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April 2020 Watchlist: We Are In A Bottle Episode
A bottle episode of a series is one where the scope is more limited than what is typical, usually with a single location and/or heavily focus on just a few characters. The purpose is usually to save production costs, but it also can be a real playground for writers and actors to explore people and places in depth.
Sound familiar? It should, ‘cause it’s us! Here we go a-sheltering, so thank goodness for television.
Archer S6E5 “Vision Quest” - This show is wacky anyway, but locking all the characters in an elevator for a real time bottle episode is a whole new hilarious danger zone chock-full of in-jokes and call-backs.
Atlanta S2E6 “Teddy Perkins” - Atlanta is a funny show, but “Teddy Perkins” is a psychological horror masterpiece. One of the series regulars arrives at a mansion to pick up a free piano from essentially a late stage Michael Jackson lookalike, and things go from unsettling to much worse over the course of 41 minutes. This aired without commercials or advanced critic screenings, and both helped us feel absolutely suffocated in this giant house.
Breaking Bad S3E10 “Fly” - Extremely over budget and looking at the lives of their characters, the Breaking Bad producers decided to make an episode with just two characters, set in the lab. Rian Johnson- yes, THAT Rian Johnson- directed this tale of two guys with big contamination in their lives who focus their energy on ridding themselves of at least one toxic thing: a fly in their workspace.
Community S2E8 “Cooperative Calligraphy” - Annie’s purple pen is missing, and she is TIRED of lending out her stuff and not getting it back. Nobody is seeing the puppy parade, touching that just-finished diorama, or even leaving this room until it’s found! Community had multiple bottle episodes, but this was a truly incredible feat of small screen filmmaking.
Fawlty Towers S1E4 “Hotel Inspectors” - This show is one of John Cleese’s most enduring works, and still holds up decades later. This particular episode, loosely based on a Nikolai Gogol satirical play, has Basil Fawlty hearing that inspectors are coming to his hotel and immediately mistaking regular guests for them. The cycle of frustration is hilarious!
Friends S3E2 “The One Where No One’s Ready” - It takes a lot of work to make even a single member of an audience feel kinda bad for Ross, but if you’re a punctual person, he’ll earn a bit of your pity in this one. Ross shows up to collect the whole gang for a fancy dress work event only to witness, in real time, some of the most ridiculous bickering, problem solving, and going commando ever undertaken on the show. This is also the one with Monica trying to delete her voicemail message from her ex’s phone and the one where Joey wears all of Chandler’s clothes at once.
It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia S7E7 “Chardee MacDennis” - The absolute chaos that is the Reynolds siblings and the most terrifying tabletop extravaganza of Game Of Games, aka Chardee MacDennis, meet and peak in this episode, when the gang is stuck inside the bar on a rainy day. There are notebook-sized sets of rules for this game if you’d like to risk your life and friendships at home, but we recommend just watching this absolutely ridiculous episode instead.
Mad Men S4E7 “The Suitcase” - There’s a sporting event happening that all but two characters are heading toward. The remaining two are Peggy, who is only waiting for her boss to leave so she can go celebrate her birthday with her boyfriend, and Don, who is sinking into his ad deadline like it’s television quicksand. Peggy and Don end up spending the night working together, refreshingly without romance, even as their personal lives continue to encroach. Their process leads to a brief but absolute understanding between them. Shame the show peaked here, at its halfway point.
Parks & Recreation S7E4 “Leslie & Ron” - There’s a time jump between the 6th and 7th seasons, and for some reason Leslie and Ron are no longer on speaking terms this side of the series. Tired of this nonsense, the rest of the gang tricks them both into meeting in the good ol’ office and locks them in overnight so they can talk it out. What starts as Ron being sullen and silent and Leslie trying to annoy Ron ends in secrets shared, reconciliation, and a stunning rendition of “We Didn’t Start The Fire.”
Star Trek TOS S1E5 “The Enemy Within” - No show ep deserves to be on this list more than The Enemy Within- possibly the origin of the term ‘bottle episode,’ Leonard Nimoy’s invention of the Vulcan nerve pinch, the first time McCoy says, “he’s dead, Jim,” and the true start of the person-split-in-two-parts trope.
Veep S2E8 “First Response” - Imagine the most uncomfortable interview you’ve ever seen or been part of. Now imagine that interview involved a supposed fluff news reporter who is suddenly intent on asking hard-hitting questions and a socially inept, graceless vice president. This episode is all the secondhand cringe an audience could handle, and we will let you decide who- if anybody- won this battle of wills.
The West Wing S2E18 “17 People” - This is a nearly perfect hour of television, even if the show as a whole has some issues in hindsight. Several conversations all happening inside the White House weave together to form a hilarious and heartbreaking narrative that drives the remainder of the season. How good is it, you ask? A fan (some fans?) literally built an entire website for this episode alone.
As always, this pared down dozen and the masterlist are available on our Patreon. Enjoy!
I’m watching Veep and I immediately knew Julia Louis-Dreyfus had major Capricorn placements in her natal chart because her comedic timing on the show is fucking spectacular. Also who else would be able to make a show about corruption in the executive branch hilarious?
Look at her Sun, Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury in Capricorn conjunction! She was destined to nail Selina Meyer.
the vic allen dinner (s2e4) is an episode i obsess over for many reasons but mainly dan mentioning powerboating on lake erie. we never see dan just Having Fun. he's always doing something for work or for sex he is never just Having Fun and the image of dan dressed casually with wind in his hair and sunglasses and a genuine gleeful grin on his face from just sheer happiness at how nice the weather is and the cool mist the boat kicks up and-
i just know when jonah was a kid he was the autistic/nd kid people pretended to be friends with but were actually just making fun of but he couldn't tell! he is so precious to me! he is so brain damaged and autism coded!
no one fucking talks about how kent davison is in a motorcycle gang and it is so fucking hot btw
not a motorcycle gear fetishist but i believe in their beliefs. possibly the coolest looking form of homosexual kink
dan and jonah hiding easter eggs for their kids the night before easter for them to search for in the morning ❤️ dan never had any childhood traditions like this, in his house easter was about the resurrection and spending the day at church and jonah loves teaching dan the more secular and more fun ways to celebrate
their kids woke them up early because they were excited like christmas morning and theyre both really tired but theyre happy to put their coats on over their pajamas and sit in the backyard grass and watch their kids run around the garden collecting eggs
and they dye easter eggs and at first dan is like nah i'll just watch u guys do it but then he gets really into it and hes making a cute concentration face and hes painstakingly painting little flowers on them
commissioning from @neildrawn he is genuinely an amazing person and also amazing artist go look at his blog
obviously some characters were left out but. i dont like all the characters so. and theres selina and danjonah content for me to stare at already so idrc about them
Jonah hcs plz 🤭
he was also a lifeguard and swimmer as a teenager (part of my elaborate athletic rivalry headcanons dont worry abt it,, also just so tall he's probably a 50 free and 100 free state champ tbh)
he is autistic and brain damaged, i thought maybe he had dyscalculia but in helsinki it looks like he's actually pretty good at the math stuff ? idk that ones up in the air for me
the math teacher stepdad was okay but i think his other stepdads were rly shitty, his mom also probably had some mh issues that like caused her to seek out shitty men and all that clearly affected jonah
i feel like he was poor growing up like his mom has decent money now based on her house but i feel like most rich kids would've gotten braces if they had an underbite he clearly didnt? but i also know ppl who are over like 35 now and grew up rich wouldnt have gotten braces anyways sometimes. and the giant weird portrait of him in his moms house is also like a rich kid thing i feel like? i am not well acquainted w 20th century economics or the new hampshire housing market so idk. whatevs
i go back and forth on whether he was popular in school i can see it either way but him being bullied and also him being super popular are both my headcanons i guess
he is not In the manosphere but he in the periphery in like s1 the way he talks about women being eights or whatever makes me think he does. mewing or whatever. he almost gets into bonesmashing but richard dissuades him
he has a stupid fast metabolism in addition to just being really tall and he is literally always eating something like he is rarely seen eating in the show but i feel like 90% of the time he has some food in his hand or in his mouth
before selina knew . his personality. she def had a crush on him (maybe still does kinda sorta) basically canon when she first meets him in the flashback
that's all i can think of right now but i have so many
at the beginning of chung selina makes an effort to walk out of dan's hearing range before contradicting him even though they've only known each other for like six episodes and he is her inferior and she has zero reservations about insulting ppl... selinas had a thing for dan since s1
mike->selina->dan->gary->amy->jonah
Accurate
sonic commercial guys? u mean sidney purcell and a random dude sitting to his right?
this is getting me so bad
two takeaways from data:
dan calls his penis "king danny" (????)
kent calls dan handsome :3
torn between the urge to hate s6 for reducing dan's screentime to him occasionally talking about fucking his coworkers and the urge to love s6 because dan is living his best slutty life and congressman!jonah has better hair/lack of hair than his weird bangs
alicia is such a weird episode. its not *that* weird but the first few minutes are really weird because it feels like a medical drama even the camera angles n stuff. like characters we have never seen before on the side of the road talking about something random it feels like one of them should start having a weird medical problem cut to chase explaining the issue to house (tom james?)
tom james does know a weird fact about the medication scopolamine so he could be house md
i see the vision i think house md is tom james actually