My favorite instance of that was actually the classic-series serial "The Claws of Axos," in which the aliens have already turned on the Master before the beginning of the story.

(It does bear some interesting similarities to a pivotal moment in the story arc of Babylon 5: the main protagonist is caught in a strange place temporarily suspended between life and death, from which he returns to take a central role in an interstellar war between destructive superpowers, neither of which can be…

"Night of the Doctor" is actually now one of my all-time favorite Doctor Who episodes, even though it's less than seven minutes long. The shout out to the Big Finish continuity is one of the things that gives it surprising depth.

Okay, the "hoses" line just came perilously close to producing a hot-coffee spit take.

I guess there was never more than one kid named Davros.

Just don't mention the war. I mentioned it once but I think I got away with it.

…but my favorite thing-that-originated-on-Doctor-Who is probably The Matrix.

And Doctor Who ripped off everyone, too, so it was only fair.

Or a Slayer and a vampire.

I finally saw this episode… I'd say that whether they're going in that direction or not, the episode at least showed more emotional maturity on Finn's part; there's none of him acting like a crush-besotted kid, he's just hanging with PB, taking some time off from heroing and princessing.

"Mars University" is just an OK episode, but it does contain one of my all-time favorite bits of Futurama dialogue (which is not even on the IMDB quotes page, so I'm reconstructing from memory):

Reminds me of little Peter Quill's rotten luck in "Guardians of the Galaxy"… his dear mother dies, he goes outside and immediately gets abducted by a wondrous glowing UFO straight out of a Spielberg film… and the guys flying the UFO turn out to be the outer-space equivalent of a meth-addled biker gang.

SETI researchers usually imagine that what they'll find is some far-off civilization that can't even hold a two-way conversation with us without centuries of light-speed delay. I'd imagine they'd have to go public long before the far end hears about anything.

…also, whenever I see the word "Nethersphere" I keep reading it as "Nightosphere" and expecting Hunson Abadeer to show up.

…I might actually rank Robot Of Sherwood slightly above the other two at the bottom, because there's nothing in there that particularly does violence to the characters, just a premise that never makes sense on its own terms.

1. Listen (riveting, superb all around)

Well, that's why they came up with THE LOOMS….

They were all getting further from K-Mart.

…Anyway, as mentioned here earlier, I think we can just assume that the Master can come back from any sort of death, no matter how permanent, with "nya-ha-hah" serving in lieu of a detailed explanation.

She was in there before, and apparently things can physically come out of it (which is pretty goofy but makes a kind of sense if it's based on Gallifreyan Matrix technology, I guess, given what we've seen the Matrix do before).