I actually like the 9th season with the caveat that you have to watch the entire thing in 1 day. It doesn’t work as 16 separate episodes but as one long episode the final two shows really pull it back into focus and remind you of how incredible the writing actually was for that series.
I actually own all 9 seasons of Roseanne on DVD and the only episode I ever skip is the one where she fantasizes about having the bathroom to herself for 10 minutes.
I love Scrubs and have seen every single episode, but the episodes in season 5 with JD fantasising about himself as the floating-head doctor were just awful.
I liked Lexx.
No, let me rephrase that: I liked the experience of watching Lexx, which consisted of me going “Wait, what?” “Wait, what?” “Ewww!” “Wait, what?”
It was disgusting and bizarre, but rarely predictable. That said, I’ve never seen the final season so am willing to concede that the awfulness factor could have exceeded my tolerance level.
Bzzt! Nope!
That would be the monstrosity known as “Go Fish.” Horrible premise with really horrible rubber costumes.
“Angel” - “I Fall to Pieces” - the episode where a brilliant doctor, Dr. Ron Melzer, discovers a way not only to detach and reattach his body parts, but to animate them as well. He uses them to stalk a woman who has rejected him. I suppose we were supposed to be horrified when the detached hand strangled the damsel in distress. Me? I couldn’t help wondering how the hand got its strength absent, you know, a forearm muscle. Or its electrical impulses absent a spinal cord.
I’m all for suspending disbelief, but the science is this episode was so bad that it required a suspension of intelligence. I’ll accept that a detached eyeball can see even with a severed optical nerve. I’ll accept that this ball of tissue can transmit images to a brain in another room. I’ll even accept that it can just be popped back into socket and all the nerves and tiny little vessels will magically reunite.
What I can’t accept, even in the world of “Angel,” is that the eyeball could fly.
Sorry, but if the doctor was so gifted, so brilliant, he wouldn’t need to stalk women. He’d be so famous, so rich, so lauded, that beautiful women would be spilling themselves at his feet. Next on Oprah: Dr. Ron: the brilliant doctor who cured the blind! The lame! Burn victims! Heart patients!
On behalf of my wife, I must defend this episode with 5 words: Nicky Brendon in a Speedo.
Second.
Meh. Both shows had their flaws and problems, but they don’t come close to my top three.
“Eden” was terribly cliched, making it practically a parody of itself, but I really want to know why people hate it so much. The biggest plot hole is that the scruffies locate their “Eden” within the Romulan Neutral Zone, and after taking over the Enterprise, have no hesitation in invading it. Of course they wouldn’t care about the treaty; they’ve just sentenced their new allies to a slow, painful death. But they should care about getting their asses fried. If “Doc Seven-up” and “Addams” had some super-scientific way of concealing themselves from the Romulans, it was never even referenced.
Okay, for that and a lot of reasons it really, really STANK. But even so…
“Wink of an Eye” had an extremely silly premise that we normal-speed humans would have a chance against humanoids that move too quicky to be seen. Kirk didn’t even seem hurried when he made the tape for Spock, although each additional second he delayed finishing it would be- how many weeks, at the minimum?
“Alternative Factor” had the very silly idea that matter/antimatter explosions would only occur if exactly matching shapes met. Uh huh. And when did Kirk even meet the sane one, to make the comparison at the end? Or Spock, for that matter?
And the winning loser is…
“Menagerie I and II”
Based on from the first piolt, it has many production problems, no doubt more than even “Alternative” and leaves many questions unanswered. I don’t have library time to go into them all.
Maybe just a bad concept, reworking parts of the piolot, to begin with. Maybe it simply could have been executed better.
Oh well.
No way, Rita was great. There’s a fifth season episode, Local Man Eaten By Newspaper, that’s pretty weak; spends most of it’s time on a power struggle within a crime family, with one of the participants egged on by his whiningly insane wife.
Re: Star Trek, TOS - Has everyone forgotten “The Empath”?
I like that one a lot. It demonstrates the Kirk, Spock, and Bones dynamic well, and shows how much they care for one another. I found the scene where Kirk and Spock sit with dying McCoy to be genuinely moving. Deforest Kelley said it was one of his favorite episodes (I’m sure it helped that he got to play the hero for once).
Lights of Zathar, or whatever, was the worst. It’s the only episode of TOS that made me actively angry. I was kinda hoping that the girl died in the end, if only to free her from Scotty’s stalking. I think LoZ is also the only ep that made me truly hate a major character, if only for a while (the interigation scene from Enemy Within comes close, though).
Speaking of The Way to Eden again does anybody like the music?
Hey, out There!
Lets say Brother…
Spock’s jam session…
Going to eat all the fruit and throw away the rine…
I’m gonna crack my knuckles and jump for joy, I got a clean bill of health from Dr. McCoy!
On second thought, I guess not.
Odd, I rather like that episode. Not one of my favorites, but not even close to being on my “worst” list. Some good laughs, charmingly cheesy CGI wasp monster, and I’m always a sucker for episodes with quasi-historical tie-ins.
Not sure which episode I’d peg as my least favorite new Who, but the “Daleks in Manhatten” two-parter is up there. Cheesy characters, dumb rubber pig masks, crappy plot devices, and an hour’s worth of story stretched into a two-parter because it has Daleks.
Holy cow, am I seriously going to be the one to bring up TNG’s “The Icarus Factor?”
Riker and his daddy work out their family issues by playing blindfolded American Gladiators while Worf goes emo because everybody forgets his Klingon Tazer Quinceanera.
It’s an episode composed of two B-plots stapled together, either one of which would rank as “worst ever B-plot” when attached to any given A-plot.
I would watch the Hippie episode of ST:TOS a million times before I’d sit through And The Children Shall Lead again. Oh my god, what a horrible, horrible, horrible episode. You need heavy duty drugs just to get through it.
Friends.
The Holiday Armadillo episode.
I know the actors had Warner bent over a barrel, but yeesh, the stuff they had to put up with.
And there was an episode of Voyager, I don’t remember the title, where Janeway et al got sucked into some 50s Sci Fi show that Paris was watching. I remember thinking Kate Mulgrew must have hated the whole thing, because as she was playing the villian in the holosuite, she kept rolling her eyes in disgust.
I LOVED Lexx. The last season was a total satire. I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by telling you the crew bought a house in the suburbs, they kept Kai in an ordinary freezer, and their desperate housewife neighbor was Britt Ecklund!
And I know everyone hated the Nikki and Paolo stand alone episode of Lost, including me, but it’s always bugged me, those other totally anonymous castaways just milling about in the background. They were never used for anything and they might just as well have gone with Jack/Kate/Locke - the core group.
I understand what you mean. I was in college at the time, and we had a weekly Lexx-watching party every week for most of the second season.
*I never saw the third season either. Some of my friends continued to watch it for a while but said it got boring. Personally I’d had enough by the end of the second season, and when I heard the third season wasn’t even in space anymore I decided I really didn’t care to watch it at all.
I vote one from Season 3: Bendin’ In The Wind. That one was just awful; many jabs and jokes about a band I’ve never heard nor care. Bender for the most of the episode acts out of character, being a ‘touchy-feely’ musician rather than a crass robot.
Starsky and Hutch has one episode (I think it’s called Huggy Bear and the Turkey) where Starsky and Hutch are only in it at the very beginning and the very end, and the whole rest of the episode features some other guy as the protagonist. I have no idea why they did this, other than to try to give the audiences something “different,” but it was just stupid.
I really love Starsky and Hutch. Watching it is a fascinating exercise in how much the pacing of television shows has changed between the 1970s and today. A show like S&H would not be tolerated by modern television audiences; it just moves too slowly. There are 15 and 20 minute stretches of time where there’s nothing happening except a bunch of guys in plaid suits sitting around in wood paneled rooms, smoking cigarettes. No way would people sit still for that kind of stuff today. The action on that show is very sparse compared to the scenes establishing the plot; the storylines were given a ridiculous amount of attention.
Chasing It was the worst episode of The Sopranos and a lot of fans agree. It was not believable that Tony would all of a sudden become a degenerate gambler, after six seasons of lecturing everyone else about how they should never gamble. And it is not believable that Tony would strain his relationship with Hesh over a few thousand dollars of gambling debts. This is not consistent with Tony’s character at all, and excuses like “well, it demonstrates how Tony is losing control of himself” do not explain it away. It was a pointless storyline and bad writing, plain and simple.
I have only vague recollections of these two. Please tell me I dreamed them both:
The *Voyager *ep in which Janeway and Paris visit a planet and become giant slugs . . . and mate with each other.
The *House *ep in which a guy (cop?) has unrequited love for someone (his partner?), so they give him a lobotomy.