2.1 Red Rain Anna (Morena Baccarin) shows up to gloat and then we get the big reveal that our cold opening was only a dream from a guilty-hearted Erica, whose carefully timed cryogenic grenade killed a litter of Anna’s children in the season 1 finale. Unfortunately, that means Tyler is still around and not everyone on V is dead. However, on the plus side, the sky is still an awesome shade of reddish pink, giving everything an awesomely Pepto Bismol pink hue....

3.4 Scarred As I discussed elsewhere, a series that depicts a warrior culture sets up the expectation that the focus will be on fighting rather than on the other aspects of that culture—a trap that Vikings has avoided quite nicely. Of course, in such cultures (and especially in a series which includes first contact between two warrior cultures: those of medieval Scandinavia and Britain), the main business of life is the struggle for power....

Second place this weekend is the impressively strong hold-over, Liam Neeson’s Taken, which took in $20.3 million. It’s amazing that, in this day and age, a film that’s already out on DVD in Europe can be a wild success in the US. You’d think that piracy would have nipped at the theater success, but I guess not. Paul Blart: Mall Cop, marches onward. Destination: 100 million dollars domestic box office....

Since debuting just before Christmas, the series has won acclaim among toy obsessives and regular folks alike due to the care in which it has been made. We all remember the dismissive manner in which shows like VH1’s I Love the ’80s discussed iconic toys, but such snark is completely absent from The Toys That Made Us — replaced by thoughtful comments from the pioneering men and women who helped make our adolescence such an unforgettable time....

Zed (Jack Black) and Og (Michael Cera) are two misfit cavemen. Zed is a hunter, but he’s widely seen as the worst hunter in the village. Og is a gatherer, but he’s so scrawny and meek he’s not much at even woman’s work. When Zed has a supposedly hilarious accident involving his spear and the shoulder of a fellow tribesman, Zed is banished from the village (which he promptly burns down) and begins a trek across time itself....

The above is an example of a conversation regularly heard in our house. The only variants are that sometimes it was ‘that girl from that thing’, and a lot of the time the song was far from good. 1. Kevin Kennedy (Curly Watts) – Bulldog Nation Here we see Coronation Street‘s finest and supermarket manager extraordinaire with an indie effort from 2000. DID YOU KNOW – Kennedy was in a band with Johnny Marr?...

13 Reasons Why Season 2 With suicide, rape, assault, mass shootings, and addiction, 13 Reasons Why prides itself on sparking conversation. This isn’t a bad thing. Media has the power to really impact us and provide new perspective on our lives and the world around us. It’s disturbing one of the few times the show does take a stance is when Tyler decides to kill everyone at the school. It’s shocking the extreme lengths the season goes to humanize Tyler....

CORRECTION: June 23, 2014 As a journalist, the right thing to do is often the toughest: admit when you were wrong. Whether you print mistakes that costs people money, their reputation or in the saddest of circumstances, their lives, swallowing your pride and owning up to your flub is the only way to reestablish some semblance of your credibility. I’m here now, on the 23rd of June 2014, to issue a sincere apology for printing erroneous information....

24 Season 8 – 7:00-8:00am Dana’s ever increasing army of haters will, no doubt, have found the episode a particularly enjoyable romp, as she finally gets discovered, although not before letting CTU’s previously clumsy security prove they’re not all bad after all. Making the lame excuse of needing to get her migraine medication from her car in order to escape CTU, security wouldn’t let her leave, on Hasting’s orders, until she’s cleared, and just when the guard looked ready to relent and let her through, he instead offered to let one of his colleagues go out for her (although, why could the guard go without Hasting’s say so, and not Dana?...

That was the big plan with 30 Rock. But something didn’t quite happen. The buzz is missing. So are the viewers. So is anyone even caring. Or being care-adjacent. Sure is echoey in here, isn’t it? At first I was determined it would be the fault of the public and their faulty tastes. But, no, I’m slowly coming to accept that it isn’t actually that good, and people may be onto something, which isn’t something I ever wanted to admit....

How the different Agents handle Hannah, who believes she is possessed by demons, reveals a great deal about their character, May coldly accepts that taking Hannah down was necessary, while Skye sees the girl as a lost and frightened innocent in need of a warm shoulder. Where the episode temporarily goes off the rails is when Skye goes after May for doing her job just minutes after she poured on the compassion for Hannah, a stranger....

If you missed yesterday’s chat, you can find it here. But without further ado… I think I might have been on it for four to six months, as I remember. We were a long way into the vehicle design for instance, so we had conceived of the biggest road vehicle ever made for the fire engines. There’s this massive thing, we’d got a long way into that. We were in this holding pattern of where we were going to shoot, and the locations were going to be dependent on that....

5.1 Checking In With American Horror Story entering its fifth season, it’s more than fair to say that the show’s been wobbly for the last couple of seasons. After the kooky fun of Murder House and the insanity of Asylum, subsequent runs Coven and Freak Show were examples of the show trying to do too much, going too far, pushing too many boundaries in the name of shock rather in the name of some sort of central story....

That being said, the episode as a whole was saved by a killer final 10 minutes, which saw Thea finally severing ties with Malcolm, Oliver recording a heartbreaking message to William, and Felicity getting the use of her legs back just in time to walk away from Oliver. (Oh, the irony!) Yes, serialized television is a marathon — the ebbs and flows of long story and character arcs — but, sometimes, the culmination of those longer arcs can make an otherwise lackluster episode just a little bit better....

Arrow Season 5 Episode 9 Arrow took a really big time out from its regular-season plot last week in order to deal with an invading alien force. For the midseason finale, titled “What We Leave Behind,” it was back to business as the Season 5 big bad took front and center. Sharp was one of Green Arrow’s merry band of new recruits, except she was never really merry. She stayed quiet at first while Wild Dog, Ragman, and Oliver’s issues took center stage....

It was at the episode seven mark of the last series of Ashes To Ashes that the show delivered the best episode of that particular run. After the mind-messing of last week’s Ashes To Ashes, and knowing that this week’s is the pentultimate instalment of all time, our anticipation levels were high. That was an hour of utterly enthralling television, perhaps lacking the devasting impact of events at the same point last series (unsurprising, given this is effectively part one of two), yet nonetheless really drawing together the worlds of Life On Mars and Ashes To Ashes, and sending our many theories off in all sorts of directions....

I loved the first season of Donald Glover’s FX show Atlanta, off and on. The setting and characters were all extremely unique, but the storytelling was scattershot. The first season was ever-willing, within the span of individual episodes, to jump between extremely dark and grounded to goofily comedic and surreal. Its fearlessness and wildly fluctuating tone were what drew me to it in the first place, but, by the end, I had to admit I was left wanting more consistent plotting....

1.12 Touched By The Gods – Part 1 With this level of plotting, what could possibly go wrong for anyone? The Queen is unaware of the plot against her and continues to stoke up her position of power, though a botched assassination attempt does shake her resolve slightly and she sets out to discover the identity of her would-be-executioner, deploying the best men of the royal court to find out who would be so mean as to try to murder her whilst she slept....

1.4 Twist of Fate Yes, this week Jason brings about yet more social change by rescuing an abandoned baby, despite tradition suggesting that the baby should be left to die. So Jason heroically changes nappies, valiantly shops for food and then asks Medusa, the only woman he really knows, for help, which she quite happily gives (probably because, for Jemima Rooper, it means some dialogue and the chance to show how great she is as an actor....