![]() What’s great about it? This episode does something that plot-heavy, high-death-count shows often forget to do it takes some time to let the characters process the things that have happened to them and the things they’ve done since the show started. The ship in the bottle: Walt refuses to get on with the job in the lab until he’s vanquished a fly.īottled up emotions? And how! Walt has something of a breakthrough concerning his feelings about the direction his life has taken, but when he tries to tell Jesse the truth about Jane’s death, in the end he can’t quite manage it. Quotable: ‘Enough good people have already died. The final revelation concerning her Cardassian prisoner is intriguing, and it’s interesting to see her attitude towards him soften to a perhaps surprising degree. ![]() What’s great about it? Duet is a fairly basic Holocaust metaphor, but it’s well done and it adds some nice layers to Kira’s character at a fairly early stage in the show. Whether or not that’s a positive development may be debateable, but this is a fun episode and provides a nice break from the usual routine, especially given the downbeat major story arc of season eight.ĭo they cheat? There are a fair few extras and bit-part players around, and they make use of all the standing sets, but the episode takes place entirely on Deep Space Nine, making it a bottle episode in the classic Star Trek sense. But Secrets and Lies stands out because it breaks the ER mould by dropping the patients in favour of exploring the relationships between the doctors, something the show usually did in the context of medical treatments. ER did many, many episodes that took place entirely (or very nearly) within the hospital and several that had other ‘bottle’-like features, notably season eleven’s Time of Death, which followed the last forty-four minutes of one guest character’s life in real time. But once the five are shut in that room together, the whole of the rest of the episode plays out in there, up until the last few minutes when they go out into the street. The ship in the bottle: Four key characters plus new boy Gallant are stuck in a lecture theatre waiting for a seminar on sexual harassment.īottled up emotions? The sexual harassment seminar isn’t just a plot device for keeping these five in one room, coupled with an amusing way to start the episode – it’s also the biggest theme of the story, in which Gallant finds himself stuck on the edge of a complicated love quadrangle between Susan, Carter, Abby and Luka.ĭo they cheat? The first quarter or so of the episode proceeds as normal, with some eccentric patients brought into the ER while the staff gossip about Corday having left Greene, in case anyone missed last week’s episode. In comedy – well, in comedy we really just want to laugh till we snort juice out of our collective noses, but it won’t hold together without some kind of emotional, character-based undercurrent.Īll this pent-up emotion and necessary artistic creativity can make bottle episodes the best episodes of all – these ten are particularly successful. In dramas, we expect to see emotional breakthroughs and revelations that will affect the characters for a long time to come (essentially, we want a teeny tiny Greek tragedy). The name could almost refer to the tendency for bottled up emotions to become un-bottled, secrets to be revealed, and generally for everyone to start shouting at each other around four fifths of the way through these episodes. Of course, what really matters in a great bottle episode is the strength of the writing and the acting. ![]() But technically, to be a bottle episode, excluding necessary framing devices or tags, the episode should feature regulars and recurring characters with no more than one guest actor, on standing sets only. The fantastic episode Ice might be considered a bottle episode of The X-Files, for example, because it requires only one new set and a handful of actors The X-Files regular cast and standing sets are so small that a true bottle episode would be nothing but Mulder and Scully talking in Mulder’s office (although actually, that sounds awesome). Exactly what constitutes a ‘bottle episode’ can vary according to the nature of the show. ![]()
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