Just as the series 4 ‘holiday’ episode must surely be coming up (last year it was Stephen Moffat’s award-winning Blink), so The Unicorn and the Wasp proves to be this year’s budget-slashing, wardrobe-box raiding period filler (rather than thriller) which has clearly surrendered the majority of its budget to the effects bills for Fires Of Pompeii. Donna’s attempts at a clipped English accent are amusingly stifled by the Doctor, but it’s clearly a great thrill for her to meet the arch-hack and literary bore herself, as it presumably is for writer Gareth Roberts to get to explain Christie’s amnesiac 10-day disappearance in 1926....

With regard to her character’s increasingly mysterious past, Tipper agreed that “there’s always the idea or the essence that Naomi is hiding something. Everyone seems to be wondering what side she’s on, …but I can’t give you a clue as to what side she actually is on.” Hints of a connection to the supposed terrorist organization of the OPA have appeared as well as a strange request recently made of Fred Johnson for help in tracking someone down have added to Naomi’s intrigue....

Dragon Ball Super Episode 2 So here we are with Dragon Ball Super episode 2. With the lofty expectations of last week’s premiere finally out of the way, perhaps a much more casual approach can be applied to the series. Unfortunately, while this is still more of a step in the right direction than the premiere, things are still very in a land of re-introduction where the show is gently easing us back into this large cast of characters, with this episode focusing on Vegeta and his distinct little family....

Dragon Ball Super Episode 28 The introduction of Beerus and Whis has added a lot to the Dragon Ball universe, but one of their most distinct characteristics is their tremendous love of food. This food obsession that they have brought to Dragon Ball Super has been a fun diversion, but it’s interesting to see that this time it’s actually the spark to the show’s newest arc. It’s not some generational grudge, a new dangerous species, or some unleashed form of evil....

It’s an incredibly rare occurrence for a film to leave me so utterly divided, especially one that chooses quite openly to take a visceral grindhouse route in the opening minutes. But I imagine that’s, in part, down to not being able to quite maintain the balance between what’s naturally cool and what’s forced and uncomfortable to watch. Then along came the prospect of Nicolas Cage, on a vengeance mission, after escaping from hell, looking like a cross between Cameron Poe and Johnny Blaze....

Victory. The Duo Gamer controller attempts to bring hardcore gamers to the iPad by giving them the tool necessary to play top rated Gameloft titles like my personal favorite Modern Combat 3 (which is the main reason I wanted to test out the controller) and others such as Order & Chaos, Ashpalt 7: Heat and NFL Pro 2013. Playing these games with your finger feels nearly impossible and just isn’t that much fun....

3.14 The Female Of The Species Take this week’s reappearance of Gina Gershon’s mob boss. Elana Marsh was last seen thirteen episodes ago being put away by Watson in the season three opener. Elementary hadn’t forgotten about her in the meantime, it was simply waiting to harvest the seed planted all those months ago. It was a structurally neat return for Gershon’s character, who bracketed Watson’s experiment in flying solo as a PI....

Given the overall excellence of episode two, I was left wondering, as the credits rolled last week, just how the sitcom could scale the same heights a week later. Perhaps sensing that the momentum of last week’s show was impossible to replicate, writers David Crane and Jeffrey Klarik appear to have intentionally eased off the throttle for episode three. The result is an episode that’s less consistently funny, but nevertheless has plenty of great, isolated lines of dialogue....

Such big, emotional and sad events immediately become part of history, and their effects bled into the culture of the planet. Considering the impact of that day and the events which followed, it’s surprising that there have been little more than a handful of films that deal with the subject. But Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close, from director Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot, The Hours), begins in the aftermath of 9/11, and the pain and hope suffered by a child who lost his father in the tragedy....

Hal’s dynamic with his new Volm pal, Shaq, is pretty fun, though, I have to admit. Probably the strongest part of the episode was Hal’s group realistically failing to get through a mess of mech and skitter patrols, who are understandably out looking for the ghetto escapees. Shaq’s unconventional plan to liberate a transmitter from a mech so that he could pinpoint the positions of all patrols and beamers was conceptually just wild enough to work and enjoyable for the viewer to experience vicariously....

5.3 Hatchlings It’s very rare that Falling Skies explores a darker side of war best described with the famous Spock quote about the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few. Tom Mason and the gang make hard calls, but it’s not often that they do something that costs the individual for the good of humanity. Sometimes, though, the massive number of aliens streaming into the valley near Alexandria requires tough choices....

5.7 Everybody Has Their Reasons Falling Skies isn’t really acknowledging that the show is drawing to an end. This is the fifth season, and this is the final season, and seven episodes in, Falling Skies is behaving with the leisurely pace of a second or third season, instead of a show with three episodes left in which to expel the alien threat from Planet Earth. We’re meeting new people and killing them, we’re searching for food and ammo, we’re doing alien… liver transplants, I think, and we’re very slowly making our way to Washington DC, where the Espheni are apparently plotting something nefarious....

You know when you come home from a funeral and you’re having a couple of drinks and scrolling through all the nice funeral photos you took? The usual snaps – digger shifting the soil, coffin being lowered, the cutting of the funeral cake, grievers doing the hokey cokey? It’s hard for crime drama fans to also be sticklers for realism – contrivance, manipulation and false trails are more or less the name of the game....

2017, however, will provide a bountiful supply of Snipes. He’s set to have three movies out before the end of the year, the first of which is Final Recall (aka The Recall elsewhere), a sci-fi film in which he stars alongside Breaking Bad’s R.J. Mitte and Jedidiah Goodacre from Tomorrowland. He’ll play a character only referred to as ‘The Hunter’, and the trailer sells the movie as somewhere between Cabin Fever and Skyline, which has us absolutely intrigued....

4.2 One Night In October I find her fascinating to watch on a number of levels, as she works on the signature details of Altivia that make her different from Olivia: the head scratching, open body posture and Cheshire-cat smiling. The problem here is that they’re both dressed identically and have the same hair colour, so as not to confuse the audience. Thus, she’s got to be pretty liberal with these hints....

Ranger Gonzalez got in trouble with his superiors (again) for going after the Gecko brothers at the motel and almost getting the two local cops killed; and he’s due to show up in front of a committee so they can tell him how messed up that was and what is going to happen with his career. Unfortunately, the committee is going to be waiting a while, since he knocked out his friend, a fellow Ranger, stole the guy’s ride and continued his lovely vendetta towards the border....

It starts with a slightly different intro than normal: two brief scenes in deep, and not quite so deep, space (featuring a green glow), bring us into the main titles for the movie. The intro tune has changed to a Vegas-style swing number, and the story kicks off with the destruction of Mars Vegas. It’s all typical Futurama stuff, and if you like the series then you will no doubt like the movie....

3.8 Second Sons As Sansa and Joffrey took their sweet time heading towards the altar through the parted crowd, with the camera shooting up at them to emphasize the weird tallness of the set, and faces and bodies on either side of them, the whole thing reminded me of a German Expressionist horror. With every step down the aisle, things got more and more unnerving, and when Sansa and Tyrion finally took their wedding vows, it became clear that the whole thing was both a real wedding and a cruel, cruel joke....

7.3 The Queen’s Justice This is quite literally the endgame for all the warring parties on Game Of Thrones. It was said several seasons ago that when you play the game, you win or you die, and those words are proving to be prophetic. Daenerys might have had her fleet shattered, but she’s still got formidable ground forces, which are moving to take Casterly Rock from the Lannisters. The Lannister army isn’t going to wait around to engage the Unsullied; they’re going to get a little more revenge for Cersei and bring another house to heel....