9 Awful Episodes From Awesome TV Shows

Some TV shows can do no wrong and, against all the odds, manage to produce uniformly high quality episodes week after week, season after season. They never ever serve up a dud. Well, except maybe just once. Yes, even the best series that television has to offer have produced at least one stinker, that single episode that seems like it belongs to another show entirely - so poorly does it treat the usually brilliant characters or tell an oddly weak storyline. Those boring filler episodes that contribute nothing to the overall story arc or, heaven forbid, those finales which totally screw up the landing. Such installments aren’t necessarily the absolute worst episodes of television ever, but they are some of the most disappointing, as they fall significantly below the high bar set by the rest of their respective series. So, on that note, join us as we count down 9 of the most awful episodes that featured in awesome TV shows. There will be some spoilers here, but given that most of these shows are now off air, you should be safe to proceed. 9) Star Trek: The Next Generation - "Shades of Gray" Nobody likes a clip show. Those times where the production team simply can’t afford a new episode so they have to resort to splicing together a load of old footage, usually with some flimsy wrap-around narrative. Still, they are something we can usually accept as necessary evils to keep our favourite sitcoms going. However, when a usually high-concept sci-fi series lowers itself to a clip show, it is a lot harder to forgive. In Star Trek: The Next Generation’s second season that is exactly what they did. When Riker is infected with an alien virus, he has to undergo a lengthy treatment that causes him to relive past events. You would expect the series to come up with a clever way of doing a clip show, but instead, the episode is completely devoid of any saving grace. 8) Doctor Who - "Love & Monsters" Impressively for a show which can literally go anywhere, Doctor Who managed to stretch a little too far out of its comfort zone with this oddball entry from the revamped series’ second season. Instead of focussing on David Tennant’s Doctor and Rose, "Love & Monsters" followed a bunch of fans of the Time Lord as they try to track him down. A later episode titled "Blink" (the one with the Weeping Angels) showed that a Doctor-lite episode could work, but numerous other issues ensure that this one largely remains a misfire. Unusually for Doctor Who, which is known for managing to appeal to the whole family, its tone is all over the place – veering from the desperately silly monster-of-the-week to bizarrely tasteless jokes about a man having a sex life with his sentient paving stone. No, really. We're not making it up. 7) Mad Men - "Tea Leaves" Don Draper himself, Jon Hamm, made his directorial debut with this season five episode, something which should have helped endear it to the show's fans. However, most couldn’t get over the rather lacking storyline which introduced the issue of Betty’s struggles with her weight. Granted, this was something brought on by necessity, as actress January Jones had fallen pregnant and so the idea was made to put her into a fat suit to cover this fact. Still, it was entirely unnecessary to devote quite so much of the episode to Betty’s depression over her weight gain. Despite the best efforts of Hamm in the director’s chair, the result was an entry that fell far below the usual thematically and symbolically strong storytelling of Mad Men at its best. 6) Battlestar Galactica - "Black Market" Since the show’s conception, it was an aim of Battlestar Galactica showrunner Ronald D. Moore to evenly split the focus between the main characters on the Galactica and those on the civilian ships. However, the failure of this second season episode mostly curtailed any ideas Moore had about following through with that. The entry sees Captain “Apollo” Adama getting involved in organized crime after he gets close to a single mother/prostitute. Compared to the smarts and style of the rest of the show, critics and fans slammed "Black Market" for its nonsensical storytelling, poor dialogue and for just being pretty dull to watch. Moore himself wasted no time in standing up for this episode, and promptly apologized to Battlestar fans via his weekly podcast straight after it aired. 5) The Simpsons - "Lisa Goes Gaga" It is no secret that the once majestic The Simpsons is now quite a way past its prime, though many hardcore fans have stuck with the show. However, even those who tuned in all the way through the middling output of the 2000s were turned off by this clunker from 2012. In "Lisa Goes Gaga," none other than – you’ll never guess - Lady Gaga comes to Springfield and befriends Lisa and… Well, that’s pretty much it for the plot. Instead of the usual Simpsons satire or character comedy, it’s basically just an extended commercial for the eccentric pop star. A shameless attempt to piggyback off the singer’s popularity to give the ailing show some extra media attention, The Simpsons can occasionally still offer something great, but this one was lazy, dumb and, most damningly, not very funny. 4) Buffy The Vampire Slayer - "Beer Bad" In this, the far and away weakest episode of the usually fantastic Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy drinks too much of some magically-spiked beer and becomes a caveman. Because alcohol is bad, kids. Buffy’s best episodes used the supernatural side of the plot to mirror the everyday struggles of teen life, yet without it ever becoming preachy. "Beer Bad," however, has as much subtlety as a mallet to the head. All the episode has to say is literally there in the title. Apparently, it came about as the production team needed some cash and so they made a more moralistic episode to get funds from the Office of National Drug Control Policy. However, the organization turned them down because they didn’t think the message was clear enough. Go figure. 3) Dexter - "Remember The Monsters?" Everyone knows that Dexter’s glory days disappeared around about season four, but we still hoped that the eighth season’s final episode could pull it back from the brink and send the show off in style. All it had to do was address the question of can Dexter stop his murdering ways and live a normal life? Naturally, it did not only fail to do this but it also managed to be completely unsatisfying in every single way. For inexplicable reasons, Dexter has some sort of character transplant as he fakes his death, abandons his child and turns into a lumberjack. "Remember the Monsters?" is simply a spectacularly awful wrapping-up of a series, and acts as a lesson to showrunners everywhere; don’t chuck out logic and consistency of character for the sake of a hurried conclusion. 2) Lost - "Stranger In A Strange Land" Lost was a show that constantly came up with questions that viewers desperately wanted to find out the answer to. One of these was certainly not "hey, where did Jack get his tattoos from?" For some reason, though, this forms the crux of the plot of season three entry "Stranger in a Strange Land," an episode which painfully demonstrates just how redundant the flashbacks had become by that point. Exec producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse have admitted that this one only came about because they were getting desperate for storylines. Still, some good did come out of it – the episode was so bad that Lindelof and Cuse used it to convince the ABC bigwigs that they needed to set an end date for the series, so they wouldn’t have to resort to such empty filler in future. 1) How I Met Your Mother - "Last Forever" Unlike Dexter, which was clearly going off the deep end before the finale arrived, HIMYM was setting itself up for a strong conclusion. However, it threw all that potential away in what must be one of the most fumbled TV finales ever. Firstly, running at double the usual length, it is a depressing slog of an episode, which is never a good thing for a comedy show. Still, we might have been able to put up with that if the end result paid off. Instead, various plot threads were torn to shreds rather than being neatly wrapped up. Barney and Robin’s marriage broke up, the titular mother died off-screen and, perhaps most egregiously of all, Ted ran back to his failed relationship with Robin. "Last Forever" is a terrible reminder that one bad episode is sometimes enough to irrevocably taint a once great show.