kind of like this episode (except for the mudwrestling epiphany, which was admittedly silly).

I liked ST:TNG an awful lot, but man there are some crap episodes. Any of the holodeck episodes are strong contenders for awfulness, especially the Professor Moriarty ones, but I just watched “Force of Nature” a few weeks ago and yikes, what a stinker. A very, very thinly veiled metaphor for environmentalism – Jesus, I hated when they tried to make shows “topical”, a completely confusing and anticlimactic message (“uh, yeah, our starships are fucking this shit all up, so let’s just, uh, study it and only use Warp 4. Except only Federation ships will actually follow this rule anyway, and nobody can make the Ferengi or Romulans or anyone else do it, and … yeah”), and an excess of boring technobabble, even for Star Trek. Oh, and let’s not forget someone killing themselves just to prove a point, and the completely wooden response of not only the regular cast but the individual’s own brother seems to barely notice. Booooooo.

X-Files: Well, practically everything towards the end. The one when Mulder was resurrected from the dead, I guess, but I stopped paying attention after that.

68

I am a completely indiscriminate lover of The West Wing, even the seasons after Aaron Sorkin left, and I actually do not mind the episode you mentioned.

But I cannot, will not, absolutely refuse to ever watch again the episode “Han,” the 4th episode from the 5th season. I will not watch it for any reason, for any amount of money. It OFFENDS ME, it’s so ridiculous horrifically unrealistic in the context of the already-established characters. NONE of those people would allow that to happen, or be complicit in it. It’s egregiously WRONG.

69

MAS*H: “Major Fred C. Dobbs”. Hawkeye & Trapper drive Frank to request a transfer, which results in Hot Lips also requesting a transfer. Rather than go on double shifts until replacements are found, they concoct a scheme to have Frank reconsider by relying on his greed and some gold paint.

Even Larry Gelbart considered this the worst of the series.

70

Star Trek: TOS is one of my favorite shows for the promise that it held. But my word, was it ever plagued by bad writing. And “The Way to Eden” was the worst of the bunch. Space hippies take over the Enterprise? Spock jams with them on his harp? Somebody was smoking some bad shit to come up with that script.

71

Probably. Both were awful, though - because they were trying to be Married With Children II, they get mixed up in my mind.

Mr. Salinqmind wishes to advise that the worst LOOKING episode of NYPD Blue was the one where Sipowitz practically mooned the viewing audience as he and the Mrs. took a shower :eek:.

72

Well, “Black Market” might give it a run for it’s money in the “Useless episode” department.

But “The Woman King” was pretty bad. It might have been otherwise if they had actually set up the premise and then followed through. Instead, we just got an episode that doesn’t really go anywhere and seemingly comes out of nowhere.

73

Right now I’m really into the new Dr. Who and having just finished the 4th season, I’d have to say I thought “Fear Her” was one of the weakest episodes. I don’t know why, but it’s probably because it never explains how the whole alien drawing power thing is supposed to work or what it does. I also got rather annoyed by the whole “Draw the Earth” and everyone will be affected thing.It felt like a cheat, even by this shows standards.

74

You know that episode in the last season of Star Trek: TNG where Wesley goes off with the Native Americans and became a time traveler or whatever?

(Journey’s End).

That episode makes my soul hurt.

75

Phil Farrand, who wrote the Nitpickers Guide books, noted that the person who killed themselves to prove their point was like an environmentalist protesting the danger of a nuclear planet near a town by…blowing up the nuclear plant.

And according to the tech backstory of Voyager, Voyager’s engine’s were a newly developed type that wouldn’t damage subspace when used (maybe it was the tilting that helped). So they just shot that plot point down, for good measure. Whats worse is that is was Voyager that wrote off a stupid technobabble point from TNG. That’s only slightly humiliating. :o

76

I can’t believe you reminded me of the existence of this episode. I had previously been successfully able to block it from my memory. :mad:

Although actually my vote for worst TNG episode is that god-awful one where Troi gives birth to the star baby.

77

Perhaps it’s just my age – 33 – but I find that one so bad it’s horribly entertaining. I mean, space hippies??? Bwahahahahahahaha!!! My mom who saw the eps in first run might have a different view on that one, I’ll try to remember to ask. But really the entire show has gotten, for me, so dated it’s kinda cool again. But oy, it’s dated. The sexism makes me want to scream.

78

Okay, refresh our collective memories on this one? Episode guides online are useless in relation to your specific complaint about mischaracterization.

79

What - no hate for Genesis from ST:TNG? Troi turns into a frog-person, Picard starts becoming a lemur and - yes really - Spot “devolves” from a cat into an actual iguana.

Also, at the end they’re laughing off Beverly’s little “oops, I accidentally created a plague that contaminated the whole crew” gaffe. Um…didn’t the proto-Worf actually **kill **a couple of crewmembers along the way? Hilarious! But hey! We didn’t know them, so that’s okay.

80

In order to do justice, I would have to watch it again. However, the gist of the story is that an incredibly talented North Korean pianist passes a note to Bartlet & Co. that he wants to defect. Because the U.S. is about to enter the possible beginnings of disarmament talks with North Korea, they refuse to help him and Bartlet tells him basically to sacrifice himself on the altar of potential world peace. Later, the North Koreans cancel the talks (independently of the defect plotline).

The way that I remember thinking about it is that the characters were all acting absolutely diametrically opposed to the way they’d been acting for the last four seasons, not only in the sense of denying Han (the titular pianist) defection (these were people who’d arranged a breakout of about 100 Chinese stowaways from a California National Guard holding center a few seasons before) but in their interactions with each other. But again, specific examples would require that I watch the episode to refresh my memory.