Inventory TV in a bottle: 19 great TV episodes largely confined to one location

11. Battlestar Galactica, “Unfinished Business” (2006)
Due to the spectacle-heavy first four episodes—comprising the survivors’ settlement, occupation, and eventual escape from New Caprica—the rest of Battlestar Galactica’s third season has several flat bottle episodes in which the characters mope around their existing sets, avoiding pricey CGI battles. “Unfinished Business” attempts to shake things up by incorporating a series of previously filmed flashbacks to New Caprica that were originally intended to be spread out over the course of the season, filling in the gaps of what happened during those early days on the doomed colony. Instead, they’re interspersed with footage of a cathartic crew-wide boxing match on the Galactica, revealing the conflicts, affairs, and betrayals that brought the characters to their current edgy states. The results are more character study than narrative. That frustrated many fans—particularly those not enamored of the Apollo-Starbuck-Anders love triangle—but provided a good arena for the series’ actors to show off both their emotional range and their boxing abilities. 

12. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, “Duet” (1993) 
Deep Space Nine always had to fight an uphill battle in the Star Trek franchise—after all, it’s the only series set on a space station instead of a starship, which meant that, for the most part, the action had to come to the cast. But in season one’s “Duet,” the show busted out of its confines by narrowing them: Set predominantly in a holding cell occupied by a captured Cardassian war criminal, the episode is a tense cat-and-mouse between the slippery-tongued prisoner and DS9’s Major Kira (Nana Visitor), whose Bajoran race was under the heel of the Cardassians during a long, brutal occupation. The allusion to the Holocaust is blatant yet chillingly effective, especially as the air between Kira and her prisoner grows more and more charged with lies, truths, guilt, regret, vengeance, and the horror of attempted genocide.

13. Bones, “The Man In The Fallout Shelter” (2005)
Bones started out on shaky ground, but the show’s lighthearted yet occasionally poignant approach to the forensic procedural came into sharp focus in season one’s “The Man In The Fallout Shelter.” After acquiring a body that’s been trapped in a nuke-proof bunker for 50 years, forensic anthropologist Temperance “Bones” Brennan (Emily Deschanel) and her nerdy team—including her partner, grumbling, tough-guy FBI agent Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz)—get trapped themselves: A toxic fungus in the corpse is released during the examination, which causes the lab to go into an automated, locked-down quarantine. What could make matters worse? It’s two days before Christmas, of course. As Bones struggles to solve the mystery of their dead guy, the whole crew comes closer as they’re forced to make secret-Santa gifts, send bittersweet holiday wishes through glass, and find out some of each other’s little secrets—for instance, that Angela’s father is Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top.

14. The United States Of Tara, “Torando!” (2010)
The great appeal of a bottle episode is when a show’s writers can get their whole cast together in one room, all of the characters carrying a load of secrets, and then turn them loose. The United States Of Tara offers a great reason for that gathering in the second-season episode “Torando!” A tornado (“torando,” as the poorly copyedited local news would have it) is bearing down on Overland Park, Kansas, and all of the show’s regulars and a few of its recurring characters ride out the storm in the basement. A season that’s been slowly weaving a web of mysteries sees nearly all of them come out in the midst of a long, borderline-hallucinatory wait through a storm that takes its time arriving, but finally does so violently and symbolically.

15. 24, “Day 5: 7:00 p.m.-8:00 p.m.” (2006)
24 spent its eight seasons presenting what felt like a nation-spanning action movie on a TV budget, but its early episodes often broke the bank, with giant explosions, train accidents, and assorted other calamities. That usually meant a later episode in the season would require the minimalist approach, and “Day 5” from season five was the show’s best. The CTU office has been hit by a deadly Sarin-gas attack, and all the still-living characters have locked themselves in a conference room where the seals around the doors are slowly failing, letting more and more gas in. And the one woman who might be able to do something about it is rendered catatonic by her colleague’s death. As the hour ticks by, heroic sacrifices will be made, of course, but the characters’ predicament keeps things so propulsive, viewers likely won’t notice the show’s contrived premise.

16. Doctor Who, “Midnight” (2008)
Under the supervision of show-runner Russell T. Davies, Doctor Who had to come up with at least one episode each season that was light on the Doctor or his companion, the better to free up the actors for each year’s Christmas special. These episodes would often double as bottle episodes to save on cash, as with the fourth-series entry “Midnight,” featuring David Tennant’s Doctor trapped in one room with a bunch of people who are slowly going mad, at least one of them possessed by some sort of ancient evil no one can see. Davies uses every trick in the book to suggest the monster in these people’s midst (up to and including the monster mimicking the Doctor’s speech patterns), and he reduces all of them to their basest instincts. It’s a great episode that feels more like a tightly wound short story or one-act play than a piece of TV.

17. Bewitched, “A Is for Aardvark” (1965)
The fantasy comedies of the ’60s were light, fluffy fun much of the time, but they were also more expensive than the basic family sitcom. Of the bunch, Bewitched was the best, at least for its first two seasons, before it dropped off the cliff. Its best episode, “A Is for Aardvark,” directed by Ida Lupino of all people, was a bottle show. Darrin (Dick York) is confined to his bed with an injury, and Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery) gets so sick of running up and down the stairs that she gives him her powers for the duration of his bed stay, in spite of Endora’s warnings. It’s a terrific premise, growing directly out of the show’s central idea, and Bewitched finds a way to twist it in just about every fashion it can while working entirely on the existing sets of the Stephens’ home.

18. Firefly, “Out Of Gas” (2002)
It’s rare for a bottle show to have a sense of epic grandeur, since so many of them are confined to tiny spaces for set amounts of time. But “Out Of Gas” manages the trick of feeling far bigger than its actual size. The story is an origin tale, of sorts, for the ship Serenity and the story of how all its crew members came to be on board, all threaded through a framing device of Captain Mal Reynolds using his last few breaths to save his ailing ship. The storyline darts through year after year of its characters’ history while remaining almost entirely on the existing sets for the ship. It’s warm, moving, funny, and action-packed, and it became the emotional core of the show’s brief run.

19. Friends, “The One Where No One’s Ready” (1996)
Like most traditional three- and four-camera sitcoms, Friends was limited to a few key sets: two adjacent apartments and the Central Perk coffeehouse, mostly. But “The One Where No One’s Ready” was the first to take place solely in one apartment, without any guest stars, such as put-upon waiter Gunther or the rotating cast of sometime boyfriends and girlfriends. The episode’s plot is carried off in the classic “small-but-impossible task” format, as Ross tries to get all his friends ready to leave together for a fancy work event at the museum. But time runs short while Joey and Chandler quibble over a chair, Monica obsesses over a voicemail left by her ex-boyfriend, and Rachel and Phoebe try to figure out what to wear. As a bonus, the episode also introduced the term “going commando” into the popular vernacular.