Meanwhile, after an attack on Varrick’s cargo ship that was transporting her merchandise for a business deal crucial to the survival of Future Industries, Asami’s situation is getting pretty dire. The explosives used in the attack, namely their notable lack of fuses, remind Mako of the attack on the Southern Water Tribe Cultural Center from the previous episode. Of course, Chief Beifong and her dopey cops shut him down, so… okay, hold on....

To steal a line from MacKenzie McHale, “it’s easy to be cynical.” Season one had plenty of flaws, especially in the brutal first few episodes. The show tried to outsmart its viewers with its rocky relationships and overzealous reporting initiatives and most egregiously failed to give us a reason to emotional attach ourselves to Will, a character that is more likable than most people make him out to be. But let’s not make this an Aaron Sorkin bash zone....

2.1 First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill All The Lawyers. “14 months ago, you went on the air and called the Tea Party ‘the American Taliban’.” “I did.”“And?”“The Taliban resented it.” If you’re just tuning in, The Newsroom follows a news team at fictional network ACN, and their quixiotic efforts to raise the standard of cable news broadcasts. The news stories covered in the show are real, but Sorkin has the benefit of hindsight in order to give his characters an almost preternatural ability to report a story in just the right way, while also following their inter-personal melodrama....

1.14 Long Way Back From Hell Yet the news that she and Marcel had conspired to bring Michael to New Orleans back in the day didn’t have the impact that I’m sure the writers had hoped, and the big problem with this episode were the reactions of the characters to this newest betrayal. Sure, Klaus didn’t like his dad much and would have been peeved to learn that his sister had intentionally brought his to town in the hopes of getting rid of him, but we know that it’s pretty standard for this family to commit such treachery on a weekly basis....

Hence our meeting with him last year. It was on the set of his The Predator movie, a soft reboot and reimagining of the storied franchise. As a series, Predator obviously means much to Black. He was after all Hawkins in the original 1987 movie, the glasses-wearing, foul-joke telling cut-up who was also one of the first to get literally cut up while Arnold Schwarzenegger had his oily back turned....

Like its predecessor, The Raid 2 excels not only because its fights are almost flawlessly choreographed, but also because director Gareth Evans builds up to them so creatively. Like the high-noon showdowns in old cowboy movies, the long stretches of brutality in The Raid 2 are preceded by moments of ominous calm, like the sea drawing back before a tidal wave. With The Raid 2, Evans expands his canvas far beyond the dingy tenement building that served as the previous film’s battleground....

The Simpsons: Season 29 Episode 8 Finally, a couch gag we can trust. The Simpsons season 29, episode 8, “Mr. Lisa’s Opus” is an epic comedy film parody, along the lines of, but funnier on a line-by-line basis than, last season’s “Barthood.” Even a short gag on an everlasting battle takes on historic relevance. The episode has its treacle, but Al Jean cuts it with brilliant subversion. Dan Castellaneta’s voice of Homer is in its glory as a rapid fire laugh delivery system....

In the not-too-distant future, 16-year-old Gardner Elliot (Butterfield) is the first human born on Mars. Raised by scientists and kept secret from the people of Earth by aerospace CEO Nathaniel Shepard (Gary Oldman), Gardner rails against his sheltered life and longs to visit his late mother’s home planet. His only contact with Earth is through a series of space Facetime calls with Tulsa (Robertson), a young woman living in foster care in Colorado....

Let’s start with our main protagonist Eph. This week, Battlestar Galactica, Falling Skies, Alphas, and Defiance vets Bradley Thompson and David Weddle replace executive producers del Toro and Hogan on scripting chores and examine Eph’s past as a failed father, successful CDC agent, and alcoholic. Eph is totally in the Chief Brody role but instead of protecting Amity Island from a great white, he must protect the city that never sleeps from an evil that has just awoken....

I suspected that this week’s outing might mark a change of pace for the series with the introduction of a photo shoot, and so it proved, as for the first time the tragedy inherent in the show outweighed the comedy. Yet while there were undoubtedly fewer laughs, the episode still maintained the gloriously high level set thus far. In what was easily the funniest part of the episode, a dream sequence saw him bump into a fan (‘AHA!...

After all these years, I really should have known better than to assume The Vampire Diaries mission to wipe out all of Rayna’s escaped captees would take up the rest of the season. This show doesn’t do that. It doesn’t introduce the final conflict more than a couple of weeks before the end of the year’s run, and even then said conflict will almost certainly be different than the one we were expecting....

Whether you actually find this episode enjoyable or not will squarely depend on how much you like the new character Augustus St. Cloud, who was introduced earlier this season as Billy Quizboy’s punctual and overly-prudent archrival. Personally, I find St. Cloud to be extremely annoying and lacking any sort of depth that we have come to expect from the rest of the Venture clan, and so centering an entire episode on St....

The Walking Dead Season 6 Episode 11 “Knots Untie” is the kind of episode we’ve come to expect midway through a season of The Walking Dead. It’s a slow burn, and definitely could’ve used a bit more time in the editing room, but it also introduces new characters and places that keep things interesting enough. Things don’t trail off from the midseason premiere as drastically as they have in the past....

2.12 Better Angels But yeah, Randall is a problem, and Rick and Shane are at odds about how to solve said problem. Shane, as is Shane’s wont, is going to solve this problem one way or another. As you saw last week, poor beloved Dale is now on the other side of the grave, thanks to the very same walker that Carl freed from the swamp bog. The conscience and the group’s counterpoint to Shane is now gone (thanks to a very impressive zombie gutting scene and a bullet to the head from good old Daryl), but the zombie strike has scared the group straight....

5.3 Four Walls And A Roof This has immediate and important parallels to the story of Bob, who last week was seen limping suspiciously around in the dark before being kidnapped and having his leg turned into a pork roast by Gareth and the surviving Termites. As many folks in the comment section correctly surmised, and as I thought to myself but didn’t type out for fear of being a fool, this led quite nicely into a very big reveal that I won’t spell out so close to the opening of the review....

We open, unfortunately for us, on Mandy, doing her Clarkson-goes-riot-grrrl thing again, before screaming at client and lover Lloyd Russell that she’ll kill him with her shoes for scuppering his own chances for the Democrat nomination. She’s shrill, arrogant and, oh look, now she’s gone and got herself a sense of entitlement the size of Belgium as well as a job at the White House. Terrific. (And this coming from a reviewer who loves nothing more than a feisty heroine in killer heels....

This week’s action-heavy episode of The White Queen served me up a delicious platter of my own words. It turns out that the series doesn’t ignore battles at all, it was just saving them up for the half-way point. This week had mist and creeping and mud and blood, arm-flinging battle speeches, thrusting and grimacing, slo-mo hair-flicking and swords galore. At one point, Edward IV performed a head-butt so powerful that a vase fell off the top of my TV....

This Is England ’86, on the other hand, is most definitely hard to watch. At least, it has been of late. ’86 is a series that has clearly changed direction. Instead of the ensemble teen series prior episodes have lead us to expect, in this episode we’re faced with a heavy, high stakes drama, where life and death really feels like it’s hanging in the balance, particularly in the key scene that spans practically the entire episode....

This review contains spoilers. Episode two’s flashback to Robin and Johnno’s wedding one month earlier overflowed with new things to look at. Unusual sights abounded – Tui in white coattails, the bride in a bomber jacket, her wedding dress suspended from a branch and driven into the flames of a bonfire, all against the backdrop of the glass-still lake and snow-capped mountains. It was a welcome return to series one’s distinct location and proof of this show’s excellent eye for arresting tableaux....

When I first heard that Jane Espenson had been signed up to write episodes of Torchwood: Miracle Day, I’m not going to lie: I was thrilled. Her CV speaks for itself, with significant contributions to Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Battlestar Galactica already to her name. So, what could she bring to Torchwood? This week’s episode, Dead Of Night, really starts to up the ante, after the fast and furious foundation work of The New World and Rendition....