1.1 Pilot Nine years ago, Catherine Chandler – waitress and aspiring lawyer – is changed forever when gunmen appear and murder her mother, a noted scientist, right in front of her. They chase her into the woods, intent on killing her too but a beast of some kind stops them dead – literally. What’s great about Catherine’s origin story is that it takes a girl who was terrified and attacked and lets her utilize that as a drive to become a cop and fight back instead of letting it break her....

This episode of Beowulf: Return To The Shieldlands desperately wants to be The Lord Of The Rings. All episodes of Beowulf: Return To The Shieldlands desperately want to be The Lord Of The Rings, of course, but in this one it is particularly obvious. In the brief pre-credits sequence, it has to be said, the ambition is really quite effective. The scene is short, sharp and to the point, and the looming shot of the militarily significant bridge that’s designed to remind us of the Argonath is suitably impressive....

Better Call Saul Season 4 Episode 6 Is it time to start worrying about Better Call Saul? We’re now over halfway through the latest season, a season that was promised to up the ante considerably by smashing the worlds of Jimmy McGill and Saul Goodman closer together than ever, and yet six episodes in, it feels like Season 4 of Better Call Saul is still resetting the table after Season 3’s shocking finale....

3.8 The Pony Nucky, who seems to have fully recovered from his moping earlier in the season, was on fine form even as he navigated the different layers of his world. His scene with Gillian, in which they traded lie for lie, was a case in point. We’ve seen both characters almost destroyed by their loss and guilt, but here they prove themselves capable of maintaining their chosen façade, breaking it through choice, rather than necessity....

This review contains spoilers. Ellie’s moment of apprehension about that hooded dog walker showed just how widely the suspicion spreads. The bleakness of the picture was summed up by Cath and Trish’s crumbling certainty about the attacker not being somebody they knew. “A few drinks…” started Cath, letting us finish her thought that any man, given the right (or wrong) circumstances, could be responsible. Cath and Trish’s conversation recalled Beth’s hardened “We know” to Miller’s series one protest that the list she and Mark had drawn up of Danny’s potential killers comprised only their friends....

Is your hand up? Good. Keep it up there if you enjoyed Super Troopers. So, if you’ve just skipped down from the top, welcome back. We’re about to discuss what Broken Lizard is. Broken Lizard is a comedy troupe made up of five writer/performers that have been responsible for the films Super Troopers, Club Dread and Beerfest. Their speciality is silliness. They don’t work exclusively together, and you may recognise them from other things....

Although this seems to be just a simple and straight-up death of a tween idol, something is definitely off. When it is realized that the dead Mandy Sutton is not the Mandy Sutton red flags go up all over NYC. As it turns out. Mandy’s mother’s overbearing stage-mom presence had taken it upon herself to run decoys of Mandy and doppelgangers around town in order to throw off the press....

6.10 The Good, The Bad, And The Baby There are a few clear problems with this trope. One, it happens almost exclusively to women on these shows and is based on the misogynistic belief that biology is destiny: all women are mothers or mothers-in-waiting. When we accept this premise, we are also buying into the idea that women who absolutely do not want to be mothers are less than women....

8.10 Witness For The Prosecution & 8.11 Dead Red Last week, we Castle diehards finally caught a real break. Not only did we get back-to-back episodes, but the episodes we got were largely what we love about the show: a good mystery, a little spice, and most importantly, the gang together and firing on all cylinders… even when they don’t. The “when they don’t” come in early in Witness For The Prosecution when we find out that Rick witnessed a murder a few months before and is set to testify as the one eyewitness in what seems a slamdunk case....

As Wayward Pines season 2 gets ready to premiere this month, Charlie Clouser returns to the studio to work on the soundtrack for the FOX series. Clouser’s unique style of musical composition has produced distinctive soundtracks for horror films like the Saw series and Resident Evil: Extinction as well as TV show themes and scores for Wayward Pines, NUMB3RS, and American Horror Story. So what can musically-inclined fans expect for the futuristic conspiracy thriller this season?...

Chuck has gone through some odd oscillations recently, swinging abruptly from the sublime to the distinctly sub-standard. Chuck Versus The Final Exam is certainly better than his last outing, but not classic Chuck, as such. It starts with Chuck following a man in a rail yard, who, when cornered, pleads for his life. Chuck pulls a gun and points it at him, and then a shot rings out! Surely Chuck isn’t a killer?...

4.17 Chuck Versus The First Bank Of Evil Chuck Versus The First Bank Of Evil connects directly to the previous story, where Vivian discovers her father’s lair and uses her charm to access i’s secrets. I’d assumed she’d got access to Hydra, but what she actually got was a bank account code, and through it possibly a link to the resources of the Volkoff empire. (Those with a PVR might be amused to freeze on the card, because the number 4815162342 is significant to those that stuck with Lost....

It is through this prism that Colette turns period piece conventions on their head and offers a clever reworking of the form, as well as a superior turn for one of its greatest modern stars, Keira Knightley. As a lead who is no stranger to roles requiring corsets and historical dress, Knightley along with a mostly English cast discover a surprising amount of continental charm that hews refreshingly close to a Parisian sensibility, and one that does its Belle Époque era proud....

Obviously, someone saw Nicholas Hoult in George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road, and thought, “We should put him behind the wheel as a high-speed car thief, but what should that story be?” Over 40 minutes into the movie, Hoult finally gets behind the wheel of a high-speed sports car to escape from his captors but quickly ditches it in favor of a less sexy stolen station wagon topped with a family’s vacation luggage....

If you’re in it for the long haul – and as I wrote that I thought: how unfortunate that we have to be “in it for the long haul” at all, as though it’s a big old baggage weighing us down for the week rather than an entertaining drama – then Collision is going to be rewarding and excellent. It already is excellent. We’re there; we’ve been introduced to all the necessary people involved in the multiple vehicle motorway pile-up; we’ve kept up through all the plot establishments here, there and everywhere; we’ve met the desperately watery-eyed Detective Inspector John Tolin (Douglas Henshall) who is trying to piece together the crash through photographs and diagrams pinned up on his board....

The main plot here is that there’s a rich kid coming to tour the Greendale campus and the Dean really wants him to enroll. The kid, Archie, is the slacker type who’d likely have to repeat classes again and again and, with his parents’ disposable income backing him, that makes him a hugely valuable asset. The Dean therefore needs to make Greendale seem particularly enticing for the lad, something Annie is on board with because some of the money will go toward a new “body farm” for the forensics majors....

2.12 Beautiful Dreamer The result is that Copper’s lack of focus, the show’s primary sin this season, disappears in a puff of smoke. This one-plot model might be worth further use by the Copper writers – though it would require them to permanently band all the characters together, which could be difficult. All hell breaks loose in the wake of Donovan’s death at Corcoran’s hand. Corky, with trusty companions O’Brien and Francis (Francis is apparently trusty again now), goes on the run as a new group of menacing bigwigs comes to hunt him down, including boss Eustace and Holland the granny-puncher....

This review contains spoilers. Hands up if, at some point in this episode, you thought the massive cliff-hanger promised for the end of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend season two was going to involve Rebecca LITERALLY HANGING FROM A CLIFF? Because I definitely did. When You Stupid Bitch started playing and she walked out to the cliff edge to gaze expectantly across the ocean, I thought we were headed somewhere terrifying. And – well, we were, weren’t we?...

Standing in front of a set made up of family photos, it’s hardly surprising, either. The show – a mix of storytelling, video clips and screenshots – is Baddiel’s response to the death of his mother primarily, but also the illness of his father. As he explains, compellingly, in the aftermath of his mother’s death, he didn’t want the nuances, the quirks, the faults of her life to be whitewashed away....

After last week’s abysmal opener, this reviewer started to wonder whether ‘the British Buffy’ was all part of some elaborate hoax; had the respective creators of Demons and Bonekickers got together down the pub and taken bets on who could get the most idiotic concept greenlit? Still, everything deserves a second chance. Well, most things. The episode – in its own crude, clunky way – taps into one of the most pertinent issues of the day, particularly when, as their family is hounded by the press, the mother turns to her husband and articulates the thoughts of every gutter-journalist and Daily Mail reader within a ten-mile radius: “They think it’s us....