I’ll Never Forget These 10 Sci-Fi TV Episodes That Are All 10/10 (And #1 Is the Best Ever) – comicbook.com

By Shawn Lealos
Sci-fi television has been popular since the advent of television, with early masterpieces coming from the anthology series The Twilight Zone. The following years have seen some of the most successful properties debut thanks to television. Shows like Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, The X-Files, and Lost built massive fan bases, worlds that exist outside of TV, and all possess a legacy that is almost unheard of. While not every great sci-fi series has a spotless track record of episodes, the best of them do have episodes that sit among the elite in the genre, with stories, themes, and acting that allow them to be 10-out-of-10 experiences for fans and critics. Looking back at the history of sci-fi television, here are episodes that are 10-out-of-10 masterpieces, and the number one episode on this list has no equal.
Watchmen took the story from the Zack Snyder movie, and the Alan Moore comics before it, and showed the world three decades after the events of that original story ended. The world didn’t fall to World War III, meaning Ozymandias’ plan worked. However, America is still a bad place, and racism and bigotry are on the rise again.
In Episode 8, “A God Walks into Abar,” the show reveals that Angela Abar’s husband is Doctor Manhattan, and this episode spans their entire 10-year relationship in nonlinear form. It shows how Manhattan sees time pass, making the nonlinear storytelling intrinsic to the episode. This episode received a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score, and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited Series or Movie.
The X-Files had several great episodes in every season of the show’s run. However, the best was the Season 3 episode, “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose.” Peter Boyle plays Clyde Bruckman, an insurance salesman who has psychic abilities. He offers to help Fox Mulder and Dana Scully on a case, where they investigate the deaths of other people with psychic abilities.
A standalone “Monster of the Week” episode, this was a heartbreaking one. Boyle won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series, while Darin Morgan won the Emmy for Outstanding Writing in a Drama Series, an impressive feat for a sci-fi episode. The entire story blends dark comedy and existential philosophy in a brilliant manner, and it remains a highlight of the entire series.
The best Star Trek episode of The Original Series is “City on the Edge of Forever.” This was written by Harlan Ellison and sends the crew of the Enterprise into an alternate reality story when time travel disrupts the timeline. When Doctor McCoy leaps through a sentient time portal and changes history, Captain Kirk and Spock follow to try to fix things. They end up in 1930s Depression-era America.
At this point, Kirk meets and falls in love with a social worker, and then he realizes tragically what he has to do to reverse the timeline. This was one of the Star Trek episodes that focused solely on morality and what happens when good men have to make tough decisions, even if it means hurting themselves. This episode won both a Hugo Award and a WGA Award.
Firefly was a series that was canceled before it had a chance to thrive, ending after just one season. The biggest problem was that Fox aired the episodes out of order when it released the series, which hurt the show’s ratings as it confused viewers. When the series ended up hitting DVD in the correct order, it developed its massive cult favorite reputation. The best episode of that first season was Episode 7, “Jaynestown.”
When the crew of Serenity lands on Higgins’ Moon, Jayne learns he is a folk hero there because he accidentally rained money down on the impoverished “mudders,” and they consider him their own Robin Hood figure. This episode broke down how heroism and the power of symbols can affect a society, and Jayne’s selfish nature came second to these people’s need for a hero. .
Fringe was unlike anything that sci-fi television had seen in years when it debuted on Fox. The series refused to dumb things down for TV viewers and delivered a smart show that forced its audience to pay attention. What resulted was a brilliant series that rewarded people who gave themselves over to the stories. The best of the episodes came in Season 2 with “White Tulip.”
A physicist (Peter Weller) surgically implanted time-travel machinery into his body and keeps going back in time, attempting to save his fiancée from dying in a car accident in the past. However, every time he jumps back in time, he causes the deaths of other people in the present day. A subplot involved Bishop struggling with whether to tell his son that he stole him from a parallel universe. This was a standalone episode that reset the timeline at the end, so it never happened, but what the episode accomplished was to tell a story that was quietly devastating and one of the best hours on sci-fi television.
Lost was one of the most successful sci-fi shows of all time when it was at the height of its popularity. The story about the survivors of a plane crash who find themselves on a remote island with secrets of its own delivers plenty of shocking twists and turns. The flashbacks and later flashforwards added to the brilliant storytelling, and the best of the episodes was in Season 4 with “The Constant.”
While on a helicopter heading to the freighter, Desmond started to time jump between 1996 and 2004 as they passed through an electromagnetic anomaly. He had to find a “constant,” which was a person he cherished in both of those years, to anchor himself back to the present time. When it ended with Desmond and Penny making their emotional connection, it delivered on every level. The episode received three Primetime Emmy Award nominations, and it holds one of the highest ratings on IMDb for any drama television episode in history at 9.7.
Doctor Who has been on television for decades, but it really began to skyrocket in popularity when it rebooted in the 2000s. Thanks to the higher-quality storytelling and higher budgets, it is no surprise that the episodes became better over the decade. The best of Doctor Who, from start to finish, was the Season 3 episode “Blink.”
The monsters here were the Weeping Angels, statues that come to life when a person stops looking at them. Carey Mulligan guest stars as the main character, Sally Sparrow, in an episode that doesn’t have many scenes with the Doctor (David Tennant) at all. Sally has to figure everything out on her own with only pre-recorded messages from the Doctor. Steven Moffat won the 2008 BAFTA Craft and BAFTA Cymru awards for Best Writer and the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form, and it has a 9.8 rating on IMDb.
The original Battlestar Galactica was a campy sci-fi space television drama that followed in the footsteps of Star Wars and Star Trek. The reboot in 2003 ended up being one of the greatest sci-fi military epics to ever appear on television. After the 2003 miniseries ended, the full series kicked off in 2004, and the first episode was titled “33,” a perfect series premiere that showed fans what they could expect from the series.
The plot sees the crew on the fifth day of the Cylon apocalypse, when they have to make an emergency jump every 33 minutes because that is how often the Cylon attacks arrive. The crew is operating on no sleep, and the psychological collapse sets in. This premiere episode won a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form. This episode demanded an immediate emotional investment and swept viewers into this world.
The Twilight Zone is the best anthology sci-fi series ever made, and it is responsible for inspiring every similar series that has been released on television in the six decades since. Of all the incredible episodes from this original series, the best was Season 1’s “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.” Released in 1960, this was a strong allegory of the McCarthy-era Red Scare going on in the United States.
The story featured neighbors on Maple Street who noticed lights flickering on and off in their neighborhood. They suddenly began to think that one of them might be an alien, and the community began to turn on each other. The twist was that it was aliens causing the problems, but from a distance, and the aliens realized how easy it would be to conquer humanity. It showed how simple it was to use paranoia to turn friends against each other. This Twilight Zone episode still resonates to this day as a perfect sci-fi allegory.
The best sci-fi television episode of all time is from Star Trek: The Next Generation. The Season 5 episode, “The Inner Light,” has an energy beam knock Picard unconscious. While his crew tries to figure out how to wake him up, Picard’s consciousness awakens in another location, living the life of another man on a dying planet called Kataan. In the 25 minutes he was unconscious, he lived 40 years in this man’s life, getting married, raising children, growing old, and watching as his planet dies.
The twist is that all this information was sent into Picard’s mind as the only way to chronicle what happened to this planet before its sun went nova. “The Inner Light” won the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation in 1993, the first TV program to win a Hugo in that category since “City on the Edge of Forever” 25 years earlier. This sci-fi episode has a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score and a 9.4 IMDb rating.
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