Characters
[Loved Trope] The one random episode that doesn't follow the main characters
Heated Rivalry Episode 3 "Hunter": The show stops following Hollander and Rozanov's love story to follow another hockey player, Scott Hunter, and his romance with a smoothie store employee.
The Last of Us S1E3 "Long Long Time": Joel and Ellie need a car. So to explain why there's a car waiting around for them to use, they show us an incredibly heartbreaking love story lasting 20 years between two men Joel knows. They have a car.
Doctor Who S3E10 "Blink": With no explanation given, this episode begins with a character we've never met, one Sally Sparrow, poking around an abandoned building. Our lead character, The Doctor, is glimpsed seemingly randomly on TVs. What is going on? Did that statue just move!?
MythicQuest S1E5 "A Dark Quiet Death": Rather than continuing to follow our lead characters as they develop an MMORPG, we flash back many years to witness the history of a couple who start a videogame company, and how over the years the pressure to drive sales causes them to give up on their artistic integrity.
I miss when The Simpsons let themselves get completely ridiculous, because those bizarre, unpredictable episodes are the ones that still make me laugh and feel nostalgic years later.
It's like there is some mandate to always squeeze them in no matter what, I don't know how many episodes open with a secondary character storyline and then the Simpson family are just kinda standing there as if they were close family friends forever or the secondary character goes to live with them for a while.
I swear a couple of years back someone landed in the hospital and after that character and Dr. Hibbert finish talking the camera zooms out and there stands the entire family ready to insert themselves into a story that has nothing to do with them.
According to the commentary, this episode was intended to potentially be a backdoor pilot for a show called something along the lines of "Springfield Stories". Since the original show is called "The Simpsons", every episode has to relate to the Simpson family in some capacity. The showrunners toyed around with the idea of being able to have stories in Springfield that didnt involve the family at all. Ultimately, the idea was scrapped due to concerns about trying to produce two shows at the same time.
There's an episode in Season 3 of Adventure Time called Thank You, which follows the story of this random snow golem guy. He gets followed home by a fire wolf pup and ends up taking care of it, then helping it find its way back to its pack, suffering the obvious natural consequences along the way.
Finn and Jake are seen in the background periodically, dealing with Ice King shenanigans, but aren't focused on at all and aren't even aware of the snow golem's adventure until the very end of the episode.
This brings up another trope I personally love which is when characters are having a whole other story in the background. I don't know too many examples, but yours made me think of the episode of Community where Abed is helping a pregnant woman around then helps deliver the baby, all quietly in the background until it's only vaguely mentioned at the end.
The Zeppo, s3 e13 of Buffy, is a combo of both these tropes. Episode follows Xander, who is a sidekick. Buffy and the other characters are in the background of the episode stopping the apocalypse, while Xander is trying to deal with some zombie jocks who are trying to blow up the highschool. At the end of the episode, Buffy and the rest are talking about their night and Xander decides to keep his story to himself.
I really don't like Xander, but it's probably one of my favorite episodes to reference because it breaks the Buffy formula in a fun way
Batman: The Animated Series has an episode where Batman has very little screentime. Instead, we follow a low level criminal who thinks that Batman accidentally died while apprehending him. This raises his status in the underworld and draws the attention of bigger fish like the Joker and Rupert Thorne
Kind of similar but the episode of P.O.V while still having batman as a plot point had the episode follow three officers giving conflicting testimonies on how a case went wrong.
In House, one patient has Locked In syndrome where they're conscious but seem brain dead.
The entire episode follows his perspective, until a major risky operation is done on him halfway through the episode and the perspective shifts back to normal (House and his team). This creates suspense because now we have no idea if he's dead or still alive but locked in. It was a super cool way of doing so.
There’s also the episode from Wilson’s perspective, in which he deals with his own patient and personal issues but also sees glimpses of House and his team treating a patient, highlighting just how nuts House’s process looks to an outsider.
And it shows how absolutely talented Wilson is as a doctor. Even when it comes to diagnostics, which isn't supposed to be his field.
He catches something based on his parient not mentionning something as mundane as their grandchildren. Had this patient been treated by House, House would never have caught that.
Wilson is not only House's Watson, he's also his Mycroft.
Atlanta had a lot of bottle episodes. From memory there's the foster kid who is adopted by white lesbians and the episode where white people can be sued because their ancestors owned slaves.
Not the first time they did it, but Scrubs has an episode called Their Story which decides to follow 3 reoccurring side characters insted of JD and it's really fun
We even get to hear their inner monologues like we do with JD in every episode
The series Star Trek: Lower Decks was created based off an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called 'Lower Decks' which centered around the lower-ranked members of the crew.
So it's basically an entire series all about the 'side characters', which DOES have it's own 'side character' episode in it, called 'Upper Decks', that focuses on the command crew.
I love how they took one episode’s idea and turned it into a whole show, then flipped the concept again with “Upper Decks.” The writers really knew how to have fun with the Star Trek universe.
The lore was mostly great, I just hate that the series has so much Eastern inspiration, which leads us to expect a yin-yang type of relationship between these two spirits, only for it to be a much more Western-feeling pure good vs pure evil. Vaatu should've been more nuanced.
100%. I don’t mind the concept, but it would’ve been vastly more entertaining if it was more nuanced. Raava, who represents order, is portrayed as entirely good while Vaatu, who is chaos, is entirely bad
In reality, too much order is a bad thing. Too much order means no freedom. Everything is rigid and rule-based, so you need some chaos because it essentially is the basis of free will. The Avatar should’ve been the one balancing the two and making sure neither grows too powerful, rather than it being an overly simple good vs. bad dynamic
They even could've pointed out that Kyoshi upheld the order of Ba Sing Se by creating the Dai Li... and we all know how that ended up. Meanwhile, Asami's father invented a ton of new machines, advancing industrial development and helping even the playing field between benders and non-benders. Vaatu, as the harbinger of chaos, absolutely had a role in their world.
That’s a big gripe I have with most of the post-ATLA content in general, it feels like it lacks nuance. The Fire Nation was allowed to be more than just evil, even from the beginning. We get a sense that post-war reconstruction has a chance because we see their children, and know that when taken away from aggressive propaganda, they’re just normal people. Ozai is irredeemably evil, but even he had normal trips to the beach with his family. Even he was a normal child at one point.
LoK suffered heavily from having fewer episodes per season. Atla's 3-season run had more episodes total than LoK's 4-season run. And seasons 1 and 2 had to be self contained. It truly deserves a remake.
I'd argue the non-s2 villains in LOK were pretty nuanced as well. Amon came from an abusive family and fought to combat injustice caused by power imbalance. The Red Lotus argued certain people such as the avatar and world leaders had too much power and that we'd be better off without them. Kuvira saw how her nation had been dealt the wrong hand, and wanted to prevent it to fall in the hands of another useless monarch. She wanted to bring peace, freedom, justice and security to her new empire.
That's my complaint in general with Order v Chaos conflicts. It always feels like people just want a Good v Evil conflict but don't want to use that because it's too 'simple'. But then they force Order v Chaos to fit in those simple boxes. Like, yeah, pure Chaos would definitely be bad. But so would pure Order.
Sir Terry Pratchett's Death novels do Pure Order as a villain very well, the main villains in some of those books, the Auditors, are beings that want perfect order in the universe. The problem? Life is chaos. It's messy, and out of order. So, in their minds, the only way to bring Pure Order to the universe is to erase all life in it. Only when the world is a lifeless rock, will they be satisfied.
Point being, is either Order or Chaos winning is bad, and you're right, they really should balance each other. And I wish Vaatu had more nuance.
Two nickels for Cristin Milioti between this and Mythic Quest.
I will say though, for the many, MANY failings of HIMYM S9, it’s truly remarkable that they managed to deliver on 9 seasons of hype and anticipation within the span of this ~24-minute episode.
The last 5 minutes or so where Tracy tearfully asked her dead boyfriend for permission to move on made me cry.
They really did deliver on why Tracy is the perfect match for Ted. To be with a character for 9 seasons, and then introduce another character that has perfect chemistry with them, without them interacting with each other, is incredibly impressive.
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“Oh Rick, I don’t want to be on the Citadel anymore! I want to be a regular kid! I want to go to school and throw balls around and masterbate!”
When I watch the segment with the Cop Rick and Morty, I keep thinking about how slowly Morty eventually goes even very serious or apathetic. Officer Morty doesn't care about consequences or getting fired as long as the job is done. He doesn't even care that he literally turned entire apartment block to dust. It's like Morty's natural path is to become worse than their grandpa or the same as them.
Morty starts to resemble Evil Morty more and more, and it's kind of terrifying.
This is actually a really good episode, and it focuses entirely in Rudy's point of view as he tries to get through a monthly dinner with his divorced parents and their respective new partners. He tries to ease tensions with a magic trick that goes awry, as these things must do.
As a child of divorced parents, I enjoyed this one despite it not being especially funny because you really feel the weight of Rudy trying to keep things together for his parents, even though things aren't okay with him. He comes across the Belchers' restraunt, looking from the outside in at a family dynamic he knows he can never get back. In the end, he finds support through Louise and makes it through the dinner.
I really wish they would do more episodes like this.
One of my favorite episodes!
“The Amazing Rudy” should have won the Emmy and is absolutely a tearjerker.
As a child of divorced parents myself, it really hit home for me. When he told The Belchers “I guess this is how things are going to be now.” it always makes me burst into tears. I knew this when my parents first got divorced and more than 2 decades later it’s still an emotional sucker punch.
It’s also a foil to Rudy’s home life to show that Bob and Linda aren’t just good parents but they are caring people.
That episode sure is something. They really captured the confusion and heartache of being a child of divorce, particularly when you seen friend's families staying together.
Also I'd die for Rudy. Don't make my poor asthmatic poppet sad!
That episode of Last of Us sent me on such an emotional rollercoaster. It started funny, then awkward, then beautiful, then made me cry my eyes out. I also cannot believe Nick Offerman did a role like that so well. Bro was like "I'mma one-up Brokeback Mountain with this performance."
I feel like they described my ideal death? "I am old. And I am satisfied." That scene was written so well I literally aspire to a death where I can say that (of natural causes ideally💀).
There's an episode of the show The Magicians called "A Life in a Day" that has this vibe. It's truly so beautiful and it pre-dates The Last of Us by years. It's worth watching. I cried so much my husband came into the room and thought someone died. The Magicians as a show is a bit uneven but has some absolutely spectacular episodes.
It's an insanely beautiful and tragic love story. Sadly I never recommended the show to my dad because he was homophobic. I loved him, but man he was a stubborn ass boomer to the very end.
I really enjoyed how they completely flipped Bill's story from the game where he's ultimately able to impart the same lesson to Joel from an opposite perspective.
More tv shows need filler episodes. Explore side character’s lives. Get into some world making. Throw in a beach episode. I’m tired of all shows having 8 episode seasons
YES. People have complained about filler episodes but I'm honestly just happy to get more episodes out of a show, and sometimes it ends up being great because they have to stretch their legs a bit
That is genuinely my favorite episode of the entire show. The whole thing feels like a fever dream, especially as he goes from one misadventure to the next.
Though at this point I will probably never rewatch 'Louie', it kind of reminds me of that show; there's a few episodes where a bunch of weird, dream-like things happen in a row and you're kind of just left wondering if what you saw was real or not, and yet it was quite emotionally impactful, much like this episode.
At this point so many of my favorite artists have been exposed as truly terrible people that I’m now actually interested in revisiting their work. A lot of these films and shows had a profound effect on me and I’m curious how I’ll interpret them and/or if I can enjoy them under this new context
The righteous Gemstones, Season 4 episode 1, Prelude.
The story of the family of a Megachurch pastor and his family, and all of the ways they suck as people (the pastor is actually somewhat chill but his kids suck).
The last season starts with the story of their great couple times removed grandfather who, well it’s complicated, but basically served as a minister in the Confederate Army. He’s also played by Bradley Cooper of all people.
Conpletely decepticon centered, none of the autobots or main humans appear appear. It's a horror/comedy episode about Starscream and Knockout accidentally creating a zombie apocalypse on the Decepticon warship.
The show is about a prehistoric guy and his dinosaur pal going on adventures throughout a fantastical version of the stone age, with absolutely zero dialogue (at least in English).
...except for one random episode set in the 1800s to focus on Charles Darwin and a few of his colleagues in a thriller/horror story about the savage nature of humans.
I like the theory that it takes place at the same time as the rest of the series in a different, more civilized area of the world. Afterall, how does he have the head of a sabertooth tiger mounted on his wall?
Oh yeah, I remember the Cuddy one. It followed her day as she had to make a funding decision or something, with the repercussions being outed from her role. And this was after she was a mum. I remember it being interesting to see her dealing with House from her perspective. She's a great character.
Doesn’t deserve it. I love how they come across all the mysteries of the island before the main crew but don’t engage because they have 0 context and honestly don’t really care lol
I understand people not liking it when they wait a week for an episode and get something that doesn't progress the plot, but when binging it I thought this episode was pretty decent
This episode ends with them being buried alive, right? They played each other and both ended up paralyzed from the spider, then they were found and thought dead.
Some parents surely saw this and assumed their kid was watching some version of Starship Troopers. No, it's Power Rangers: Lost Galaxy. Terra Venture soldiers just happen to use Starship Troopers surplus.
The Starship Troopers movie made so many costumes and props for all the extras that all those costumes kept being recycled over and over for other productions.
In the TV show Firefly, for example, the Alliance soldiers wear the same armor.
I can't believe nobody has said this yet: You're the Worst: Season 3, Episode 5 "Twenty-Two"
The show is pretty decent, mostly a comedy about the main characters romance and comedic takes on some of their toxic behavior. Then this Episode hits like a fucking freight train seemingly out of nowhere. Edgar is an Iraq Veteran with PTSD. Up until this point he seems to mostly have it under control, generally being a happy and positive guy, but then we get an entire episode from his perspective. The entire tone and even filming style of the show changes. We see how little things send him into a panic. Survival instincts that helped him survive combat are completely incompatible with civilian life. Litter by the highway is perceived as potential IEDs. People on cell phones who glance at him are spotters calling in mortar strikes on him. A cop on the overpass with a radar gun looks like a sniper. He struggles, he panics, he suffers, and the other characters just don't see it. The meds aren't working and the side effects are too much. It's the best depiction of PTSD I've ever seen on screen.
The real part that stuck with me is that it felt out of nowhere, but if you go back and pay attention the signs are there the whole time. Edgar is just doing his absolute best to hide it and try not to be a burden.
Doctor Who also had Love And Monsters, an episode that focused on a group of people who became friends and a band before an alien absorbed most of them.
That episode of the TLOU was so good. It completely captured a part of the game the players only saw through dialogue and leftover notes scattered throughout Bill’s story.
Babylon 5 5x4 "A View From the Gallery" focuses on two maintenance workers going about their jobs when the station is under attack, barely even featuring the main cast
I love this episode for two reasons. First, because it gives us the chance to see the way average people view the main characters. My favorite being when President Sheridan tells the two guys to escort Ambassador Delenn (Sheridan's wife) to a life pod. She refuses, they insist, and so in a rarely seen act of mischievious defiance, Delenn asks them what would happen to her if all the controls in the life pod got smashed after launching. They say she'd die, and she tells them that if she is forced to evacuate and watch the station be destroyed from the safety of the life pod, then she can guarantee such an accident would happen, and thus the life pod is not a safe place for her to be.
Second, and more significantly, the way this episode frames battles. There's a moment when the maintenance workers have just finished up a task in a particular room, called The Sanctuary, but really it's a multipurpose room that happens to have a view out the front of the station. They're resting, after doing some mundane task in preparation for an event scheduled for later, and all the while there's an attack taking place outside.
The one worker comments to the other about how the color of the explosion indicates the atmosphere, and thus the species, of the pilot that has died. We see random pilots die throughout the series, and even more ships blow up that we never see their pilots or crew. But it's this quiet moment between two co-workers, contemplating how those pilots are dying for them, that really hits hard. There's no fancy CG dog fighting shown, and no intense music. It's a solemn scene drawing attention to the fact that we see so many characters die for people who don't even know the character existed.
Surprised this hasn't been mentioned yet: In Season 3 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, we got "The Zeppo," an episode that centers almost entirely on Xander while Buffy and friends deal with the monster-of-the-week in the background.
Judging from what we see, it wasn’t a Monster-Of-The-Week that Buffy and friends were dealing with. It was more like a Big Bad that would have spanned a 2 or 3 part episode. Which just makes the episode even more hilarious and awesome.
Old dad here, all of the bluey episodes that follow their friends or other relatives are really sweet and a nice change of pace. Specifically the episode about muffin and the aunt and uncle who aren't as on the ball as chili and bandit are kind of relieving as they are still figuring it out but still loving. Its a little reassuring when your not an always at 100% ideal childrens cartoon parent.
I like the one about the Dalmatian family, since it was about how a dad who isn’t as extroverted as Bandit handles playing with his kid (and Bluey) in a different way
The Stargate SG-1 episode "The Other Guys" primarily follows these two dorky scientists who try to rescue SG-1. There's also "Disclosure" (where General Hammond reveals the existence of the Stargate program to UN representatives); and "Inauguration" (in which the newly elected US President is briefed on the existence of the Stargate Program), both of which are also Clip Shows.
Really gave a different view of the park and some hosts that were not the main characters. It’s actually one of my favorites of the series because of how it expands the world and introduces a character we’ve previously only seen glimpses of and learn his whole backstory.
Edit to add: It also shows how the writers (the ones within the show, writing the hosts’ backstories) started with a more balanced and peaceful representation of Native Americans as hosts, but later recoded those hosts to be heavily stereotyped, violent versions because they needed antagonists for their Wild West stories to appeal to their customers.
What is life? Is it nothing more than the endless search for a cutie mark? And what is a cutie mark but a constant reminder that we're all only one bugbear attack away from oblivion? And what of the poor gator, flank forever blank, destined to an existential swim down the river of life to an unknowable destiny?
Speaking of Lost, there's also the episode featuring Nikki and Paulo, titled “Exposé.” If I'm not mistaken, Nikki and Paulo had never even appeared among the passengers
This episode puts the ever-stoic Shikamaru in a state of heavy grief, and it's really moving to see how he and the rest of the town cope with the loss of such a valued member of their community.
I like Shikamaru. I also like it when action-heavy series slow down and take a breather. I've never really liked the series in it's entirety but the student-teacher dynamics of Asuma and Shikamaru is one of my favorites.
South park has a lot of these, but one of the most iconic is an earlier episode that decided to ditch the main boys and dedicate the episode to following Butters.
This is the first character development we see from him, as he slowly gets tangled into his parents' martial issues uncovering his father's gay orgies and his mom trying to kill Butters and herself when she finds out. All this happens with Butters oblivious to what's going on
The funny thing for me is that Blink was actually one of my first Doctor Who episodes. I had no clue what the show was about or who the guy was. But that whole episode got my interest and is one of my favorites of that era.
For anyone who might not know, The Scott Hunter x Kip story is actually the entire plot of the first book in the series, with Shane and Ilya’s relationship actually being the focus of the second book. They all become interconnected throughout the series though, so the way the tv series did it made a lot of sense.
Lucifer season 3 is incredibly bloated, but though a problem that may be, it led to some really good one off episodes.
Case and point, smack in the middle of season 3 is 'Off the Record's, an amazing episode of television and up there with Priest Walks Into a Bar as one of the best stand alone episodes of the series. The main cast are side characters in the story of an obsessed, envious investigative journalist with an underdeveloped sense of responsibility. A big part of the episodes success rides on always great guest actor Patrick Fabian of Better Call Saul fame, but the story is also great. It almost plays like a Twighlight Zone episode, complete with a hell of a twist ending.
American Dad episode "Lost in Space" is about Hayley's then-boyfriend Jeff who got abducted at the end of the previous episode (a rare instance of continuity).
It's actually a pretty good episode with an entertaining musical number.
We don't see the main cast, though they thought of a few ways to sneak in quick glimpses like a brief flashback and a shapeshifter alien.
The crew get a day off for mandatory R&R and side character, Dr Beckett, tries to get every one of his friends to go on a fishing trip with him. Unfortunately, no one actually wants to go with him. Everyone has an excuse, some reasonable, but others are pretty obvious attempts to get out of it. Dejected, Dr Beckett relieves the on-duty doctor saying 'no one wants to hang out with him so he might as well work.'
Well, bad things happen and Beckett ends up dying and everyone's sad they didn't hang out with him.
There was an episode of Married with Children that was a stealth pilot for a spinoff show about Kelly's himbo friend and his con artist dad, the Bundy's only made a few brief, scattered appearances. That episode sucked though
Scrubs would structure most episode titles as "My [blank]" and they would follow the main character JD. Every now and then it would be from another characters perspective with the title being one of His/Her/Their Story.
None of the central characters present (doesn't even take place in London at all), only seeing hired assassins cleaning up a clan of travellers who know too much. Pretty much a full hour of absolute mayhem. And because none of these characters are central to the story (some introduced in this very episode), you really have no idea or guarantee who is going to make it till the end.
The special episodes of mythicquest just prove that they should have made an anthology instead. They are orders of magnitude better than the actual show 😅😂
Vampire/zombie apocalypse aboard the Decepticon ship, with Knockout and Starscream as the central characters in the episode. One of my all-time favorite episodes for the interactions alone…
Starscream: Oh, no? You're the mastermind who chose to experiment with synthetic Energon.
Knockout: And you're the monkey wrench who thought it was a good idea to dabble in voodoo!
In Desperate Housewives, typically we see a few plotlines centered around each of the 4 female leads. However, in season 3 episode 16 the entire episode is centered and from the perspective of their husbands/boyfriends.
Any idea if anyone is ballsy to pull that off in a novel? Like we can have all the plots and subplots happen, then boom a chapter just focusing on a side character on their own adventure start to finish, and main plot resumes next chapter
The Stormlight Archive series by Brandon Sanderson does this. He has regular "interlude" chapters about random people in the the world it's set living their lives to make the setting richer. Sometimes the characters from interludes end up being important, some end up getting novellas or short stories, but often they don't.
Terry Pratchett does this too in a lot of his books! He doesn't always do chapters, but he will randomly jump to a random person's POV if he thinks the insight of this sort of person would add to the story and the picture he's painting. We even sometimes get a decent amount of their backstory, too.
Many authors will have their core crew of viewpoint characters for most chapters but have prologues, interludes, and epilogues from the perspective of the supporting characters or just complete and utter randos who can give a greater insight into the world as a whole.
Ayinde's Invoker Trilogy takes that fairly far in that there is basically a major plotline (potentially just as important as the A plot) that we only see glimpses of when a certain supporting character appears or during said interludes where her machinations play out from her perspective.
Victor Hugo is infamous for that. To be fair, his novels were published serially, so digressions are more acceptable, but it does make it feel any better when our main story pauses for 100 pages so we can learn about the Paris sewer system or the battle of Waterloo.
A lot of serially published works (Dickens, Dumas, Hugo, etc.) have this because the authors used lengthy digressions to sell more type. The main example that comes to mind is in The Count of Monte Cristo, where Dumas will go for several chapters setting up a single side character like Luigi Vampa, the morse code operator, or the boy who fell in love with Villefort's daughter.
This is a pretty common thing in older novels. For example, Tolstoy's Hadji Murad has a self contained section about a soldier, Peter Avdeev, who dies. Victor Hugo was famous for this. I think for more recent works, I recall seeing it quite a bit in fantasy and scifi, especially Discworld and game of thrones.
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u/yellowvincent 1d ago
I wish the simpsons had more episodes without the simpsons, they have such a rich variety of secondary characters
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