Upon arrival, E4’s archetype contemporary teen drama Skins was, much like the teenagers of today, the subject of many a derisive snort. Its critics ranted against the supposed portrayal of modern youth as a sorry bunch of a drug fuelled, sex obsessed, feral thugs who would kick in their grandmothers’ teeth for vodka money then upload the mobile camera footage to YouTube. Except it wasn’t like that at all. Well, not totally, anyway....
Mini is the girl who has it all, the looks, the star rugby player boyfriend and the popularity. But it isn’t enough to fill the void in her soul, the void that leaves her threatened by Franky turning up and being herself. After turning Franky into a mirror image of herself, Mini stuck the knife in by publicly humiliating her. So, how could you ever humanise someone who makes it her mission to destroy anyone who differs from her?...
3.1 So Season three picks up where we left off at the end of season two, with Gemma on the run, framed for murder. Also, Half-Sack is dead, and Abel has been kidnapped by Irish gun-runner Jimmy. The finale of season two was captivating and infuriating in the same breath. Captivating because it was truly the kind of television that raises your pulse, and infuriating because it ended on a huge cliffhanger....
If Howard Overman and his fellow writers had listened too hard and done a complete u-turn, it wouldn’t have worked, so I’m pleased that they’re bringing some elements back and weaving them into the new show, rather than trying to make Finn, Alex, Jess and Abbey into Simon, Curtis, Alisha and Kelly. One version of the series ended after series three, and the final two years are something else entirely....
Like all blockbuster movies, some of Star Trek Beyond sometimes leaves you with questions. Occasionally they have answers that are implied, or stated so quickly you might miss them, and occasionally they just don’t give you much to go on and you have to make up your own mind. As ever, we’ve tried to anticipate what questions you might have after seeing the movie and then answer them. Spoilers for Star Trek Beyond, quite naturally, follow....
Serving as a both a warning to the dangers of genetic engineering and follow up to The Original Series episode, Space Seed (and no, that episode wasn’t about GM crops) The Wrath Of Khan (or TWOK as I’ll call it) is a great action packed movie, with some real emotional kick behind it. Opening with an unfamiliar face in the centre seat, the Enterprise is on a mission near the Klingon neutral zone when an emergency signal has the ship trying to rescue a stranded vessel, The Kobayahsi Maru, when it’s suddenly outnumbered and out-gunned by three Klingon warships....
Star Wars Rebels Season 2 Episode 15 “The Honorable Ones” isn’t about genocide per se, but the specter of it literally lurks overhead in the form of the Death Star construction module. That’s the backdrop for a story of forced cooperation, in which Zeb and Agent Kallus are stranded together on one of the moons of Geonosis. Kallus isn’t so much fleshed out as made more sympathetic by dint of circumstance, and the episode just narrowly misses what could have been strong story beats....
2.5 Wings Of The Master At long last, Hera flies into the spotlight in an exciting episode ofStar Wars Rebels. The Twi’lek pilot has taken a back seat this season despite occupying the literal front seat of the show, and Wings Of The Master changes that, as well as giving us a tantalizingly brief glimpse at her backstory. It seemed inevitable to me that any episode focused on Hera had to address one of her defining traits: her secrecy....
Faith We start with Destiny dropping out of FTL into a seemingly empty area of space. A sun is the only thing in the near vicinity, leaving Dr Rush (Robert Carlyle) to worry about why Destiny would bring them here, as the ship only stops off where Stargates have been placed on planets. Rush eventually notices a small, oxygen-based planet that seems more out of place than the sun. You see, the sun is quite young, apparently, with only 100,000 years in its history....
2.8 Malice Simeon then proceeds to take out a few guards and head through the gate with Dr Park taken hostage. Dr Rush follows and the usual suspects aren’t far behind, and soon enough, the team has split off into groups. Lt Scott and Sgt Greer accompany Dr Rush as they attempt to find the snaky bastard and capture him, although that may not be everyone’s agenda. Robert Knepper finally gets some proper screen time here to show off his evil routine, and it works pretty damn well, I’d say....
Survivor’s Remorse is produced by basketball player/international icon/Cleveland Jesus/person-that’s-most-likely-to-make-me-cry-happy-tears-in-2015 LeBron James and his childhood friend and business partner, Maverick Carter. James and Carter along with showrunner Mike O’Malley (Who should always be remembered first and foremost as the host of Nickelodeon’s GUTS) have created the show as a loose adaptation of James’ own life. I imagine NBA fans will enjoy watching this show if only to spot logical inconsistencies. And Cam’s first big contract is my favorite....
Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) is a budding teenage special effects wizard, who works with his best friend, Charles (Riley Griffiths), while Charles and the other outcast boys in the middle school work on monster movies. While it’s not exactly the most girl catching of pastimes, it does allow the boys to have fun and work on their craft using a handy-dandy Super 8 video camera. Of course, their craft is low-rent zombie detective movies, but you have to start somewhere, right?...
2.10 We Can Be Heroes What makes a hero? If it were superhuman power that makes someone heroic, as Kara tries to argue to James, than Livewire would be a hero, not a villain. No, Supergirl has never had such a simplistic view of what makes someone heroic. Kara’s powers may make her good at her superhero job, but it is her desperate desire to help others, an instinct calcified when her mother sent her on a mission to Earth, that inspires her to save people’s lives....
Supernatural Season 13 Episode 19 The Winchesters and Castiel search for allies to help with their multifaceted problem of rescuing Jack and Mary and holding back the dictatorial Michael. Sam and Dean tackle finding Rowena, who won’t answer her cell, while Cas heads up to Heaven to recruit the angels. Things do not go well for anyone. Rowena’s indiscriminate killing of people and reapers had the high stakes of screwing up fate and causing a potential mass extinction due to the butterfly effect....
9.12 Sharp Teeth That’s what Sharp Teeth feels like. With the exception of some very important moments for the brothers and the larger story (which are both interesting and well-written), the monster and plot of this episode are so stale that they’re like a constant, glaring, forty-minute reminder that Supernatural seems to be long past its expiration date (and I say this as one of those passionate fans who could very well be a walking Supernatural Wiki)....
It begins with a king and queen (respectively, John C Reilly and Salma Hayek) who turn to witchcraft in order to conceive a child, before lurching to the story of monarch (Vincent Cassell) who’s so sex-obsessed that he embarks on a romance with a peasant girl based purely on her angelic singing voice. You can probably guess the king’s reaction when he discovers that the peasant girl is actually far older and more leprous than he assumes....
Formality So, you see where this is going. Meanwhile, while Scott and Allison are enjoying one last dance of normality, and Stiles has displayed surprising intelligence and drive in actually getting Lydia to go out to the dance with him (and has a heart-to-heart with her that actually seems to penetrate her icy facade), the Alpha’s plan is starting to slowly come together. Wherever Allison is, he is. Wherever he is, Scott is....
4.8 Time Of Death One of the highlights of Teen Wolf is the way it has embraced its meta-ness. It’s a show about teenage werewolves on a channel that used to be called Music Television, so it makes sense that Teen Wolf would both poke fun at its history (by having Baby Derek be a teenage werewolf basketball player) and at MTV (by making music a character in the series, constantly working in tunes, and even having musical guests on its after-show)....
Casey’s transformation is shown in a sequence featuring purple-prosed narration from his journal, creating an interesting comparison between him and Watchmen’s Rorschach. He even has a bit of Rorschach’s look; his mask and face paint are both black and white and the paint design is a cross between a Rorschach test and the Misfits’ logo (the Danzig band, not the one from Jem and the Holograms). Like Rorschach, Casey’s out for vigilante justice; he’s looking for a fight and wants to hurt anyone that might cause trouble....
1.4 Murphy’s Law A show like The 100 was never going to work without the guts to show us disturbing stuff, even on The CW, and this week’s episode finally delivered on that eventuality with the mandatory misguided lynch mob episode. The whole ‘live together, die alone’ motto hasn’t really factored into the group’s adopted morality since the first episode, of course, but now that the first unarguable murder has occurred from within the camp, things were always going to take a darker twist....
