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.
