Scandal Season 7 Episode 5 What better title for a Scandal episode than “Adventures in Babysitting?” I haven’t watched The Help with Viola Davis, however, I’ve seen enough television shows, movies, and plays with an African American female cast as a caretaker for children and spoiled adults. Little was different in tonight’s episode from previous ones that included shouting, pouting and fighting between and from Rowan, Olivia, Fitz, and Mellie. I understand star vehicles built around an actor or actress that are infused with similar expectations some parents have for their unborn child....

Scandal Season 7 Episode 8 I was wrong. Rowan murdered Quinn. I thought the gunshots were more provocative than credible. Dinosaur bones and a loss of puppeteer power were motivation to assassinate a pregnant, soon to be a wife, before her wedding. In the world of Scandal, a petulant father and daughter battle each other using their darkest fears and friends as pawns. This type of chess game has no winners because it’s personal, emotional, and not logically strategic....

Scream Season 2 Episode 10 You could tell almost instantly that the episode was not going to end well for someone. The killer was up to his usual games and lead to a heartbreaking end. Most of the episode focused on two different pairings of people mending broken friendships. Emma and Audrey were still at odds after Audrey’s big reveal to her connection with Piper while Maggie and Sherriff Acosta surprised us with their unexpected history....

Karen is an interesting creation for the American version of Shameless. Like many antagonists on cable television, she is written far nastier and crueler than anything you can find on the networks. Whether the name is Walter White, King Joffrey or Tate Langdon, cable villains all initially are written to deceive the viewer into sympathy. Karen is being curiously reverse engineered. After spending all of Season 2 convincing us that she is a textbook sociopath with narcissistic tendencies (and then reaffirming it for the last two episodes), the writers are humanizing her after the fact....

1.3 The Sign Of Three An extremely funny detective, as it happens. Tot up every big laugh of Sherlock’s seven previous episodes – blanket, Bee Gees, bed sheet, deerstalker, “punch me in the face”, “he fell out of a window”, harpoon, doggers, “bollocks!” – and you’ll barely equal the gag total in this single outing. The Sign Of Three was a broad comedy with a relationship at its heart, or to give it its proper title, a rom-com....

6.8 Los Fantasmas This week saw Nero sacrifice himself to save SAMCRO and to protect his son. “I’m responsible for the death of those children.” We should have known that Nero was no Judas and his constant association with Christian imagery pays off here. If we’ve been paying attention, this revelation from Nero is anything but shocking, it makes perfect sense. Additionally, as martyrdom is the entire basis for the Christian religion one can argue that on some conscious or subconscious level that this is in fact something that Nero has always longed for....

Yes, if you do feast on enough gluten, your dick will fly off. The panic, as is the title of the episode, “Gluten Free Ebola,” is a play on the Ebola outbreak in Africa, which has caused thousands of deaths on the continent and alarm here in the United States as more outbreaks continue to be reported. Surprisingly, South Park doesn’t use the media to induce panic in the town (possibly because they used the news to explain crowd funding just last week), rather it comes from the source, the United States Department of Agriculture....

In another election cycle, we’d be able to plug and play with any two politicians to manufacture an ideological debate so hostile that it would seem that the immediate future of the country was in jeopardy. This year, the immediacy of the internet and the dying gasps of the cable news business is rewarding those who use fear tactics to spread their message. It’s a noticeably different culture from when President Obama and his tech-savvy campaign staff leveraged social media to victories in 2008 and 2012....

This seems like it could have been a “regular” episode of Space Dandy. Things start off innocuously enough with Dandy and company walking through a gorgeous bento box-type market looking for something to eat, but rather than buying food, Dandy has spent their money on a teleportation flashlight beam. His mentality here is that good things will happen to those who take crazy choices. It’s Napoleon’s Battle Plan, show up and see what happens, and things will eventually start going your way....

3.6 Spoils Of War The answer is with the most Spartacus-light episode of this season – possibly since the series began. And yet, unlike the last time they attempted to go heavy on the Roman side of things, this one had something we could latch onto: Gannicus. The story of his escape, intertwined with Laeta’s expulsion from Rome, was easily the most interesting strand in the episode, not least because it’s the last season: there was no guarantee he was going to make it out alive....

This review contains spoilers. Three fifths of the way through, it’s clear there’s no modern insight to be had here. SS-GB isn’t a complex investigation of political themes; it’s an old-fashioned spy romp down to the last hidden film reel, bombshell blonde and cyanide-laced cigarette. It’s unable to tell us anything about today’s world, or the 1970s world in which Deighton originally wrote it, because it exists in a bubble, less drama than antiques shop....

Stan Against Evil Season 2 Episode 5 “You could even say, ‘She’s a dead ringer.’” It’s actually a smart idea for Stan Against Evil to deliver an installment that spends most of its time with Evie, as it highlights the sexual harassment and frustrations that she regularly faces. The episode begins with a strong point of view (one that feels particularly relevant as of late) that pairs Evie’s gender-based hostilities with the supernatural disturbance of the week....

Stan Against Evil Season 2 Episode 6 Stan Against Evil is always at its best when it sinks its teeth into a popular horror trope. Dana Gould and his staff of writers have a clear love and respect for the classics of the genre. Devil babies are a beloved staple of horror and this show takes the subject matter to some truly crazy places. Horror films such as the The Omen, Rosemary’s Baby, Children of the Damned, or even the more recent comedy-skewing, Little Evil, all have firm point of views and things that they want to say about children and the supernatural....

If the past few weeks of The Clone Wars has demonstrated anything, it’s that the very fabric of Star Wars lore can be addressed and added to in the animated spin-off. And, so quickly, another story comes along which has possible dramatic ramifications with the television series. The story sees Anakin, his feisty Padawan Ahsoka and Obi-Wan, encountering a family of Force-wielders, beings whose powers belittle the Jedi with uncomfortable ease and lie somewhere between, and above, Jedi and Sith....

4.1 & 4.2 Heroes Of Mandalore It turns out that it can. After spending time with her Mandalorian mother and learning to lead, Sabine Wren is back in a big way. The hook for the two episodes is strong: Sabine is trying to rescue her father from a rival clan, while Ezra gets into hijinks. Even the possibility of seeing Sabine’s father is exciting, since it means we will learn more about her history....

Why would you base a series around the starship Enterprise they’d never mentioned, with the Captain that wasn’t worth reference? There isn’t an answer, because this was a story that never needed telling. From a TV viewpoint it took the once thriving franchise and sunk it deeper than whale doo. But Enterprise didn’t have even that chance, because it predated the lore of the original series, to which it was sadistically glued!...

1.11 The Calm As suggested by the title of this week’s The 100, The Calm, this hour was mainly preoccupied with set-up for the first season’s final stretch, putting some core characters in mortal danger, teasing prospective romances that’ll undoubtedly get shippers’ backs up and fleshing out the bad guys a little more. It wasn’t the most thrilling or thought-provoking hour the show has ever produced, but it did a good job of building on the things already covered in the preceding ten episodes while also introducing new intrigue in time for the two-part finale....

3.2 Wanheda Part 2 A lot of The 100‘s narrative energy last year came from several concurrent journeys home, whether that meant characters trying to get back to parents or children, prisoners of one camp trying to escape to another, or just the folks at Mount Weather wishing and hoping they’d one day get to walk outside again. That works, because it keeps things moving at an often exhausting pace and, although we all wish to see certain characters interacting with each other more often, the constant shifting and changing of location eases the frustration....

If it ain’t broke, therefore, then why not get the teams to the maternity ward of a hospital in double quick time? They could put blue shoe covers on and everything. It’d be great. It’d also be a tenuous platform from which to launch the ninth task of the series, where the two teams had to look at a variety of baby products, and take them off to A Very Big Baby Show to flog them....

After the dramatic conclusion to last week’s episode, with Taariq on the run following his ‘release’ by Henrik – part of a strategy to find out what it is he’s hiding about the murder of Margrethe Thormod – it was inevitable that the next instalment would be pretty intense. The amount of shocks in this episode, however, is remarkable even for a show as reliably gruelling as The Bridge. The emotional crises endured by the main characters are beginning to peak now, as the cumulative effect of one blow after another takes its toll....