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The votes are in.
Earlier this month, over thirty of Den Of Geek's writers nominated up to five of their favourite television episodes of the year, ranked in order of preference. Points were allocated. Favourites emerged. And the sanity of the site's TV editor was offered once again as a festive sacrifice to the God of Microsoft Excel worksheets.
Over eighty individual episodes were nominated in total, and below are the fifteen that placed highest overall...
15. Rick & Morty - Total Rickall
What our writer said:
Clip shows are traditionally seen as ways to save money, building a flimsy narrative framework of nostalgia-fuelled new footage around flashbacks to previous episodes. Somehow, Dan Harmon's shows usually manage to put more effort into spoofing this type of episode than any other episode. Like a sci-fi spin on Community's entirely new clip shows before it, Rick & Morty played a blinder with Total Rickall, in which a mind-eating parasite tries to feast on our heroes in a locked-down house by creating new memories of their so-called lives together. In a marginally lighter take on John Carpenter's The Thing, it's unbelievable enough that one amongst them (Rick, Morty, Jerry, Beth, Mr. Poopybutthole and Summer) might actually be a dangerous shapeshifter, before a whole menagerie of other creatures like Pencilvester and Reverse Giraffe get involved. Funny, colourful and ultimately very dark indeed, this is the very peak of Rick & Morty's amazing second season.
Also ran: Episode three of season two, Auto-Erotic Assimilation, received a vote, but Total Rickall appeared on multiple lists.
14. Fargo - The Castle
What our reviewer said:
The palpable foreboding became almost unbearable in the first two thirds of the episode itself as a collective spirit of arrogance, manipulation and good old fashioned stupidity swirled into an inevitable orgy of violence. That final multiway outburst was simply a fantastic piece of action television; frantic, exciting, and utterly, utterly terrifying.
It was also gloriously absurd. Sheer, unadulterated Fargo. Indeed, there is a case to be made for The Castle being considered the exemplar episode of Fargo, every special component working at full pelt and contributing to a superbly entertaining whole, hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measure.
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