Safety Not Guaranteed is the latest film in that grand tradition, incorporating elements of the romance and longing in Richard Matheson’s novel Bid Time Return (filmed as Somewhere In Time in 1980), and perhaps even a dash of the 1960 film adaptation of The Time Machine in its production design. Although Jeff’s confident that the anonymous classified ad writer’s just another deluded soul to write an amusing story about, Darius is more credulous....
Okay, so a congressman dies this week as the major problem, something that feels like a situation that we’ve seen happen before on this show. Regardless as to whether congressmen in danger is something Team Scorpion has dealt with before, it still certainly doesn’t feel like the most high stakes situation, even if there are incredibly bad CG exploding boats happening around it. Drew is still a big presence on the show, almost as much as any of the rest of the cast, and he still sticks out like a sore lobe on a genius’ brain, as he talks about things like “crushing” Proton Arnold with the best of them....
On this week’s SmackDown, the match was booked after Styles interfered in a No. 1 contender match for the title. That being said, at least this feud isn’t getting rushed to an ending. It felt like they were skipping a few weeks in the booking, but with a few weeks before the show and then the match itself, this feud between Owens and Zayn with Styles will get a proper sendoff instead of being rushed through for the sake of sending all three men onto different things....
5.3 Laying Pipe Firstly, I have to say that I take it all back. Sons of Anarchy hasn’t lost its way at all. Kurt Sutter has given us a fantastic episode that grabbed hold from the first minute and didn’t let go until 46 minutes later. In this episode we get to see how far Pope’s reach goes when he manages to set up a meeting with Jax within one of the offices in the prison....
6.2 One One Six On top of that, Clay has now teamed up with Lee Toric. Clay Morrow is anything but “taken care of.” Clay is the ultimate survivor and perhaps he has a few more things to teach his stepson before it is all said and done. So we have the man that Jax hates and arguably fears the most in this world teaming up with the man that Jax should be investing all of his energy into stopping....
7.6 Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em Some cliffhangers, however, are just frustrating and not much else. When this episode ended with Juice finally about to meet his maker (and presumably about to reveal the truth about Gemma’s involvement in Tara’s death) I was neither outraged nor exhilarated. I just rolled my eyes. Cliffhangers only work when they have built up sufficient tension and investment in the outcome, otherwise they are just annoying....
Matt and Trey take this episode and absolutely go off on the doping scandals and charity causes (or “Scauses”). They open the episode with the anger and sadness of a prominent figure letting the public down. Turns out everyone is cutting their “What Would Jesus Do?” bracelets off because scientists discovered that Jesus performed his miracles while on Human Growth Hormone or HGH. They indirectly go after Lance Armstrong’s rise to fame after beating cancer and winning the Tour De France seemingly every year by saying that Jesus rose with drugs and called it a “miracle....
South Park Season 21 Episode 1 In interviews leading up to South Park’s season 21 premiere, creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker reiterated over and over that they wanted to get back to the boys being boys. What springs to mind are more innocent stories like when the boys banded together to defeat a Warcraft troll, a simple concept that barely had a B plot. The glory days of South Park!...
Spartacus is back! Well, sort of. It was a hard decision for Starz to make, as the show has proved to be very popular, in no small part due to Whitfield’s driven titular hero. While many have said the show should just be cancelled or ‘wait’ till Whitfield is well enough to resume the role, that makes no sense from a business point of view and re-casting was an inevitability....
Stan Against Evil Season Episode 8 Let’s just kick things off by making something super clear: Evie Barret is the true protagonist of this show, not Stan Miller. The show might feature the character’s name in its title and Stan is certainly front and center in all of the marketing, but it’s all just clever misdirection. Evie Barret is the real savior of Willard’s Mill, and if anyone ever has doubts about such a claim, it should all become painfully obvious after “A Hard Day’s Night,” the second season finale of Stan Against Evil....
Star Trek: Discovery Episode 12 One of the main reasons why the Mirror Universe has felt somewhat hollow in previous Star Trek: Discovery episodes is that we never had a chance to get to know our universe’s versions of these characters Michael and the others are meeting. As for Sarek, he is a character we have a much deeper connection to, both in the world of Discovery and especially in larger Star Trek canon....
2.1 The Lost Commanders Rebel informer Ahsoka Tano creates the link between the Rebels and the clone troopers Rex, Wolffe, and Gregor. She’s had trouble contacting them in the past, but a captured droid head contains the information she needs. Once the Ghost crew finds the clones, they go fishing for a sand worm, until a well-intentioned traitor calls the Empire down. Captain Rex was a cornerstone of The Clone Wars, and a lot of the emotion in this episode came simply from the tense relationships between the Jedi and the clones after Order 66....
Firstly, then, we have an interview with Moffat and Gatiss, conducted back in March, when we ventured out to the BBC studios in Wales with a bunch of eager journalists. The two creators were generous with their time, going into eloquent, rambly detail about their love of Holmes, the thinking behind the change in setting, and how Matt Smith almost played Watson. How did the idea for this Sherlock series come about?...
Ten years on from the ending of 1999’s Toy Story 2, Woody, Buzz Lightyear and the other toys in Andy’s room have come to terms with the fact that their owner will eventually grow up and leave them behind. When they came to that realisation, all was happy, and a squeaky penguin did a lounge singer rendition of You’ve Got A Friend In Me. To put it simply, some of the kids don’t play as gently as Andy did, and the toys quickly realise they were better off with Andy....
Supergirl Season 2, Episode 10 What makes a hero? If it were superhuman power that makes someone heroic, as Kara tries to argue to James, than Livewire would be a hero, not a villain. No, Supergirlhas never had such a simplistic view of what makes someone heroic. Kara’s powers may make her good at her superhero job, but it is her desperate desire to help others, an instinct calcified when her mother sent her on a mission to Earth, that inspires her to save people’s lives....
Don’t get me wrong. Some parts of “Bloodlines” showed promise for a spinoff to find its own footing. Forty two minutes in a show that still needs to squeeze in some Sam and Dean is not enough time to develop the handful of important characters for Bloodlines. There were some misses though. Our main character, Ennis, is introduced very early on and we follow him around for the entire show....
Supernatural Season 11 Episode 18 “Back to square one” must be a favorite phrase of the writers. The Winchesters make major headway in their plans to defeat Amara, only to have it all taken away in an instant. Rowena, surprise-surprise, returned this episode. She was pretty obviously dead when Lucifer killed her for the hell of it. Bad choice of words. Anyway, Rowena explains to Amara how she retconned her way back to life....
Supernatural Season 13 Episode 20 I knew right away I would like this episode better than last week’s. Not only was it Gabriel-centric, it was also directed by the man himself, Richard Speight Jr. He always seems to get really fun episodes. I don’t know if it’s determined in a lottery or via throwing darts at a board of episode titles, but whenever I see he’s directing, I haven’t been disappointed....
Meanwhile, some bumbling thieves break into Daddy Winchester’s secret storage unit. Bypassing Sam’s soccer trophy and Dean’s first sawed-off shotgun, they steal something evil. Very very evil and for a woman and it’s… it’s an evil rabbit’s foot! (Bet you wouldn’t have seen it coming if they hadn’t completely focused on it in the previews). Sam and Dean continue on, winning free food for a year staying just ahead of the kitschy religious hunter (I bet you forgot about them!...
This review contains spoilers. Atticus was one of four new characters introduced this week, each one sporting a more perfect name for a nineteenth century melodrama than the last. There’s him, royal adviser Solomon Coop, actress Lorna Bow and thirteen-year-old urchin Winter (whose hopeful plan to get to America pegged her as this series’ war movie private with dreams of buying the family farm and thereby signed her death warrant for a few episodes’ hence)....
