2023 is over is just a couple short days. The year brought us lots of great TV, both from returning series and in the form of brand new shows. We've already rounded up what we think were the best fantasy and sci-fi TV series of the last 12 months. Now let's drill down and talk about what episodes in particular stood out, starting with this year's best animated bloodbath:
7. Invincible, "It's Been a While" (Amazon Prime Video)
Invincible, based on the Robert Kirkman comic book of the same name, Invincible made a huge splash when it premiered on Amazon Prime Video in 2021. The premise is deceptively simple: Mark Grayson, the son of the superhero Omni-Man, gets powers and starts out on a superheroic career of his own. Kirkman and his team slowly expand the world, adding in a huge cast of heroes, villains, and organizations, and before audiences knew it they had a whole new universe to be obsessed over. In an era where Marvel and DC movies are losing cache, Invincible managed to break through.
The first season of Invincible ended on a shocking cliffhanger that was memed into the ground on Twitter: in the season finale, Omni-Man revealed to his son his true motivation for coming to Earth: to take over the planet. Father and son fight, Mark is left brutalized and barely conscious, and dad flies off into space, unable to reconcile his love his family with his duty to his home planet of Viltrum. It was a hopelessly dramatic ending and people couldn't wait to see what happened next.
In season 2, the show took its sweet time telling them. We don't see Omni-Man again until the fourth episode, "It's Been a While," where dad and son pick up where they left off. Omni-Man has thought on what's happened and had a change of heart, but Mark isn't ready to forgive him. Their bonding is interrupted by the arrival of three of Omni-Man's fellow Viltrumites intent on punishing him for abandoning his mission. We get what this point has become one of Invincible's signatures: animated ultra-violence so nasty you can you watch it through shuttered fingers.
But the trick of Invincible is that the violence isn't there for its own sake. It raises the stakes and gets us invested in what the show really cares about: its characters; who they are and who they're becoming. So we get violent splatterfests like the Viltrumite-on-Viltrumite fight in this episode, but also contemplative moment like Omni-Man's slow drift through space as he contemplates his existence. It's all part of what makes Invincible tick. The only problem now is that fans have to wait for the resolution of yet another cliffhanger.
Invincible is just the first stop on our tour of 2023. Next up, we visit the final frontier and the world known only as Randland:
6. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, "Those Old Scientists" (Paramount+)
Star Trek has been undergoing a renaissance over at Paramount+, with shows like Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard giving fans a little bit of everything. It can all seem a bit much at times -- how manyTrek shows really need to be on the air at once? -- but then an episode like "Those Old Scientists" comes along and you think we really might be living through a new golden age for the franchise.
"Those Old Scientists" is an episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, probably the best Trek show currently running. However, it brings in characters from the animated comedy Star Trek: Lower Decks for a cross-over spectacular. Ensigns Mariner and Boimler (voiced by Tawny Newsome and Jack Quaid on Lower Decks and played in live-action by those same actors here) get warped back a few hundred years in the past and meet the cast of characters from Strange New Worlds, some of whom are legendary heroes in the future. The two shows mesh surprisingly well, making you realize what an embarrassment of riches Star Trek currently has on offer.
This episode is funny, it has heart, and it's a celebration of Star Trek as a franchise, bringing together multiple generations of talent (it's directed by Next Generation star Jonathan Frakes) for one big blowout. There may be hope for the final frontier yet.
5. The Wheel of Time, "Eyes Without Pity" (Amazon Prime Video)
Everyone loves a comeback story, and The Wheel of Time has a great one. While plenty of people enjoyed the first season, many fans derided it for going too far afield of the fantasy book series by Robert Jordan. But the cast and crew revamped things for season 2 and came back bigger, bolder and better. The best piece of evidence is the sixth episode of the season, "Eyes Without Pity."
In this episode, the Aes Sedai trainee Egwene al'Vere (Madeleine Madden) is kidnapped by the Seanchan, a culture of people who didn't appear in the first season until the very end. While people who can use the One Power, aka wield magic, are treated with awe and fear where Egwene comes from, the Seanchan treat "channelers" as sub-human animals only fit to be slaves. The episode has a few standout scenes, but all the most powerful belong to Egwene as she struggles to accept her new reality.
In addition to being an impressive acting showcase for Madeleine Madden, "Eyes Without Pity" commits fuly to an intricate, expanding world, implying that the best of The Wheel of Time is yet to come.
4. Warrior, "A Window of F*cking Opportunity" (Max)
Warrior is a martial arts drama set in the city of San Francisco in the aftermath of the Civil War, where Chinese gangs called tongs waged war on each other in the midst of huge social upheavel. It doesn't quite fit the mold of "sci-fi/fantasy," but I'm including it here for a few reasons: 1) historical action may not be sci-fi or fantasy but it's sort of a second cousin; 2) Warrior is a terrific show that didn't get nearly enough attention when it was on, and; 3) Max canceled Warrior after this most recent third season; I'm still upset about it and I'm making it your problem.
"A Window of F*cking Opportunity" is the season 3 finale of Warrior. Lead character Ah Sahm (the splendid Andrew Koji) comes to a personal crossroads and finds himself fighting his long-time friends in one of the most spectacular close-quarters action scenes the show has yet produced. And that's saying a lot because Warrior pulls off eye-popping fight sequences. As with Invincible, you may come for the violence, but you'll stay for the in-depth character work and richly realized historical setting.
Warrior began life on Cinemax, where it ran for two seasons. Then Max picked it up for a third. In the new year, those three seasons will be available to watch on Netflix. I don't have any illusions that a listicle about TV can help revive a series, but considering how much I've loved Warrior, I feel I have to try. If anyone who reads this is inspired to check out Warrior on either Max or Netflix, maybe that'll be the view that convinces Netflix to give it a new home once again.
3. Black Mirror, "Joan is Awful" (Netflix)
Black Mirror is an sci-fi anthology show about the dangers of emerging technology, and no emergying technology was on people's minds in 2023 like generative AI. How will this new field change industries? Will writers and artists get replaced by machines? Is privacy possible in a world collect data about us without us realizing it?
The first episode of Black Mirror season 6, "Joan Is Awful," zeroed in on some of these concerns. It revolves around Joan (Annie Murphy), a somewhat messy businesswoman whose life becomes the subject of a streaming drama created on the fly by advanced computers. The TV show does not depict Joan in a favorable light, but she can't do anything about it because she signed the clickwrap agreement with the streaming service and has given the world access to her life through her various devices. The episode chronicles her attempts to take back some level of control over her own reputation.
"Joan is Awful" is mostly here to make us laugh, but it touches on some very trenchant, clear-and-present fears about the role of AI in our society; a lot of its success can be chalked up to good timing, especially since it aired during a time when Hollywood actors were on strike in part out of fear of AI taking their jobs. It's the best episode of Black Mirror to come out in a while, and certainly the best of the sixth season. If a couple years it can be one we watch again to see if any of its predictions ring true.
2. Loki, "Glorious Purpose" (Disney+)
In the year of our lord 2023, you have to get up pretty early in the morning to get me excited about a Marvel show. The MCU has been running a bit of a hype deficit lately, with shows like Secret Invasion and movies like The Marvels not inspiring the kind of excitement they would had they come out only a couple years earlier.
Generally speaking, there are understandable reasons for the MCU's failing fortunes, but it also means that an excellent season of television like Loki season 2 can get overlooked, and that's a shame. Whereas some Marvel content is becoming more meek and mild, Loki went boldly into a timey-wimey wonderland featuring 1890s period pieces, creepy Freudian clocks, and twisty art deco production design. But it wasn't about style for style's sake: the whole series culminated in a finale that left me impressed, thoughtful and emotional, which I'd thought Marvel had lost the ability to do.
To quickly summarize, "Glorious Purpose" ends with Loki taking responsibility for the fraying timelines of the multiverse, dooming himself to an eternity of making sure existence doesn't tumble out of control, immobile upon his faraway throne. It's a great inversion of what Loki always said he wanted: glorious purpose, the chance to do something meaningful. But usually when he talked about that, he meant ruling over people and being pampered like the godking he considered himself to be. In the end, he chooses a lonely life without glory, only duty.
It's a huge development for Loki's character, one that lead actor Tom Hiddleston pulls off with pathos and charm to spare. And as dramatic as the ending is, the episode is pretty funny, too, especially in the early going when Loki and company try and fail over and over to stabilize the timelines, with poor Victor Timely getting spaghettified so often he could feed all of Italy.
"Glorious Purpose" has it all. It's just good for a Marvel show; it's one of the best episodes of the year.
1. The Last of Us, "Long Long Time" (HBO)
The Last of Us was one of the biggest hit TV shows of 2023, and deservedly so. Yes, it's yet another zombie drama, but this show was always first and foremost about characters, whom it forced into situations that required them to confront harrowing truths about themselves, the world and the people they cared for. What, The Last of Us asked, is the cost of love? Can it hurt as well as help, destroy as well as save?
The peak of the first season came early, in the third episode, "Long Long Time." This episode is mostly a side story about two characters largely unrelated to the main action: the embittered survivalist Bill (Nick Offerman) and a rather more optimistic man named Frank (Murray Bartlett) who wanders onto Bill's danger-proofed compound sometime after the outbreak of the zombie apocalylpse. We watch their relationship develop over the decades, continually expecting the episode to pivot into a story about fighting zombies or roving gangs of desperate survivors. But it never does. "Long Long Time" is a panorama of an epic romance that managed to thrive in the most impossible of circumstances. It doesn't spare us the hard times, but it does turn them into something affirming and beautiful.
"Long Long Time" is way more touching than an episode of an HBO zombie drama has any right to be. If it has a problem, it's that the rest of the show can't quite compete. By isolating Bill and Frank's story in one episode, The Last of Us gives it a potency it might not have it were spread out over an entire season of TV. There's no question in my mind that this is the best sci-fi/fantasy episode of 2023. And like most great sci-fi/fantasy, it's really about the humans at the center of the story. "Long Long Time" is just a bit more direct about it than usual.
And those are the best sci-fi/fantasy episodes of 2023! But if I can wander into the realm of ordinary drama for a minute, I can't end this list without mentioning one more great hour of TV:
Bonus: "Connor's Wedding," Succession (HBO)
Okay, true, Succession is neither a fantasy nor a sci-fi show. But you could argue that it was HBO's most natural successor to its phenomenal fantasy hit Game of Thrones. Think about it: Succession is about a family a of uber-wealthy power players who try to out-maneuver each other in order to take their rightful seat on the throne of their father's company. It's like if the Lannisters lived in modern-day times and didn't have to deal with dragons.
The fourth and final season of Succession was also one of the best seasons of TV this year, so I didn't want to leave it completely unremarked upon. And "Connor's Wedding," predictable a pick as it is, was the best episode. This was the episode where Logan Roy, patriarch of the hugely influential and wealthy Roy family, died...offscreen, during his eldest son's Connor's wedding. He doesn't attend the wedding, of course; he was a cold, emotionally distant man, which is part of the reason his kids are so uniformly screwed up. But we see them come together, at least briefly, in the wake of their father's death. The show observes their selfish, cascading emotional crises with its usual eye towards sensitivity and pathos. These kids are a bunch of screw-ups, but they're our screw-ups, and they've suffered a crushing blow.
The episode also gets points for its unpredictability; Logan Roy was the hinge on which Succession turned, so to kill him off in the third episode of a 10-episode season was a shocking masterstroke. It set up the rest of the season to be a richer, fuller experience. It'll be a while before we see another show like Succession.
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