star trek monster of the week

• The Inventory

The 10 Best 'Monster of the Week' Episodes of All Time

The "monster of the week" episode is an endangered beast. Once upon a time, television was full of single-episode stories, in which the heroes faced an unstoppable threat and won, all in about 43 minutes. Here are 10 "monster of the week" episodes that pack more storytelling power than a season-long arc of most TV shows.

Related Content

Note: To help narrow things down, let's set a few conditions. We'll only include standalone "monster of the week" episodes where the monster in question appeared only once, and was never heard from again. So for example, Doctor Who 's "Blink" is disqualified since it was arguably the first episode in a long-running arc involving the Weeping Angels. With that out of the way, here we go...

10 Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, "Self-Made Man"

When the Terminator TV show started, the creators said they wouldn't be doing "Terminator of the week" episodes — but then they did just one, featuring a random Terminator who goes back in time to kill a politician and overshoots, becoming Myron Stark, a big wheel in the 1920s gangster scene. Cameron, the friendly Terminator, figures out that Myron Stark is coming back, and manages to be there to greet him. It's a lovely, creative take on Terminator lore that uses time travel in a uniquely clever way.

9 Red Dwarf, "Polymorph"

It's sort of a weird version of Alien set on the Red Dwarf, in which the crew is hunted by a shape-shifting creature that steals their negative emotions to sustain itself. And it's often mentioned as one of the best Red Dwarf episodes, because the monster radically changes all of the characters and their dynamic winds up becoming very different before they deal with the monster. Often, the best monster-of-the-week episodes are the ones that change the regular characters in some way, or help us see them in a new light.

8 Cowboy Bebop, "Pierrot Le Fou"

This is the one where Spike gets his ass kicked, by a killer who targets him after Spike sees Pierrot commit a murder. Spike and his crew have to figure out who Pierrot is and what his weakness is, before he finishes the job. We discover that Pierrot is the result of strange experiments, which turned him into this abomination. This episode gets a lot of praise for its amazing visuals and intense atmosphere — but also for putting Spike in a position where he's already lost a fight at the beginning of the story, for once.

7 Xena, "A Day in the Life"

The monster this time around is the world's biggest giant, who's going to crush a village, and meanwhile some bandits are going to raid another village. But really, it's about exploring the Xena-Gabrielle relationship, while also introducing us to Minya, a young woman who feels threatened by Xena's awesomeness. In the course of the story, Xena has to outwit the bandits and giant while also empowering Minya — and the giant, whom we only meet this one time, is a particularly great foil in an episode about outsized personalities.

6 Supernatural, "What Is and What Never Should Be"

This is the one where a Djinn traps Dean in a dream world wherehe has everything he ever wanted, including his mother back from the dead. Like a lot of the episodes on this list, it's about illuminating the characters, as a way of presenting them with an even bigger no-win situation.

5 Star Trek, "Where No Man Has Gone Before"

The "monster" in this episode is Captain Kirk's friend Gary Mitchell, who gets godlike powers after being bombarded with a strange energy — and Kirk has to sacrifice his friend to save the ship. The real focus is the interplay between Kirk and Spock as Spock tries to convince Kirk that sometimes you have to make the impossible choice for the good of everyone else. Never does Spock seem more chillingly emotionless.

4 Angel, "Smile Time"

We praise this episode a lot — but it really deserves all the praise. Ben Edlund's hilarious story of Angel being turned into a puppet actually features a great monster, in the evil puppets that try to suck the life essence out of children through their television screens. It's one of the show's most fun episodes, but presents Angel with a unique adversary during his "tool of the man" phase: cute puppets that use mass media to get their own way.

3 Doctor Who, "Midnight"

The fact that we've never met the creature from this episode again, or learned more of its secrets, is part of why it still has so much power. The Doctor is on a tourbus in the middle of nowhere, when one of the passengers becomes sort of possessed by a mysterious presence — and then it targets the Doctor. Like most of the episodes on this list, this shows the Doctor in an extreme situation that paints him in a new light, but it's also an intense tale in which there's no easy win.

2 The X-Files, "Jose Chung's From Outer Space"

We almost put "Tooms" here, because of intense horrible creepiness — but Tooms actually appears in two episodes. And Jose Chung does feature a monster of the week, the alien that's abducting fake aliens. The whole thing is the setup for a strange metafictional tale, in which Jose Chung gives us a very different look at Mulder and Scully, and their entire world. Check out Crave Online's great exegesis of why this might be the best X-Files episode.

1 Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "Hush"

We had to put this up top, because the Gentlemen are another great example of a monster that never reappears and starts getting overexposed or overexplained. They show up, steal the voices of everyone in Sunnydale, and nearly complete a terrible ritual — until Buffy and Riley figure out a way to stop them. In a show that's all about characters who have the gift of gab, using their voices to figure out everything together, the nearly silent episode is the creepiest thing ever.

So what did we miss?

Thanks to Genevieve Valentine for the input!

Advertisement

Star Trek's 10 Best Monster Episodes

• Star Trek embraces peace but also explores monster movie elements for some thrilling episodes.
• Shows like Voyager & Next Generation weave classic monster movie themes with sci-fi twists.
• Even as monsters take center stage, empathy remains a core theme in the Star Trek universe.

Star Trek has a message of peace and tolerance and seeing beyond the surface, but it's not above doing an all-out monster movie from time to time. From its inception in 1966, Star Trek has taught audiences not to judge alien species by appearances . For example, Star Trek: Voyager villains Species 8472 were terrifying, Alien -inspired creatures, who turned out to be benevolent aliens that had been driven to violence by the actions of the Borg Collective. Earlier episodes like Star Trek: The Original Series ' "Devil in the Dark" revealed hidden emotional depths to a creature that was ostensibly a disgusting rock monster.

Despite Star Trek 's message of empathy, sometimes the writers can't resist creating scary monsters and super creeps. Star Trek has always drawn on the history of science fiction, and the big monster movies popularized by studios like RKO are no exception . Over nearly six decades, Star Trek TV shows have drawn on classic monster movies like The Thing From Another World and King Kong , giving them a Gene Roddenberry-style twist.

10 Times Star Trek Went Full-On Horror And Gave Us Nightmares

Star trek: voyager, season 2, episode 15, "threshold", story by michael de luca, teleplay by brannon braga.

Star Trek: Voyager 's notorious salamander episode , "Threshold" begins as an exploration of theoretical transwarp barriers and becomes something more akin to The Phantom of the Opera or King Kong . When Lt. Tom Paris (Robert Duncan McNeill) breaks the transwarp barrier, he begins experiencing some bizarre side effects. Breaking the transwarp barrier has triggered a strange evolution in Paris' body, which turns him into a salamander, who decides they need a mate in the form of Captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew).

...the monster movie elements ensure that "Threshold" is never boring.

There are some obvious monster movie parallels in "Threshold", from the way that the reptilian Paris carries an unconscious Janeway like the Phantom of the Opera to the body horror of the Voyager helmsman's transformation. The climax of the notorious Star Trek: Voyager episode, in which the "monster" that is now Paris fights off the crew to take Janeway as his mate, is pure King Kong . It's a Voyager episode that is rightly panned for its lack of narrative cohesion, but the monster movie elements ensure that "Threshold" is never boring.

Star Trek: The Next Generation, Season 7, Episode 19, "Genesis"

Written by brannon braga.

Star Trek: The Next Generation season 7, episode 19, "Genesis" is essentially The Island of Dr. Moreau set aboard the USS Enterprise-D. Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) and Lt. Commander Data (Brent Spiner) return to the Enterprise to discover that the crew has devolved into various terrifying monsters. For example, Lt. Reginald Barclay (Dwight Schultz) is de-evolved into a spider-like creature, while Lt. Worf (Michael Dorn) devolves into a savage proto-Klingon that tries to kill Picard. The cause of these transformations is a mistake made by Dr. Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden) while reactivating a cell that would have given Barclay immunity to the flu.

Gates McFadden injects what could have been a very silly story with genuine tension.

Although the science is just as dubious as Star Trek: Voyager 's "Threshold", Star Trek: The Next Generation season 7, episode 19, "Genesis" has the benefit of being much more atmospheric. Interestingly, "Genesis" was directed by Dr. Beverly Crusher actor Gates McFadden , who injects what could have been a very silly story with genuine tension. The climax, where Picard tries to fend off an attack from a prehistoric Worf, while Data tries to concoct a cure using the DNA of Nurse Ogawa's unborn baby, is well directed by McFadden, giving this daft TNG outing an exciting monster movie vibe.

"Genesis" was the only episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation to be directed by Gates McFadden.

Star Trek: Every Actor Who Also Directed Episodes Or Movies

Star trek: the original series, season 1, episode 26, "the devil in the dark", written by gene l. coon.

"The Devil in the Dark" is a classic Star Trek monster episode , because it hinges on Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner), Lt. Commander Spock (Leonard Nimoy), and Dr. "Bones" McCoy (DeForest Kelley) learning to understand a creature beyond their understanding. Investigating a supposed monster that is attacking a mining operation on Janus IV, they soon discover that the titular " devil in the dark " is no monster, but a mother protecting their young. It's thanks to Kirk and Spock's open-mindedness that the miners manage to avert the destruction of the entire Horta race .

The scene in which Kirk has to reason with the baying mob invokes images of the villagers with torches and pitchforks in the climax of Universal's classic monster movie, Frankenstein .

From a visual effects perspective, the actual Horta in Star Trek: The Original Series may look hokey by today's standards , but it tells a story about the need for empathy. TOS' cave monster isn't able to communicate with the miners, and so has to resort to violence. Similarly, the miners want violent recriminations from the "monster" that killed their colleagues. The scene in which Kirk has to reason with the baying mob invokes images of the villagers with torches and pitchforks in the climax of Universal's classic monster movie, Frankenstein . Thanks to Kirk, however, the Horta has a happier ending than Frankenstein's monster.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Season 2, Episode 12, "The Alternate"

Teleplay by bill dial, story by jim trombetti and bill dial.

In one of Constable Odo's best Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episodes , a mysterious monster stalks the corridors of DS9 late at night. It's believed to be the mysterious sample that Odo (Rene Auberjonois) and scientist Dr. Mora Pol (James Sloyan) brought back from the Gamma Quadrant. However, in reality, it's Odo, who is under the influence of mysterious alien toxins, and the stress of seeing his "father" again. "The Alternate" is a fun Star Trek spin on Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde , that has some genuinely unnerving moments of horror.

Odo's monstrous alter-ego is less Mr. Hyde, and more like the titular Blob from the classic 1958 sci-fi monster movie.

Odo's transition into the monster toward the end of the episode is horrifying to watch as he rants and raves while struggling to remain in a solid state. Odo's monstrous alter-ego is less Mr. Hyde, and more like the titular Blob from the classic 1958 sci-fi monster movie. Interestingly, Dr. Julian Bashir (Alexander Siddig) doesn't categorically confirm it's the alien toxins that caused the transformation, suggesting another cause. As the gelatinous monster bears down on Dr. Mora Pol, it becomes clear that the real cause of the transformation is Odo's father issues.

All 4 Star Trek Characters Played By James Sloyan

Star trek: voyager, season 3, episode 12, "macrocosm".

Star Trek: Voyager has many creepy episodes , but "Macrocosm" is the most overt monster episode. Like Star Trek: The Next Generation 's "Genesis", also written by Brannon Braga, "Macrocosm" has a silly concept that is realized like a survival horror movie. The monsters faced by Captain Janeway and the Doctor (Robert Picardo) are effectively giant viruses that become airborne, infecting those they come into contact with. To repel the viral infection of the USS Voyager, the Doctor created an antigen which Janeway eventually detonated inside the holodeck, killing the assembled macroviruses.

"Macrocosm" finally gave Captain Janeway her Ellen Ripley moment.

"Macrocosm" got a wryly funny sequel in Star Trek: Lower Decks ' season 4 premiere, "Twovixed", but the episode itself is a decent homage to the Alien franchise. As the Star Trek franchise's first female captain, it's great to see Janeway getting to be an action hero like Captain Kirk in Star Trek: The Original Series , or Picard in Star Trek: First Contact . While the monsters themselves weren't anywhere near as terrifying as Alien 's Xenomorph, "Macrosm" finally gave Captain Janeway her Ellen Ripley moment.

Star Trek: Discovery, Season 1, Episode 3, "Context is for Kings"

Teleplay by gretchen j. berg, aaron harberts, and craig sweeny.

The disgraced Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) is given a second chance after her mutiny aboard the USS Shenzhou in a Star Trek: Discovery monster episode. "Context is for Kings" explores what happened to the USS Glenn, the second of Discovery 's crossfield-class starships . Following a catastrophic accident while experimenting with spore drive technology, the ship's entire crew were killed, save for the tartigrade creature they had captured and wired to the spore drive. Freed from its shackles by the accident, the creature rampaged through the Glenn, killing a Klingon boarding party and turning its attention to Burnham and her away team .

The true monster in Star Trek: Discovery season 1, episode 3, "Context is for Kings" is Starfleet themselves.

The true monster in Star Trek: Discovery season 1, episode 3, "Context is for Kings" is Starfleet themselves. The cruelty that the crew of the USS Glenn had shown to the tartigrade was unbecoming of Starfleet, and showed how far they were willing to diverge from their principles to defeat the Klingon Empire . Captain Gabriel Lorca (Jason Isaacs) hammers this point home by having the tartigrade brought aboard the USS Discovery, taunting it as it tries to break free from the forcefield.

Jason Isaacs 10 Best Acting Roles (Including Star Trek: Discoverys Lorca)

Star trek: lower decks, season 4, episode 2, "i have no bones yet i must flee", written by aaron burdette.

Star Trek: Lower Decks introduced Moopsy into the canon in the season 4 episode, "I Have No Bones Yet I Must Flee". Visiting an alien menagerie, newly promoted Lt. junior grade Beckett Mariner (Tawny Newsome) and Commander Jack Ransom (Jerry O'Connell) had to conted with Moopsy, a soft fluffy creature that also happened to drink bones . Mariner and Ransom came up with a suitably irreverent Lower Decks solution to their problem, by punching out Ransom's teeth and using them as treats to lure the Moopsy back into its cage.

Moopsy is basically a monstrous Tribble, unable to control its base urges.

Moopsy was the sort of creation that could only feature in the irreverent world of Star Trek: Lower Decks , and yet it plays on existing creatures in the canon. Moopsy is basically a monstrous Tribble, unable to control its base urges. However, Mariner and Ransom don't kill the creature to save themselves, they find a humane - if slightly painful - solution to their situation. Not only that, but Mariner also unmasks the truly dangerous monsters - greedy humans seeking to bulk up their business portfolios , in this case by staging a hostile takeover of an alien menagerie.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Season 1, Episode 9, "All Those Who Wander"

Written by davy perez.

"All Those Who Wander" combines the classic Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Arena" with Alien to provide a terrifying episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds . The vicious Gorn babies that are encountered by the Enterprise away team are relentless, rampaging through the ship and killing everything in their path. It's through the noble sacrifice of Lt. Hemmer (Bruce Horak) that the away team is able to get back to the safety of the USS Enterprise. However, the scars of the terrifying encounter between the Enterprise and the Gorn carry over into Strange New Worlds season 2 .

The Gorn infants move like raptors, drawing comparisons with the climax of Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park

Because there's genuine dramatic stakes and a cost to life, Star Trek: Strange New World 's Gorn survival horror movie is the best version of the subgenre after the classic movie, Star Trek: First Contact . As an hour of television, it wears its genre influences on its sleeve, particularly the similarities between the icy crash site with the colony in Aliens . However, it's not just the Alien franchise that Star Trek: Strange New Worlds riffs on in "All Those Who Wander". The Gorn infants move like raptors, drawing comparisons with the climax of Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park .

Complete History Of The Gorn In Star Trek

Star trek: the next generation, season 1, episode 23, "skin of evil", teleplay by joseph stefano & hannah louise shearer.

Armus (Ron Gans) in Star Trek: The Next Generation , is a truly monstrous creation, and even refers to himself as " evil " . Unlike the Horta in Star Trek: The Original Series , Armus isn't attacking the Enterprise away team to protect its children, he's doing it because he's a monster. A black, oily mass of everything impure and evil rejected by a " race of Titans ", Armus was abandoned on the planet Vagra II . There, he fantasized about torturing any visitors to the planet, but he quickly got bored after killing Lt. Tasha Yar (Denise Crosby).

Tasha Yar was no red shirt, and her death at the hands of the monster of the week makes "Skin of Evil" an impactful entry in the TNG canon.

"Skin of Evil" is one of Star Trek 's best monster episodes because, like "All Those Who Wander", it takes a toll on the characters. Star Trek: The Next Generation loses Tasha Yar to this monster, which proved that it would be a very different show to Star Trek: The Original Series . A TOS version of "Skin of Evil" would have played out in a similar fashion, but with the deaths of some disposable red shirts thrown in . Tasha Yar was no red shirt, and her death at the hands of the monster of the week makes "Skin of Evil" an impactful entry in the TNG canon.

Star Trek: The Original Series, Season 1, Episode 5, "The Man Trap"

Written by george clayton johnson.

Star Trek 's best monster episode is also its very first, setting the tone for those that would follow . Star Trek: The Original Series , season 1, episode 5, "The Man Trap", features a Salt Vampire that feeds on salt, which can also shapeshift to take the form of anyone that can help it achieve its goals. In essence, "The Man Trap" is Star Trek 's take on the 1951 movie The Thing From Another World , later remade by John Carpenter as The Thing . Both the Star Trek episode and the Thing movies center on a shapeshifting creature that feeds on the human characters.

"The Man Trap" was chosen by the network as the first episode of Star Trek: The Original Series to air due, in part, to its strong monster-of-the-week.

Both iterations of The Thing and Star Trek: TOS season 1, episode 5, "The Man Trap" also play on paranoia and being unable to trust your own eyes . In "The Man Trap", the Salt Vampire has the ability to take the form of the woman most desirable to each of the male characters. For example, Dr. McCoy believes it to be his former lover, Nancy, driving a wedge between him, Kirk and Spock. "The Man Trap" was chosen as the first episode of Star Trek: TOS to air in 1966, and its influence can be felt in Star Trek 's monster episodes nearly 60 years later.

All these episodes of Star Trek are available to stream on Paramount+.

"Star Trek", Original Series, Monster of the Week Quiz

Although the "monster of the week" trope was coined for "the outer limits", it certainly applies to "star trek" too. see if you can answer these questions about "original series" "monsters" (hint: they won't all be living creatures.).

• Star Trek Universe
• Star Trek: Original Series

Den of Geek

In defence of ‘monster of the week’ episodes

While TV shows nowadays tend to concentrate on building complex mythologies, what's wrong with the odd one-off monster?

• Share on Facebook (opens in a new tab)
• Share on Twitter (opens in a new tab)
• Share on Linkedin (opens in a new tab)
• Share on email (opens in a new tab)

There was a time when the Monster of the Week was the standard format for genre television. There might be some character development across the series, but from week to week each plot stood alone and the audience didn’t need to have seen the previous week’s episode to understand a new story. There were exceptions and special cases of course. Classic Doctor Who was serialised, and some shows like The Prisoner , while largely following a distinct narrative each week, also incorporated ongoing plot progression, an ongoing story arc. But for the most part, you could tune in to a show a month after you last saw it and still know what was going on.

Due to a variety of factors including the increasing popularity of video recorders throughout the 1980s, things started to change. The name ‘Monster of the Week’ comes from writing relating to The X-Files , as the phrase was used to distinguish between one-shot stories and episodes relating to the alien conspiracy myth arc. Several 1990s shows, such as Stargate SG-1 , Buffy the Vampire Slayer , Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Farscape , followed this model and combined ongoing story arcs with monster of the week episodes. While The X-Files floundered a bit when its myth arc became rather convoluted, many of these shows produced strong, compelling story arcs that culminated in dramatic, emotionally resonant season finales.

This continuing trend has produced some fantastic television over the years, but I believe it has had one rather unfortunate side effect, namely, the de-valuing of the monster of the week episode. From the late 1990s onwards, these episodes have frequently been referred to as ‘filler’ episodes, implying that they are somehow worth less than story arc episodes. Good ones may be praised as being surprisingly good for a filler episode, while bad ones are criticised partly for being a filler episode. Shows that don’t use this format can be criticised on that basis alone, and if characters fail to mention the events of the previous week’s episode in the following episode, they can be accused of pressing the dreaded reset button.

In extreme cases, show-runners have started to produce more and more episodes based around ongoing plot arcs relating to the main characters, on the grounds that episodes about the main characters are always the most popular with the fans. It’s true that episodes whose plots revolve around something deeply significant to a main character will always be the most popular – but that doesn’t necessarily mean you can get the fans to love every single episode by making them all about the main characters. Take Quantum Leap , for example. Fan favourites episodes of that show often include those revolving around Sam or Al; M.I.A ., The Leap Home , A Leap for Lisa . But Quantum Leap simply couldn’t work as a series if every episode was about something deeply personal to Al or Sam. Just because fans like episodes focused on personal crises for the main characters doesn’t mean they want to see that every week.

Ad – content continues below

Of course, every show has to find the format that works best for that particular series. Some shows combine story arcs with monsters of the week very effectively. Other shows tell an ongoing story in which every episode builds on the last and it is necessary to watch every week. This form of long-form story-telling has been around for a long time, chiefly in mini-series and book adaptations, a tradition continued today through hit series like Game of Thrones , which uses shorter, more tightly scripted and focused seasons to tell a story adapted from a specific book (or half a book). The format has also become popular in non-literary-based longer US-format seasons following the (initial) popularity of Lost , Heroes and 24 . There’s nothing wrong with any of these formats and they are clearly the best option for some shows. However, I believe some shows could benefit from more monster of the week episodes and less of an emphasis on story arcs, and that no episode should be criticised on the basis of being a monster of the week episode alone.

Artistically, monster of the week episodes allow a show to tell a contained, focused story with a clear beginning, middle and end. Viewers can sit down to enjoy an episode of their favourite show knowing that they will get some resolution by the end of the episode (or by next week if it’s a two-parter). The show can also embrace a wider variety of styles and stories, so that if a viewer doesn’t like a particular episode because it’s not to their taste, they know there’s a good chance they’ll enjoy next week’s more. This is especially true of series with particularly broad-ranging concepts, like Doctor Who or Quantum Leap , but it is also true of series that stay more closely within one genre, as The X-Files might follow up a mutant serial killer story with a ghost story, or the various incarnations of Star Trek might follow up a technology-gone-wrong story with an alien-planet-based story.

There are also practical advantages to this form of story-telling. Most of us who spend time on the internet talking about science fiction shows are probably pretty tech-savvy and knowledgeable about the various options for following complex plots over a period of time, including catch-up services, Netflix subscriptions and so on. But there’s a whole world of people out there who haven’t the time or inclination to hook up their computer to their television (or arrange their furniture so they can sit and watch things on the computer together), who don’t pay for the services required to get catch-up services on their television or who simply haven’t got around to finding out about these things. Even when catch-up services are easily available, not everyone wants to have to work on squeezing in two hours of catch-up viewing before watching this week’s episode. Sometimes, it’s nice to be able to sit down and watch a show you haven’t seen in a while without wondering what on earth is going on.

Ultimately, like most things, it all comes down to personal preference. Some people will always prefer complex, long-form story-telling, some will always prefer more self-contained episodes, some will prefer one for one show but a different form for another show. So I suppose my point is that whatever your preference, there’s nothing inherently wrong with a monster of the week episode or an anthology show. Criticise episodes for being boring, criticise them for being stupid, criticise the plot for not making any sense, the acting for being terrible, the direction for making you feel sick, but maybe think twice before criticising something purely on the basis that it’s a ‘filler’ episode. They’re not completely without merit.

Follow our  Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here . And be our  Facebook chum here .

Juliette Harrisson | @ClassicalJG

Juliette Harrisson is a writer and historian, and a lifelong Trekkie whose childhood heroes were JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis. She runs a YouTube channel called…

Advertisement

Supported by

‘Star Trek: Picard’ Recap: Of Monsters and Men

This week’s episode takes a deep detour inside the mind of our protagonist.

• Share full article

By Sopan Deb

Season 2, Episode 7: ‘Monsters’

Jean-Luc Picard’s subconscious is a largely unexplored subject in “Trek” lore, despite Jean-Luc being such an oft-discussed character. “Monsters” shows us that our friendly neighborhood captain has demons in his head that he is literally running from.

Those demons come to the forefront as a result of a therapy session he has with a Starfleet therapist. This is telling as well: Even in his coma — even in his own mind — the best way for Picard to interrogate his own past is to do it with someone wearing a Starfleet uniform. Even then, the conversation is mostly about trying to get back to work. It’s Jean-Luc Picard in a nutshell: Trying to keep duty at the forefront. (This isn’t too different from the Picard we see in “Star Trek: Generations” appearing in the Nexus . He is in his paradise, spending Christmas with his family. And even then, he’s wearing his Starfleet uniform.)

“You are a captain. Ethical. Diplomatic. Cultured. An affinity for the arts. Intellectual thought,” the psychologist offers in her stinging diagnosis. “And yet, perpetually untethered in the ways of the heart.”

When Jean-Luc opens the door to discussing his upbringing, it’s revealed that he has undergone a significant amount of trauma deriving from, he thinks, his abusive father. The trauma is presented in the form of terrifying monsters that attack a young Jean-Luc and his mother.

What’s interesting here is that this is all playing out in Jean-Luc’s mind. The therapist’s diagnosis isn’t actually coming from the therapist; it’s coming from Jean-Luc himself, meaning there’s some self awareness about why he keeps people at arm’s length and why he fears true intimacy.

But as is often the case with childhood memories, the true meaning is more complicated than it seems. And there’s a plot twist: The psychologist is Picard’s father! All this time, Jean-Luc thought his father was abusive toward his mother, even locking her away at one point. The young Jean-Luc calls him “a monster,” when the real monster, according to Jean-Luc’s father, was the depression that overtook Jean-Luc’s mother. (He was unable to manage it, with some regret it seems.)

The implication is that Jean-Luc’s mother struggled with bipolar disorder, and it affected the relationship between Jean-Luc and his father.

Interestingly, there’s no mention of Robert Picard, Jean-Luc’s older brother, whom we met in “The Next Generation” episode “Family.” You might remember they rolled around in the mud for awhile and then laughed about it. In that episode, Jean-Luc called his older brother “a bully,” and it’s implied that their father was an authoritarian whose rules Jean-Luc always broke. Robert accuses Jean-Luc of thinking he’s too good for the rest of the Picard family.

Given what we learn in this episode of “Picard,” it’s more likely that Jean-Luc poured everything he could into his career because he didn’t know how to make meaningful connections with his family.

It’s a fascinating glimpse inside Jean-Luc psyche. Maybe, as he notes later in the episode, this is what Q wanted to teach him all along. We saw Q as a therapist earlier in the season, and maybe that’s what Q sees himself as toward anyone named Picard.

The Watcher is a Romulan? She’s Laris’s ancestor? This felt like an unnecessary plot twist. If Romulans were on Earth well before first contact, which was with a Vulcan, that would be problematic for generations of “Trek” lore.

The Watcher is, however, able to do her thing and help Picard out of his coma. And then Picard is up and totally fine to go save the universe, despite being hit by a car hours earlier.

It’s a nice touch when Rios calls Jean-Luc a father figure. In an episode where we examine one potentially toxic father, it shows that Jean-Luc himself plays a paternal role with some of those who are close to him.

I wrote last week that I thought Rios was going to end up staying behind in 2024. I was wrong. Instead, he brought Teresa and her son onboard his ship, which is an insane decision that will surely have major implications going forward. But we do get the childlike wonder of being beamed aboard a ship from Teresa’s kid!

Not a nice touch: Rios handing Teresa a medical device from the future and her being able to operate it with absolutely no training whatsoever.

Young Guinan gives us some insight into why El-Aurians have beef with the Q Continuum. Then Guinan drinks a potion to try to summon Q and destroys her bar in the process — this after not wanting to take part at all with Picard’s shenanigans. Young Guinan seems to exist in order to do whatever the plot needs her to do.

Picard and Guinan are arrested at the end of the episode, although it’s unclear what they were arrested for. I’m assuming law enforcement had been surveilling Picard for sometime, or something. We’ll probably find out in the next episode. But why would Guinan get arrested with him? She was just minding her own business as a bartender until Picard showed up!

Sopan Deb is a basketball writer and a contributor to the Culture section. Before joining The Times, he covered Donald J. Trump's presidential campaign for CBS News. He is also a New York-based comedian.  More about Sopan Deb

Explore More in TV and Movies

Not sure what to watch next we can help..

Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell speak about how “Anyone but You” beat the rom-com odds. Here are their takeaways after the film , debuting on Netflix, went from box office miss to runaway hit.

The vampire ballerina in the new movie “Abigail” has a long pop culture lineage . She and her sisters are obsessed, tormented and likely to cause harm.

In a joint interview, the actors Lily Gladstone and Riley Keough discuss “Under the Bridge,” their new true-crime series  based on a teenager’s brutal killing in British Columbia.

The movie “Civil War” has tapped into a dark set of national angst . In polls and in interviews, a segment of voters say they fear the country’s divides may lead to actual, not just rhetorical, battles.

If you are overwhelmed by the endless options, don’t despair — we put together the best offerings   on Netflix , Max , Disney+ , Amazon Prime  and Hulu  to make choosing your next binge a little easier.

Sign up for our Watching newsletter  to get recommendations on the best films and TV shows to stream and watch, delivered to your inbox.

Star Trek: Planet, Monster, Romance of the Week

Growing up in the 1970s and excited by the space program, I found Star Trek to be a promise of a bright future for humanity, often advocating for nonviolence and empathy in the face of conflict, while embracing diversity . I watched the episodes so frequently that I could often name the episode by the opening shot. I loved the characters but watched uncritically.

Starting last July, after wrapping up Discovery seasons 1 and 2 and Strange New Worlds as part of my goal of re- watching Star Trek chronologically , I began re-watching TOS in production order . Episodes had been aired in a different order than they were filmed, as some required far more time-consuming special effects than other episodes. As the producers and writers were inventing key details on the fly, it’s fun to watch the development of these ideas, especially during the first season, by watching in production order instead.

For a show that was meant to be episodic, with nothing changing the status quo, it is often surprisingly inconsistent. Crew come and go, changing roles and unfirms (and sometimes names, as the same actor plays another crew member). The vocabulary ends up changing a lot; early on, there are “defense screens” instead of shields, “Earth outposts,” “Vulcanians,” etc.

• Planet of the Week: As the first planet-of-the-week show ( Lost in Space was “planet of the season” in it’s first two seasons), TOS was actually pitched as “ Wagon Train to the stars ,” about a recurring cast on a long journey.
• Monster of the Week: But there’s a strong monster theme to many episodes, especially in the first season, often with twists. In “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” Kirk’s best friend becomes the monster, due to the activation of his ESP. In “The Corbomite Maneuver,” the powerful alien monster is something else entirely. In “Mudd’s Women,” the women are sirens, as “they” are in “The Man Trap.” “The Enemy Within” is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In “Charlie X,” the monster is a teenager. In “The Devil in the Dark”, well… And that’s just the first part of the first season.
• Romance of the Week: TOS crew fall in love bizarrely quickly, but Kirk is not the womanizer pop culture remembers him as . McCoy is more of a ladies’ man .
• Destroying computers, robots or androids, in at least a dozen episodes .
• Obsessed with superpowers: “The Cage”, “Where No Man Has Gone Before”, “Charlie X”, “Plato’s Stepchildren”, “Blink of an Eye.”
• With aliens with godlike powers: “The Squire of Gothos”, “Arena” (the Metrons not the Gorn), “Errand of Mercy”, “Catspaw”, “Triskelion”, “The Day of the Dove”, “Let This Be Your Last Battlefield” (the alien is 50,000 years old and mind-controls the Enterprise).
• Obsessed with intellect over emotion: Spock, the Talosians, the Kelvins…
• Amazing odds that the crew encountered on multiple occasions the “last of its kind”: “The Man Trap” (purportedly the last salt vampire), “Devil in the Dark” (the last horta), “Who Mourns for Adonais” (the last Greek god), “The Lights of Zetar” (last of the Zetarians), and maybe “Metamorphosis” (the solitary Companion).
• Time travel is ridiculously common: “The Naked Time”, “The Alternative Factor”, “Tomorrow is Yesterday”, “The City on the Edge of Forever”, “Assignment: Earth”, “All Our Yesterdays”. ( Some include “Wink of an Eye.” )
• Alternate Earths: “Miri”, “Bread and Circuses”, “Patterns of Force”, “The Omega Glory”, “A Piece of the Action.” These episodes make more sense when you realize that Twilight Zone was a key inspiration for Star Trek .
• Four of the episodes leave or try to leave the galaxy: “Where No Man Has Gone Before”, “Return to Tomorrow”, “Is There In Truth No Beauty”, and “The Day of the Dove.”
• Deus ex machina – Sometimes, surprisingly, the crew weren’t able to save themselves: “Charlie X”, “The Squire of Gothos”, and “Shore Leave”.
• 60s sexism: a misogynistic focus on “frigid” women—“The Cage” (Number One), “Where No Man Has Gone Before” (the psychologist), “Metamorphosis” (the Commissioner); women can’t be starship captains (“The Turnabout Intruder”); weird gallantry mixed with misogyny. (But the miniskirts were a feminist choice .)

Ratings by Author

To my surprise, Gene Roddenbery’s stories aren’t great—

• His episodes were slightly worse than average: 7.15 vs 7.39 of others; average rank of 49 vs. 39 out of 79 episodes. His best episode was “The Menagerie” (8.2) and his worst was “The Omega Glory” (6.1). “ Ay plegli ianectu flaggen, tupep like for stahn.”
• Gene Coon’s (including those he wrote under the pseudonym Lee Cronin): 7.45, rank of 37; his best episode was “Space Seed” (8.8) and his worst was “Spock’s Brain” (5.6).
• D.C. Fontana : 7.38, rank of 38; her best episode was “Journey to Babel” (8.5) and her worst episode was “The Way to Eden” (5.4).

It’s hard to write a classic without also writing a clunker, apparently.

Random Notes on Episodes

• 1.02 – I was surprised that “ Charlie X ” is so poorly ranked (#58 out of #78) as I always found the core story of Charlie compelling. Robert Walker did an excellent job in that role.
• 1.11-12 — “The Menagerie” is so amazing because it gives the show a tremendous sense of history, with the flashbacks to the original pilot. It really ramps up the verisimilitude.
• 1.19 – Great article on the tropes in “Tomorrow is Yesterday” . The time travel in this episode is awful and sets a ridiculous precedent.
• 1.21 – “The Return of the Archons” was the inspiration for The Purge!
• 1.23 – “A Taste of Armageddon” was ranked #18 on IMDB, so it didn’t make the “Top ~10” episodes (I padded the list a little) my youngest watched with me. But I thought it really held up well , and wished I’d shared it with him.
• 1.24 – I also regretted not including “ This Side of Paradise ” in my initial personal top 10. It’s pretty important for appreciating Spock, I think.
• 2.01 – “Catspaw” introduces Chekov , “created to add Davy Jones-like appeal to the show and the Russian heritage was because Roddenberry wanted to honor the fact that the Russians were the first people in space.” Also, given the Cold War, I think it forecast rapprochement. Bonus fact: “Catspaw” is the only holiday episode the franchise has ever done!
• 2.05 – More than a third of the way through my re-watch of TOS and “ The Apple ” was the worst episode I’d watched so far. A supercomputer can nearly pull the Enterprise down from orbit using a tractor beam, but needs a few dozen humanoids to feed it fruit daily, or it will run out of power? People never touch one another on the Planet of Virgins until they see Chekhov kiss a woman?! A redshirt dies in every Act?! They beam down 17 kilometers from where they want to go and then need to hike? Yet again they can’t use the shuttle to rescue people stranded on a planet?
• 3.04 – “And the Children Shall Lead” is the worst episode of the series, by far.
• 3.23 – “All Our Yesterdays” as an homage to the series. ( Spock’s “City on the Edge of Forever” .)

Because of re-watching TOS, one of the things I’ve decided is that Strange New Worlds needs to have an episode with comically staged fight scenes with clearly visible stunt doubles!

My Favorite Episodes

• “Balance of Terror”
• “The Trouble with Tribbles”
• “The Devil in the Dark”
• “The City on the Edge of Forever”
• “All Our Yesterdays”
• “Amok Time”
• “Journey to Babel”
• “Mirror, Mirror”
• “A Piece of the Action”
• “A Taste of Armageddon”
• “This Side of Paradise”
• “The Doomsday Machine”
• “Space Seed”
• “The Naked Time”

To watch in production order:

The image is copyrighted, but used here under  fair use guidelines. Owner/Creator Paramount Global  (was  ViacomCBS  and/or  Paramount Pictures  and/or  CBS Broadcasting, Inc. ) .

Share this:

• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Pingback: Star Trek in Chronological Order – Troy Press […] Detailed review—Star Trek: Planet, Monster, Romance of the Week. […]

7 Wonders: Architects Makes a Great Gift

5% of Americans Have Studied a Constructed […]

Featured Posts

Pbta moves for city and village encounters, customizing stonetop, osr spellcasting systems, astro basic, warm-up questions prior to a session, subscribe to blog via email.

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Email Address

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Monster of the Week: From One-Shot to Campaign

I ran the conclusion of  Ghoul’s Night Out  for my players, my  Monster of the Week  one-shot adventure that I prepared in  a previous post . They bested the monster and saved the would-be human sacrifices. Best of all, my players liked the premise so much that we agreed to a regular Monster of the Week game. This post I’m going to briefly discuss what worked and what didn’t from my prep. I will also explore how I can transition from a one-shot to a campaign. Do you GM Monster of the Week? Send me your tips and observations on Mastodon:  @ [email protected]

The Strong Start Delivered

Last time I prepared a confrontation with a group of cultists. The scene worked very well cinematically, and it set the tone I wanted. The cultists walked in after magically tracking one of the PCs to the team hideout. They questioned three PCs while the fourth whom they had tracked was in the bathroom. As tempers flared, everyone heard a toilet flush and the PC in question strolled into the middle of the room.

My players got a kick out of the scene. They dealt with the cultists creatively and after gathering some more information moved on to an assault on the cultists hideout.

The strong start not only engaged the table in the game but reminded the players of important plot points from the first session. So, big plus there.

New Table Tools

Last time, I ran the adventure pretty much from memory. I didn’t use a GM screen, either. While I’m generally good about improvising details, I found that I floundered on coming up with names when my players decided to talk to random people. This time I brought a sheet of random names that I ripped off from the white pages. I had it on the table in front of me and got to use it a few times.

I also made a mini GM screen, 8 inches high, with descriptions of the player moves and GM moves. This really helped me adjudicate dice rolls without getting buried in my notes. Also, I could leave my notes on the table in front of me instead of putting them inside a manila folder.

On the table in front of me I had the GM screen, the list of names, the adventure outline, and a GM copy of the area map. It wasn’t so much paper that I had to search to find anything.

Conversion to a Limited Campaign

My players told me they wanted to continue with Monster of the Week in the current setting. This means I need to get out of the one-shot mindset and make some changes to make a campaign. Specifically, this means coming up with a good plot arc to connect our subsequent four-or-so monster hunts. Once we solve the plot arc, we can retire the campaign.

Why limit the campaign to single plot arc? I like MotW all well and good, but it has some mechanical limits. In particular, once players make rolls with a +3 bonus or higher, their characters reliably succeed without complications. This is already happening at my table. One player started off with a +3 in weird and two of the three other players took ability score increases as their playbook advancements.

I can limit this by encouraging players to make rolls outside their character competencies, reminding them that a miss can make for a fun scenario, and they’ll earn XP to boot. Realistically though, they’re going to try to maximize their chances of success. It’s what the hunters are supposed to do.

A limited campaign will focus me on getting the players to a meaningful conclusion rather than have us play out episodes until the characters become too powerful for the game to hold. My meta-goal with this group is to complete our  Monster of the Week  campaign and then move on to another system like  Blades in the Dark  or  D&D . To get there I need to keep forward momentum.

Creating a Campaign Goal

The player characters are a band of monster hunters dedicated to protecting their hometown from things that go bump in the night. The general public doesn’t know about them. The police know about them but think they’re harmless eccentrics chasing shadows. Our first adventure,  Ghoul’s Night Out , ended with a return to the status quo. Let’s start by giving ourselves the liberty to upend the status quo and let the world run wild. The players may still want to keep the public ignorant of the unnatural threats out there, but I won’t scale the challenges to be so easily contained.

I like the thought of their hometown having some feature that attracts all the weirdness. Maybe a bunch of ley lines cross there and that just attracts stuff? Our game is set in coastal California, so perhaps there’s an Atlantis-like sunken city right off the coast that’s full of weird energies. Continuing with the California theme, maybe some forgotten expedition was transporting an arcane Olmec artifact up the coast and lost the dang thing. The artifact exudes a strange influence on the area which attracts weirdness. And so on.

Then it hit me,  all the above plus . The strange influences of each individual feature combined to weaken the fabric of reality and an eldritch horror is pushing though a widening rift. Boom. We’ve got our campaign goal–close the rift and prevent the horror from destroying the world.

Character Focused

Now that I have a campaign goal, I can focus each hunt leading up to it on one of my characters. I can use character hooks the players have provided as motivation to investigate and then reveal the campaign goal through loose ends.

For example, one of my players is playing the Wronged. He hates vampires because he said one seduced away his character’s fiancée. Sure, it’s an overplayed trope, but l bet we can work with it. Let’s connect this vampire to our Olmec artifact from before. The vampire began life as a conquistador who found the artifact. While trying to recover the artifact he was turned. After some vampire-ing around, he wound up in Alta California. Years later he commissioned the expedition that went to retrieve the artifact. The PC’s ex-fiancée can be the great-niece of the expedition leader. The vampire has been hunting for the artifact and she is the key to finding where the artifact went missing. When the party reaches the artifact they find ooze-y cosmic horrors around it.  Huh, where did those come from?

Okay. It’s a rough outline that needs work. The important thing is that it bridges character motivation and the campaign arc. However, it gives my session prep direction. As I prepare each session here, I’ll include a character spotlight and a campaign arc piece.

Next time we’re going to take a break from  Monster of the Week  and turn to Mophidius’s 2d20 system for  Star Trek Adventures . I’m playing in a STA campaign right now and wrote an adventure to run for my group when our GM wants to take a break. It’s a classic  Star Trek  bottle episode. I’ll give my thoughts on STA and share the adventure next time. If you want to chat about Monster of the Week campaign arcs or have tips for how to keep the game from becoming a boring string of full successes message me on Mastodon  @ [email protected]

Feature Image “Ghouls’ Night Out” by Fajareka Setiawan copyright 2021 Wizards of the Coast

Keep up to date with the Big Issue

The leading voice on life, politics, culture and social activism direct to your inbox.

'Star Trek teaches us we can be better than we are': Finding comfort and optimism in Star Trek

The world feels scary, unempathetic and dangerous right now, now is when we need Star Trek’s utopian vision of the future the most

William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy in episode 26, The Devil In the Dark, 1967. Image: Everett Collection Inc / Alamy Stock Photo

Star Trek is back soon, with the fifth and final season of Discovery launching on Paramount+. There will plenty of people who will revel in its dark and gritty take on the franchise, light years away from the goofy coloured jerseys and computers which explode when you ask them a riddle, which we remember from the 60s show. 

But as someone who recently rewatched everything from The Original Series (1966-1969) to Star Trek: Enterprise (2001-2005), the dark and gritty nature of Discovery makes it rather atypical of the Star Trek franchise, and it risks throwing away the very thing which made The Original Series so ground-breaking and beloved. 

Get the latest news and insight into how the Big Issue magazine is made by signing up for the Inside Big Issue newsletter

Take The Devil in the Dark , from the first season of Star Trek . This begins with Kirk and the Enterprise being called in to deal with a terrifying monster which has already killed 50 miners – seemingly a pretty standard-issue hunt-the-creature story. So far, so Boy’s Own adventure. Only Spock’s scientific curiosity about an organism which might be the last of its kind stands between our heroes and their bloodlust. But midway through comes the revelation that the monster is a mother protecting her eggs. Before the episode is over, Kirk is threatening to kill any miner who raises a hand to the thing, and in the end, he brokers a peace between the alien and the humans. The story is resolved through compassion and understanding rather than superior firepower. 

Look at what Star Trek was up against on US TV in the 1960s. If you wanted something other than cop shows and cowboy shows, your choice was the goofy Lost in Space , or the bleakness of The Twilight Zone. And the pattern continues through movies and TV shows of the 1970s and 1980s. If you want your science fiction exciting and fun, here’s Star Wars , where dozens of anonymous stormtroopers get slaughtered, but it’s all just larks. If you want your science fiction to play like serious drama, there’s 2001: A Space Odyssey , in which a psychotic computer murders four men without ever raising its chillingly level voice. 

Star Trek lives in this middle ground, where we aren’t assuming a dystopian future where everything is awful, but nor are we just playing everything for laughs either. When the show relaunched in the late 1980s as Star Trek: The Next Generation , original creator Gene Roddenberry laid down firm rules, which continued to be respected by his successors. Chief among them: no conflict between our regular characters. They are the best of the best and won’t succumb to petty personal vendettas. 

For many new scriptwriters, this was an insane directive. Drama lives in having characters with opposing viewpoints butt heads – and to be fair there are quite a few rather dull episodes in the first couple of years of The Next Generation . But over time, having to stick to this rule forced the writing team to find unexplored areas of narrative, and the results include all-time classic episodes like Ship in a Bottle , Darmok , The Inner Light or I, Borg . Star Trek teaches us that we can be better than we are, and in a world riven by conflict, it’s a useful lesson. 

• Star Trek: Picard is finally set to stun thanks to The Next Generation reunion in season 3
• Lea Thompson on directing Star Trek: Picard and her plan to make a Howard the Duck sequel

Later iterations of the franchise dealt with this in different ways. It’s a slightly weird quirk of fate that the series about characters hanging out in a shopping mall in space ( Deep Space Nine ) ended up being the one about the horrors of war, the pain of generational trauma, and the terrible things which people will do to obtain and cling on to power. Whereas the one about a tiny group of survivors stranded light years from home, desperately clinging on to the one small life-raft ( Voyager ), ended up being the one about spreading the Federation’s optimistic vision of the future to far reaches of the galaxy. 

So, it is with the current crop of shows. If the darker tone of Discovery isn’t for you, then the breezier Strange New Worlds may be a better fit for your tastes. Or if you think that Strange New Worlds has gone too far, with its cartoon-crossovers and characters bursting into song, then the pure nostalgia of the final series of Picard may be where you’ll feel most at home. 

But in all of its incarnations, there’s an optimism about the future which Star Trek always carries with it, and maybe precisely because the world feels scary, unempathetic and dangerous right now, now is when we need Star Trek ’s utopian vision of the future the most. I know that I was much happier watching and documenting 724 episodes of science fiction adventure than I was watching the news.  

Star Trek: Discovering the TV Series by Tom Salinksy is out now (Pen & Sword, £25). You can buy it from  The Big Issue shop  on Bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.  

This article is taken from The Big Issue magazine, which exists to give homeless, long-term unemployed and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income. To support our work buy a copy!

If you cannot reach  your local vendor , you can still click  HERE  to subscribe to The Big Issue or give a gift  subscription . You can also purchase one-off issues from  The Big Issue Shop  or The Big Issue app, available now from the  App Store  or  Google Play

• Author feature
• From the magazine

Support the Big Issue

Recommended for you

Dopesick star Kaitlyn Dever: 'I realised I can create change with the roles I choose'

Blue Lights co-creator Declan Lawn on 'massive responsibility of telling Belfast's stories'

Helen Lederer: 'There was no room for more women on TV in the 80s and 90s, the slots were taken'

This Town cast and crew on how unrest and disruption forges creative genius: 'Music is the heart'

Most popular.

Renters pay their landlords' buy-to-let mortgages, so they should get a share of the profits

Exclusive: Disabled people are 'set up to fail' by the DWP in target-driven disability benefits system, whistleblowers reveal

Cost of living payment 2024: Where to get help now the scheme is over

Strike dates 2023: From train drivers to NHS doctors, here are the dates to know

Get our free pet archive magazine special.

Screen Rant

Supernatural: 10 of the best monsters-of-the-week from the kripke-era.

Through seasons 1-5, Sam and Dean encounter some wild, terrifying, and brilliantly done monsters-of-the-week, the main style of Kripke-era seasons.

In the Kripke-era of  Supernatural , the first five seasons of the show,  Supernatural had many monster-of-the-week style episodes, something that became rarer as the series went on. These style of episodes rarely affected the overarching plot of the season; if anything, they would have a few moments of importance, but overall would usually be their contained story, and many of them were awesome.

RELATED: 10 Times Sam & Dean Were Possessed Or Controlled In Supernatural

Through seasons 1-5, Sam and Dean encounter some wild, terrifying, and brilliantly done monsters, with many of them standing out either on their own or because of their great episode, being fan favorites remembered long after Kripke left the show.

Bloody Mary

In the season 1 episode titled after the main monster of the episode, Sam and Dean encounter the Bloody Mary, a vengeful spirit who appeared to those with dark secrets when they spoke her name into a mirror three times.

The spirit would liquify the eyes of those looking into the mirror, causing internal bleeding and death. The episode continued the great start of the show, and Bloody Mary is definitely one of the most memorable one-episode villains of the show's first season. She does pop up more, though, in seasons 14 and 15 after Chuck releases the spirits from hell, a delightful call-back for long-time fans.

Similar to  Scooby-Doo, humans would sometimes be the cause of true evil in  Supernatural. They often were in service to a real monster, including the Vanir, who the citizens of Burkittsville somewhat worshiped as it possessed a scarecrow.

Being the embodiment of a North Pagan God, the Vanir rewarded sacrifice with wealth and health during bad times and was also fairly creepy in his season 1 episode "Scarecrow." Dean was the only brother hunting the Vanir before Sam came right at the death to save his big brother, and it is one of the best monsters-of-the-week style episodes of season 1.

Woman In White

The  Supernatural pilot all the way back in 2005 kicked the show off in a great way as fans are introduced to the Winchester brothers as they search for John Winchester , and to the first monster-of-the-week, the Woman In White.

A ghost who suffered romantic troubles such as unfaithful spouses during their life before taking her own life, the Woman in White kidnapped men (and even children) and killed them. Constance Welch was the particular Woman in White that Sam and Dean fended off in the pilot and was a memorable first foe for the newly reunited Winchester brothers.

Following the death of Jess, Sam agreed to join Dean in the search for their dad, leading them to a forest in Blackwater Ridge where they would hunt the Wendigo - another fan-favorite monster from Supernatural’s early days.

RELATED: 10 Characters Who Left Supernatural Too Soon

A former human transformed into a monster with superhuman abilities due to their cannibalism, Wendigos were deathly frightening and formidable creatures. The monster only appeared twice in the show, once in season 7 and in the second episode of the series. Fans wish there were more sightings of the monster whose name means “evil that devours,” but the creature made a big impact in its two appearances.

Werewolves in Supernatural  are not as prominent as the likes of vampires, but in the one appearance of the creature in the Kripke-era, “Heart,” (not including the shapeshifter in “Monster Movie”) a Werewolf gave audiences one of the best episodes of season 2.

Madison’s story in the episode was heartbreaking as she had a genuine connection with Sam, it was a doomed Supernatural  romance . The episode was one of the first and best to explore the humanity of monsters and the tragedy behind some of their stories. Madison was not the only Werewolf in the episode, of course, but she was certainly the main focus, and the creatures worked brilliantly.

Sam Winchester's fear of clowns is a hilarious running joke  for audiences and for Dean, but it also added a lot to the creepiness and terror that was induced by the Rakshasa, creatures from Hindu mythology who can shapeshift and turn invisible, and eat human flesh.

The creature is found in "Everybody Loves A Clown," the episode following the death of John Winchester death in season 2. The episode is solid, and the creature is a standout, being so intensely creepy. Them being in the form of a clown in the episode adds so much, playing on a fear many have, and it also showed the intelligence of the sickening creature, as they require permission to enter homes children's love of fare clowns made them easy targets.

Changelings

Children in  Supernatural often find themselves targeted by various monsters and creatures, including the Changelings, who replace children who are taken to feed on by the Mother Changeling.

RELATED: Friendships That Should Have Happened In Supernatural (But Didn't)

These replacements are evil, physically identical to the human children, but can be seen in their true form via reflections, and often act mechanical, allowing parents to deduce it is not their child. They only appear once in  Supernatural in the season 3 episode "The Kids Are Alright," the debut episode for Lisa and Ben Braeden, and a great monster-of-the-week episode at that.

Djinns were prominent throughout  Supernatural  but only appeared once in the Kripke-era, in the Led Zeppelin title inspired "What Is And What Should Never Be," and was a fantastic monster for the brothers to face.

Also known as Genies, Djinns fed on blood and were cave-dwelling hermits who could induce a comatose state in a human while sending them off to a dream-like state with powerful hallucinations. A Djinn did this will Dean, sending him to an apple-pie life, making for an immense episode.

Shapeshifter

Another prominent monster in the series who provided a handful of great episodes was the shapeshifter, a classic horror villain who found its way to three episodes in the amazing seasons 1, 2, and 4 of the Supernatural  Kripke-era .

Shapeshifters can take the form of any human and are probably the most human of any  Supernatural  monster, driven by human impulses and choice rather than the instinct of, say, a vamp. In "Skin," a shifter took the form of people's loved ones and killed them; in "Nightshifter," the shifter robbed banks using employees and killing them, and in the wild "Monster Movie," a shifter took the form of classic Hollywood monsters, killing victims as they would. An excellent trio of episodes from an excellent monster.

The Trickster turned out to be the archangel Gabriel, so calling him any old monster-of-the-week is a bit unfair. However, when he posed as the Trickster, his episodes were contained stories and absolutely brilliant ones at that.

"Tall Tales," "Mystery Spot," and "Changing Channels" are three of the very best episodes out there in the whole of  Supernatural , not just the Kripke-era, especially the latter two. Gabriel obviously was not a Trickster but posed convincingly. Warping reality in an often sick yet humorous manner, as well as being just about immortal with a craving for sugary treats, Gabriel/the Trickster ticked all these boxes and was phenomenal throughout the Kripke era.

NEXT:  5 Times Dean Winchester Did Something Evil Against His Will (& 5 Times He Did It On His Own)

• View history

The Horta were a sentient non-humanoid silicon cycle life form native to the planet Janus VI .

Horta anatomy was composed of a material similar to fibrous asbestos . Horta physiology was very different from the carbon-based lifeforms more commonly found in the galaxy . Horta were difficult to detect with tricorders , and were invulnerable to type 1 phasers , though they could be injured with an adjusted type 2 phaser . They fed on rock , and thus they were nourished just by tunneling. Horta tunneled through rock like most humanoids walked through air , moving with the aid of an extremely corrosive acid . They left perfectly round tunnels in their wake. This acid was so corrosive that it only left fragments of bone and teeth if used on a Human . Although Hortas did not evolve in an oxygen environment, they seemed able to exist in it for extended periods of time .

The Horta species possessed an unusually long life span . Every fifty thousand years , all of the Horta died out except for one, the so-called mother Horta , who then watched the eggs until they hatched , and mothered and protected them. Horta eggs were spherical in shape, and they seemed to mostly consist of silicon , aside from a few trace elements . These silicon nodules were stored in a hatchery / nursery inside the Vault of Tomorrow which was accessed through the Chamber of the Ages .

A Horta-created tunnel

It was in the midst of one of these temporary phases of extinction that the Federation colonized Janus VI in the 2210s . The mother Horta tolerated the Federation presence up until the miners established a new, lower level in 2267 , where they first encountered Horta eggs. Thinking them nothing more than balls of useless silicon, the miners' automated equipment destroyed thousands of them. The mother Horta defended her children by carrying out actions of sabotage and murder against the Janus VI colony .

It was only when Commander Spock of the USS Enterprise mind melded with the mother Horta that he was able to determine that the Horta was actually an intelligent lifeform. In fact, before the discovery of the Horta, silicon-based life had been thought a fantasy by Federation scientists .

The mother Horta reached an accord with the miners, who were distressed at the destruction they had caused. The miners would leave the Horta young alone on the lower levels once they began hatching, while the Horta would use their abilities to locate and construct access passages to choice mineral deposits for the miners. Vanderburg, himself, later decided that " The Horta aren't so bad... once you get used to their appearance. " likewise, the Mother Horta felt, according to Spock, " that our appearance is revolting, but she thought she could get used to it. " Spock further added that " The Horta is a remarkably sensitive and intelligent creature with impeccable taste, " after sensing that she found his ears to be " the most attractive Human characteristic of all. "

As the Enterprise departed the planet, the first baby Horta hatched and began tunneling rapidly. ( TOS : " The Devil in the Dark ")

A Horta (above, center)

In 2268 , when considering the possibility that the rocks on the planet they were investigating were alive, Sulu reminded Kirk of " Janus VI, [and] the silicon creatures. " McCoy then further reminded Sulu and Kirk that their instruments had registered the Horta as lifeforms, unlike the rocks they were surrounded by now. ( TOS : " That Which Survives ")

Information about the Horta was displayed by a computer , as an okudagram graphic depicting Comparative Xenobiology , in Keiko O'Brien 's schoolroom on Deep Space 9 . ( DS9 : " A Man Alone ", " The Nagus " okudagram )

Appendices [ ]

Background information [ ].

The German word "Hort" (male gender, der Hort) means "hoard" (as in hoard of treasure or supplies) derived from Latin "hortus", garden . Recently, the word's meaning is extended to include "all-day nursery" – a place where you "hoard" children (hence cognate to Kinder garten ), fitting after-the-fact the role the Horta had.

The Horta was played by Janos Prohaska . Aside from playing the creature, Prohaska also designed and created the "suit" for the creature as Producer Robert H. Justman clarified,

"We made a "spec" [note: industry idiom for an unsolicited pitch without any guarantees] deal with Janos. If he came up with a really great creature for a script Gene Coon was writing, we'd rent it and hire him to play the part. Janos was back within a week's time with his custom-designed creature. It was a large pancake-shaped glob of gook with a thickened raised center and fringe around its circumference. It sure didn't look like much. As Janos took the glob out of sight to put it on, Gene Coon raised an objection "Bob, why are wasting time with this?" Suddenly, the blob skittered around the corner, making straight for us. Then it stopped, curiously, backed away, and rotated in place. The blob gathered itself up, quivered, made a whimsical up-and-down movement, grunted, and skittered away again – leaving behind a large, round white "egg". Coon was dumbfounded. He watched the creature giving birth. And when the creature suddenly turned and scurried back to nuzzle its "child", Gene was sold. "Great!" he exclaimed, "It's perfect! Just what we need." Then he excitedly hastened back to his office to finish writing the script. "Gene Coon's "The Devil in the Dark" became one of Star Trek 's most famous episodes. And Janos Prohaska played his own creation, one of Star Trek 's most famous creatures, the highly imaginative and custom-designed mother Horta." ( Inside Star Trek: The Real Story , pp. 214-215)

What neither Justman nor Coon had realized at the time however, was that Prohaska had actually already created the creature previously for the original ABC series The Outer Limits , first appearing in the final episode, and that he had only slightly modified the rubber costume with veins and the "fringe" for its Star Trek appearance. ( Star Trek: The Magazine  Volume 3, Issue 9 , p. 73) Titled "The Probe" (with Peter Mark Richman ), the Outer Limits episode's storyline was about survivors of a plane crash in the Pacific waking up to find themselves (and their life raft) on the floor of an alien spacecraft sent to collect terrestrial lifeforms . In this episode, broadcast in January 1965 , the future Mrs. Horta was performing yeoman service as a giant cold germ threatening the hapless Earth people. ( The World of Star Trek , 3rd ed., p. 74)

In an interview with John Ellis for the DVD commentary of the Steve Canyon episode "The Search" for the DVD collection Bob Hoy revealed to Ellis that he actually was in the Horta costume in the same episode (in certain shots as a "stunt performer") and that Janos Prohaska, who created and also wore the costume, was a long time friend and coworker. [1]

According to the audio commentary for " How Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth ", David Wise mentions that for Kukulkan's zoo , " If you were to read the original script, we had animals, various life forms from earlier episodes of the live action Star Trek . There was a tribble , a couple of tribbles in one cage, there was a Horta from "Devil in the Dark" [sic] in another cage, they were supposed to be reference, the various menagerie of characters who had appeared in earlier Star Trek s. "

A Horta was referenced in the first-draft script for " In Thy Image " – the story that gradually developed into Star Trek: The Motion Picture – in which Kirk reminded Dr. McCoy, now a veterinarian , of the Horta having been "patched up" by McCoy using silicone cement. ( Star Trek Phase II: The Lost Series , p. 125)

Two days before filming of the Federation Council scenes in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home , it was requested that one of the aliens present in the setting be a Horta ambassador . As notice of the request was given so soon before the scenes were shot, however, the creation of a Horta in time for filming was an impossibility. Thus, the Horta failed to make an appearance in the film. ( text commentary , Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (Special Edition) DVD )

Some new CGI visual effects were created for the Horta, in the remastered edition of "The Devil in the Dark", for the 40th anniversary of the original series. Notably, the Horta emerging/tunneling through a particular rock face, when Captain Kirk encountered the Horta mother on his own, was a combination of new and original footage.

Apocrypha [ ]

According to several novels and comic books by Diane Duane , there is a Horta crew member on the Enterprise , Ensign Naraht ( β ), one of the several thousand children of the Horta who appears in "The Devil in the Dark". In particular, Naraht plays a critical role in The Romulan Way . According to that novel, Horta who enlist in Starfleet must be regularly spray-coated with teflon, since oxygen -based atmospheres are highly caustic to silicon-based lifeforms . Devil's Bargain has them cooperating with the Federation mining colony Vesbius to de-stabilize an asteroid headed for the planet so the Enterprise can safely destroy what is left of it. Some of the Horta ask for Kirk's recommendation to Starfleet Academy . The book also suggests that Horta can live in the vacuum of space for a short period of time.

The novel Articles of the Federation , by Keith R.A. DeCandido , has the Horta as members of the Federation as of 2380 and are represented by one Councilor Sanaht ( β ). Further appearances include the Greg Cox and John Gregory Betancourt 's DS9 novel, Devil in the Sky . Hortas were also mentioned in The Lost Years .

In the Pocket TNG novel Dyson Sphere , it is revealed that Starfleet has starships crewed entirely by Horta. These ships are of standard design, with nearly all amenities removed, and are filled with solid stone, which the Horta can reshape as they see fit.

The series of Star Trek: Titan novels also has a male Horta character, Chwolkk ( β ), who serves as an engineer on the USS Titan .

In the MMORPG Star Trek Online , in the mission "Mine Enemy", a Horta kills Tal Shiar officers and burns the words "NO KILL I, NO KILL I" into a cave floor with acid. If the player observes this, he or she will get the accolade: NO KILL I. The mission reward is a Horta hatchling pet that follows the player when activated from the inventory. Horta are also seen being employed for mining operations, as a player's fleet dilithium mine has Horta miners working in environments hostile to humanoid lifeforms. There you can also purchase Horta duty officers for your ship. Also, during the numerous anniversary events, a Horta is one of many creatures that players could be temporarily turned into by the visiting Q should they annoy him, or just by asking if he really is that powerful.

The short story "Guardians" from the anthology book Strange New Worlds VII featured a number of Horta being relocated to the Guardian of Forever 's planet to protect it from races or beings who might seek to abuse its powers.

Devil's Bargain provides some insight into Horta culture. The mother Horta is referred to as the All Mother. In addition, Horta belong to clans based on their abilities and roles. Horta names are descriptive of the individual's strengths, abilities, or sometimes bestowed on them by others.

In the Pocket TOS novel The Latter Fire , the Horta's taxonomic name is given as Janus hominidae .

External link [ ]

• Horta at Memory Beta , the wiki for licensed Star Trek works
• 2 ISS Enterprise (NCC-1701)

Cookie Preferences

Roll20 Marketplace Product

Monster of the Week: Core Book

Package: A combination of art and adventure content. More detail on each item is below.

This Package Includes:

Monster of the Week Token Markers

Monster of the Week Art Pack

Monster of the Week

Monster of the Week: Base Module

MotW Addon: Dream Away the Time

MotW Addon: Damn Dirty Apes

MotW Addon: Mongolian Death Worm Attack!

MotW Addon: Haunted House Story

Most people don’t believe in monsters, but you know the truth. They’re real, and it’s your task to bring them down. Monster of the Week brings that adventure to life.

Monster of the Week is a standalone action-horror RPG for 3-5 people. Hunt high school beasties a la Buffy the Vampire Slayer , travel the country to bring down unnatural creatures like the Winchester brothers of Supernatural , or head up the government investigation like Mulder and Scully.

This book contains everything you need to tackle Bigfoot, collar a chupacabra, and drive away demons. In it you’ll find:

• Character creation rules to bring your hunter to life and create a cohesive hunting team.
• Eight simple moves to investigate and deal with monsters.
• An easy-to-use system based on the popular Apocalypse World RPG.
• Thorough mystery-creation tools and two ready-to-play mysteries.
• Introductory mysteries.
• Example monsters like Balkan vampires, werewolves, and other-dimensional creatures.
• Hunter types like the Crooked and the Spell-Slinger.
• Complete core book rules compendium.
• Base module to set up your campaign, filled with GM tools.
• Four mysteries as addons your can pull into your campaign.
• Art pack with over 200 tokens and a choice of page backgrounds.
• Token markers to track character status.
• Rollable tables for countdown clocks and for customized backgrounds to progressively reveal each mystery.
• Curated playlists of 18 ambient soundscapes, 20 mood music pieces, and 44 sound effects.
• Animated walkthroughs showing how to use the GM Tools.

Grab the fireplace poker and get your spell book. That monster’s going down!

You might also like...

License: Roll20 End User License Agreement (Personal Use Only, Do Not Distribute)

Roll20 ® is a Registered Trademark of Roll20, LLC. All rights reserved.

• APPLETV+ MOVIES
• MARVEL MOVIES
• NETFLIX MOVIES
• SONY MARVEL
• STAR WARS MOVIES
• ABBOTT ELEMENTARY
• STAR TREK SERIES
• MARVEL SERIES
• PERCY JACKSON
• THE BAD BATCH
• THE MANDALORIAN
• 9-1-1: LONE STAR
• DOOM PATROL
• HOUSE OF THE DRAGON
• THE LAST OF US
• NIGHT COURT
• SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE
• HEARTSTOPPER
• STRANGER THINGS
• THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY
• CRIMINAL MINDS: EVOLUTION
• YELLOWSTONE
• LORD OF THE RINGS SERIES
• THE SUMMER I TURNED PRETTY
• RESIDENT ALIEN
• ALL AMERICAN
• SUPERMAN & LOIS
• HARRY POTTER
• LORD OF THE RINGS
• CREATION ENTERTAINMENT
• NEW YORK COMIC CON
• RHODE ISLAND COMIC CON
• ROCKWOOD MUSIC FESTIVAL
• SAN DIEGO COMIC-CON

It’s the end of an era. Not only is Supernatural the show over, having aired its finale in 2020, but now Monster of the Week — a weekly “creepy but necessary” podcast covering each and every episode of The CW series — has reached the end of its regular run as well.

Hopefully, fans will hear more Supernatural related talk from MOTW ’s hosts, Chris Mosher and Jeremy Greer, on special occasions in the future. But, for now, regular Thursday releases have drawn to a close.

A moment of silence for fans, please. There are only so many endings one fandom can take during a pandemic!   

There are many pop culture podcasts out there, accounting for every taste and opinion on almost every kind of media imaginable. Supernatural especially, with its long run and worldwide audience, has spawned quite a few of them. MOTW achieved something pretty impressive in relation to many of its peers, though: in February 2022, MOTW released “ Non Consensual Pluck ,” a reaction to the last episode of Supernatural season 15—meaning that MOTW had finally covered every episode aired during the show’s decade and a half long run. As far as the hosts, their devoted fans, and extensive internet research can ascertain, and without any evidence to the contrary, MOTW is the first podcast to have managed the sizable feat.

Even more remarkable than the runtime of the podcast is its sheer popularity among fans of the show. On Apple Podcasts , MOTW is currently tied for the highest-rated Supernatural podcast with Supernatural Then and Now , a podcast hosted by Rob Benedict (Chuck Shurley/God) and Richard Speight Jr. (Gabriel) from the cast of Supernatural itself. Not bad going for a podcast hosted by two guys who didn’t even interact with the wider fandom of the show before they launched it!

To commemorate Chris and Jeremy’s achievements with MOTW , they talked with Nerds and Beyond about their beginnings, their jokes, and what they have coming up next.

Note: This interview was edited for clarity.

Nerds & Beyond: First of all, I have to congratulate you on making it all the way to the end of the show, and then take you right back to the beginning and ask you when you started watching Supernatural and what drew you to it in the first place, as viewers?

Chris: I think just the premise! I’m a big horror fan, and Supernatural just appealed to the side of me that likes those things, it’s a horror show about two dudes fighting demons, hunting ghosts—what could be cooler? I was a teenager when I started watching it, my best friend got me into it. We weren’t cool, hunky guys but when we were watching Supernatural we could kind of feel like we were, and live vicariously through them. I honestly didn’t realize some of this until we recorded our finale episode, but it was a tough time in my life going from high school to college and Supernatural became something I could rely on and come back to. It was comforting but it was also just kick-ass, it had awesome characters and storylines and monsters and everything I liked.

Jeremy: I was there day one, I would watch with my wife — it was appointment viewing every week! I think what drew me to it was probably the same as Chris, you had the two hunky guys hunting vampires and the Americana kind of vibe, and all the classic rock going on. It was just cool — at the time, I think it seemed like a modern version of The X-Files without any aliens.

Nerds & Beyond: So how did you go from separate, general audience fans to hosting such a beloved podcast?

Jeremy: We had a DM!

Chris: We did! On my old show, my co-host said we should start a Supernatural podcast, but he was completely kidding and did not want to do that. But Jeremy heard that and was like, “Hey man, what’s up? You like that show too? Maybe we should talk about it.” I’d mostly been kidding about the podcast, but before we knew it we’d picked out a name and talked ourselves into doing it. And here we are 5 years later!

Jeremy: I mean, yeah, that’s it. I think the first episode, you can kind of tell when you listen to it that we were just like, “This is a goofy thing that we’re doing!” It’s crazy to think how seriously we came to take the show—and that kind of came naturally as we watched because we wanted to do a good job by this thing that we genuinely like a lot.

Nerds & Beyond: And now you have hundreds of episodes and a dedicated fanbase, all from that. How does it feel to get the feedback that you do now, compared to when you first started?

Chris: It’s really gratifying. Recently people wrote in for our finale coverage. To have people talk about things that we said five years ago and to be able to track how much we’ve changed even just in relation to our opinions on Supernatural , it’s really cool because I don’t think we would have realized it without that feedback.

Jeremy: Yeah. Just seeing the numbers start to elevate, seeing people starting to talk about us on random social media sites, live chatting about the episodes as we released them—that level of feedback you get as more and more people start listening is intense.

Chris: When we started out, we knew other people from our online communities, and it felt like that was our audience: people who knew us. As it started to build, suddenly there were people talking about us in places we had never looked before—there was a whole thing going on with Tumblr that we never even realized. We started seeing the numbers go up and we were like, “Holy crap, people are actually listening!”

Nerds & Beyond: And now you even have your own in-jokes about everything from characters not knowing how pregnancy works to Richard Speight…

Chris: [laughs] To set the record straight on the Richard Speight thing—sometimes we got it right, sometimes we got it wrong. Sometimes it was Speight, sometimes it was Spite. People would correct us, and we got so in our heads about it that even when we said it right, we weren’t sure. And then even when we’d settled on it and knew it was Speight, we continued to keep saying it wrong because that was just the joke at that point, and that’s who we are as people…

Jeremy: One of the best things you can do as a podcaster is purposely mispronounce things to annoy people. [laughs] It’s a lot of fun. It just became a running joke. We did the same thing with Rowena — I called her Welsh or Irish or something, just picked a different accent for her every time. And one thing I really appreciate about Chris as a co-host is that he is willing to just run with me on a joke for as long as I care to take it.

Chris: Well, Jeremy, you’re the same, otherwise it wouldn’t work! The best thing about these jokes is that we make them and then we move on, talk about something else, and forget about them. Then they go out there to a wider audience and they bring them back to us, and we’re like. “Wait, what, a lizard with a—I said that?!”

Nerds & Beyond: So, now that Supernatural is over, can you share what’s next?

Jeremy: We can! We’re launching a new podcast covering BBC’s Merlin, called Still His Kingdom Keeps, where we’ll be doing the exact same thing as with MOTW and going episode by episode . We’ve recorded a few already, and it’s wild going from how intense and dramatic season 15 of Supernatural is to how bright and easy and loose Merlin season 1 is. It’s just about some goofy kids who all want to flirt with each other, it’s awesome.

Chris: We talked a lot for years about what we wanted to do after Supernatural because we knew we didn’t want to stop talking to each other on a podcast. Two years ago, I hadn’t even heard of Merlin, but I found it on Netflix and it reminded me of the way I feel about Supernatural . It’s a different vibe, but there was something about it. And it seems like a lot of our community are into the show too. I don’t think it’s what anyone expected, but it seems like the perfect fit.  

Jeremy: For MOTW , we’ll be keeping that as our Supernatural base of operations. We’ve got some ideas for some bonus content, some interviews, and when The Winchesters come out we’ll cover that as well.

Chris and Jeremy’s new podcast Still His Kingdom Keeps will be available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, and most other podcast platforms.

• monster of the week
• supernatural

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

‘9-1-1’: when is the next episode airing, bring ‘the boy and the heron’ home this summer, disney’s ‘mufasa: the lion king’ teaser trailer released, ’walker’: season 4, episode 7 “hold me now” synopsis released, ‘black butler’ english dub cast returns for public school arc, ‘tracker’: first look at jensen ackles as russell, synopsis for season 1, episode 12 “off the books” released, ‘tracker’: synopsis released for season 1, episode 11 “beyond the campus walls”, ‘the rookie’: synopsis released for season 6, episode 8 “punch card”, jensen ackles to appear on cbs’ ‘tracker’, ‘walker’ recap: season 4, episode 4 “insane b.s. and bloodshed”, related articles, ‘supernatural’ spooky picture book coming soon, ‘jake and chill’ with jake abel: more than just a film screening, ‘underwater’: listen to the trailer for podcast series starring jason derulo & alexandra shipp, ‘supernatural’ cast and crew hold picket event for sag and wga strike.

Terms of Service | Privacy Policy © 2024 - Nerds and Beyond. All Rights Reserved. Made with Newspaper Theme.

Privacy Overview

• Show Spoilers
• Night Vision
• Sticky Header
• Highlight Links

Follow TV Tropes

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MonsterOfTheWeek

Monster of the Week

Edit locked.

Episodes where the characters fight a villain who is expeditiously defeated at the end, never to be dealt with again. Essentially, the Monster of the Week serves as the Big Bad of a single episode. Can be seen as the complete antithesis of a Story Arc , or a Story Arc compressed into one episode. Sometimes, use of a plot element like Arc Welding can bring together what appear to be unrelated threats, but other times they are established as being minions of the ultimate Big Bad from the start.

The term (a play on Movie of the Week) was originally coined by the writing staff of The Outer Limits (1963) , which sought to distinguish itself from its biggest competitor, The Twilight Zone (1959) , by promising viewers a new monster every episode. Out of its 49 episodes, only around 8 twisted or outright eschewed the formula. note  "The Man Who Was Never Born" (where the "monster" is the protagonist), "The Hundred Days of the Dragon", "The Borderland", "Controlled Experiment" (where the central characters are two martians with completely human appearances and a time control device on hand, and they aren't evil), both parts of "The Inheritors", "The Form of Things Unknown", and "Demon with a Glass Hand".

Variations crop up from time to time, though the most generic term is "Villain of the Week". The 4400 and Smallville , for example, are sometimes discussed in terms of the "Freak of the Week". Mystery of the Week is the detective series version of this trope.

Sometimes, the monsters get ridiculous , especially in fillers , where they are almost always themed after the plot of the episode. Futari wa Pretty Cure had a giant vacuum cleaner early in its run, for example; Digimon Adventure , a walking garbage dump.

This actually is not a bad thing. Monster of the Week (and perhaps Monster Munch ) can be used to establish characters or setting. Or perhaps lead to a much bigger Story Arc - such as deliberately showing the characters developing as they have to learn new tactics to overcome their foes, sustain injuries from more powerful monsters, or even setting up things such as He Who Fights Monsters . Additionally, some shows that use this formula have no wider plot whatsoever, and do not need to, since the core "defeat the villain" episodic plot can be more than enough to maintain audience engagement as long as the plots themselves remain interesting.

It's actually Older Than Print ... several pieces of old mythologies about folk heroes can be interpreted as a recurring Monster of the Week.

Sub-Trope of One-Shot Character . Often used in collaboration with Adventure Towns , may or may not be Monogender Monsters . See also Robeast , Monster of the Aesop , and Single Specimen Species . Contrast Monster Mash , Rogues Gallery and Villain Exclusivity Clause .

See Continuity Creep and Not So Episodic , for heavy overlap.

• Live-Action TV

    open/close all folders 

• Akame ga Kill! : The first few arcs center around Night Raid offing disgraceful elements of the Empire one by one.
• Akiba's Trip : Each episode focuses on a particular hobby, which the villain of the week's scheme coincidentally revolves around.
• This is the one of the recurring criticism behind Aldnoah.Zero . After the seemingly promising first three episodes, the technical aspect of its slow-paced combat slowly thrown away in favour of introducing (and defeating) more and more Kataprakths at least per one to two episodes, ensuring more mecha-action in every weeks. Even moreso in the second season onwards.
• This gets played with in Akazukin Chacha , as, on occasion, one of the monsters would be brought back to fight Chacha again rather than just making a single appearance.
• In Angels of Death , Rachel and Zack progress through a tower that is managed by a group of serial killers whom they will need to face off against on each floor.
• Inverted in Assassination Classroom . Koro-sensei is the Villain Protagonist of the assassination side of the plot, and in each story he foils an assassination attempt made by a different student, teacher, or character from outside the classroom.
• Bleach started out like this, with Ichigo fighting a different hollow each chapter. Though after Rukia got taken back to Soul Society, it became more Story Arc focused. Even during the Arrancar arc, he and his allies duel with Lieutenants, Captains, Arrancars, etc, all count as part of this.
• Cells at Work! has some elements of this in early volumes, with many chapters revolving around the immune cells having to deal with some new pathogen or other threat.
• Chainsaw Man : Each of the main arcs has the Devil Hunters encountering a major Devil.
• With the exception of the series' recurring antagonist Vicious , most Cowboy Bebop episodes centered around a single villain or group of villains that was never heard from again after the end of the episode (some were two-parters).
• The anime Dai-Guard hangs a lampshade on this one by having scientists predict that the conditions necessary for the alien giant monster invaders to appear will repeat themselves roughly once every week.
• Devil May Cry: The Animated Series : Dante would battle a demon each episode. In the first episode, he spared a demon he considered too weak, this comes back to bite him once said demon becomes the last opponent in the final episode .
• In the case of Digimon Tamers , this is generally held to be what killed the show's American ratings as a true Big Bad was not introduced until the trip to the DigiWorld 24 episodes in.
• Digimon Frontier states that most all monsters are sub races of Digimon, save a few, from the start.
• Dororo (2019) follows this, with Hyakkimaru battling a demon while gaining one of his body parts back.
• Dragon Ball GT : In an interesting display of symmetry, the show used this format in the Black Star Saga (the first arc) and the Shadow Dragon Saga (the final arc).
• In the Tournament of Power Arc of Dragon Ball Super , there are episodes that generally involve fighters outside of Universe 6 and 7 that never get heard from again after they are taken out. For instance, one episode pits three Universe 4 warriors against Master Roshi, while one episode pits two assassin warriors in an episode focused on Tien. Even though they are introduced at the start of the tournament, they don't get any real introduction until their respective episodes.
• The Jyarei Monsters from Eto Rangers . This is a variant of the trope, however: they disguise themselves as characters of the Novel Worlds, so before the Eto Rangers can do battle they first have to use the Revealing Mirror on the disguised Jyarei to get them to reveal their true form.
• Figure 17 Tsubasa & Hikaru plays this completely straight, although there is strong continuity as well. By the end of the series the monsters don't even look different from each other — they just get slightly upgraded powers. This does become less prominent as the plot goes on, however, as emphasis shifts toward Tsubasa and Hikaru's relationship, with some episodes not featuring a Maguar at all, and others being dedicated to particularly large and important, multi-episode fights.
• Fist of the North Star 's Kenshiro regularly faced off against villains of the week, often with some weird Nanto or Hokuto-derived power that he had to overcome, moreso in the anime than in the manga, and the series varied between these and genuine story arcs.
• Fullmetal Alchemist played this for the first volume before going into the main plot (which it would keep through the entire series); interestingly it was still only one of the chapters of the first volume that didn't affect the story in any way. Likewise, some early episodes of the 2003 anime adaptation had a version of this: if there's a plot-important character in the episode we have not seen before, he is probably the villain of the week. The main exception to this rule is Rose. 'Course, a fair share of these episodes turned out to be important to the plot later.
• Played straight in GaoGaiGar with the Zonders, though taking things in canon time passage it could more likely be considered the "monster-of-the-half-a-week."
• GeGeGe no Kitarō uses this for every adaptation with Yokais . While the first four animes used the format with no intricate plot, the 2007 and 2018 series use it with an ongoing Myth Arc .
• Played straight by Genesis of Aquarion , though at first the monsters were just regular Cherubim Soldiers with some kind of new ability that the team had to find a way to overcome by using lessons from earlier in the episode to unlock a new attack.
• The Getter Robo series did this a lot. The original, G , Go , and to an extent New all used this trope. Even the crossover movies were monsters of the week.
• Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex has two types of episode: "Stand-Alone" episodes that deal with a one-shot villain or case, and "Complex" episodes that advance the overall Story Arc of the season.
• In Guardian Fairy Michel , every episode has a fairy turned into a monster that the heroes must stop and purify.
• Hellsing Ultimate : Each episode had the Millennium Lieutenants with their overconfidence thinking they're a match for Hellsing... before Alucard tears them to shreds.
• Inuyasha was this for nearly every episode outside the last anime story arc, usually having some demon or monster getting their hands on a jewel shard. Once the manga got past the point of the anime ending, it changed up a little bit. The sequel series Yashahime: Princess Half-Demon also goes with this, with a new monster battled while also exploring the Half-Demon Princesses' relation and past.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure began this in Stardust Crusaders . As the heroes go on their journey to defeat the Big Bad ; a Stand User, sometimes two, shows up to eliminate them. The previous two Parts were more arc-based.
• Kekkaishi follows this trope, with a strange new Ayakashi or two attacking the Karasumori site every night. But it's justified through the actual behavior of the Ayakashi, the motives of more dangerous ones, and the steady plans of the Kokuboro.
• Kekko Kamen : Every chapter had the eponymous heroine battling a sexual deviant hired as a "punishing teacher" by Toenail of Satan . A running gag in the work was that most often than not the "teachers" were parodies of other characters i.e the crew of Cyborg 009 reimagined as members of a tailoring department.
• Kemono Jihen : The Inugami Detective Agency handles cases to exterminate Kemono, supernatural creatures akin to the monsters of lore when they cause trouble in the city.
• Kill la Kill plays with this trope a bit. In the first four episodes, Ryuko fights three minor Club Presidents who have all the makings of this trope- only stopping to try to skip right to Satsuki herself between the second and third. However, once Ryuko beats the third, she gets strong enough to reduce her fight with another Club President to a short Curb-Stomp Battle and promptly finishes off the rest in a montage.
• Kinnikuman first began this way, Monster Extermination arc, before it became the Professional Wrestling series it became famous for.
• Nightmare/eNeMeE in Kirby: Right Back at Ya! would provide King Dedede with a new monster with which to try to kill Kirby just about every episode. Naturally, Dedede is just too cheap to buy more than one at any one time. He did go into debt buying them. eNeMeE actually had to send a monster to collect the debt without him realizing (at first), though it still ended up being defeated. Some of the monsters were from the games, like the Ice Dragon and Mumbies, but others weren't.
• Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha started out like this, then Fate intervened . Even before that she collected some Jewel Seeds off-screen and several per episode.
• Both parodied and played straight in Magical Project S , which has Pixy Misa summoning a new "Love-Love Monster" in half of the episodes. The show and its characters are quite aware of both the futility of these creations (as the incantation of "Calling Mistakes" suggests) and their formulaic nature (in an episode where Misa introduces a small army of them, Sammy dryly says "I've seen all those already").
• Mega Man NT Warrior goes with this, each episode involves Lan and the others dealing with an evil Net Navi and their operator.
• My-HiME runs like this: The heroic girls (Himes) wield weapons and CHILD s to fight off monsters called Orphans threatening their school. After a Wham Episode midway, the formula continues, except that this time, it's the CHILDs who are lined up on the chopping block as the Himes engage in a battle royale where There Can Only Be One .
• Averted in Shin Mazinger , probably because it stuck more closely to the original manga. Dr. Hell never just sends one monster out into battle, and usually has backup plans should his monsters fail.
• Mob Psycho 100 : Early on, Mob and Reigen perform exorcisms on various ghosts and spirits causing trouble. Mob would soon battle with agents from Claw .
• Mobile Fighter G Gundam is THE best example in Gundam , because this was the entire point behind the series, to draw on the monster of the week fanbase, or more specifically the robot of the week fanbase, because that was how most robot shows were done prior to Gundam .
• SD Gundam Force did something like this during early on. Basically, the Dark Axis' Quirky Miniboss Squad would use a Control Horn on a robot in Neotopia, such as a swan ferry or a train, turning it from a helpful Mobile Citizen into a dangerous menace, and it would be the Gundam Force's job to destroy the Horn. According to the Zako Zako Hour , the Dark Axis (or at least Zapper's squad) were not very good at making new weapons, so they have to steal everything. This stopped after Episode 9 as the Dark Axis began sending in better warriors to attack Neotopia.
• Moriarty the Patriot starts out like this before Sherlock Holmes shows up and the Continuity Creep takes over, with each "Monster" of the week being yet another noble that the Moriarty brothers are planning to murder.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion also started like this. From the 13th Angel's attack on, however, even though each monster is still gone at the end of the episode that introduced it, every mental scar left behind by the monster's attack remains, building up and taking its toll over time. Evangelion 's cast is on its last legs by the time the 17th Angel kicks the bucket. Cue The End of Evangelion .
• One-Punch Man has this in spades. There's a chance there will be a monster to beat at least once per arc. Trope gets exaggerated, when Monster Assocation is introduced, with multiple monsters appearing for sometimes even few seconds just to be killed.
• In Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt , the main duo occasionally battle a renegade demon causing mischief around the city, though they're somewhat more outlandish than usual.
• Phantom Quest Corp. is comedy/horror sitcom style series which follows a case-by-case format (referred to as "Incident Files" ). Each of its 4 episodes are its own stand alone adventure, complete with a different villain, or supernatural horror.
• Pokémon: The Series is well known for this. Some Pokémon get to be the monster of the week multiple times . Within the first 24 episodes, Gastly was monster of the week twice : when he was impersonating a statuified woman, and as part of the Lavender Town episode with its evolutions.
• For a while in Popcorn Avatar , this is how many of the Asura and their avatars appear in front of Kurando.
• In The Powerpuff Girls anime adaptation Powerpuff Girls Z , the Powerpuff Girls tended to fight one-shot antagonists created by the black Chemical Z rays when they weren't fighting any of their traditional adversaries. They often only appeared for one episode because their episodes always ended with the monster either being permanently returned to normal by Professor Utonium or having a Heel–Face Turn . The anime's interpretation of Him also created some one-shot villains by exposing random people, plants, and inanimate objects to dark particles he released throughout the city.
• One notable example from Doki Doki Pretty Cure . The Greater-Scope Villain and True Final Boss is the final Monster, since he was only indirectly responsible to the plot and was never the Big Bad . He even gets defeated in the same way like any other.
• This trope gets averted in Star★Twinkle Pretty Cure , where the villains just use Mooks instead. Then it gets double averted when they actually do start using monsters called Nottoreiga in Episode 6. Even so, they are shaping to be less commonly used than the other Monsters of the Week due to the way they're required to be summoned: the bad guy needs to capture a Star Color Pen to corrupt it into a Dark Pen and then use it to steal the imagination of the Victim of the Week to call forth a Nottoreiga. Given that the Precures will be getting most of the Star Color Pens first, this leaves the villains with fewer chances to employ this trope. Eventually, the series settled on with only Aiwarn being able to summon Nottoreiga. After Aiwarn went AWOL after one too many defeats, not new Nottoreiga have appeared in the series. The villains went back to employing mooks and giant mooks to attack the Precures.
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica starts out like this. The format gets dropped before the halfway mark. One such monster manages to kill off a major character in the third episode .
• Played with and used straight by RahXephon . The Dolems mainly show up on a once-a-week basis, although some of them survive their initial appearance and go on to reappear later.
• The majority of Martial Arts and Crafts opponents in Ranma ½ ended up like this, from the comical and ridiculous (Sentaro Daimonji of the Martial Arts Tea Ceremony School, Picolet Chardin of La Belle France School ) to the serious and dramatic ( Prince Herb , Ryu Kumon , Saffron). Then the anime took it above and beyond with outlandish rivals of the week who used toys, eggs, calligraphy, or even crepes . Only rivals who had preexisting relationships with the cast, such as Ryouga, Mousse, and Ukyou, were given the chance to stick around and become regular characters.
• This is the basic structure of RIN-NE so far, albeit longer than most of the examples on this page — most cases take two or three chapters to solve.
• Rosario + Vampire started as your typical Unwanted Harem monster of the week manga, until it became focused on more serious and involved story arcs. The anime adaption continued to be a fanservice-laden comedy into its second season, much to the chagrin of the fandom.
• Sailor Moon is the most famous of this, with the monsters of the week — at least 80% of the time — also being Monogender Monsters , females in this case. None of the monsters ever survive the episodes they were introduced in, with the only two exceptions being Regulus (because Nephrite only used him as a distraction and never summoned him again after that) and Cenicienta (because the episode she appeared in was a two-parter).
• Samurai Pizza Cats : Lampshaded in one episode, where the Big Cheese introduced the robot menace he'd prepared for this episode with "Monster of the week, please enter and sign in."
• Shaman King : This is used for the 2001 anime, with Yoh and his allies battling with a shaman on their way to the tournament, and fighting one of Hao's minions when he sends them after Yoh.
• In Sonic X , the first 26 episodes of the first series had Dr. Eggman's randomly deployed robots, each one with an E-(insert number here) as their serial number, and the first 11 episodes of the first half of the second series had random Metarex encountered by Sonic and co. along their journey to save the universe from the Metarex.
• For about the first half of Speed Grapher , Suietengu's plan to recapture Kagura is to have his henchmen sic a different Euphoric on Saiga. They never live more than two episodes after being introduced.
• Spriggan : On each of his missions, Yu would battle with the head of an organization hunting for an artifact or a creature that comes from the related object.
• Played straight in SSSS.GRIDMAN like its previous series . A Kaiju pops up to attack the city, Gridman then materializes to defeat it. SSSS.DYNɅZENON would also follow this.
• The first two seasons of Stitch! had several episodes where Stitch and his best friend in that series Yuna meet a yokai whose unique powers or abilities causes the episode's conflict somewhere on Izayoi. Also, as with its Western predecessor Lilo & Stitch: The Series , various Experiments —both old ones from that show and ones newly introduced for this show—also appear, especially during the second and third seasons, usually causing mischief for Stitch to stop like before. Dr. Hämsterviel even modified many of the experiments (primarily in the Denser and Wackier third season) that he somehow acquired in the years after the events of Leroy & Stitch to give them different powers than before and/or improve their already existing powers to cause evil on his bidding.
• Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann plays this straight. In the first episode, the Lagann is introduced as well as a minor enemy. Next episode introduces some more mecha, including the Gunzan (later Gurren). The third episode introduces the first actually recurring villain, who's more of an anti-villain. By Episode 6, the show actually starts straying becoming more serialized rather than episodic, but maintains its monster of the week standard until Episode 15, where the MOTW is actually the first Big Bad . The second half reversed this, by having the good guys introduce more and more powerful mecha to kick the enemy's ass, most notably after Team Dai-Gurren goes to space.
• Tentai Senshi Sunred shows how this trope plays out from the monsters' point of view: The Evil Organization Florsheim has a stable of monsters who rotate between branch offices, letting them challenge the local heroes with fresh monsters on the regular. Monsters also retire (usually after receiving enough beatdowns) and require Florsheim to cultivate new local talent and pair them up with their own veterans to get them used to battling heroes. Florsheim's Kawasaki branch has the problem that their local ' Arch-Enemy ' Sunred is a Comically Invincible Hero (retired), and battling him is usually very traumatising (luckily he is a Technical Pacifist and never kills). As such, while fights with Sunred usually involve a newcomer, Florsheim also need a few regulars around that can serve as Recurring Villains.
• Tiger & Bunny : As corporate-sponsored superheroes, Sternbild First Leagues are tasked to take on NEXT criminals that the police have trouble capturing.
• This caused a Dub-Induced Plot Hole in the English Macekre of Tokyo Mew Mew . If there's now an "army" of monsters of the week, why do we only see one at a time?
• Trigun Stampede : The show has Vash and the others encountering an opponent in each episode, though they don't necessarily always defeat them by the episode's end, and each encounter plays out as part of a larger story.
• In Umi Monogatari , the first few episodes have Marin and Kanon battling creatures that Sedna summons. This pattern gets abandoned halfway through the series as it focuses on more personal battles.
• Ushio and Tora started this way with the titular duo battling a rogue Yōkai monster causing mayhem whenever it pops up. The series would later shift away from this into being more arc-focused.
• Witch Hunter Robin got a new witch every week for the first half. Then things changed rather abruptly.
• In Yo-kai Watch , with the yo-kai. Each episode features several sections, with at least one of those sections featuring an odd situation, Nate finding out it's caused by a yo-kai, then beating said yo-kai in some way or another, though he doesn't always defeat it. Sometimes the end of the part is played for laughs with a failed resolution, but this is pretty rare.
• Early chapters of Yu-Gi-Oh! generally featured a "bully of the week." His role was typically to scam or beat up Yugi's friends, at which point Yugi would challenge him to a Cooking Duel or the local equivalent. Most notably, The Rival Kaiba started out like this, but then...
• The anime based on the manga, and its spin-offs, have a Duelist of the Week who pops up with a new deck gimmick and quirky personality to challenge the hero. With very, very few exceptions, these characters will be defeated in a single episode and will never appear again. If they're lucky, they'll get a two-part episode before they vanish. Yu-Gi-Oh!: Capsule Monsters has different monsters to defeat for each of the five trials to return home.
• Zatch Bell! : The series starts off like this, and this is the format between major story arcs. In-Universe, this is justified by several demon children learning that Zatch is in Japan, and wanting to eliminate what they think is an easy target.
• Catch! Teenieping : Almost every episode in Season 1 features Princess Romi attempting to find and catch a loose Teenieping who likes to cause trouble and mischief for innocent townspeople.
• Gaju Bhai has the title character, a movie actor from Jollywood, going to Gajrajpuri and fighting off a different villain in each episode.
• Happy Heroes has the heroes go up against a different monster, usually summoned in one way or another by the primary antagonist Big M., in a vast majority of episodes. However, some of the monsters make recurring appearances, and a few even have detailed personalities and backstories.
• In Kung Fu Wa the Kwei are evil spirits in the shape of white orbs with vaguely evil faces on their surface that can possess objects and living creatures, turn them into monsters and cause destruction, they can only be stopped by sealing them in the Ancient Scroll .
• Zakia Al Thakia involves the titular superheroine battling a different type of foe in each episode, primarily living inanimate things such as hamburgers, clouds, and vending machines, along with others such as aliens and cats.
• Many comics tend to have a story with a one-shot villain every now and then. It would be easier to list comic books and comic strips that DON'T utilize the monster of the week trope.
• Wonder Woman Vol 1 : Marston seemed to be using all villains outside of Paula, who reformed and became a hero, only once at first. Then they started reappearing years later, with ties to current villains or looking for revenge but Marston died before there was any real payoff outside of the connection between Hypnota and the slavers of Saturn and the initial formation of Villainy Inc.
• In the old The Dandy comic strip, Jack Silver, the villainous Captain Zapp had a device known as a Duplicator, which could create a living, breathing copy of any picture that was fed into it. Every week, he would use the strange creatures the machine produced to commit crimes, before being stopped by Jack Silver and his gadget of the week.
• Each volume of Scott Pilgrim has the titular character battling one of Ramona's Seven Evil Exes.
• Superlópez : A common format in the early stories. Chiclón, Luz Luminosa, the Galactic Gladiator, Morgana the Witch or the Atomic Nightmare are all one-off villains, never appearing again.
• Every week, the Amazing Three of Jackpot had to battle a monster created by the evil Vogler, who could bring any monster he thought up to life.
• The Lion King Adventures follows this format, featuring an absolute plethora of villains, monsters and aliens.
• Most chapters of My Brave Pony: Starfleet Magic deal with the good guys blowing up Titan's recently created monster/Chrysalis's new changeling/the recent monster made by the main villain of each Season.
• Done in two terms in Magical Girls Unite Retransformed . Half of the chapters focus upon facing a Witch and turning them back into a Puella Magi, the other half focuses on recruiting other magical girls, in which case the monster is an established villain.
• Sev Trek Pus In Boots spoofs Star Trek 's use of this trope. Lt. Barf: Captain, we are being hailed. I recommend we go to Red Alert ! Captain Pinchhard: We haven't even met them! Isn't that a little premature? Lt. Barf: Every week we encounter aliens who try to destroy or take over the ship. It would save a lot of time if we assumed the worst now.
• Dramatically subverted in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse . When Miles first encounters the Spot as he's trying to rob an ATM in a gas station, he's incredibly casual and relaxed about it despite knowing nothing about the guy or his powers. He explicitly refers to him as a "villain of the week" on more than one occasion when dealing with him; Gwen and other Spider-People also get in on this, deeming him useless and too comical of a villain to be taken seriously. The humiliating scorn results in the Spot going completely off the deep end when combined with a Trauma Conga Line of other tragedies he's had since the accident that caused his mutation, resulting in him getting a better handle on his powers, enough to travel to other universes. Spot then proceeds to power himself up with dark matter from multiple Super-Colliders until he becomes a Humanoid Abomination who can threaten the entire multiverse and declares his specific intent to kill Miles' father so that Spider-Man will finally respect/fear him as an Arch-Enemy .
• Each Godzilla movie usually sees Godzilla going up against a new daikaiju that's emerged to terrorize Japan, particularly in the first Showa series. The later eras of Godzilla movies had more reoccurring rivals, due to the financial failure of Godzilla vs. Biollante , resulting in the studio deciding to play it safer with pre-established characters.
• In a similar manner, Gamera fights a new monster every movie, some even being recycled from previous films. The sole exception is Gyaos, which is thus far the only monster to appear in several movies, rather than just being a one-off antagonist.
• The James Bond film series generally follows a " Diabolical Mastermind of the Week" formula. This was moreso common in films after the Sean Connery era, as due to a legal dispute Eon Productions couldn't use Ernst Stavro Blofeld , and so they created one-shot evil masterminds to go up against Bond instead.
• Each Terminator film usually has a "Terminator of the Week" sent back in time to kill Sarah and/or John Connor.
• Alex Rider would be sent on a mission to stop the Evil Plan by whoever's plotting it.
• In the Animorphs series, whenever Visser Three ( Big Bad of the series who possesses the same shape-shifting abilities as the titular heroes) would personally participate in a battle, he would do so by assuming the form of a new exotic alien creature that clearly outmatched the Earth animals that the Animorphs themselves had taken the forms of . Subverted by the fact that it is the same character every time, only in a different form. Played straight in later books with one-shot antagonists like Queen Soco and the Inspector .
• The Captain Underpants series has the titular character facing off against a new villain in each book.
• The Doc Savage novels are always this except one because Doc is so good at what he does (lobotomies) .
• Beyond the Deepwoods , one of the books of The Edge Chronicles , is basically this. Twig has to face a (deadly) menace every chapter in this book.
• This trope is actually Older Than Steam . Journey to the West is lately made up of monster of the week encounters, or in this case monster of the chapter.
• The Dresden Files has this, particularly in the first three books in the series. Storm Front has an evil sorcerer, Fool Moon has werewolves, Grave Peril has a ghost called "The Nightmare". Later books continue this somewhat, with Summer Knight focusing on Faeries and Death Masks on fallen angels, but both of become significant returning elements as the series continues. Later books focus more on recurring allies, enemies, and story threads that the series has built up over time, although there is also often a monster of the week element happening alongside it.
• Goosebumps , much like The Outer Limits (1963) , adds this formula to its The Twilight Zone (1959) influence. Almost every book deals with the everyman kid heroes encountering(or in some cases becoming ) a new monster or supernatural entity that's featured right on the cover art. A few later books however (such as Fright Camp , Scream School or Are You Terrified Yet ) avert this by having no supernatural elements and making the conflict a mundane one.
• In Princess Holy Aura , the frequency of the monsters increases, so by the end of the book the Maidens are close to facing a monster per week, which also is lampshaded, though not all monsters are shown in action. Some of the monsters they face are; a dhole, a shoggoth, a crazy rhyming axe murderer, and a phantom clown.
• The villain usually had a new superweapon, too: "the Death Star but Better" sums up all of them. The Tarkin was "the Second Death Star before the Writers Knew about the Real Second Death Star ", World Devastators are "the Death Star but Slow and Productive ", the Nightcloak was "the Death Star but with Climate Change ", Darksaber was "the Death Star but Minimalistic ", the Eclipse was "the Death Star but also the Executor ", the Galaxy Gun was "the Death Star but with Really Long Range Nukes ", Centerpoint Station was "the Death Star but also Long Range", and the Sun Crusher was "the Death Star but God-Mode Sue ". As you can guess, people who prefer the Death Star as an ultimate weapon hate every single one of them. Particularly since about half of these have characters popping up to exclaim that this superweapon is worse than the Death Star, omg!
• Galaxy of Fear has a different horror or threat for each book. The first six can all be traced back to the Mad Scientist Big Bad , who had a lot of projects going. The others are mostly unrelated.
• In the Trixie Belden series, there's almost always a new villain in every book.
• In Journey to the West , the pilgrims have to fight their way through many independent forces of demons and their monsters, which are treated as powerful roadblocks.
• Zeus Is Dead : A Monstrously Inconvenient Adventure has an in-universe, reality TV version of this with Monster Slayer in which Jason Powers stalks and kills a new monster each week. (When the Greek gods returned to the world, mythological monsters weren't far behind. There are now harpies off the coast of North Carolina and a hydra in Lake Michigan.)
• The premise of the Bailey School Kids book series is that each book has the children encounter an unsual person whom they believe to be some kind of supernatural creature, with no clear indication whether or not the children's suspicions are true .
• Black Widowers : The stories have a "mystery of the month" format, where each meeting has a guest who provides a puzzle for the characters to solve. Meetings where there is no mystery simply don't have stories written about them , but are implied to exist.
• " The Psychohistorians ": Taking place when Seldon is still alive, he invites a mathematician to discuss his psychohistory and sneaks in a private nocturnal meeting with the man . This prompts Chief Commissioner of Public Safety, Linge Cheng, to imprison, then exile , Seldon to stop his schemes.
• " The Encyclopedists ": Salvor Hardin, mayor of the planet Terminus , tries to get the Encyclopedia Foundation to deal directly with the threat of the four neighboring kingdoms. Unfortunately, their leader, Lewis Pirenne, is an Obstructive Bureaucrat as dense as a brick. It takes Seldon's reveal that the Encyclopedia Galactica was a scam in order to set the colony of Terminus in motion before they're willing to deal with the problem. By then Mayor Hardin has already taken control of the situation .
• " The Mayors ": Salvor Hardin, mayor of the planet Terminus , is facing internal revolutionary elements on Terminus, led by Sef Sermak. At the same time, they're facing a threat from Anacreon, where Prince Regent Weinis, uncle to the King of Anacreon, is making a power play for his country to take control of Terminus.
• " The Merchant Princes ": Foundation politicians Sutt and Manlio are still clinging to the power of the Scam Religion , so they try to weaken the blossoming Traders by sending an agent to undermine Master Trader Huber Mallow during his mission on Korell, a world staunchly against the Foundation's religion. During the last third of the story, after Mallow has defeated his political opponents, he is faced by the planet of Korell itself, which has declared war on the Foundation. Mallow uses the Foundation's economic powers to win by declaring a trade embargo on Korell. Despite winning every battle, Korell is forced to surrender due to civil revolt during wartime hardships.
• " The General (Foundation) ": General Bel Riose is a massive threat against the Foundation, fully immune to their previous tactics, as political maneuvers are useless on him, the Foundation's religion is long dead and nuclear embargo can do nothing to him as he has Empire technology. He manages to severely weaken the Foundation's hold on the Periphery, and even lay siege to the Foundation's doorstep by taking some of the Four Kingdoms, its inner core worlds. He's also surprisingly likable, fairly noble, and philosophical . His main concern is reigniting the glory of the Empire, with no ulterior motives whatsoever, which makes his inevitable defeat by the politics of the inner court of the Empire rather heartbreaking . The timing of the attacks favoured him, too; the Foundation government is much weaker than the capitalists running the corporations. We have foreshadowing that a class struggle between the plutocrats and the common traders is forthcoming.
• " The Mule ": Seldon expected the conflict in this era to be democracy against tyranny, pitting the advocates for independence against the advocates for strong central organization. However, their disagreements had to be put on hold to deal with an unexpected threat .
• " The Mule ": The Mule is an apparently unstoppable Galactic Conqueror who successfully defeats Seldon and shatters the plan nearly beyond saving. The Mule is miles above anything the Foundation has ever faced, causing Terminus to fall for the first and only time ever in its history. Yes, the Foundation loses to him . He does this with relative ease, outsmarts Foundation's insurgents and in Part Two, starts his plan of tracking down the legendary Second Foundation, which is surrounded in myth and rumored to be able to defeat him.
• " Search by the Mule ": Rather than some psychohistorical imperative, last week's threat continues. Equal parts attention are given to the villain of this work (the Mule and his minions) and to The Hero of this work (First Speaker and their Second Foundation), making them mutual antagonists .
• " Search by the Foundation ": The primary conflict here is a silent showdown between the First and Second Foundations, with the First being notably more antagonistic, since they have become extremely paranoid of any psychic since the Mule and thus want to destroy the Second, which is an entire nation of psychics. Simultaneously, the First Foundation is also facing war with the remnants of the Mule's empire and its current leader, Lord Stettin. The Second Foundation manages to masterfully trick and outmaneuver the First into thinking they have been defeated, while Lord Stettin is a mere cover up who has been manipulated from the beginning by a Second Foundationer, the whole war being a farce to give the First Foundation the confidence to stand on its own.
• Many of the Franny K. Stein books have Franny having to fight a monster or villain whose existence is at least partially her responsibility.
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians , prior to The Last Olympian (the conclusion to the original pentology and the end of the Wham Episode that was The Battle of the Labyrinth ), has a common formula: Our heroes are sent on a quest, and along the way end up fighting a few monsters or opponents that serve as obstacles to them. While there are a few who are working as a group, for the most part the monsters are fighting by themselves, specifically targeting the heroes who either walk into their operation or because a reward was promised.
• The Kane Chronicles , primarily in The Red Pyramid , features the titular Kane siblings encountering obstacles that are often dispatched
• The Heroes of Olympus also uses the formula where the heroes are continuing on their quests, but much more like The Kane Chronicles , sticks mostly towards progressing its overall arc and the Myth Arc itself. While situations like these do appear in the last two books of the quintet, they are much fewer in number and are almost always something they are informed of ahead of time. Which leads to the last two which contrast the most :
• In contrast, The Trials of Apollo and Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard more or less ditched this. Virtually every opponent encountered serves a purpose to either the current objective or the myth arc.
• The Give Yourself Goosebumps gamebook Curse of the Cave Creatures also features monsters of the week in which the Cave Spirit sends creatures after the player, who the player has to defeat in some way.
• Solar Defenders: The Role of a Shield , being a Power Rangers pastiche, takes place in a world where regular monster attacks every Thursday are an expected part of the normal routine.
• The stories of many folk heroes often end up this way. Often, reading collections of such things will highlight how certain monsters met their demise, or how certain things came to be.
• Greek Mythology in particular is full of this, featuring a hero who fights a strong opponent or a monster. Even some of Homer's epics such as The Odyssey features quite a bit of obstacles in Odysseus's path that are only around for a few instances. The Twelve Tasks of Hercules stand out, as Hercules had to face a different monster or villain each time.
• Residents of Proserpina Park largely takes a creature of the week format. The primary plot of each episode involves the cast encountering, or learning about, a new creature from mythology or folklore.
• The science fiction radio show Alien Worlds had the heroes confront a different villain or alien race with sinister intentions in every adventure.
• The game Monsterhearts (based on Apocalypse World 's rules) can run on this trope, if one of the players is using the Chosen skin.
• The aptly-named Monster of the Week game (also based on Apocalypse World 's system) is Exactly What It Says on the Tin .
• Although a different medium, episodic RPG campaigns also fall into this pattern, as gaming groups usually get together to play once a week.
• Most early cases in Ace Attorney follow this format, being self-contained cases with a killer who is caught in their first appearance and isn't relevant to the game's over-arching plot. In the second game, no case is connected to the others and the last one simply has far more impact to the main characters than every other case. Later games have begun subverting this, however, with early case villains often having minor ties to a greater conspiracy that forms the game's Story Arc .
• In Bomberman 64: The Second Attack! , Bomberman and Pommy on their travels to each planet would do battle with a member of the BHB Army's Astral Knights led by Rukifellth to gather the Elemental Stones.
• In Danganronpa: Ultra Despair Girls , while Komaru and Toko are traveling through Towa City, each chapter has them fighting a member of The Warriors of Hope who uses a remote-controlled Mini-Mecha to fight them.
• Platformer entries that were released after Rareware's tenure on the Donkey Kong Country series generally had a unique major new villain for each, but Donkey Kong Jungle Beat in particular solely consists of Donkey Kong beating up an antagonistic Kong, Roc, Hog, or Tusk at the end of each world.
• Dragalia Lost has this structure a lot of the time, especially early on. There are many events that mainly just focus on Euden and friends taking on a different fiend.
• The Fire Emblem series uses this for bosses of most chapters. In general, most games begin with the main army fighting isolated skirmishes against a few irrelevant bandit leaders, before the greater Story Arc begins.
• Ganbare Goemon usually has the eponymous hero and his friends battling a new zany villain in every game. In the series, it's rather rare for characters aside from the core quartet and the supporting cast i.e Impact, the Old Wiseman and Omitsu to appear more than once, even as cameos. The most noteworthy aversions is Kabuki, a cyborg kabuki warrior who has appeared in four games and Taisamba and her various versions.
• In Killer7 , the titular Killer7 hunt down a major target in each mission after receiving intel of their crimes and location.
• Killer is Dead : The main focus is an assassination agency that only targets killers heading out on each mission to take them down.
• A large amount of Kirby games' plots follow this, each game being based on one Big Bad at a time (the major exception being the Dark Matter Trilogy ).
• Trails in the Sky : In each chapter, Estelle and Joshua, along with some of their allies, would deal with a major villain, who turns out to have been Unwitting Pawns of the true Big Bad . In Sky - Second Chapter , the Enforcers of Ouroboros are introduced as the one responsible for the incident in each area for every chapter.
• Trails through Daybreak : The general structure of the story goes like this. In each chapter, Van and his party get a request from someone, goes to the location mentioned by said requester, get wrapped up in whatever problem the place has at the time, and ends with Van using the Grendel and beating the chapter's villain with the party assisting him.
• The sets of 8 Robot Masters in the Mega Man (Classic) series easily fall into this. The Game Boy spin-offs do this with the Mega Man Hunters/Rockman Killers ( and Quint ) and the Stardroids as well, while the sole Genesis game in the series ( The Wily Wars ) had the Genesis Unit. Then, there's the major villains fought before Dr. Wily.
• Mega Man Battle Network follows this format, with Lan and Mega Man getting involved in a incident being caused by criminal's Net Navi, then jacking into the net to battle them.
• Noel The Mortal Fate : Each episode follows Noel and Caron dealing with one of Russell Burrows' subordinates sent to kill them.
• No More Heroes follows this with Travis hunting down the main Assassins on the rank board to be the Number 1 assassin. This also applies to the two sequels, though in all three games, a good chunk of the monsters become The Unfought , frequently being killed by another character before Travis ever fights them.
• The monthly Full Moon Shadows that the party fights in Persona 3 at first seem to fall into this category; however, later on, it is revealed that they are all actually fragments of a single Shadow, Death , who is the herald of Nyx , the one destined to bring about The End of the World as We Know It .
• Persona 4 does this with the team rescuing whoever's trapped inside the TV world and battling their Shadows to make them repent.
• Persona 5 has the Phantom Thieves in each chapter entering the mental Palaces of a criminal individual to make them confess their crimes.
• Sly Cooper does this, with Sly and the gang taking down a major criminal while shutting down their crime operations.
• Unlike the rest of the franchise, Super Mario RPG and Paper Mario does this, with a major villain in each chapter, and at least one Big Bad unique to the game.
• Mario Party DS : In Story Mode, while on-route to Bowser's Castle, Mario and the group assist an ally when they're being troubled by one of the usual series enemies at each area.
• Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon : Each boss of every location has a creature or object possessed by a Possessor.
• Luigi's Mansion 3 : Each floor of the hotel is haunted by a major ghost that Luigi encounters as he tries to catch them.
• The Wario franchise (outside of WarioWare ) mostly does this, featuring Wario going up against a new antagonist standing in his way of getting even richer. Wario World also has Wario battling a monster created by the Black Jewel at the end of each level. The only recurring antagonist he has is Captain Syrup, who only served the role in Wario Land 1 and II .
• Super Robot Wars : Not only do the heroes have to deal with most (if not all) of the villains and monsters from their respective series (including those mentioned above), but there's also a new latest threat to stop on top of everything else.
• Tokyo Mirage Sessions ♯FE : In each chapter, the team finds a Mirage gate emerging at a major location in Shibuya, with the main boss being a monstrous version of a Fire Emblem villain.
• Tokyo Xanadu : The story follows this formula of isolated incidents caused by Elder Greeds, with said monsters being the last bosses of each chapter. This goes on until Chapters 5 and 6, where an Arc Villain is introduced to be the cause of the Grim Greeds wreaking havoc in those chapters, and the last chapters put focus into fighting the Big Bad .
• Most Touhou bosses only appear as the main boss once and then either turn good or at least befriend Reimu, Marisa or both the next game they're seen, though this doesn't stop the occasional misunderstanding , especially in the Fighting Game or PVP spinoffs, or are never seen again outside of a Gaiden Game . This has continued for 15 games and counting ( discounting decimal-numbered games! ).
• Undertale does this. The Human Child would encounter a major monster character who'll be the main obstacle for each new area they enter. Deltarune has The Delta Warriors facing off with a major villain in each chapter who rules over a Dark Fountain.
• A literal example in The World Ends with You . Each week of the Reaper's Game is presided over by a "game master." These are especially powerful Reapers who, what do you know, transform into monstrous versions of themselves when you get to fight them.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 3 : While some of Moebius get more screentime to themselves and serve as primary villains, a fair number of them only serve to be the Arc Villain of a Hero's recruitment quest.
• DSBT InsaniT has a different monster showing up in every episode with varying threat levels. Koden even references this trope in 'The Camping Webisode'.
• Mega Man Dies at the End does this in the first season. Mega Man would hunt down a target on his hit-list such as the BattleToads , Samus , and BomberMan to obtain their abilities.
• Quirky Misadventures of Soldine the Cyborg : The first three mini-movies follow this format. The fourth one contains Night of the Living Mooks and a Quirky Miniboss Squad , but the fifth one returns to the classic format.
• Sonic Zombie : Every entry in the series has at least one. Godzilla with the Tank, Satan, Zombie Knuckles, Hornhog Sonic with Monster Silver, a sea monster, Monster Bowser and the giant carnival sewer worm.
• The first three chapters of Agents of the Realm has the girls face three bleeds : a bear-bleed, spider-bleed and bird-bleed.
• Gorgeous Princess Creamy Beamy parodies and plays this straight ( albeit, in an arc-based way ) with its Instant Monsters, for obvious reasons . So far, three of them have been defeated, with the former two being sentient everyday objects, and the third being human (however, the side effects of the potion on him were unintended).
• The Green Knight generally follows this structure, with the main protagonists facing off against a different kind of fairy everywhere they stop.
• The Sword Interval dedicates each of its story arcs to dealing with a different monster. Justified , as the protagonists are monster hunters .
• Ash & Cinders often has the trio facing off against different strange perils in between their Fetch Quest to retrieve their stolen half-brother.
• The web fiction serial Dimension Heroes often has the Dimensional Guardians fighting a new monster in every chapter, though it must be pointed out the fights still help to advance the story arc.
• New York Magician : Not many (as there aren't that many stories, all told), but they definitely have this vibe.
• Series One plays it straight, with Baron Stellos sending out a new Hollow Heart minion each chapter or few chapters.
• Series Two averts it entirely, instead putting the focus on the five Savage Star Generals .
• Series Three downplays it. The various Fallen Star prisoners often serve as enemies for the Rangers to fight and are treated like this, but they are given much less focus than the Hollow Hearts were, and are less frequent.
• The Adventures of Figaro Pho : Every episode focuses on a different phobia, usually manifesting said phobia as a character who serves as the villain for the episode.
• Amphibia : Most of Season One episodes see Anne and the Plantars having to contend with some horrible species of wildlife.
• Aqua Teen Hunger Force usually follows this rule, with the monster somehow spawning out of Shake or Carl's short-sighted actions or out of nowhere . This arguably counts as a parody, as said monsters usually turn out to be more obnoxious than evil. Although the cast usually gets killed or horribly maimed regardless.
• Archer : Unsurprisingly for a show set in a spy agency, most of the show follows this format. A good chunk of episodes have the format of "ISIS is hired for a mission, and either succeed by the skin of their teeth or bungle it completely" Season 5 and 8 avert this, having more long-form storytelling, and while Season 7 has a story arc running throughout, still mostly follows this.
• " The Underdwellers " spotlights a villain called the Sewer King who never appears again. He's sufficiently creepy for a Batman villain, but it's just as well he never returned, since he was really only good for one story (that is, showcasing the evils of child slavery).
• The same could be said of Baby Doll, as she only ever had two appearances and was limited in both motive and ability compared to other, more menacing Batman villains.
• Batman Beyond : Most episodes have Terry fighting one-shot villains, though recurring villains such as Inque, Powers, Shriek and others are also fixtures of the show.
• Ben 10 lives on this. Considering the strange and varied varieties of trouble that tend to occur wherever Ben goes, one feels sorry for this kid's hometown if summer vacation ends. Sometimes inverted in a few seasons, where the Monster of the Week wasn't just what Ben faced, but what he became .
• Big Hero 6: The Series : In each episode, the Big Bad turns each one of the Season 1 villains into a more powerful monster.
• Biker Mice from Mars frequently had Lawrence Limburger summon a one-shot antagonist to defeat the Biker Mice or distract them from ruining his schemes. Unusually for this trope, some of the Monsters of the Week would occasionally come back for another episode.
• Bonkers had very few recurring villains, most episodes having the titular character and his human partner dealing with a different human or toon criminal.
• Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers typically had Chip, Dale, Zipper, Monterey Jack, and Gadget Hackwrench face one-shot antagonists in episodes that didn't focus on their main enemies Fat Cat and Professor Norton Nimnul.
• Code Lyoko : XANA would use his specters to take control of an object, person, or animal, to take out the Lyoko team.
• Courage the Cowardly Dog faces off against a new monster or villain in every episode. In one episode near the end of the series, several old villains band together to try and get their collective revenge on the "stupid dog" .
• Creepy Crawlers : The Crime Grimes are each a different monster made by the main villain Guggengrime to carry out his plans and defeat the insectoid heroes.
• Cybersix : Doctor Von Reichter would send one of his genetic-created monsters for Jose to put to use in a scheme to defeat Cybersix and put the city under his control.
• Danny Phantom fights with a ghost in each episode, either from his usual Rogues Gallery , or an entirely new threat.
• Defenders of the Earth features several guest antagonists, the first to appear being Shogoth from "A Demon in His Pocket". A common plot device throughout the series involves Ming trying to use the Monster/Villain of the Week to conquer the Earth and/or eliminate the Defenders.
• Dino Squad had a somewhat interesting variation on this. While it did have a central villain mutating normal animals into prehistoric creatures, and doing so was part of his master plan to take over the world, he only did so to gather scientific data to improve the mutation process. The mutants were almost never created to facilitate some other evil plan.
• Dragon Hunters : Each episode features a battle against a different "dragon" ; by the end of the episode, the creature has been vanquished, proved harmless or freed. Sometimes said dragon makes a cameo in another episode (for example the Giant Spider from "Billy Thoughnut" reappears in "Farewell Lian-Chu" and "By the Book" as a minor antagonist.
• DuckTales (2017) has a major monster/villain dealt with on each of the Duck family's adventures.
• The Epic Tales of Captain Underpants runs on this, with the main characters facing a villain every episode that's either indirectly or directly caused by their actions .
• Fangface has a group of teenagers Walking the Earth catching monsters and solving crimes, with the twist that one of the teens is a monster himself - a werewolf.
• Garbage Pail Kids Cartoon : All antagonists are one-shot villains. Ironically, the first episode's villains, the Funbusters, promise vengeance after the Garbage Pail Kids drive them away.
• Gargoyles : The Manhattan Clan would do battle with someone of their usual Rogues Gallery or dealing with Xanatos's schemes. This continues to play out during the World Tour arc with the group encountering a supernatural threat.
• Ghostbusters : The various ghosts of both The Real Ghostbusters and Extreme Ghostbusters fit neatly into this trope. Justified as it is their work description to deal permanently with the ghosts. The ghosts of Filmation's Ghostbusters were more like a Rogues Gallery with one-shot monsters and ghosts being the exception.
• The Godzilla Power Hour : This was basically the entire plot of the show; there was no overarching myth arc or continuity, simply Godzilla fighting some random new menace in each episode, although it was sometimes multiple menaces at once or in rapid succession.
• Godzilla: The Series has a new creature of some sort in every episode. However, most of these monsters are actually pretty good, and they range from a petroleum-eating goo blob , to a swarm of ants big enough to uproot and carry a tree. Some monsters would occasionally reappear after "Monster Island" was established, however.
• Gravity Falls makes use of this trope especially during its first season, with different monsters or other supernatural weirdness every episode. Though later on, it starts focusing more on the overall series' Myth Arc .
• Hero: 108 has Big Green visiting a kingdom and doing battle with the animal leader to convince them into joining their group.
• Inspector Gadget : Dr. Claw has a new special MAD agent almost every week, who will never be seen again after the episode they appear in. The Sequel Series Gadget and the Gadgetinis does the same, but also has some one-time villains with no connection to M.A.D. or Dr. Claw.
• Hilda : Each episode or "Chapter" will involve Hilda and friends having an encounter or a conflict with some sort of magical creature.
• Invincible runs with this. Mark would battle with a villain each episode, while the incident of Omni-Man killing the Guardians in the first season is investigated by others.
• Jackie Chan Adventures usually features a cast of recurring villains, especially a Big Bad who serves as the main antagonist of the current season's storyline . However, there are a sizable number of filler episodes scattered throughout the series, which featured some minor villains and monsters who do not appear outside of single (or a few) episodes.
• King of the Hill has someone on almost every episode who wants to take advantage of the main characters or just be a jerk to them, and never appear again.
• Lastman has literal monsters (the Wrens): a few of those are used as monster of the week and killed off at a rate of one per episode... But some of them (Rizel, the Passenger, Eric Rose...) are longer lasting antagonists. However even one-time Wrebs are used to move the plot along and can do lasting damages, even killing one of the secondary characters.
• Lilo & Stitch: The Series runs on this trope, but with a twist. All of the monsters in this show, known as the Experiments , are genetically-engineered alien creatures created by Jumba Jookiba (with Stitch himself also being one of these Experiments). In each episode, Lilo must help Stitch find and confront another one of the latter's many "cousins", who are usually running around and causing trouble, and rehabilitate them into peaceful creatures that can use their powers for good .
• Martin Morning demonstrates this, with the odd twist of the protagonist being the new monster each episode.
• Martin Mystery was this kind of show, with the characters being sent to investigate a mystery that always ended up being caused by a monster.
• Megas XLR practically lives off this, along with a fair bit of lampshade hanging. "Let's go check out what bad guy I get to whoop this week!"
• Men in Black: The Series has the variant of "Alien of the Week", albeit in some few episodes the villain of the week is human. And not every new alien featured in an episode was necessarily evil or dangerous.
• The Mighty Heroes : Nearly every episode has the heroes fight a different villain.
• Mighty Max has its share of one-shot antagonists. Some of them are affiliated with the series' main villain Skullmaster, but the majority work independently.
• Miraculous Ladybug : The Big Bad Hawk Moth uses magical butterflies called Akumas to turn ordinary people suffering from extreme negative emotions into brainwashed supervillains, making them both Monster and Victim of the Week . He helps them get revenge on whoever wronged them in exchange for them stealing the heroes' Miraculouses for him.
• Monster Force had Count Dracula as a Big Bad , but the majority of the series had the Monster Force combating one-shot monsters who are working independently, though Dracula did try to recruit some of the one-shot monsters to fight for his side.
• Moville Mysteries : Nearly every episode has Mo and his friends dealing with a different supernatural creature.
• My Adventures with Superman revolves around Superman fighting a supervillain and learning the extent of the mystery technology they're using.
• My Life as a Teenage Robot runs on this trope. Most of the villains only appear for about one or two episodes, get beaten by Jenny, and never appear again.
• My Little Pony 'n Friends : Each villain usually gets a multiple-part story, but never appears again after their defeat. In fact, there's only one instance of a returning villain — a trio of witches who appear in both the movie and the first serial for the series, though they share both of their appearances with another villain.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic tends to follow this format in its first several seasons; each premiere or finale features a new villain who is freed from a thousand-year imprisonment and tries to conquer Equestria. After Season 6, however, the show switches to reusing older villains; Queen Chrysalis, in particular, has multiple returning appearances, and the final season focuses on a team of returning villains working together.
• Oh Yeah! Cartoons : The four Super Santa shorts each have a different villain in them: a sapient toy rabbit in "Jingle Bell Justice", a descendant of Ebenezer Scrooge in "Naughty", a Bad Santa in "South Pole Joe", and a Mad Scientist who attempted to create an army of mutant vegetables in "Vegetation".
• The Owl House : The first season is mostly this, with Luz dealing with a monster or antagonistic character while around The Boiling Isles.
• In Ozzy & Drix , the main duo would eliminate a threat to Hector's body each episode.
• Patrol 03 : Every episode has Professor Molo create a new monster to aid in Pamela's latest plan to get rid of the mayor or make him look bad that the titular Patrol 03 have to stop.
• Piggsburg Pigs! was, somewhat unexpectedly for a cartoon about Funny Animal main characters, an example of this. Unexpectedly because the monsters that ended up driving every story weren't used for humor themselves. Considering how every episode ends up being about some monster/demon/alien escaping the Forbidden Zone , one would be forgiven for thinking there'd be more done than putting up a few warning signs.
• The Powerpuff Girls : When not facing their Rogues Gallery , the Girls mostly just take on different monsters.
• Primal (2019) : During their travels across the land, Spear and Fang encounter a variety of vicious animals each episode; a herd of mammoths, a horde of bats led by a Giant Spider , and savage ape-men.
• Quack Pack : Nearly every episode has Donald Duck, Daisy Duck, and Donald's nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie face a one-shot antagonist, usually mad scientists or thieves.
• ReBoot : Most episodes have the heroes stop the User from winning a game, with the variety of different player characters the User controls serving a similar function to the trope of every episode having a different antagonist.
• Regular Show features one-shot antagonists in almost every other episode, though sometimes the conflict wasn't about a true villain or literal monster, but rather some sort of daily task turned into a supernatural problem . One special episode even involved the villain of the week bringing several previously fought villains back for revenge .
• Rick and Morty would deal with a different villain each episode, whether it's a one-shot character or a rogue alien species.
• Samurai Jack faces off against a different villain or monster in every episode, with the only recurring antagonist being Aku , the Shapeshifting Master of Darkness . This was the case until the fifth and final season, which had an actual story arc that introduced a few more recurring foes: The Omen , The High Priestess , and Scaramouche the Merciless .
• Scooby-Doo is famous for its use of People in Rubber Suits pretending to be monsters , which remain among the most well-known and archetypal examples of this trope. Some incarnations even occasionally fought actual monsters.
• Though a lot of these were the result of the machinations of one or more of the show's three Big Bads — Tombstone, Doc Ock, or Norman Osborn , rather than isolated encounters. What's really interesting is the show's justification for why there are so many supervillains running around: The Big Bads had them created to keep Spider-Man busy and thus unable to interfere with their standard criminal operations.
• Speed Buggy had the characters getting entangled with the exploits of various criminals and evil masterminds every episode.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars : Most episodes have a "Separatist commander of the week" who's in charge of the Battle Droids and usually has a Tactical Droid assisting them. One episode even had a Tactical Droid be the main villain.
• Static Shock : While several of the Bang Babies are recurring villains, most of them were one-shot antagonists.
• Steven Universe started out with the focus being on the protagonists fighting random monsters, going after certain artifacts, or dealing with a mess caused by the titular hero, while using that as a backdrop for worldbuilding and character development. This was the dynamic even in the more Slice of Life -oriented episodes. Halfway through the first season, however, it slowly introduced a Myth Arc and ditched the style altogether; nowadays the Slice of Life episodes tend to be more... Slice of Life .
• SWAT Kats : This phenomenon crops up as the "Missile of the Week" used to deal with the current problem at hand. Lampshaded by Razor in "Unlikely Alloys" upon seeing Zed.
• Sym-Bionic Titan : General Modula would send a Mutraddi Megabeast to annihilate the heroes that also comes with its own unique abilities. Sometimes the sent Mutraddi isn't a megabeast, possessing more intellect than the larger beasts, even the flashback episodes had antagonistic Galalunins as the threat.
• Teen Titans occasionally had some one-shot villains (besides the ones where the Brotherhood of Evil reunites them). Some villains were lucky to have more than two appearances.
• Totally Spies! typically operates under this format, though some villains do escape from prison from time to time. Also inverted in that one of the spies often gets turned into a monster (well, Cute Monster Girl at worst) as well.
• Transformers: Robots in Disguise (2015) is based on the premise of Bumblebee and his team recapturing escaped Decepticons, with almost every episode having a new Decepticon appear as the antagonist.
• Trese revolves around the adventures of Filipino Occult Detective Alexandra Trese, who faces off against a variety of mythical monsters and other supernatural villains associated with Philippine Mythology .
• The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat had a fairly large gallery of one-shot villains and monsters for Felix to fight, such as The Sludge King, The Bermuda Triangle, Jeepers Creepers, The Elf and many others. This is especially distinct in the context of the Felix the Cat series, which only had a handful of recurring villains and very few one-shot villains prior to this revival.
• Underdog : The titular character often fights one of these (usually an alien) when he isn't fighting Simon Bar Sinister or Riff Raff.
• The Venture Bros. : Discussed by the Pirate Captain at his booth in "The Buddy System." He touts the benefits of being a "small-time diversionary menace," playing off his original role as a parody of a Scooby-Doo villain, as opposed to a career supervillain .
• Voltron: Legendary Defender is notable for subverting this, despite its Super Robot source material. There's only three Robeasts in the entire series — seven, if you count enemy mechas and one plant monster.
• Wakfu generally started like this. The villain of each episode shows up in the opening credits throughout season 1, though as the show progresses into season 2 and beyond, it begins to turn away from this format.
• Xiaolin Showdown has the Xiaolin Monks fighting someone from their Rogues Gallery or a new supernatural creature for a Shen Gong Wu.
• Yogi's Gang : Each episode features a different villain or team of villains reveling in or encouraging bad behavior, from vandalism to cheating to air pollution.

Video Example(s):

Nmh3 - emperor of the night.

FU sends the eighth-ranked member of the Galactic Corps; Black Night Direction, to eliminate Travis.

Gorgom Kaijin

Saizo Komiya

Alternative Title(s): Villain Of The Week , Freak Of The Week , Monsters Of The Week , Monster Of The Day

• Girl of the Week
• Index of the Week
• Monster of the Aesop
• Magical Girl Tropes
• Muggle Best Friend
• Minidress of Power
• Tokusatsu Tropes
• Monster Clown
• TimeImmemorial/Tropes H to N
• Monster Town
• SquarePegRoundTrope/L to P
• Men Are the Expendable Gender
• This Index Is Expendable
• Militaries Are Useless
• Kaiju Tropes
• Monumental Damage
• Monster Lord
• Monster Progenitor
• "Mission: Impossible" Cable Drop
• Older Than Cable TV
• Long-Lost Uncle Aesop
• One-Shot Character
• One-Scene Wonder
• Earth: Final Conflict
• Space Opera
• Monster Mash
• Speculative Fiction Tropes
• Monster Organ Trafficking
• Monster Modesty
• Superhero Tropes
• Morally Ambiguous Doctorate
• Chopper on Standby
• QuoteSource/Western Animation
• Rebuff the Amateur
• Mating Dance
• ImageSource/Western Animation
• Sudden Video-Game Moment
• Timey-Wimey Ball
• Series/Toei Universe
• Kamen Rider Decade: All Riders vs. Dai-Shocker

Important Links

• Action Adventure
• Commercials
• Crime & Punishment
• Professional Wrestling
• Speculative Fiction
• Sports Story
• Animation (Western)
• Music And Sound Effects
• Print Media
• Sequential Art
• Tabletop Games
• Applied Phlebotinum
• Characterization
• Characters As Device
• Narrative Devices
• British Telly
• The Contributors
• Creator Speak
• Derivative Works
• Laws And Formulas
• Show Business
• Split Personality
• Truth And Lies
• Truth In Television
• Fate And Prophecy
• Edit Reasons
• Isolated Pages
• Images List
• Recent Videos
• Crowner Activity
• Un-typed Pages
• Recent Page Type Changes
• Trope Entry
• Character Sheet
• Playing With
• Creating New Redirects
• Cross Wicking
• Tips for Editing
• Text Formatting Rules
• Handling Spoilers
• Administrivia
• Trope Repair Shop
• Image Pickin'

Advertisement:

How well does it match the trope?

Example of:

Media sources:

11,241--> Report

NMH3 - Emperor ...