Underrated
5. The Crawling Hand (Episode 106)
Even the biggest MSTie will admit that the early episodes typically from the "Season 0" KTMA ones up to around the third season are a bit rougher than the later ones. The writers mostly flew by the seat of their pants in those early years, ad-libbing nearly all the jokes. The early episodes have less than half the number of riffs (statistical fact) as the ones in Season 5, meaning that there's a lot more raw bad movie to sit through. As a first season episode, The Crawling Hand certainly falls into this category. Still, there's something charming about this one, I think. There are a few great long-running gags that go on hand-related jokes, fish puns, and the "Tell them I'm smoking" bit in the first scene. Even the movie itself is surprisingly entertaining and watchable. The two scientists in search of the dead astronaut hand (the eponymous "crawling hand" of the title) have some great deadpan delivery, and there's something refreshing about watching car chase scenes that
don't end in massive fireballs. Unlike some of the other episodes, the story in this one moves along at a pretty good pace. One of the faults in a show based around bad movies is that sometimes bad movies are bad because they're plodding and boring; writing enough attention-catching jokes to fill those big blank spots is a tall order, and one the show didn't always fill (especially, again, in those early ad-libbed episodes). On its own, The Crawling Hand would be watchable, but with Joel and the bots, it's pure entertainment. That isn't to say this episode gets a lot of hate, necessarily. It doesn't. It just doesn't get a lot of love, either.