We are, for the most part, creatures of habit. It’s not an absolute—even the most circumspect of us will occasionally feel the urge to break out of our norms, to seek the novel and, occasionally, the risky. But, face it: in the end we seek security, stability, a return to the familiar, an assurance that the universe is just so, has always been that way, will always be.
One striking example: episodic TV. Whether you binge an entire series or kick it old school and opt for a weekly fix, there is something eminently reassuring in being able to return to the same cast of characters and the same familiar, well-established scenario. Even if the setting is dystopic and the people inhabiting it are right bastards (hellooooooo, Succession!), just the fact that you know pretty much what you’re in for from chapter to chapter instills a warm, comforting glow in your otherwise stressed-out psyche. Audiences like that. Showrunners, studios, whole networks and streaming services like that. They count on it.
Well, maybe not showrunners so much. For any number of reasons—a desire to spread their production wings…an impulse to deepen and challenge their characters…maybe just sheer boredom—the creative forces behind established TV series have regularly sought to break away from the dependable, throwing their viewers out of their comfort zones and compelling them to look at the perhaps-too-familiar in a new light. It can be a risk, but when the effort is successful, it can leave loyal fans a little stunned, a bit giddy, and, ideally, re-energized in their appreciation of the tale being told. Sometimes, the outcome can be proclaimed a TV classic.
Below, in no particular order, is a set of episodes that dared to veer off the beaten path, and in doing so left their mark not just on their viewers, but on our notion of what a TV show is capable of.
(NOTE: Of necessity, the following discussions will be rife with spoilers. We’ll try to do it in a way that won’t seriously affect your appreciation of the episodes if you haven’t seen them, but have a care, me bucko…ye have been warned.)
The Dick Van Dyke Show—“It May Look Like a Walnut” (1963, S2:E20)
If I Love Lucy was the prototypical sitcom for the 1950s—what with its setting in a small, walk-up apartment building and its husband-wife dynamic that often seemed to morph into parent-child—The Dick Van Dyke Show was a paragon of the New Normal, Sixties-style. Rob Petrie (Van Dyke) was comfortably middle-class, happily living in a suburban ranch home and employed as head writer of a successful variety show. His wife Laura (Mary Tyler Moore) may have been satisfied to keep house and raise their young son, but she was also bracingly independent, and could rock a pair of capri pants like nobody’s business. Most hearteningly, the relationship between the two evoked a true partnership, anticipating the push toward gender equality that would soon be coming to the fore in society in general.
And that marriage-between-equals dynamic is where “It May Look Like a Walnut” starts, with Rob mercilessly teasing his wife over her reaction to the late-night horror film he’s watching on TV, while she counters by decrying the inanity of a scenario that sees an alien emissary from the planet Twylo—a man with a striking resemblance to comedian Danny Thomas, save for the four eyes (two front and two back)—disseminating booby-trapped walnuts around the world in order to mutate earthlings into Twlyo-ites, all to stop humanity’s push into space. Oh, and the mutants also lose their thumbs. Gotta hand it to series creator and writer Carl Reiner: It’s at least as credible as anything that happens in Plan 9 From Outer Space.
It seems less silly the morning after, when Rob wakes to find walnuts cropping up in the most implausible places, as well as his wife, son, and co-workers acting very oddly, and his TV show casting as its next guest star Danny Thomas, who just so happens to notice the stain on Rob’s tie while facing away from him. Plus, Rob’s having a helluva lot of trouble lighting a cigarette without any thumbs.
“It May Look Like a Walnut” tips its hand early that this is all a dream sequence, yet the accretion of goofy, sci-fi (term deliberately used) details into Rob Petrie’s otherwise normal, Camelot-era world—capped off by the sight of Moore sexily surfing out of a closet on a wave of walnuts—took an audience expecting reassuring sitcom hijinks and gave them something more akin to the show’s network-mate, The Twilight Zone. (As if it wasn’t obvious enough, Rob himself makes reference to a “Twylo zone”— guess they couldn’t get Rod Serling in to do a spit-take.) “It May Look Like a Walnut” wasn’t the only time The Dick Van Dyke Show would dip a toe into the genre pool, but for pure, satirical dedication, it was one of the series’ better deviations.
Doctor Who—“Blink” (2007 – S3:E10)
It’s no secret that the Doctor’s companions are viewer surrogates, bringing a much-needed human perspective to the alien time-traveler’s adventures. They’re also wish-fulfillment surrogates—after all, who hasn’t toyed with the fantasy that one day the Doctor might single them out, whisking them away from their humdrum, conventional pursuits (don’t kid yourself, your pursuits are humdrum and conventional) and taking them on the adventure of a lifetime?
“Blink” finds a way to literalize that desire. Taking the viewpoint of a never-before-seen character, Sally Sparrow (Carey Mulligan), the episode starts with the woman being dropped into a tantalizing mystery —an abandoned house where strange, gothic statues seem to move on their own—and then has her stumble upon a set of DVD Easter eggs where the Doctor (David Tennant) gazes through the screen and speaks directly to her.
Conceived as way to allow Tennant and his then-current companion Freema Agyeman to focus their energies on subsequent, more-demanding episodes of the series, “Blink” successfully synthesizes the feel of what it would be like to have your own life suddenly subsumed by something more incredible and magical. Sally and her own version of a companion, Larry Nightingale (Finlay Robertson), take point in the adventure, while the Doctor and Martha Jones remain largely relegated to the background (or maybe to the side—at the end we see them trotting off to some other, never-explored, confrontation). Scripted by Steven Moffat, the episode introduced one of the series’ most intriguing adversaries: the Weeping Angels, statue-like creatures who can only move when not seen and whose “kills” are more poignantly conceptual than literal—they whisk their victims into the past so that they die before any of their loved ones and acquaintances are even born. But more than that, it gave its watchers a more direct in-road into the Whovian universe, no TARDIS required. Like Sally Sparrow engaging in banter with a video-bound Gallifreyan, viewers of “Blink” felt the potential for the strange to reach past their screens and touch their own lives.
Star Trek—“The City on the Edge of Forever” (1967, S1:E28)
“A Wagon Train to the stars…” is what Gene Roddenberry promised the execs at NBC (even though he had something more profound in mind). And in its first season, that’s what Star Trek delivered: action, adventure, strange creatures, and a bevy of females for perpetual horndog Captain James Kirk (William Shatner) to bed. It was all good fun, in that conventional, zero-sum TV way: Whatever the challenges, the viewer could rest assured that it’d all turn out okay by the end, and in the final fadeout, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy would be back on the bridge, sharing a good-natured chuckle (at least in the case of the two humans) over the narrow scrape from which they had just extricated themselves.
From the get-go, “City on the Edge of Forever” signaled that it was not going to follow the established template. Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) undergoes an involuntary case of drug-induced psychosis, and flees through a time portal into a past where he somehow succeeds in erasing Starfleet—and the starship Enterprise—from existence. Kirk and Spock (Leonard Nimoy) follow, and discover, in depression-era America, the missionary Edith Keeler, an idealist positing a future in which humanity has grown beyond war, greed, and hate, and has thus managed to harness unimagined energies to reach the stars—in other words, Keeler is Gene Roddenberry recast in guest star Joan Collins’ body. Kirk, of course, is smitten, but Spock discovers a grim consequence: If allowed to go unchecked, Keeler’s contagious idealism will delay America’s entry into World War II, thus ceding victory to Germany. For history to be righted, Keeler must die.
And in Harlan Ellison’s brilliant script (liberally rewritten—to Ellison’s eternal ire—by Roddenberry and company, but still respecting the author’s intent) there will be no clever, last-act save. There will be no corbomite bluff, no computer that Kirk can coax into self-immolation. There will just be Kirk doing what he must—as McCoy stares aghast and Spock learns firsthand the steep price humans pay for their emotions—followed by a grim return to a restored future. And, instead of a jocular, back-slapping wrap-up, there would be a disquieting reunion with the landing party, punctuated only by the captain uttering a mild (but for the time shocking) profanity.
“City on the Edge of Forever” won a WGA award for Ellison’s original script, and a Hugo for the episode itself. Beyond that, in a television landscape where all problems were supposed to be tied up in a neat bow by the end of an hour, it dared to capture the complexities of true drama, and showed that science fiction television could reach beyond the ray guns and rubber monsters, touching on something deeper, and more disturbing.
Batman: The Animated Series—“Read My Lips” (1993, S1:E59)
The producers of Batman: The Animated Series worked hard to get concessions from their network’s Standards and Practices department so the ostensibly kid-oriented program could depict the Bat kicking crime’s ass the way any good Dark Knight should. There were a few absolutes, though: among them, go light on the threatening with guns (to the extent that at one point the animators were forced to put a clown’s face on the muzzle of the Joker’s weapon), and, fer chrissakes NO KILLING.
Then came, “Read My Lips.”
In one of the more bizarre episodes of the series (scripted by Joe R. Lansdale), the Caped Crusader sets out to discover the mastermind behind a series of successful robberies. What he discovers is that the gang is taking orders from Scarface, a dummy under the control of a meek (and nameless) Ventriloquist. A paranoid dummy, it should be noted, brilliant but convinced that someone in his gang is repeatedly ratting him out to the Bat.
And it’s only when Batman has been captured and manages to sow chaos among the criminals by convincing Scarface that his own operator is the snitch, that you realize director Boyd Kirkland has been doing something insidious all along: Even though only one gang member cops to believing that Scarface is a real person, everyone, including Batman, acts like he is. Kirkland changes the puppet’s expressions depending on its moods, and when the Ventriloquist moves the dummy, the limbs are animated in a way that makes it appear they’re operating under their own volition. A subtle imparting of humanity, but with a devious intent: When a machine gun accidentally goes off and destroys the puppet, the image of bullets ripping through Scarface’s body—graphically animated and held for long, agonizing seconds— becomes one of the most disconcertingly violent moments imaginable, not just on a kid’s show, but on television in general. And just as you’re telling yourself, “Okay, calm down, it’s just wood, fabric, and stuffing…and just drawings of them, at that,” the episode imparts its coup de grâce: a fade-out that has the now-incarcerated Ventriloquist viciously taking a wound-forming knife to the raw pine head of Scarface Mk. II. Many adults had already figured out that Batman: The Animated Series was more than your stock kiddy cartoon. It took “Read My Lips” to teach them that mere ink on cels still had the capacity to truly unsettle.
The X-Files—“Jose Chung’s From Outer Space” (1996, S3:E20)
https://youtu.be/T5n0x2hrQj0
In its first season, The X-Files reveled in its ability to take the kind of outlandish urban myths found in the pages of the Weekly World News, and, if not treat them with actual gravitas, then at least imbue these stories with enough tongue-in-cheek verve to let people whose IQs didn’t equal their waistband size feel less guilty about enjoying them. As the show’s popularity spread, though, it became clear that creator Chris Carter felt that he had to take all those Unsolved Mysteries and actually make them mean something. By the third season, the show had hit its storytelling stride, but the delight in the wackiness of the myths that were the show’s original raison d’etre had been somewhat pushed aside.
“Jose Chung’s From Outer Space,” written and directed respectively by series stalwarts Darin Morgan and Rob Bowman, sought to put a pin to the series’ ballooning sense of gravity. Built around that most basic of urban myths—the abduction of two earthlings by alien “grays”—the episode has Agent Scully (Gillian Anderson) being interviewed by an illustrious fiction author (a gleefully effusive Charles Nelson Reilly, whose character bluntly admits he’s only in it for the money), and takes a Rashoman approach to a story that filters its events through the vantage points of innocent bystanders, skeptics and believers, conspiracy theorists, and even the then-notorious alien autopsy video.
Somehow, Morgan and Bowman manage to maintain the series’ evocative atmosphere—groundbreaking at the time—while deconstructing the show’s screw-loose inspirations: restaging sequences through multiple levels of perceived reality; having the personalities of Agents Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully morph depending on who’s telling the tale; and for good measure, throwing in Jesse Ventura as a Man in Black. Aliens smoke cigarettes, shots are run forwards and backwards, and Mulder aggressively eats an entire sweet potato pie—anything, it appears, to say, “Hey, it’s okay if you want to believe, but it’s also okay to snicker at this stuff.” There were still a few strong seasons ahead before The X-Files seriously lost its way, but “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space” served as a kind of loving shock to the system, reminding viewers that—as the wry re-write of the show’s theme indicated during the final fade—this was all just supposed to be a bit of fun.
Cowboy Bebop—“Pierrot le Fou” (1999, S1:E20)
A whole week early, the original viewers of the anime series Cowboy Bebop knew that “Pierrot le Fou” was going to be something off the beaten path when they got a look at the episode’s preview. Instead of the customary clips of spaceships, futuristic Wild West casinos, and exquisitely choregraphed fight sequences, accompanied by witty voice-overs from the show’s space-faring bounty hunter leads, they got: maniacal laughter; fast, near subliminal glimpses of a gun-wielding, top-hatted, roly-poly gent sporting a clown collar and an unsettling rictus of a grin; and a peculiar, silhouetted shot of the self-same gent doing impossible, mid-air flips while kicking the living Jack Daniels out of Bebop’s typically unflappable hero, Spike Spiegel.
That clown-from-hell is Tongpu, the Mad Pierrot, a heavily armed, essentially indestructible, and absolutely unstoppable assassin. It turns out Spike isn’t his target, just someone who wandered onto the scene as the maniac was fulfilling a contract. Which is just as bad, because once a soul has laid eyes on Tongpu, that person either dies as a consequence or spends what’s left of her/his limited life fleeing the madman’s pursuit. Spike being Spike, he decides that he is not only not going to run away, but will accept Tongpu’s invitation to an after-hours rendezvous on the battlefield of the killer’s choosing: the exquisitely designed and subtly ominous theme park, Spaceland.
Cowboy Bebop as a whole had already attained domestic notoriety—and placement in a late-night time slot—for its uncommon level of violence, delivered in a jazzy, adult atmosphere of sardonic cool. With “Pierrot le Fou,” director Shin’ichirō Watanabe not only pushed the envelope with wall-to-wall gunfire, explosions, wanton destruction of property, and a hearty body count—he threw cool out the window in order to poke at all the soft, sensitive places in the human psyche, the places you didn’t know you had. This comes through in the incongruous blend of absurdity and deadly action at the barrel of a comically cartoonish, gleeful angel of death; in composer Yoko Kanno’s demented hurdy-gurdy background music; in the lingering vision of a bullet-riddled, animatronic Goofy stand-in undergoing its prolonged and painful death throes; and in a stark, monochromatic flashback to the assassin’s torturous genesis and the unsettling revelation that this remorseless killing machine has the impulse control of a two-year-old. With stunning design and animation—the episode has “blown budget” written all over it—“Pierrot le Fou” took loyal viewers out of their customary universe of hip, and transported them to a surreal continuum of deadly, wacky dementia.
Star Trek: The Next Generation—“Conspiracy” (1988, S1:E24)
https://youtu.be/gKCtqoDPUBo
The first season of ST:TNG exhibited more than its share of growing pains. The production was lavish, the shots of the mammoth Enterprise-D, courtesy of ILM, were magnificent, and the cast, headed up by Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean Luc Picard, was impressive. But the universe these characters plied, constrained by Gene Roddenberry’s idealistic vision of a paradisiacal Earth where war, hate and greed had been eradicated, was not a direct extension of the exciting, adventurous terrain that had been travelled by the cocky Captain Kirk and crew two decades prior. The ship was too powerful, easily skirting dangers that would have challenged its predecessors; the adversaries were less than daunting, consisting primarily of a race of scheming capitalists and an effete, pan-dimensional being with a bad sense of humor; and the crew was so hell-bent on cooperation at any cost, avoiding any form of interpersonal friction, that they were less the adventurers you looked forward to joining every week than folks you might suspect of considering spirited rounds of “100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” a rollicking good time. Roddenberry & Co. had to have been well aware of the problem, and must have known that a course correction was needed. That course correction came late in the first season, and boy, was it a doozy.
“Conspiracy” starts off normally (blandly) enough, with the main crew, save Picard, bantering jovially on the bridge (and Worf [Michael Dorn] uttering the immortal line, “Swimming is too much like… bathing.”). That quickly ends after Picard receives an encrypted message from a colleague, summoning him for reasons unexplained to a meeting on a deserted planet. It’s when Picard transports down to his subterranean rendezvous that director Cliff Bole essentially goes all-in, bathing the set in an uncharacteristic, foreboding red light, having composer Dennis McCarthy lay an ominous drone on the soundtrack, and staging a confrontation between Picard and a clutch of suspicious—hell, paranoid— Starfleet officers who inform him that something has gone very wrong back at the home office, with inexplicable reassignments of personnel and cryptic orders being issued. Unnerved and back on the Enterprise, Picard then witnesses the aftermath of the destruction of his colleague’s ship, and decides that an unannounced drop-in to Starfleet is in order.
Back at headquarters, it turns out that a Body Snatchers scenario is in full swing, with creepy brain-controlling bugs, an upper echelon imbued with super-strength and impervious to phaser fire (not sure how that works, but go with it), and Picard treated to a lavish banquet of (shudder) mealworms. The pinnacle of WTF-ness comes at the very end, as a mind-controlled officer with a throbbing throat throws Roddenberry’s idealism back in his face—“We mean you no harm,” he sneers, “We seek peaceful coexistence”—and Picard and Riker (Jonathan Frakes) respond with a full-power, two-phaser salute that explodes the invader’s head in a startlingly splooshy on-screen effect.
Like a momma’s boy who’s abruptly decided that enough’s enough and runs off in his good Sunday suit for a healthy splash in the mud, “Conspiracy” wears its rebellion perhaps too flamboyantly on its sleeve. But after twenty-three episodes of mild, go-along-to-get-along adventure, it has the effect of a reassuring—if somewhat ham-fisted—palette-cleanser. Roddenberry reportedly endorsed its production, and even held firm against studio pushback over that exploding head. The follow-up episode (and season closer) would see the welcome return of the Romulans (and both episodes were supposed to be harbingers for the advent of the Borg at the start of season two, had a writers strike not intervened), so it’s clear that Next Gen was working its way toward becoming the beloved classic that fans would eventually embrace. But wild swing that it was, “Conspiracy” stands alone, a defiant exception to its creator’s hopeful vision.
The Prisoner—“Living in Harmony” (1967, S1:E13)
Imagine this: It’s 1967 in Great Britain. You keep hearing about this strange, surreal series, The Prisoner, in which Patrick McGoohan, late of Danger Man (aka Secret Agent), plays a spy who abruptly resigns his post, and is subsequently subdued and carted off to the Village, an isolated town where the leader, known only as Number 2, attempts to find out the reason for his resignation by subjecting him to a variety of mind-bending interrogation techniques. Unfortunately, you have been preoccupied with other matters (you know, general British stuff), and thus have been unable to catch the show until late in its run. Now, at the very end of December, you finally have a chance to sit down and see what all the fuss is about. So, on a cold Friday evening, you pull up a chair, fire up the telly, and watch in anticipation at the screen fades up on…
…A western?
A very odd western, in which a sheriff abruptly resigns his post and is subsequently subdued and carted off to Harmony, an isolated town where the leader, known only as the Judge, attempts to find out the reason for the Sheriff’s resignation by subjecting him to HEY, WAIT A MINUTE!
Created primarily because star and producer McGoohan wanted to try his hand at a classic oater à la Sergio Leone, “Living in Harmony” starts out as a recasting of the prime Prisoner scenario (it’s eventually revealed that the whole thing is another one of Number 2’s mind games), but then goes its own course, incorporating scripter Ian L. Rakoff’s anti-war sentiments in the character of a sheriff who refuses to arm himself, and bringing in Alexis Kanner as a mute, sociopathic gunslinger. With McGoohan at his ironic, charismatic best—he pretty much out-Eastwoods Eastwood—“Living in Harmony” flips the tables on the notion of a WTF episode, dropping into an otherwise strange and iconoclastic series a bit of naturalistic grounding. Reaching beyond its genre, it gives the surreal a breath of fresh—if slightly horse-scented—air, and cements The Prisoner as one of TV’s most off-beat experiments.
Black Mirror—“White Bear” (2013, S2:E2)
True confession time: The “White Bear” episode of Black Mirror is the only one I haven’t rewatched for this article. I can’t. I won’t. It’s not that it’s bad—quite the contrary: it’s one of the series’ best. But it did such a number on me the first time around that I can’t bring myself to relive the trauma again. It’s my Voldemort, a presence so intimidating that I shudder just writing its title, as if that mere act will conjure it up to drag me into its particular brand of hell. (And if you’ve already seen this episode and feel this is an overreaction, well, more power to you. In the coming robot apocalypse, let’s be roomies—I could use your fortitude.)
What makes “White Bear” so disconcerting is how far it goes to convince you that it’s a regular episode of Black Mirror, creator Charlie Brooker’s tart, conjectural examination of the ways humanity can be warped by the growing digital landscape. At the start, a woman (Lenora Crichlow) wakes with a splitting headache in a strange house in a strange town, only to discover that society has abruptly trifurcated into hunters, prey, and smartphone-wielding spectators. So far, so typical—the woman’s chased by sadistic maniacs, betrayed by putative allies, and finally makes her way to a transmitter that supposedly is broadcasting the society-bending signal. And it’s in that facility, at the episode’s presumed climax, that Brooker springs the trapdoor you didn’t know you’d been standing on all along.
And despite the fact that I’ve issued an all-purpose spoiler alert up above, I’m going to go ahead and fortify that with an ULTRA DOUBLE-SPECIAL ONE-TIME-ONLY SPOILER ALERT right here, because if you haven’t yet seen “White Bear,” what happens in its last act will have the greatest impact if you have no idea of what’s actually going on. So, you’ve been warned. Ready? Here we go…
Turns out it was all B.S. The mysterious setting is actually a theme park of retribution, the stalkers and victims are staff, the spectators are all park visitors willing to shell out some cash for the privilege of relishing the torment of a woman who, it’s revealed, was complicit in the torture and murder of a young child. The actual murderer—her boyfriend—took the easy way out by committing suicide, and so society has decided to vent its rage upon the accomplice, who has her memory (painfully) wiped every night, every morning wakes with the same headache, every day is immersed in the same nightmare scenario, and every evening is forced to witness the same grotesque pageant that lays her atrocities out before her.
And in a series that had previously shown us a Prime Minister blackmailed into video-streaming his carnal relations with a pig and posited a world of mandatory consumerism, complete with legally-enforced commercial viewing, “White Bear” might be Charlie Brooker’s most subversive work, forcing us to empathize with a sociopath, making us stare into her stunned, uncomprehending eyes as she witnesses the evidence of her crimes, and raising questions both about the morality of capital punishment—particularly as a form of public catharsis—and of warehousing criminals for so long that the point of punishment recedes into meaninglessness. Black Mirror had always trafficked in social commentary; with “White Bear,” the series doubled down, conjuring images that couldn’t easily be exorcised, and challenging viewers in a way couldn’t blithely be dismissed.
Buffy: The Vampire Slayer—“Hush” (1999, S4:E10)
More true confessions: After the first season, I pretty much dropped out of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Not that I didn’t like the show—what’s not to love about Joss Whedon’s blend of inventive fantasy, beguiling characters, and witty dialogue?—I just didn’t feel strongly motivated to continue. But after three years of friends continuously berating me for my grievous error, I decided to revisit the series in its fourth season, to see what I was missing. And the night I tuned in just so happened to be the night that “Hush” aired. After which, I literally uttered the key phrase in the title of this article.
This is another entry that pokes at all the soft, tender places of your psyche. It’s there in the mere presentation of the episode’s main adversaries, the Gentlemen: elegant, cadaverous figures (fronted by the inimitable Doug Jones) who float inches above the ground and move with a disconcertingly sinuous formality. It’s there in their unholy mission: to cut the hearts out of seven still-living humans. And it’s there in their mode of attack: they operate by stealing the voices of every soul in Sunnydale, rendering their victims incapable of crying out for help.
Whedon, who scripted and directed, has the amazing capacity to make even his “break-out” episodes relevant to his characters and their arcs, and “Hush” is no exception. Xander (Nicholas Brendon) and Anya (Emma Caulfield) argue over his inability to communicate his feelings; budding witch Willow (Alyson Hannigan) bemoans the fact that her Wicca group is “all talk;” meanwhile Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and her soon-to-be-boyfriend Riley (Marc Blucas) busy themselves concealing their secret lives —as Slayer and Initiative member, respectively—from each other. But what stands out in the episode is the way Whedon makes the silence serve multiple functions, not only as a subtextual element, but as surrealism in the sight of street riots devoid of angry voices, in the primal terror of having to face your death without the voice to proclaim your agony, even in comedy as Giles (Anthony Head) attempts to bring the Scooby Gang up-to-speed with some hastily prepared overhead projector slides (and, for some reason, a cassette playing Danse macabre).
“Hush” received writing nominations from both the WGA and the Emmys. It was far from Whedon’s only stand-out episode—the devastating “The Body” was yet to come in the following season. The Buffy creator has said the whole point of the episode was to get himself away from his trademark facility for dialogue, to demonstrate he was more than just clever banter. Clearly he succeeded, highlighting his series’ strengths while subverting one of its most celebrated aspects. And in the process, he created one of the most delightfully unsettling hours in television history.
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Yes, the world is strange, and chaotic, and sometimes terrifying. But when I find myself awash in doubt and confusion, I ease my tortured soul with this one truth: There are more than just ten TV episodes that have inspired the cry, “WTF?!” Maybe you know of one, or more…comment below, and do your part to spread peace and happiness.
Dan Persons has been knocking about the genre media beat for, oh, a good handful of years, now. He’s presently house critic for the radio show Hour of the Wolf on WBAI 99.5FM in New York, and previously was editor of Cinefantastique and Animefantastique, as well as producer of news updates for The Monster Channel. He is also founder of Anime Philadelphia, a program to encourage theatrical screenings of Japanese animation. And you should taste his One Alarm Chili! Wow!
I was a kid during the prime-time life of DICK VAN DYKE. The walnut episode was awesome and scary! THE PRISONER episode was a bit of a parody of BONANZA. Notice the costumes.
To add to your list. All the SUPERNATURAL meta episodes. To name a few of the best. Sam and Dean end up as animated characters in a SCOOBY DO episode. They are thrown into a world where they are the actors who play Sam and Dean on the show SUPERNATURAL. Imaginary friends are real, and someone is murdering them. All totally and wonderfully bonkers.
I’m currently rewatching Buffy, and I feel like Whedon has so many episodes that fit this bill! Not only The Body and Hush, but also Restless, Once More With Feeling and Tabula Rasa. The amazing thing is that all these episodes are important for the story and character development, not only “for fun”.
I would also add… The entire run of Legion. =)
In Angel, there was an episode where Angel becomes a literal puppet, complete with felt and stuffing. It was the funniest episode I’ve ever seen.
I’m surprised, nay flabbergastedly shocked, that no Twin Peaks episodes made it on the list. At the very least Part 8 from Season 3 (or “The Return” as Showtime would like us to say it) should be part of the list. I’m quoting a fan made description of this particular part just to show you all how zany it was: “Just as I predicted last week: Evil Coop gets shot but then homeless ghosts revive him. Then a nuclear bomb explodes for 20 minutes while the Giant watches the current episode of Twin Peaks and levitates. While meanwhile, sixty years ago, Zombie Abraham Lincoln goes on a murder rampage before he lulls everyone to sleep so that a mutant bug can crawl into a girl’s mouth.” While somewhere at the beginning of the episode we have a “The” Nine Inch Nails concert.
The second to last episode of The Leftovers. So much of that show was great but man that penultimate ep was def a “WTF just happened” as the credits rolled
Another WTF “Prisoner” episode would be “The Girl Who Was Death.” It begins at a rural cricket-match, with No. 6 in attendance, apparently on assignment as a [S]ecret [A}gent, with no sign of the Village. The viewer has no way of knowing if this is some kind of “prequel” of his pre-Village life, if he’s been somehow granted “furlough” to carry out this mission, or if it’s some kind of hallucination or mind-game. The only “clue” as to what’s happening is each commercial-break cliffhanger ends with a shot of a pair of hands holding a picture-book with a drawing vaguely related to what’s just happened. And then, in the end, it turns out No. 6 has been telling a story, with this book, to a group of children in the Village, supposedly of one of his earlier adventures. The Village authorities, who were monitoring him, end up disappointed that he did not even let his guard down to a group of children.
With escalating surreal murder-attempts, elaborate death-traps and deadly but yet comical “mastermind villain.” the story feels more like an episode of “The Avengers.” And it’s rather disturbing, to say the least, to find out that children are also being held in the Village (what could they know, or be guilty of?)
Ugh, “Pierrot le Fou” has got to be my least favorite episode of Bebop. On the other hand, “Ballad of Fallen Angels” was a mind-blowing experience when I first saw it. The soundtrack during the shootout in the church is amazing. It really cemented that this show was far from a typical anime.
I’ll add one to the list: the original Transformers cartoon episode “Only Human” where a very thinly veiled Cobra Commander somehow changes the main Transformers characters into humans with mecha suits. That was a WTF episode all around and has stuck with me since it aired in ’86.
Oh boy! I was in my early teens when I saw the episode “Hush” (I only saw it once), and almost twenty years later, the Gentlemen still give me the creeps. Literally. I have gotten over all of my monsters-in-the-dark-fears I had as a kid, but very-very(-VERY) seldom (like, last week), when I have stayed up very late alone and have to open the door to dark outside (to let the dog in, for example), I sometimes remember the Gentlemen. And close the door a fraction quicker than usual. These things are CREEPY.
MByerly @1, yes! The meta episodes are so quaint, and I absolutely love them! “Changing channels” might be my favourite of them.
Victoria Hannah @5, I have been doing a rewatch of “Twin Peaks” this autumn, following its rerun on my local channel, and when I started reading this article it was the first series that came to my mind as well. The whole series is full of what???. And I find myself loving it! (“The owls are not what they seem” has been constantly replaying in my head for the last two months.)
Whenever I wind up in a conversation about Black Mirror, I have the exact same reaction to White Bear that you did. Love it but can’t bring myself to watch it again.
Another great genre episode of Dick van Dyke is the one where they spend a weekend in a creepy cabin that appears to be haunted. The whole thing turns out to be a gag, but kid-me, who was just beginning to discover his love of all things horror, adored it. Still a fun episode to watch around Halloween.
When you brought up Cowboy Bebop I thought you were going to talk about “Toys in the Attic”, the episode that’s an homage to “Alien” and where (spoilers) all the characters die, then it’s back to normal in the next episode.
I’ll add the “Seven Little Indians” episode of Facts of Life. It’s a horror film pastiche where the characters are one by one killed in strange ways. It certainly had me scratching my head when I came across it while flipping channels.
Can we please retire the myth of “perpetual horndog Captain James Kirk”?
More importantly, many early Star Trek episodes ended on a sad or thoughtful note. “Charlie X”, “The Man Trap”, “Balance of Terror”, “This Side of Paradise”, … “The City on the Edge of Forever” is a wonderful story, but it isn’t nearly as atypical as you make it sound.
Did we leave Game of Thrones off the list because it was an entire season of WTF, not just one episode?
All these are amazing episodes, but the thing I can’t get over is the Space: Above and Beyond shirt the guy in the X-Files clip is wearing. That was the first show that hurt me by getting cancelled early after a cliffhanger season finale, and I had forgotten how upset I was that it didn’t continue until that shirt reminded me.
Star Trek Voyager’s “Threshold” maybe, the ones where Janeway and Paris have lizard babies together? I guess you can follow its plot okay, it’s just a really WTF direction to take it.
Thank you, Victoria Hannah!!
I kept waiting for this Twin Peaks episode to show up on the list. I’ve watched a lot of TV in my lifetime, but this episode is one of the craziest things I’ve ever seen.
The mention of the puppet reminded me of “Legends of To-Meow-Meow” in Season 3 of LEGENDS OF TOMORROW, a series which has been totally bonkers since Season 2, but still managed to out-bonkers itself in a few episodes. The show did a INTO THE SPIDERVERSE bit where they kept switching mediums including puppets, and one of the characters was turned into a cat. (Praise Beebo!)
EUREKA, another show with a good sense of humor edging into total bonkers, did the same thing with a Christmas special. “Do You See What I See”
@3 I definitely agree. Of course almost every episode of The Twilight Zone would qualify for this list.
There must be a whole subcategory of ‘WTF did I just watch?!?’ musical episodes, but Xena: Warrior Princess S3E12 “The Bitter Suite” is outstanding.
@14 Semper Fi! Loved SPACE ABOVE AND BEYOND. Morgan and Wong the creators were X-FILES alums.”Who Moniters the Birds?” would qualify as a WTF episode.
Great choices here. I’d also nominate the TNG episode “Genesis” where the crew “de-evolves” into cavemen and other prehistoric monsters. Oh, and Barclay turns into a spider man for some reason. It’s bonkers but fun, and more than a little creepy. Probably the closest the show came to doing a Halloween episode.
Terrific list, bearing in mind that I never watched Batman: The Animated Series or Cowboy BeBop. Also, even though I watched the first few seasons of ST:TNG before I went off it, I have no recollection of that episode at all. And I agree with @12 that City on the Edge of Forever, while excellent, wasn’t really atypical.
Blink was excellent, one of my 3 favorites of the Tennant tenure. Moffat should have stuck with writing.
My understanding was that Living in Harmony was a bit of an act of desperation, because when McGoohan & Lew Grade finally agreed on a 17 episode run, they needed a few scripts in a hurry. Many Happy Returns, Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling, & The Girl Who Was Death were other scripts they came up with fast, and all are atypical in different ways. For whatever reason, Living in Harmony was not shown by CBS during its original run, so I didn’t see it until PBS ran the series in the late ’70s.
Jose Chung’s from Outer Space also featured Alex Trebek, in addition to Jesse Ventura, as a Man in Black.
I regard It May Look Like a Walnut, which I watched when it first aired, as the single funniest US sitcom episode in history. I am still unable to watch it without laughing until my sides ache. Speaking of US sitcoms, the ending of Newhart, when Bob wakes up in bed next to Suzanne Pleshette, his wife from the earlier Bob Newhart Show, and the entire 8 season series had been a dream, belongs on the list.
I agree with commenters who suggested Twin Peaks season 3 episode 8.
IMO every episode of The Prisoner was a WTF did I just watch? Another British series completely made of WTF episodes is the short lived Sapphire and Steel. My father watched an episode with me, then turned to me and said ‘That made no sense at all’ to which I replied, ‘i know, ain’t it great?’
Cartoon Network hosted a lot of WTF series around the turn of the century. I think the WTFery stemmed from their really being cartoons for and about young adults who were waving cynicism, nihilism, and cruelty around to prove how Very Adult they were, with the characters drawn as children (and presented to children) so that the creators could get them on the air.
The capper is an episode of The Grimm Adventures of Billy & Mandy whose title I can’t find. The show is “about” two kids who manage to trap the Grim Reaper, after which Hilarity Ensues. But this particular episode is actually about a little boy who tries to make friends with Billy and/or Mandy. He is the type who gets bullied–a little bit lonely, a little bit anxious, and short–and Billy and Mandy reject him. The rest of the show is about how he gets burned to the point of losing his eyelids, and IIRC hit by a truck at one point, and falls of a cliff into cholla cacti, and gets to watch a huge crowd of people all decide not to help him, and he doesn’t get cartoon immunity to any of it–he is visibly burned and mangled and audibly whimpering and wheezing, and It’s Funny. His degradation, terror, and pain are the punchline. WTF?
I only saw it in rotation once, and I am grateful for that.
(We kept watching CN because we wanted to see Teen Titans, one of the few good shows from that period, and the time kept jumping around.)
I think my favorite WTF episode of TNG is the one with the ‘mint frosting’ (Phantasms)…either that or the one where Riker is in some kind of mindscrew…was it Frame of Mind?
@12. i agree with both your points. TOS Kirk was not a ‘perpetual horndog’. and the show didn’t shy away from sad endings…
my favorite ‘WTF’ moment was the first time I saw the reboot Battlestar Galatica when Six snaps the baby’s neck. I mean…holy hell that was awful and made you aware that nothing was safe
Without checking, I think that Giles gave his slideshow in ‘Hush’ to the tune of “Der Erlkonig.”
“Perriot du Feu” was a mindblower for me–my favorite episode of a great series. Glad to see someone point out its quality.
The way @Dan Persons and @10 ViewerB feel about “White Bear” is the way I feel about “Midnight” from the 4th season of new Who, I saw it once on broadcast, and once on DVD, and never again. I love it but I’m absolutely terrified of it. “Blink” is good but it’s still a safe episode, the Doctor ultimately triumphs over the Angels, whereas he was completely powerless against the thing from Midnight.
My literal WTF tv episode is “You Are There” from Xena, I enjoy meta and alternate universe episodes when they come up on a tv show, and I can usually take them in stride, but “You Are There” just kind of broke me.
27Jayn: it was Danse Macabre
@23: The first episodes I ever saw of the Prisoner were the last two episodes – which I went into entirely cold, knowing nothing at all about the series. I’m not sure I’m recovered yet (and that was 1986 or so).
For those adding British sitcoms you gotta go with The Young Ones. Try and explain any episode of that show… Or for cartoons find The Amazing World of Gumball. Takes the craziest kid shows and dials it way up. And it’s safe to watch with your kids.
Farscape had a fair number of WTF-provoking episodes – sometimes it fairly ran on them – but the two that stand out for me are Won’t Get Fooled Again and (of course) Scratch’n’Sniff.
tk @@@@@ 29 – wow, so I’m watching S4 of New Who now…for some reason I never saw the latter half of this season. Last night, saw Midnight for the first time and immediately thought it would fit well on this list. How have I never heard of this episode? Creepy as anything and…the way it ended…wow. You rarely see the Doctor quite as shaken up as he was at the end of that one.
The absolute most bonkers thing I’ve ever experienced on television was a stupid show I just happened to settle on while flipping through the channels one night in the mid-80s. It was a show named after the museums and called “Ripley’s Believe It or Not,” and was co-hosted by Marie Osmond of all people. She did a bit on some kind of surrealist stuff and went off and did a totally bizarre poem from memory. I mean she was her naturally bouncy self and then all of the sudden-boom-she’s doing this perfect rendition (as far as I can tell) of this nonsensical poem and staring directly at the camera (and into my soul). It was SO perfectly wtf.
Thanks all who agreed with my suggestion. I’ve been a long-time Twin Peaks freak and even that episode made me gobsmacked! And I have a Trigger Warning now with the seemingly innocuous song, “My Prayer” by the Platters because of it!
I know I’ve mentioned it in previous threads, but a major WTF episode for me was the Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy episode that was a full-on God-Emperor of Dune parody, with Mandy in the role of Leto and Billy in the role of an endless succession of rapidly-dying Duncan Idaho gholas.
Hmmm, and here I thought the Buffy episode would be the mental-patient one. Standard trope of an episode – character wakes up in a mental institution, Dr. tries to convince them their life is a big lie. Usually, we find that the doctor was working for some hostile government, or aliens, or something, trying to extract info from the ‘patient’. Happened to Riker, right?
But for Buffy? The episode ends with the doctor shaking his head sadly, as she sinks back into her life. Was it really the demon blood making her hallucinate the mental hospital? Or is that the real her, and the Slayer is just a fantasy life? Unlike basically every other time the trope is employed, we’re left not knowing.
My pet theory about ‘Conspiracy’ is that it’s the only time on any series of Star Trek where we get an honest depiction of what being shot by a phaser set to ‘kill’ does to a body. Every other time, when someone just glows and evaporates, or falls down with at most a scorch mark? Just a PG-rated stand-in for what being hit by a deadly energy weapon actually entails.
I glad that nothing from “Lost” made it on the list.
I can’t believe the last two episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion wasn’t mentioned.
I just throught of another, although it’s more WTF in the silly ‘what did we just watch’ kind of way.
I don’t remember the name of the show – a friend of mine was spending a few days with us (he lived upstate) and we were up all night talking and etc and this show came on and in our sleep deprived state we thought it was HILARIOUS. This was back in about 2000, mind you. He even ended up writing a short story based on it (he was a talented writer).
The general premise was some kind of horror show where the main characters ran some kind of haunted antique/pawn shop and I think the episodes revolved around various items. This particular episode involved a haunted mulcher that, if you fed people into it, you got an amount of money corresponding to the person’s net worth. This is already kind of WTF, but the thing that absolutely made this episode was Enrico Colontoni as the guy feeding people to the mulcher who portrayed his role with a kind of sadistic glee that never left my head, heh. I don’t recall if I’d already seen Galaxy Quest by then, but this was of course well before his (awesome, awesome) role as Keith Mars in Veronica Mars.
But man, for YEARS the ‘possessed mulcher’ was a source of inside jokes and laughter for us.
Ha – found the episode!
http://www.postmodernbarney.com/2014/09/friday-the-13th-root-of-all-evil/
(It also amuses me that both this, and another review I found, both refer to Adrian as ‘Veronica Mars’s dad’ and one even says that’s his most famous role, because eve before that I knew him from things like Just Shoot Me and Galaxy Quest, and I never got the impression that VM was much more than a cult hit. A cult hit I’m mildly obsessed with, that is. In fact, I kind of wanted to restrain myself from suggesting VM episodes for this list, because they’re not WTF in a genre way. But then again, perhaps there’s some overlap between people who like Veronica Mars and people who review shows like Friday the 13th…)
Rashoman?
Kurosawa’s Batman?
Moonlighting’s Taming of the Shrew episode.
@42: I always think of Enrico Colontoni as Carl Elias from “Person of Interest” – he’s a great actor.
Guy in the first picture straight up looks like a uterus.
The Star Trek TNG episode where the crew devolved was not one of my favorites. It was one of my problems with most science fiction shows (though I still loved them). There was a good premise, but in 42 or so minutes, there’s not much time to develop it. This means that you have only five or ten minutes to reset everything to perfectly normal. There’s no (or hardly any) residual effect in the following episodes. Events that would permanently scar real people are treated as transitory. Another example is what V-Ger does to Uhura in TOS. The episode ends with her learning to read again, because her mind has been wiped. This is a terrible thing to do to a beloved character, but it’s even worse because it’s never mentioned again.
Joss Whedon often does terrible things to his characters, but at least he doesn’t pretend that those things don’t really matter to the characters.
I have to add my vote for “Blink”. It was, far and away, the most terrifying tv spisode that I can remember watching. Moffat must have had a truly devastating mind-fart to come up with that one. Those weeping angels still are REALLY scary.
“The Runaway Bride” wasn’t all that scary, but it really showed the “human” side of the Doctor, doing what he had to do to the Empress (of Racnoss?), all the while hating that he need to do it. Well-acted, and not the usual whovian light touch.
Revenging Angel Fromm Farscape was definitely one of my WTF episodes. Farscape wasn’t exactly a predictable show, but an animated episode in the style of Loony Toons was definitely not what I’d expect.
Hush is definitely the WTF episode of Buffy. There were several episodes that packed a punch, like The Body, but that all stemmed from the characters’ arcs. So while there were WTF moments, they weren’t WTF episodes. Even Once More With Feeling wasn’t a WTF episode, because we were already used to the idea of musicals, and everyone had secrets that needed to be outed to move arcs forward, and what better than by the power of music?
Hush was different. We hadn’t really seen anything like it before, and had moments that could only work inside the framework of the show: notably the final moments where Buffy and Riley can speak, but neither can find the words to speak, so sit in uncomfortable silence.
Then there’s several from The Legendary Journeys of Hercules. Take “Les Contemptibles” – IRL, Hercules was used symbolically by both the Royals and the Revolutionaries during the French Revolution, but in a series set in Ancient Greece, you get a clip show with the framing narrative set in Revolutionary France with no explanation why the characters in Greece look like the characters in Revolutionary France (beyond being the same actors). Weird.
Then there’s the episode “yes, Virginia, there is a Hercules” – where the show goes all meta. Set in the modern day, it suggests Kevin Sorbo is a cover identity for the immortal Hercules, I guess Highlander style. So the show suggests Hercules is playing Kevin Sorbo playing Hercules. Again, no explanation of the sudden shift from Ancient Greece to modern times (and back again in subsequent episodes).
@42, @45 For some reason I liked Enrico Colontoni’s as a gone-to-weeds CIA agent in Central America in Stargate (the series). Some of his lines were awkward as hell, but there’s just something about that character…
@47 ” This means that you have only five or ten minutes to reset everything to perfectly normal. “
I’ve always thought that one of the biggest problems with the first three seasons of ST:TNG is that they spent the first 30 minutes of the episode wandering around to the “conflict”, whatever it was going to be.
In ST:TOS the conflict was usually established within the first five minutes, before the intro with the Enterprise swooshing back and forth.
In early TNG, by the time you knew what the story was about, there was only 10 minutes left to resolve the conflict. In TOS, after the conflict was identified, you still had 45 minutes to find a resolution.
Later seasons of TNG mostly fixed this glaring scripting problem.
A lot of great episodes mentioned. Another one from X-Files I would include would be the episode “Ice” Season 1, Episode 8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_(The_X-Files)
Also from Deep Space Nine I would recommend the episode “In The Pale Moonlight”, Season 6, Episode 19. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Pale_Moonlight
@47, 52: Many TNG episodes had an A and B plot. It seems that for establishing and resolving a conflict, fifty minutes is plenty.
I don’t think the Voyager episode where Janeway and Paris turn into lizards, or the TNG episode where everyone devolves into different organisms along their evolutionary lineage, really fit the theme here. “WTF, that was a mind-blowing concept, I need to think about it” is utterly different from “WTF that was terrible, what were they thinking”. (As a biologist, I especially despise these two episodes. Individual creatures never “evolve”, evolution doesn’t work that way, and neither does FTL travel. Introns don’t work that way either, and even if they did, Barclay couldn’t become a spider unless he devolved back to a slide mold and then re-evolved forward on an entirely different evolutionary track. This is bad bad bad writing, and not in a wow factor experimental or format-breaking or thought-provoking way.)
I think we can add “Inner Light” and SG-1’s “200” here.
-47-
Hey, that’s just episodic television.
-55-
That’s fair, but keep in mind not everyone watches Star Trek for the same reason. Sometimes a man turning into a spider for nonsensical reasons is all the WTFery one needs to be happy in life. Bad schlocky writing can be fun in its own right.
Babylon 5 was virtually a TV show filled with WTF moments. The standout episodes for me would have to be “Confessions and Lamentations” (season two, if I remember correctly), and “The Illusion of Truth” (season 4). Both work better in the context of the show, but the Illusion of Truth, in particular, stands well on its own, without that context.
As a point of information, I considered both Farscape and Legion, but since those shows were pretty consistently WTF anyway, it was hard to identify a single, standout ep. That said, it says something that in the extreme landscape of Twin Peaks, S3:E8 distinguishes itself — it would have qualified if I had thought of it. (It’s also, in and of itself, a stunning bit of filmmaking.)
And I don’t care what anybody says, Captain Kirk boinked a lot of women.
I know it’s a new series but Evil has already had several WTF episodes.
Let’s not forget DS9’s “Far Beyond the Stars” and XENA’s “The Bitter Suite.”
@59/Dan Persons: “A lot” as in “one, two, a lot”? Yeah, that’s about right. Two while he was a prisoner, and one freely and without ulterior motive: his wife.
Disappointing, I know.
@5: That ‘Twin Peaks’ episode (3×08) is immediately what jumped to mind. I mean ‘Twin Peaks’ could be strange but it’s like they went on the dial from 5 to 8 and then just straight to 50. “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima” as a musical piece was perfect and that scene with the bomb was unlike anything I’ve seen on TV before or since.
I’ve watched “Pierrot le Fou” three or four times, maybe more, and I”m never less than incredibly impressed and creeped the hell out by it. The industrial metal music, the darkness, illuminated by flashes of both light and memory, the complete batshittery of a man tortured into sadistic insanity, who is as much a victim as his victims … yeah, WTF to the nth degree.
Doctor Who: Blink was a good choice. Another would be Extremis (the best Capaldi episode IMO).
Torchwood: Children of Earth also worth a mention. (I think Episode 4 is the WTF one.) The mini-series started out like a regular Torchwood adventure, but in the episode we leave the comforting confines of a typical alien invasion story, and come face to face with the banality of (human) evil.
I feel like this article was begging for input from Fringe.
@44.
Atomic Shakespeare! One of the best interpretations of Shrew I’ve seen, and an excellently weird episode of Moonlighting. It really does take all the really problematic parts of that play head-on, and highlights them, while remaining true to the characters. Both as written by Shakespeare and in the context of the show
A 1971 episode of The Name of the Game called “L.A. 2017” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0273868/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_50) was an SF story directed by Steven Spielberg and written by SF writer Philip Wylie. The series was usually about the contemporary adventures of a magazine publisher played by Gene Barry. He is driving back from an environmental conference (the 1st Earth Day was the previous year) on a smoggy day in SoCal when he is overcome by exhaust fumes in his car. He awakens to find himself in the far future of 2017. An environmental catastrophe has decimated the world population and forced the survivors to live underground in a corporate -run totalitarian society. People get drunk on milk and aging hippies play rock music as a from of rebellion. Psychiatrists are the police. Refusing to cooperate with the corporate rulers, he flees back to the surface, where he passes out from the pollution. He is revived by paramedics where his car ran off the road in 1971. He resumes dictating his memo to the President about the urgent need to do something about pollution NOW! And we all know how that worked out. But hey, at least we’re still able to live on the surface! This was a completely one off episode and it was never referenced again, nor was there any other similar episode in the series. But it definitely made an impression on me at the time.
I first got into the Prisoner when CBS was showing it late night on, I think Fridays, in the late 80s. My first episode was Schizoid Man. but the next one I saw was Living in Harmony, and I was very confused as to why CBS was now showing a Western. I also remember that a few weeks later, a basketball game ran long and they decided not to show the final episode. I had to wait until the showed the whole series again to see how the show ended.
These episodes are why I really like getting into a show for many seasons, because every once in awhile the showrunner will switch it up and really put the actors through their paces. It’s so fun to witness.
Hush is always the episode I introduce to Buffy newbies so they can see how wonderful the show is.
There was an excellent episode in Lost Girl where the characters all switch places with each other. I’m a sucker for the body switch– super enjoyable to see the actors’ interpretations of each other’s characters after several seasons of development.
Plenty of Community episodes that were off the wall and wonderful, such as the paint ball episodes.
For me, the Ozme episode of FARSCAPE is pretty up there. When D’Argo is the more responsible party, someone has clearly crossed the streams.
And let’s not forget the first run of THE TOMORROW PEOPLE–“Bubbleskins, humans love to wear them!”, with the runner-up “Heart of Suggoth”. Like, people don’t call rock & roll demonic already, right?
Although Nicklelodeon advanced the cause of evil when Plus and Minus taught perfectly innocent children how to play “I touched you last”. Seriously, if that’s not a thoughtcrime, what *is*?
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@49 – I thought of “Revenging Angel” too as I was reading the article.
If we’re bringing up The Prisoner, I guess picking “Fall Out” as the best example of WTF is too obvious?
Sorry, I stopped being able to take this list seriously once you called Kirk a perpetual horndog. And not only is TOS not as unabashedly optimistic (and neat) as you make it sound, but I’m surprised a number of other more discomfiting Trek episodes didn’t make your cut. Picard’s “I am Locutus of Borg”? DS9’S “In the Pale Moonlight?” How about the one where we discover Kirk survived Tarsus IV as a child?