Season 4 survey: Top 3 and runners-up (some spoilers

After a month talking about it, I decided I’m finally ready to do my list of the best episodes of season 4, after finally watching all of them. I was not surprised that this did not change my personal choices for what I planned as a top 3 list, all episodes I can remember seeing back in the day. So, here are my picks, and let’s see if I get flamed worse than I did for criticizing He’s Alive.

 

  1. The New Exhibit- A man obsessed with a wax museum’s gallery of serial killers takes his work home, only to find that the figures may have a life of their own. It’s an episode that feels less like TZ and more like Outer Limits or (especially) Thriller, and it benefits from pushing the envelope. I will further editorialize, it’s a disturbingly prescient critique of the “true crime” genre I once followed, before the ecosystem was bulldozed by the monotony of Stochastic Terrorist of the Year/ Month/ Week.

 

  1. Printer’s Devil- Burgess Meredith is back as the actual Devil, with a deal for the owner of a failing newspaper. It’s another take on media mayhem. To me, Meredith’s performance kind of brings this  one down a bit, simply because he stomps the scenery so completely in a story that really does very little we haven’t seen before.

 

1.  Death Ship- I already nominated this one as best of the season, and I stand by everything I already said. The one point I can see arguing is whether this would have been better in the half hour format. The hour length does make the prolonged and repetitive arguments stand out a lot more, but that is very much a part of the horror of an inescapable situation.

 

And while I’m at it, I’m going to go ahead and cover 3 more runners-up:

  1. In His Image- This is definitely the best of the ones I watched just for my completist run-through, and the one that REALLY feels like Outer Limits. It makes full use of the hour format and really builds on earlier entries, especially The Lonely, which I already praised covering S1. It gets extra points for the split-screen confrontation between the android and creator, which notably always makes it clear who is who.

 

  1. On Thursday We Leave For Home- This is the one that gets the most praise, and yeah, it’s good. To me, it just tries too hard to set up a tragic ending while simultaneously dissipating our sympathy for the main character. Nothing here is more interesting than it would be if we actually saw everyone go to Earth.

 

  1. Miniature- This is one I haven’t gotten a new viewing for, but I remembered it well enough from a viewing on streaming. It’s good enough to be a “best” for the season and the series, and it definitely could have been better known if legal issues hadn’t made it even less accessible than the rest of S4, but as a neurodiversity self-advocate, I personally don’t care for the romanticization of a clearly disabled main character. While we’re at it, I don’t buy literally joining his crush in a dollhouse as a “happy” ending for either side.