Before Joss Whedon was the undisputed king of geekdom, responsible for making an Avengers film not just possible but awesome to the nth degree and finally proving that the Incredible Hulk could actually work on the silver screen, he worked on a couple of TV shows that you might have heard of. Well, "worked on" is a bit of an understatement, much like "TV shows". What he actually did was create a number of groundbreaking cultural phenomena that still have a huge impact on the pop cultural landscape even though they've been off the air for a decade or more. And, er, Dollhouse. These series - Buffy the Vampire Slayer, spin-off Angel, the cancelled-too-soon Firefly and to a lesser extent the aforementioned Dollhouse - were full of Whedon's trademark humour, snappy dialogue, pathos and explorations of topics including but not nearly limited to existentialism, gender, isolation, makeshift families, misogyny and, of course, mortality. And people loved them for it. However, in order to create such a diverse and affecting body of work, Whedon and his collaborators experimented with a wide variety of storytelling techniques and plots to test both their characters and the shows' audiences. Some of these resulted in episodes that were much stranger than most TV audiences were used to from their subversive comedy horror shows, and ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. Here we've collected ten of the best, weirdest examples of plots from all over the televisual Whedonverse so you can see just how crazy things got (and might well do when Agents of SHIELD gets purring)...
