10 Terrible Episodes That Almost Ruined Great TV Shows

Very few shows are perfect. Unlike films, which aren't released to us until they're totally complete, television is a medium that's constantly being made up on the fly. That can lead to true brilliance, but it also means writers have to fill up hours upon hours of screen time, and that can sometimes get pretty difficult.

In shows with dozens or even hundreds of episodes, it's natural that one or two will fail to meet our expectations. Sometimes, the writers try some sort of gimmick that just doesn't really land the way it should. Other times, in a season of 22 episodes, the writers ar e forced to stall, and the result is a seriously lame hour that is just a huge waste of our time. Then of course there's the series finales that are so bad, they manage to retroactively ruin great shows in the span of a single episode.

These issues will of course be symptomatic of mediocre or bad shows, but even the best of television sometimes has its issues. Shows like Lost, The West Wing and The Simpsons, some of the best TV we've ever seen, have at least one episode that just stands out like a sore thumb and doesn't mesh with the brilliance of the rest of the series.

Between pointless flashbacks about tattoos to lame revelations that a beloved character is really an impostor, here are 10 of the worst episodes of otherwise great shows.

This episode is so bad, executive producer Damon Lindelof actually used it as an example of why ABC needed to give the creators an end date to the show. If the network didn’t let them wrap up soon, he said, the writers would have to keep making episodes like this.

In this episode from the show’s third season, the flashback motif has officially been exhausted. We basically know everything important about these people at this point, and so we’re now getting flashbacks filling in details absolutely nobody was asking to be filled in. Here, we find out the thrilling story about how Jack got his tattoos, finally answering the question of what they mean, a question which nobody but Kate was asking.

And what do they mean? His tattoo translates to “He walks amongst us, but he is not one of us”. What a bombshell, right?

It’s not that anything in this episode is terrible, but it’s just such a classic example of a filler episode. Nothing is accomplished at all, and the flashback is pretty much a complete waste of time. After this, it became clear that the creators needed to start working towards an ending as soon as possible.

Luckily for fans, ABC would quickly give the writers that end date they wanted. It only took boring episodes like this to finally accomplish that.