davidklecha | Day 6 of 30 Days of TV Shows (Reply)

Day 06 – Favorite episode of your favorite TV show

So, there’s a few contenders for favorite episode. “Wormhole X-Treme!” and “200″ are almost a single, awesome episode, marking the 100th and 200th installments in the series. “Threads” is a great pseudo-series-finale, and “Moebius Pt. 1 & 2,” is a great follow-up movie to the series finale. The series really should have stopped there, but “Bad Guys” is a pretty hilarious 10th season episode, and “Unending” is a fantastic actual series finale. All of them deserving, as are a dozen others, but I’m going to go with the episode that sucked me in to the show when I first saw it, muted, years and years ago.

Window of Opportunity, as I mentioned the other day, is the series’ “Groundhog Day” episode. In it, the team goes to a planet and meets with an alien archaeologist another team met on a previous trip. Interestingly only to me, this is one of the earlier indications that there is human gate travel outside of the SG teams and their enemy the Goa’uld. That gets explored more later in the series, but it was kind of an odd, yet uplifting note, to this episode.

Anyway, it turns out the archaeologist is really working some shenanigans, trying to make an Ancient time travel device work, and in the process he starts up a loop that everyone but he, Jack, and Teal’c get caught up in. The show takes some predictable turns, in terms of the inevitable realization that nothing they do will have consequences, along with some hilarious bits of them learning to juggle, or the usually somewhat dim and uninterested Jack correcting Daniel’s translation of the Ancient language. Of course, they manage to convince the rest of the team that they’re stuck in a loop (each and every time), and finally do break out of it. But this episode tends to show off a lot of the things it does well, like the team dynamic, mixing light and heavy, and being able to consciously engage with genre tropes. More than once, in the episode, someone references or otherwise points out what usually happens in these kinds of movies/TV episodes, usually for comedic effect.

So, it’s got a warm and fluffy place in my heart for a couple of reasons, and it’s not surprising that it has consistently been among fans’ absolute favorite episodes.

Day 01 – The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. (should never have been canceled)
Day 02 – The IT Crowd (show that you wish more people were watching)
Day 03 – Detroit 1-8-7 (favorite new show)
Day 04 – Stargate SG-1 (favorite show ever)
Day 05 – The Office (show you hate)
Day 06 – Favorite episode of your favorite TV show
Day 07 – Least favorite episode of your favorite TV show
Day 08 – A show everyone should watch
Day 09 – Best scene ever
Day 10 – A show you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving
Day 11 – A show that disappointed you
Day 12 – An episode you’ve watched more than 5 times
Day 13 – Favorite childhood show
Day 14 – Favorite male character
Day 15 – Favorite female character
Day 16 – Your guilty pleasure show
Day 17 – Favorite mini series
Day 18 – Favorite title sequence
Day 19 – Best TV show cast
Day 20 – Favorite kiss
Day 21 – Favorite ship
Day 22 – Favorite series finale
Day 23 – Most annoying character
Day 24 – Best quote
Day 25 – A show you plan on watching (old or new)
Day 26 – OMG WTF? Season finale
Day 27 – Best pilot episode
Day 28 – First TV show obsession
Day 29 – Current TV show obsession
Day 30 – Saddest character death