Now more than ever though, Carol’s future looks dangerously uncertain – if she’s intent on not killing (as much as the Saviors will allow) then surely her place in The Walking Dead universe could have reached its natural conclusion… here’s hoping that’s not the case though and she has at least one more Rambo-esque chance to save the day in spectacular style. As it happens Melissa McBride is quite uncomfortable doing press, for whatever reason, but her concerns were alleviated at our round table when love for her character exuded from everyone....

4.12 Still However, when you have a compelling central character, bottle episodes can work really well. For example, take Daryl Dixon. We know very little about him, all things considered, because he’s not the kind of character who’ll sit down and air out his grievances, nor is he the kind of character who’ll make a big speech talking about himself, his goals, and his dreams before dying – Daryl is too popular to die....

5.2 Strangers With that mindset in place, you may be ready for Strangers, the first think-piece episode for this season of The Walking Dead. Indeed, that seems to be the way the audience should be thinking because that’s the way the characters are thinking. Carol has done a lot for Rick and company, and she’s done a lot to Rick and company too. However, this week is forgive and forget, or at least forget and move on....

5.7 Crossed That doesn’t work quite as well with The Walking Dead, because if you’ve seen one post-apocalyptic zombie hellscaape, you’ve seen ’em all. However, the characters look different enough that it’s pretty easy to figure out where you’re starting and where you’re going, be you with Abraham and unconscious Eugene or Sasha and Tyreese or Beth and comatose Carol. The focusing has mostly been successful – as much as I might want an uninterrupted Carol and Beth arc – but a trip back to the old style of doing things might help advance both plots without paying unnecessary attention to two people who are mostly just laying there after having suffered a traumatic injury....

The White Queen is dank and depressing, but it’s not actually dark. If you’re going to call yourself a witch, be a witch. When you’re accused of sorcery make satanic sauce, don’t suck off fifteen-year-old sympathy from a queen, no matter how bad she is. And that voodoo doll? The two figures made of lead bound in devilish union, shit, I bought one of those at the Pink Pussycat boutique....

Personal taste aside, throwing these two together in a road movie is like combining sea salt with caramel; two contrasting elements that work together to create something that you just know will work well. Like many great road movies of the time, Thunderbolt And Lightfoot combines character study with a topographical glance at the American national psyche, though not quite to the same scathing level as some of its contemporaries....

Ramlak Rising Determined to get revenge, Lion-O sets out for the Sand Sea with Tygra and Cheetara reluctantly in tow. They think he should be following Jaga’s advice to seek The Book of Omens, but have no choice as Lion-O is now king. Along the way they’re joined by Wilykit and Wilykat, a pair of street urchins who ask to accompany them until they find the lost city of El Dara....

Timeless Season 1, Episode 13 But with three more episodes to go, there’s great potential for another go at some of the enduring mystery surrounding the secretive group. With Emma Whitmore having apparently given Flynn and Anthony more details about Rittenhouse’s plans for the mothership, things must be even worse than whatever theories fans have come up with, or Anthony wouldn’t have decided to betray Flynn. It’s easy to see how Flynn might have become too focused on saving his family given the parallels to Wyatt’s situation....

Timeless Season 2 Episode 5 As Timeless gets more creative with its formula, it becomes clear how many possible permutations of time travel intricacies and lesser-known historical tidbits the show is able explore. Having JFK in the present could have come across as extremely gimmicky, but it actually served the larger story quite well in a number of ways. While the investigation had only small moments of action and stretched credibility at times, the important relationships evolved in a manner that wouldn’t have seemed possible even at the start of this season....

The Secret Revealed!John Byrne’s 1986 revamp did a lot of good for the character – and featured some fantastic artwork from Byrne himself – but since I’ve already got one interpretation of Supes’ origin story elsewhere in the list, I’m going to plump for this little vignette from early on in the series proper (after the Man of Steel miniseries had taken care of the origin itself). In it, Byrne shows that although he’d drastically changed Lex Luthor by turning him from a mad scientist into a billionaire tyrant, he at least understood the relationship between him and the Man of Steel – and, more specifically, Lex’s superiority complex....

Thus, we get to see Eve Myles’ Gwen making a fairly ineffective Lara Croft clone, unconvincingly firing her guns at supposed sharp shooters who were in turn trying to gun her down. Somehow, she escaped, although don’t ask this reviewer how. Meanwhile, Ianto too is being chased down, and he too escapes capture, thanks to the most incompetent enemy firing this side of a Star Wars movie. Frobisher, meanwhile, finally gets the detail of the message that was broadcast on the 456 frequency, which appears to be plans to build something....

The Cyberwoman Ianto was keeping alive in the Torchwood base was Lisa Hallett, a former employee of Torchwood One that had cyber-components grafted onto her during the Battle of Canary Wharf before being rescued by Torchwood Three’s support man. Now, love makes people do stupid things – I once sent a letter to an ex with a picture of Julian Clary, for example – but bringing in a cybernetics expert to help an artifact of a genocidal line of cyborgs breathe on its own?...

Well yes and no. However this is where the ‘good’ stops and the ‘bad’ starts to slip in. The overall tone of the book is set in the aftermath of a mega-battle between the ‘Liberators’ and the ‘Ultimates’. So within the wreckage of Washington, and amid the carnage of torn off limbs, exploded heads and millions of dollars worth of trashed Mechs, the team only has a moment to catch their breath before they are once again thrown back into the fray between Thor and his evil half brother Loki in the mother of all fantasy battles....

Did you enjoy your V-cation? While you and I had a break from the show for a few months, the powers that ABC were busy little beavers. The show runner from the first four episodes, Jeffrey Bell, was taken off the show permanently. Scott Peters, creator and executive producer, lost his power. While the changes behind the camera have been many, for me, the thing that’s been the most damaging to the show has been this new network tactic of the half-season....

3.7 Paris And that is largely because it is the most modern of the settings that we’ve seen so far on Vikings, and thus, it looks like a dozen other medieval sets we’ve seen. There’s nothing particularly foreign or new about the architecture the inhabitants live in or the clothes they wear. That doesn’t mean that there’s nothing interesting here, of course. Count Odo seems the usual sort of officious but probably effective enough lieutenant under normal circumstances, but it’s the relationship between the king, Charles the Bald, and his daughter that are the most intriguing....

4.4 Yol This season has been a bit of a disappointment thus far for me, in a certain way. If you’ve been following my reviews, you know I’m a tremendous fan of Lagertha’s—primarily of her take-no-shit way of dealing with a world which insists that she is a second-class citizen. And we’ve had little chance to enjoy that aspect of her this season. What I have loved about the show’s depiction of her is that it doesn’t pull punches about what the price of being that kind of woman is....

Though I loved Waz in the end, I initially didn’t want to watch it, due to its implicit association with torture-porn – do you think this is the kind of thorny marketing issue that could keep it from its true audience?I was always very concerned personally that it wasn’t represented with any images that would put it in that kind of sub-genre. I think it’s going to be a challenge for them, to be honest....

When Michael Crichton chose Delos as the name of the resort in his 1973 sci-fi film Westworld, he chose wisely. The Greek isle of Delos has more stories than a barfly on his ninth pint, and they’re all excellent. Another says that the island was created by Poseidon thrusting his trident into the sea, but is entirely free of quails, so you decide which is better. Sticking with the King of the Gods, Zeus once impregnated Titan goddess Leto, which, understandably though-you’d-think-she’d-have-been-used-to-it-by-now, angered Zeus’ wife Hera....

Charlize Theron in Young Adult? She finds the gaps in between as well. She doesn’t present so much the extremes, but pitches her performance just a few careful steps back from there. It’s immensely controlled. In Mavis, she creates a three dimensional, pretty monstrous character, one in whom writer Diablo Cody invests real care and diligence. It’s a rare union of words on the page and an actress who doesn’t hold back, and Theron’s performance in Young Adult is quite, quite brilliant....

Zootropolis is a metropolis full of evolved mammals, where predators and prey co-exist with one another in relative harmony in neighbouring habitats – picture it as a New York full of animals, with a Harlem tundra and a Brooklyn rainforest and so on. A few miles away in the rural town of Bunnyburrow, Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) has always dreamed of being the Zootropolis police department’s first bunny officer and through her uncommon determination, she graduates at the top of her class in police academy....