I’m not saying it was Shakespeare or anything, but in its early seasons Xena: Warrior Princess was a fairly well written fantasy/action series. After a couple of years it started to become increasingly weird and inconsistent, and I eventually stopped watching. But while I could name a number of weak episodes, only one left me wondering how on earth anyone could ever have thought it might possibly be a good, or even coherent, idea: the season five episode “Married, With Fishsticks”. Thinking back, this may actually have been the episode that made me decide the show was not worth my time anymore.
At the beginning of the show Gabrielle, Xena’s common-law sidekick, is feeling uncertain about dealing with Xena’s new baby. Gabrielle then gets hit on the head and falls in the water. Most of the rest of the episode is a dream sequence that is basically the Goldie Hawn movie Overboard (woman has amnesia after head injury, man convinces her she’s his wife and has her take care of his kids) only for some reason Gabrielle is now a mermaid and one of the supporting characters is impersonating Fran Drescher. There are also a lot of awful fish puns.
Gabrielle eventually regains her memory (in her own dream! She’s having a dream where she’s a mermaid with amnesia, and then while still in the dream remembers who she really is), tells her phony husband to go find his real wife and patch things up with her, and then wakes up. Now she likes babies more or something. Gabrielle is told she was unconscious only briefly, but the episode ends on a predictable but nonsensical “It was only a dream…OR WAS IT?” note when we see that Gabrielle still has a ring that was given to her in the dream. The whole thing was incredibly stupid, annoying, unfunny, and aside from the actors had no resemblance to any other episode of the show ever.
Looking on the Web now, I see that Xena executive producer Rob Tapert has since admitted that idea for this episode really didn’t have anything to do with Xena. It was his way of trying out a concept he’d had for a new show, a sort of under-the-sea family sitcom. After seeing how badly this idea worked in practice, he abandoned it. I think it should have been an obvious no-go before the script was even finished, though.
I really disagree with this. I like this episode, mainly for the sequence right after the title credits. The music and the zoom in to the space station is, to me a wonderful scene. The episode also at least advances the overall story of the series since it starts with Faye being out of fuel after scamming Spike and Jet in the previous episode.
I’ll admit that it didn’t advance the overall story line a great deal but it did more so than did ‘Mushroom Samba’ or ‘Pierrot le Fou’, two of my favourites.
That Cowboy Bebop episode is the one with the monkey virus, right? The only thing I remember about it is the great music playing while Spike and Faye are trying to shoot down the missiles in hyperspace. That along made it a good episode.
Wow, no one has mentioned BSG’s “Black Market”? That was truly an awful episode.
I came in here to say Isaac and Ishmael of the West Wing. What? Make a very special episode only days after Sept. 11? Did you ever think that people might want something different than even more Sept. 11 stuff?
Also the 2001 Christmas Special of “Only Fools And Horses”. Not only did it ruin the 1996 “real” ending for no reason it was, as a stand alone episode rather dull and laugh free.
Seriously though I think that there are four or five Starsky and Hutch episodes that literally consist of sixty minutes of guys in tweed suits and aviator-style eyeglasses sitting around in rooms with wood paneling, green carpeting and ceiling fans, smoking cigarettes and talking.
I’ve managed to miss that one. So I have to nominate that pathetic stitched together episode where Riker got the mysterious space disease/poison/infectation and Polanski and Troi spend the whole episode in sickbay poking at his brain and making him remember past episodes.
In the end, they discover that hitting bad memories drives back the msd/p/i, so the do their best to dredge up all the past tragic moments they can. It was a sloppy piece of nearly nothing.
TKO actually does advance the overall plot…slightly.
The boxer dude tells Garibaldi at least twice that he’s too trusting and doesn’t watch his own back and it’ll be his downfall–several episodes later, Garibaldi is shot in the back by one of his own men.
Plus, TKO has the good subplot with Ivanova. The eps would be in my bottom 10 B5 eps, but at least TKO isn’t totally without merit.
I’m going to disagree with this. It aired on October 3, 2001, and networks had put so many shows on hiatus. Remember when Letterman and Leno just ran reruns for a few weeks? It wasn’t a great episode, but it wasn’t the worst (anything with Zoey being kidnapped can fill in nicely for that distinction). The episode had a decent discussion, and was several levels of discourse above the “kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out!” mentality that was building across the country.
The show Heroes had a couple of hit or miss seasons. I almost gave up on it. This year, however, it become good once again… and then there was 1961. Ugggh. Makes me want to reconsider my decision to stick with the show.
I’m currently watching BSG for the first time and just finished up season 3.
I agree that “Black Market” was goofy, but at least the concept behind it was cool and made sense.
Instead I’d nominate any episode that’s primarily about Starbuck and Apollo being in love or whatever. Blargh. But then, I thought season 3 was pretty shitty overall.
X-Files had a lot of lemons during its run, but I was particularly unimpressed by “The Field Where I Died”. Boring, pointless, and shamelessly piggy backing on the Waco debacle. Oh, and there was the Fluke Man one, which remained a kind of running joke for the duration of the show, in a “did we really shoot such a ridiculous episode ?!” way.
I actually like the Fluke Man episode. You can’t say that you didn’t feel a little uneasy about using a port-a-john after that.
Speaking of The X-Files, I need to mention the episode “Home.” I guess it accomplished something by being memorable and shocking. The thing is, this seems to be the only episode that X-Files haters have ever seen or heard about. This is the one they always bring up when you ask them what they didn’t like about the show.