I’m not talking about “Jump the Shark” moments in which you realize the show is permanently headed downhill. I’m thinking more along the lines of the single worst episodes of your favorite series. The truly bad clunker episodes that make every other episode of the series, however mediocre they might be, look good in comparison. A couple of examples IMHO would be:
Star Trek: The Next Generation: the episode wherein Picard, Guinan and Ensign Ro get reverted back to eight years olds. A dumb premise to begin with; Embarrassing cheesy moments between young Picard & Dr. Crusher/Riker; totally overlooks the fact that Guinan is hundreds of years older than Picard & Ro; and the Ferengi’s (of all the lame races) take over the Enterprise! !
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: I’d vote for the one with the magical varsity jacket that makes every woman fall in love with the football jock who wears it. Lots and lots and lots of forced ‘humor’ and no explanation as to how this jacket got charmed.
The X-Files: The ‘Brady Bunch’ Episode. You know you’re scraping the bottom of the barrell when you get into Brady Bunch sendups.
I never followed Buffy, but I happened to catch the varsity jacket episode while over at a friend’s place, and I thought it was great. It was just a good, fun romp.
The only series I’ve followed closely in recent years is Babylon 5, and I’m having trouble thinking of a bad episode during the main arc (I rather think season 5 falls under your jumped-the-shark moratorium, although it had its moments). There were episodes in the first four seasons that I didn’t much like, but even in those, the writing was decent, and the episodes were well-crafted; I just wasn’t interested in the subject matter.
BtVS–As You Were.
So, so, so awful on so many levels.
Let me introduce you to Spike, the vampire who lives in a crypt. He steals enough electricity to run a small fridge and a TV. He doesn’t have a phone. He never leaves Sunnydale and spends his nights with the Slayer and his days sleeping–trapped in his crypt.
Oh yeah, and he’s an International Arms Dealer, ironically enough call The Doctor, which bares more than a passing resemblence to the name of the guy who sliced up Dawn and threw him, with a knife in his back, from the top of the tower.
The International Arms he Deals are demons eggs. Suvolte demon. You drop those from the sky and they can wipe out whole villages. It’s not a problem because the demon is very rare. So rare in fact, that it lays thousands of eggs at a time. It’s based in South America, but they are tracking it to the Hellmouth, where it laid its eggs. Apparently, it laid the eggs, returned to South America, then went back to California. Spike, AKA The International Arms Dealer, AKA THe Doctor, took advantage of the situation and harvested them and stuck them in his crypt–where the Slayer comes to fuck his brains out.
Please, stop me when things get ridiculous.
:rolleyes:
ST TOS: The very last episode where Kirk’s mind winds up in his old flame’s body and vice-versa: “Turnabout Intruder.” Gad, that was horrendous. “Plato’s Stepchildren” was also pretty painful to watch.
ST TNG: “The Naked Now.” Downright embarrassing.
Enterprise: “Vanishing Point”: Hoshi’s dad is a dolt and then the whole thing turns out to be a dream. Please!
JAG: An episode from earlier this year when Harm started imagining that every woman in the office was pregnant. Really dorky.
Chicago Hope: Dr. Joe Cacaci tries to kill himself by jumping off the roof, and then his wife and all his former wives show up to comfort each other and talk about what a great guy he was. Gimme a frikkin’ break!
For me it is when a series betrays its basic premise, that you tuned in to watch (not saying surprises saying a basic betryal of the audience):
Diffrent Strokes: Arnolds friend gets molested episode
Family Ties: Alex’s Friend dies episdoe
St. Elsewhere: The cast dresses as clowns to make the patients happy episode
Or they kill a critical character
Hill Street - Mick killed Episode
NYPD - Rick Schroder killed Episode (even tho thru spoilers I knew it)
DS9 (because the thread demands it ) : Vulcan Baseball Episdoe
STNG(’ " " '" " ):Welsey is Q-like (I always had the power to return home by clicking my slippers??) Episode (but then he goes – almost 4-ever)
The X-files: The one where they kill the Lone Gunmen. I know that the whole last season kind of falls under your “jump the shark” thing, but honestly that was a terrible moment in a terrible, terrible season. They died for NO REASON!! It wasn’t even a myth arc eppy, if I recall. And then they made that dumb speech about the Ramones. I mean, I love the Ramones but do you want a speech about them to be your last words?? I’m pretty sure that was the one. It was so bad that my mind is blocking it pretty well.
[slight hijack] Mick Belker got KIA in “Hill Street Blues”? I remember the one where Ed Marinaro’s “Joe Coffey” got killed, and who can forget the first Sergeant checking out “whilst in the act,” as Renko put it. Bummer! [/hijack]
O.K., going all the way back to “Little House on the Prairie” – the episode where a pedophile chases a little girl up a very tall, rickety-looking ladder in a barn. She falls and is critically injured; I think he is shot and killed in the end. Pedophiles? Man, that just does not belong in the the “Little House” universe! :eek:
You’re damn right! Man, that show had some ugly, out-of-place episodes. The one with Pa curing Albert of addiction and the horrific withdrawal scenes—yeeccchhhh!!
The thing with those Little House episodes though was that they weren’t bad, just different. Perhaps a little too different for the tastes of some, but it can’t all be sunshine and happiness.
Indeed, it seems that some people are ignoring the OP and not listing genuinely bad or terrible episodes, but just ones that pissed them off because they didn’t lie what happened in them.
There is a difference between episodes you don’t like and episodes that are genuinely bad.
The only truly bad episode of any show I can think of is an ep of Sliders before the show moved to Sci-Fi and got really terrible. There were lots of episodes where things happened that I didn’t like (the one where Arturo was killed, for example) but none of those were truly, unwatchably bad. The one ep about vampires, featuring Tommy Chong as a vampire hunter, that episode was absolute excrement. A truly awful hour of television.
Cowboy Bebop episode four. I still cannot actually describe how this episode is bad, yet I know that it is, in fact, bad. It’s completely out of tone with the rest of the series. I pretend it never happened.
Cheers is one of the few sitcoms I like. Well-written and funny. But there was this one episode where Norm and Rebecca had to make up some excuse to get the Tom Skerritt character out of his house when he was tired and just wanted to sleep. It got more and more ridiculous and ended up with Norm carrying him on his back through the yard.
WTF? Its like they hired the writers for a Laverne & Shirley episode. Utterly stupid. Painful.
I think the worst eposode of ST:TOS was the one where Kirk, Spock and McCoy go on a rescue mission to a planet inhabited by the Mongol-like “Coms” and the savage “Yangs”.
“Yangs. Yanks? Yankees!”
“Coms… Comunists?”
And then they bring out Old Glory and Kirk recites the Preamble to the Constitution. Ooh, that was cheesy!