I’ll go first.
Winner:
Breaking Bad, season 3 episode 10, “Fly”
Honorable mention:
Community, season 3 episode 10, “Cooperative Calligraphy”
PS: I’m having a hard time categorizing these as real bottle episodes since they don’t feel cheap or “fillery” at all, but they are at least spatially and plot wise confined.
Doctor Who reboot, season 3 episode 10: Blink. Minimal Doctor action, great villain and introduced Carey Mulligan to mainstream audiences.
Midnight, from a few seasons later, is my personal pick. The Doctor is there the whole time, but he’s just stranded on a bus with a few strangers. Great example of that “nothing is scarier” type of horror.
Blink is great, but it is not a bottle episode.
Edit: I stand corrected. Abed led me to believe a bottle episode happens in one place, but it’s any episode designed around minimizing cost.
https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Bottle_Episode
Which was still not Blink. Blink was designed to allow two episodes to be shot simultaneously but it is not a bottle episode. It uses new locations and new characters (almost exclusively, even)
Reading the Wikipedia page for Blink, I can’t see any justification whatsoever for calling it a bottle episode. I assumed from the upvotes, people knew something I didn’t, but, no, they just liked the episode so they upvoted the comment.
It’s listed in the link you posted as a bottle episode, so I’ll stand by it. 🍾
Well, I guess it’s time to get involved with a wiki project, because I’m calling bullshit.
Effects
Moffat joked that “since I was a kid, I’ve been thinking of Doctor Who monsters, just now when I do, it costs the art department […] a lot of money”.[8] To create the rigid structure of the angels’ dresses, prosthetics supervisors Rob Mayor soaked fabric in fibreglass resin, which was then painted over.[8] Although they are never shown moving on screen, all of the Weeping Angels were played by actresses Aga Blonska and Elen Thomas wearing makeup and prosthetics.[2][8] The actresses wore two distinct masks: one that was more docile looking, and one with fangs bared.[8] Blonska later noted that “I’m partly painted, partly glued into the costume, but it’s quite comfortable.”[23] Although the actresses were slightly “wobbly” when they stood still, the producers used digital effects to, in essence, freeze the angels on film.[9] Moffat was very pleased with the results, and called them “fantastic”.[8] Mulligan later called the effects “so good” and “really creepy”.[8]
The argument seems to be based entirely on Tenant t being absent, and fewer special effects than otherwise. Since INTENT seems to matter–for instance the Seinfeld bottle episode of the chinese restaruant was intended as a bottle episode but the budget ballooned due to set construction–I think we need either a statement of intent from the creators in cases where the bottley nature of the episode is not immediately obvious, and I don’t think Blink is at all obvious.
Well that’s just 90% of doctor who up until about the end of Tennant.