What can you tell us about your new book, Love Songs For The Shy & Cynical? So where did the ideas come from? Where do you find the themes for your stories? My first collection, Tiny Deaths, was all about looking at mortality from lots of different and bizarre angles – but what I found, deep down, was that most of the stories were really about love, and the way that people struggle to connect to each other....

Scandal Season 6 Episode 4 Cyrus has been claiming most of the screen time at four episodes into the season. But in “The Belt” we were treated to a harsh look of the dire circumstances Cyrus has found himself surrounded by in prison. He is quick to learn the prison rules: what to say, what not say, how to get what he wants, how to survive. For some reason the very foolish guard thinks Cyrus isn’t above the law and above playing these little games....

Trivia is something that director Ben Wheatley’s third film, following Down Terrace and Kill List, both thrives on and skilfully utilises. Because what Sightseers does is use small conversations and little details to make its pair of central characters so much more believable. Their goals in life, and their thoughts on day to day matters, are all the more tangible and believable because they talk about things that are so grounded and apparently non-consequential....

But that’s so 20th century. Today the American dream exists in a virtual space and its tangible capital is Silicon Valley, California. In the valley, the stakes are higher, the decisions weigh a little more and the reality is that potential is sexy. Before creating two polarizing cartoon shitheads in 90s, Judge (Office Space, King of the Hill, Bevis and Butthead) was a programmer trying to find his way in a still developing Silicon Valley during the late 80s....

The character with most screen time this week was Rachel, followed by the cartoon bad guy (who I predict is also a good guy) Rob. She goes ‘undercover’ to follow a clue left for them in a tree last week by the long dead Hannah (or is she?). The means of sending her incognito was entirely preposterous, having her appeared to be stabbed in a nightclub. This was one of the first things that happened, and at that point they’d lost me....

Star Trek: Discovery Episode 10 The creative team behind Star Trek: Discovery can’t be this culturally tone deaf, right? They’ve heard of the “Bury Your Gays” trope and the vocal backlash against recent unnecessary, insensitive deaths of queer characters, right? They know they have also been criticized for killing of their characters of color? (Up until this point, it has been women of color, with Captain Georgiou and security officer Landry as primary examples....

Even the political side of “Crisis at the Heart” has more logic than this: after voting to put Clovis in a position of power, the senate seems pretty quick not to blame themselves or Palpatine, but instead the Separatists, for the problem – a situation which could be used to teach kids about real-world governments. Parts of the episode are gorgeous, including a large Republic ship in drydock and a battle that really shows how much more detailed explosions on The Clone Wars have become....

Star Wars Rebels Season 3 Episode 12 and 13 Saw Gerrera returns to Star Wars Rebels in a two-part episode that doesn’t quite nail its horror movie atmosphere. “Ghosts of Geonosis” is an ensemble episode that does a better job than usual of using the entire team, but the action scenes are less exciting to watch than they might have been on paper. Setting Saw’s ruthlessness against Kanan’s nobility and Ezra’s naiveté is interesting, but by the end, both episodes fizzle instead of soaring....

Star Wars Rebels: Season 3 Episodes 21 & 22 Now that’s a Star Wars war story. “Zero Hour” featured plenty of space battles, Force mysticism, and suspense. Although some characters’ stories fizzled out just as they seemed to get going, the season finale brought Rebels into what might be an exciting new era. One of the best characters in that fight is Fulcrum. The more I see of Agent Kallus, the more I like him....

From the moment the episode opens, you know that this is truly going to be the oddest episode of Stargate Universe you will see for a long time. It opens with Lt Scott and Sgt Greer on a bus heading into a town called ‘Cloverdale’ and stepping off to be greeted by his ‘father’, played by Col Young, and his fiancée’s brother played by Eli Wallace. However, it’s all in Lt Scott’s head, as he is really on an alien planet having been infected by a plant that is slowly killing him....

Den of Geek was part of a group of reporters who chatted with Stephen Amell and Emily Bett Rickards on their Vancouver set earlier this month. Here’s what they teased about the Thanksgiving episode, what it’s like working with the young actor who plays William, and what we can expect from Oliver and Felicity moving forward. Not even Arrow could upset us too much on Thanksgiving. Does Oliver fail the turkey?...

In this episode, we also see the odd pairings of Crowley with Dean on one mission, searching for the one weapon that can kill Abaddon, and Sam and Castiel working to locate Gadreel. Not only are Sam and Dean literally working with opposite entities from Heaven and Hell, they’ve also switched their roles from a few seasons back, when it was Sam buddied up to demon Ruby and Dean having his private chats with Cas....

Everyone dies. Almost. No, that’s not a spoiler for once – but the premise for the latest new/old big budget genre drama on BBC1. This may be doing the original a disservice, although probably no less a disservice than the ‘created by Adrian Hodges’ tag on the new re-imagining, which, like ‘Russell T Davies’ Doctor Who‘ (which often appears as a press trope, but not on the programme titles) gives a rather misleading impression....

Last Time, the ‘Next Time’ trailer was rather misleading. I expected Bunker Action, and lots of it… but what we get This Time is another largely standalone episode which gives us a bit of the Abby/Greg dialogue I’d hoped for, though over a glass of bubbly rather than in a shoot out somewhere, and barely any Men of Science (other than a short, but major set up for next week’s series finale – I’m calling this confidently, absolutely this time)....

3.8 Visionary Two of my television shows this week indulged in some experimental formatting. Falling Skies took the dream sequence format, telling a story via the subconscious of major character Tom Mason. Teen Wolf has taken a more traditional flashback format for this week’s episode, Visionary. Rather than just one unreliable narrator, we’re given two separate but equally unreliable narrators, as well as a vision of what may apparently be the truth as communicated directly to the viewer....

This one story shows exactly where Heroes goes wrong in trying to follow too many characters and plots at once, when it pitches a story that is really entirely about Cameron and ignores almost everyone else. We discover that Cameron goes to a local library where she’s developed an association with a young wheelchair-bound bone cancer victim, Eric, who lets her research outside normal hours. That ties to an opening sequence set in a 1920s speakeasy where people die in a fire on New Year’s Eve....

To mark the 30th anniversary of the Blue Bomber, Capcom announced that Mega Man would return for another main installment in Mega Man 11. It’s a return to the franchise’s fast-paced side-scrolling gameplay that celebrates Mega Man’s legacy while also looking toward the future. With dozens of titles, it can be hard to pick out the Mega Man games that are actually worth your time. Den of Geek has picked the absolute best 25 Mega Man games of all time:...

Yet I flicked over to BBC One, and there was a problem. The England football team seem to be playing some meaningless, and thuddingly dull friendly, and there was no sign of some vacuous wannabe begging for a job that they’d be chucked out of several months after getting it (unless it was the England football manager, ho ho). This review, therefore, is brought to you in association with my Sky box, which may seem to be full of junk half of the time, but it’s the solitary reason I got to watch this week’s Apprentice, albeit a day late....

Complaints about the film emerged in the BBFC’s annual report, which stated that a total of 26 people had picked fault with the Board’s rating. “Despite a number of reductions made to scenes of violence to achieve a 12A certificate,” the BBFC said, “those who contacted us considered the film too violent, dark and sadistic for 12-year-olds, and inappropriately presented the hero as a vigilante figure.” Of the 12A certificate, and the occasional suggestions that it’s misapplied to certain films, the BBFC’s director David Cooke said the following to the BBC: “It’s inherently a slightly more complicated explanation than most … [But] especially at that age, children are developing at different speeds, and therefore their own parents are far better placed than us to judge whether a particular film would give their child too intense an experience or not....

In a quite brilliant interview with The A.V. Club, Patton Oswalt revealed that all wasn’t well on the set of Blade: Trinity, and Wesley Snipes doesn’t come out of it well at all. Oswalt recalls that Snipes would stay in character throughout the whole shoot for the film, and when Oswalt introduced himself, Snipes simply said “I’m Blade.” Furthermore, “a lot of the lines that Ryan Reynolds has were just a result of Wesley not being there....