The 5 Best Halloween Episodes You Should Watch Tonight

It was like magic. Somewhere in Heath Ledger's wonderful performance, the worst people you knew heard a dog whistle. A dog whistle which screeched "Annoy the fuck out of everyone you know and love." The Office understood that this was going to happen, and that's why "Employee Transfer" is so great.

Airing on October 30th, it was like a warning to the general public: Beware, for tomorrow your neighbors will turn on you, your children will betray you, and your roommates will spend six hours attempting to apply cheek prosthetics before giving up and just using a pound of lipstick. Any show that can accurately capture the frustration of existing in the same universe as the mob of Jokers before that day of frustration actually occurs is worth your attention.

"Employee Transfer" features some of Steve Carell's best acting in the whole series, but it's also a great parody of the time the Earth cancelled Halloween and replaced it with Jokerfest 2008. I'll never forgive Christopher Nolan. Never.

Unsurprisingly, The Spectacular Spider-Man, the best superhero cartoon of all time, broke the mold a little bit and gave us a Halloween episode that's a little more think-y. However, all this metaphorin' doesn't prevent the episode from having a fight between Green Goblin and Spider-Man which takes up the entire third act. That was probably the greatest strength of the show: being able to balance teen drama and deep reflection with radioactive boxing matches that usually lasted about seven glorious minutes.

While most interpretations of the Green Goblin never get past the whole "Curse you, Spider-Maaaaaan" section of their shtick, this Green Goblin is a playful, sadistic dick. He's constantly asking Spider-Man to consider what "mask" is real -- the mask that hides your face or the mask that is your face. This doesn't just play into the mystery of who the Green Goblin is, but also deals with something that's lacking in a lot of superhero shows that are made for kids: At what point does your human identity become the facade? The Green Goblin and Peter Parker aren't opposites; they're both freaks who only find respite and fulfillment when they wear their masks. Peter Parker is a bespectacled shell of a nerd. It's only when he's Spider-Man, quipping and punching with psychopathic consistency, that his actual mask gets taken off.

Anyway, Green Goblin (Norman Osborn) fakes a leg injury and then retreats back to his home. There, he finds his son passed out, breaks his own son's fucking leg, and puts the Goblin costume on him. Then, when Spider-Man gets there, Norman is all like "We gotta get my son some help. He's really sick. See, his leg is broken. He's helpless. WINK." So yeah, if you want to watch something with all the fun of a Marvel character and all the "Oh my god, no" of comic book child abuse, this is a good one. Jeez. Maybe you should've just gone to a costume party or something, y'all.

You wanted to have a Roseanne Halloween. A Halloween where you could buy that expensive costume that you saw at the mall and run around and play pranks on everyone. A Halloween where you could go trick-or-treating with your friends, because most houses were less than a quarter of a mile from each other. A Halloween where everyone, adults included, understood how important Halloween was to you.

The Halloweens I experienced as a kid were fucking wonderful. But just once, I wanted a Roseanne Halloween.

Halloween in a big city is weird. On one hand, you want to explore what it has to offer, but it's easy to get discouraged by the fact that you know that something like "HALLOWEEN PARTY FEATURING DJ QUANTUM. HALF-OFF SHOTS. PEOPLE IN COSTUMES GET A FREE PUMPKIN TEQUILA ENEMA" will attract roughly 30,000 people. So you go to parties, where you make friends you don't see again for eight years. And so your big-city circle of friends becomes a mix of a core group you hang out with constantly and people you see once a decade. It's kind of nice, especially in a sea of sitcoms that portray NYC as a place where you apparently can teleport from borough to borough, never having to worry about petty things like time or physics.

One scene of men in ape masks shooting machine guns at a convenience store for no reason later, and we get a touching montage of kids practicing martial arts that feels like it lasts two hours. One of those kids is abducted by a satanic cult, and Walker is dropped into a race against time to stop children from being sacrificed. How spooky is all of this? So spooky that the opening credits adopt a Tales From The Crypt font and show us a cemetery with a blue filter over it. Fucking boo.

Sony Pictures Television Distribution

That's ultimate spooky.

Regardless, Walker has never met a problem he couldn't quite easily resolve by beating it unconscious. In the nick of time, he literally flies onto the screen with a side-kick, and then breaks a Satan worshiper's neck in front of a group of stunned children. He proceeds to kick an entire cult into submission and saves the day. Walker finishes the episode by drinking coffee in a bar while ignoring the women who hit on him, because as the theme song says, "That's what a ranger's gonna be." Yep. Murder a bunch of strangers in front of elementary schoolers and never have sex, like, ever. It's what a ranger's gonna be. Who am I to argue?

Daniel has a spooky, scary Twitter.

The Simpsons Tree House of Horror Collection is objectively the greatest Halloween TV you'll ever find on this Earth. Enjoy!

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