The season four episode, Pip, is one of the notoriously bad ones. There's a reason why even some of the season two episodes hit syndication more often.
The thing is, I think that it was an episode that was intended to be awful. It feels like Matt and Trey had the same lingering hatred for the novel that I had, and felt like torturing anybody who hadn't read it for a half hour.
It's not too controversial to joke about Ayn Rand being a bad novelist. It is controversial to say that Dickens has never done it for you. So far as I'm concerned, I'd subject myself to John Galt's speech a thousand times over before subjecting myself to more Dickens.