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Spun from writer Ian Kennedy Martin’s successful one-off ITV drama, Regan, the show revolved around the title’s DI Jack Regan (John Thaw) and his partner DS George Carter (Dennis Waterman) of the Metropolitan Police’s Flying Squad. Running for four seasons between 1975 and 1978, The Sweeney was a huge hit with audiences, even spawning two well-regarded big-screen adventures in 1977 and 1978. Starring Ray Winstone as Regan and Ben ‘Plan B’ Drew as Carter, Sweeney 2012 opens strongly as we’re thrown into the middle of a late night Flying Squad raid in London’s Docklands....

As it turns out, those Norwegians found a spacecraft and the body of an extraterrestrial, and they need Kate to pull it out of the ice. But why use a grad student? Well, Dr Halvorson wants to keep all the credit for himself, of course! Plus, if word of an alien got out, well, there’d be a pretty big freak out, right? Needless to say, they’re all going to keep all this information under wraps....

1.7 Limbo The cold opening tonight, in which we are introduced to the threat of the week for this episode, is straight out of a 2000s-era horror movie, but it’s actually executed really well. A creepo attacker is mentioned, and a girl is left on her own to wait for security to return. Of course, after the guard walks away to lead another vulnerable woman to her car, the creepo strikes....

4.22 The Walking Dead The whole episode was dedicated to it, too, with each old face’s return announced via swelling music and an expectation of surprise, despite the audience having several weeks warning that these characters would be popping up again. Alaric is the most missed of the three, with only a small cameo in the season four premiere since his death last season (his return here might have something to do with Cult’s cancellation), but it still didn’t have the impact I was hoping for....

7.9 Cold As Ice Going into this season of The Vampire Diaries, we all knew it would be a transitional year for the show. It’s rare for a series to lose its main character before it’s done, and even rarer for it to survive after their departure. But it felt like The Vampire Diaries would be the one to break the rule, not just because of a creative upswing it was on relative to the quality dip that had seemingly lasted for several seasons beforehand, but also become it felt like the show had outgrown Elena long before she went to sleep....

The White Queen’s characters are playing five card stud where there’s no ace in the hole, just a couple of queens. All the best cards are face up and no one knows how to bluff. Poker is the one game where emotion can overcome logic. A bluff can trump mathematics. Everyone on The White Queen wears their cards on their sleeves. Which is also where they blow their nose. There are four queens, one sits on a throne, one is in exile, another is in a tower and one doesn’t want to be there....

‘Americans are stupid people by and large. We pretty much believe what we’re told.’ and ‘The bigger the lie the more they believe.’ Season five picks up a year after the end of season four and re-introduces most of the characters that we know and love. Marlo Stanfield is running a large part of the drugs trade with his attack dogs Chris Paltrow and Snoop Pearson held on a short leash....

It was obvious from the very first trailer for Thor: Ragnarok that the Hulk was the Grandmaster’s chosen champion. After all, it’s how and why he ended up fighting Thor. But Hulk was far from the first champion of the planet Sakaar, and there are some pretty great clues about who the previous champions were. The first face (the one with the elephantine nose) is Man-Thing. Yes, Man-Thing, infamous for appearing in a comic known as, I shit you not, Giant-Sized Man-Thing....

Enter Thor: Ragnarok, which gives proof, just as we need it, that Marvel Studios will still give movies the chance be surprising. The film is directed by Taika Waititi, a filmmaker made famous by his eccentric, genre-lampooning horror mockumentary What We Do In The Shadows. There’s no mistaking his fingerprints all over Ragnarok, with its constant action-bathos and frequent juxtaposition of the mundane against the fantastic. The movie skewers Marvel’s own tropes so frequently that, like Iron Man 3 (aka the best Marvel movie) it threatens to leave the playground an unusable mess for anyone that follows....

Barrett admits that Rufus wasn’t always as invested in the mission as he is now. “In season two his main motivation is to save the world,” he says. “Before this, their goal was to stop Flynn, and now their goal is just to stop this conspiracy and stop Rittenhouse and stop these villains. They kind of have a different villain every week. I think more than the first year, [Rufus] understands how much this isn’t about him....

Imagine it this way: you’ve had a long, tiring day at work, and you decide to go the pub for a relaxing beer – all the better to unwind and forget about the world for a couple of hours. But once inside, the whole establishment erupts into a dervish of violence: there’s glass and beer flying everywhere. Tables are turned over. Chairs are thrown. A man behind the bar screams at an unbearable volume....

Let’s start from the ground up. How did you approach this game? Of course, this is a movie licence, but also it is the second movie in the series, and also the second game in the series (the first Transformers movie game was developed by Traveller’s Tales, the Cheshire-based studio who are known for the popular Lego game series). As soon as we started talking to Activision about it being a real possibility, we started scouring the Internet, all of the forums, hearing all the fans, and seeing what kind of game they wanted....

Season two of the best show on TV – True Blood – continued this week with a slightly less deathly than usual episode. After the shenanigans and shocks of last week’s series premiere, Keep This Party Going drops us right where we left off, with Lafayette (Nelsan Ellis) at the mercy of a post-impromptu feast Eric. It seems at least two vampires have gone missing, and Lafayette is the last person that might know exactly what happened to them, thanks to his sociable lifestyle....

4.10 Burning Down The House Having already produced a season-long run of fantastic episodes, this week’s True Blood stepped up several gears, from amazing to positively stratospheric, with Burning Down the House. An episode full to bursting with vendettas, vaporisings, broken men, powerful women, and death aplenty, Bon Temps has never seen so much supernatural action. Racing towards the season conclusion, the episode provided much plot furthering, particularly where Marnie is concerned....

4.7 Cold Grey Light Of Dawn At the beginning of Cold Grey Light of Dawn, it looked as if this week was going to be all about the relationships: Sookie and Diet Eric, Tara and her now ex girlie, Laf and Jesus, even Andy and the homeless, wiccan waitress. Bill’s doom and gloom talk seemed a tad dramatic to begin with – being incredibly old vamps, you’d think there was some sort of contingency plan for occurrences of necromancy – but then, they don’t make you king for nothing....

I’d come up with a great simile or metaphor there, but I think Twilight gave me brain damage. I think if I had spent two hours huffing paint thinner in the freezing cold parking lot of the movie theater, I would have been better off. My head would hurt less, and I wouldn’t want to burn down the closest library. Everyone says the books are great, but anything would be better than this movie....

Twin Peaks Season 3 Episode 13 For a while there, every episode of Twin Peaks: The Return almost felt like a non-sequitur to the one preceding it. But Part 13 picks up directly after Part 12, even—and it’s funny to say it, but this feels like a rarity—checking back in with characters who are right where we left them one episode ago. However briefly, I was happy to see the casino crew again accompanied by a soundtrack with a time signature to rival The Shaggs....

Surprisingly, V got renewed between last episode and this episode. I figured it was returning, since FlashForward was not returning, and no network wants to wipe out twice on new sci-fi-ish dramas in one season. In other words, “Flash-bang, this is us leaving you wanting more!” Gregg Hurwitz just might have saved this show. Three really good episodes in a row, and all three of them feature his name prominently as writer....

2.10 Mother’s Day Yes, it still tended to move a little slower than some would like, myself included, but it was finally moving, and it seemed to show signs of gaining steam over the long season, building up to an absolutely break-neck season finale in the form of Mother’s Day. The first half of the episode is something you’ve seen before. The Fifth Column come up with a convoluted plan and fake a kidnapping to lure Anna out into the open, where her own daughter will deal the humanity-saving coupe de grace....

The premise is a simple but intriguing one; the Phaeton is Earth’s first interstellar ship built to take its 12 man crew on a ten year journey to a distant star system. It’s approaching the point of go-no-go on its journey when the crew are informed that catastrophic changes on Earth have elevated the mission from purely science to the potential survival of humanity. Earth has 100 years left, and a habitable planet found by Phaeton might be the only hope of mankind....