Live Action TV - Television Tropes & Idioms

Famed for notoriously bad episodes, Voyager still managed to have one episode in particular so bad that the powers that be noticed. "Threshold" was that episode. In it, the characters, while attempting to figure out a way to get back to the Alpha Quadrant, break a law of series physics... and "evolve" into newts as a result, and then make out and have baby newts (the moment which caused the page quote). While never formally retconned (except for Tom Paris later saying he never went into transwarp, which he did in this ep), both fans and writers essentially pretend that episode never happened.
- The real problem with this episode was that it occurred before they'd discovered a way to communicate with the Federation. All they had to do at the end was put one volunteer on the transwarp shuttle with the Doctor's newt-mutation-curing hypospray and send him back to Starfleet HQ to tell them what was going on. Instead, the whole transwarp shuttle was ditched and never spoken of again.
- They ret-conned the entire episode out of existence later on.
Voyager managed to alienate many longtime Star Trek fans in its pilot by introducing a spacefaring race of desert dwellers who use water as currency because it is so scarce. On planets with oxygen-rich atmospheres. While powering their spacecraft with fusion reactors that run on hydrogen. Did they lose the recipe?
- Probably. Those particular aliens were a pack of phenomenal idiots.
  - Yeah. Later, the Borg say that that race was so Too Dumb To Live that the Borg refused to assimilate them.
Another long running wall banger for Voyager was their constant search for deuterium... an isotope of HYDROGEN and one of the most common isotopes in the universe. Research? We don't need no stinkin' research!
- They acknowledged it in a later episode by having Tom Paris say something along the lines of "why steal deuterium? You can find it everywhere."
And then there was the infamous Physics-Defying Pickup Truck from "The 37's". Voyager comes across a 1936 pickup truck just floating through outer space. They beam it aboard, and discover that:
1. There's still oil in the crankcase, water in the battery & radiator, and gas in the tank.
2. It starts right up as soon as someone turns the key in the ignition.
3. The lousy AM radio picks up a distress signal through atmospheric interference that none of Voyager's sophisticated communication equipment can pierce.
4. Torres needed a tricorder to know what cow manure is.
- As if that weren't bad enough, it turns out that the owner of this brand-spanking-new truck was a poor black sharecropper who (along with a bunch of other people) was abducted from Earth... in 1937. Think about it. That was an age when rural areas still used mules.
- The distress signal was handwaved as being on a frequency that is not monitored by Voyager's sensors unless told to. But why should they? AM radio, at least on this planet, bounces off atmospheric interference. That's why AM radio stations once reached farther than any FM station can, and why AM doesn't sound as good as FM: AM radio waves don't just shoot straight through the atmosphere into space...
The episode "Memorial": Not only did Janeway not destroy a grossly unethical memorial that traumatized countless millions, but she also ordered that memorial repaired. At least she put up a warning beacon.
- That's because it's a memorial to a Genocide. It's the only remains of the genocided culture, so destroying it would be destroying a priceless artifact. Nonetheless, what were the designers of that thing thinking?!
In "Nothing Human," the Doctor saves B'Elanna's life with the help of a hologram modelled after an infamous Cardassian doctor. The Doctor later decides to delete this hologram, a hologram that appeared just as sentient as the Doctor himself!. The Doctor also deletes all the data that saved B'Elanna's life in the first place, condemning to death anyone who gets into the same situation.
- It was far stupider for B'Elanna to refuse the treatment because of its source. The doctor did the right thing by ignoring her wishes; however, there was no reason to delete the medical information that could be used to save more lives. Sure, the way the information was gotten was terrible, but throwing it away isn't going to help the Bajorans who died.
  - Your Mileage May Vary. The episode was clearly an allusion to Nazi medical experiments. To this day there is still considerable controversy over whether it's ethical to use the Nazi's medical research on human guinea pigs to treat patient's today, under the grounds that it could encourage future breaches of ethics by unscrupulous doctors (in fact the episode in question brought up this very point).
- Not only that, but the Cardassian doctor also POINTS OUT that much of humanity's medical knowledge was gained by unethical means or using practices that would be considered barbaric... So, it's idiotic AND hypocritical.
  - The Cardassian here is clearly meant to represent Nazi doctors. Many will argue that the Nazi doctors did NOT gain any medical knowledge because they were just fucking around for the evulz rather than following proper procedures that might have allowed them to LEARN anything. BUT the episode hinges on the idea that the Cardassian doctor DID learn something useful —specifically, that which lets them keep B'Elanna alive!
  - The Cardassian doctor's argument is extremely flawed. Animal testing is not remotely the same as involuntary experiments on living human beings, and The Doctor says so.
Yet another example: in the series finale, they have a future Janeway travel back in time to get Voyager home earlier. (It seems that the death of Seven of Nine in transit is, in hindsight, completely unacceptable to her.) In prior episodes, it was established that, in the future, the Federation monitors time travel and prevents interference in the timeline (the Temporal Prime Directive). Getting the ship home 16 or so years earlier, affecting the lives of possibly trillions of people, including at least two on purpose, should have got their attention.
- She was so hellbent on saving Seven, Chakotay, and Tuvok that she ignored the possibility of saving Carey or other dead redshirts.
- The point at which she choose to stop by seemed entirely arbitrary - she travels from the Alpha Quadrant to the Delta Quadrant AND IN TIME... so why not just pop open a rift and shove Voyager back ANY TIME. The fact Janeway didn't stop the death of about half her crew just to save precious Seven of Nine certainly leads us to Xena and Gabrielle levels of subtext. Squick.
- She also ignored how it would affect people born to crewmembers after the time she jumped in. These people may never exist, or at best have wildly different lives; but that doesn't matter....
- The Temporal Prime Directive is an extremely ill-defined concept that probably shouldn't have been dreamed up in the first place.
An odd episode of Voyager that is otherwise good, "Before and After," features ~~an elderly Kes somehow rewinding through her life~~ the present Kes having her life flash before her eyes from the wrong direction. Her species only lives to about nine years, so this avoids any major set changes; her species had unexplored mind powers, so precog was never ruled out; and her knowledge of the future leads her to act on it and change it, which is why we don't see most of these events later in the series. Not too bad - no worse than most things involving Mental Time Travel. But it hits wall-bangingly stupid when it becomes clear that Kes apparently married Tom Paris and they had a child together. This child apparently grows up on the Ocampa schedule (read, really fast) and then marries. Who does she marry? Why, Tom Paris's best friend and near-brother, Harry Kim.
- There's a bigger problem. At the end of "Before and After," Janeway heads off to debrief Kes on everything she learned about the Krennin. In the "Year from Hell" arc, when the Krennim DID show up, they completely ignored "Before and After" and acted as though they never heard of the Krennim, nor that they had had warning that there would be a Year from Hell.
- One could just assume that the Krennim just played around with the timeline enough that the warning never happened.
Then there's the deeply racist "Tattoo." Do we have to have Chakotay's Native American heritage rubbed in and given reality this way? It was skewered rather marvelously by SF Debris by tranferring the plot to a Deep Space Nine episode about Sisko, with the aliens helping black culture. It ends with "Offended yet?"
There's also 'Prey.' Janeway made a decision to get her entire crew killed for absolutely no purpose. Dying to protect 8472 would have been dumb enough; insisting on doing so when they knew that 8472 was going to die no matter what they did is just stupid.
'Course: Oblivion'. They suddenly, randomly had Tom and B'Elanna get married; they are meant to be exact duplicates of the real crew, so why the hell would their relationship progress about two years faster that the real Tom and B'Elanna? Ok, they did encounter different situations to the real Voyager, but how would that put them two years ahead? On that note, how did they end up a few weeks ahead of Voyager distance-wise? They have the exact same warp drive, and started out behind the original. Okay, Voyager screws around a lot, stopping to inspect every bit of space dust; but, since the duplicate crew had the same personalities and tendencies, wouldn't they be doing the same thing? But, whatever. Also, the cheap attempt at wrenching some tears out of the audience in the first 15 minutes with B'Elanna's sudden death was just plain nasty. Finding out they were duplicates was interesting, but then they had that go nowhere by having duplicate Janeway with insane stubbornness try to continue for Earth and then give up and have them all die in the end with no real purpose. If the real Voyager had seen them for a few seconds before they disintegrated, leaving them with something to think about, this could have been a decent episode.
- The duplicate ship had an enhanced warp drive that they invented, that was what caused the destruction of their ship. Actually, the duplicate crew seemed smarter than the original, building a better warp drive and progressing in relationships. If it wasn't for the unfortunate radiation they would have made it home in a few months.
"Human Error." How did Seven suddenly go from one episode as her normal love-is-irrelevant self to in love with Chakotay? They never appeared to even like each other as friends. You could count on the fingers of one hand how many times they spoke outside of a professional setting. He didn't approve of Janeway's decision to sever her from the collective, and there was nothing to suggest that he ever changed his mind about that until "Endgame." They also had absolutely ZERO chemistry in 'Natural Law.' One of the most blatant examples of Strangled By The Red String in TV history.
Viidians. Oh, Viidians. You're a warp capable species with advanced medical technology and, apparently, the ability to SPLIT PEOPLE IN TWO. So... the Delta Quadrant, especially the piece of it the Vidiians are in, is the Star Trek ass end of space, with plenty of dumb, defenceless races. And you need to harvest organs to sustain yourself against the ravages of the Phage... So who do you go after to get those tasty organs? One advanced starship with about a hundred people on it - when there are planets full of people who haven't even achieved space flight or who are pacifists! You should be setting up shop there, doing some abductions, and then you're set. You don't even need to chase anyone... but no, you go after Voyager. The only reason for this would be that Klingons seem to have some natural immunity to the Phage; but in that case, as B'Elanna could be the cure, so why not just get a fleet together and go after what is possibly the most important thing TO THE SURVIVAL OF YOUR SPECIES, instead of half-assing it a few times? (She's the only Klingon in the Delta Quadrant, after all...)
- If the Vidians are so advanced, then why don't they just go to Janeway, ask for a pint of blood and some stem cells, and manufacture the needed organs and antibodies themselves? The Doctor did this in another episode when he manufactured antibodies from B'Elanna's baby to cure a Klingon plague. Of course, knowing the writing on Voyager, this would be the time when Janeway would stand up and insist that giving the Vidians even one dead skin cell of any crew member would be violating the Prime Directive and upsetting the balance of power in the Delta Quadrant.
- The Vidiians didn't chase Voyager all over the quadrant. The Vidiians faced by Voyager very clearly DIFFERENT GROUPS each time.
  - Except for Denara Pel's crew, who they met again half a season later?
In TNG, there was a solid episode, "The Measure of a Man," where Data is the focus of a legal dispute - his status as a sentient being is the crux of the episode, and if he loses, he'll be disassembled and studied by the mandatory Jerk Ass scientist who seems him as a an object, not a person. (Not that Dr. Pulaski ever got slapped for that kind of behaviour — onscreen...). The episode ends with what should be a precedent of recognising Data as a person. Voyager seemed to rather enjoy the issue of holograms in later seasons, which led to a similar situation to Data's in "Author, Author". Given that Data and The Doctor are both artificial beings who are demonstrably intelligent and sentient, it seems logical that an enlightened, forward thinking society like the Federation would thus give The Doctor a free pass... Logic doesn't enter into it, though, and the Doctor is deemed a non-entity and then to further compound the obvious disenfranchisement of a group of sentient beings - a whole group of EMH Mark Is are shown working in a mine, all with presumably identical capabilities to gain the level of awareness that The Doctor has. For a show that is about tolerance and understanding, this shows considerable intolerance for arbitrary reasons.
- It gets stranger. The EMH got into this because he had written a holonovel and disapproved of how it was being handled back in the Alpha Quadrant. Even though the Federation wouldn't declare him a person, they did say that he is legally an artist and thus has copyright control over his work. And you thought applying the Fourteenth Amendment to corporations was bad...
- And the saddest part is, Picard's biggest argument back when he was defending Data was that declaring Data non-sentient would set a bad precedent! (More on this below.)
Almost every time Janeway talks about the Prime Directive or Starfleet protocols. One week, she's willing to kill the entire crew to stick to them; the next week, she's willing to kill the crew to violate them (and almost never acknowledges that that's what she's doing). No wonder The Doctor kept a log of all her questionable command decisions.
Voyager is a small ship, far from home, slightly overcrowded depending on how many redshirts have been killed off, and often low on resources. For much of the series, there is exactly one child on board, a child whose mother was pregnant before they got stranded. Yet, when two named characters get married and decide they want to have a baby, there is NO discussion of how this will affect the rest of the ship or why, if breeding is allowed, NOBODY else on board has done it in seven or eight years.
"Virtuoso": Janeway was about to let the doctor leave and leave Voyager without competent medical staff.

Close Star Trek: Voyager

Star Trek Enterprise damaged its credibility the moment it became clear that the communicators didn't work as well as the transporters. Working "cell phones" were beyond 22nd-century Starfleet; but disassembling living and non-living matter down to the sub-atomic level, flinging it vast distances, and having it reform perfectly was no problem. Seriously?!
- It's a little strange when you consider that many of the big transporter screw-ups happened in series that come later in the universe's timeline. Starfleet should have improved and perfected the technology. Maybe this is an overall, retroactive Trek wallbanger.
Possibly the worst episode, or rather the second worst episode, of any Star Trek series ever produced (worse than "Spock's Brain" from the original series): the Star Trek Enterprise episode "A Night in Sickbay". It wasn't just the stupid and overly melodramatic plot or the wooden acting. It went on and on and on, boring as hell, and what exactly was the point?
- It was an excuse to show the actors in their underwear and have them rub ~~lube~~ decontamination gel on each other.
  - The "decontamination gel" is simply idiotic any way you look at it:
    1. It's supposed to be rubbed all over the body. What about the privates? Shouldn't the away team be completely naked? (Though, if they were, then no one could film it... but still...)
    2. It seems that away team members aren't able to rub themselves with the gel; instead, they have to rub one another. What would they do if only one person leaves on an away mission? Who would rub them when they come back?
  - A decontamination shower would not only have made more sense but also have been more titillating.
The episode "Dear Doctor" has Captain Archer and Denobulan Dr. Phlox withhold a vital antidote intended for an alien humanoid race dying of a serious disease. They elect to cause genocide because of a set of rules (that is, the Prime Directive) that might be instituted in the future (Archer only just came up with it!) and because a second sentient humanoid race on the planet might be better off if the first race went extinct. Never mind that it lacked common sense; it also made them look like mass murderers.
- Look like??
- The entire premise that the first race was somehow "holding back" the evolution of the second race simply by existing was utter rubbish. It was an unpleasant "the parents must die for the children to reach their full potential" Aesop. But biologists long ago dumped in the trashbin the idea of an "evolutionary plan" which by some unseen hand (*cough*) progresses the evolution of species from a "primitive" stage to its destined glorious pinnacle, with Mankind (especially white people) standing tall at the top of the Great Ladder. (Manifest Destiny, indeed!) The idea is and has long been popular in Sci Fi, but anyone espousing it clearly demonstrates that he doesn't understand what Darwin and modern evolutionary biologists are talking about! Evolution is not some inexorable "progress" to higher levels; nor does "mutation" and genetic drift work like a magic wand.
  - The second race had started with ape-like intelligence and had been fostered by the first race. They were getting more intelligent while coexisting with the first race; this was cited by Phlox as "proof" that the second race was trying to fulfill its "genetic destiny" (what?) and the first race was holding them back. It's far more likely that the second race was becoming more intelligent because of coevolution with the first race and their high-tech civilization - they were subtly being bred for it, just as 15,000 years of coevolution of humans has increased canine mean intelligence (compared to wolves). Apes held in captivity to be taught sign languages have been documented to teach sign language to their own children and other apes, both in captivity and after reintroduction to the wild! What kind of pressures to adapt to human presence does hunting and habitat destruction put on chimpanzees?
  - Intelligence is an adaptive trait which created science, technology and medicine. But just when the first race would need medicine to survive the pandemic, Dr. Phlox claimed that the pandemic showed that their race was genetically degenerate and they had reached the end of their path and should just lie down and die already. It was all ~~God's will~~ destiny, bless their souls. WHAT?
- The science shouldn't overshadow the likely genocide.
- If they never wanted to get involved, then they shouldn't have promised to help, created a cure, and then changed their minds and left only a hint. That was heartless. And then, in 'Observer Effect,' they have the audacity to cry and whine about the Organians sitting back to watch them die!
'Observer Effect' is one of the most sickeningly self-congratulatory Humans Are Special pieces of fiction to ever be produced. How does INCREASING the risk of infecting your entire crew and then DELIBERATELY exposing yourself to something you know will kill you before you can cure it to "help" two people who are ALREADY DEAD help anything? It's idiocy bordering on retardation... or perhaps that's the kind of "special" they meant.
Humans in general, and Captain Archer in particular, were always able to justify their actions because they're special.
The episodes in the second half of the second season focus on the Enterprise helping to settle land disputes to end a war that the Enterprise was responsible for starting. Episodes like "Cease Fire" were meant to be a commentary on the the US presence in Iraq but suffered from multiple Analogy Backfires.
Season Three brought Seasonal Rot to a whole new level by Retooling the series to be Twenty Four IN SPACE!, minus the real time. "Chosen Realm" was one of the most insulting, trying to act as a metaphor for the 9-11 attacks — the Enterprise is hijacked by extremists with "Organic Explosives". It turns out that the only reason that the Enterprise was hijacked and people killed was that these terrorists had a feud with another faction about whether the Spherebuilders made the Universe in six days or seven. Wow. That kills the analogy. At least with 9/11, we know that al-Qaeda was (and is) angry at America itself...
The fourth season premiere had the Enterprise become indirectly responsible for creating an alternate Earth populated with evil space Nazis. The entire Temporal Cold War arc is dropped with little explanation.
- Is this related to the episode in the original series with the planet of evil space Nazis? (If so, someone lived way too long...)
  - Nope. Different space Nazis. Mein Kampf is apparently popular in space.
- The "reason" that the Temporal Cold War was dropped is that, somehow, the time/space reset button was hit and somehow it was the Space Nazi leader going back in time that started the Temporal Cold War... which one is best not trying to justify because it makes progressively less sense the more it is analysed.
Then there was the "Terra Nova" episode. The Novans are suspicious of humans because they believe that Earth tried to wipe them out generations ago; it is all solved with the revelation that the Novans are a lost human colony. Except... the Novans should then have known perfectly well that they're human; they just wouldn't identify as "Terran" or "Earther".
The finale of the show is a Star Trek The Next Generation episode in disguise, completely ignoring both shows' continuity and characterizations. The worst offender? Trip Tucker blows himself up during a hostage situation. Not once does he think to wait for a security team to arrive (T'Pol alerts everyone to intruders on the ship), nor does he try to stall for time. Instead, he has the aliens knock the captain unconscious and then leads them to a room where he intentionally blows himself up...and for what? (There is an officially licensed Fix Fic out there.)
Is anyone surprised that the Xindi managed to blow up their home planet? They're CONSTANTLY bickering amongst themselves - they bicker so much that their council is no more effective than the UN. And they spent huge amounts of resources on a superweapon to destroy a planet - which is stupid for many reasons for any civilisation that has warp technology. Not only that, when they're duped into thinking that humans are their enemies and they have to destroy them... instead of testing their mini-death star on, say, a barren rock or moon somewhere in their own backyard... what do they do? Yup, they send it straight to Earth, tipping their hand, when, if they had tested elsewhere, they could just have dropped the finished superweapon out of warp on Earth's doorstep and KABOOM! Also, literally millions of people are killed in this pre-emptive strike on Earth, and the Vulcans are Earth's first and closest allies; but come the finale, who helps out Enterprise? Andorians (whom the Vulcans are unfond of). Perhaps Archer's racism pissed them off enough that they wanted humanity to die. It seems logical.
The episode "Bound," which is full of Wallbangers. Long story short, the Orion Syndicate has put a bounty on the crew of the Enterprise, and an Orion bounty hunter comes to collect. He does this by giving the crew three Orion women, who have the power to control men and weaken women with their pheromones. Cutting to the chase: it's discovered that the women are controlling the men and using them to sabotage the Enterprise so that their "master" can come and capture them without incident. Captain Archer is trying to interrogate them but is so enthralled that he can barely keep his head up and his eyes forward. He almost lets them out of their prison cells upon request, and he would have if it weren't for T'Pol being right there. He then goes back to the bridge, leaving them with a single male armed guard. Ten minutes later, they're out of their cells and the guard has taken 5...
1. Didn't it occur to anyone — the captain, T'Pol, Trip (who wasn't affected due to events earlier in the season) or any random female member of the crew — that maybe they shouldn't have women who can make men do whatever they want guarded by men?
2. T'Pol was slacking off on her Straw Vulcan duties. The instant it was discovered what effect the women had on the men of the crew, she should have immediately relieved Archer of command — by Vulcan Nerve Pinch if necessary. A few of the men were clear-headed enough to understand and go along with this almost to the end of the episode.
3. Are there no rooms with separate ventilation systems on the Enterprise? Can't they filter the pheremones out of the air? Or put the Orion women in a big soundproof box with an opaque door or force field so they can't seduce anyone else?

Close Star Trek: Enterprise

...Sometimes, it's amazing that this series even had a chance to be as good as it was in season six with all the rampant WallBangers flying around in season one.
- "The Naked Now" is the supreme Wall Banger episode in the hit-and-miss first season. The inhibition-destroying disease from the original series episode "The Naked Time" hits the Enterprise-D. During the story, Dr. Crusher is somehow unable to recognize a dangerous disease with a known history, nor does she find it in her medical database; but Commander Riker finds it in Kirk's archived Captain's Logs, which are more than 70 years old. This implies that Dr. McCoy or Starfleet Medical kept terrible records. And that is nothing when you consider that Data gets drunk off of the molecule! A sentient machine, made (mostly) of metal and plastic with a positronic brain categorically different from our own, gets drunk off of a molecule that itself only causes drunkeness because of its similarity to the alcohol molecule. The whole "Riker found what Doctor Crusher didn't" is nothing compared to that.
- In "Datalore", it's understandable for Lore to be dismissive of Wesley to slip up his disguise. But the crew is dismissive as well, causing Wesley to basically shout it out to them!
  - One of the stupidest lines in the whole series: the climax hinges on the crew realising that Lore has replaced Data because Lore can use contractions in his speech, while Data (inexplicably) cannot. But when the real Data is returned and Picard asks how he is, he responds "I'm fine, sir"... That was a mistake by the actor, and they either didn't catch it or didn't have time to reshoot. Still pretty 'tarded, though. There are those who consider the mistake a fanfiction-fueling Or Is It? ending, but that's Stockholm Syndrome for you.
"Genesis": an "evolution" disease causes the crew to mutate into various creatures whose blueprints were still in our "junk DNA." Barclay turns into a spider - which shouldn't be in the DNA of anyone with a spine. A cat has kittens while turning into an iguana. A cat that may have once been considered male. Uh........ no.
- Of course, the Spot that was male was a different breed of cat than the Spot in later episodes. Still a wallbanger, since "Data's Day" came in the middle of the series, but a different type.
- They figured out that Spot was female in an episode a couple of months before "Genesis" ...and they found out because she was pregnant. Cat pregnancies don't work that way. Data should have noticed his cat's "in heat" behavior about eight or nine weeks previously.... Do cats normally have four-month-long pregnancies?
- It should be noted that both "Threshhold" and "Genesis" were written by Brannon Braga, whose knowledge of evolutionary biology is exceeded only by his knowledge of quantum mechanics.
The existence of the holodeck on starships. A piece of RECREATIONAL EQUIPMENT routinely has its safeties fail or get worked around and regularly puts crew members' lives at risk. Regularly. And Starfleet has not issued a bulletin ordering that all ships' holodecks be shut down ... why?
- DS 9 at least took the time to poke fun at this, with Chief O'Brien commenting to Worf how they could never get the holodecks to work. Doubtless, if "Take Me Out To The Holodeck" had happened on TNG, the whole thing would have been a death trap.
- Odds are, during Star Trek The Original Series, holodecks were illegal - see "The Cage" and "Menagerie." The end of "Menagerie" made the concept of holodecks legal; it just took almost a hundred years for Federation holodecks to be practical.
In "Redemption," the Enterprise tries to catch a cloaked Romulan ship by linking 20 ships together with light beams, in the hope that they would detect it if it crosses any of the beams. Problems:
1. The Romulans could fly around it.
2. The Romulans could fly through it, as the gaps between the beams would be massive.
3. If the Romulans cross any of the beams, the Federation ships would indeed know they are there, but the Romulans could just fly on with their cloaking still active. (Having Data captain a critical ship lessens the problem, but doesn't remove it.)
- How did this script get approved?
  - Space is an ocean.
Any episode with Lwaxana Troi because of the running gag. In every episode that she appears on the Enterprise, she is constantly trying to hump Picard's bones, openly; Picard is openly uninterested, annoyed, and disgusted by her advances, but keeps his mouth shut because Lwaxana is one of the most powerful people on Betazed as well as its ambassador. He still thinks his annoyance and disgust, though; and Lwaxana is aware of that because she is, not only empathic (that is, she can read feelings), but telepathic — she can read his thoughts and "send" thoughts back. And she makes sure everyone knows she is telepathic — she's told off Deanna for choosing to speak when she could think. So how is it that with all these wonderful powers, she willfully disbelieves what everyone else can see without mindreading — that Picard wants nothing to do with her?
- Denial and obsession?
  - Must be, or else she loves a challenge. There is one episode where, after he rebuffs her, she falls for someone else who happens to be an evil Ferengi who had kidnapped her and who planned to take her away forever. Since she's a high-ranked Betazoid, that's unacceptable to the Federation. The only way Picard can think of to get her back is to pretend that he has fallen for her. He does it badly — the only people it fools are the Ferengi and Lwaxana; fortunately, they are the only ones who need to be fooled. Now, Ferengi do tend to be on the stupid side but — again — Lwaxana is telepathic! And afterwards, she treats the confession like Picard meant it...
- Lwaxana'a telepathy itself is Special Effect Failure. Most of the time in Star Trek, we either hear about telepathic communication second-hand through one of the parties explaining what's going on (mind-melding in TOS, for instance), or we get a VR view with both audio and visuals (which is how it is usually done in Voyager). But with Lwaxana, we usually hear, and only hear, the thoughts she sends directly, as if she was simply speaking. Since only a subtle echo effect differentiates her speech from her mental voice, and since we almost never hear anyone mentally reply (they always speak), Rule Of Perception is likely to treat it as speech...
- Maybe she just likes messing with his head, so to speak.
The episode "A Matter of Time." Matt Frewer plays a "professor" who says he has come back in time to view an important event on the Enterprise, just as the Enterprise is on a mission to save a planet from destructive climate change which, if unsuccessful, could destroy the Enterprise at best and destroy the whole planet at worst. Picard continually asks Frewer's character to help him make decisions, but Frewer only answers that he can't change the past, no matter what the reason. All of this while being as annoying and intrusive as possible in shadowing everyone on the ship. Of course, Frewer isn't what he seems; by the end of the episode, it is clear that the crew is just playing along with him to get him to out himself... The wallbanger logic kicks in at the beginning of the episode and continues through most of it. The first time Frewer objected to telling Picard about the future for fear of changing it, Picard should have immediately noted that it was too late for that — the simple act of beaming aboard their ship and saying "I'm from the future" changed it. If he was even pretending to care about the timeline, Frewer should have done what most time travellers from Star Trek do and never mentioned the future voluntarily; instead, he should've just done a bad job of seeming like a contemporary and then gotten "caught". Yes, he was pulling a con; but as written, it was a Voodoo Shark con.
In the episode "The Enemy," the Enterprise crew finds a Romulan soldier stranded on a desolate planet. He's badly injured and in need of a blood transfusion. After some experimentation, Dr. Crusher concludes that Worf is the only hope as a donor. But Worf refuses to set aside his bitterness towards Romulans by being a donor. He makes this clear to Picard. In turn, Picard assures Worf that he won't force him to be a donor, but adds that as captain, "I have to weigh the good of the many against the needs of the individual and try to balance them as realistically as possible.". If that were true, then the best thing to do for the good of the many is to tell Worf to give blood! The result: Picard doesn't order Worf to give blood, and so the Romulan soldier dies in Federation custody. This would surely have started a war between the Federation and the Romulans if it hadn't been for Geordi's dumb-luck discovery and recovery of another Romulan soldier on the planet surface. As another reviewer put this, "I must balance the needs of the many against the needs of one as realistically as possible? - which is why I will risk a horrific galactic war, rather than hurt Worf's feelings!". Compare this to the TOS episode "Balance of Terror," in which Kirk tells the similarly bigoted Stiles to "Leave any bigotry in your quarters. There's no room for it on the bridge!".
- When watching this episode, you have to understand Worf to get the depth of this wallbanger. Worf refuses to help the dying Romulan; his reason is that it's against everything he is as a Klingon. He also tells both Riker and Picard that he will give blood if he is ordered to because they are his superior officers. (Honorable Klingons almost always follow the orders of superior officers, unless they're trying for a Klingon Promotion). Note that Worf doesn't gloat over the dying Romulan and even tells him that he won't listen to him beg for his life. Worf is not really putting his own hatred ahead of the Federation's needs, rather, it's that this was a case of Worf getting ensnared in Klingon technicalities, and Picard failing to recognize this. Remember two things:
  1. The Romulans aren't just Worf's enemies, they're enemies of the Klingon Empire. For Worf, this may not have been just a matter of setting aside his own prejudices, but of betraying his Klingon heritage and country as well.
    1. Also - if memory serves, Romulans killed Worf's parents. His biological ones. This might help explain Picard's particular sensitivity in this matter. Though it might have been helpful if it had been brought up in the episode...
  2. Worf never had to mention that Riker and Picard were his commanding officers: everyone involved knew. So why bring it up? Well if Picard or Riker understood Worf at all, they should have immediately read between the lines: When Worf was telling Riker and Picard about his feelings and how he would respond to a direct order, he was really saying "Look, I'm a Klingon, we don't assist our enemies of our own free will, because even if we wanted to, or had good reason to, it would cause us great dishonor. However we Klingons have to do whatever our commanding officers tell us to, even if it would normally be considered dishonorable. Obedience to our CO's takes priority over other measures of honor, and acts that would normally be considered dishonorable get a free pass if done at the behest of said CO. So if you want to avert this galactic war, I suggest that you force me to do it, because I will never do it of my own free will beyond telling you how to make me do it."
The whole episode "The Pegasus". Why would the Federation ever sign a treaty that forbids them, but not the Romulans, from using cloaking devices? That question haunts the whole episode. The Enterprise crew goes on a mission under the supervision of one Admiral Pressman, who was Riker's first CO. Pressman reveals that Starfleet wants the Enterprise to salvage a top-secret cloaking device from the long-lost USS Pegasus, which was Pressman's ship. This cloaking device allows ships to travel through solid objects. It's especially important to get it because Starfleet is worried that the Romulans may be looking for it, too. They find the Pegasus deep inside an asteroid field in one of the asteroids. After retrieving the cloaking device, they "accidentally" get stuck inside. The nearby Romulan commander offers to rescue the Enterprise crew, but Picard knows that the Romulans would surely make them prisoners of war and take the cloaking device for themselves. So they hook up the cloaking device and use it to get out of the asteroid. But, upon exiting, Picard orders the Enterprise to decloak in plain view of the Romulans, puts Pressman under arrest, and hails the Romulans, telling them about the cloaking device and what the Federation's been doing with it... What makes Picard think the Romulans will accept what he tells them? When have they ever taken anyone's word at face value? And Picard does this on his own authority, without consulting Starfleet... This isn't just one admiral's doing. The higher-ups in Starfleet Command had decided that they were no longer going to honor the treaty. Picard was never in any position to overrule their decision. His decision to tell the Romulans was treasonous.
- Oh, that isn't the half of it. Picard and Riker's reasoning might have been sound if we were dealing with a species that had usually honored their non aggression pacts (such as the Klingons), or that we were otherwise on good terms with (Bajorans, Andorians, Vulcans). But these are Romulans. This species has plotted to attack and invade the Federation almost every time we see them. Even if we assume beyond all logic and common sense that the actions of the Romulan captain in this particular episode were not aimed at subverting Federation security, Picard should know better than to trust Romulans. How many times before this episode did the Romulans try to execute some plot to one up, invade, or destroy the Federation or their allies? Um, let's see, "The Mind's Eye," "Redemption," "Unification," "The Next Phase," and "Data's Day." (In that last, Romulans retrieve a spy who had actively been spying on the Federation.) Forget the Federation no longer honoring this treaty: the Romulans never did. There comes a time when one has to admit that playing fair doesn't always work.
- Once again, compare this to TOS. In "The Enterprise Incident", Starfleet saw the Romulan cloaking device as such a great threat that they were willing to go deep into the Romulan Neutral Zone to steal one to be examined. Starfleet shouldn't be barred from trying to level the playing field against a dishonest foe like the Romulans. Picard's idealism far too often takes him into naivete in his hopes that Starfleet is altruistic.
- Even though the Romulans may be sneaky and try to subvert the treaty at every turn, they are not the type to declare war unless they have a good ~~reason~~ excuse. A game of cat and mouse is a lot better than all-out war, as DS9 so brutally demonstrated.
- Decloaking a Federation ship in front of a Romulan one is supposed to avert direct war? How? The second Picard did that, they broke the treaty. If the Romulans were looking for an excuse to go to war with the Federation, then that was it right there. Remember, Romulans are almost always duplicitous; there's no reason to believe that coming out and 'fessing up would smooth everything over. Picard should have rigged a probe as a decoy to mimic the Enterprise and had it self destruct while they phased out of the asteroid. Then Picard should have just kept on trucking to a point well within Federation space, where he could decloak and take the device to the nearest starbase for mass production.
  - Picard probably figured they could talk their way out of the situation; future episodes of various Star Trek series indicate that he ended up right. Let it never be said that Picard takes the pragmatic route when the "right on principle" one is within sight.
In another episode, a rogue Starfleet captain is attacking Cardassian ships because they're supposedly transporting military hardware. Picard and his crew hunt the man down and capture him. Then, in a private conversation with one of the Cardassian leaders, Picard reveals that he knows that the other captain was right in his assumptions. Why does he not act on it or even try to confirm it? Because then there would be war, and no one wants that. To Picard, upholding the peace is preferable.
- Picard's actions at the end of that episode are a wallbanger of its own. Captain Maxwell turns out to be right, but Picard puts him under arrest without trying to defend his assertions. How does anyone get behind that "I'm gonna pretend I don't know what you're doing..." attitude?
  - Remember that Picard hadn't proven that Captain Maxwell was right. The Cardassians had shown their hand by acting as guilty as possible in transporting the military hardware — a giant, sensor-jamming subspace field on a cargo vessel screams "I'm up to no good." This was enough for Picard to confirm the accusation with the Cardassian leader in a private capacity (not that the Cardassian admitted to anything), while leaving it off the record. The other captain, right or not, was breaking the law in how he went about proving it, which is why he was arrested.
  - That still doesn't excuse the "I didn't see nothing" attitude Picard takes towards that captain.
  - No, it doesn't, but that's Picard for you. In his eyes, if you're going to do something illegal, you need some damn good justification (and possibly a way to pull your own ass out of the fire should fuck up). The Properly Paranoid captain was running on little more than suspicion. Picard came to his own conclusion through a rational assessment, but wouldn't act on it.
"The Measure of a Man." The whole court case over Data's sentience was flawed up the aft nacelle. The "bad precedent" that Picard argued against in the trial? Labeling Data property and recreating him would be tantamount to raising an entire race of slaves. He only barely delves into the argument of Data's sentience, all but abandoning it for the slavery issue after he forces the Jerk Ass commander to prove for him that Data meets at least two of the three requirements for sentience (intelligence and self-awareness); the question of his consciousness is glossed over. It's made worse by Riker's argument that Data is property, which is little more than showing off what he learned about Data's mechanics from his schematics, proving nothing beyond that he's a machine, something that Data himself has already asserted. It never explores whether merely being artificially-made meant you were property; in fact, during one demonstration of Data's roboticness - bending a steel bar with his bare hands - Picard called BS on the entire thing, pointing out that there were several recognized life forms known to Starfleet that could bend it, and so that demonstration was irrelevant to the hearing...an objection that was overruled by the JAG overseeing the proceedings for no good reason. Even so, Riker's argument was eventually labeled as "devastating" by Picard even though it didn't prove anything relevant to the hearing. And the Jerk Ass commander who started this debate in the first place was the only council member to reject Data's admission into The Federation. Data shouldn't have been accepted or risen to Lieutenant Commander or gotten all of his fancy metals of honor if his sentience was in question — but this point is never raised. In the end, the entire trial can be summed up as thus:
Commander: Data is a machine and has no rights in the Federation, so I can do whatever the hell I want to him!
Picard: Data is a sentient being with rights, and you cannot do whatever the hell you want to him!
Commander: Ha, see? I just proved he's a robot. That means I'm right! Try to prove me wrong, now, huh?
Picard: If you don't stop this, you'll be condemning an entire race to slavery! Do you want that on your conscience?
JAG: Both of your arguments are stupid and nonsensical. I have no choice but to say "the hell with it" and default this court's decision to the droid. Whatever he decides on this manner, goes, and I don't want to hear another damn thing about this. Understood?
Commander and Picard: (*cowed*) Yes, sir.
- Picard was using a variation of the Turing Test to prove Data's status as a citizen. Is Data conscious? It's irrelevant if, when talking to him, you can't tell he's an android, as opposed to a Vulcan or a well spoken human. Picard's argument was, since the Federation has no reliable way to detect a soul, then if an entity is intelligent, can relate itself to its surroundings, and can express itself to others intelligently, then it should be considered alive and respected accordingly. In Data's case, this seems reasonable; but the Voyager episode Virtuoso takes this to its logical extreme, where the Doctor, a part of Voyager's programming, decides he wants to leave the ship. This raises the question of whether being artificial restricts one's rights in and of itself. This in turn makes Picard's argument look bad: Data is free because his creator and his benefactors at Starfleet granted it to him. Noonien Soong expressed disappointment when he learned that Data joined Starfleet, but accepted that he gave Data the ability and freedom to do whatever. But, regardless of how a machine passes the Turing test, if you created it with your own resources, knowledge, and effort to perform a task for you, then can you accept it if it decides not to do what you want? Imagine the sensor array or the life support system deciding that it didn't like its job anymore: is there any difference?
  - That still doesn't change the fact that Picard was only inspired to use that test after he realized that a ruling of property for Data would be condoning slavery, and used the test as a supplement to hammer home the "slavery is bad" angle of his argument, not as its own standalone evidence.
  - Really, two other major wallbangers occurred in this episode. As stated before, Picard's argument that if an entity passes a Turing Test, it can decide it's fate whether or not it was constructed by Starfleet opened up a whole can of worms, that somewhere down the line is going to result in the warp drive deciding it doesn't like it's job and going offline or something similar. Which actually gets us to the 800 lb elephant in the room: DATA WASN'T STARFLEET PROPERTY IN THE FIRST PLACE!!! Really, the whole court case was about Starfleet's right to take apart someone else's property who knew nothing about the situation in the first place. That is just preposterous: artifical or not, you can't just walk up on objects that belong to other people and lay claim on them. In a society that prizes law and order like the Federation, I would think that this would be obvious.
- At the time, Noonien Soong was believed dead. Data was discovered by a Starfleet crew, and therefore could be deemed salvage.
- And why in the Galaxy was Riker, Data's friend and crewmate, tasked with disproving Data's sentience? Doesn't the phrase "conflict of interest" exist in the the 24th century?
The episode Contagion: the Enterprise contracts a computer virus from a ship that had been infected with said virus after scanning an ancient planet for a legendary transportation technology. As a result, all of the ship's systems begin to malfunction, including turbolifts, life support, replicators. It gets so bad that Commander Riker remarks that (paraphrase) doing anything, no matter how seemingly harmless, could trigger the destruction of the ship or it's crew. So, they decide to go to the planet that the original ship in question surveyed to see if the can understand the program that has infected them better. They then transport an away team to the surface. Where is the logic in that: the issue is that all of the computer operated systems are failing, so to get to the source of the problem, you use a device which relies on the computer disassembling, transmitting, and reassembling every subatomic particle of your body WITHOUT ERROR? BANG
- Speaking of that episode, check out Data's behavior there; he throws Geordi from an electrified panel and gives a very human reaction of embarassed surprise and shock, stupidly puts his hand through a rapidly-changing portal through space (good thing the "image" didn't change while his hand was in there, otherwise we'd have a conn officer with only one arm), and look at his reaction to being reactivated after purging his systems of the Iconian program. This is supposed to be an emotionless android, correct? One incapable of mimicking or even understanding human behavior? Why is he acting like this?
In the episode Homeward in Season 7, Picard condemns a species to death to avoid violating the Prime Directive. Despite the facts that: a) Nikolai Rozhenko has a plan to save at least one town without ever revealing the existence of the Federation to them, b) after Picard shoots that plan down, Rozhenko comes up with (and implements) another, back-up plan to do the same, and c) Picard has always played fast and loose with the Prime Directive and certainly has stronger morals than to let a law prevent him from doing what he knows is right.

Close Star Trek: The Next Generation

"Spock's Brain". Spock's brain is removed from his body, and his body is hooked up to remote control while the crew of the Enterprise try to get his brain back...
- Rumours abound that the episode (written, under a pseudonym, by the same man who gave us Khan, Klingons and the Prime Directive) was either a practical joke or a deliberate protest against the show's new direction and producer that somehow got made anyway.
  - A specific rumour was that it was the writer making a rather pointed statement about Gene Roddenbery's understanding of science - or lack thereof. This probably isn't true, unless the writer was using Self Deprecating Humor.
- Others (including at least one book that predates the Internet) say that it was supposed to be a serious story about whether the freedom of one person (Spock) should be sacrificed to benefit a whole society. That isn't incompatible with the protest theory, but still...
"The Omega Glory." We have a post-apocalyptic war between two primitive societies which threatens to create a second apocalypse. Kirk, being Kirk, takes sides. The side he takes ends up with an "American flag" and an American Constitution through some highly unlikely cultural convergence. And this particular society had an illuminated Bible, which just happened to have a picture of the Devil that looked exactly like Mr. Spock. They never appeared to be anything more than bloodthirsty genocidal thugs, but Kirk still took their side against their Asian-looking rivals.
"Miri." A planet exactly identical to Earth exists in our galaxy and followed an exactly identical geological and evolutionary history right up until they accidentally create a pandemic that wipes them out. The odds of this happening should have been something like one in something much bigger than Graham's number - but Spock does say that the odds of this sort of thing happening in the Trek-verse are high. No, the problem is that the planet being an identical copy of Earth has no bearing on the rest of the story; all that was needed was a radio beacon into space and a population biologically close enough to human to pass the killer disease on to humans and half-human Vulcans. In this 'verse, that needn't be that close.
In the otherwise good "Who Mourns For Adonis," Kirk gives a wallbanger speech to the ancient civilizations specialist to get her to dump Apollo, who is holding the crew hostage. The wallbanger? The speech was about how her primary duty is to humanity. Good thing Spock wasn't present at the time.
The premise of The Naked Time is stupid. Gravitational anomalies mutate the water supply on the Psi station to become a complex hydrocarbon that "acts on the brain like alcohol." Um...what? Why would adding a few more carbon molecules to water make it intoxicating? And the water is not "acting on the brain like alcohol." The Naked Time's first infectee's breakdown in the mess hall could be a result of that sort of intoxication (suicidal insecurities and paranoia brought to the fore from the loss of inhibitions adherent to alcohol happens); but the rest of the crew's behavior after becoming infected seems much more akin to their being pumped full of something more illicit and potent than alcohol, like PCP or Red Bull. And if it is just a "complex chain of hydrocarbons", then how the hell does it become so virulent that it's spread by touch?! Yes, the infected sweat up a storm, but getting drunk from touching them would be akin to getting drunk by screwing someone who had just had an alcohol enema anally. It doesn't quite work that way.... This is likely why Star Trek The Next Generation retconned the infectious substance into being a virus.
- During the 1960s, the idea of "polywater" was popular. Polywater was a theoretical water polymer that could form above zero and be more stable than water, more popularly known as Ice-9 from Kurt Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle". Contact with polywater would catalyze the conversion of all water to its form, like the first nucleation in a volume of supercooled water, explaining the instant "drunkenness" of infectees. Unfortunately for the episode, polywater has definitively been proven to be entirely fictional.

Close Star Trek (the original series)

"Let He Who Is Without Sin...": So people who don't believe in free love are Always Chaotic Evil? Or, since Fullerton is lousy at being evil, always jerkasses?
"Profit and Lace." Quark gets a sex change operation, which in the 24th century apparently involves brain surgery to make the patient start behaving like Betty Crocker.
"Sons of Mogh": An atypically Jerk Ass Captain Sisko meddles in Worf and Kurn's private affairs by saying Kurn is not allowed to commit assisted suicide, which is perfectly lawful (and, if you've been dishonored, recommended) under Klingon law. This despite both Captain Picard and Captain Janeway having allowed people the choice in the past. That's right, there is canonically an issue about which Sisko is less understanding than Janeway.... For the record, they end up erasing Kurn's memory to get him out of this situation. Killing the body for assisted suicide is illegal, but killing the mind and personality is tolerable?
Season seven... We have the wormhole closed at the end of season six... and apparently this leads to things going south for the Alpha Quadrant forces even though the Dominion are based mostly on the OTHER side of the wormhole AND had an entire fleet of reinforcements disappeared by the Prophets in mid-season six. Apparently, Sisko opening the wormhole again INEXPLICABLY turns the tides of battle (shown gratuitously), thus showing that superbeings were helping the good guys win. Which likely was the point, but the Skepticism Failure is painful.
- And the season seven finale... which had considerable clip content... sigh.
Sisko once let Jadzia Dax go out and fulfill a Klingon Blood Oath. StarFleet might be Mildly Military, but letting an important officer go out and kill people for no reason but revenge (Jadzia wasn't bound to the Oath in the beginning — it was made by the previous Dax host — and she wasn't even a Klingon) is simply insane.
- The sad thing is, her keeping that oath for Curzon Dax proves critical for the plotline of the rest of the series. Because she does it, she becomes an honorary Klingon; because of this, Worf gets another chance to be a legal Klingon, and the Klingons remain allied to the Federation (with Jadzia as liaison)... Her running off to do something that should, by Federation standards, be outright immoral, which is in itself nothing more than vengeance, is critical to the resolution of the Dominion War!
The entire command staff had a tendency to leave at the same time, and no one ever thought this was a bad idea. When the station commander (a major religious figure), the security chief, the chief medical officer, the first officer (the liaison with Bajor) and the chief of engineering all leave at once who is running the station? Nog? Morn?
Sisko going on leave after Jadzia's death in Tears of the Prophets. In The Way of the Warrior, Sisko essentially told Worf "you can't run from your pain", and what does he do himself? Run away from the pain.
In the finale of the third season of DS 9, Sisko initiates the self-destruct system on his ship because an alien has co-opted the controls and may cause a war with some other aliens. (Long story) But WHY does Kira have the self-destruct code to confirm this? She doesn't belong to the Federation — her authority shouldn't extend past Deep Space 9 itself. For that matter, why are Odo and Kira on this ship? They're not in Star Fleet, and that ship has very limited passenger space! They have authority on DS 9 because it's a Bajoran station (Kira chose to grandfather Odo in); but they have no reason to be on a Federation ship In Universe. It's just to keep the ensemble together for the episode — and the problem with that is noted above. (To rephrase: Who's running the station?)
"Q-Less": To sum up, Vash, one of Picard's love interests from a previous episode of ST: TNG (Q-Pid) is found on a planet in the Gamma Quadrant. From that point on to about 20 minutes into the episode, the two big questions are "how did this woman get to the Gamma Quadrant without the wormhole," and "why is this completely intact runabout nonfunctional?" Now keep in mind O Brien from TNG, who happened to be present for the events of Q-Pid, is on the station. Sisko asks him directly about Vash, and he tells Sisko about her history with Picard, and nothing else. Sisko continues to worry over this possible security breach, and O Brien continues to have problems wioth the runabout and soon, other power drains on the station. This state of affairs continues until O Brien sees Q at the cafe. He then immediately tells Sisko, along with adding that the last time they met, it was with Vash in Sherwood Forest ON THE ENTERPRISE. Can we put two and two together? As soon as the ship came in with the unexplained power drain and the woman who just magically appeared in the next quadrant over, who by the way, was involved with an imp, O Brien should have realized what was going on, told Sisko, who should have then either a) told Q to show himself and state his business, or b) put Vash back on the next shuttlecraft or runabout back to the Gamma Quadrant, as it's not part of Starfleet's mission to defend humans who willingly make deals with Q from the Q Continnum (especially after Picard told her You'll Be Sorry).
The first season episode Dax has Jadzia Dax put on trial for a crime allegedly committed by the symbiont's former host, Curzon. First, apparently the Federation has a treaty with this race that allows them to kidnap Federation officers accused of crimes. No government would ever do that, least of all the Federation. Second, the argument put forth at trial is, of course, that Curzon is dead and Jadzia is a wholly different person, therefore she can't be held responsible for his crimes. What makes this ridiculous is that under Trill law, this is apparently still an open question! Symbionts are immensely important in Trill society, and you're telling me that they had never decided whether a later host can be punished for the crimes of an earlier host? It seems obvious that the Trills would likely say, "No. The crimes die with the host."

Close Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

The whole season 1 episode "Mr Quiet." An failed running gag with everyone breaking into Gratuitous Spanish just so Cliff can say he's just listening for his name. Then there was the fact that the entire episode focused on some guest character who we've never seen before, and never saw again.

Close The Cosby Show

In the Doctor Who Christmas special, "The Christmas Invasion", the Doctor started a health scare which may have led to a leadership challenge and a vote of no confidence for PM Harriet Jones. The reason was that she ordered an alien ship full of slavers to be destroyed. The Doctor has his morals (even when they don't make sense), but it still didn't come off right. Hell, his previous incarnation mentioned that Harriet Jones was supposed to be the guiding light for Britain in the future. She's certainly not going to be any kind of guiding light now that she's become Dalek fodder. Harold Saxon (A.K.A. The Master, the Big Bad of Series 3) replacing Harriet Jones makes this even more of a stupid move.
- The Doctor claims that he can bring down Harriet Jones with just six words: "Don't you think she looks tired?" But the only person he told those six words to was Harriet's aide; the rumor would've had to have spread through that aide. That aide had just witnessed a heated argument between Harriet and the Doctor complete with raised voices. The aide would have to be stupider than Ralph Wiggum to fall for that ploy, or else blinded completely and instantly by Ten's charm. (This wouldn't be the last time Ten won people over with little-to-no warning, but we didn't know then that it would become an established trait...)
  - He told Harriet that he would bring her down. It could be a Self Fulfilling Prophecy for her; still stupid, especially for someone who should've created a golden age, but at least not Ralph Wiggum stupid.
- Didn't he call her 'the architect of Britain's golden age' in Season 1 of the new series, when he was still Nine? Even if she served as a guiding light after Ten changed things, she sure didn't do that.
- The worst thing about the Doctor's complaining about the destruction of the alien ship was his noting that it was leaving. The aliens had just proven that their word was worthless when their leader attacked the Doctor despite 'surrendering'. If the one had sworn on the blood of his species that they would leave and then immediately tried to kill the man who forced him to swear, who's to say the others would have stood by his word? Earth couldn't take the chance and let them go because they might come back and plan a less direct attack next time, one which would prevent any defence.
  - The situation becomes less wallbanger-ish if you see it for what it was: an allegory to the sinking of the Belgrano during the Falklands war. That was also a perfectly legal and reasonable act, but seemed heartless and was endlessly criticised by Margaret Thatcher's opponents. This was a comment on that. Though what the comment was, is open to question.
- The original script for "Last of the Time Lords" had the Master explicitly saying that it was only because of the Doctor's stunt that he was able to become Prime Minister, which was removed with the idea that being turned into a House Elf and finding out the true identity of the Toclafane was plenty for the Doctor to feel bad about. Russell T. Davies says that he still considers this canon; it's a pity it's not unmistakably canon.
  - Considering how many people find both the Doctor being turned into a House Elf and the true identity of the Toclafane Wall Bangers, the fact that those were left in and this was left out may be a Wall Banger.
  - Even if this element was left in, it would create (or at least lampshade) problems: the Doctor knows that Earth suffered horrible things because of him, and there are now several deaths that can't be reversed. So what does he do? Does he try to reinstate Harriet Jones? Does he apologise to her? No. He does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. After the catastrophe's over, he descends into Wangst about having a mass-murdering bastard die in his arms and loses his companion to "you traumatised my mum to save that bastard's life" syndrome; then he forgets all about it. So, unless RTD is prepared to repair the timeline, it just exacerbates the problem. (And the Blinovitch Limitation Effect will make repairing the timeline pretty difficult.)
- The worst part is that even after he brings Harriet down, she openly and enthusiastically decides to, not only help him, but also sacrifice her life so he can succeed in saving them from the Daleks. Okay, she did need to help, but her dying cheerfully implies things about her or Ten or both that are kinda scary.
  - Well, it would imply that Harriet was depressed and suicidal following Ten's betrayal. After all, it's hard to cope with the fact that the future of Britain is officially based on the whims of a hyperactive narcissistic Designated Hero who can't be bothered to show up for the disasters that face the other defenders of the world. So, the Doctor succeeded in driving a woman to Heroic Sacrifice and then forgetting about it. Is it too much to hope that someone on the production team might remember Harriet Jones, or make Ten suffer for as long as possible before he regenerates?
The Daleks In Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks two-parter has a plot device involving Dalek DNA being transmitted to human corpses through the use of lightning strikes conducted through the Empire State Building — which, even in a series not known for its fidelity to hard science, is more than a little unbelievable. Worse, they claimed that this energy came from gamma radiation. Right, so gamma radiation = lightning, and lightning moves DNA and does a job that would take a dedicated team of geneticists decades to do. And the gamma radiation is supposed to be coming from a solar flare. This sequence takes place at night.
- In a more mundane but still annoying moment, a very young(-looking) man and two women, one of them black, get into the unfinished Empire State Building by posing as "two engineers and an architect." Psychic paper or no, someone in New York in 1930 should have questioned that.
- The real Wall Banger in this episode was just how terrible the makeup and acting of the lead bad guy was. A lot can be forgiven if it's cool and atmospheric, but this wasn't.
  - The guy had semi-prehensile penises on his head... that's more hentai than Saturday family entertainment.
Journey's End. Who the hell let Russell near the medicine cabinet?
- Every finale of the current Doctor Who has been a Wall Banger. A futuristic space station that broadcasts homicidal versions of modern game shows and that's a plot by the Daleks? CHECK. An ark containing millions of Daleks who end up fighting ghosts who are really Cybermen? CHECK. The Doctor gaining magical, god-like powers due to everyone chanting his name? CHECK. Two Doctors, one of them half-human, and a half-Time Lord Donna seem almost san-wait, no, they don't; it's completely bonkers. It's sad that the first season finale is probably the most believable one...
- Rusty not only got to the medicine cabinet, but he also fed the characters the same idiot pills he took. Uh, guys, you have not one, but two functional teleport devices. Think they might be helpful?
- Ten getting all prissy at Blue!Ten / 10.5 / Handy (choose whichever you prefer) for blowing up the Daleks. Whatever happened to "no second chances"? The Daleks must be on their fiftieth chance by now. We have been told over and over and over that DALEKS = TEH EVOL. They certainly pose a far greater threat to the universe than, say, giant baby spiders.
- Finally: what happened to Donna. The Reset Button has never been used so cruelly.
  - Some think that character thoroughly deserved that... in fact, surely the REAL wallbanger is that RTD was too much of a fucking coward to kill off any long-term companions. Hints were laid that it WOULD be done, but he never had the testicular fortitude to kill them outright.
In the classic series, most of the Sixth Doctor's debut adventure 'The Twin Dilemma' suffers from Wall Banger after Wall Banger, from the decision to dress the Doctor in a costume that can be best described as a technicolour nightmare and have him attempt to kill his companion Peri, to the sheer lack of acting skills from the twins whenever they're on screen. Some fans had a hard time forgiving Six for trying to kill the person Five had recently died to save.
- Some fans had a hard time forgiving Six for failing to kill the person who caused Five's death.
Likewise, the Seventh Doctor's debut adventure, 'Time and the Rani', suffers from several Wall Banger moments, including the Rani's brilliant plan to confuse the Doctor... by dressing up and acting like his companion, Mel.
- What about Mel herself? After the series tried hard to shake its reputation for being filled with Screaming Girlie stereotypes, we have an annoying, useless character whose personality can be described as "she has a whiny voice and she screams really loud and really often". She's blamed for the waning of Doctor Who in the 1980s more than Colin Baker is.
Due to cancellation after Season 26, a movie which went mostly in another direction, and the reboot which ignored it (and Jossed some of it), the Cartmel Masterplan to freshen the image of the Doctor to a more mysterious and godlike persona now has all the hard-hitting impact of a Wall Banger. There were better ways of doing it...
The Sixth Doctor episode "The Two Doctors." Humans are compared to, and treated like, cattle to make a Family Unfriendly Aesop. "Go veggie!"
- "Terror of the Vervoids" came just one season later and had evil mutated plants revolting because they instinctively fear people will eat them. Take That, vegetarians! That'll teach ya to eat grass!
- "Terror of the Vervoids" was interesting until the monsters were revealed. It's like their heads are penises!
Going back (forward?) to the new series: the ending of "Love and Monsters." Ursula dies bravely; but instead of letting her sacrifice stand, the Doctor brings her back—but only partially, so that she's essentially a face on a slab of concrete. Possibly forever. The biggest problem? This is supposed to be a good thing. Head, meet desk. Almost as bad? The episode hints that Ursula and Elton still have a "love life" of some kind... Squick.
- It's even worse when you remember "The Five Doctors," in which Borusa's terrible punishment for seeking immortality was getting it - by becoming a face on a slab of concrete...
- And a little later in the new series, we're shown how horrible it is to be turned into a Cyberman. How's that worse than being a slab of concrete?
- There is the fan theory that Elton is meant to be an Unreliable Narrator and was driven a bit nutty by losing Ursula so now he's just imagining her as a piece of pavement. Note how we only see her face from his point of view, while his camcorder only sees the back of it... Which means that the Doctor has left Elton to go completely insane in the privacy and comfort of his own home, with a slab of concrete to obsess over. How is that any better?
- It's also a bit disturbing to realize that the Doctor could have saved Ursula, and maybe a few of the others, had he not chosen to sit and listen to Elton cry over Ursula and then explain what happened to Elton's mother. If he had decided to try to separate "the last victim" just a little earlier, Elton wouldn't be having sex with a paving stone either in real life or in his own head.
- Doubly disturbing is the way Elton was rescued — by the Doctor and Rose, who only tracked him down to make him know how annoyed they were. Nice, Rose, real nice: four people just died, there's a psychotic alien monster less than a metre away from you, a man's about to die, and you're giving him hell because he upset the mother whom you were happy to leave behind while you went joyriding through space and time with your boyfriend — THE SAME TIME-DERAILING BOYFRIEND WHO'S HAPPY TO ACCOMMODATE YOUR PETTINESS!!! Yeah, these two really make life so much better for everyone they encounter.
"Fear Her" featured, among other things, an alien spaceship that is powered by love. That is refueled by all the love surrounding the Olympics. The Olympics. While Rose exclaims, "Feel the love! feel the love!!." That episode is going to look doubly ridiculous come 2012, when David Tennant doesn't magically show up in the middle of the stadium to light the torch. (Though if he does, then that will be cool.) And right after that, the Doctor arbitrarily decides that "a storm is coming," just to end the episode on an ominous note for the season finale. Except that this episode takes place in 2012, and the finale takes place in 2006...so the Doctor can sense a big battle that is about to happen...six years ago.
The Doctor deactivating Harkness's teleport device/time machine. What's the point of that, besides making it a bit more convenient for Torchwood (the series - the organization would be severely annoyed) by making sure he can't time-travel easily? It's just an act of dickery on the part of the Doctor.
- What? Nearly destroying all of mankind the last time he time traveled isn't a good reason to take away his time machine?
  - Even if it is (and it was an accident!), the Doctor shouldn't be the person to do that. He probably destroyed most of Gallifreyankind to take out (most of) the Daleks, on purpose.
The spontaneous offscreen transformation of Romana from Mary Tamm into ~~Princess Astra~~ ~~Mrs. Richard Dawkins~~ Lalla Ward definitely qualifies. Bonus demerits for her then playing with her looks in such a way as to suggest she's wasting valuable regenerations, only to end up back at "Princess Astra.".
Ah, the Delta Wave from "Parting of the Ways". Rather than being "a high amplitude brain wave ....usually associated with slow-wave sleep" (thank you, Other Wiki), it's instead "a wave of Van Cassadyne energy. Fries your brain. Stand in a Delta Wave and your head gets barbecued" (thank you, Jack). So, not the kind of delta wave your brain produces when you sleep, then. (This could be an instance of Did Not Do The Research; since it's a Russell T. Davies script, it most likely is.)

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From Torchwood: Jack spent almost twenty centuries suffocating, dying and coming back to life, but apparently suffered no permanent psychological damage as a result. Moreover, after being buried in dirt and exposed to the elements all that time...his clothes are completely intact! Come on — it's not like this show has a nudity taboo! (Though we would miss that Badass Longcoat...)
- Considering he spent those twenty centuries dying and coming back to life willingly in penance for failing to protect his younger brother, one may argue the psychological damage had already been done. That just leaves the lack of Clothing Damage...
- There should've been still more damage to the psyche. Regardless of whether he thought he deserved it, 1700 years of torture should have been enough to make him completely insane.

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SG-1 save the world from total destruction on a regular basis. What is their government's reaction? To complain about costs and suggest shutting the program down. Just to be clear, not to shut down development of a replacement defense, but to shut down the only defense against alien threats.
- All of these arguments run along the lines of "If you hadn't used that Stargate..." This makes it MORE idiotic because it's pointless crying over spilt milk AND because the Senator who hates the SGC so much thinks that God will save the good ol' USA. Even a theocracy would think that was stupid - God helps those who help themselves, and all. (Hey, we need to fight the heathens!) It's all stupid.
When the humans get the technology to build starships, America keeps it to itself even after telling other nations about the Stargate program. America represents a minority of global manufacturing capacity. Spreading the knowledge would mean that Earth would have three or five times as many ships. Apparently, the viewers are supposed to agree that the extinction or enslavement of the human race is preferable to handing advanced technology over to dangerous evil and unstable nations like ... Britain and Canada.
- It got silly when there was a big deal made of finally revealing the Stargate program (well, aside from Russia). Apparently, all the Canadians who work out of Cheyenne Mountain for NORAD never noticed what was happening in the basement.
- This has been addressed in three episodes: one has the Russian General telling a Chinese ambassador that they are waiting for the Americans to iron out the kinks, at which point they will get the plans for none of the R&D. A second has a Russian Daedalus class which promptly gets blown up in the second part of the episode it is introduced in, but still... The third happened in the Atlantis finale when a ship that is probably meant to be Chinese (Tsun Tzu) is said to be engaging the enemy (and doesn't get blown up).
Stargate SG-1 also has its moments. The worst may be the two-parter "Heroes." The bulk of it is one joke: annoying cameramen who must be rushed out of the way whenever the chevron guy says "Unscheduled offworld activation." This happens over and over and is the primary focus of the two episodes. The B-plot? Just a small matter of another SG team that has been ambushed offworld, with SG-1 needing to rescue them. In the end, a beloved major character is Killed Off For Real... ''offscreen.'' Dropped A Bridge On Him is the understatement of the century.
- That episode is one of the most popular in the series and won a Hugo Award.
- "Heroes" is a brilliant two-parter. It starts off as a light story, then shifts into something much more serious and important. Regarding it as a one-joke show is Completely Missing The Point.
SG-1: Their resident anthropologist/linguistic geek guy explains that another planet (the Tollan) are ahead of Earth technology-wise because Earth had the Dark Ages and so they are 100-500 years ahead of us. The Dark Ages only affected Western Europe (leaving the Islamic World in a cultural and scientific renaissance, not to mention the Byzantine Empire, or, you know, small places like CHINA).
- This is a little complicated because the concept of progress is relatively recent. The Renaissance was - somewhat ironically - looking BACK to Rome... much of the knowledge of Rome was reacquired through the reconquesta of Al-Andalus (modern day Spain and Portugal) and emigration from the collapsing Byzantine empire. It's a complicated issue. But, at best, Daniel was grossly over-simplifying, and at worst, just plain wrong; and given his profession... you'd think he'd be more... accurate.
This one from Stargate SG 1 is especially bad. Considering the two SG-1 episodes "Thor's Hammer" and "Thor's Chariot" together, the SG-1 team can be considered guilty of negligent genocide. (Yes, the Goa'uld did the killing, but surely SG-1 should have seen that coming.) Come on, folks—-couldn't they have found a better way to get Teal'c out of the labyrinth than destroying the one bit of technology keeping the world safe? The humans could go through both the labyrinth and the stargate at will; they could easily have sent for more help from home, dug him out, and then rebuilt the wall so that any remaining Goa'uld would still have to go through the hammer. Or Stargate Command should have left behind a full set of infantry or something once they destroyed the protection. The characters in the show lampshade this but somehow are never held morally responsible for it.
- Why couldn't Teal'c do a running jump through the thing? Or, if the device paralyzes him, why couldn't the rest of the team just pull him through?
  - It's even worse when you consider that O'Neill was able to pull him back through it.
The Ancients, anyone? SG-1 sets them up so much that Thor pretty much said that the Ancient database was so vast and awesome that the Asgard had only scratched the surface. Their technology easily defeated the Replicators and saved the Milky Way... And then we find out that the Wraith apparently managed to kick their asses, and then they all ran away with their tails between their legs and let an entire galaxy of humans be harvested by the Wraith for 10,000 years - which would have gone on if not for the SGC. The Ancients make the Prime Directive seem SENSIBLE.

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Stargate Atlantis had a Wall Banger episode by the name of "Sunday". Doctor Beckett moves an explosive device instead of removing people from the scene, and the writers Hand Wave it by stating that the patient "will die if moved"; just after he gets it to the bomb squad but before they can put it into their safe detonator, it goes off. On top of that, the Techno Babble behind the Applied Phlebotinum doesn't even sound plausible, and the "tumor bombs" break the rules set forth for them in the very same episode in which they were introduced. Why? Because they wanted to have a Tonight Someone Dies episode where they kill off a beloved cast member. This proved so unpopular that the producers declared that Beckett was Not Quite Dead and that he would return in a later Story Arc; they even confirmed that he would be the genuine thing, not an illusion or a clone. When the episode, "Kindred", rolled around, however, he turned out to be a clone after all, so...whoops?
- The poor guy's doomed to die, sadly.
- Even worse, that death scene was a carbon copy (well, except for the exploding tumor bullocks instead of a conventional bomb) from a death scene in Greys Anatomy. Not so dramatic anymore if you have seen this before in a Love Dodecahedron Medical Drama.
- What's worse than all of this combined is that Beckett had more than enough time to run away after he gave the bomb to the member of the bomb squad. Instead, he just slowly walks away and is thus dead. So in conclusion, this character, who has to have some intelligence since he made it through medical school, is too dumb to run away when there is a bomb waiting to explode.
  - Another kicker: Nobody seems to care at all about the bomb squad guy Beckett handed the bomb-tumor to, even though he had the thing in his hands when it went off.
  - This has has been mentioned above, but to give some more details, the tumor bombs break their own rules. These tumors are meant to be growing inside whoever is unfortunate enough to have them until they reach "critical mass," whereupon they will immediately go off. Until that critical mass is acheieved, the host can do whatever they want with no ill effects (jump up and down, run around, wrestle bears, bounce around in zero gravity, whatever). So when Beckett extracted the tumor in question from his patient, it clearly had yet to reach critical mass. And he'd just disconnected it from its supply of nutrients, so it could not grow anymore. Wall banger, indeed.
- The series finale "Enemy At The Gate" also sparked rage among the fans, as many believed it didn't do justice to being the series finale. There are various points where those fans are right. The whole idea of a "super hiveship" is mediocre. This hive was powerful to fend off two earth cruisers (which happened offscreen), probably the strongest known battleships, which made people go "wait, what?". Of course, the ZPM-powered Odyssey was on a "secret mission". Then they throw in the "Wormhole drive" to make Atlantis able to travel to Earth quickly. When Atlantis arrives to battle the ship, you were probably expecting some epic fight. Sorry, to disappoint you, but an Atlantis with three goddamn ZPMs couldn't even win against that hive. The visual effects also were incredibly mediocre, and the pacing felt rushed. This may have been forgivable for a normal episode, but it was the goddamn series finale!
  - The wormhole drive made NO sense anyway. They use it when they're at the EDGE of the Milky Way. And the Asgard could do intergalatic travel in about five minutes, but the Wraith couldn't... and the Ancients were supposedly a whole lot smarter than the Asgard (that is a different headbanger). So... apparently a ZPM magically gives the Wraith uber intergalactic FTL. Stronger hull, better weapons - maybe; but the intergalactic FTL tech was clearly stated as a different tech level, not just a case of shoving more power into things.
  - Hate to contradict, but as the Replicators demonstrated way back in SG-1 when Carter blew up a sun, hyperdrive can be made to go as fast as you want it to with enough power. All the Replicators did was strap a superbug to the drive to feed it energy. Same concept here, except the power also reinforced the hull so it would survive the trip.
  - They'd have had plenty of time to do a two-parter if the entire previous episode hadn't been devoted to an alternate reality just to explain how the Wraith got the coordinates to Earth. They wanted to spend an entire episode on that, instead of having time to show the cruisers being defeated and explain some of the other crazy shit from the finale, maybe making it not so rushed??
  - Or if the series hadn't been cancelled between the Wraith-on-earth episode and Enemy at the Gate. The writers had originally planned something different, but had to tie together too many loose threads in one episode (while ignoring things like the surviving Asgard).
  - Seriously, the greatest Wall Banger in the series finale: They sent a team through the ship-to-ship stargate onto the super hive to destroy it instead of just sending a Gate Buster nuke through.
  - Ronon's resurrection is still inexcusable. Way to ruin a dramatic and fitting character send-off in the final episode.
- They chose the lamest way possible to negate Earth's excellent defenses (in the form of the ancient outpost): Randomly having the international community decide they don't want international control of that nasty uber-powerful weapon in Antarctica - after many seasons of political maneuvering and fighting over the fact that the US was hogging all the goodies, and claiming that it was unacceptable for the US to have superweapons when no one else did. And the creation of the IOA. Just so that the chair could be moved to Area 51, where it could be blown up in an additionally lame fashion.
The Ancients are classic Neglectful Precursors. First, they created the Wraith by accident. One might excuse this if it was an isolated incident. Next, they let the Wraith evolve into a spacefaring race of human-eating monsters in their galaxy; this did not happen overnight, even if the Wraith adapted Ancient language and some tech for a boost. The Ancients ignored them despite all the signs that this is not a good species. Then, when the Wraith were finally a minor threat, the Ancients decided, "We're fucking untouchable!" and sent single ships up against ridiculous odds. The Wraith stole enough ZPMs to power a cloning device (and evidentally cloned ships, too), and increase their numbers by a ridiculous amount. Now the Ancients were basically fucked; but rather than focus on ship production, they try all manner of silly BS that never works — even the Asuran Replicators, which they went out of their way to vape. Finally, they get cornered and decide, "We're tired of this shit; these humans can deal with our mess." When those living Ancients arrived in the city and declared that they were taking over, the Atlantis team would have been well within their rights to imprison the lot of them and force them to start mass-producing ZPMs and all manner of awesome tech for the absolute mess they made of the galaxy. While it's not good that they got killed by the Asurans an episode later, they had it coming.

Close Stargate Atlantis

The second season of Heroes seems to be built entirely on a foundation of Wall Bangers and Idiot Balls:
- When West tells Claire that he was abducted by a man with horn-rimmed glasses, the reasonable response would've been for Claire to say "Yeah, that's my dad. He used to work for an evil company that kidnapped people, but now he's a good guy". Instead, she keeps quiet. Likewise, she told him not to come to her home, but was utterly incapable of telling him it was actually dangerous, rather than that she just had overprotective parents. "Don't come if you don't want to be killed or locked up" isn't hard to say, even if she can't explain the details.
  - Basically everything that Claire has ever done in her entire life is one of these. And the worst part? She's going to live forever.
- Then there's the Maya storyline, which ended up being a colossal Shaggy Dog Story, as Maya gets shot just before the climax and is only healed in the closing moments. This one may have been caused by the writers' strike.
  - It was; before the writer's strike, Maya was supposed to use her power at the end of the season, after the entire town of Odessa became infected with the Shanti virus, to absorb the virus and either purge it from her system or die (they hadn't decided yet). Since the writer's strike hit in the middle of the season, her plot had no real resolution, so she was just Put On A Bus the following season since she was effectively useless as a character.
The death of DL belongs here. At the end of Season One, he has a bullet to the gut and is slumped on the floor. At the beginning of Season Two, his wife, Nikki, and his son, Micah, are at his grave. Obviously, DL died from the bullet wound, right? WRONG!!! A flashback reveals that DL recovered from the bullet wound and became healthy before his wife went crazy again. As "Jessica", she goes to a dance club; DL goes after her. She's dancing with some guy when DL arrives, and he snaps her back to sanity. The other guy gets pissed, pulls out a gun, and blows Dl away. Two problems:
1. If DL was doomed to die anyway, then why did the writers think it necessary to give him the most round-about death possible? He dies in a FLASHBACK that happened between seasons.
2. DL has the power of becoming intangble. He was already shown to have quick reflexes with his intangibility — he used it to avoid being punched by the guy who ended up killing him. Why couldn't he have used it to escape the bullet? The guy took much longer to pull out the gun than to throw the previous punch.
Peter was told by Hiro, Matt, and Victoria that Adam was evil, but didn't read his mind to check if he wanted to release the world-ending virus instead of destroy it. Granted, given that Adam's worked with a mind reader before, lived for 400 years, and presumably developed strong willpower, it's possible that he's trained himself to resist all mind reading. But Peter never even tries. Also, Peter tried to open a massive vault with telekinesis andwaited for Adam outside as he walked in to destroy it by himself, presumably with his sword, instead of simply phasing through it and destroying it himself. Peter seems to be a walking pile of phlebotinum that is held in check only by his Idiot Ball.
- Another good example of Peter-flavored Wall-Banging: Amnesia-ridden Peter goes to the future with his new Irish girlfriend, promptly loses her there, and returns to the present without her. Granted, he'd have had a helluva time finding her; but that future's been invalidated, and she's now lost in an alternate future forever. And he promptly forgot about her upon his return (as in, within five seconds).
  - Wasn't Caitlin infected with the virus? Bringing her back to the present would likely start the viral apocalypse. Then again, he didn't even check.
  - "I wasn't going to leave you." Apparently, Peter cared more about Sylar than he did about Caitlin...
One of the apparent main themes of Heroes is that nobody can make a good decision, ever. This is a Wall Banger in itself. About the only decision any character makes that isn't disastrously wrong is "I think I'll have the waffles."
- Claire would somehow be maimed by the waffle iron.
Season three seems to be nothing but Wall Bangers.
- Sylar's Hunger Retcon.
- In 3x12, "Our Father": After a touching moment where Hiro receives the catalyst from his dying mother and swears to always protect it, he reunites with Claire. Then Arthur Petrelli shows up from NOWHERE having no way of knowing how they would be there. He proceeds to take the catalyst and Hiro's power, rendering most of the episode meaningless. And that's the second time Arthur does that!.
  - Somewhat justified; Arthur DID steal every power Peter had ever absorbed, including time-travel, teleportation and precognition. We had already seen him drawing out future events earlier in the season, so it isn't too much of a jump to suggest that he drew a few more pictures off-camera, figured out what Claire and Hiro were up to and acted accordingly. And we already saw him teleport to go after Hiro the first time... Though this wasn't immediately obvious; this was one of the few times this season when repeating things as if the Viewers Are Morons (how DID Peter survive that fall?) was necessary. That they DIDN'T explain this point is a Wallbanger in itself.
  - That justification just makes Arthur Petrelli not doing more with his phenomenal cosmic power all the worse. Seriously, he spent almost the entire volume sitting around doing nothing before they found the Haitian and killed him.
- Episode 3x13. Sylar angsting about HRG and friends turning him evil and throwing a tantrum over the lack of good in the world?
  - What's idiotic with Peter that episode is his cooperating with Knox & Flint on their destructive rampage enough to ask Knox to stand guard on Nathan. Peter, you are aware that you are now an accessory before the fact to the attempted murder of your brother and the murder of everybody who didn't get out of that building in time? Of course you're not; you're Peter Petrelli and thus Too Dumb To Live.
- The finale of volume 3 could be infuriating (although the Sylar bits were brilliant). The super-marine, who could have been an interesting character, gets his neck snapped by Knox randomly. It would have been better to have the two super-strength guys have a real knock-down fight scene - that's what super strength is for.
  - Perhaps the only meaningful thing that Pinehearst and the Company ever did was create Sylar and let him loose on the world.
It seems volume four is going to be one of these after another as far as Nathan is concerned; he's turning into Marvel Civil War Tony Stark. At least the show's writers aren't waiting until the storyline is over for everyone else to take turns telling him what an asshole he's being, though.
- Just as well.
- Even worse with volume four is the abduction of Hiro. The US government abducted a private Japanese citizen from Japan and held him without trial because they thought he might possibly commit a crime in the future that he is physically unable to commit. This citizen is the head of a major corporation who can afford to get the message out and who should have some pull in Japan.
- The Volume 4 finale delivers just as promised. Big effin' fight scene that takes place almost entirely offscreen? Check. Major character (Nathan Petrelli) getting a bridge dropped on him? Check. And Matt Parkman using his telepathic powers to rewrite Sylar's entire identity to make him think he's Nathan. Yeah, there's just no freaking way that that isn't going to blow up in everyone's faces (especially the writers').
  - It's already starting to...
- The last episode of season 3/Volume 4 marked the third season finale in a row to kill Nathan Petrelli only to bring him right the fuck back with a contrivance. It's also the third season in a row to end with the faux-death of another main character; they also brought back Traci, who died some episodes prior. The show has a serious problem with killing anyone on the DVD cover.
Claire's blood might be the biggest one of all. Established in Season 2 as being able to heal wounds in others, including BRINGING BACK THE DEAD...and then forgotten about/ignored. What's worst of all is that the problem is easily fixed via a simple hand wave: When Sylar took the talent from Claire, he damaged it. Ergo, her power can only heal herself, as can Sylar's. Arthur Petrelli stole Adam's and Peter's talent, but never learned to move the sweet spot in his head and ergo died from the bullet and the Haitian's power nullifying. Boom, suddenly the end of Season 3's second arc goes from a mind-boggingly STUPID resolution of Nathan turned into Sylar when BOTH SYLAR AND CLAIRE, WHO WAS THERE, HAD HEALING BLOOD THAT COULD REVIVE THE DEAD to the desperate denial of a woman putting the world in great danger by being unable to let go of her son. The sheer simplicity of the fix combined with how gigantic the plot holes it makes...forget a wall banger, this knocks over a whole house.

Close Series/Heroes

Season 3 contains a relatively minor but still vexing one that was even Lampshaded towards the end of the series. Why didn't Wesley tell someone, anyone, about the prophecy that Angel would kill Connor? It's understandable that he didn't tell Angel, but going to Angel's sworn enemy before his own friends... Bang, bang, bang.
- He didn't trust Angel to handle it rationally, Cordelia was off banging the Groosalugg, and he'd already fallen out with Gunn and Fred over the romantic triangle involving them (which was a bit of a Wall Banger itself). Plus, it is a standard rule of Angel that if you think you've ever reached the depths of how fucked up Wes is, you're wrong.
How about season 4, when they just take the word of the big evil that killing the human enslaving and eating Jasmine was a bad thing, and then they take over Wolfram & Hart?
- Angel himself had a good reason; they gave him a choice between accepting Wolfram and Hart's offer, or having his son kill Cordelia, a mall full of people, and himself. But he accepted the offer unilaterally. Not only did none of the others sign on (Angel signed for all of them), but they were also affected by the memory edit re: Connor until Wesley broke the spell in "Origin". Inconsiderate of Angel, but oh well....
"That Girl In Question". Where to start? It makes everything about Buffy again, even though we only ever see a woman in a blonde wig. There are many lazy, horrid attempts at meta-humour. Fred's parents were apparently never told about their daughter's death, which makes the gang look like Jerkasses. And they turned Angelus into a Butt Monkey. For the love of God, why?

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Buffy example: "Summers Blood." All through season 5, it was repeatedly stated that Dawn was the Key and that there was something that she could do that no one and nothing else could. Then, at the last moment, it turns out that Buffy could take Dawn's place and die instead of her. Granted, it happens to set up a Heroic Sacrifice (and possibly a Crowning Moment Of Awesome) for Buffy. ~~But Buffy should have had to sacrifice Dawn or watch her sacrifice herself; it would have been more poignant.~~
- That particular wall banger was lampshaded by Anya later when she admitted that she never got how the whole "Summers blood" thing was supposed to work; the scene moved on before anyone could try to explain it. Unfortunately, as much as Joss Whedon loves lampshading and winking at the fans, pointing out the plot hole doesn't make it less of a plot hole.
  - Let's just say "Summers blood" is code for The Power Of Love and call it a night.
The list of crimes against the series in seasons 6 and 7 was long:
- Tara's death. She was standing in the middle of the room on the second floor. Unless a sniper was framing Warren, that shot was one-in-a-million.
  - Worse. The bullet would either have had to materialize in mid-air, or come through the wall and not the window, for that shot to be possible. But we saw the killing from the bullet's POV, and so we know neither happened.
- Tara's death being the cause of Willow's Face Heel Turn. Reducing such a beloved character and relationship to a Morality Chain is appalling in itself.
- Xander leaving Anya at the altar. Totally out of character and contrived for the sake of drama.
- Hey, Buffy just came back from the dead! She's back from endless torment in hell (or so we think)! Do we run to her and hug her like we would have in previous seasons, like when Willow was thought to be dead and turned out not to be in "Dopplegangland"? No! We stand there at a safe distance and talk about her like she's not there
- "From beneath you, it devours."
- Giles suddenly leaves for England, comes back, leaves again, and then comes back... never mind that his reasons for abandoning Buffy are so out of character that the actor himself had issues with it.
- Dawn continues to regress to an annoying child, making everything she says a Wall Banger. How does the entire cast of characters put up with it?
  - To drive the point home, by season 7, Dawn's main source of angst was that she wasn't special like Buffy. Special! She had her chance at that!
- Willow hops into bed with the first annoying skank who shows interest in her despite being the character who'd be the least likely to do that and subjects us to their annoying "relationship" for the rest of the season.
- Willow's Anvilicious "magic addiction". This plot line could have been interesting. Instead, it was played for full after-school-special camp, reducing Willow to a painful cliche.
- For some fans of the character, Willow's Face Heel Turn is a horrific Wall Banger and a heartbreaking Character Derailment.
  - Furthermore, Willow's (arguable) Chickification in the following season because she couldn't use magic for the better part of the season, lest she become evil again.
- Buffy and Spike's "love story," in particular the re-structuring of the series to revolve around it.
  - The particularly mind-boggling thing about the Buffy and Spike relationship of Season 6 is that Seeing Red, in which Spike is given a Rape the Slayer moment, was contrived by the writers because they thought the fans were starting to like Spike too much. Since they had given him a number of redemption moments in the previous two seasons, this was entirely their fault. Then they rolled a 1 on their Authors Saving Throw. Bang, bang, bang.
  - It gets worse. Many fans interpret that scene as Rape Is Love!
  - This troper has not seen a fan interpret that as Rape Is Love, but has seen several insist that it's completely ridiculous for Buffy to have been rendered that helpless by some bruises from one fight considering what she goes through on a regular basis, or that it was a logical result of Buffy playing no-means-yes games with Spike for so long instead of actually having an adult discussion about sex. A few crazy people even point out that he DIDN'T rape her, and backed off when he realised she was serious... but who listens to them?
  - This troper interprets the rape scene as a demonstration of what it means for Spike to be in love without a soul, making him able to love, but not able to emphathize, to understand Buffy's feelings or lack thereof. Buffy's weak response is a little harder to accept.
- The entire concept of Buffy falling for Spike is flawed in and of itself. First, Spike starts treating his love for Buffy as a real and pure crush and thinks that essentially running Riley off is a good thing, a year after being a persistent pain in Buffy's side. Not to mention Spike's attempts to kill her pre-realizing of his crush and post-realizing of his crush as he brings a shotgun to shoot her at one point but instead just sits beside her. By the end of Season 5, Spike has earned her respect but she doesn't show any signs at all that she likes him, let alone loves him. Of course this all immediately changes in Season 6 as they have a mutual hit is love relationship which then evolves into Season 7 where Buffy admits she's developed feelings for him somewhere in between being punched, punching him, and having sex. The fact it served as Buffy being shown as physically and mentally weak in Season 6 didn't help and it becoming a focal point of positive relationship/negative relationship depending on the writer... yeah.
  - During Spike's "pep talk" to Buffy (which is a wallbanger in of itself since it was all about Buffy being right in her deplorable past behavior toward everyone), Spike offers to kill Faith for Buffy's sake. Excuse me? A few episodes ago, Spike was crying over all the people he had killed now that he has a soul, and yet now he's casually offering to kill one of the good guys for the sake of his so-called-romance with Buffy? Spike's Badass Decay was bad enough; at least keep his characterization straight!
- Everyone abandoning Buffy and kicking her out of her own home. What?
  - Dawn says, "This is my house too, so you have to leave." Yes, the whiny underaged brat clearly must have as much say as the adult who pays the bills.
  - After the way Buffy had been acting though, the mutiny against her was probably justified.
- Giles and his "act like a general" speches from the last season. When Buffy makes the hard and unpopular decisions regarding Spike, Giles gets on her case for not making the decision that he wanted. But he was the one urging her to take command. If he was serious about it, then he needed to accept her decisions when she took command.
- After two seasons about how our title character is so Cursed With Awesome that she'd rather be dead than have to shoulder it, we're supposed to inspired and moved by her cursing thousands and thousands of other girls with her awesome?
- Even the ~~vastly overrated~~ universally beloved "One More With Feeling" is not without one. Xander summoned Sweet?
  - He thought he was a spirit of singing and music, not a murderous demon. Xander's always been Book Dumb.
  - Totally screwing five seasons worth of Character Development for a quick joke? The objection still stands, especially since Xander already had one magic spell go terribly wrong on him ("Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered"). He should have learned his lesson then. And even more especially because he told none of his friends what he did when the singing and dancing first started, when he must have known he was responsible for it.
- "Doublemeat Palace" achieves wallbanger status for many, not just because the episode is bad, but also because Buffy has to get a job at a fast food restaurant...while Willow is apparently living at her house rent free.
- Buffy's "Cookie Dough" speech.
- "Get It Done". Buffy-Stalin calls a young girl who was scared out of her mind and who committed suicide a "weak idiot". We also learn that the Slayer's origins lie in rape. How charmingly sickening.
Before all of that was Season 4's "Wild at Heart", which seems to give out the unfortunate message that men are animals and have no control over their sexuality. And should be held responsible for their sexual actions anyway.
- That message was also in season 3's "Beauty and the Beasts", in which Faith makes the comment that "All men are beasts."
Any episode written by Tracey Forbes. She only wrote three, thank God: "Beer Bad," "Something Blue," and "Where the Wild Things Are." Apparently, she has a fascination with rewriting every character to be as shallow and two-dimensional as possible (the aforementioned episodes express the beliefs that every man wants sex, college students are walking hedonistic superiority complexes, and discarding grammar equates to "Buffy Speak"). In addition, they have heavy-handed moral proselytizing and a general vomit-inducing nigh-unwatchableness.
Riley and the Scoobies go out on patrol; he ends up ditching them because they hinder him. Granted, the Scoobies don't have his military training; but you'd think that spending years fighting beside Buffy would teach them such fine arts as not talking and yelling out loud while hunting.

Close Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Ronald D. Moore himself admits that the second season episode "Black Market" is a huge Wall Banger, and it has not been referred to since (apart from the death of Fisk).
Let's just say that if it's a stand-alone episode, then it's almost assuredly a Wall Banger. This goes double if it's a stand-alone in the third season.
- The ultimate stand-alone episode (third season, natch): "The Woman King." ~~Michael Angeli~~ "Helo" thwarts a racist serial killer doctor who didn't exist before and is never heard from again. Everyone carries a gigantic Bigotry Ball so Helo can be the hero.
Cylon/human fetal stem cells cure cancer.
- ...Temporarily.
The whole New Caprica debacle as a whole. You do not start suicide-bombing against a race who is for all intents and purposes invincible when they, if sufficiently angered, can simply take off and nuke your planet from orbit, that being the only way to be sure. And then there's what happened to the Pegasus.
- They were using suicide bombers to kill the people volunteering for the new Cylon police force, hence discouraging people from co-operating with the enemy. Of course, the "nuke your planet from orbit" problem still stands.
- Also suicide bombers tactics seemed to scare Cylons, who had thought they could control humanity easily by intimidating them. It's hard to scare an enemy who doesn't care about his own life. Given the fact that the Cylons never died, they must have considered this as an ultimate act of barbarism and desperation combined.
- Maybe that would make sense if there weren't only 40,000 human beings left - a number that drops rapidly in any case.
Battlestar Galactica's Grand Finale has proved to be the grossest of its Wallbangers, which were building up throughout the third and fourth seasons. Spoilers ahoy.
- The two most powerful and constant themes of the show are "It is not enough to survive; one must be worthy of survival" and "The cycle of revenge must be ended". Well, guess what. Throwing away all your culture and history completely pisses on both. A primitive existence is, by definition, nothing but a raw struggle for survival. And it's hard to end the cycle of revenge when you wipe the historical record clean; those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it.
  - At least they gave the robot Cylons all their tech so they can, you know, form a peaceful Empire.
  - The plan wasn't to "throw away" culture or history, per se. It was giving up an increasingly difficult life in space and dependence on their failing technology to try and build a new, better civilization on this "new Earth" (which is ours) by giving the next generations all the "best" that the colonials had to offer (culture, religions, and so on). The hope was that, without the technology and the burdens of the past (for example, the fleet of ships near Earth's orbit or the knowledge of the whole Cylon-fiasco), this new humanity (a mix of colonials and "primitives") could start anew without repeating the cycle of hate. So, no Wallbanger there.
  - Except that it clearly did NOT work. It's our Earth — how well-adjusted do we look? And it STILL makes no sense.
  - Especially since the Colonials were still throwing themselves to the wolves because they wouldn't be able to survive on an environmentally hostile planet without medicine or modern farming techniques. And what about all the sick and disabled people within the fleet? And what about the diseases they'd have carried all the way from the 12 Colonies? Aaaargh.
  - Okay, first of all: It DID work. No cylons on "our" earth, no new cylon-war, and that after what, 150thousand years? The Earth before ours and the colonies lasted only a few thousand years, tops. So, even if the cycle didn't stop completely, it has already worked out better than Kobol, old Earth and the Colonies put together. And second - the sick and disabled people in the fleet: What about them? The Galactica wasn't going anywhere and the rest of the fleet wasn't in any better shape - hell, the only long-term space-ready craft left was the basestar itself. It was either New Earth or desperately trying to to get to another hospitable planet before the last ship couldn't fly anymore. And given the choice of dying in space or dying on a nice green planet, trying to build a new civilisation, the colonization makes all the sense in the world - especially when you remember the fact that these people have lived the last years in ever worsening living conditions in space and in war, with no escape-option and no real medicine-supply (most of it was gone after the year on New Caprica) OR farming equpiment to speak of (they basically lived of algea for the better part of their journey). I'd have chosen a primitive earth over that any time, hostile enviroment or not.
  - This is not something we're going to agree on. The state of the Colonials' technology is beside the point: Lee Adama's argument was that they should reject technology and not even try to rebuild a technological civilisation, and turn to an entirely primitivist culture, with some kind of Ludd Was Right bullshit aesop, even if it was unintentional. Even considering the run-down state of the spacecraft etc. etc. it shouldn't be too difficult to create a civilisation with late-nineteenth century technology levels at the very least. Construction of tractors and other vehicles - hell, even steam engines - wouldn't be too hard for them. Yes, their stocks of medicine were probably pretty low by then - but with fleet doctors like Cottle around Colonial medical knowledge should at least have been kept intact, rather than dispersing the entire population around the globe to hope for the best.
  - Which was pretty much the first plan, until Lee proposed his idea of going more primitive and screw the godsdamned technology - to which appearantly a vast majority of the fleet agreed, otherwise he wouldn't have gotten away with it (and hey, maybe some of the other groups did take some basic tech with them.. helped some south american tribe build pyramids or whatnot). But to make this short: The decision to leave behind their tech and ships may not be what others would have done in that situation, but it's reasonably explainable and it makes sense in context. You may not like it, but that doesn't make it a wallbanger. More of a downer ending.
  - Someone's going to end up pruning this at some point. No, the point is that it DOESN'T make sense in context. The willingness of the fleet to go along with Lee Adama's "proposal" is madness and a wallbanger in itself. It is neither reasonably explainable, nor does in make sense in context, as I pointed out above - they're basically choosing suicide of their culture over survival, regardless of the writers' absurd Hand Wave that all their culture - including, inexplicably, the English language according to Word Of God - gets passed down through to us, which makes my head hurt just *thinking* of the lack of logic.

Close Battlestar Galactica

Supernatural: In All Hell Breaks Loose, John manages to stroll out of hell, saves Dean from getting shot by Azazel, give his boys an 'I'm proud of you' look, and goes up to heaven in a cheap white light. Nice, if slightly cheesy, right? Wrong. Dean's going to be in hell for a shorter time than he was and suffer PTSD when he gets out; there's no way he should be fine. Sam just gets a stiff nod (which doesn't exactly make up for him being sent for coffee in My Time Of Dying). The boys don't have much to be proud of. Dean gets to commit suicide, Sam's killed a human in cold blood, and Bobby and Ellen got to close the gate while they were pinned to a grave and a tree. They've made clear that John's a terrible father who has messed them up horrifically badly. So you can be forgiven for either feeling completely frustrated or having a bitter taste in your mouth. (This might have been intentional; you can never tell with this show.)
When it comes to John, there tends to be a lot of (maybe intentional, seeing how they think he's a psychopath) wallbangers. Like Long Distance Caller, for example: Dean had a beautiful revelation that John was an arsehole, and now he's back to "I made that deal 'cos you told me to look after Sam and I'm sorry, please don't be mad at me"; and Sam is completely disbelieving anything his father (or a reasonable facismile thereof) says. Oh John, why are you still fucking up their lives so much?
Ghostfacers has a nice one where the after some lovely homophobia ("You gotta be gay for the poor dead intern!" was particularly cringe-inducing), we learn about the awesome power of tote bags to contain the power of magnets. Unless the magnet is taken out of that tote bag, no harm can come to one's sensitive computer and video equipment.
Dream a Little Dream of Me. The villain became a psychotic killer because he couldn't dream.
- REM sleep holds the psyche together, and the villain had an abusive father. This is not a stretch. If anything's off, it's the fact that he has long-term memory.
Season 3 in general, Bella in particular.
After the Wallbangers in Season 3, Season 4 bounced back by producing some of the show's best episodes - until the 10th episode. "Heaven And Hell" had several Series Continuity Errors within the same episode, most notably the idea that angels can't feel or show emotion, despite a large amount of emoting by the actors. Then they decided to include a contrived plotline with "fallen angel" Anna , complete with a schmaltzy Titanic homage. Some are of the opinion that if not for the Tear Jerker Downer Ending, the episode would have been a complete waste. There is plenty of snark to be had, but nothing does it justice like the TWoP recap.
The "pep talk" at the end of "It's A Terrible Life", where the angel tells Dean to stop whining about his life because he has a cool car and can sleep with hot women. Say what, writers? If you feel like that, then why put so much effort into breaking the cutie in the first place?
- It was meant to get Dean to stop all his Wangsting; his Wangsting is a common complaint against the show. The angel in question lists Dean's many legitimate problems but concludes, 'you have good stuff too, so there's no need to mope all the goddamn time.' He did come down a little hard on the fellow, all the same.
- Now that we know more about Zachariah, that speech gets really chilling.

Close Supernatural

House, third season, 'Que Sera, Sera.' When Cameron investigated his apartment early in the episode, there was a saxophone, clean and polished and clearly well-used, lying on the couch, an instrument which the patient could have never been able to play if he had had lung cancer in its final stages. Think about it: Cameron's failure here allowed House to make a final misdiagnosis, which will be fatal, and the writers didn't notice.
The Christmas episode in Season 4. The little girl knows that her mom, when having sex, "used to like being on top, but now she likes to be on her stomach." Okay, so their policy was to keep no secrets from each other, but seriously! Is there no such thing as privacy in that household?
- Yeah, that was creepy, wasn't it? But not as bad as the girl from 'Sex Kills' reminding her dad that he should use a condom. EW! That was just wrong!
4th episode of the fifth season. Two words: Wilson returning. His reason (that he had fun around House) somehow seems insufficient.
Cuddy in "The Greater Good." Yes, House is a bastard and was responsible for her having to come back to work (Cameron left the deanhood because she didn't think she had the backbone to deal with House). But forcing him to walk up the stairs, installing a trip-wire in his office doorway, and taking his cane away? She has no idea that he's been having more bad pain days lately - but that's no excuse, especially since we've been told over and over that she gave him his job because she felt horribly guilty for having a hand in crippling him in the first place. This sort of thing could've crippled him further, or (in the case of the tripwire) crippled someone else! What she did was petty, dangerous, and immature. We might expect it from House (he did spend much of a season 3 episode pulling horrific and dangerous pranks on Wilson) — but this is Cuddy, the dean of medicine, who is usually officially against horrible pranks.
Kutner committing suicide. The producers and writers, and Kal Penn, were setting themselves up for a no-win situation: they tried to do it without any foreshadowing whatsoever, including no clear immediate cause. It was made worse because, with proper acting, there could have been clear foreshadowing for the viewers. The actor in question was leaving for a political job at the White House, and everyone involved liked the idea that there was no foreshadowing and no answer that anyone could spot, as often happens in real life. Total cop out, even so.
- What's worse, "no foreshadowing" didn't work because of forgotten canon. He was always reckless: he set Greta on fire in 'The Right Stuff', and he electrocuted himself with the defibrillator in 'Mirror Mirror.' Also, the guy in "Mirror, Mirror" picked up on some masochism in him. He was an outcast at school. It's implied that he didn't have a social life or friends the supplementary material doesn't count. He was constantly taken advantage of because of his kind nature; House did it to him countless times, most notably in 'It's A Wonderful Lie,' and Taub did it in 'Locked In.' He had his parents murdered in cold blood right in front of him when he was six years old, for God's sake! He also seemed least affected by Amber's death. He just stared blankly at her instead of saying a real goodbye, and he was later shown eating cereal in front of the TV, and there was also a scene somewhere in season 5 when he was discussing suicide with Taub and he said something like, 'Wouldn't you do it if you were burning at the stake and someone handed you a gun?' Though he also claimed that he himself would never do it. <sigh> Ok, there's nothing to concretely say he was depressed (though Wilson didn't seem that way either, and we find out he's on anti-depressants in 'Resignation'), suffering from PTSD, etc.; but it's clear from early on that he was messed up. Seriously, how much did we know about him? He had more mystery to him than Thirteen because he was Out Of Focus so often. Clearly, his cheery exterior was just that; it hid something else. There was something a little off about him.
- It's stated explicitly that nobody suspected that Kutner would kill himself and no one ever noticed anything; yet there were signs. The above list was not comprehensive.
- When someone commits suicide, the people that knew them well often look back and notice signs, blaming themselves for not having put it all together ahead of time. Accepting that you aren't to blame because you didn't figure it out is usually part of the grieving process. And you know what they say, hindsight is 20-20
The last fifteen minutes of "Under My Skin" violate the workings of medicine as previously demonstrated on the show, and also what little dignity Cuddy has. (Possibly Wilson's character as well, because he isn't there.) Fortunately, the producers had an explanation all prepared, which they unveiled at the end of the season finale. But, since we had no indication beforehand that we were looking at a two-parter, many of us were furious for a week or so. And the explanation was a little too explanatory...
The Son of Coma Guy episode. "Oh, let's give the man who have been in a vegetative state for EIGHT years some magical wonder medication, which will make him walk around and talk like a completly healthy person." Had he aleast been placed in a weelchair and acted a just little bit confused, it wouldn't have felt like like such a massive strech.
Season 6, "Epic Fail." Cuddy closed the Diagnostics department for the summer while House was gone, and then told Foreman that she intended to close it for good after House told her that he didn't want to return. Okay, we understand that she opened the Diagnostic Department specifically for House; but she made House take fellows. She tasked House with teaching Diagnostics to other doctors. And then she doesn't understand why one of his former students thinks the Diagnostics department can exist without House? Especially the one who led another Diagnostics Department, however briefly?
- Also from that episode, an in-character Wallbanger: Foreman attempts to repair his strained relationship with Thirteen by firing her. Brilliant. The results of this tactic aren't in yet, so it might even work...

Close House MD

Smallville's finale for Season 8. Bangers galore:
- Clark Kent. He attempts to dictate terms to Oliver about what the Justice League of America is; he tries to kick Oliver out for murdering Lex when he's not even a member of the JLA; he tells Chloe off for trying to protect him (though maybe he had reason for that - see below) and abandons her at or after Jimmy's funeral. He also trusts the man who put a kryptonite dart in his shoulder and trusts his coworkers so much that he leaves his TIME-TRAVELING RING ON HIS DESK. He experienced the whole Linda Lake thing, and yet he does this. He also loses his faith in humanity because "a human killed Jimmy," even though Davis isn't human and is barely even Kryptonian in the classic sense.
- Chloe Sullivan. She ends up looking wishy-washy; she's shown to have feelings for Clark, Jimmy and Davis; she eventually settles on doing everything for Clark, caring for and wanting to save Davis, and never having left Jimmy.
  - Another wall-banger in this episode was that Chloe, having brought about the death of her husband and the disappearance of her cousin as a direct result of harbouring a serial killer because she had feelings for him — deliberately sabotaged every one of Clark's plans to bring him to justice, claimed that it was for his 'protection' but never explains how, and then claimed when she unleashed Doomsday that it was 'exactly' what Clark wanted. Not only was she not punished at all, and not only did she show no contrition whatsoever, but she allowed Clark to take the blame for the events which she canonically brought about. The premise of this episode included that none of the events in it would have happened if Chloe had died earlier in the season). That was frustrating.
  - She only "sabotaged" one plan, that being placing Bloomesday in the Zone, and all she did to sabotage this was tell Clark that it was wrong. Tess sabotaged his new plan by destroying his crystal, and then Oliver shot him with Kryptonite, which stopped him from being on hand when Davis was split. Further, given that Clark's plan was to separate Davis from Doomsday with Black K and throw Doomsday in the Luthorcorp hole, it was exactly what Clark wanted, just a bit too early. And further still, Lois' disappearance was hardly a direct result of Chloe harboring Davis. Tess and Lois fought over the disappearance of the orb, and Lois found Clark's ring after the fight. Davis doesn't affect this at all.
- Davis Bloome. Prior to the finale, he's portrayed as not wanting to kill; he only killed to suppress the Superpowered Evil Side that would kill thousands more. He already exhausted the option of suicide. After being separated from Doomsday, he murders Jimmy in a jealous rage because Chloe lied to him. The actor himself had a problem with the scene, and told the writers so. Doomsday doesn't get away scot-free; the wimpy fight ends with Clark burying Doomsday under the earth, despite the death anvils Clark had been getting and Doomsday's reputation.
- Jimmy Olsen. Or rather, Henry Olsen, as a retcon surpassing even Veritas rears its head. After being on drugs for so long that he steals money in his most recent appearance, he's suddenly fine and well-adjusted. Not only that, but despite his need to steal money and his reconciliation with Chloe not coming until later, he also has enough money, somehow, to buy and pay bills on a beautiful gigantic loft that is somewhat anviliciously referred to as the Watchtower. And he is first killed by Davis and then revealed to be the older brother of the Jimmy Olsen fans recognize in an effort to realign the show with the mythos they've ignored for seven seasons. Never mind that we've never seen this younger brother - his own ex-wife hasn't met him prior to his funeral - and his horrible home life (also shoehorned in last-minute) should have suggested that, at least when he was sober, he wouldn't allow his younger brother to be left alone with his dad.
- Oliver Queen and the Justice League of America. Apparently, the JLA is a-okay with murder; they accept Oliver's murder of Lex without incident. Then they help Oliver trick Clark into coming to rescue Chloe and shoot him with Kryptonite. Then they assumed that they could somehow kill Doomsday with a bow and arrow, super-speed, and a high-pitched scream. Further, Dinah, under the username "Black Canary," sends emails and an audio clip of her voice to Clark at his work computer, which is known to be monitored; it's not immediately apparent what's wrong here, but when you remember Dinah's and Clark's professions (famous radio show personality and newspaper reporter, respectively)... While Tess may have known Dinah's identity, others probably did not; and the clip was somewhat loud.
- Lois Lane. While Lois hasn't always been portrayed as exceptionally intelligent, she drops to a new low by chewing Clark out for not searching for Chloe when she herself is also sitting at work. After seeing Clark writing a letter (which she sees for at least an instant), she is in no way suspicious of Clark when he disappears and the Retter Business Bureau calls her to publish his letter. She then puts on a time-traveling ring for no good reason, without knowing to whom it belongs or what it does.
- Tess Mercer. Even though she knows that both Clark and Davis are Kryptonian and have a motive to steal her orb, she questions Lois about the break-in. This could be forgiven because she's seen Lois (or someone she believed to be Lois, but who was Faora) kill a man and use super strength and perhaps speed. But Lois has no motive for stealing the orb, and she certainly displays no great strength or speed in her fight against Tess. Tess also ignores her minion's report that the vault containing the orb was blasted open from the inside.
- Further, the aforementioned fight between Clark and Doomsday that had been teased for the entire season and heralded as the biggest challenge Clark would face by both Jor-El and Rokk lasted under two minutes and was released ahead of time in a Director's Cut. It's no surprise that Smallville was moved to the Friday Night Death Slot for S9.

Close Smallville

Mythbusters with their first Viewer's Choice special. The myths were all so easy to test that they could easily have been used as "extra scenes" on the Discovery website. That doesn't make the average viewer look good.
- The producers of Mythbusters ADMITTED to trying to make sure something is destroyed dramatically in every episode. Because we poor drooling fans can't be happy unless we see a "big boom" every week.
  - Sssshhhhh! We're trying to watch the explosions!
  - The scientific method is still present. It's just that most of the experimentation gets edited out in favor of Adam hurting himself or things being blown up.
  - Some viewers would love to see more science. And then promptly see how it can be applied to blowing stuff up.
Landry and Tyra killing a man who had tried to rape Tyra and then dumping the body in the second season premiere of Friday Night Lights. Within minutes, fans were lighting up message boards about how this development completely went against the realistic, intimate portrayal of small town life the show's first season had done so well. It was highly unpopular with critics, also; not one has yet come forward to defend it.
One episode of My Wife And Kids involves the Kyle women inventing a holiday, "Sweethearts Day", expressly for the purpose of forcing their men to buy them diamonds. Michael gets Jaye pearls when she displays a bad attitude over the phone and encourages the other men to do the same; of course, they don't, and Michael spends the rest of the episode attempting to apologize. What made the episode a Wall Banger was that it made Jaye look completely faultless, ignoring the fact that she invented the whole thing because, as she declared, Michael needed to prove how much he loved her by buying her diamonds — completely ignoring the years of happy marriage and their three children. Quite aside from making Michael look like an idiot for going along with such bullshit, Jaye comes off as an ungrateful materialist, and is held up as the protagonist in the story for it. What an uplifting message for female viewers. And it isn't like he got her feces. Pearls cost money too. Should given her a homemade gift. A liquid home made gift.
The 1998 Merlin miniseries climaxes with the Good Guys defeating the Evil Queen, who had just fought Merlin to a stalemate in a cool magical battle, by turning their backs and disbelieving. It is set up, but it's still a Missed Moment Of Awesome.
Serena Southerlyn's reaction to being fired from the Law And Order team:
Serena: "Is this because I'm a lesbian?"
- The look on Arthur's face spoke for us all. Wait, what?
Sara Sidle's sudden departure from CSI shortly after she accepted a proposal from Grissom and transferred to another shift so they could be together without jeopardizing their careers - especially since her reasons for leaving (specifically, "ghosts" from her past cropping up since the death of her father) fly in the face of why she hooked up with Grissom (he was a stabilizing point in her life who, for two seasons, helped her greatly).
- Also from CSI, Sara's inability to practice basic survival techniques in the season 8 premiere, even after years as a CSI when she would have either gotten a brief lecture as a part of bonus job training or learned the basics after she encountered someone who died while hiking in the wilderness, like the guy Grissom found while searching for Sara.
- Another one from CSI: using silica as GPS Evidence. You know, the second most common molecule on the planet. It's quartz dust, people!
- CSI New York, the episode centered around Second Life. Sure, the episode had about every inaccurate gaming trope (despite help from the game's developers), but the real Wall Banger was when the perp got away. First of all, she was so desperate to get away, she shot an innocent bystander and then leaped down a garbage chute. Yet, in the shot between those, we see her walking calmly down a flight of stairs at a clipped stride because she's in six-inch heels. Wouldn't she have yanked her footwear off to go faster? Despite that hobbled pace, she still manages to outrun the police, who didn't take that long to see that the bystander was safe. Bad Video Game portrayals in a videogame episode is one thing; the final chase following slasher flick physics is something else.
- Speaking of CSI video game episodes, CSI Miami's 'Urban Hellraisers' episode is incredibly stupid. From the guy playing himself to death to the entirely wrong portrayal of video games to the game company having people commit crimes from the game for advertising: stupidity after stupidity for an hour straight.
- How about CSI's "Fur and Loathing"? Behind Wall Banger Number One: Latex lining for a Fursuit! Yes, latex, which traps heat and moisture in an already extremely warm costume. He'd cook in that thing. Even without latex, everyone in a fursuit (which most con-goers wouldn't be, given that they're expensive and not every furry wants one) would be cooking... even without having sex or making speeches under hot lights. Did the furry con take place in a giant walk-in freezer?
  - The bigger Wall Banger in that episode would be how the latex does wonders to keep in the ''blood pooling from the guy's mortal wound'', but somehow lets out ''his semen during a fursuit orgy''.
  - CSI has a tendency to induce this trope on a particular subculture when they do an episode about them. The furry episode is simply one of the best-known.
- Season 5's "Committed": the murder is captured based on a confession he made in a pottery class; the sound was captured in the grooves of a pot like a vinyl record. They hook the pot up to a laser beam to play the conversation, and they can hear it perfectly. How many laws of physics does that recording defy?
Kamen Rider Faiz contained a running rivalry between hero Takumi (and his alterego, Kamen Rider Faiz) and Kiba (and his alterego, the Horse Orphenoch). This began as a case of Living With The Villain (even though both are basically nice guys), but soon descended into pure farce. The device used to transform into Faiz was frequently stolen and used by the bad guys just long enough for Kiba to assume that Takumi had done it. Eventually, they each found out who the other was; even then, the rivalry wouldn't stop. At one point, they're trying to make up with each other, but things just get worse because their friends can't be bothered to accurately memorise one simple message. By the fifteenth skirmish between Takumi and Kiba, it starts looking a bit contrived.
In the show Brainiac Science Abuse: One episode had a viewer mail question, "Will those things that make your bike sound like a motorcycle make it run faster". They did a test of it. When they did the bike run with the motorcycle sound device, the run was faster by the previous run (without the device) by one second. They instantly stated that the device will make your bike run faster. Yeah. Studies include margins of error for a reason...
- They tested the Brown Note and outright lied about the results to make it funnier. They gave up any shadow of being a scientific or educational show right there.
- They also faked the results of dropping Alkaline Metals in water, as proven on Mythbusters. (The one that, in theory, should've produced the biggest explosion was so heavy that it produced only a little explosion. So Brainiac Science Abuse goosed it with another explosive when they filmed it...)
The X Files season 9 episode "Jump The Shark" (one can only presume the title was meant to be ironic) gave the initial appearance of being a tongue-in-cheek comedy episode centred on fan favourites The Lone Gunmen, only to end up killing off all three of them in the most shamelessly moronic manner imaginable. They quite clearly had enough time to escape between pulling the alarm lever and the emergency doors sealing them in, and yet they didn't even try. And if for some reason that wasn't possible, why would all three of them need to stay behind? And what the hell was the point the bad guys' plan in the first place: killing thousands of people with a virus . . . just for kicks?
- "Audrey Pauley", from the same season, the one where Reyes spends most of the show in a dollhouse. Seems to have been filmed from five completed pages of script. Nor does it help that the villain may as well have the word "EVIL" tattooed on his forehead, yet no one suspects him.
On the trail of a cannibal killer, the third season of Bones ended with the Character Derailment of Zack, in a last-second reveal that he was an apprentice cannibal killer. With no lead-in or explanation whatsoever. The writers admitted they made their decision at random, and it was hastily written in two months before the shooting. Next season, it will be revealed that Booth is an Iraqi transvestite prostitute during the season finale, no doubt.
- Jossed. Booth only had a brain tumor that let him see Stewie from Family Guy, among other problems. There are a few who were furious that an apparent sex scene between Bones and Booth in the finale is somehow half Bones's writing and half Booth's hallucinating in a coma. The producers said it would not be All Just A Dream, but they appear to have used a loophole — apparently, it isn't just a dream if Booth is acting on the memories of his hallucinations in real life...
  - The tumor is in and of itself a major Wall Banger. It was used to explain Booth's "hallucinations" in earlier episodes, even though they were clearly portrayed as having happened! When Booth sees the ghost of an old friend who died, Brennen thinks it's ridiculous. Then later, without knowing it's a ghost, she sees him too and has a conversation; then when she looks away, he disappears. This strongly suggests that the ghost was real. The point was to show one of Brennan's flaws — that she couldn't understand the power of faith. But they ruined that by Doing In The Wizard and having Booth have a brain tumor. Just great.
In a recent episode of The Unit, the Unit is called in to help defuse a hostage situation. Instead of bringing in a team of expert soldiers to clear the building out like expected, they send a few troops to train the local SWAT team in basic room-clearing tactics. When the issue comes up about shooting around hostages, the Unit has the SWAT officers train to deal with this by firing between their moving teammates with live ammunition(!). Then, when the time comes for the assault on the terrorists, the Unit troops (who are supposed to be advising the SWAT team and haven't participated in any of their clearing excercises up until this point) lead the way wearing civilian clothing and armed with pistols when the rest of the SWAT officers are properly armored and armed with submachineguns. Isn't this show supposed to be somewhat realistic?
- In another episode, terrorists used chlorine gas pumped through the municipal water system. The average municipal water system already has some chlorine pumped into it. And chlorine is neither tasteless nor odorless — people would smell it before it could kill them (else no one could chlorinate the municipal swimming pools). And if the pipes were completely dry, it would take an obscene amount of chlorine to get it to ground level. Chlorine hugs the ground, which is why it was used in WWI to target trenches. Combine with it being an open air environment, and.... ouch! Understood, they don't want to give real terrorists any ideas that would work, but still...
Power Rangers has a bad one in the "Operation Overdrive" season. It doesn't affect the plot or derail any characters, but it's so overwhelmingly stupid that it deserves a place here. Tyzonn, the Mercury Ranger, and Crazar, an alien cat beast, are grappling in a desert when Crazar throws a handful of sand in Tyzonn's face, which is currently encased in a helmet with a full faceplate and no visible openings. Tyzonn inexplicably reacts by yelling and clawing at his visor, just as if he had just gotten sand thrown in his eyes, as opposed to having some grains bounce off his helmet. Head, meet wall. What makes this worse is that the beginning of the episode featured Crazar trying to split up the team by trapping Tyzonne in a fantasy that he was still on his home planet with his fiance and had never left - his adventures on Earth and career as a Ranger were nothing more than a hallucination. This is a great idea, except Crazar doesn't remove the morpher, attempt to turn it off, change the volume, or anything like that. The attosecond the other Rangers call for Tyzonne, the whole scenario falls apart. There is a reason Crazar earned the title 'world's dumbest Fear-cat', and her messy destruction later on is thoroughly deserved.
- If you want one that does derail the characters, you want Just Like Me. Ty fanboying Will, Will suddenly being Mr. Teamwork, and Mack acting like a general leading his army (yeah, Red is usually the leader, but nobody put Mack in charge; and for the first half of the season, they made a point of giving everybody a turn to initiate the Transformation Sequence - a typical Red privelege) is all kinds of wrong. For tropers who aren't familiar with Power Rangers, imagine Luke Skywalker circa Return of the Jedi suddenly being Han Solo's biggest fanboy, taking it to a "lovesick puppy" level. Now imagine Han acting like your average character from a 1980s-to-early-1990s cartoon, all about teamwork and The Power Of Friendship, And Knowing Is Half The Battle. Now imagine Lando (post-Heel Face Turn, pre-Generalship) acting like Qui-Gon. And top it off with everybody acting like all this has always been the normal state of affairs. Head, meet wall. Preferably Bruce Kalish's head.
- Quite a lot of Wall Bangers were caused by Adaptation Decay. In one episode of Magiranger, the team mentor learns An Aesop that the time you waste doing nothing but thinking about how to overcome a problem is time that could be spent working to unlock a possible solution, and explicitly states that the moral is not "don't think, just do". In Power Rangers, the lesson becomes "Do things your own way, even if it means disobeying orders and acting reckless." Following this, the mentor immediately drops his own way of fighting in favour of acting just like another character. If that wasn't bad enough, that character fights with a "don't think, just do" philosophy.
- Two key plot points in SPD: Sam the Omega Ranger condenses into a ball of light while in the present (even the real-world reasons for the decision to make him like that are worthy of slamming someone's head through a wall...), and Aisynia's survival. Seriously, Doggie being the Last Of His Kind was cool and all, but why have his wife still alive when Fridge Logic dictates there is no reason for her to be? To wit (and add insult to injury), Emperor Gruum - who has a personal grudge against Doggie - could've used the fact that he has Aisynia under his control as bait to further screw with the Sirian, but he himself doesn't know; the one who does - The Man Behind The Man Omni - has no reason whatsoever to keep her alive after Sirius' destruction, making her survival completely nonsenical...Anyone have an Aspirin?
- In "Return of An Old Friend," both the villains and the rangers consider the villains' theft of the Dragon Dagger (and by extension the Dragon Zord) essential to the villains' plan to make the rangers surrender by kidnapping their parents. That's right - apparently, the rangers would have been willing to leave their parents for dead if they hadn't lost the Dragon Zord.
There is an episode of Wishbone in which Wishbone is wrongly accused of knocking over trash cans and covering yards with their contents. The culprit is a much larger, more foul-smelling dog (though in the humans' defense, Wishbone is the only character who specifically mentions the smell, so it's possible that only his sensitive nose can detect it). His primary accuser is a female dog catcher who appears married to the idea of "he was there; therefore, he is guilty." The height of the stupidity in that episode is a scene in which Wishbone, chasing after the other dog, passes in front of the porch ... and immediately, the dog catcher steps down, snaps a photo, and says "They always return to the scene of the crime!" The closeup shot of Wishbone, sitting there and staring up at the camera, without any of the garbage visible, is treated as conclusive proof by the other human characters. This is exacerbated by the fact that the tip of the actress's shoe was visible in the shot of the porch as Wishbone passed in front of it. So she only saw Wishbone, and didn't notice the much larger brown dog right in front of him, and didn't even consider the possibility that it might be someone else? It gets better, though — when Wishbone finally catches up with the other dog, and contrives that the humans see it at the same time as a garbage-covered yard ... they automatically point their finger at the larger dog, and Wishbone is cleared of all suspicion. The other dog is guilty, and Wishbone is not, but really ...
In Walker Texas Ranger, the whole 2-part episode about AIDS. Especially Haley Joel Osment saying, completely deadpan, "Walker told me I have AIDS." At least it made for a great Walker, Texas Ranger Lever.
Mr. Monk and the Astronaut, on Monk. Civilians are allowed to wander around an air force base and handle live missiles (which aren't left lying around like that) without being shot; one of the Air Force security personnel wields an AK- series rifle, even though the rest hold M4s and AK=whatevers are a Russian type of rifle; Monk runs right behind an active jet engine without being fried... They get pretty much everything else wrong, too.
- But at least it had Burn Notice's Michael Westen as the astronaut. That counts for something.
High School Musical has plenty, but the Dethroning Moment of Wallbangery has to be when the drama teacher changes the time of the callback audition for no apparent reason other than a couple of students told her to. It doesn't even occur to her to check and see if the other participants might have conflicts. It was subtly suggested that she did it on purpose; she didn't like the other participants much and was convinced they were going to ruin theater forever. But that would be even worse - it would make her petty and vindictive as well as stupid. The only reason the 'other participants' were in that position was because she invited them back. It's not like this was a performance; this was a callback for her to decide who to pick.
- Gabriella saw Troy declare that he wouldn't do the play or be with her on live camera. It never occured to her that this was an obvious set up. He was being harassed into saying it. Christ, good job at being the "freaky genius girl," Gab...
One of the subplots in The West Wing episode "The Women Of Qumar" features C.J's bad reaction upon hearing that the United States is selling arms to Qumar, a Quracian Throw Away Country with a poor record for observing women's human rights. Whilst the overall point that the episode is making - that women in several Middle Eastern countries are subject to outrageously barbaric and inhumane treatment as second-class citizens, and that the United States' record of maintaining relations with these nations means that it shares some degree of complicity in this - is valid, the writers unfortunately choose to stress this point by having C.J behave in an unreasonably immature and unprofessional near-Straw Feminist manner about it to her male colleagues in general and to Toby in particular - who she seems to blame for the treatment of women in this region, despite his sole connection to the arms deal in question being that he informed her that it was happening; he had not displayed any kind of pleasure about or sympathy with what is going on. She gatecrashes a completely unrelated meeting Toby is having with some World War II veterans to beat her drum further about the issue and tells Toby to screw himself before he can not-entirely-unreasonably call out her unprofessional behaviour. And it seems that we are supposed to agree with C.J here, since Toby is a man and therefore directly to blame for what is happening. This all has the effect of less making us consider what effect U.S foreign policy is having on women in developing nations, and more on what an irrational and unlikeable person C.J is. The slightly Narmy ending where C.J wails that "They beat the women!" doesn't help.
Lost arguably has many of these...But the most common complaint during its first season is the frustration people had about characters not sharing vital information with each other. This is never explained within or outside the show.
- It has not been explained, and probably never will be explained, why, in Season 2, the Others did not capture Jack, Sawyer, Kate and Locke when they had them surrounded and disarmed in The Hunting Party - only to later offer Michael the following deal: "we will give you Walt and a boat if you bring us Jack, Sawyer, Kate and... Hurley." (They only needed Hurley as a messenger.) This is particularly jarring if you consider that, in The Hunting Party, these facts hold:
  1. Ben had not been captured yet, and so they didn't need Michael to rescue him yet.
  2. Ben was already aware that he had a tumor and needed Jack.
Life On Mars, American vs., "Things to Do in New York City when You're Thinking You're Dead." Or does the equivalent British episode also introduce a paint gun from left field? If it were a literal Deus Ex Machina, it wouldn't be here, but it's played like a step in an unspoken Xanatos Gambit of Sam's.
- Okay, it's explained now, but ouch! The ending of the US version of Life On Mars counts. The finale episode was awesome until the last five minutes, when the writers pull an All Just A Dream (or rather, All Just a Matrix) ending on us and leave it uncertain how much of what we got invested in meant anything. It's full of incredibly lame puns to boot - some of which the characters know are lame. Still, it's a lovely Voodoo Shark because it explains all possible previous Wallbangers.
- The ending of the UK Life On Mars counts as a Wall-Banger when you find out that you're supposed to consider it a happy ending. Should we be happy to see Sam so deluded and unhappy with his life that he would fall to a painful death just so he could get back to a fantasy? Especially since he had spent the last fifteen episodes whining about how he wanted to go home? This is not the way to manage a Friend Or Idol Decision.
- The US ending is, IMHO, not a patch on the UK one, for philosophical reasons. Both shows spend ~15 episodes showing Sam in the throes of an existentialist crisis. The UK ending posits that it was up to Sam to choose which reality was real. In the US ending, Sam does choose a reality, but his choice is overturned by those in a third, realer reality. EXISTENTIALISM FAIL. In the US version, Sam's choice ultimately didn't matter; in the UK version, it was all that mattered.
Home Improvement, towards the end, when the eldest son has to make a Friend Or Idol Decision between going to college straight out of High School and accepting an offer to play pro soccer in England. Everyone acts as though the former was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and the latter could wait four years. If anything, the opposite is true.
Seinfeld, "The Dealership". George's candy bar subplot makes no freaking sense. In the first place, all of the peripheral characters in the story are laboring under the impression that Twix candy bars contain coconut. This running gag would make sense if this was a common misconception, but it isn't- not even close. It's just a bunch of characters believing an incorrect fact for no identifiable reason. In the second place, George lets himself get all worked up because he can't seem to get his hands on a Twix. A bit extreme, but believable- he is the Costanza, after all. But then the story jumps completely off the rails when he tries to figure out who took his candy bar by arranging a "candy lineup" consisting of all Twix bars. Um, so when he was just hungry, he can't get a candy bar to save his life, but now that revenge is his goal, he can obtain all the Twix he needs? George would definitely do this, but how is he able to?
- Also, he gets all these chocolate bars, he's starving, but he won't let himself eat one? Apparently, the lineup would have been ruined with one less Twix pretending to be another candy bar. On the plus side, it was almost worth it to hear him yell "TWIIIIIIX!" near the end of the episode. That and the "they all have swirling chocolate!" exchange.
Oliver Beene. The first episode establishes that Lenny Bruce is Oliver's idol. We're then treated to Oliver re-enacting one of Lenny's routines in front of his delighted classmates. The bit? The celebrated 'Tits and Ass' routine, lampooning censorship, bowdlerism and all forms of hypocrisy regarding sexual expression. The Wall Banger? Oliver delivers a routine about... "Boobs and Ass." It appears that the writers didn't get the skits... Yes, "tits" is one of the seven words that can't be said on television, but still...
In Century City, there was this episode where the main characters were defending a guy from being sued because he had made a couple's Gattaca Baby gay. More specifically, he kept in the kid's genetic predisposition toward homosexuality despite the couple's desire to have heterosexual kids and lied to them about it. They later find out that he had done this multiple times. His agenda was that, because so many people who use this treatment want grandkids, they typically don't want to have homosexual kids. The lawyers manage to convince the jury that the attempt to remove gay people like this was like genocide, and they also convince the jury that the plaintiffs should be awarded about 1$. Good intentions, supposedly, but there are several factors that seriously undermine the whole premise:
1. : He's providing a service; if they're paying for something and he's not intentionally not delivering, then he's scamming people.
2. : It's an expensive procedure, and so people who can't afford it can still replenish the homosexual population without his intervention.
3. : Why don't the gay people hire surrogate parents or use artificial wombs (provided they exist) to make their own gay babies?
On All My Children, the writers retconned Erica Kane's abortion (which occurred right after Roe v. Wade) by saying that the ob/gyn who performed the procedure saved the fetus by implanting it in his infertile wife. Who then carried it to term and gave birth to a healthy baby boy. Even putting aside the sheer absurdity of such a procedure being performed in the mid 1970's, it retconned out of existence one of the show's signature and most groundbreaking stories.
Among many, MANY, examples found on 7th Heaven - one of the most troubling occurs in Season 6 when Mary returns to Glenoak following her banishment to Buffalo, New York. Annie welcomes her back with open arms as "the prodigal daughter," even offering her the apartment above the garage. When Matt, Lucy, Simon and Ruthie all raise the legitimate, reasonable concern that maybe Mary hasn't changed for the better and is taking advantage of Annie's kindness. Annie responds by banishing all four of them to the (unfinished) garage apartment, refusing to care for them at all until they apoligize to her and Mary. It's a week before they do. Keep in mind, both Simon and Ruthie are minors (which makes this a matter for Child Protective Services). Eric does nothing at all to put a halt to this act of child abuse at the hands of his insane wife.
Friends has multiple examples, but one of the most striking is the 10th seaseon episode with Greg Kinnear as Charlie's ex-boyfriend. Basically, he is in charge of a committee to decide who gets a grant that Ross is applying for, and he attempts to blackmail Ross into breaking up with Charlie (which Ross calls him out on as being "crazy", but which he insists is "romantic"). When Ross tells Charlie about this and the two of them go to confront her ex, she agrees that it is romantic, and proceeds to leave Ross for her crazy ex-boyfriend, and starts kissing him RIGHT IN FRONT OF ROSS! It's particularly bad because Charlie had been built up for several episodes as ideal for Ross; her ex is said to have broken up with her (which he explains as being due to a fear of committing to her); and it leaves Ross with no dignity whatsoever. It strikes one as a completely contrived incident for the sake of leaving Ross free to be conveniently paired with Rachel at the finale. This also falls squarely into What An Idiot territory: one wonders why Ross failed to report what was a clear violation of ethics on the part of Kinnear, especially after losing both the grant and his girlfriend. There probably wasn't anything he could have done about Charlie; but if he'd reported Kinnear's behavior, he could possibly have held onto his grant.
- 'The One with the Shark', where Monica walks in on Chandler masturbating to porn; he jumps up and quickly changes the channel to a shark documentary. Despite seeing how he panicked and jumped, it never occurs to Monica that maybe he changed the channel; she honestly believes he gets off to sharks! Whaaat?
In the first-season finale of Farscape, the crew of Moya inadvertently allow their mortal enemy Krais to steal Moya's baby spaceship (don't ask), with Aeryn earlier having given him a tour of the ship's interior. Krais has broken his word, killed his second in command despite her obvious and illogical loyalty towards him, and thrown his career in the bin to get revenge on Crichton for killing his brother despite his knowing it was an accident. But they still let him walk around Moya as much as he wants and then act surprised when he screws them over once again.
- No, no: Crais spent most of his first stay onboard Moya in a prison cell or under guard. They were largely surprised because he'd chosen to steal a ship that's not mature enough to go to hyperspace, which is suicidal, considering that the new mortal enemy was patrolling the area in a massive battleship - one of the reasons he had to return to help the crew again in the next episode.
  - Yes, it was suicidal, but why is that surprising? This is Crais. Crais already had a history of malicious idiocy, including trying to kill Crichton in circumstances that would end up making Maldis, a being that lives off misery and death, more powerful. Despite there being every likelihood Maldis would kill Crais afterward. They let Crais out of his cell and then stopped even watching what the maniac was doing.
Several moments in the seventh season of Two Pints Of Lager And A Packet Of Crisps count as Wall Bangers, including the incredibly forced relationship between Gaz and Janet. These two did indeed sleep together a couple of seasons back, but it was firmly established that it was a one-time thing; they both regretted it immensely afterwards, and they felt nothing romantic for each other - it was purely a moment of lust brought on by the two of them feeling lonely. It is also established that they feel no attraction towards each other afterwards (aside from Gaz being his usual pervy self). It also severely damaged Gaz's relationship with Donna, but they later reconcile after they realise just how much they love each other. The affair is rarely mentioned from that point onward (aside from the whole "who-is-the-father-of-Janet's-baby" dilemma). Until the seventh season, that is. Cue the Wall Banger when, pretty much immediately after the funeral of Jonny, Janet's husband, who is killed off-screen, Gaz and Janet start feeling attracted towards each other again, completely out of the blue. Gaz and Donna get married, but their relationship fizzles out, also pretty much out of the blue, and then Gaz and Janet suddenly realise that they are in love with each other, sleep together again, and, instead of reacting furiously like she did the first time around, Donna just accepts the whole thing... and moves to London to be with Wesley, who she had, at the time, only known for a short while. The Gaz/Janet relationship does work, and is a major plot point (two-thirds of a triangle), once it's forced into existence; but still...
2008 revival of Knight Rider. Pilot movie? Not bad. Could've done without the nanites; then again, turning KITT's CPU off disables the nanites. Then the series itself starts ... with the worst misuse of fire ever, capped by a person who inserted the key to an unbreakable code into his own DNA. "Genes don't work that way!!" KITT is armed in this series, but he steadfastly does not use his bevy of guns even when they would be useful. Apparently, having events proceed in a logical fashion is less a concern of the writers as padding out 60 minutes' worth of Shelby Cobra commercial - which is why the show didn't get canceled after four episodes.
New BBC series of Robin Hood. Specifically, the Series 2 finale. Can you say Character Derailment?
- To be even more specific, the S2 finale is one awful, inexplicable decision after another. Out of nowhere, Marian decides to kill the sheriff in cold blood. Instead of immediately executing her for this, the sheriff drags her along on a covert mission to assassinate the king. Robin travels all the way to the Holy Land for just this one episode, and it only takes him five minutes to get there. King Richard turns out to be a complete imbecile who condemms Robin and his men to exposure in the desert after he takes the word of a shifty-eyed Saracen spy that Robin has come to kill him. Popular guest-star Carter returns only to be killed off in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment. The sheriff shoots the king with an arrow but doesn't make sure the job is done before galloping away. And then…IT happens. A weaponless Marian runs up to Guy and, for no reason at all, starts shouting: "I could never marry you! I love Robin Hood!" Guy responds by running her through with his sword.
  - On the DVD commentary, Richard Armitage (who plays Guy) apologises to the audience for the complete stupidity of this episode and reveals that he fought the writers' decision for it to happen.
- There are Wall Bangers galore throughout the third season, culminating in the tenth episode, in which Robin's father (who has never been spoken of before and was presumed dead by both Robin and the audience) drugs both Robin and Guy with blow-darts as all three of them just happen to come across each other in the forest. He then tells the men the story of their past, revealing that he fathered a son with Gisbourne's mother. This infant was called Archer because of an arrowhead-shaped birthmark on his chest and was fostered away in secret. Robin's father is only now revealing himself and this information because Archer is about to be executed in York. He wants them to team up to save him. Why would Gisbourne care about any of this? (Does he look like the sort of fella who'd care about a half-brother?) Why would Robin need Gisbourne's help? And why on earth would Robin agree to team up with the man who brutally murdered his wife? No one knows, least of all the writers.
  - What makes matters worse is that the introduction of this half brother was to make Robin Hood a Legacy Character and ensure that the series could continue; but since the show was cancelled after the season 3 finale, the whole contrived mess becomes a complete waste of time.
In an episode of The Famous Jett Jackson, Jett goes to his first day of school. (He was previously home-schooled because he was a highly-paid television teen actor). Long story short, he makes friends with a guy who used to be the popular kid in school until Jett came. The old popular kid wants Jett out of the way, and so he forms a half-assed revenge scheme. His plan is to frame Jett for stealing Jett's own cell phone, which a teacher had confisticated earlier. Not only is this beyond stupid, but it also works; Jett gets "caught" and is suspended, all before lunch. WTF!?! Even the character questions the sheer idiocy of his crime to his father later, in a montage scene.
In a late-season episode of M*A*S*H, "The Joker Is Wild," BJ, tired of hearing of the prankster exploits of Trapper, sets Hawkeye up in a major way. Problems abound:
- Trapper was never a solo prankster and was Hawkeye's second banana. And neither of them could have pulled off their greatest stunts without Radar.
- Pierce is undone by the 'joke that is never pulled'. Cool, except it was supposed to be BJ's physical prank that got him. No eggs in helmet, no victory.
- BJ pulled this off with the aid of almost everyone, including his old friend who just happened to visit. Not a solo prank.
- Potter is also in on it. All in good fun, except his Chief Surgeon is now exhausted and has slept out in a field with no cover from shell or sniper fire, protected only against BJ's prank. This, from a man who ripped Pierce those few times he wasn't on the ball for surgery, in a place where, lull or cluster shelling, massive amounts of wounded can arrive at any time.
Babylon 5. The Lumati. Aliens whose equivalent of a signature in a deal is having sex with the other party. Even if the other party is, you know, of a different species.
- That's a believable "Weird Alien Culture Thing", Ivanova’s "sex dance" however had his troper racing for the remote.
- That's not so bad compared to Sheridan's uber wallbanger:
  Future Londo: Make sure to clean up after your wars!
  Sheridan: Okey doke!
  - And then Sheridan TOTALLY FORGETS. You could argue that this is due to B5 having an apparently immutable time line, but Sheridan doesn't seem to do a DAMN thing to try to stop it, and it's totally forgotten outside of this meeting.
During Desperate Housewives' otherwise fine season finale:
- Susan has had her fair share of wallbanging moments, but her Dethroning Moment of Wallbangery is this: A now-psychotic David Williams tells Susan to get out of the car and says he'll let her son, MJ, go after her. Does she see right through his bluff, grab MJ, and run? Nope. She thinks he's serious. She discovers that he was bluffing just as she is being tied to the telephone pole. And now...*bang* *bang* *bang*
Spike TV's Deadliest Warrior, despite being loads of fun, tends to have several of these per episode due to their questionable testing criteria and procedures, mostly limited to people swinging various weapons at dummies as hard as they can. This leads to some bizarre testing results. The show also plays loose with history and presents several Hollywood cliches as historical fact.
- In the "Spartan vs. Ninja" episode, the Spartan shield was determined to be the deadliest offensive weapon in the show, receiving more kills than even the Spartan's spear. The only data used to gauge the shield's effectiveness was how hard the Spartan expert managed to swing it at the dummy. In a previous episode, the Viking's shield received hardly any kills because the expert chose to push it at the dummy, which resulted in lower readings.
- In the "Apache vs. Gladiators," the gladiator is given a sling because he needs to have a long ranged weapon, even though gladiators didn't have slings. Similarly, the knight in the "Knight versus Pirate" episode is given a crossbow, even though medieval knights didn't use crossbows in battle.
- In the "Yakuza vs Mafia" episode, the gangsters are treated like soldiers and use things like ice picks and molotov cocktails as if they were standard issue weapons of war that they just carried around all the time. (You don't do that with molotov cocktails.) Also, the Yakuza are given a number of stereotypical kung fu weapons such as nunchucks and sai. During the episode's showdown, a Yakuza gangster uses a little Hammerspace to pull two giant sai from behind his back.
- The ninja in the "Ninja vs Spartan" episode is presented as the cinema cliche, right out of a Chuck Norris film.
- Another source of wallbangers is their weapon comparisons, which are ridiculous at times. In the "IRA vs Taliban" episode, they compared a rocket propelled grenade to a flamethrower. In "William Wallace vs Shaka Zulu", they compared the targe and dirk to poison spit.
The new show on A&E, The Cleaner, features a main character who FORCES people to go into rehab. Problem is that people only get clean when they admit that they have hit rock bottom and are willing to get help. If you apply Fridge Logic, those that the main character "helps" will likely just wind up being tortured by withdrawal symptoms before going back to the drugs.
On Wings, Joe the Butt Monkey/Doormat suffers a moment that even his wishy-washy nature can't fully account for. His and Brian's mother returns years after she abandoned them, having finished serving prison time for embezzlement. Brian is mostly just happy to see her; Joe, much less so. She casually ascribes this to Joe being 'tight-cheeked, even in the womb'. Later, Joe calls her out, saying his uptight nature came from having to take care of Brian and their addled father when she left. She responds that she is 'just a lousy mother,' and she is forgiven. So, to review: It is all right to spring up unannounced after two decades, deride a child you abandoned, and then squirm out of being responsible for the thing you derided them for by merely admitting your painfully obvious deficiencies as a parent. Yeah, Joe could stand to man up a degree or two, but the writers forced him to carry an Idiot Ball here.
On Nickelodeon's show Kenan And Kel, there was an episode where Kenan discovers that Kel has a genuine talent for painting when seeing his work at the local Rec Center - so much that an elderly man requests that Kel take part in an Art Auction at his manor. Kenan, smelling an opportunity to make money, makes Kel paint until the day of the auction. While at the auction, the elderly man comes up to Kel and says that "(he's) always been his favorite artist since he was a child." It's then that Kenan realizes that the old guy is talking about the artist Carl Krimble (Kel's name is Kel Kimble); he then tells that old man that he's made a mistake. Instead of apologizing, the elderly man goes into a fit and accuses Kenan and Kel of scamming him. Everyone then acts like Kenan and Kel were trying to scam the old man. And it's all played for laughs.
In an episode of Family Matters, Carl hires a maid who happens to be very attractive. His wife Harriet doesn't like this and, at the end of the episode, manages to convince Carl that it's wrong for them to have an attractive maid, even though Harriet herself admits there was nothing wrong with her work. In the happy ending, Carl agrees to fire the maid. Apparently, attractive people deserve to be punished for their appearance regardless of whether they've done anything wrong.
Greys Anatomy was a guilty pleasure until the 3-part season 2 finale, in which one of the characters goes ballistic and kills a patient on purpose. Do her coworkers try to stop her? Do they report her to the authorities? No, they all play along and cover for her when it goes foul.
- That's a little unfair. She didn't kill him "on purpose", in fact, she broke all the rules to try and save someone she loves. Okay, it was a stupid plan, and completely insane, but Love Makes You Crazy and Love Makes You Dumb. Despite all this, the plan nearly worked...except for that pesky blood clot. There are plenty of Wallbangers on Grey's, but this isn't one of them...it's just a storyline about The Power of Friendship between the residents and The Power of Love between Izzie and Denny.
  - ...who later becomes a tumour-hallucination who sleeps with Izzie. THAT was a wallbanger.
  - Other wallbanger related to Denny is what happened after his death - Izzy got suspended for a ridiculously short amount of time and after she goes back to the hospital... which shouldn't happen at all... she's all surprised and angry when the chief tells her that she will be watched and controlled for some time. And it is shown as perfectly understandable that she's furious, hurt and whiny about it! Yeah girl, you've just stolen a heart which was supposed to be given to another, sicker patient who propably died because of it, to give it to your Tru Wuv (because we all know that he is more deserving!), then you put said Tru Wuv in danger on purpose, you broke practically every existing rule of medical ethics, so why are they so mean to you? Those bastards!
Dexter Season 2 has a criminal proving he couldn't have murdered someone yesterday by showing a video tape of him reading yesterday's paper. The detectives comment that the time stamp could have been changed, but what proves it is that he's holding yesterday's paper. A point that an officer in the lab drives home by holding up an old copy of the paper.
- The officers know that it's a phony alibi, but if they can't definitively invalidate it then their hands are tied. It is exactly this kind of red tape that forms the premise of the show.
In True Blood, how the hell is the Fellowship of the Sun not on the list of most wanted terrorist organizations after sending a suicide bomber to a vampire gathering and then gloating about it in public television? It's clear that vampires are considered people under the law, and there were many human participants as well. How the hell is FBI not on their tail with charges of domestic terrorism?
Merlin, episode The Labyrinth of Gedref. Arthur has to pass a Secret Test Of Character when he and Merlin have to drink one of two cups, one of which is poisoned. He pours them together and drinks, thus intentionally sacrifices himself, and passes. Problems:
- He has no way to know that pouring the cups together so he can drink them is following the instructions. When looked at a certain literal way, it is; but if you look at it in a really literal way, there are even better solutions (pour them on his lap and drink the one drop remaining in the cup—that's the whole cup, right?). This solution working depends on knowing the test-giver was exactly that literal and no more.
- Arthur is a future king. As far as he knows, Merlin is a nobody. As a future king, he's an asset to his nation. As such, preserving his own life can be justified for reasons having nothing to do with selfishness—depriving his kingdom of future leadership can seriously hurt other people.
- One of the other tests was Arthur sparing a looter and killing him later after finding out that the looter was lying about needing food for his family. We were supposed to believe that Arthur failed the test for trying to kill the looter when the looter insulted him, but there are also legitimate reasons to kill the looter. Looters were officially under death sentence; and stealing food, which could lead to the starvation of innocent people, is like attempted homicide.
  - However, it is explicitly stated that Arthur was killing the looter for the insult, not because of the crimes he'd comitted. And either way, the proper thing to do in that situation would be to take the looter back to Camelot and have him executed there rather than killing him on the spot.
In Two And A Half Men, Alan's mistreatment goes beyond horrible, like his ex-wife going more evil bitch, his son being an asshole no one would love, his brother always considering him a burden, etc., but for an entire episode plot! even everyone bet on how long till his stupid second ex-wife would kick hiim out! Does Chuck Lorre purposely do these things to every buttmonkey on his own shows?
Law & Order: Special Victim's Unit has the episode where the CEO of a company is convincted of facilitation of murder after a man bases a murder off one of his company's stories. As in, a man goes to prison over someone reading too far into fiction, in direct opposition to a number of Supreme Court decisions that are brought up in the episode.
- That's because he allowed his company to give pseudo-Child-kidnapping porn to a pedophile who was seriously in need of help, even though he begged them to stop sending him the porn. The man was on the sex offender list, which the company was using as A MAILING LIST FOR THEIR PORN. The company's actions were the real wallbanger in that episode.
- See the No Bisexuals page for Stabler & Co.'s... experiences with human sexuality.
- "Avatar". A kidnapper once put a girl in a cabin near a lake, which is replicated perfectly in his MMORPG. The logical way to find the cabin? Turn on the sun and find out where the shadow is cast, of course!

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