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2020-03-18, 10:39 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Terrible episodes of great shows.
There's a good guide to TNG here. I skipped season 1 on general principles and started watching through everything with a 3 or above. While I didn't always agree with the rating it's a pretty good list for screening out the crap.
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2020-03-18, 12:20 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Terrible episodes of great shows.
Voyager suffered the curse of extremely inconsistent writing. When it was good, it was really good (several Voyager episodes on my top 10 favorite Trek episodes in general). And when it was bad it was really bad.
Definitely harder. After all, I generally give a show 5 episodes, and if I don't like it by then I stop watching. So for me to be able to answer this, I'd have to have a show where one episode was "great" but the others were bad enough that I still stopped watching. That's a tricky balance, and I don't think it's ever happened to me."That's a horrible idea! What time?"
T-Shirt given to me by a good friend.. "in fairness, I was unsupervised at the time".
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2020-03-18, 12:26 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Terrible episodes of great shows.
Cuthalion's art is the prettiest art of all the art. Like my avatar.
Number of times Roland St. Jude has sworn revenge upon me: 2
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2020-03-18, 05:20 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Terrible episodes of great shows.
"That's a horrible idea! What time?"
T-Shirt given to me by a good friend.. "in fairness, I was unsupervised at the time".
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2020-03-18, 05:38 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Terrible episodes of great shows.
Last edited by Peelee; 2020-03-18 at 05:38 PM.
Cuthalion's art is the prettiest art of all the art. Like my avatar.
Number of times Roland St. Jude has sworn revenge upon me: 2
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2020-03-18, 05:41 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Terrible episodes of great shows.
To be included on this list would require Voyager to be a great show
But I agree that is a TERRIBLE episode. Not just from the idiocy that traveling faster than warp somehow 'evolves' humans into lizards. Or the fact that he steals a ship that can now go literally anywhere in the galaxy.... and goes to a planet normal warp distance away. The functional equivalent of somebody jumping in a getaway car and driving down the street. But no, the worst part is that it SHOULD HAVE ENDED THE SHOW.
They had a method for instantaneously returning to Earth, AND a cure for the side effects. "OK boys, hit the warp for earth, pick up your lizard 'evolution' cure and hit the bars by 5."
Nope. They just discard it and never mention it again. Despite the fact that they explicitly claim it is 'transwarp', and that multiple times later in the show they talk about the Borg transwarp gateways, so CLEARLY its just a matter of proper stabilization to do it. Nope. Discard, never speak of it again.
Artist of my Avatar: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Rakrakrak-272771299ALL HAIL THE GREAT RAK!!
I use the same name in every game I ever play or forum I join (except the pretender on PSN that forced me to be RealOlinser). If you see an Olinser in a game or on a website, there's a high chance it's me, feel free to shoot me a message.
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2020-03-18, 09:15 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2020
Re: Terrible episodes of great shows.
Let's break the Star Trek discussion up a bit.
Leverage: The White Rabbit Job. Final season, ramping up to the finale, and then we have this one. The show has a very specific formula they use that relies on a hateable villain. You can mess with that, sure(the rehab episode in S1, the carnival in S4), but both of those bring in alternate villains to focus on. This one, there's no villain, the moral justification for the team being involved is extremely thin, and that's supposed to justify their incredibly risky con? No. There were other episodes I dislike and skip on rewatches for one reason or another, this is the only one where I actually think the series would be better without it.
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2020-03-18, 09:54 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Terrible episodes of great shows.
Blasphemy!
Especially when you say that before I have a chance to play out my "any Voyager episode with a photon torpedo" card.Cuthalion's art is the prettiest art of all the art. Like my avatar.
Number of times Roland St. Jude has sworn revenge upon me: 2
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2020-03-18, 10:14 PM (ISO 8601)
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2020-03-18, 10:35 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2012
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Re: Terrible episodes of great shows.
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Not all heroes wield scimitars, falchions and longbows! (I'm quite proud of this one ) - Lemmy's Homebrew Cauldron
You can find all my work here.
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2020-03-18, 10:46 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Terrible episodes of great shows.
I love this theory.
But they were rationing energy so hard they had Neelix be a chef so they wouldn't have to replicate food. Incredibly energy-rich photon torpedoes would be, in theory, astronomically more resource-intensive to replicate.
As for the torpedo manufacturing team, I also vaguely remember that, but never really in any capacity other than off-handed mention. And if photon torpedoes are actually easy to manufacture, why make such a big deal about their scarcity early on?Cuthalion's art is the prettiest art of all the art. Like my avatar.
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2020-03-18, 10:59 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Terrible episodes of great shows.
Obviously, Neelix's meals have as many calories as a photon torpedo.
Seriously, though... I always figured that between scavenging and trade, they figured out a way to produce at least a few photon torpedoes. Probably not as many as the montage shows, but still more than just what they had in the early episodes.Last edited by Lemmy; 2020-03-18 at 11:05 PM.
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2020-03-18, 11:56 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Terrible episodes of great shows.
Presumably early on Voyager and it's crew didn't know where to locate harvest-able resources to power their replicators since they didn't know the lay of the land. They were probably scavenging whatever bits and pieces they came across on their travels, dedicating the lion share of what they could find towards maintaining the ship and cutting corners as often everywhere else (food, holodecks, ect)
Also they were trading with the species they encountered at pretty much every opportunity.Sparxs Plays: My friend's Youtube gaming channel where you can watch us.
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2020-03-19, 12:19 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Terrible episodes of great shows.
Yeah, I have no problem with them being able to build a few extra torpedoes, scrounge together parts to make another shuttle, maaaaaaaybe the Delta Flyer if I'm feeling generous. But like, the entire thematic point of them being out in the Delta Quadrant is to have them be cut off from the Federation, so no carefree luxuries like ice cream whenever you feel like or impromptu concerts whenever you feel like replicating up a cello
or goofing off in a holodeckohwait.
Also, I wanted to share this:
Originally Posted by Voyager GothicCuthalion's art is the prettiest art of all the art. Like my avatar.
Number of times Roland St. Jude has sworn revenge upon me: 2
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2020-03-19, 02:54 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Terrible episodes of great shows.
I'd add Eureka's season 3 Here Comes the Suns to the list. Now, Your Millage May Vary when it comes to Eureka, but I appreciated the Syfy trinity of Sanctuary, Warehouse 13 and Eureka, because they formed a very interesting "TV Universe." The series conceits were related enough that you could have characters travel between shows for cameos, but different enough that they don't step on each others' toes: Sanctuary does cryptids, Warehouse 13 does old, magic junk, and Eureka handles the superscience (And is also more geographically contained).
In particular, the episode formula of "present a bunch of goings-on, reveal the Problem of the Episode, weed out the Red Herrings, solve the POTE" encouraged the audience to pay attention and try to figure out which seemingly-innocuous goings-on would be responsible.
The Syfy trinity even had a recurring cross-show romance/fling, which is something I don't think I've seen since (although I don't watch much TV, so Marvel/DC have probably already done it ten times).
However, Here Comes the Suns manages to be uniquely bad, because the episode is resolved by the most blatant product placement I've ever seen. In order to survive the effects of a second (artificial) sun, the protagonist must don specially-made superscience Gillette-brand deodorant . This basically comes out of nowhere, and is probably the most ham-fisted product-placement I've ever seen, beyond even some legitimate paid-for advertisements!Last edited by Dargaron; 2020-03-19 at 03:04 PM.
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2020-03-19, 07:19 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Terrible episodes of great shows.
The Simpsons has had its fair share of bad episodes but two stand out for me. 1. Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming was probably the first outright bad episode since Season 1, ending possibly the longest sustained run of quality episodes from a single show in TV history. Especially given how good previous Sideshow Bob episodes had been, it's a bummer, and the "clunk" on arrival is obvious when you watch all the episodes sequentially (as I, uh, have, at least until...)
2. Bart to the Future, which is not only possibly the worst Simpsons episode ever in its own right, but came early enough in the show's history that before it aired the qualitative dip might still have been a blip. Instead it finally terminated the minimum expectation that the show would always be worth watching. There were more bad episodes later - many of them - but none of them were ever so disappointing again.
Both are from the first half of the penultimate season which I think was the most inconsistent period in the show's run. After seven years it seemed to take them a while to find their feet again and readjust to the episodic format.
Proposition Infinity I think was intended as a satire on a then-current debate. It was a bit on-the-nose at the time and ten years on it has dated. But I can live with that. The Mutants Are Revolting didn't do much for me though.
Speaking of boxing - the boxing episode in Battlestar Galactica. Had they ended it after the fight between Adama and the Chief, it would have been mediocre and forgettable. But then going for another bout and getting wrapped up in the Lee-Starbuck drama that I don't think anyone really cared about, that was just dire.
I don't really like The Crown, but I thought both Assassins and Aberfan were great.
I'm sure there must have been at least one episode of Scandal that I thought was good at the time, but I'm struggling to think of any.
Most of the time, though, I give up on shows I don't like after a few episodes anyway. I don't have a partner or housemate to push me to keep watching or put it on in the background, etc. so I just find something else.Last edited by Aedilred; 2020-03-19 at 07:26 PM.
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2020-03-20, 04:53 AM (ISO 8601)
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2020-03-20, 07:26 AM (ISO 8601)
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2020-03-20, 08:51 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Apr 2007
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Re: Terrible episodes of great shows.
"And if you don't, the consequences will be dire!"
"What? They'll have three extra hit dice and a rend attack?"
Factotum Variants!
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2020-03-20, 12:07 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Mar 2009
Re: Terrible episodes of great shows.
"That's a horrible idea! What time?"
T-Shirt given to me by a good friend.. "in fairness, I was unsupervised at the time".
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2020-03-20, 02:15 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2019
Re: Terrible episodes of great shows.
That's brilliant!
Voyager probably has the biggest waste of a cool premise of any Star Trek show. Bring in new Delta Quadrant aliens! Change the design of the ship as they patch it up with locally sourced parts! Have supply crises and rationing! Just do something with the idea of being alone and surviving on your wits in uncharted space! Every now and then the show would actually remember that it wasn't TNG, and we'd get a cool bit like the introduction of the Borg, where the start of the episode really sold "we are so, so out of our depth here", but they were few and far between.
Doctor Who is....when, it's good, it's amazing. When it's bad, it's terrible. I think the one that stands out for me is the one that concluded the....which season was it? The one that starts off with the Richard Nixon cameo.
Spoiler
Okay, so the premise of the season, which we've been beaten over and over the head with, was that the Doctor has to die at the ordained time, or the universe breaks. That's what all the drama has been based on for multiple episodes, with growing fear, suspicions and attempts to find a way to cheat fate. That's a problem right away, because nobody believes the series is going to permanently kill it's main character.
And it turns out, very suddenly, that he only needs to be somewhere on the beach, and appear to die. So of course, he uses a workaround to cheat death, one of many he could have used even if we just limit ourselves to technology seen in this season. That wet farting sound you hear is all of the build-up dissipating.
Not to mention which, it retroactively makes the pretty cool conclusion to the previous season into a damp squib. Who were the Silence? Oh, just these random aliens who were maybe working with the villains from this arc or something. Why did they blow up the TARDIS and screw up the entire universe? Dunno.
It was about then that I started to get the impression that Moffat was brilliant at creating mood and coming up with cool ideas for an episode's premise....but wasn't so hot at tying those cool ideas into a coherent and satisfying multi-episode arc.
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2020-03-20, 08:14 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Terrible episodes of great shows.
To be fair, this part of it was answered later. Much later. After everyone had forgotten about it, and even then only if you had a good memory and were paying attention. It was addressed at the end of The Wedding of River Song by Dorium, even, but it was in Moffatese so nobody had any idea what it meant.
SpoilerIt's a rogue chapter of the Papal Mainframe - which uses those aliens as confessional priests. The events in The Time of the Doctor were predicted, sort of, at least to the extent that it was established that if the Doctor spoke his name at Trenzalore, the consequences would be terrible (presumably a resumption of the Time War). At Trenzalore, the Papal Mainframe addressed the situation by maintaining a truce between the Doctor and his enemies. But the Kovarian chapter decided to take the prophecy more literally and kill the Doctor before he got there to prevent the events coming to pass. They tried this twice, once by destroying the TARDIS (which failed, thanks to the second Big Bang) and again by stealing Melody and training her as an assassin to kill him at Lake Silencio (which failed thanks to the assistance of the Tesselecta).
There is, however, the major unanswered question of what happened to the Kovarian chapter. In the alternate timeline of The Wedding of River Song Madam Kovarian was killed by Amy and the Silence, but in the main timeline she was never seen again after she escaped from Demons Run, and she wasn't acting alone.
Moffat can do some great stuff, especially when it comes to time-travel related shenanigans. The Big Bang, Blink and even The Curse of Fatal Death play around with the possibilities of time travel in clever and entertaining ways to make it a part of the story rather than just a set-up. But when he gets it wrong, and especially when he gets bogged down in his own pseudo-philosophical claptrap, ye gods it can be awful.
The Wedding of River Song was perhaps the nadir of Moffat's too-clever-for-its-own-good plotting and it was pretty dreadful. But as you say, Doctor Who is so hit and miss that I have to query whether it's really a great show at all, or whether that is a particularly poor episode by its standards. The one that stands out for me as the real turkey in the New Who era is Fear Her which was just dire, but it's not like bad episodes are in short supply.GITP Blood Bowl Manager Cup
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2020-03-20, 08:44 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Terrible episodes of great shows.
I've connected with this sentence in so many ways.
I wholly agree with this. It's incredibly swingy, and once Matt Smith came on it became far more bad than good and I just stopped altogether. And basically embraced this.Cuthalion's art is the prettiest art of all the art. Like my avatar.
Number of times Roland St. Jude has sworn revenge upon me: 2
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2020-03-21, 02:57 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Terrible episodes of great shows.
With my sudden abundance of free time I've been catching up on TV I got behind on. I made the mistake of getting caught up on Picard before trying to finish off Doctor Who. Good Lord. The writing quality isn't even close. And yet, it's still some of the best Doctor Who I've seen in recent years. I was just so starved for good Sci-Fi that Doctor Who seemed great in comparison.
Speaking of terrible Moffat - the final episode of Sherlock. Instead of witty crime solving, we are treated to a Saw movie in which all our characters act like utter idiots. That finally broke me and I swore never to watch Moffat again unless someone else watched it first and told me that it's good.
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2020-03-21, 04:12 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Terrible episodes of great shows.
But that's how Sherlock started - with Sherlock acting like an idiot. (You never, ever, play against the Sicilian Gambit, because even if your opponent isn't cheating you have only a 50% chance to win.)
Alignments are objective. Right and wrong are not.
Good: Will act to prevent harm to others even at personal cost.
Evil: Will seek personal benefit even if it causes harm to others.
Law: General, universal, and consistent trump specific, local, and inconsistent.
Chaos: Specific, local, and inconsistent trump general, universal, and consistent.
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2020-03-21, 04:29 PM (ISO 8601)
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2020-03-21, 05:05 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Terrible episodes of great shows.
For me, the absolute worst is Star Trek TNG's "Homeward". What few interesting bits it had were mangled terribly, and the core premise was not only awful but badly handled.
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2020-03-21, 06:01 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Terrible episodes of great shows.
I mean, you can play. You should just remember that both drinks are the wrong choice.
The right choice is either the bottle or, less risky, using your weapon that you're better aiming at the other guy.
That goes doubly if you know they're a Princess Bride fan.
Also, bad episodes on great shows, Babylon 5 had the one with the disappeared Sector.
I mean the maps are missing a bit of the Station.
Concerning but, not bad as a B-Plot.
Making it the A-Plot and involving some space-monster and the wackos who want to get eaten?
No. At least the Boxing one made sense.
Both on its own and in the context of B5's (the station) purpose."If it lives it can be killed.
If it is dead it can be eaten."
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2020-03-21, 07:02 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Terrible episodes of great shows.
I think there's an element of personal taste. Overall I prefer the Moffat era to the RTD one (i.e. starting when Matt Smith arrived), partly because I just prefer Smith and Capaldi to Eccleston and Tennant, but also because RTD has a real talent for annoying me even on his good days. There aren't many episodes from the RTD era I remember as being excellent, and those that were were often written by Moffat. There were a couple of turkeys, but once Moffat took over the whole thing seemed to become even more inconsistent.
I think in some ways their respective season finales are a reasonable way to compare them because they exhibit some of the worst features of either. Moffat's tend to be technically better plotted with less reliance on complete ass-pull deus ex machina effects. But they also have a tendency to overcomplicate themselves and, while nominally tying up loose ends, do so incomprehensibly at a million miles an hour. Moffat also has a tendency to return to the "destruction of the universe", which he admittedly does better than RTD, well a bit too often. As a friend of mine commented after The Name of the Doctor: "just once it would be nice to have a season finale where the stars aren't going out..."
Funnily enough the best finale for either of them was probably the one on the lowest scale (in universe-destruction terms), and featuring one of Who's least compelling and threatening villains: the Cybermen in each instance. Though they upped the ante in each case by adding a better one (the Daleks and the Master, respectively).Last edited by Aedilred; 2020-03-21 at 07:03 PM.
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2020-03-21, 08:12 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Terrible episodes of great shows.
There's that Batman TAS episode where Batman fights evil farmers and giant bugs... Or was it in Superman TAS??? The episode is so bad I can't even recall what series it's from... ><'
Homebrew Stuff:- Lemmy's Custom Weapon Generation System! - (D&D 3.X and PF)
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