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The Worst Episodes of NOVA

Every episode of NOVA ranked from worst to best. Explore the Worst Episodes of NOVA!

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PBS' premier science series helps viewers of all ages explore the science behind the headlines. Along the way, NOVA demystifies science and technology, and highlights the people involved in scientific pursuits.

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Episode Rankings

  1. #1 Worst Episode
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    NOVA Season 1 Episode 1 - The Making Of A Natural History Film
    0.0/10(0 votes)

    #1 - The Making Of A Natural History Film

    S1:E1

    NOVA premieres on public television with a behind-the-scenes look at the making of a nature film. Oxford Scientific Films Unit shows how it tackles such problems as filming a wood-wasp laying its egg inside trees, the hatching of a chick and the courtship rituals of the stickleback.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  2. NOVA Season 1 Episode 2 - Where Did the Colorado Go?
    0.0/10(0 votes)

    #2 - Where Did the Colorado Go?

    S1:E2

    NOVA explores the mighty Colorado River which today has become the life-blood of the Southwest, providing water and electricity to the farms and cities of California, Nevada, and Arizona. The program examines the political expediency and technological over-optimism that has led to some major miscalculations of the river's capacity.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  3. NOVA Season 1 Episode 3 - Whales, Dolphins, and Men
    0.0/10(0 votes)

    #3 - Whales, Dolphins, and Men

    S1:E3

    NOVA explores the impact of whaling and the goods it produces for the industry, verses the grace and beatury of this intelligent mammal of the sea.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  4. NOVA Season 1 Episode 4 - The Search For Life
    0.0/10(0 votes)

    #4 - The Search For Life

    S1:E4

    Does life exist outside this planet? The Viking lander will set down on Mars in July 1976 to try to find out just that. NOVA explores how life started on Earth and examines the Viking Lander being built in its germ-free room before starting its long journey.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  5. NOVA Season 1 Episode 5 - Last of the Cuiva
    0.0/10(0 votes)

    #5 - Last of the Cuiva

    S1:E5

    How does a primitive nomadic tribe of the Amazon basin cope with the encroachment of Western settlers? NOVA looks at both sides of the story, revealing the misunderstandings between the two cultures.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  6. NOVA Season 1 Episode 6 - Strange Sleep
    0.0/10(0 votes)

    #6 - Strange Sleep

    S1:E6

    Medicine was transformed in the 19th century by the discovery of anesthesia; surgery, until then hasty, bloody and completely unable to deal with internal disorders, subsequently took its place in the front rank of medical practice. This NOVA docudrama depicts the pioneers of medicine.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  7. NOVA Season 1 Episode 7 - The Crab Nebula
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    #7 - The Crab Nebula

    S1:E7

    In 1054 AD, the Chinese recorded the explosion of a star so bright that it lit the sky for three weeks, even during the day. It was the explosion of a dying star that was bigger than our sun. NOVA explores this mysterious explosion that led to the discovery of Crab Nebula.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  8. NOVA Season 1 Episode 8 - Bird Brain: The Mystery of Bird Navigation
    0.0/10(0 votes)

    #8 - Bird Brain: The Mystery of Bird Navigation

    S1:E8

    Birds migrate in search of perpetual summer, sometimes traveling as much as 20,000 miles every year. NOVA uses radar to track and identify migrating birds that travel at night, focusing on how they coose routes tat avoid bad weather and make the best of prevailing winds—information that can aid meteorologists.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  9. NOVA Season 1 Episode 9 - Are You Doing This for Me, Doctor?
    0.0/10(0 votes)

    #9 - Are You Doing This for Me, Doctor?

    S1:E9

    The advance of medicine depends inevitably on the testing of experimental procedures on human volunteers from either the healthy or the sick. Yet such procedures are often dangerous, and may not be of direct benefit to the subject. NOVA examines how individuals' interests are safeguarded, and asks, under what circumstances experiments should be conducted on children.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  10. NOVA Season 1 Episode 10 - The First Signs Of Washoe
    0.0/10(0 votes)

    #10 - The First Signs Of Washoe

    S1:E10

    Washoe is a chimp more like a person: she talks with her hands. NOVA visits with Washoe and her teachers—Professor Allen Gardner and Dr. Trixie Gardner—to learn more about this unusual animal.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  11. NOVA Season 1 Episode 11 - The Case of the Midwife Toad
    0.0/10(0 votes)

    #11 - The Case of the Midwife Toad

    S1:E11

    When Paul Kammerer committed suicide in 1926, it was taken by most of his fellow biologists as a tacit admission of guilt that he had faked his experiments purporting to show the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Arthur Koestler joins NOVA in an in-depth examination of Kammerer's infamous experiment.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  12. NOVA Season 1 Episode 13 - The Mystery Of The Anasazi
    0.0/10(0 votes)

    #12 - The Mystery Of The Anasazi

    S1:E13

    Who were the people that built the first cities -- complete with apartment blocks -- in North America? They were the Anasazi Indians, who lived in the Southwest for some eight or nine thousand years and who then, in about 1300 AD, abruptly abandoned their cities and apparently disappeared. NOVA traces the steps of this ancient sophisticated culture.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  13. NOVA Season 2 Episode 1 - Why Do Birds Sing?
    0.0/10(0 votes)

    #13 - Why Do Birds Sing?

    S2:E1

    NOVA travels to forests and marshes to discover why birds sing and finds surprising parallels with the acquisition of speech in humans.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  14. NOVA Season 2 Episode 2 - How Much Do You Smell?
    0.0/10(0 votes)

    #14 - How Much Do You Smell?

    S2:E2

    Many insects and some mammals use smell as a primary means of communication. NOVA explains how, for example, the entire economy of an ant's nest is organized by smell, and how some moths use smell for population control—an ability we is now beginning to understand.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  15. NOVA Season 2 Episode 3 - The Hunting Of The Quark
    0.0/10(0 votes)

    #15 - The Hunting Of The Quark

    S2:E3

    Smashing matter into ever smaller pieces in an attempt to find its fundamental building blocks has produced a confused nightmare of particles. NOVA looks at this on-again, off-again story—one of sciences's most mysterious—and, one of the most expensive, involving some of the biggest machines in the world.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  16. NOVA Season 2 Episode 4 - The Secrets Of Sleep
    0.0/10(0 votes)

    #16 - The Secrets Of Sleep

    S2:E4

    Most of us spend one-third of our lives in a state of which we understand remarkably little—some people sleep for only a few minutes a night, and function perfectly well, while others declare that eight hours isn't enough. NOVA explores traditional notions about how much sleep we need; looks at effects of the sleeping pill, and, perhaps the most baffling of all aspects of sleep—dreaming.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  17. NOVA Season 2 Episode 5 - Inside the Golden Gate
    0.0/10(0 votes)

    #17 - Inside the Golden Gate

    S2:E5

    NOVA joins a team of U.S. Geological Survey scientists on a mission to find out just how San Francisco Bay works: its physics, its chemistry and its biology.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  18. NOVA Season 2 Episode 6 - The Men Who Painted Caves
    0.0/10(0 votes)

    #18 - The Men Who Painted Caves

    S2:E6

    Just why did Cro-Magnon man living in France's Dordogne Valley some 15,000 years ago take time out from the desperate business of survival to paint pictures in inaccessible corners of his cave dwellings? NOVA joins French and American archeologists as they piece together the lifestyle of these hunters of the last great Ice Age, and try to interpret the meaning of their cave art.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  19. NOVA Season 2 Episode 7 - Red Sea Coral
    0.0/10(0 votes)

    #19 - Red Sea Coral

    S2:E7

    NOVA joins a group of English biologists living literally on a platform in the middle of the Red Sea, who for several years have been studying the crown-of-thorns starfish, notorious for the devastation it has wrought on the coral reefs of Australia and the Pacific.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  20. NOVA Season 2 Episode 8 - War From the Air
    0.0/10(0 votes)

    #20 - War From the Air

    S2:E8

    No description available

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  21. NOVA Season 2 Episode 9 - What Time is Your Body?
    0.0/10(0 votes)

    #21 - What Time is Your Body?

    S2:E9

    Have you ever sensed that your body reacts differently at different times of the day? NOVA examines the best and worsetimes for work, good times for sex drives and your body's most reactive time of day for alcohol consumption.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  22. NOVA Season 2 Episode 10 - The Rise And Fall Of DDT
    0.0/10(0 votes)

    #22 - The Rise And Fall Of DDT

    S2:E10

    Has the case against DDT been proven? A strange question, perhaps, to be asking one year after the US has banned the insecticide, but NOVA dares to ask. Tracing the history of DDT from its discovery through its banning in the States, NOVA asks whether America overreacted with its total ban of this once acclaimed "wonder" chemical.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  23. NOVA Season 2 Episode 11 - Take the World From Another Point of View
    0.0/10(0 votes)

    #23 - Take the World From Another Point of View

    S2:E11

    NOVA profiles two very different scientists: Richard Feynman, a theoretical physicist, at the pinnacle of his career—a Nobel prizewinner; and Richard Lewontin, a biologist and highly regarded population geneticist from Harvard University.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  24. NOVA Season 2 Episode 12 - The Lysenko Affair
    0.0/10(0 votes)

    #24 - The Lysenko Affair

    S2:E12

    NOVA explores T.D. Lynsenko's rise to power in the Soviet Union in the early 20th century, and how it affected plant genetic research in the USSR.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  25. NOVA Season 2 Episode 13 - The Tuaregs
    0.0/10(0 votes)

    #25 - The Tuaregs

    S2:E13

    High in the Hoggar Mountains, in the exact center of the Sahara desert, lives Sidi Mohammed and his family: children, grandchildren, cousins and a few former slave women. Their environment, one of the most ungenerous on earth, provides them with almost nothing. NOVA examines the changing lifestyle of Sidi Mohammed.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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Worst Episodes Summary

"The Making Of A Natural History Film" is the worst rated episode of "NOVA". It scored /10 based on 0 votes. Directed by Unknown and written by Unknown, it aired on 3/3/1974. This episode scored 0.0 points lower than the second lowest rated, "Where Did the Colorado Go?".