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American Horror Story Season 7 Episode 3 There goes the neighborhood. American Horror Story: Cult, season 7, episode 3, ensures there won’t be any block party thrown on Ally and Ivy’s street for a very long time. And if it is, they won’t be invited. Even if they were able to finally evict their “Neighbors from Hell.” The doctor prescribes systematic desensitization. He is proud of her progress, but this puts him subliminally with the insane clown posse terrorizing the town....

This week’s Archer Vice would seem to mark the end of the Isis gang’s short stint as gun runners to South America, but if this is how it ends, then it went out on a high note. Essentially a farce about a warring couple, the thing that elevates this classic scenario is that this couple can be actually warring when one of them is a third world dictator who is more interested in wooing Charlene’s Outlaw Country than he is about the rebels at his gates....

Sure, it featured elements that plenty of other shows had successfully relied upon but no one show had pulled all of those elements together into such a tightly-plotted, carefully edited comedic atom bomb like Arrested Development had. Arrested Development took things we had seen in sitcoms before, unlikeable characters in an unlikeable family, fast-paced pun humour, a weird soundtrack, and some light mockumentary cutaways, and turned it into a singular show that somehow felt improvised and carefully planned at the same time....

Opening with a car/motorcycle chase is always a good thing, and Arrow always does alright when they kick things off with a nice action sequence. Green Arrow (I’m just gonna call him that until the show starts doing it), is looking for “the man in the skull mask” who has been causing all the trouble in Starling City, and he’s squeezing an unfortunate drug dealer for information. Nothing we haven’t seen before, really....

Arrow Season 5 Episode 12 All season long, Arrow has been rewarding fans that stuck with its flashback gimmick since day one, but no episode exemplified that better than “Bratva.” However, one wonders if the choice to double down on a storyline that’s not yet complete was the right move for the aging CW series. The reason I mention that the episode may have suffered for this gimmick, other than the fact that it was impressively light on both the action and cool superhero suits, is that it felt a bit too soon....

Ash vs Evil Dead Season 3 Episode 9 I found out yesterday that Ash vs Evil Dead has been canceled by Starz. Needless to say, I am not a happy camper. I don’t even own any camping equipment. But that’s neither here nor there. What I’m saying is this: I’m writing a review of the next-to-last episode of a television series which felt too good to be true, one that I’ve been covering since it first premiered around Halloween in 2015....

Essentially, there’s a lot of good stuff here. Kurzel – as you’ll know if you’ve seen either of his previous films, Snowtown and Macbeth – really knows how to frame a landscape, and he uses that skillset here to bring the Spanish inquisition to life in impressively eye-catching ways. Those transitions, from the modern day to hundreds of years ago, are visually delicious. The biggest problem, for me, is the structure of the story....

1.11 Hunger Pangs This week’s Atlantis sees a poverty-stricken Jason stealing a loaf of bread to sate his hunger, clumsily escaping the clutches of the rightfully outraged shopkeeper, whilst dropping the bread into a trough of water. It’s a lesson to us all that theft is wrong, actions have consequences and even heroes that, at one point, could dine on their reputation cannot dine if they no longer have money....

This review contains spoilers. 1.5 Oregon This week of Awake proves once and for all that the writers know what they’re doing, and poses a few very intriguing questions to those who had stuck it out this long. In every way, Oregon is a huge improvement on past weeks, and marks the strongest outing for the show since the pilot episode. Even the case is vaguely interesting, with the criminal pushing the series into a pleasing direction for genre fans who’ve been waiting for some substantial developments....

Let us tell you: the man practices what he preaches. Three minutes early, the phone rang, and we started talking to the man that so many of us grew up watching, thanks to his near two-decades of work on the Film programme on BBC One. You touch on this in the book, where you talk about how writers have to write. But why did you put this story, such a personal one, out in a book?...

2.6 Plunge This episode aired in the week that a third season of Bates Motel was confirmed. Unless Carlton Cuse & Co decide to take a rather radical direction with the show, this means that Norman’s burgeoning descent will be drawn out over at least fourteen more screen hours. While knowing how much more story may yet run can help provide a little context, each season must be judged as it is presented, and it is therefore a source of excitement rather than alarm that Norman’s fugue states have blossomed into full-blown rage sessions, even more so that they are now punctuating the season instead of being saved for the finale....

Digging through my back catalogue of magazines, I discovered an old issue of Premiere magazine, dating back to the film’s release in May 1995. As it turns out, even before the film came out, and even before the world wide web as we know it today had risen, the nipples were an issue. In a big interview piece to promote the film just prior to its release, Jim Carrey – who played The Riddler in the movie – recalled that “it pissed off Bob Kane....

Last week’s Bedlam got the show off to a great start, especially considering the problems it had during the first series, but sadly this week it’s back to business as usual. Lacey Turner is still a great protagonist and carries the action well, but the plot and character work elsewhere is far too generic for a show in its second year. While many were happy to overlook the problems in the first six episodes, a major shake-up just last week should really have made Bedlam Heights feel fresher....

In a simply brilliant twist that was far more effective than last week’s, albeit slightly contrived – would you really let a random boy have a mooch around your bedroom – the housemates’ lives were turned upside down as accusations of being ‘Peedos’ (spelled incorrectly as George was quick to point out) were sprayed all over their house’s exterior. It helps if you don’t own a depraved, vampire porn DVD as well, of course....

1.3 Nacho “I’m no hero,” says Jimmy McGill. Well, no Jimmy. You aren’t. But bless you for trying. Much of Better Call Saul’s third episode – more low-key than last week’s, which is no bad thing – concerns entanglement; specifically, the entanglement of Jimmy’s drive for self-preservation and his attempts to do the right thing by others. The fact that we already know that Jimmy is going to end up becoming Saul Goodman gives weight to his desire to do right (or as right as he’s capable of doing), as we know that somehow, probably through a combination of rotten luck and his own character flaws, it’s a desire that’s going to be more or less stamped out of him....

4.2 Breathe Jimmy needs a job. He can’t be a burden on Kim; he values the relationship too much to take her for granted or let her see just how far he’s sliding back into his old ways. But faced with a year away from the only legitimate job that ever interested him? Working as a copy machine salesman seems like a grim consolation prize. But he has a responsibility, so he makes a red hot go of it....

1.1 Pilot Essentially Bourne meets Memento, Blindspot wastes no time putting its constituent parts together. Within minutes, Alexander’s Jane Doe is found in a holdall in Times Square without memories, clothes or a discernable purpose, clad in mysterious tattoos – one of which is the name of Sullivan Stapleton’s character, Kurt Waller, of the FBI. The FBI bring her in, and Waller and his colleagues get to work trying to decode the inky clues all over her body....

Fortunately, because I need something fresh to write about, a legitimate challenger taking aim at Christopher Nolan’s Batman opus came to the American box office in the form of Brendan Fraser and Rob Cohen’s The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. Blowing past my expectations, the fourth installment of The Mummy franchise and third official Mummy film took in an incredible $42.45 million dollars for a very strong second place....

4.8. Hermanos New TV is all about immersing you in tangible worlds; places loaded with exotic detail, with their own quirks and codes and laws, that make them seem like places that actually exist outside the hour you spend exploring them. It’s about creating an environment that’s intoxicating enough to make you want to visit every week. The quality HBO/AMC/cable shows do this either by a rigid social or historical verisimilitude (seen in shows like The Wire and Mad Men) and/or the kind of intricate, pervasive character work that makes the characters (and therefore the plot) as fascinatingly unpredictable as people in real life usually are....

5.14 Ozymandias Vince Gilligan has been building up Ozymandias on the Breaking Bad insider podcast for weeks, identifying it as his favourite episode of the whole series. Aaron Paul has been excitedly tweeting since at least the start of the year about how crazy things were going to get in the final few episodes, and there’s also Bryan Cranston’s “morass of ugliness” quote from the Den of Geek interview I alluded to last week....