Season 4 First Look
- Thread starter Precious Tritium
- Start date
You never heard of jumping the shark?How does one episode ruin an entire season?
And honestly The Corbomite Maneuver's character of Lt. Bailey and the episode itself barrows many aspects from the the Cold War film The Bedford Incident.
My brain doesn't work like that. What if the rest of the episodes of the season are really good?
I don't dismiss an entire season/show over one (potentially) bad episode.
If that were the case I would have missed some of my favourite episodes of some of my favourite shows.
Doing that feels very narrow view on things to me.
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“Jumping the Shark” is not something you would immediately recognize when watching the show live. This is something only noticed retrospectively. In fact the term “jump the shark” wasn’t actually coined until 1985, about a year after HAPPY DAYS had already ended.
Why not both?
I should have given up on Trek with Spock's Brain then.
I would've forgiven you if you had.
That Happy Days episode was referenced by many in talking about ridiculous TV episode stunts. The term was ultimately coined because a lot of folks would say:
"...like that Happy Days episode when Fonzie jumped the shark in the water cage on water skis..."
when talking about ridiculous ratings stunt episodes done by many series during Nielsen ratings sweep periods.
I did give up on TNG though
I gave up on both Voyager and Enterprise, although I have since filled in all my gaps.
Voyager was probably the harshest disappointment in my young fan life.
Enterprise was easier as I had other shows I really liked.
Captain Leo Walsh has some wives for those strip-miners...
They've barely touched the surface of the memberberry motherlode. They've just panned the river at this point.
My actual four year old thought the bar fight in the tribbles episode was "awesome and hilarious"Four year-old you wouldn't love puppets? That's so sad.
At this point, "jumping the shark," like "Mary Sue" before it, has been so overused and misapplied that the term, which might once have served a purpose, is now essentially meaningless.
Nowadays, it's usually just means "a show just did something I really didn't approve of."
Whether it truly represents the beginning of the end cannot be determined at the time, only in hindsight.
Nowadays, it's usually just means "a show just did something I really didn't approve of."
Whether it truly represents the beginning of the end cannot be determined at the time, only in hindsight.
It doesn't really matter when it's determined to have happened, I'm just saying that it can happen.
I'm not sure there's such a thing as an off-format episode in Star Trek, at least as long as its framed in something that happens to the crew on their trek through the stars.
In the original series, the idea that the crew could find themselves in a non-skiffy format on any given week, or a hybrid skiffy+nonskiffy format, was established. "Patterns of Force": World War II. "A Piece of the Action": Gangster. "Bread and Circuses": Roman Empire. "Spectre of the Gun": Western. "The Way to Eden": musical.
Fast-forwarding to the TNG era, with godlike beings forcing scenarios and with holodeck episodes, there's more. "Qpid": Robin Hood. "The Big Goodbye": Private eye/noire. "Bride of Chaotica!": Flash Gordon. "Our Man Bashir": James Bond/spy.
"Subspace Rhapsody" was literally caused by a subspace anomaly. "Those Old Scientists," by a time machine. What will be the skiffy explanation for puppets? Trelane again? Another subspace anomaly?
I think there's room for anything in Star Trek. Hill Street Blues, I agree, not so much.
