Cheerio to James Delaney, currently sailing with a ragtag crew to Portugal to liaise with an American spy. Why he’s doing that is anybody’s guess. Why James Delaney has done any of this is anybody’s guess. Forget that Delaney’s plan was roughly as slick as a Rube Goldberg machine and twice as complicated. Only if we assume that he blamed himself for Winter’s murder and wanted the punishment does the fact that he let Helga get him arrested make any sense....

Speaking of time crunches, did we mention that Kate is not only back, and not only a werewolf, but one who can’t quite control her shifting? Yeah. That’s happening. I’d avoid any and all public women’s bathrooms should you hear the cracking of bones and screaming emanating from therein. Could it be devilish constipation paying a visit? Sure. But it could also be a murderous lady werewolf – and they need their privacy....

2.1 Omega Like that will put and end to their Very Hairy Romeo and Juliet relationship. In the aftermath of last season’s stellar finale, poor Lydia finds herself recovering from a werewolf mauling, not that anyone knows that’s what it is, and while she’s showering in the hospital, she starts oozing black stuff from various orifices and wounds while her hair falls out in clumps. Turns out it’s not The Blob paying her a visit via shower drain, it’s something else entirely....

3.9 The Girl Who Knew Too Much Life goes on in Beacon Hills, even as multiple lives continue to be snuffed out. Folks are waking up dead, victims of the crazed druid serial killer, the Alpha pack, or some other potential killer on the loose. If you’re a random person in Beacon Hills, your lifespan ends up being pretty short, what with the family of werewolf-hunting psychopaths, serial killers, vengeful drowning victims, Kanimas, werewolves, and other supernatural monsters running around....

4.1 The Dark Moon Derek is missing, and as the show suggested last season, the primary culprits are a group of hunters from Mexico known as the Calaveras. Or so Scott and company think. As it turns out, the mystery is much deeper than that, and it involves Aztec mythology, a returning Kate Argent, and yet another new wrinkle in the world of the supernatural. For a show ostensibly about werewolves, Teen Wolf is all about were-everything these days, and each new additional were critter seems to come with its own special abilities and complications....

5.10 Status Asthmaticus Falling Skies went into its final season promising a darker outlook, more excitement, and a killer final season. So far that hasn’t materialized, though there’s one episode left so maybe the last one will get super dark and murdery. However, the one thing they have done that I can talk about is blow through plots left and right. Falling Skies had a lot of stuff, and they’ve introduced more plot elements to blow through....

The 100 Season 4 Episode 9 “DNR” served to set up the events for the last push to the end of the season. But this episode had so much heart it didn’t feel like filler at all. While there is nothing more Octavia than that gorgeous closing shot of her approaching Polis on horseback in silhouette, I hope this turn back toward extreme violence is short-lived. Octavia is a warrior, through and through, but that doesn’t have to mean she’s a killer....

The twist in The Accountant is that Affleck’s hero Christian Wolff is also qualified to sort out your taxes, like Jack Reacher with a master’s degree in bookkeeping. All of this partly explains why Wolff leads a double life as an adult, crunching numbers by day and offing mobsters on the side; the story’s flashpoint comes when he’s asked to sort out the accounts at a tech company owned by Lamar Blackburn (John Lithgow)....

Almost 15 years later, this writer is still upset about the narrative choice, which resulted in a half-baked plot about Starbuck’s greater destiny as some kind of Christ figure, leading the last vestiges of humanity to Earth. In the Say So We All snippets, the writers try to explain themselves (she typed, with love)… Sackhoff put forth her idea. At this point, showrunner Ronald D. Moore had already talked to Sackhoff about Starbuck having a larger destiny, and Sackhoff wondered if the mandala triggers a recollection of the mandala in her own past that she now interprets in a completely different way....

Lucrezia’s Wedding This episode sees Pope Alexander VI marrying his daughter off to Giobanni Sforza (Rome‘s Ronan Vibert), a nobleman from a wealthy Milanese family, in order to strengthen his family’s position. In order to make the ceremony as scandal-free as possible, he decrees that the mother of his children, Vanozza (the lovely Joanne Whalley), not attend, due to her past as a courtesan. However, he sees absolutely no problem with leaving the evening’s entertainment up to Juan, who has as much subtlety and nuance as a Michael Bay movie, and decides to produce his own risqué play, or with inviting his current mistress, Giulia Farnese (Lotte Verbeek), to sit by his side and take part in the ceremony....

Kozmo Ah yes, that would be Merlin, that famous non-fictional character, and Jack the Ripper, noted cape-wearer. Well, in The Cape‘s universe, at least. Nonetheless, the ideas that the cape’s previous owners might be interested in regaining it, and that the cape itself might exert some influence over those who wear it, are both solid ones that can definitely carry a story. Luckily, this week’s guest villain, Gregor, was perhaps the most interesting the series has presented yet....

“Keep breathing”. The final words from Benedict Cumberbatch’s character in A Child In Time are a summary of its message. Through trauma and though loss, the film urges, keep going. Keep breathing. The Child In Time though, isn’t Kate’s story; it’s Stephen’s. And it’s resolutely a story about emotional resilience, not child abduction. In the years following Kate’s disappearance, Julie and Stephen fall apart and rebuild themselves separately, coming together in the film’s last moments with the symbolic birth of their unexpected second child, Kate’s brother....

4.12 Slaves of the Republic This move does freshen the atmosphere considerably (some story arcs can become rather samey in style) as Zyggeria counters the luscious, artful surroundings of Kidnapped with the harsher Eastern flavoured streets of the slavers’ homeworld. In style, it owes a great deal to the hive of scum and villainy, Mos Eisley, and, more accurately, Mos Espa (from The Phantom Menace), as the gang tread the streets on their quest....

Sunday night on BBC One is the cosy-blanket-and-Horlicks slot, a time when audiences don’t expect to witness anything much more traumatic than Judi Dench’s bonnet falling into a puddle or Minty from Eastenders opening a tin of fusty spam. How, without causing indigestion, can a main course dealing in the profound horror and loss of WWI follow on from an Antiques Roadshow starter and Countryfile amuse-bouche? There’s the odd pantomimic character of course; it wouldn’t be a First World War drama without a heartless toff riding roughshod over the troops....

I’m happy to admit that The Deep has got better and much less predictable in the third, and now in the fourth episode. And this latest episode, Everything Put Together Falls Apart, could be a stark warning for the final part of this show next week. But it’s more about the secret lava bugs that Catherine discovered while on the Volos. But then the whole explanation about how much they pressurise the moon pool so that Clem can use the mini-sub was entirely illogical, because they’d have had to pressure it from the surface, not at 2000 feet underwater to go down another 6000 feet....

“[Anger is a Gift] is part autobiographical,” Oshiro told us at this summer’s San Diego Comic Con. “I wanted to write a high school that looked a lot like my own. It wasn’t until I got to college that I realized having a resource officer and having disciplinary procedures manned by police officers was not normal in this country.” A resource officer is a police officer who is stationed on a school campus, handling disciplinary actions....

Having eaten and/or turned pretty much everyone in town, John and his ever growing army of flesh eating immortals seem content enough. As far as world domination plans go though, it’s languorous at best. And quite possibly ill conceived – what happens when they’ve eaten and/or turned everyone? Surely even immortals need a steady food supply? Paul and his magic hands need a plan, but for reasons not fully explained, he doesn’t want to simply kill all the once dead, now immortal not-quite humans – despite the fact that they are killers themselves, and would quite like for there to be no humans left....

The Flash Season 3 Episode 9 At this point, I don’t know what else to say about The Flash Season 3. I was so thoroughly disillusioned by the back half of season two and not particularly thrilled about the use of Flashpoint as a major story driver early on that I was perfectly ready to be kinda psyched for this show to just be OK this year, and I would have probably been cool with that....

1.14 The End Is Near I understand that taking light away can create tension where there is none, even if nothing happens except Kevin Bacon tripping over an ottoman, but when you’ve got stuff that’s already fairly tense—searching room to room for a hive of killers, for example—you don’t need to resort to cheap tension so much. It’s a technique that can work, but if it’s overused (like it is on this show), it becomes tedious....