Just about every long-running or critically acclaimed show has at least one major stinker in its run. It's just inevitable that when you have so many episodes, some of them are gonna be duds. Sometimes, these episodes can be just as well-known as the great episodes.
I'll start with Code of Honor from TNG. Everything, from the racist undertones thanks to the baffling decision to make the actors playing a primitive alien race who lust after strong women black to the terrible fight scene makes me wonder how anybody involved thought this episode was a good idea.
The finale of How I Met Your Mother.
It made really really dislike Ted, and ruined rewatching many (not all, and not a majority but still) of the old eps when i come across them.
Well now it's not fair to heap all the dislike on Ted, Robin deserves at least half of it. I get that dignity probably goes out the door whenever one decides to date Barney, but she could have tried to pretend to have some.
__________________ Chicken Boo, what's the matter with you? You don't act like the other chickens do. You wear a disguise to look like human guys, but you're not a man you're a Chicken Boo.
I remember Gillian Anderson wrote and directed at least one episode of The X-Files (Season 7) and it was boring as fook. Two episodes later was a Duchovny written and directed episode and it was hilarious, a real send up of the show.
__________________ Then lets head down into that cellar and carve ourselves a witch
__________________ Your Lord knows very well what is in your heart. Your soul suffices this day as a reckoner against you. I need no witnesses. You do not listen to your soul, but listen instead to your anger and your rage.
The finale is also considered bad, but on that I disagree. I loved the ending.
__________________ What CDTM believes;
Never let anyone else define you. Don't be a jerk just to be a jerk, but if you are expressing your true inner feelings and beliefs, or at least trying to express that inner child, and everyone gets pissed off about it, never NEVER apologize for it. Let them think what they want, let them define you in their narrow little minds while they suppress every last piece of them just to keep a friend that never liked them for themselves in the first place.
Yeah, the final episode of Dexter's Lab was not good.
I'm sure that's what you meant.
__________________ What CDTM believes;
Never let anyone else define you. Don't be a jerk just to be a jerk, but if you are expressing your true inner feelings and beliefs, or at least trying to express that inner child, and everyone gets pissed off about it, never NEVER apologize for it. Let them think what they want, let them define you in their narrow little minds while they suppress every last piece of them just to keep a friend that never liked them for themselves in the first place.
It's the one where a screenwriter is following them around because he wants to make a movie about them, ironically I'm not sure I remember the Mandela Effect one.
__________________ Then lets head down into that cellar and carve ourselves a witch
Never let anyone else define you. Don't be a jerk just to be a jerk, but if you are expressing your true inner feelings and beliefs, or at least trying to express that inner child, and everyone gets pissed off about it, never NEVER apologize for it. Let them think what they want, let them define you in their narrow little minds while they suppress every last piece of them just to keep a friend that never liked them for themselves in the first place.
Here's the plot to the one i was talking about. its one big spoiler...:
[SPOILER - highlight to read]: A pre-credits black and white sequence appears to show the climactic scene of an episode of The Twilight Zone, in which a man in a bar reveals his fears that Martians are invading Earth while disguised as human beings. When the bartender points the man to a mirror, the man is shocked to see that he himself is a martian...and that the bartender is The Devil.
While searching through his video collection for his copy of "The Lost Martian", a "Twilight Zone" episode Fox Mulder remembers, but can find no trace of, Mulder receives a signal to meet someone. In an underground garage, Mulder finds the contact is a man named Reggie who claims to know him. The man claims that someone is trying to erase him from society and to prove his point refers to Mulder's childhood memory of watching "The Lost Martian", to Mulder's surprise. Dana Scully later matches his disbelief when Reggie (now going by the last name "Something") gives her a container of a cherry-flavored Jell-O rip off brand called Goop-O A-B-C, which she remembers from her childhood.
Mulder and Scully, and eventually Reggie, argue over whether these events are an example of the Mandela Effect, in which history is seemingly rewritten by collective acceptance of erroneous facts. (Reggie refers to it as the Mengele Effect.) Reggie frantically rants that "they" are trying to erase memory. When Mulder explains that conspiracy theorists often use a vaguely defined "they" to give "intentionality" to random events, Reggie explains that "They" is actually the name of scientist who has learned how to shape collective memory. Reggie shows Scully and Mulder an online video detailing the life of Dr. Thaddeus They, who first learned how to manipulate memory while working at NASA, then perfected his techniques while working at "The United States Hospital" in Grenada. Now in the private sector, They applies his knowledge in cases ranging from corporate products liability to Holocaust denial. Reggie then admits that he had been in Grenada prior to the US invasion of that island, and observed the alien survivor of a crashed spaceship being taken from the hospital by the American military. Reggie then shockingly reveals that his experiences led him to join the FBI and start the X-Files, and that despite their lack of any memory of him, Reggie had actually been Scully's and Mulder's partner from the beginning, and was there on the day in 1993 when Dr. Dana Scully arrived in Mulder's basement office. (A montage is shown of the most memorable scenes of the series, now showing Reggie as being present.) Before Reggie can reveal anything more, two men, possibly henchmen of They, appear and chase Reggie from the garage.
Still skeptical, Mulder is then surprised to receive a call from They himself, who not only meets with Mulder but does so in an obvious public place. When first meeting Mulder, Dr. They ominously says "you're dead," quickly admitting that he means Mulder's purpose via the X-Files and chasing down conspiracies is dead, because the truth does not matter. Despite Mulder's insistence in the existence of an objective truth, They cheerfully explains that in the current era the truth does not matter because "you believe what you want to believe—that's what everybody does now anyway."
Reggie is revealed to be a longtime US government employee turned mental-ward patient named Reggie Murgatroid, whose past includes piloting weaponized drones, waterboarding terrorists, working IRS forms longhand, and sleeping through a stint as a fraud detection officer at the SEC (in a montage of scenes apparently filmed in the same office), but not having actually worked at the FBI. Instead, Reggie suffered a nervous breakdown, probably the result of torment Reggie suffered on realizing that his many years of service to the country he loved were spent on tasks that betrayed that country's ideals. An ambulance from the Spotnitz Sanitarium arrives to take Reggie back.
Sympathizing with Reggie, Mulder asks him about his last X-Files case. While on a stretcher, Reggie recounts their last X-Files case together: an encounter with a Trump-like alien of the same race as that that had been found years earlier in Grenada. The alien, representing the "Intergalactic Union of Sentient Beings from All Known Universes and Beyond" tells the trio that his organization no longer wants to have anything to do with Earth, which he says, isn't "sending us your best people". So that there are no hard feelings, the alien does leave them a book which has the answers to any questions they might have...about anything. The alien then leaves, wishing them a less-than-fond goodbye and good riddance. Mulder, distraught with the idea of there being no more answers to seek, breaks down into a childish tantrum as Reggie and Scully embrace.
In the present, as Reggie's ambulance is leaving, Skinner witnesses this, and asks Mulder and Scully and asks where they are taking Reggie, much to Mulder and Scully's surprise.
Back at Mulder's house, Mulder and Scully watch "The Lost Martian", after Mulder realizes that it was a real episode from a cheap Twilight Zone knockoff show called Dusky Realm. Scully, serving some Goop-O made in Mulder's mold of Sasquatch's foot, tells Mulder "I want to remember how it all was."
'take me out to the holosuite' was bad, but I tend to be more forgiving toward fluff episodes with no pretense of seriousness.
__________________ Your Lord knows very well what is in your heart. Your soul suffices this day as a reckoner against you. I need no witnesses. You do not listen to your soul, but listen instead to your anger and your rage.