Individual episodes that were a little more ambitious than all the rest

[Gulftastic]

Corrie did a couple of episodes following what happened to one character in a day. Not one-handers, but one plotters, I suppose. Tirrone was the star of one, when that mad Kirsty was abusing him, and Peter Barlow was the other, where his struggles with alcohol played a major part.

Both were excellent.

[Sin Agog]

I do admire the audacity of that episode of Bagpuss where Professor Yaffle indoctrinates all the mice into a murder-sex cult.  Few moments of children's TV were as harrowing as the vermilion-flecked rodents perched atop Emily's prostrate corpse, gleefully singing 'we will mend it, we will fix it,' their black button eyes piercing through the camera to all the little Emilies at home.

[Sin Agog]

The latter - the man is off his bonce.  There's a doc that Shatner did when he interviewed all of the captains (up to and including Scott Bakula), and Brooks out-Shatnered Shatner to the point where even Shatner was lost for words at a couple of points, and he (Brooks) said an awful lot without saying anything.  He's an absolute loon.

Yeah, I think I saw that- The Captains or something like that.  But being a little moon-eyed doesn't necessarily make you a bad actor.   It can positively help in certain cases (Timothy Carey).  It's how hugely emotional he gets in certain scenes, doubling-up with the feels.  Sometimes I wonder if he's playing it a bit broad, and other times I think he's infusing something vital and real into the mulish, workmanlike atmosphere of old-school, 26+ episodes a year network television.

[purlieu]

Farscape - S3 Ep16 Revenging Angel. Half of it is done as a Chuck Jones cartoon, mostly based on Road Runner.

One of my favourite episodes of anything. But from the second season it so frequently played with the format (season 3 having two alternating storylines featuring two different Crichtons) that even a fully animated Road Runner parody strangely didn't feel very out of place.

Definitely second the X Files comedy / meta episodes. Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose is the classic, but there are a number of other excellent ones...
Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space' follows the exploits of Mulder and Scully from several viewpoints, including a conspiracy theorist who sees them as the bad guys;
Bad Blood, with the same story told from Mulder and Scully's perspectives, with many different details;
Triangle, where Mulder goes back in time and seemingly meets various characters from the show as Nazis and American passengers on a ship in the 1940s;
X-Cops, filmed as a fictional episode of the US reality TV show Cops;
Hollywood A.D., with Mulder and Scully on set of an X Files movie based on their lives;
Improbable, featuring Burt Reynolds as God.

There are plenty of other odd / silly episodes in the show's nine seasons (including almost all of season six and seven), but those are probably the most immediately different.

There was a 'backwards' episode of Scrubs once as well where it started at the end and worked backwards to see how it ended up that way, which I thought was quite good at the time but now obviously know it wasn't because it was Scrubs.

The episode told from the perspective of everybody else rather than the main characters I thought was really good, largely the meta aspect of showing how weird they all behave.

The episode of The Leftovers when yer man spends his entire time in that life/death limbo in that hotel where he has to sing karaoke.

Bloody hell, I forgot that. Yes, a tremendous episode. Mind you, him intentionally returning there, and the link to his dad's acid trip, mean it works even better in context of everything around it.

The Doctor Who episode Heaven Sent is very much worth watching. A couple of elements benefit from having seen earlier episodes in the series, but it pretty much stands up on its own and is basically Peter Capaldi on his own for an hour.

No idea if any Lost episode would make much sense outside of the whole thing, but Desmond-centred episodes Flashes Before Your Eyes and The Constant are really superb.

The Star Trek: TNG episode that particularly goes above and beyond is maybe Parallels. There's an obvious clue about the thrust of it in the title, but the way it handles it is really excellent and often surprising and shocking.

The original-era Clangers episode where it ends up with two sentient handbags falling in love (truly one of the most bizarre things I've watched).

I love it when The Muppets played with the format, particularly the episode that was all done as auditions to be on the show (Steve Martin auditioning several times), and one set in a train station because the regular theatre was being used.

And of course Twin Peaks Season 3 Episode 8.

[phantom_power]

Community Paintball episodes
Once More With Feeling
That episode of Scrubs where it turned out the fella was dead

[Norton Canes]

The original-era Clangers episode where it ends up with two sentient handbags falling in love

Oh come on, you don't genuinely expect us to believe they would really make an episode where - oh...

[a duncandisorderly]

Oh come on, you don't genuinely expect us to believe they would really make an episode where - oh...

boxed set here, & a CD of the music. "music of the spheres" is a proper tear-jerker.

[Phoenix Lazarus]

The Klansman episode of The Professionals.

[Gulftastic]

Oops, double post

[Catalogue Trousers]

Warehouse 13's Don't Hate The Player. A gleeful parody of all things virtual reality and role-playing games.

Xena: Warrior Princess's For Him The Bell Tolls. The episode which first showed that the programme could be great comedy, played as an homage to the climactic sequences of The Court Jester (with possibly a dash of Saps At Sea).

[chveik]

Buffy : "Once More, With Feeling" "The Body", "Restless"
the puppet episode in Angel
the one where David gets assaulted in Six Feet Under

most episodes of the series 2 & 3 of The Leftovers are incredibly ambitious.

[boki]

- the Eastenders episode that is just Dot Cotton monologuing on her own on a sofa.

The one where Alfie was on a mission to buy condoms was a cracker, a welcome bit of comic relief when you consider how miserable things often are on the square.

[neveragain]

The last couple of seasons of Futurama, as well as being a lot better than they were given credit for, had a lot of surprising episode concepts; putting the characters into animals for a nature documentary or various Saturday morning kids cartoons for example. And there was a further different types of animation one (using black and white cartoons, early 1980's computer game and anime) which was very good.

[Gulftastic]

The one where Alfie was on a mission to buy condoms was a cracker, a welcome bit of comic relief when you consider how miserable things often are on the square.

We'll have to agree to differ on that one. Half an hour of that twat Richie was a big part of why I stopped watching EE.

[Dr Rock]

Then you missed the next episode where he just comes on her tits instead.

[Gulftastic]

Emmerdale did a great episode trying to give some idea of what it's like to lose your mind to dementia.

They even went back to film at the original Woolpack (from before they had a purpose built set in the grounds of Harewood House). It made everything feel familiar but somehow wrong. All the characters apart from the dementia sufferer were played by different actors too, to bring home his confusion.

[Jockice]

The last episode of The Office. Can't remember exactly what happened but it certainly wouldn't happen like that in real life.

[purlieu]

Oh come on, you don't genuinely expect us to believe they would really make an episode where - oh...

Those original Clangers series are so good and frequently very strange, but this is definitely the peak of 'what the fuck was that?'.

My favourite moment, however, is still the end of The Visitor. The original version of the show was a lot more cynical than the more cuddly one we have now. After encountering a TV that blasts out lots of rock music and other loud, un-Clangery noises, they decide to get rid of it. Oliver Postgate's final line of narration is perfect: https://youtu.be/-M7bKWrtJI4?t=535

[Gulftastic]

A Couple of episodes of 'The Prisoner', namely 'Living In Harmony' and 'The Girl Who Was Death'. The first is a western, the latter a high camp spy thriller.

Both written when McGoohan had run out of ideas set in the Village but had to fulfill episode orders.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Either Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose or the one where Mulder & Scully explore a haunted house together.  Well, neither of those confused me, but both were out of the (extra)ordinary.

The one that did it for me was Killswitch. Later I found it it was done by yer man William Gibson.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Oz had some good ideas in between jumping the shark about 15 fucking times.

[pupshaw]

A Couple of episodes of 'The Prisoner', namely 'Living In Harmony' and 'The Girl Who Was Death'. The first is a western, the latter a high camp spy thriller.

Both written when McGoohan had run out of ideas set in the Village but had to fulfill episode orders.

What about the body swap episode, Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling, which was the solution to the fact that McGoohan was off filming Ice Station Zebra.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Better than Life and Queeg.

[gib]

Oz had some good ideas in between jumping the shark about 15 fucking times.

Yeah, the musical is the one i remember.

[Gulftastic]

What about the body swap episode, Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling, which was the solution to the fact that McGoohan was off filming Ice Station Zebra.

Good shout!

[phantom_power]

Crossroads Bukkake

[Gerald Fjord]

i'm sure I remember an episode of diagnosis murder where dick van dyke did a kind hearts and coronets and played every member of the same family. it was shit.

[mothman]

Person Of Interest: "If/Then/Else" A blinder of an episode, told from the Machine's perspective in a few microseconds as it tries to work out a way to get PoI's own Scooby Gang out of an impossible situation.

DS9: "Whispers" The first I think of the annual "torture O'Brien" episodes? It's a wonderfully paranoid, claustrophobic episode. Not giving it away, but I recommend watching it a second time immediately after: knowing what's actually going on, it's completely different the second time.

Space: Above and Beyond: "Who Monitors The Birds?" The show's replicant character gets picked for a spec ops mission, and reminisces about his upbringing as a genetically-engineered slave.

Star Trek: Enterprise: "Through A Mirror, Darkly" If ever there was a love letter to Trekkies, it was this. A visit to the Mirror Universe a century before Kirk's, and nearly 40 years after the original series episode it both prequels and sequels. Showing at around the same time as Doctor Who "Dalek," this was true nerdvana for me - but elevated even further as I watched both with my baby daughter on my knee.

[Attila]

A lot of Blake's 7 was bonkers, but Tanith Lee wrote an episode for series 3 called Sarcophagus that had a sort of space-mummy princess taking over the ship and making all of the crew into her servants. It had a really odd, but enjoyable, feel to it.

[Mister Six]

New Doctor Who has so many of these that it sometimes seems like it's the rest of the show being
unambitious...

Season two's much-loathed Love & Monsters is told by an unreliable narrator in a choppy fashion, sometimes using archive footage, and ends completely deranged.

Three has Blink, in which The Doctor and his companion barely appear, and the story unfolds like an elaborate puzzle, with a clever double use of a brief bit of video footage.

Four has Midnight, which is a bottle episode constrained to three sets (with two of them barely glimpsed) that mostly consists of characters talking, as the unseen monster transmits itself through language.

It also has Turn Left, in which - due to some time trickery - The Doctor dies right at the start and the companion watches the world go to shit as a bunch of world-ending plots that The Doctor stopped in previous episodes occur in his absence, and Britain slides into a fascist hellscape.

Five has Vincent the Doctor, which takes time out from wacky adventures to talk about the torment of depression and visualise Van Gogh's unique vision in a very lovely way.

Six and seven probably have notable episodes, I dunno, I'm typing this quickly and nothing's coming to mind.

Eight has Listen, which is The Doctor having a nervous breakdown with no monsters or villains in sight.

Nine's stand-out is Hell Bent, which is The Doctor talking to himself about grieving, then ends with a twist/montage that is jaw-dropping.

Ten has Extremis, which is the first is a terrible three-part story but is actually brilliant in of itself, sliding inexorably from wacky intro to a massively dark, weird ending, and the final two-parter which has a grand high-concept setting (a spaceship where time runs differently in different sections due to its proximity to a black hole) and balances that with two villains, Cybermen, body horror, a mystery, battle scenes and a great speech about what makes The Doctor The Doctor.

Eleven has Arachnids in the UK, which is an astounding examination of what a story would look like if you got every conceivable thing wrong about it.