2.3 Telemon With Jason selected as her champion, Hercules’ secret is making him an angry man, much to the disapproval of Pythagoras. With the secret now shared, and Hercules reinforcing their position as protectors of the secret and of Jason’s destiny, Hercules sets out to train Jason and they come across Telemon, another warrior intent on winning the games. Pythagoras doesn’t trust Telemon, though Hercules thinks differently. It’s made even more suspect when Telemon is revealed to be a prince, just what Ariadne needs to improve her standing as leader of Atlantis....

Baskets Season 3 Episode 7 As far as Baskets episodes go, this is a jam-packed one. Christine and Martha go to Vegas, Ken comes to Bakersfield, and Dale drops his lawsuit. Some of it feels a bit sloppy but there are good laughs and sweet moments peppered throughout. Martha is then forced into an unwanted lapdance, which ends with her taking a quite painful-looking fall off the stage (I love Martha and found this moment genuinely distressing)....

2.4 Gloves Off We start with a classic cold open. Mike limps into his house, looking weary and worse for wear. He deposits an envelope of money on his desk, then goes to the fridge, gets some frozen peas, places them on his face and sits down. It’s only when he removes the peas for a moment that we see the extent of the damage he has sustained. Immediately we know that Mike accepted and completed the job he was given at the end of the previous episode, but took one hell of a beating in the process....

What first made you want to make Beyond The Pole? We thought the radio series was funny and could film it with two leads and a cameraman following them and make it cheap and sell it for a million dollars. Unfortunately, lots of crew insisted they were absolutely vital and they probably had a point as we were floating on sea ice in polar bear territory. Was it tricky getting funding for a film with such an unusual subject?...

1.4 Short Squeeze Maybe it’s because deer represent the fragility of life or maybe it’s because they’re the closest thing to nature most suburban deep thinkers will ever encounter. Stephen King used a solitary deer in his novella The Body (which was eventually adapted into Stand By Me) as a cypher for childhood bliss. The Walking Dead trotted a faun out for a young Carl to share a tender moment with before tragedy yet again strikes (tragedy always be striking on The Walking Dead....

1.6 The Deal The structural decision that doesn’t work out comes in the very first scene. It begins with a flash-forward in which Wendy meets Axe in some creepy bathhouse. He gets naked and enters a pool then invites her to do the same, which she does (cue: datass.jpg). We then get the chyron that every right-thinking audience member dreads: “72 Hours Earlier.” Booooooo! If Billions’ writing team had been watching Rick and Morty like every good American is obligated to do, they would know that this a beyond tired and useless plot device....

As soon as the second part of the Burial at Sea DLC for BioShock Infinite is released, Irrational as a studio will be wrapped up and Ken will take fifteen staff members to form a smaller scale outfit under Take Two. Staff that aren’t lucky enough to make the handful Ken keeps on for the new venture will be given plenty of help to secure their own future, including the use of the studio to put together their portfolios, but in the end, a lot of people are going to lose their jobs, which is always sad to see....

Please be advised: SPOILERS BELOW. Mr. Smarmy: Karl Marsten [Pascale Langdale]Creeper Guy: Victor Olson [Patrick Garrow]The Muscle: Zachary Cain [Noah Danby]Little Twerp: Daniel Santos [Michael Luckett]Groupie Girl: Amber [Eve Harlow] You’ll notice a new name on that list. That’s right, Groupie Girl. Groupie Girl is fifty percent of the gratuitous sex scene in this episode. She’s also the bait in a bait and switch attack. Because they have been changing people left and right, you figure at first that she must also be a werewolf....

It’s all utter hokum of course, but sadly this sophomore effort doesn’t maintain the manic pace or sheer goggle-eyed dreadfulness of the first episode. There’s a breadcrumb trail of clues, underground caverns, and some cheesy character names (an American senator called Simon Joy? Priceless!), but things are far more competently handled this week, which is a terrible disappointment. Still, there is some fun to be had: a scene clearly shot on a foggy field in Essex is meant to stand in for a park in Washington; Gorman (William Hope) from Aliens makes an unexpected appearance; Hugh Bonneville’s character Gregory ‘Dolly’ Parton continues to channel the spirit of Inspector Morse, sinking pints and shouting gruffly about bones....

Wow. I’ve been hugely impressed with this season of Breaking Bad up until now, but this week’s episode was by some distance the best so far. It had the perfect mix of humour, tension, action, and drama, topped off with a doozy of a cliff-hanger. Bullet Points (great title) began with a fantastic cold open. We’ve been treated to some good ones already this season, with Gail’s tragic flashback in the first episode and Walt’s Taxi Driver-esque meeting with the gun salesman in Thirty Eight Snub....

5.3 Hazard Pay Splendid snarky work from comment man/woman there, and while I suspect he was being a tiny bit facetious, he’s right – Walt is, probably for the first time in the series, unquestionably the out-and-out villain of the story. We got a little taste of what this last series, when the icy veneer of Gus was defrosted and humanized by his backstory just as Walt was metaphorically killing younglings – but this is the real deal now....

Dakota Fanning stars as Elizabeth, a mute midwife who has the thankless task of delivering babies at a time when childbirth is fraught with danger. And on the day that one delivery goes tragically wrong, a scarred, glowering Reverend (Guy Pearce) shows up to tell Liz that she must be punished for her sins… The further into the story we go, however, the more sadistic the events become, to the point where the catalogue of violence and cruelty becomes voluminous past the point of absurdity....

Last week, the Latimer family was drowning in sympathetic platitudes from their neighbours, this week; it was flowers, cards, and home-cooked food. Not that episode three lingered in the domestic for long, unusually for Broadchurch, we spent much of the hour inside an all-too-familiar location in crime drama: the interrogation room. Fittingly for an episode that charted the course of mistrust running between Beth and Mark Latimer, episode three of Broadchurch was bracketed by two scenes of the couple in bed....

It’s taken three episodes, but weaving the Sandbrook case in to Broadchurch’s second series has finally served a purpose other than tantalisation. Up until now, the Claire/Lee subplot has been a juicy diversion, a narrative trick to keep our heads bouncing excitedly from side to side like a crowd at a tennis match. This week though, Sandbrook really started to pull its weight. The penny dropped for me in that moment of enlightening irony when Miller called Hardy a fuckwit and reeled off the reasons that make Claire a viable suspect in the Sandbrook murders....

Rewind two years and the atmosphere surrounding the new series of Broadchurch was one of gentle hysteria. Preview access was fiercely guarded and press releases were accompanied by secrecy oaths sworn in blood. The success of the first run and the anticipation for its sequel were so great that it felt less like series two was airing than making an official state visit. After a rewatch and some time to reflect, it’s clear that series two was both better and worse than it was accused of being at the time....

Give me the child and I’ll give you the man, says an old Jesuit adage I’m paraphrasing and probably misattributing, but nonetheless the wisdom stands: what we learn in childhood forms us as adults. Of Broken’s many messages, that’s the loudest. It’s a job that Father Michael, now in his fifties, is still working on. As he struggles to support his bruised community and atone for his past wrongs, he’s also trying to make sense of the abuse he suffered....

The Long Night For several episodes now, we’ve known Morgan can assume the form of Igraine and despite not really doing much in Castle Pendragon except winning the favour of a few lords, we have impatiently waited for her to unleash her grand plan that would see her try and win the throne from her stepbrother, Arthur. So, what do we get? Another invitation for Arthur and his knights to come for dinner....

This week on Castle, our favorite team of writer and detective explore the “steampunk” world. For those of you unaware, steampunk is a “sub-culture that embraces the simplicity and romanticism of the past and at the same time couples it with the hope and promise and super coolness of futuristic design,” according to Castle himself. Actually, the beginning started off very strong. You see, back in the first season and even some of the second season, Castle always started with a really artistic shot over some great music and then panned around until you saw a dead body....

Making Superman’s birthday “Leap Day” could be a sideways reference to his ability “to leap tall buildings in a single bound.” Since February 29th is barely a “real” day at all as far as most people are concerned, it makes sense that a fictional character’s birthday doesn’t even exist during most calendar years. It’s also a handy way to explain why a guy who has been fighting crime since 1938 doesn’t appear to age....

Moving to Los Angeles in 1975 to work on an American version of Porridge called On The Rocks Clement and La Frenais soon realised that although the US remake wasn’t working out, Los Angeles as a base definitely was. They were asked to beef up a couple of scenes in the “alternative” 1983 James Bond film, Never Say Never Again. Sean Connery was making a comeback as Bond to rival Roger Moore in Octopussy....