Thisisgina on a desert island.

My friend Colleen sent this around in an e-mail yesterday, and we all had a great time sharing our choices, so I thought I'd post my list here and ask you to share, too.

This began as a blog post somewhere (sorry, don't have the link), and the original question was "If you could bring one episode of television with you to a desert island, what would it be?" OK, cool question, but just one episode?? Sorry, can't do.

So we expanded our criteria to one favorite episode from your top 5 TV shows. That's much better. Right? Not so fast. Seems I couldn't even stay within those criteria! And that's excluding the 2 shows that my regular readers (all 2 of you) will be shocked to discover I've left off the list. I had to exclude LOST and Heroes from the list because none of their episodes really stand alone all that well. And after spending literally hours coming up with these shows, I realized that I never even looked at Alias!

Maybe one of you guys will land on the same desert island with episodes of LOST, Heroes and Alias and you can lend them to me...

My list:

Battlestar Galactica

This show has an abundance of excellent episodes, but not many of them are “feel-good”. So I will pick Exodus, Part II. It’s a thrilling, bittersweet conclusion to the New Caprica story arc and is one of the most cinematic episodes of television, ever.

The X-Files

I chose the 3-parter Anasazi/The Blessing Way/Paper Clip because it has everything that I love about the show: the mythology is at its peak at this point, M & S become more personally invested in the conspiracy, and in each other, and there are some great Vancouver locations. Watching these episodes feels like coming home to me.

Deadwood

I was torn between the first two season finales;

Sold Under Sin – We saw one of the first appearances of the peaches, Jewel got her boot brace, Bullock and Alma finally went at it after he beat her father to a pulp, we got Doc’s anguished prayer about the Civil War atrocities he witnessed and Al killed the Reverend Smith.

Boy the Earth Talks To – I don’t think this one was as emotionally satisfying to me as Sold Under Sin, but it demonstrated very well one of the core themes of the show, the contrast and convergence of beauty and savagery, with the murder of the San Fancisco C*cksucker, Wolcott hanging himself and Andy stabbing Cy all played out against the backdrop of Alma and Ellsworth’s wedding.

Arrested Development

How about Pier Pressure, where Gob helps George Michael (or was it Buster?) buy some pot; or Good Grief, the one with Pop-pop in the attic...Afternoon Delight was pretty good, too.

Frasier

It would come down to either The Matchmaker, which is the one where Frasier doesn't know the new station manager is gay and the new station manager thinks Frasier is, or Flour Child, where Niles carries around a bag of flour and pretends it's a baby, especially for the scene where Eddie the dog tears the flour bag to pieces and Daphne yells, “That dingo just ate your baby!”

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

This was close to impossible. I think I’m going to have to say Once More With Feeling, the musical episode. I’m not a huge fan of the musical, but this was an exception for me. It’s definitely an episode that can be watched over and over, and it would give me something to sing when I get bored with watching TV. And all of the major players are in it. (Becoming, Part II, where Buffy first teams up with Spike and she has to kill Angel and Angel gets his soul back right before she plunges the sword into him...that’s a close second)

*****

As you can see, I couldn't even keep the list to 5 shows, nevermind one episode per show. So feel free to list as many episodes as you like. Any particular favorite episode you would like to bring to a desert island with you?