The A.V. Club’s favorite TV episodes of 2021

The A.V. Club’s end-of-year coverage is officially underway—check out our picks for the and . Before our best TV shows list arrives next week, we’re looking back at our favorite episodes of the year with this week’s AVQ&A:What was your favorite episode of TV this year?

Just as leaned into the pyrotechnics for the closer to its excellent second season, I find myself choosing spectacle over everything else for my favorite episode of the year. Which isn’t to say that “The Grey,” FAM’s feature-length season-two finale, is just bombast without meaning. Written by Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi, “The Grey” is one of the tensest episodes of the year, as much for the questions it raises about the future of the space program as the fate of two of its most beloved astronauts. Overall, the second season just keeps growing on me (I regret being earlier this year!), in large part because of this finale, with its nods to Die Hard and Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan. [Danette Chavez]

I love comic book nerdery, so I had an absolute blast with Loki’s The episode is about Marvel’s god of mischief getting sent into a weird trash dimension where the Time Variance Authority dumps people and things that shouldn’t exist in the all-important Sacred Timeline, letting Loki go absolutely wild with Marvel Easter eggs and payoffs (Thanos Copter! Frog Thor!). More importantly, though, the episode gave Tom Hiddleston’s Loki a chance to meet some other rejected Lokis, like Richard E. Grant’s Classic Loki and the incredible Alligator Loki (who may just be an alligator with a hat). [Sam Barsanti]

“Roll the dice, spin that wheel!” No episode of TV made me happier this year than What We Do In The Shadows’ a gleefully ambitious dive into the central neuroses of its primary bloodsuckers. Spurred on by Atlantic City insomnia (caused when housekeeping at the titular casino hoovers up the vamps’ vital ancestral soil), the main cast’s sojourn in Slightly Less Sinful City lets Nandor, Nadia, and Laszlo get especially weird, culminating in an amazing sequence in which season MVP Colin Robinson cheerfully destroys a sleep-deprived Nandor’s entire worldview by explaining to him that “The Big Bang Theory” is a little more than just his favorite slot machine. [William Hughes]

As predictable as it may be, season three finale “” was a masterclass in dramatic writing, acting, and directing. Just as soon as we thought we had everything figured out, Jesse Armstrong turned the entire trajectory of the episode on its head in the last ten minutes. While the hinged on the potency of its dialogue, the finale told more in the silence and exchanged looks. All of the dots connected with the incredible set up of Tom’s betrayal and all of the Roy children landing flat on their asses together. The final scene between Tom (Matthew MacFadyen) and Greg (Nicholas Braun) alone felt like pure poetry and keeps churning in my mind. Like every good season finale, it left me wondering what will happen next. [Gabrielle Sanchez]

Ted Lasso is a special show because it gave me my least favorite episode of television from this year (yes, it’s been months and no, I’m still not over ), but it also gave me my absolute favorite episode of the year—we love duality. In Rebecca and Ted have parallel journeys in which they grapple with grief and the loss of their fathers. It was a heavy, poignant highlight of a show that generally prides itself on being “happy-go-lucky” and “feel-good.” The episode was especially cathartic for Ted and it was a big step in his character development. After over a year and 19 episodes of buildup, viewers finally learned the source of Ted’s anxiety and why he works so damn hard to be so damn nice. And finally, of course, this episode gave us the most bittersweet method of Rickrolling ever. [Shanicka Anderson]

Directed by Rob McElhenney and written by creator Craig Mazin, “Backstory!,” the latest narrative detour, is just as poignant and twice as stylish as the season one’s “” Growing with its central character, C.W. Longbottom (Josh Brener shedding years of Big Head as a young F. Murray Abraham), the episode transforms from optimistic fanfic about sci-fi geeks into a nuanced exploration of how feedback can feel like daggers when success doesn’t come easy or quick. For C.W., the aw-shucks hopefulness of finding his place in the world doesn’t pair with the bitter truth that there’s more to talent than mechanics: It’s listening to people who want his success. Arrogance and resentment, he learns, are the first step toward selling turkey legs at a Renn Faire. “Backstory!” proves that I need to stop underestimating Rob McElhenney. He knows how to make good TV. [Matt Schimkowitz]

Sometimes, there’s nothing more satisfying than a good introduction. So while there are certainly more accomplished—and definitely more moving—episodes of TV I saw this year, for pure entertainment-value intrigue, I don’t think I could have smiled more than I did while watching . Forget paying off long-running narratives, or delivering profound character study; watching the premiere jump back and forth in time between a gonzo Lord Of The Flies-style disaster involving a high school soccer team and then the decades-later look at those now-grown women wondering who could be digging up their murky past, is a total blast. Especially when those adults are played by Melanie Lynskey, Juliette Lewis, Tawny Cypress, and Christina Ricci. (Especially Christina Ricci, as .) When it ended, I turned to my partner and said, “I don’t know what’s going on, but I never want to watch anything else.” Slight hyperbole? Maybe. But no more so than a series that knows how to go just over-the-top enough. [Alex McLevy]

This is kind of an oddball choice, I admit, but given all the Bachelor Nation viewing I have done on the job this year, there is absolutely no Bachelor-related episode I have ever appreciated as much as Matt James’ “After The Final Rose” special. First, since Chris Harrison had been ousted, football star Emmanuel Acho stepped in, and took the opportunity to ask questions about race that The Bachelor had dodged for all of its 25 seasons. Sitting down with Matt James, the first Black bachelor, Acho opened up the conversation into what that actually meant for the franchise, what James had hoped to accomplish, and what particular pressures he had to deal with. At the time, James and his final pick Rachael Kirkconnell were estranged after her attendance at a college Antebellum Party had been revealed (they have since reunited). But as always in Bachelor Nation, there is one step forward, two steps back: Michelle Young, James’ runner-up, is currently wrapping up her own Bachelorette season, and selected the first final four consisting exclusively of men of color. But then who does the franchise pick for the next Bachelor candidate and host? The uninspiring Clayton Echard and Jesse Palmer, respectively, making this “After The Final Rose” seem like even more of an anomaly. [Gwen Ihnat]

There’s always been an implicit wisdom to the hooky casting gimmick of , the ingenious choice its creators made to play themselves as middle-school girls: Maybe honestly capturing the myopia of adolescence requires growing out of it first. My favorite of this month’s (sadly final) crop of new episodes is the one that explicitly breaks from the perspective of its 13-year-old protagonists. “Yuki,” which Maya Erskine wrote and directed, dramatizes an eventful, bittersweet day in the life of Maya’s mother (wonderfully played, as always, by Erskine’s actual mother, Mutsuko). The episode lightly riffs on a couple of giants of world cinema with a romantic reunion straight out of an Edward Yang film and a jukebox scene that’s a little Wong Kar-wai. But what’s truly lovely about it is the earnest attempt at supplying the character with an interior life that her children couldn’t possibly see or grasp at that age. The kind of empathy “Yuki” expresses comes only with age, arriving when you start to understand your parents as more than just your parents. I will deeply miss this show, and the truths it uncovers through hindsight. [A.A. Dowd]