Top 25 Episodes of 2020

Welcome back! I have a lot of big posts to write and not much time to do them. I have a special catch up time to do in this month and the next one. I might even do some of this in March as well. I want to keep up on this blog now that the hiatus is over. And this post, once to be the last post of 2021, is the first one that’s going to do it.

 

Now when it came to ranking the top 25 episodes of 2020, there were some changes with the pandemic and what happened with it. This meant that some episodes were made to focus on the pandemic and there were a lot of good ones of these that we wouldn’t have otherwise seen. We also got at least one episode on the racial injustice. And some sudden season finales were good episodes that might not have stood out as much otherwise. Now let’s get to the episodes.

 

#25 Chapter Seventy-Three: The Locked Room (Riverdale): This almost wasn’t on the list as I was going to instead include an ABC news special on the pandemic instead. But then I remembered just how good this episode was and how it belonged on the list. While I missed the first half of this season, this was one of the reasons why it was good to come back for a while as I could see some of what had happened on the show come to fruition as one of the arcs on the show came to an end. Jughead explained some of what had gone on while identifying those who would have had him murdered. It was just what we needed to see to end this arc of the show in a great way.

 

#24 Saturday Night Live at Home (Saturday Night Live): One of the few socially distancing episodes that we saw, it was nice to see the cast perform and do stuff even without a live studio audience. While most people hated such a thing as zoom meetings and whatnot, we never would have seen such a great time like this without it.

 

#23 Fasten Your Seatbelts (Manifest): The season 2 premiere of this show, it provided a lot of great twists and turns throughout the whole episode as it continued the previous season’s cliffhanger in a good way while also setting up a surprise ending and giving a good episode the rest of the way as well. For a show that kind of jumped around in quality when I saw it, this was a good standout.

 

#22 Fade Out (Arrow): The series finale of the show did what I wonder if it should be done more often or if I should ever do as a showrunner of a show: end the series with the funeral of the protagonist. There was more in there than just the end of Oliver’s arc to the franchise as we saw other characters in the show’s history reunite and include the last major mission involved with the show.

 

#21 Pilot (Big Sky): As I think about just how far in quality and content the show has strayed from its original plot and purpose, I still think that the way this show started was a pretty good way to set up all of the major plot elements of the original episodes and its arc.

 

#20 The Clue in the Captain’s Painting (Nancy Drew): What became the first season finale had quite a lot of interesting parts to it as it had cliffhangers going into what would become its next season. That wasn’t all that was good about it, but in a TV season where most shows couldn’t get out the cliffhangers that they were wanting to, this one happened to have a good set up for the future making fans even more disappointed that there would be an even longer wait until we got it. But that’s what a good season finale cliffhanger does: leave fans wanting more as we eagerly wait to see what happens next.

 

#19 Aloha (Hawaii Five-0): This series finale made the list as a lot of them did as it provided a good way to end the series at hand. It makes you glad that they were able to finish filming the series before the pandemic related shutdowns. Speaking of which…

 

#18 Clueless (Schooled): For a show that didn’t know that this episode would end the season, much less the whole series, it provided a great homage to the movie Clueless while also ending the series nicely in a way it otherwise might never have done.

 

#17 Pilot (9-1-1: Lone Star): Here’s a great way to start a TV series. It shows you why the leads in the show got together where they did in the place that they did while also talking about series issues like PTSD and missing persons. There was a lot in there, which is why it became a two parter, but you never felt like you were missing much of anything in it.

 

#16 Frontline (The Good Doctor): This two parter focused on the pandemic in the show’s season premiere and first episode filmed right after it had started as we saw this show’s take on the whole thing at hand. I quite liked it and felt that it was a good way of addressing this.

 

#15 3 Seventeen Year Olds (S.W.A.T.): Focusing more on the recent racial injustice than the pandemic, it was nice to see this season premiere go in a bit of a different direction than focusing on the other main issue of the year instead going into a cultural reckoning of today’s times versus those in the past and how they related together.

 

#14 In the Air Tonight (NCIS: New Orleans): Set in March of 2020, one of the strangest times in the whole world, another two part episode focused on the pandemic and how it changed a lot of things in the world including how these people were reacting to it. It was a strong start to what became the final season of the show.

 

#13 Whenever You’re Ready (The Good Place): The last episode of the show may have had some issues as it seemed to imply that one would want to erase their own existence in eternity due to the boredom that you would succumb to there, it still had a great send off to the characters that we would know and love throughout the whole series.

 

#12 Like Father… (Prodigal Son): Officially the best cliffhanger of the year, it was shocking to see the twist at the end of Malcolm’s sister turning into a killer and all of the events leading up to it. Just the way that she did it in addition to knowing that it needed to be done as well made the season’s end even more shocking than we otherwise would have gotten.

 

#11 My Corona (Bull): This was the best of the episodes focusing on the pandemic as we got to have a more humorous look at it than just a serious one. While this episode was largely just instead the head of Bull given his dreams while suffering from covid, he was still able to do what he knew he needed to in the reality of this world where people randomly burst into song.

 

#10 Day of Death (The Rookie): I had taken a bit of a break from this show to focus on watching the final season of Madam Secretary and not even bother trying to record it. Sometimes when you come back to a show after a break from it, you see a really good episode that makes you wonder why you ever gave it up in the first place. Ultimately, following the cliffhanger of the midseason finale, we got to see one of the characters try to outwit her captor and stay alive even while buried in a barrel and wanting for the rest of the team to get to her in time. It was a wonderful episode to see.

 

#9 Save+The+Dam+World (MacGyver): There wasn’t much not to like about this episode where the Phoenix foundation had to continue with the threat of Kodex with some of them having infiltrated it and the other part worried that they might have turned with even one of the villains willing to save their own planet in the end.

 

#8 Pilot (Stargirl): A lot of shows that aired on the CW after this one had terrible origin stories in their first episodes. This was what a show should strive for when creating a first episode. There was a lot of back story into the characters at hand as we saw the beginnings of the main character’s turn at being a superhero in the end and start the series.

 

#7 Deus Lex Machina (Supergirl): Episodes like this makes me think that Jon Cryer missed his calling. He never should have been in comedy. He should have always been a dramatic villain. This show explained a lot about how Lex Luthor was living in the post crisis world and managed to make people believe that he was a hero with few people knowing the truth at the time.

 

#6 My Hangover’s Arrived (Dynasty): In what was a clear homage to The Hangover movie, the clear difference between that movie and this episode is that this episode was actually good in a very fun way as it set up a lot for the future while also providing a whodunit of sorts as they sought to piece together some of what had happened over the previous day and night.

 

#5 The One Where We’re Stuck on TV (Legends of Tomorrow): If you had told me that I would have wanted to see what effectively a crossover between Friends, Downton Abbey, Star Trek, and Mister Roger’s Neighborhood, I would have thought that you were either crazy or telling me what you think the plot of an episode of Legends of Tomorrow should be. And this was a great episode, going as far as using the filming styles of each show and making sense in the world of the show. It even combined the high stakes of the previous episode Doomworld while also combining the fun of Legends of To-Meow-Meow and being one of the best homages to TV ever made.

 

#4 Out of the Past (Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.): As much as I wanted to include the series finale of the show in this list as it did just about everything right a finale could do, this episode was better in the final season of the show that was better than all the rest, rising above the occasion to be a good end to the series. This episode finally resolved the cliffhanger ending of Agent Carter while providing a great link for the future of the series with a new character as part of it.

 

#3 Leave a Light on (Grey’s Anatomy): Perhaps the most controversial part of the list as it is not only on the best episode list, but this high on it, this episode explained what happened to Alex Karev in a way that many didn’t like, but I felt was one of the best episodes in terms of character development that we ever saw in TV history. Everything actually made sense about this episode in terms of where we last saw him in the series, why he would have left, and why it would have been so hard to explain what had happened to him. He narrated perhaps the most heartbreaking episode of the series where no one even died, but it still provided a satisfying ending to his arc on the show.

 

#2 The Arizona (NCIS): In a nod to World War II and a quest to right potential wrongs, a man goes to drastic lengths in order to get the award he deserves for serving his country and proving that he could. Christopher Lloyd was spectacular in this as was the rest of the cast with the writing top notch.

 

#1 Dancing at Los Angeles (All Rise):  I have no idea just how short turnaround this episode got, but it was great how the writers of this show could do a virtual episode so quickly with the actors able to accommodate and the show going out around the time when it was and would be one of the most topical episodes in TV history.