The Most Disliked Episode of DIS, Season 2: 2021 Edition...

[Sakonna]

IDK, but in a season designed to tell one story over 14 episodes, the fact that you can't tell some episodes apart would mean that they successfully did their job of making one whole story from start to finish.

Personally, I couldn't disagree more with this. Disco is working in a fundamentally episodic medium (on a weekly release even). That's the most basic contract of television: the episodes will be individually satisfying, and also add up to something even more satisfying in the accumulation, whether through directly serialized storytelling or just in the greater amount of time spent with the world/characters.

If the actual plan was to tell one undifferentiated story over 14 hours, that was their first hack S2 writing mistake. And a sign that they should find another medium to work in, because putting it on TV would be like taking your brilliant vision for a painting and writing it up as a novel. If the story can't be made to satisfy episodically, it should not be told on TV.

Though I don't actually think this was the intent, since the beginning of the season does have a strong balance of episode payoffs and serialized storytelling, and then it's just a messy scramble when the showrunner swaps.

 

[Farscape One]

IDK, but in a season designed to tell one story over 14 episodes, the fact that you can't tell some episodes apart would mean that they successfully did their job of making one whole story from start to finish.

In the end you may not like that story, or some parts of it, but that doesn't mean they didn't execute what they plan to do to effectively.

But even within a long story told in a season, you should be able to differentiate between each episode. Even within direct two-parters, you can tell the difference.

Not having anything be distinct from other episodes, to me, is a bad thing in terms of the story. Scenes or beats may be similar, but there should be something that sets them apart from the others. Even if its just a performance.

Part of the problem was that particularly storyline was headache inducing, and it did nothing to make it better.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

And season 2 ends with "The Red Angel" being the winner.

Hmm. "Winner" in the sense that "Tessie" was the winner of "The Lottery" (and I still wonder if Shirley Jackson was, ahem, "stoned" at the time she wrote it).

Given that "The Red Angel" featured an "eye-scream" that rivals "Stardust City Rag" and the flashback in FC (not to mention a certain unofficial Bond film) for being both gruesome and gratuitous, I'd certainly agree with the outcome.