Ranking All 14 Episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Return, From Worst to Best

No Mystery Science Theater 3000 season is perfect. Every season is weighed down by episodes devoted to movies which are so bad not even Joel/Mike/Jonah and the bots can do much with them. This is something known to longtime MST3K fans, but perhaps not to newbies. As such, when Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Return first debuted on Netflix two weeks ago I split the season in half and ranked the first seven episodes, from worst to best, before then ranking the last seven episodes. That way you can know which ones to start with.

For your convenience, here now is my ranking of all 14 episodes of The Return. If you want to give the show a chance and need somewhere to start this is as good a place as any:

14. Ep. 1, Reptilicus, 1961

Best riff: "Oh, I finally found the shade of lipstick I'm going to die in," as the titular monster bares down on a guy and a girl on a beach.

Best bit (away from the movie): An educational rap song about the different kinds of monsters feared around the world.

This is the first episode of The Return, and it shows. Felicia Day and Patton Oswalt vamp it up as the new evil overlords Kinga and Max, and Jonah Ray and Hampton Yount (as Crow) and Baron Vaughn (as Tom) riff with the adorable, but overwhelming energy of people who still can't believe they landed the jobs. MST3K always overwhelms you with the sheer number of jokes it serves up per episode, but in Reptilicus the new trio of riffers are still clearly figuring out when to let certain jokes breathe. Making matters worse is the fact that Reptilicus doesn't really give them enough to mock, since the characters they get the best jokes out of keep receding into the background. So, you have jokes arriving at a mile a minute, but very few of them elicit more than a smirk.

13. Ep. 8, The Loves of Hercules, 1960

Best riff: "We killed all of the guards with our primitive weapons and enthusiasm!"

Best bit (away from the movie): The robots dress up to playfully re-enact a scene from the movie, but when Jonah's new robot joins the scene Gypsy, Crow and Tom viciously show just what they think of the idea of a robot Cousin Oliver traipsing into their lives.

Trivia: Jayne Mansfield was pregnant during the making of the movie.

There were four Hercules movies featured on the original MST3K, and only one - 1958's succinctly titled Hercules - cracked the top 75 (#71 to be exact) of Paste's exhausting ranking of every MST3K episode ever. The Loves of Hercules fails to turn the tide as the new MST3K crew prove to be equally challenged to turn a Hercules movie into a truly memorable episode. I find this particularly disappointing because Loves starts off as if it was made specifically for me. The cold open includes a running bit about Jonah and the robots binge-watching Wings (a show I love), and their riffing on Loves quickly involves multiple Pearl Jam (a band I love) references due to Mickey Hargitay's freakish resemblance to circa-1995 Eddie Vedder. However, the Pearl Jam jokes stop at the 12-minute mark, and the rest of the episode proves to be quite unremarkable, save for the final minutes when the human villain is suddenly pushed aside by a Bigfoot-like creature whose affinity for Mansfield's damsel in distress leads to some entertaining Beauty and the Beast riffs.

12. Ep. 12, Carnival Magic, 1981
The Plot: Imagine if Billy Bob Thornton in Slingblade was a talking monkey instead of an intellectually disabled Arkansas man. Imagine if his gruffly delivered monosyllabic observations were then advertised as the main attraction at a crappy carnival. Then throw in a bullshit love story between the tomboy daughter of the carnival owner and some guy.

Best riff: "Carnies assemble!" as carnies really do seem to come streaming in from all corners in response to the carnival owner's call to action.

Best bit (away from the film): Tom as a "Come one, come all!" carnie, Crow as the disappointing talking monkey who only says things like "Hmm, looks like rain today" and Jonah as a confused onlooker. Tom: "The talking monkey, a theoretical triumph but a practical disappointment!"

Trivia: The film went missing for two decades before a 35mm print was discovered in a warehouse in 2009, leading to a restored and re-mastered version debuting on TCM in 2010.

There are certain MST3K episodes which you are likely to walk away from with just Tom or Crow's surprisingly impassioned rant over the closing credits sticking in your mind. I wouldn't have expected that from Carnival Magic, which features a pretty solid running impression of the perpetually unimpressed and often sexually frustrated talking monkey. However, other than that impression and the occasional quality dig at the redneck characters there just isn't much about the Carnival Magic riffing which stands out.

Then this text flashes on the screen right as the closing credits begin: "So Long For Now - See You Again Next Year for More Carnival Magic."

This sets Tom and Crow off on a sadly accurate rant about the lifecycle of the modern Hollywood franchise but as applied to Carnival Magic. It sends us out of the episode laughing. BTW, More Carnival Magic never did get made.

11. Ep. 7, The Land That Time Forgot, 1974

Best riff: "Okay, white guy checklist: kill all the animals?"/ "Check"/ "Take the natural resources?"/ "Check"/ "Use locals as slave labor?"/ "Check"/ "Build a church?"/ "Check"

Best bit (during the movie): Crow holding a prop bullhorn while shouting out instructions as if he was an old Hollywood director on a crane: "Guy with the hammer, right now it looks like you're aimlessly hammering all over the frame. Pick a nail and just focus on it."

The problem for them here is Land That Time Forgot plays as a fairly decent submarine drama for half of its running time with no obvious terrible accents or performances. They do their best with Baron Vaughn's amusing impression of the German captain, and get some good bits at the expense of the slightly out of shape semi-famous star of the movie, Doug McClure (you'd better believe they make a couple of Troy McClure references). However, they're stuck with a merely boring movie, not an insanely terrible one.

That starts to change once the characters reach the titular land that time forgot, but even then it's mostly a bunch of familiar jokes about now cheesy-looking monsters. The eventual introduction of cavemen into the scenario proves to be the extra ingredient necessary to give them something to consistently latch onto (e.g., "Wait. Don't go. You have to tell us how we can get 50% off our car insurance!").

10. Ep. 4, Avalanche, 1978
The Plot: Mia Farrow, Rock Hudson and Robert Forster form an improbable romantic triangle in this would-be disaster flick that's more interested in shady business deals (Hudson's a greedy snow resort owner), sweet 70s love on the dance floor and comic relief grandmas than it is with, I dunno, the actual avalanche, which comes mostly in the form of stock footage. One character actually hits on a 16-year-old girl moments before being waylaid by the much-delayed avalanche, and we're supposed to cheer when he's rescued? Avalanche is ultimately a movie in which three actors with no chemistry meander their way through inter-personal conflict, biding time until the thing we were promised in the title, the damn avalanche, finally shows up after making us wait nearly a full hour.

Best riff: "She died as she lived - lit up!" in reference to the boozy Shelly Winters stand-in who oddly mistakes snowy mountains for Hawaii at one point.

Best bit (during the movie): Tom and Crow remote controlling two drone planes down just in time to strategically cover a woman's nipples during a gratuitous topless scene.

Due to budgetary limitation, sheer incompetence or both, many of the movies featured on MST3K take forever to finally deliver what appears to be promised in their title. There are at least three movies in The Return which are guilty of committing this cardinal sin of filmmaking. However, Avalanche is the most notable of the bunch because it actually features recognizable actors, but don't expect Jonah and the bots to treat them any differently. Apart from the occasional Sinatra/Woody Allen joke for Farrow and one scant reference to Doris Day for Rock Hudson, the crew keeps their jokes mostly character and story-specific. There's no "You might have noticed...I'm Adam West"-esque joke ala the classic Mike era episode Zombie Nightmare.

So, if they play nice with the celebrities in the movie what kind of jokes do they make? Pleasantly bland ones. There is a good running riff about Robert Forster's character's insistence that everything be up to code, occasional outburts of impatience about the avalanche taking so long to arrive, a quality Simpsons reference ("feels like I'm wearing nothing at all, nothing at all, nothing at all") and some inspired digs at the clearly fake-looking snow post-avalanche.

9. Ep. 14, At the Earth's Core, 1976

Best riff: "My gods were hawk monsters and you killed them, but I understand you did it for my own good."

Best bit (during the movie): The gang holds up umbrellas when it seems like their silhouettes are about to be struck by falling fire from the film.

You can see why they picked At the Earth's Core to be their last movie of the season. Its directly connected by star (Doug McClure), director (Kevin Connor) and production company (Amicus Productions) to The Land That Time Forgot and co-stars Starcrash's Caroline Munro. So, there's a slight "everything comes full circle" feel, and they work in some inspired Doctor Who/ Star Wars jokes at Peter Cushing's expense as well as a running gag about the awfulness of the cave people's Carol Burnett-esque wigs. Their riffing of the film, however, is likely overshadowed by the Satelitte of Love bits which [spoiler alert] bring Kinga's plan to marry Jonah for illogical ratings stunt reasons to a surprisingly violent conclusion.

8. Ep. 5, The Beast of Hollow Mountain, 1956
The Plot: "An American cowboy living in Mexico discovers his cattle are being eaten by a giant prehistoric dinosaur," says IMDB, but man does it take a long damn time for that dinosaur to ever show up. Until then, there's a love triangle which erupts into a mid-day, city square brawl ("that's the second brawl today," jokes one of the robots), and the doomed tale of an alcoholic sombrero-loving ranch hand named Poncho and his too-small-to-be-useful son.

Best riff: "You'll never know the joy of watching your father die of liver disease," while the American cowboy tries to console the child over the untimely death of his alcoholic father Poncho.

Best bit (away from the movie): A robot fashion show of the curious Mexican clothing on display in the film.

As monster movies featuring dinosaur-like creatures, Reptilicus, The Beast of Hollow Mountain and The Land That Time Forgot slightly blend together and lead to plenty of familiar jokes (e.g., the robots assigning a funny human voice/personality to the monster). Hollow Mountain at least stands out in that it is set in Mexico and is the only western of the bunch, but this is one of those imbalanced MST3K episodes where they make due with a good joke here or there for a while before suddenly hitting their stride. In Hollow Mountain's case, that means turning Poncho and his son into reliable punchlines until the crappy claymation dinosaur monster finally shows up and the golden zingers come fast and furious, such as a recurring bit about the monster's apparent tears.

7. Ep. 10, Wizards of the Lost Kingdom, 1985
The Plot: "When evil screams throughout the world. When all the galaxies converge. When all that's fair and fine seems lost. A Hero will emerge," is the suitably vague IMDB plot synopsis for Wizards of the Lost Kingdom, a bizarre Argentinian film about a boy prince seeking to save his future princess with the help of a walking carpet (er, technically Yeti) and rogue badass. Terrible special effects and an overly cheery James Horner musical score await you.

Best riff: "And if not I promise to come to your funeral wearing a brand new white fur coat" in reaction to an elf bidding the heroes a fond "have fun storming the castle" farewell while possibly plotting to kill their Yeti for his fur.

Best bit (during the movie): Jonah and the bots do a parody of Grease's "Beauty School Drop-Out" with updated, Wizards of the Lost Kingdom-specific lyrics

It takes a while for Wizards of the Lost Kingdom to properly begin since the prologue attempting to establish the universe and build up to our main characters is actually stock footage from other Argentinian swords and sorcerers crapfests of the era. Thus, you will be just as confused as Jonah and the bots, and the confusion doesn't exactly go away once we meet the prince and follow him on his magical adventure. Jonah and crew make do with plenty of jokes about how cheap everything looks or how bizarre the Yeti costume is, but it isn't until the introduction of this film's Han Solo that they get a more reliable source of humor, treating him like the out of shape alcoholic he appears to be ("Fight them while I call your sponsor!").

They still manage plenty of one-off jokes, though, such as "meanwhile, the movie's sole investor" describing the film quickly cutting to a new character already in full facepalm mode or "surprisingly upbeat music for a scene featuring a girl being shot in the back with an arrow" in reaction to James Horner's "did he even watch the movie?" score. The finest moment comes over the closing credits as Tom and Crow use John Locke writings to educate Jonah about the inevitable democratic revolutions which await the Prince's sure-to-be short-lived reign as the land's new monarch.

6. Ep. 11, Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II, 1989

Best riff: "Can somebody magically transform their hand into a fist and just punch him already?" in response to the latest annoying line reading from Tyor.

Second best riff: "How about my overhand! Or my overhand! And my overhand!" as an enemy in the woods begins a fight scene by using the same exact swing of his sword over and over again, somehow expecting different results.

Best bit (away from the movie): Jonah and the bots take turns doing their best Jeff Foxworthy except instead of "you might be a redneck" jokes it's "you might be a crummy wizard" in reaction to the white trash wizard who looms large over the film's first quarter before fading into the background.

(Sad) Trivia: One of the film's various sex symbols, Amathea, is played by B-movie queen Lana Clarkson, who was famously murdered by Phil Spector in 2003. Jonah and the bots rightly refrain from making any reference to this fact.

This is a MST3K episode that takes a while to get going, partially because the same is true of the movie they're watching but also because there just aren't a whole lot of quality jokes to be made. My notes from the first quarter of the film only include one joke which made me laugh ("wise wizard, please teach me how to run" as an imagined line for Tyor during one of his various scenes in which he runs about as elegantly as Phoebe on Friends). However, as the film grows increasingly inappropriate, with far too revealing costumes for the various buxom women the heroes encounter, and the "who exactly is the intended audience for this movie?" question becomes all the more glaring the jokes start to pile up and the episode finishes strong. To be fair, the robots accurately point out that Lost Kingdom II is clearly meant to be a comedy, but similar to classic MST3K episode Timechasers the film's inherent campiness/awfulness is far funnier than the filmmakers actually intended.

5. Ep. 3, Time Travelers, 1964
The Plot: A group of scientists - and their lab tech Danny who kind of just hangs around even when they all completely ignore him - accidentally create a portal to 2071, a time when the last of humanity is plotting an escape off the planet via spaceship. They're on a strict timetable because the mutants surviving on the outskirts are pushing ever inward on them. Wait a minute. That's kind of like Doctor Who 's season 3 episode "Utopia." Say, will one of these scientists turn out to be The Master in human disguise? Sadly, no. However, we will be forced to decide who to root for - the 1964 scientist just trying to get back home, the 2071 dickhead humans hoarding resources and refusing to take the '64 scientists with them or the 2071 mutants who just want to be loved (or to kill, but mostly to be loved). Personally, I'm Team Mutant.

Best riff: "Would an idiot do?" after two scientists discuss how they'll need a guinea pig for their experiment and then both mischievously glance over at the obvious candidate, Danny.

Best bit (away from the film): Joel and a comedian I didn't recognize pretending to be two of the characters from the film who have emerged from their hyper sleep and now travel the universe as skeezy swingers. "A talking gumball machine? Wow, this drink really is kicking in."

Time Travelers gives the new crew everything a great MST3K episode needs: There's a dim-witted comic relief sidekick character who is easily exaggerated through ongoing impressions as an absolute moron the rest of the characters despise. There are futuristic scientists who both dress and sound funny enough to be constant sources of ridicule. The quickly unfolding plot never forces them to make due with scenes which drag for far too long. Truly bizarre-looking part-human, part-monster robots provide a steady stream of jokes, particularly the recurring bit of Tom and Crow becoming very emotional whenever the poor robots are assembled/disassembled or destroyed.

4. Ep. 6, Starcrash, 1978
The Plot: What if Han Solo was a smoking hot former female model inexplicably walking around in the vampire lingerie clothing she was first forced to wear in prison? What if her Chewie-esque co-pilot was a human-like android who always seemed to stay behind on the ship but also consistently used powers (like regeneration) we were never actually told he had? What if C-3PO had an oddly Southern accent and was quite the heart-melting gunslinger? What if, for good measure, you threw in some Buck Rogers shit too and filled the rest of the cast with Christopher Plummer as the supremely bored, but benevolent Emperor and David Hasselfhoff as his well-coiffed son? What if, after all of that, your Star Wars knock-off still ran short and you were forced to add in even more shots of spaceships slowly making their way across the screen?

Best riff: "Believe it or not, I'm not William Katt" in reference to co-lead Marjoe Gortner, who really, really looks like William Katt circa- Greatest American Hero

Best bit (away from the movie): Felicia Day and Patton Oswalt pitching some of their invention ideas to an incredulous [special celebrity guest] as the biggest venture capitalist in the universe. "Where's the reality competition element? Where's the audience interactivity? Where's my second screen experience?" is his response to their on-going experiment to drive Jonah insane by making him watch the world's worst movies.

Starcrash would rank high on this list even if Jonah and the robot silhouettes simply sat there quietly watching the movie the entire time. That's because Starcrash is so unbelievably bad, and such a historical curiosity (coming out just one year after Star Wars) that it has plenty of entertainment value on its own.

Thankfully, Jonah and the bots add to that entertainment by instantly seizing on the Star Wars similarities, Marjoe Gortner's William Katt-ness and the shamelessness of forcing British model Caroline Munro to be half-naked the whole movie even though she's the lead character. Plus, the robot who talks like a Southern cowboy gives them the chance to bust out a pretty solid impression. Curiously, once David Hasselhoff finally shows up they almost completely refrain from making jokes at the expense of his career, public persona or more famous roles (e.g., no Knight Rider or Baywatch riffs). Coupled with the Avalanche example, it seems as if this MST3K is going to play nicer with celebrities than the Mike era of the show. However, in Starcrash 's case there's so much more to mock that it doesn't matter.

3. Ep. 9, Yongary, Monster from the Deep, 1967
The Plot: A South Korean Godzilla rip-off. What, you need more? Fine. A sudden series of earthquakes in central Korea lead to the arrival of Yongary, basically Godzilla with a horn and affinity for gasoline. As the poor actor in the Yongary suit consistently struggles to convincingly rampage through the scale model of Seoul (he often moves as if he has the worst rash in the world but can't quite reach the part that itches the most), a group of poorly dubbed Korean actors race to stop him. Wouldn't you know it, there's a precocious little boy who actually seems fairly evil, at least from the MST3K crew's point of view.

Best riff: "I tried to photograph Alec Baldwin, and look what happened!" in reference to a badly injured and clearly bloodied photographer suddenly entering a scene.

Best bit (away from the movie): Yongary ends about as you'd expect a monster movie to end, but man does it ever take a surprisingly dark (e.g., we see his leg twitch as he dies) turn while showing us Yongary's newly dead body. It's enough to leave the robots emotionally disturbed. Thus, after the movie Jonah sings them a lovely, but funny song about working through the emotional torment you feel when a bad movie suddenly turns super intense.

There are 5 monster movies in the new batch of MST3K episodes, and Yongary is easily the best. You can sense as much from the moment a little kid plays a prank on a honeymooning couple. He covertly points his scientist uncle's experimental ray gun at them and laughs hysterically when it causes them to itch uncontrollably, quite inconveniently since they were driving their car through the mountains at the time. The movie treats this as a sci-fi Dennis the Menace moment, with no one admonishing the child but instead flashing "Oh, you little scamp" facial expressions. Thus, the table is instantly set for Jonah and the bots to riff on how secretly evil the little kid is, such as when they joke "What is this machine, and how can I use it to hurt people?" as the kid reacts with wonder to one of his uncle's creations.

However, an annoying little kid does not a great episode make, not on its own anyway. Thankfully, Yongary offers a steady stream of mockable material, leading to a solid batch of running bits, such as a scientist continually aspiring to actually work himself to death like his father did, the oddly oft-repeated use of the word "capsule!", Chris Christie jokes whenever Yongary causes a bridge to collapse or the ongoing befuddled reactions to the strange, almost drunken movements from the man in the Yongary suit ("He's doing Death of a Salesmonster"/ "One last Macarena before I die" / "I'm so excited, so excited - so scared!").

2. Ep. 13, The Christmas That Almost Wasn't, 1966
The Plot: Miracle on 34^th Street posited a world in which the real Santa Claus takes a job as a department store Santa to make the world a better place and delight little children. The Christmas That Almost Wasn't takes a far more depressing approach, creating a scenario where Santa only has to take the department store job because he desperately needs the money after an Italian version of Scrooge named Phineas Prune buys the deed to the North Pole and demands a fortune in back rent. Santa's only guide on this journey is a childlike attorney named Sam who takes a job at the store with him and spends all of his time playing with the toys. To lighten the mood, the characters occasionally break out into song, but it was a simpler time, a time when it was okay for an old man to plaintively croon about his eternal fascination with little children.

Best riff: "Calling all CHUD children! Calling all CHUD Children!" when Santa's call to the children in town leads to a stampede of kids out of the sewers.

Best bit (away from the movie): Santa and the lawyer's delivery of Christmas gifts is bizarrely shown to us as a slideshow instead of actual scenes with dialogue. So, once the movie's over we see a hilarious slideshow of Jonah and the bots celebrating Christmas on the Satellite of Love and Day and Oswalt doing the same on their moon base.

Trivia: This is at least the third Santa Claus movie in MST3K history, the first two being Mexico's 1959 source of endless nightmare-fuel Santa Claus and 1964's insanely culturally insensitive and incessantly upbeat Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.

I, gulp, genuinely liked The Christmas That Almost Wasn't. Even without anyone riffing over it I couldn't resist the unique charms of this remarkably peculiar slice of 1960s Italian cinema and its inventively downbeat plot featuring a humbled and humiliated Santa inadvertently creating the concept of department store Santas while desperately searching for work to escape certain eviction. The riffing, really, is just a bonus, particularly the recurring jokes about Sam the lawyer behaving far too much like an infant when in Santa's presence or Italian Scrooge ordering bodily harm upon any child he encounters.

1. Ep. 2, Cry Wilderness, 1987

Best riff: "Does a bear crap in the woods? Well, keep watching and find out."

Best bit (away from the movie): Felicia Day quarrels with a returning legacy cast member

Trivia: The screenwriter, Philip Yordan won an Oscar for the 1954 film Broken Lance. He was not forced to give that Oscar back after Cry Wilderness, but he should have been.

This isn't just the best episode of The Return; it's among the greatest episodes in MST3K history. It's not as strong as The Final Sacrifice, which Paste ranked as the best MST3K episode of all-time (my pick would be Werewolf), but it has a similar feel, with a wide-eyed young boy palling around with a curiously-haired old man in the woods, the two of them frequently erupting into supremely awkward bits of fake laughing. Cry Wilderness is the perfect MST3K film in that it is so crazy both you and Jonah and the bots will occasionally be rendered speechless by the insanity unfolding on the screen. Then one of the bots will bust out a killer impression of one of the characters and you'll burst out laughing.

If you've finished the season already, how would you rank the episodes? Let me know in the comments.