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“It’s called The Adventure of Having Your Cake and Eating It!” Mark Gatiss joked on the set of the Victorian-era Sherlock special, displaying the kind of self-aware humour that the episode—now going by the catchier title of The Abominable Bride—was fat with. Having settled its audience comfortably into what seemed like perfect New Year’s Day television—entertaining, handsome, not too taxing—The Abominable Bride detonated itself. Bits of story went everywhere, timelines were blown apart and the resulting smoking crater was filled with shards of meta-commentary on the nature of fiction and the psychology of mind....

This review contains spoilers. 6.2 Rich I’ve been critical of Skins since the beginning of this series (granted, it’s only episode two), and that’s mainly because the show had for a long time failed to look, sound or smell like the show I started watching back in 2007. I hadn’t bonded with this new bunch of Roundview students like I had with Sid, Cassie, Cook or Katie, and that was a huge problem for my enjoyment....

Skyfall had an incredible opening weekend in the United States. It is now the top grossing film in the James Bond franchise. So did it live up the hype? Absolutely. He finally returns upon hearing that there has been a terrorist attack at MI6 headquarters. Not that he is ready to protect and serve. He is forced to undergo testing to see if he is fit for duty. The testing scenes are painful, showing that our beloved Bond has turned into a bitter alcoholic....

…They watch reality television. Talk about adjusting to 21st century problems and quickly. At least it wasn’t Honey Boo Boo or anything with a Kardashian in it… Ichabod, for his part, tried to keep the parties together, but he should listen to the returning Hawley for more tips, as his love side street detour with Abbie heats up. She invites him to help with this week’s case in a bar, but he only has interest in grabbing a drink....

I couldn’t help but think of Burnham’s anecdote while watching Sony’s viral slasher Slender Man. Early in the film, a group of teenage girls is texting one another, trying to figure out what to do about their missing friend. One girl mentions printing out flyers. Another says she will “post to FB.” These are members of a generation representing the most connected, communicative, and technologically savvy human beings in the history of the species… printing fliers and posting to Mark Zuckerberg’s grandma meme machine....

5.5 Orca Shrugged After a couple of very heavy instalments, this week’s Sons of Anarchy is more fun that it has been in a while. It has everything a good episode needs: Explosions! Fist fights! Drugs! Bad Irish accents! And of course, cameos from the cast of Kurt Sutter’s previous show, The Shield. Rather unusually, the episode starts with a voiceover from Jax. Sons of Anarchy isn’t a show that uses voiceover very often, and what you see on screen is generally all that you get....

1.7 To Seek A Foe For the section of the audience who are tuning in purely for the Romeo And Juliet story, the episode will be remembered as the one where Emery and Roman finally gave into their feelings but, for everyone else, it’ll be remembered as the one that introduced Black Cyper as a significant threat to the human race, Castor’s ominous cupboard full of explosives and a plausible grudge for Grayson to have against Emery and her Atrian friends....

Although the idea of encountering a delinquent super-being had already been covered in Charlie-X, The Squire Of Gothos reworks the concept in a slightly different way, when the Enterprise comes across a planet that isn’t on the charts. Kirk and Sulu disappear from the bridge, and the crew then investigate communications from the planet below to find out what became of them. William Campbell had a longterm relationship with the show, and would reappear later in The Trouble With Tribbbles as the Klingon Koloth, a role he’d repeat years later in Deep Space 9....

Those who tuned into Star Trek in those earliest days must have got completely confused in the third week, because Where No Man Has Gone Before is Trek, Jim, but not exactly as we know it. There are familiar aspects in this episode yet there are also, what Mr Spock might describe as ‘anomalies’ of unknown origin. The first that strikes you is the curiously coloured outfits that both Kirk and Spock wear, which are a really nasty green/yellow colour....

However, with the Holocron still missing, the Jedi council led by Yoda is given the task to try to find the force-sensitive children contained within the now active Holocron, using the force instead to try and track down ‘children of the force’. The idea is to help the children before Bane and Sidious get their hands on them. However, Obi-Wan is too late. As usual, Bane is two steps ahead of the Jedi and already on Rodia, slowly convincing the parent of the young Jedi that Master Ropal has assigned him to take the child....

3.12 Nightsisters Before I review the latest installment of the Star Wars animated series, I should say that now is the perfect time to hop on. This episode sees the start of a new trilogy and also sees an end to the rather repetitive political and trade nonsense that has marred much of Season 3. It’s also the perfect time, as Nightsisters is not only a classic Clone Wars episode, but it contains many set pieces that your average action flick would kill for....

Get a Free Trial of GameFly on Us! The 16-bit style of this video will surely be familiar to anyone who played the infamous Super Nintendo Star Wars games. Certain details like the blur of the lightsabers, the choppy walking animations, and the way characters seem to lose half their facial details when facing the camera are seemingly cribbed from the style of that tremendous trilogy of games. However, it’s clear that Stratman has taken some liberties in regards to what modern technology allows....

Supergirl Season 3 Episode 4 “The Faithful” is a lovely continuation of last week’s religious elements, this time focusing on the women of National City while letting the question of faith take center stage. It was great to see the original three members of Team Supergirl back in action, although it was so short-lived that it ultimately served as more of a reminder that Supergirl still doesn’t know what to do with two of the original main characters....

Father of all things unholy! Season five of Supernatural returned last night to UK screens on Living TV with a double package of two episodes for the price of one. Each one was a confident lead into the rumoured last series of the show, scattering out new story arcs like fifty dollars notes on a blackjack table in Vegas. Season five’s opener Sympathy For The Devilbegan exactly where season four left off....

9.8 Rock And A Hard Place I’ve been becoming progressively more disenchanted with the season after the first couple of episodes (which were excellent). After that, a few were entertaining without being particularly memorable, but more than a few were genuinely sub-par. The biggest problem I’ve been feeling, however, is that the season itself is a little all over the place: after its strong start, it’s alternated a little too much between deep, character-driven episodes and superficial funny episodes to have any sort of coherency....

4.3 Muted However, there’s a much more efficient way for Teen Wolf to introduce new characters, specifically new antagonists, and that’s through a pre-credit murder sequence. In this case, a young man named Sean—who clearly hasn’t seen enough horror movies—goes out to look for his missing cat. Failing to find missing Willow, he ambles back inside and shuts off the lights one by one before retiring to his bedroom. He takes his shirt off and crawls onto the bed, only to notice something strange on the floor in the form of discolored footprints....

Another diversion in Alpine Fields is that John doesn’t appear at all; he’s mentioned but not seen. This is primarily a Derek story, which is fine because his character’s evolution has been one of the strongest for me. Their reaction to these gun toting women is to assume it’s some sort of heist, and they bicker about why this is happening to them! But soon they find out that a Terminator is hunting them, and at this point the nature of their dysfunctional family unit starts to unravel....

It makes me wonder if the pressure the production team is under is influencing the writing, or they chose to make this show an antidote for all those feel-good plotlines some shows can’t resist running. The narrative is still indirectly absorbing: the fall-out from the death of Riley, and how this somewhat split the Connor gang into two teams, notionally the ‘trusted’ and ‘not-trusted’. Derek seems remarkably unperturbed that he’s put them all in danger with Jesse, although Cameron manages to get under his skin by revealing that she was carrying his child at one point....

Living with someone changes things. You can think that you know someone, be completely aware of their habits and idiosyncrasies, and yet it’s not until you live with them that you see how someone truly is. The filter is gone. There’s no escape. Living with someone changes things. And so I was reasonably excited after last episode ended with Lisa being taken back to Nine and Twelve’s home to live with them, figuring that with all of them in the same living quarters, some juicy details on Nine and Twelve would definitely come to a head....

However, as the years passed, that love cooled, giving way to disappointment and ultimately resentment. Could the director who’d so scared me with Jaws, thrilled me with Raiders Of The Lost Ark and touched my little heart with E.T. really be churning out such half-formed and woolly headed stuff as The Terminal and War Of The Worlds? It’s therefore heartening to report that the Spielberg of my (and so many others) childhood is back, and firing on all cylinders for his maiden excursion into the worlds of both motion-capture and 3D filmmaking....