A creepy, bandaged home invader has been killing folks…but nobody puts the fact that they have a serial killer on their hands until he kills a “chrome,” one of the Almost Human world’s genetically perfect citizens. “Chromes” don’t die of natural causes (this guy’s weapon of choice is designed to make it look like they died of natural causes), and suddenly, the case is linked to the mysterious and sudden deaths of seven other citizens....
Pilot It starts well enough, with an opening that’s straight out of Fringe and a dozen other suspense dramas. A man gets a tone on his phone, leaves work and goes to kill someone. It’s a cliché, and prepares us for all the others we’ll get, because Alphas is not for the thinking viewer. It’s like it comes with subtitles for the hard of thinking. There’s no surprise to what each ‘Alpha’ team member can do, because we’re told explicitly what their special ability is in the first five minutes, and the only reveals are what their weaknesses are, which in some cases are their inability to act....
Cause And Effect Cause And Effect tries quite earnestly to layer in some characterisation, in an effort to make some of the team seem slightly more than a cliché. This week they focused on Dr. Rosen, who rather incredibly is a ‘ladies’ man’ (spoken in a voice deeper than I can manage), and they also provided Rachel with a problematic mother. It would seem prudent to assume that other Alphas will be fleshed out later, as the main story arc unfolds....
American Dad! Season 13 Episode 2 “What if Lindbergh brings the baby back to life with the power of RC Cola?” How many out-of-character jobs or passions has Homer Simpson had at this point? If this were the case I’d have given the show some slack for scraping this bottom of the barrel in its 13th season, especially with a script as strong as the one in this episode. However, what instead goes on here is Steve receiving his first F and things turning into a classic Steve and Stan tug of war for power over what is done next....
This week’s episode of American Dad swiftly begins with Stan circling the drain of desperation. Stan’s up to some truly reprehensible behavior (with Roger doing some prime enabling) that does a good job at encapsulating how he can take Francine for granted. Before the credits even roll Stan has already hurt Francine in several significant ways, in spite of this episode not even being dominated as a Stan entry. Speaking of the great lengths that the show will go to tell its stories, this simple wine-making venture is soon transforming into a life or death situation for Stan and Roger....
7.6: Mid-Western Assassin Cult is taking place in the present day and it centres on the election of Donald Trump, so it’s going to touch on raw nerves anyway, even before the latest in a long series of terrible, tragic mass shootings took place. Ten days ago in Las Vegas, Nevada, a man opened fire on a crowd of 22,000 people at an outdoor concert, killing 58 and causing injury to 498 more....
Halloween Part 2 Unfortunately for Tate, he’s got some company in the form of a group who Vi amusingly dubs The Dead Breakfast Club, aka a group of random misfits (jock, cheerleader, smart kid, rocker, goth girl) who all have massive holes in their heads/torsos and zombie-like pale faces. Since it’s Halloween, Vi doesn’t think anything about it, but these kids seem to know Tate and hate Tate, in spite of Tate’s protest to the opposite....
Arrow Season 5 Episode 13 Arrow is a pretty great show when it comes to getting one’s quota of masked superhero violence and well-choreographed fight scenes for the week. However, what happens when the show takes a long and hard look at its own violence and tries to make it mesh with a real world problem? Those curious certainly got their answer in “Spectre of the Gun.” If you were hoping for a regular installment of Arrow, where we get new leads on this season’s big bad and clues are revealed through flashbacks, you’ll be disappointed....
2.12 The Queen Must Die With Jason and Hercules off to break a prisoner out of the cells, Pythagoras and Icarus share a tender moment talking about stars and maths, whilst they hide from a patrol. So focused on their plan are they that they remain unaware of Icarus’ deception as he attempts to secure the release of his father, Daedalus, by leaking the rescue plans to Pasiphae. Rescuing his fellow slaves, Jason inadvertently leads them into an ambush....
2.5 The Day Of The Dead As ever, let’s kick off with a short recap of tonight’s action. Pasiphae’s life is in peril and she uses the last of her strength to cast an incantation upon a handy sarcophagus, awakening the body within. Her magic rapidly spreads throughout the Necropolis, reanimating more of the deceased. Jason, in the meantime, is facing a moral quandary as he finds himself trapped with Medea, Pasiphae’s aide, surrounded by more of the zombie hordes....
Winter Solstice Part 2: Avatar Roku Well, that happened. In last week’s recap of The Spirit World – the first part of a double episode called The Winter Solstice – I wrote about the first-part syndrome that most shows get: no matter how interesting your set-up episode is going to be for the viewer, it’s ultimately set-up for the decidedly more exciting action to come. I wrote this in the hope that part two, Avatar Roku, would deliver on part one’s promise....
1.2 Nice Town You Picked Norma Which is odd. Not because of the practice of a network diving straight in to a new title (they’re not the first to do so), but because of the leap in performance from last week’s episode to this one. The storyline and setting have opened up immeasurably, and the show is far better for it. Last week, I suggested that the motel itself, as much as Norman’s personal background, that is to blame for his murderous future career....
2.7 Presumed Innocent That examination, which appeared almost as a bottle episode set in the police station, was the ideal opportunity to develop these themes in a closed environment. Once again, the focus was on the characters, rather than on the specific details of Brennan’s fall. Freddie Highmore once again offered a performance as sensitively restrained as the script, brilliantly essaying Norman as a young man suffering from a trauma that he cannot even describe, let alone understand....
Still feeling a little lost? Here’s your BSG fact sheet: The morally ambiguous good guys are… humans! Thirteen tribes of them. Many moons ago, the thirteenth tribe left all the others and settled on a faraway planet known as ‘Earth’. The remaining twelve colonised elsewhere, and named themselves after star signs. There’s Caprica, which is full of politicians, artists and fighter pilots; Saggitaron, which is where the crazy religious types live; and… uh… other ones....
There’s a moment in the first three episodes of Better Call Saul Season 4 in which overworked attorney Kim Wexler (played, as always, by the superb Rhea Seehorn) visits her client, Mesa Verde Bank at their palatial Albuquerque headquarters. Even in the early millennium timeline when the show takes place, the American West is still infinite. The cowboys and Indians are gone. But carpetbaggers still remain in air-conditioned rooms, plugging away at the American dream the best way they see fit....
1.12 The Conversation Anti-climactic is a dirty word for a season finale of television. In a perfect world, the 11, 12, 22 or how ever many episodes leading up to a finale are supposed to end in some kind of explosive, climactic resolution. By most definitions, Billions‘ first season finale could be described as “anti-climactic.” Nobody dies, nobody ends up in jail and the only potential case against Bobby Axelrod is quickly dashed away....
It’s been estimated that thirty percent of women in the 18th century worked as prostitutes at some time in their lives. In a world where women were not allowed jobs, property or control over their own existence, prostitution offered the only path to independence that many women had. Furthermore, a wife could be turned out of the house by a husband who caught her cheating. Probably the most famous case of this was Grace Dalrymple Elliott, who was divorced by her husband after an affair, and forced to become a courtesan when her parents refused to take her back in....
Black Sails Season 3 Episode 4 In the last episode, the pirates were lined up against Woods Rodgers, ready for the fight of the decade. Then Hornigold came in and read out the offer of pardon, and it was over just like that. The fourth episode of Black Sails season 3, “XXII,” starts with pirates knocking on the door of the fort, ready to turn Charles Vane in for the ransom put on his head....
Where Blindness coincides with that book is in depicting a world suffering from an epidemic of sight-destroying disease, and – as in Wyndham’s template – certain people are unaffected. These include doctor’s wife Julianne Moore, who devotedly follows her infected husband to the internment/quarantine camp where the sighted military guards keep the detainees away from the fences with sub-machine guns, after mocking them a bit. Before you know it, the ‘ward’ to where all the bad boys have gravitated takes over control of the food supply, and the other wards must supply trinkets in order to get anything to eat....
Oscar (Lou Gossett Jr.) hasn’t forgotten either. Chalky White (Michael Kenneth Williams) is on the lam and woodshedding with the easy riding singer Daughter Maitland (Margot Bingham). That shed is like a fortress in the woods because Oscar remembers how it was and knows how it is. It doesn’t matter if he’s not in the city anymore. He knows what’s shaking when Chalky gets thrown at his gate. Oscar apparently had a similar arrangement with the Commodore that Chalky’s got with Nucky....
