At least we got two things back tonight; a villain and an end goal for Dexter. Unfortunately neither of them are up to par. Dexter’s puppy love for Hannah is definitely one of the more boring things to ever happen in his personal life. I do like the weird, intense infatuation that Michael C. Hall showcases with his face when Dexter talks about their future, but I don’t know, I just wish Dexter had a bigger endgame....
7.9 Helter Skelter What I’m alluding to is having created such a wonderfully nuanced character as Isaak Sirko, at least the most interesting foe for Dexter since Trinity, they to do away with him with three episodes of the season left to run! Grrrr… However, I can see with hindsight what went wrong here, and it was casting the superb Ray Stevenson to play him. I’m sure long before he went in front of the camera the writing team had worked out the entire season’s plotlines, and what Isaak’s character was to do, and where he was to exit....
The biggest compliment I can thus give Frozen is this: somebody watching it is going to feel the same way about Disney’s latest that I felt over 20 years ago when I first saw Beauty And The Beast. At its peak, Frozen is Walt Disney Animation Studios firing with everything, demonstrating why it’s emerged in recent years as the most interesting mainstream producers of feature animation (with terrific features such as Wreck-It Ralph, Tangled, The Princess And The Frog and Winnie The Pooh)....
First, that it was not a light entertainment concern as had been rumoured. Paul Daniels was nowhere to be seen, and an actor of Eccleston’s reputation (there’s almost certainly an algorithm used by the press that selects which adjective from ‘serious’, ‘intense’, ‘brooding’, and ‘Northern’ he is to be described with) showed people on the fence of the size and ambition of the revival. In order for Russell T Davies’ vision to work, it would first need to convince his lead actor....
Charlie Higson, perhaps best known as Mr Melons in Vic Reeves’ Big Night Out, has written a Doctor Who short story, and it’s really very good. Nev Fountain says this often, and he’s right: if you’re not writing Doctor Who on television, you might as well make the most of whatever medium you’ve got to play with. Higson builds some nice reveals, posing questions and answering them. By revealing the companion to be an alien gradually over the course of the story, it’s not only a nice reveal for plot reasons, but it’s a nice little character moment for the Doctor....
Since Man On The Street we’ve been aware that there is someone inside Dollhouse who wants to lead Paul Ballard there. But in this story the Dollhouse finds out and sets about a mole hunt for the person who has been messing with the imprints. What I didn’t like was the rather lame and overused ‘Twelve hours earlier’ scheme that the story is built around. We’re presented with something terrible going on, which we can’t see, and then rewind to explain how we got here and what’s actually happening....
Easily the hardest-edged comic book adaptation we’ve seen in a long, long time, this second attempt to bring Dredd to the big screen is a far more faithful beast than the oft-maligned 1995 movie. Right from the off, we’re dragged into the future world of Mega City One. It’s a horrible, dirty, sprawling rats’ nest of crime, full of endless concrete. It’s also overseen by a series of Judges, who act as judge, jury and executioner as they attempt to bring order to the city....
DuckTales Episode 2 Webby is the greatest character to befall television in 2017. I know we’re only two episodes into DuckTales but “Daytrip of Doom” uses every moment she’s on screen to just make you love her. Haven’t we all felt like Webby at some point in our lives? Not exactly sure how to handle a social situation? Desperately trying to overcompensate to disguise your insecurities? The whole sequence of her bouncing around the bus was so perfect not just because it’s funny but because it’s all born out of something kind of sad about Webby....
3.15 When Your Number’s Up We’re here to marvel at Holmes’ deductive genius and be stunned by his final revelation, not to drum our fingertips while he laboriously inches towards the same knowledge we’ve had since the opening scene. Arguably, the most satisfying part of any Sherlock story is the point at which he swoops on the culprit, police ready and waiting, and simultaneously explains the game to Watson and the readers....
L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz and its sequels have been adapted for the screen for nearly as long as there has been cinema. There’s something about the tale of farmgirl Dorothy Gale being swept into the strange, magical, and sometimes scary land of Oz that has stuck in American popular consciousness and never let go. No, Emerald City has literally replaced the bricks of the Yellow Brick Road with poppy pollen....
So how does Hampshire play such a crazy personality at two different times in her life: both in 2016 and in 2044? Hampshire says it isn’t easy. “I always notice at the end of a shooting day of playing Jennifer I am exhausted, and sometimes emotionally exhausted… It’s at an energy level that I’m not normally at.” There was, however, a noticeable shift for Jennifer Goines in season 2, including a departure from being in charge of her father’s company, Markridge....
I don’t think I’m alone in this, but I always find the real joy of mysteries is in the set-up, rather than the resolution. The act of guessing, weighing up evidence and discarding false theories is so often more satisfying than having the conclusion laid out before you, however cleverly done. Final confrontations between victim and villain are too often histrionic to have any real pathos. Monday’s episode had left us with a hefty question mark over the story of Tom’s origins as well as that of Greenlake Mental Hospital....
“Nightmares” is an episode title that takes a few different directions, but the first is Ethan’s remarkable experience of having an actual dream – and not a pleasant one – that scares him enough to want Molly to sleep with him. So did the alien energy life form infect Ethan as well, causing him to become more human? Or is it affecting his cognitive abilities such that he can complete the matching game much more quickly and even apply it to the file encryption of the Aruna video?...
Debuting on TIFF’s opening night, Fahrenheit 11/9 is many things, including ostensibly a sequel to Moore’s zeitgeist-busting deconstruction of the George W. Bush era in Fahrenheit 9/11. It most certainly is Moore’s indictment of President Donald Trump and the waking nightmare of an American leader who declares war on the press while fawning over Vladimir Putin, and it is also a hapless comedy of manners that details the mutual folly of the DNC and news media on Trump’s slow march toward the White House....
2.10 A More Perfect Union Here’s something that blindsided me: General Bressler, the guy who led the coup that overthrew Terry O’Quinn in Charleston, is Matt “Max Headroom” Frewer and I had no idea. I guess because he’s wearing a cap and fatigues and not Moloch’s pointy ears. He’s front and centre this week; moments after throwing elected leader Arthur Manchester into lock-up, he’s agitating the 2nd Mass about actively fighting back....
“Why can the human eye see more shades of green than any other color?” Lorne Malvo quizzes Officer Gus Grimly with this riddle on tonight’s episode of Fargo, promising that his answer will answer why and how Malvo is getting away with all of the chaos that he’s causing in Minnesota. The answer is that humans are predators; in the jungle, surrounded by tress and plants, the ability to detect different shades of green allows us to avoid threats and identify prey....
Things have been moving at a clip. The usual quiet town in Minnesota has Officer Molly looking “like a raccoon,” working late nights in an effort to tie her three homicide cases together. Five episodes in to the 10 episode open and closed season, this is essentially halftime, and “The Six Ungraspables” treats it as such. It’s time to get the money together, get that hand taken care of and hear a few parables....
“Families have stories, that’s what keeps them together,” says Samuel Cotton (Bernard Hill should be given British national treasure status) midway through tonight’s final trip to Manchester, this time on the dawn of a new millennium. Peter Bowker’s flawed but overall tender family rigmarole concluded with a fitting final chapter. From There to Here has always been about family right from the beginning and here it reached a peak with the Cottons, secrets spilling out of every aperture....
7.5 Zapp Dingbat Despite a scene featuring the one-eyed goddess almost naked and looking for some rumpy-pumpy (calm down, Internet), Zapp Dingbat is emotionally concerned with the Planet Express pilot and her mutant parents (bloody emotions!). The gang visit the Turangas as the couple celebrate their 40th anniversary only to find that all is not well within the marriage, leading to a rather hasty divorce. Her mother, Munda, who studied exolinguistics at University, and her father Morris, who wanted to surf the sewers of the world as a youth, find their passions have driven them apart....
