Arrow Season 6 Episode 12 Star City faces Cayden James alone, cut off from anyone who would help them. Oliver is paying through the nose to stave James off, but it won’t last. The split teams work together more than in previous episodes, but that’s not enough to heal the fundamental rift between them, a divide that leads both sides to come up short. Dinah and Vincent take center stage, with Vigilante paying the ultimate price in the group’s attempt to find the weapon and take down Cayden James....

Few games have managed to come close to the great looks Altair and his historic adventure brought us, and the environmental interaction was excellent, allowing players to climb any building, run through impressively crowded city streets, and generally have a blast pulling off slick assassinations and death defying leaps of faith. For many, though, the cons outweighed the pros, and Assassin’s Creed became a poster-child for the perils and pitfalls of the hype machine....

When are they going to start following brilliant, blistering Jimmy McGovern dramas with a helpline call-out? “If you were enraged by any of the searing political injustice raised in tonight’s episode, call this number to join the Socialist Party/find out about activism in your local area/eat the unfeeling rich.” Banished viewers needs somewhere to channel the anger stirred up by this effortlessly gripping drama. We’re too late to do much about eighteenth century colonials, but perhaps there’s a library-closure protest we can all go on before next week’s episode?...

Job eventually awakes in a hospital bed. He can barely sit up, much less get out of Dodge. He knows it’s only a matter of time before Rabbit tracks him down. Meanwhile, back in Banshee, Hood and Siobhan are going through the motions of another night together. Vigilante justice doesn’t make for great pillow talk—even for two cops. Siobhan supports Emmett but not his actions. Hood, on the other hand, believes that the law is nothing more than a set of arbitrary rules....

2.1 Gone But Not Forgotten Naturally, the focus is still on the central pairing of Norm and Norma, the mother-son duo that remains as uncanny as ever. The ordinary travails of teenagerdom, getting on at school, learning to drive, are interspersed with, and interrupted by, the terrible desires that rattle through Norman’s gangly adolescent frame. His connection with Miss Watson, still closed to his conscious mind, has withered into troubling obsession....

Bates Motel Season 5 Episode 8 Bates Motel threw many viewers for a loop last week when its episode concluded with Norman turning himself over to the police, confessing to his crime. Norman being incarcerated is a vastly fascinating playground to explore for the show’s final three episodes, one that wields even more potential than when Norman was staying in the psychiatric hospital last season. It’s telling to see that Norman is so desperate that he specifically asks for his freedom to be removed....

4.5 Pack It Up, Pack It In We open where we left off, in one of the most brutal things this show has ever shown us. I know some of you may be rolling your eyes at that, considering all the gore and angst this show has thrown at its characters, but that’s precisely why these scenes with Kat and Aidan hit where it hurts: as much as they’re infused with the usual supernatural weirdness that permeates this show, at heart, they’re something undeniably human....

3.8 The Wolf-Shaped Bullet A fair summation of the season finale, but one that hardly does it justice. Following last week’s multiple cliffhangers, this final episode, as with most season endings, had a fine line to tread between tying up all the loose ends while also leading the viewer into a possible next series. It’s something Being Human has always achieved well in my eyes, but I’m not exaggerating when I say that this was, hands down, the best closing moments of television I’ve seen in a long time, certainly the best of the year so far....

This review contains spoilers. Before this season began, various promotional materials touted it as being all about temptation. Certainly, there’s been plenty of that, and I mean no offence to those behind the scenes at the show, but they’re wrong. This season has been about identity. Whether it’s blatantly obvious like Sally’s struggle with her split personality, or Josh’s perpetual struggle between man and wolf, or even Nora’s struggle to find who she is in a supernatural world, this season has been all about who we see ourselves as versus who we actually are, and this episode of Being Human hammered that point home hard....

Better Call Saul Season 4 Episode 4 People grieve in strange ways, and there’s no timetable for when grief should dissipate. Mike lost his son Matt in Philadelphia quite some time ago, and yet he still carries around the weight of grief, which manifests itself in a quiet, seething anger. You can see it on Mike’s face as Stacey recounts her story about her breakfast-inspired guilt, in his disgust over a lying attention-seeker, in his no nonsense scolding of the Madrigal employees, and watch it boil over as he confronts Gus....

The warning signs were there almost from the first minute, really. Batman opens up the episode by beating up on two “artists,” vandalizing a store, because, well…what better way for Batman to spend his time than on two schleps like “Daedalus” and “Junkyard Dog.” Of course, only the episode’s real villain, Anarky, sees the genius of these two dopes, and he outfits them with high-tech weaponry so they can take out their artistic frustrations on all of Gotham....

I shouldn’t be so quick to judge. It’s only 7:48pm, after all, and I’m not supposed to say what I think about the product or programme I’m reviewing until I’ve at least watched it, so I’ll sit here for another hour and look at my Sea Monkeys swimming round and round and round. Right, it appears we’re still in ‘ultra-competitive birdwatching’ mode and we’ve still got the same team captains....

Black Lightning Season 1, Episode 3 Victory is rarely clean—a reality many superhero narratives work hard to ignore. Black Lightning is, refreshingly, not one of those superhero narratives. It’s fitting that this theme, the humility and frustration of accepting (or not) that no one can control everything, be explored in an episode that is so much about organized religion. “Book of Burial” begins during Lawanda’s funeral, as Reverend Holt delivers a sermon about his inability to sit back any longer and let The 100 rule Freeland’s streets, killing without consequence....

Like all Marvel movies, if you wait until the end of Black Panther’s flashy credits you’ll be rewarded with an extra scene. And if you wait all the way to the very end of the credits, past the bit where they acknowledge the help of the City of Toronto (usually), you’ll get another. The good news is that Black Panther breaks with recent tradition and rather than giving us one actual scene and one comedy scene, both of these have potential ramifications for what comes next in the MCU....

On the way in, Linda tries to come up with a song, which of course is terrible, but funny. Bob has the entire dinner planned out to the minute, but I’m pretty sure it’s not going to go anything as planned, especially when the landlord tells him, “Go to the back, cook!” Yeah. The kids explore the house, while Bob checks out the non-elegant kitchen. The landlord goes to get drunk and get his “sex face” on…while Bob talks to the turkey....

5.12 Rabid Dog If you’ll allow me to torture this analogy for a little longer, I’d argue that Breaking Bad’s own nuclear warhead was Walt’s decision to start cooking meth, and as Rabid Dog demonstrates, that decision has had far, far-reaching psychological consequences beyond some of the more visceral and violent schemes we’ve seen him personally execute in previous episodes. While the more immediate, traditional danger to Walt and his family has subsided – he’s technically out of the game now, after all – the revelation of his true nature to those closest around him in this latter half of the final series hasn’t just upset them, it’s poisoned them....

Basking in the endless sunshine of northern Italy, precocious 17-year-old Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet) spends the balmy summer days leisurely transcribing classical sheet music and devouring copious amounts of paperback books. His world is drastically turned upside down upon the arrival of Oliver (Armie Hammer), a handsomely suave and emphatically confident post-grad American student who has been flown out to intern for Elio’s father (Michael Stuhlbarg), an eminent professor specialising in Greco-Roman antiquity....

The opening has us at a foggy dock in the middle of the night when a body is found barely hanging from fish wire by the night security guard. When the gang begins to work the crime scene, Medical Examiner Lanie is clearly startled while Esposito consoles her. When Caskett wants to see why she is so upset, it really grabs you. The body is a doppelganger of Lanie; an exact replica of our spunky M....