Agents of SHIELD - 'A Wanted (Inhu)man

And cue the Lonely Man piano theme.

The ATCU is gunning hard for Lincoln after the hospital shenanigans, and Daisy is keen to bring him in. Lincoln is less willing to be brought, especially when he realises that Mac planted a bug in his arm. He reaches out to his sponsor for help, because he used to be an alcoholic douchebag apparently (did we know this, like, at all?) When the ATCU put his picture on the news, however, his friend threatens to turn Lincoln in, and when Lincoln gives him a minor jolt to make him drop his bat, he suffers a fatal heart attack.

Lincoln, now convinced he's the scum of the Earth, offers to turn himself in to Daisy, but then Coulson makes a deal to hand him over under a guarantee of safety in exchange for the ATCU not making Daisy's picture public. Then, when Lincoln rabbits and the ATCU threaten to take Daisy in anyway (because they need to show results to justify their existence) Coulson agrees to be their adviser. Honestly, this is not a negotiation from which either Coulson or the ATCU emerges looking good.

Oh, and Daisy admits she has feelings for Lincoln.

Fitz tries to help Simmons acclimatise, but she's overwhelmed by everything. Pretty much in the stinger, she admits to Bobbi that she needs to return to the other world, which would have come as a huge shocker if it hadn't been used in the fucking trailer. Nice moves there, Channel 4.

The fuck am I even looking at?

In pursuit of Ward, Hunter contacts a dodgy mate from some past undercover shit, leading to an inexplicable scene in which a perfectly comprehensible conversation is subtitled. Seriously, it's got some heavy localised British idiom, but nothing more difficult than The Wire, I'm sure. Anyway, it leads to a Hydra 'audition', where wannabe Hydra agents fight to the last man standing for the privilege of an interview. Hunter has to fight his 'mate', who seems intent on killing him, despite which we're apparently supposed to feel that Hunter has crossed a line by hitting the guy three times and killing him stone dead. I mean, these people carry guns, and not just icers.

With 'A Wanted (Inhu)man' then, Season 3 hits its first major tonal bumps. Without having set a bar that says SHIELD doesn't kill, Hunter's actions have no real shock value (although the fight as a whole is unusually bloody,) and Coulson's willingness to make a deal with the ATCU instead of just letting Daisy, Mac and Lincoln incapacitate a swathe of frankly unimpressive goons leaves the character looking weak. Also, Ward still isn't dead.

Stan Lee's Lucky Man - Episode 1

The Woman (Sienna Guillory), the Sidekick (Amara Karan), Harry (James Nesbitt), the Femme Fatale (Jing Luci) and the Wife (just the most unflattering shot of Eve Best imaginable).

Harry Clayton is a man down on his luck. Separated from his wife and mistrusted by his colleagues because of a gambling addiction, he also owes a huge debt to Chinatown casino boss Freddie Lau, and Lau has just called in the marker. A chance meeting with a mysterious woman changes everything, and Harry finds himself stuck with a bracelet he can't remove and seemingly blessed with incredible good fortune. Then Lau dies and Harry suspects that someone was moving in on his territory; someone serious, who was supposed to receive the bracelet, and the luck, Harry now possesses.

Episode one of Stan Lee's Lucky Man is the bookkeeping episode, setting up the characters and situation and delivering the object of power to our hero. It is also a weird hybrid of British and American sensibilities. Harry and his colleagues look strangely lost in all this, a serious team of serious coppers adrift in a world of glitzy, four-colour, triad-run nightclubs. I found myself obsessing over the state of Steven Mackintosh's teeth; not because they're bad, but because they lack the cosmetic orthodontistry one associates automatically with comic book adventures. I wouldn't bat an eyelid at extreme closeups of Mackintosh delivering a solid bollocking to his shifty subordinate, except that said subordinate is wearing a magic bracelet that grants him luck powers.

The magic bracelet is on Sienna Guillory's wrist in this shot, but actually
there's remarkably few shots featuring it.

The bracelet itself is a fairly nondescript thing for a superhero power source; a simple bronze bangle. Its effects are similarly low key; little twists of fortune to favour the wearer. It's suggested that there is a price for this, however, and that the good luck has to be paid off in kind, in this instance by Harry's young daughter being in a minor traffic accident.

James Nesbitt plays roles like this in his sleep, so Harry comes across as more fully formed than perhaps the material deserves. He's a good cop who makes bad choices, but his ultimate motivations are unclear. The Woman says that she gave the bracelet to him instead of the man she was supposed to take it to because Harry is a good man, but we've seen precious little sign of that as he stalks his estranged wife, gambles recklessly, lies to his partner and jumps into bed with the Woman despite her never even mentioning a name (unless I missed it; the IMDb cast list calls her Eve.)

The supporting cast are decent, although Amara Karan's role as loyal and underappreciated sidekick is so far especially undeveloped. Stan gets his cameo, as himself this time, and I wonder if this should be considered part of the MCU. Probably not; someone would mention the spaceship crash in Greenwich.

Sleepy Hollow - 'Spellcaster' and 'What Lies Beneath'

I'm pretty sure when I was at school in the States, this hat stood for unflagging
moral rectitude and manifest destiny. Now it's basically the shorthand for
lawful evil.

A double murder at a museum in Sleepy Hollow is found to have been perpetrated by boiling the blood in the victims' veins and linked to the theft of a rare grimoire compiled by John Dee (here not an evil sorcerer, but a scholar who gathered up that which perhaps ought not to be anthologised.)

The killer is soon identified by Katrina as Solomon Kane... sorry, Solomon Kent, a Puritan minister and witch turned warlock (a word that I am glad to see Sleepy Hollow reserving for dark side adepts rather than all male witches, given its root meaning of 'oath-breaker',) who tried to cover up a sexually frustrated homicide by instigating the Salem witch hunts, claiming the life of Katrina's granny before the rest of their coven caught up with him and sent him to Purgatory, whence he escaped when Moloch was killed.

Hunting down Kent proves pretty easy, but when his blood magic proves more than a match for Katrina, his jibes appear to start her on an unlikely and (there only being a few episodes left in the season) presumably pretty meteoric descent into Dark Phoenixdom. Life clearly doesn't agree with Katrina, who held out against the blandishments of a major demonic player in Purgatory for centuries, and seems set to go full dark side after less than a year with a pulse. It's not even from the cause you might expect - protecting the Headless Horseman - but from some wild-eyed loon calling her a sissy girl.

The Witnesses take out Kent with the aid of Captain Irving, who then nicks the book and murders the unconscious Kent while Abbie and Ichabod... run off and search for him? The denouement is very strange on this one, with Ichabod getting well personal about Kent hurting Katrina, then just leaving him there with the Book of Evil to search for Irving, whom they have no specific reason to fear is hurt.

Elsewhere, Henry is recuperating and contemplating the simple life, but then he murders some random thugs who pissed him off and decides he's going back to being a wolf among sheep, meeting up with Irving to receive the Grand Grimoire, and again this is a bit confusing, because their conversation suggests they've been working a plan for sometime.

Yes, of course Ichabod knew Jefferson.

Also mad sudden are the swings of fate in 'What Lies Beneath'.

When survey workers are snatched by zombies, the investigation leads to the Fenestella, a great archive of Witness-related information watched over by techno-magical hologram Thomas Jefferson (for realsies) and protected by a cadre of Washington's special commandos (known as Reavers.) Unfortunately, the Reavers have mutated into the animalistic cannibals that snatched the workers, and to rescue them the Witnesses must endanger the power source which maintains the Fenestella.

Naturally, they choose to rescue the workers. What makes less sense is that, having done so, they immediately go back and destroy the whole shebang in order to take out the remaining Reavers. No attempt to muster their forces and clear the tunnels. No effort to preserve something before dropping the hammer. This vast resources is introduced and removed in the space of a single episode.

Meanwhile, Irving gets Jenny to help him break into the police evidence locker, where he steals a thumb drive containing the bank access details for the Hellfire Club, Henry's apocalypse backing group. He explains that he masked his continuing thralldom from Katrina with a rune which also allows his human side to surface, and he wants to see his family provided for before he goes all Dark Irving. Why he hasn't mentioned this to Abbie is a bit of a question, but so it goes.

Honestly, not one of Washington's finer plans.

And Henry approaches Katrina and scratches her with the thorn of some sort of creepy black roses, announcing his intention that they are going to look to their own people, presumably meaning witches, who have been described as if almost a distinct ethnic group a few times in the last couple of episodes.

These episodes are not Sleepy Hollow at its best. I'm starting to get the feeling that we're looking at a Babylon 5 kind of deal, and that faced with possible cancellation they've crammed two season's worth of plot into one and that the death of Moloch was originally slated for the end of the Season. This would explain why Katrina's swing to the darkside is so sudden, why Henry was apparently conspiring with Irving before deciding that he was going to be evil still, and the Fenestella coming and going as it did.

The highlight continues to be Abbie and Ichabod do a thing and he gets exasperated by something modern. In these episodes, marketing, instagram and the 24-hour news cycle.
.

Blindspot - 'Bone May Rot'

"Do I have something on my face?"

When Patterson's boyfriend sneaks a look at the tattoos, he gives her a clue which allows her to crack another puzzle, sending the team to a CDC facility where decon procedures reveal UV tattoos with the vial numbers of several missing disease samples. One of the senior scientists triggers a lockdown and goes missing, even as Patterson links the stolen vials to plague outbreaks in areas that the scientist had visited. The team track and contain a weaponised virus bomb at the New York port, and Weller and Jane subdue the woman's colleague when he tries to turn himself into the new delivery device.

Mayfair's CIA colleague asks to be allowed to question Jane, but is rebuffed. Meanwhile, Jane tries to adjust to being Taylor Shaw, only for Patterson to discover based on tooth enamel analysis that Jane appears to have been born in sub-Saharan Africa. Both tests are conclusive, but one must be wrong.

This week's revelation once more shows the depth of the Tattooist's knowledge, but is at least less absolutely time critical, and the accelerated timeline is a more natural response than episode 2's laughable piece of prognostication. I currently suspect that the tattoos are linked to 'Daylight', and that this will turn out to be Blindspot's equivalent to the Machine in Person of Interest. Sadly, the people in Blindspot are less interesting, and in particular the revelation that Agent Zapata has bad gambling debts was a total non-event because of it.

Gotham - 'Knock, Knock'

"Maniax. With an X! It's more X-treme!"

Motives emerge as Theo Galavan's new gang goes to work, opening by kidnapping the Mayor and forcing him to announce that he has run off with a younger woman, then dropping people off a roof to spell out the name of the gang - Maniax! - in a far better display of precision people dropping than of spelling. Jerome is clearly interested in chaos, while Theo talks about cleansing fires a lot, like R'as al-Ghul with the serial numbers filed of.

Bruce tries to access his father's computer, but Alfred takes a hammer to it. Bruce sacks him, but rehires him on the promise that Alfred will teach him to fight; properly this time. Alfred then approaches Thomas Wayne's former confidante Lucius Fox to provide technical assistance, on the promise that if he proves untrustworthy he will be tucked up like a kipper.

James Frain looks almost as sad as I feel at the way this is going.

Gordon is put in charge of the Maniax investigation, and prevents the massacre of a bus full of cheerleaders, but the one member of the gang that they capture is killed by Tabitha using a sniper rifle. Just in case we thought Tabitha was a cool, collected professional, we see her and Barbara chasing the captive Mayor with whips for shiggles and oh god they're going to become a cheesy, exploitative hot evil lesbian item, aren't they? Fuck you, Gotham; and where is Montoya? We need her to represent! And perhaps even be the Question, because that would be kinda awesome, which Tababra isn't.

Barbara turns up at the precinct and Gordon pursues her, trying to persuade her to turn herself in. She tells him that she's not a good person and has the big member of the Maniax beat the crap out of him. Meanwhile, Jerome and the others shoot up the precinct, because as we discovered last season, fifty armed cops are entirely defenceless against four criminals; or one if he's Zsasz. Lee - who is still working; yay! - hides under a table and Nygma gets to rescue Kristen Kringle, but Commissioner Essen is killed and footage of the massacre sent to news outlets to destroy what little confidence remained in the GCPD. On the up side, it draws Bullock out of barkeeping.

On the one hand, I applaud Gotham for gamely departing from past canons and for trying to do something with Barbara, the ensemble whipping girl of last season. Unfortunately, what they're doing is... not good. It would be not good even if it didn't involve the only gay character in the show becoming an increasingly sexualised psychopath. Seriously; Batman comics have a pretty poor rep for equality, but damnit they had Montoya (you know; once they imported her from the Animated Series, along with Harvey Bullock.)

Do it!

On the plus side, we are not losing Bullock and Sean Pertwee's Alfred continues to be a delight, the scene in which he tells Fox a long, rambling story of this lairy mate of his who let him down and had to be tucked up like a kipper being a high point of this episode. The other is the massacre, which manages to avoid the many pitfalls of having a sadistic psychopath murder one of your principle female characters. On the other hand, one of the principle female characters in a show not replete with female characters has now been murdered, and it's the one who was in a position of authority.

Gotham's remaining female characters are Goddamn Barbara, the lead's girlfriend*, a slutty enforcer, a serially codependent file clerk with poor taste in men, and whatever the good god damn is going on with Selina Kyle becoming the Penguin's... secretary? bodyguard? strategic adviser? This is a city in dire need of a faceless gay avenger in a trenchcoat, suit and tie.

* Yes, she's a pathologist, but so far this Season not so much with the pathologising.

Shadowhunters - 'The Descent into Hell Isn't Easy'

"So... are we in the Matrix?"

Faced with the choice of Jace and the Institute or finding Luke with Simon, Clary takes the third option: Institute, but insisting that Simon comes with her, despite the presence of lethal, potentially mundane-killing runes. Inside, only Isabelle and Alec even seem to register Simon's presence, and he stays with the former while Jace takes Clary to quiz weaponmaster and former Circle member Hodge, who reveals that - dun dundun! - Jocelyn Fray was part of the Circle back in the day. It later turns out that so was Jace's dad, although he died trying to get out.

Clary realises that Dot was a warlock and might be able to unlock her memory, but then has a sudden vision of Dot in trouble at the nightclub Pandemonium. Sure enough Dot, who did not die last episode, runs to Magnus Bane - which is only an awesome name if he didn't choose it himself - only to find him and the other warlocks in the city bugging out as Valentine is looking for someone to un-coma Jocelyn. Dot refuses to leave and is scrobbled by the Circle moments before the gang arrive in Simon's van. With no other options, Jace takes Clary into the City of Bones, the catacomb home of the Silent Brothers, who can cut memories free with their Soul Sword.

Luke gets into a fight with one of the Circle members he was talking to before, displays some funky superspeed, and then kills her in an unseen flurry of growling when she pulls a shiv on him. I think we're not supposed to realise he's a werewolf yet, although he appears to be working with a conspiracy of other cops who all know something about Jocelyn. Are all cops werewolves? Are all werewolves cops?

In Chernobyl, Dot refuses to talk, shanks a Shadowhunter in an escape attempt and then is, maybe, killed by Valentine, although she's been beating the odds so far.

"I love what you've done with the place."

The creepy Silent Brothers release just enough memory to tell Clary that her father was Valentine (a secret Jocelyn was so desperate to keep that she discussed it openly with Luke in front of Clary, then had her mind wiped, instead of - you know - not saying it) and then the Soul Sword... I don't know; runs out of charge or something. They return to the surface and find that Isabelle and Alec have between them proven utterly incapable of preventing Simon being scrobbled by vampires, who intend to swap him for the Mortal Cup (which makes Shadowhunters and controls demons.)

The show continues it's process of hot actionification. Not only is Luke a seriously badass cop rather than an unexpectedly badass bookseller, and Dot a hot witch instead of an elderly mundane tarot reader, now Hodge is a wiry swordmaster with a serious six pack, rather than a grizzled, bookish type. By extension, Jace really ought to be a white-hot vortex of inexpressible sexiness, visible only indirectly for fear of blinding. Sadly, he is actually pretty much the blandest thing on the menu.

One of the areas in which Shadowhunters suffers by comparison to the books or even the film is its complete failure - so far at least - to convey the supposedly colossal chemistry between Clary and Jace. It's supposed to be a big part of what draws her fully into the Shadowhunter world, but here it's an informed attribute only. Isabelle tells us it's obvious Clary is into Jace, but it isn't. As a side note, the introduction of pining friend who isn't in this episode means that 'nerd hot' Simon is clearly the natural chick magnet in this adaptation, while Jace is more like everyone's brother.

Jessica Jones - 'AKA Top Shelf Perverts', 'AKA WWJD', 'AKA Sin Bin', 'AKA 1,000 Cuts', 'AKA I've Got the Blues', 'AKA Take a Bloody Number' and 'AKA Smile'

Kilgrave: What a guy!

“You’re the first thing—excuse me person—I ever wanted that walked away from me.”

'Top Shelf Perverts' opens with harmless stalker Reuben running into Kilgrave as he sneaks around Jessica's apartment. It is not an encounter which unexpectedly reveals that Reuben is a worse villain than Kilgrave, and the poor lad turns up dead on Jessica's bed. Now desperate, Jessica plans to turn herself in for Reuben's murder and so lure Kilgrave into a confrontation in a highly monitored supermax penitentiary. We also see Jessica's already dubious moral compass drift a little further, as she roughs up Jeri Hogarth's wife to try to force her to sign the divorce papers.

Her master plan is hampered as Malcolm and Trisha try to disappear the evidence, but she perseveres, and after bidding farewell to New York in a showstopping hero-shot atop the Manhattan Bridge (I wasn't keeping exact count, but this may have come at the exact central point of the total run time) and warning Trisha's mother, a pushy child talent agent, to keep her distance, she retrieves Reuben's head and hands herself in to Detective Clemons, who previously suspected her in Hope's case. He is willing to arrest her, but not to push for supermax, but then Kilgrave turns up and puts the whole thing to bed by making everyone in the precinct turn their guns on one another and release Jessica. Returning home, she finds the gift that Kilgrave had intended her to find before she was distracted by Reuben's corpse; her childhood journal.

'Top Shelf Perverts' falls in the middle of the first season of Jessica Jones, and it's a game changer. Killing off Reuben and setting Jessica against her support team, as well as marking the first direct confrontation between Jessica and Kilgrave, it also makes explicit that Kilgrave's power has rendered him incapable of seeing his own actions as reprehensible. Reuben dies because he was annoying, and he can not conceive that anyone could be upset about it. We end with Jessica apparently bowing to Kilgrave's invitation, and returning to her family home, while Office Simpson, who has gone kind of rogue, watches.

Make you cry!

“How do you people live like this? Day after day, just hoping people are gonna do what you want. It’s unbearable.”

In 'WWJD', we learn a little about the past of both Jessica and Kilgrave. Jessica was taken in by Trisha's mother after her family were killed in a car crash for which she feels responsible, while Kilgrave was subjected to experimentation by his own parents. Video of the latter proves to be what was on the flash drive Reva hid, along with video of various other kids.

As Kilgrave strives to win Jessica over without mind control, a power struggle ensues, with Jessica pushing Kilgrave over his treatment of the help (as a contingency plan, he constantly orders them to harm themselves horribly if Jessica goes too far beyond his boundaries) and finally taking him out to do some heroing with his power. She discusses with Trisha whether it would be worth giving up her freedom to use Kilgrave's powers for good, but ultimately she chooses to do things her way, knocking out the staff so she can safely dope Kilgrave and displaying her prodigious leaping ability to give Simpson the slip when he moves in to execute Kilgrave.

This episode really gets into the meat of the twisted relationship between Jessica and Kilgrave, and while it toys with the idea that she might try to find some pragmatic rapprochement, she never lets him think that what he did was okay. He aggressively rejects the term rape, but that's part of the pathological fantasy that he doesn't do anything wrong; that sending the elderly neighbour to take out Simpson as a suicide bomber is okay because she upset Jessica by talking about the accident.

And I did.

"Was Murdercorpse already taken?"

In 'Sin Bin', Trisha rushes Simpson to hospital, while Jessica locks Kilgrave in the containment chamber and begins pressuring him to force a filmable demonstration of his powers. She brings in Jeri to help, the Trisha and finally Detective Clemons, handcuffed to a pipe, but the last not until she has her trump card ready to play. Based on the video of the experiments conducted on him, she has located Kilgrave's parents and introduces them into the cage. Sure enough, he snaps and orders his mother to stab herself once for every year she abandoned him for. And then the emergency Kilgrave zapper malfunctions and all hell breaks loose.

After Jessica ended up completely in control at the end of 'WWJD', 'Sin Bin' reiterates that, long term, her life tends towards chaos. One on one she can overcome Kilgrave, but she can't get her confession without help and we've already seen how good she is at organising a team (speaking of which, Simpson's friendly doctor appears to be the head of a dodgy military programme which Simpson volunteers to re-enter) and thus this ensemble effort goes to pot. Similarly, we get to see her once more pissing off the Kilgrave support group with her attitude as she flushes out Kilgrave's mother.

But most importantly, as Kilgrave escapes we see that her resistance to his powers after killing Reva wasn't a one off, and he hasn't been trying to get her consent from desire, but from need: He has no power over her.

The plan worked almost perfectly.

As '1,000 Cuts' begins, Kilgrave apparently kidnaps Hogarth, leaving Jessica to deal with the fallout from his escape. She and Trisha leave Clemons to clean and contain the scene, while Trisha takes Kilgrave's father to work on a vaccine for the virus which enables Kilgrave to control others. Then Simpson pops up and murders Clemons (Hell's Kitchen is a bad place to be a principled black man of a certain age,) his discount Captain America treatments turning his dipshit tendencies up to eleven.

Meanwhile, Hogarth - who cut the cables on the fail safe so that Kilgrave could force Wendy to sign her divorce papers - takes him to Wendy to get his bullet wound treated. After Wendy describes the decline of their relationship as 'a death of a thousand cuts', Kilgrave leaves them with a command for her to take her revenge in like manner, slicing at Hogarth while keeping count. Then Pam hits Wendy in the head and... well, see the image for this episode.

But wait! There's more!

Kilgrave arranges for Hope to be released, if she goes along with him, but rather than appease him she  knocks him out and ties him up. Unfortunately, Robin finds out what happened to her brother and leads a group of disgruntled survivors to break down the door. Finding a man tied up, she cuts him loose, and we end up in a restaurant with the support group ready to hang themselves until Hope kills herself in order to free Jessica to kill Kilgrave.

He even looks like a slightly less convincing Cap.

We now enter the home stretch, and events are a bit more jumbled in my mind, so the blow by blow may devolve a little.

We learn some more about the relationship between Trisha and Jessica. The latter turns out to have been adopted as a publicity stunt, and there was much tension before Jessica stepped in - against the then Patsy's request - to protect her from her domineering showbiz mother. Simpson comes gunning for Jessica, seeing her as an obstacle to his assassination of Kilgrave. With his super-roids he is a match for the injured Jessica, but Trisha drops one of his pills and takes him out. While she is recovering from this in hospital, her mother reaches out and eventually shows her a file which reveals that the same company who created the supersoldier pills paid for Jessica's hospital treatment.

Crap.

Luke blows himself up in his bar after a failed attempt to kill Kilgrave. They try to track Kilgrave through the drug supplies he is using as he forces his father to develop treatments to increase his powers. While still unable to control Jessica, it turns out the duration of his influence has increased and Luke has been his catspaw. He sets Luke on Jessica, and the fight is only ended when Jessica shoots him point blank in the head with a shotgun; which for Luke Cage turns out to be roughly the equivalent of getting hit in the head with a sledgehammer: Very bad, but not 'point blank shotgun' bad.

It's the crossover!

Jessica rushes Luke to hospital, but that just brings more problems, with that whole 'unbreakable skin' thing. Fortunately, there's an understanding nurse to help her spirit him away: Claire Temple; Daredevil's friendly medic.

While Claire gets Luke away, Kilgrave shows a new trick, mass-controlling the hospital staff and patients via PA. Jessica gets away, but realises that time is running out. After finding Kilgrave's father, dying, she heads out to a final confrontation. As a mark of growth, she willingly allows Trish to be her backup, and ultimately wins out against her enemy.

After Hogarth gets her off a murder charge, Jessica returns home and begins deleting calls from people asking for help, but with some support from Malcolm (who has rekindled his intention to help others through helping Robin with her grief) begins to realise that she might not be a hero, but she could perhaps pretend enough to act as one.

Binging on Jessica Jones is an emotional meatgrinder, especially in this second half of the series, but it's rewarding viewing. Like the best noir, it's grittiness makes it all the more emotionally satisfying, and it makes a better case for the ultimate sanction than Man of Steel ever did. Kilgrave is both a chilling and unrepentant villain, and a victim of a bad childhood, and the fact that it is possible to simultaneously feel for Kevin and loathe Kilgrave is one of the great triumphs of the series. Others include Jessica herself, a harsh, abrasive lead whose vulnerabilities are clear, and whose morality is both self-deprecating and unsentimental. The supporting cast is also wonderful. Trisha and Malcolm are the heart of the show, while Hogarth is a gay female character unabashedly occupying a role which would normally have gone to a straight male (like the comics' Hogarth;) an unmitigated arsehole, but a useful one.

Daredevil was incredible, but this has been something else entirely. I don't know how Season 2 will manage - likely it will depend on the villain - but I look forward to finding out.

Gotham - 'Damned if you do...'

There is no way this relationship is ever going to blow up in Gordon's face.

Season 2 of Batman Hasn't Begun Yet - subtitled 'Rise of the Villains', so that's promising for our heroes - opens with Penguin the 'King of Gotham', Gordon directing traffic, Harvey Bullock tending a bar and Barbara checking into Arkham Asylum with her matched luggage.

Commissioner Loeb soon finds an excuse to give Gordon the boot when he shoves his useless partner after tackling a man calling himself Zaardon the Soul Reaper (who claims to have been given dragon's blood to drink by 'the Master'.) Also Lee urges Gordon to move on, he goes to Penguin for help getting back in, which Penguin offers if Gordon will do a debt collection job for him. Gordon at first passes, but Bruce of all people persuades him that sometimes the right way is the ugly way. The job goes south and Gordon kills a mobster, but Penguin is as good as his word, forcing Loeb to reinstate Gordon and stand down, leaving Sarah Essen to become the new Commissioner.

What I love about this series is its nuanced portrayals of female characters.

Meanwhile, Barbara Gordon makes friends with Richard Sionis and Jerome whatsisname (you know, the creepiest of the 'could be the Jokers' from Season 1) in order to gain access to a phone. She calls Gordon to claim that Lee framed her and was the one to attack her, and Lee to say she's going to kill her, which kind of robs the first call of credibility. Then Zaardon arrives, dies, burps sleep gas and Barbara and her chums are rescued from Arkham by a slinky chick in leather.

A bloodthirsty, almost sexually ecstatic killer? That's new. Interesting. No,
wait... the other thing.

Said slinky leather chick is Tabitha Galavan, sister and enforcer of Theo Galavan, newly arrived civic luminary and presumed future anti-Bruce Wayne, who offers the six rescued inmates a place in his organisation. Sionis, who is a colossal moron, tells the man who has him strapped to a gurney to sling his hook because he's all possessive of Barbara's pants. He offers Galavan a million dollars as soon as he hits the street, so it's kind of a surprise that Tabitha half-throttles him with a whip then stabs him to death, rather than throwing him out of the window.

After failing to crack the code to his father's secret vault (it turns out it was 'BRUCE',) Bruce blows open the door with Alfred's help and finds a hidden study and a letter, warning him to leave well alone unless he feels a calling.

'Damned if you do...' is not a complete writeoff, and Bruce and Alfred in particular get some good stuff. The continued prominence of Barbara is not encouraging, however, and while Theo is James Frain and I can never feel entirely bad about increased levels of James Frain, Tabitha is everything wrong with female villains over the past thirty or forty years. I'm also not sure if Lee is still working, like, at all; I hope she is, because I'll be very sad if the last half-decent female character in the show - Selina Kyle is working for Penguin, which makes even less sense than her wielding a shotgun for Fish Mooney - has been reduced to the role of imperiled girlfriend.

Agents of SHIELD - Purpose in the Machine

It's James Hong, folks!

Episode 2 of Season 3 returns us to the diabolical mastermind behind the resurrection of HYDRA: Grant Ward. Well, bollocks. I'm actually really warming up to Daisy now, but Ward still irks me, and Hunter's vendetta could not easily be less interesting to me. Sure, he recruits May to help him out - and yay for May, and for her bonding with her father (played by James Hong, who is as always awesome) while trying to protect him from possible Ward reprisals - but seriously, it's Ward, so I can't care that much. It's been thirteen hours and I have literally just now remembered that he would be gunning for May because she tricked him into shooting Agent whatshernumber, the latest alleged love of his life.

The main arc of the episode focuses on Fitz and his struggle to retrieve Simmons from wherever the monolith-portal took her. Lacking experts in several key fields, Coulson taps the only known earthbound Asgardian, Eliott Randolph, and the interplay between Randolph's rambling banter and Fitz's fierce intensity drive most of these scenes, with Coulson and Morse, and to a lesser extent Mac and Daisy, providing a more measured back beat.

"I know I like retro..."

The search leads to the discovery of a hidden chamber in a castle in Gloucestershire, where an ancient gentleman's society (I'm calling Hellfire Club,) installed a mass of funky steampunk machinery designed to control the portal by replicating and sustaining whatever conditions cause it to activate. A prologue shows the club selecting a member by ballot to go through the portal, never to return.

Although the machinery sparks out, Fitz realises it is designed to resonate with the stone, and Daisy is able to open the portal with her powers. Randolph is a little taken aback by this, and clearly knows the name 'Inhumans', and I wonder if that wasn't who the Berserker Army was sent to fight. Fitz is able to jump through with a rope and rescue Simmons right before the monolith explodes into gravel, much to Randolph's relief. Back at HQ, Simmons wakes up threatening the air with some sort of stone shiv, which is also awesome. I hope this isn't the last we see of the alien world, since it would be disappointing if it were just a throwaway.

And Ward recruits Baron von Strucker's son in a wearyingly extended torture scene. Yay! Grant Ward and his army of angry, entitled, poor little rich boys.

Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands - Episode 2

Our publicity image for this episode features J'onn J'onzz, David Ajala threatening to do me in for calling him Black Tim Curry, and the dead stunt casting again, despite him not being in this episode at all.

I think we may be in the lands of the post-apocalyptic parallel, a concept I came up with to describe the way in which a sufficiently dodgy pseudohistorical setting is improved by regarding it not as the original historical or pseudohistorical story, but a loosely equivalent story set in a post-apocalyptic world, hence the goofball costume choices and scads of black Scandinavians.

Episode 2 sees the Queen trying to delay the approaching Thanes until Beowulf PI can track down a skinshifter, the shapeshifting mudborn that killed the old reeve. This leads to the smelters, an underclass of mostly black vikings who... keep beasts for gladiatorial combat? I'm actually not sure. I may not have been paying attention. He briefly suspects Thoroughly Modern Millie, but she gets her kit off and he's convinced. (Seriously; he knows the skinshifter is injured, so she drops her dress to prove a) that she's not it, b) that she's modern and comfortable with her body and c) that this show sucks at subtle sexual tension.) Beowulf partners up with the chief of viking police, Col, who turns out to be the skinshifter in a twist which would have been shocking if I'd known who the fuck he was before this episode.

The Queen meets the Thanes and tries to persuade them to make her Jarl. The interchangeable old white gits (full disclosure; there may just have been the one guy) seem loosely in favour, but her main rival is dead set against her policy of appeasing the mudborn. When I heard his voice I thought they'd somehow cast young, cute Tim Curry, and he does look a bit like him, but black, and without the need for time travel. Of course, now I'm stuck thinking of him as black Tim Curry, which doesn't make me feel good about myself. I have white guilt. I look at actor David Ajala in the picture above with his 'come at me bro' stance and its like he's calling me out for it.

Meanwhile, Prince Sneerface meets up with another Thane, played by David Harewood (Supergirl's J'onn J'onzz, so naturally with all this shapeshifting going on, I'm liking him for a Martian) and gets captured trying to rescue one of the thane's soldiers from bandits. Fair play, Sneerface is actually a pretty complicated character; a bit of a weasel, but committed to his inappropriate girlfriend and not without some chutzpah.

I'm starting to wonder why I'm still watching this, but it's drawing me back with an Atlantis-like magnetism.

Agents of SHIELD - 'Laws of Nature'

Ah, fuck; Ward still isn't dead.

We open with a shot of our season's arch-villain:

Damn you, health supplements!*

A new Inhuman has terrigenised and is cornered by armed bastards, but rescued by Daisy - now all at home with her powers - and Mac, using what appears to be a technology derived from Willie Wonka's great glass elevator** to the new bus, which is more of a giant quinjet than a conventional aircraft.

Coulson, missing his actual left arm and his figurative right hand - May, who has vanished on vacation; as an aside I like the parallel with Fury describing Coulson as his 'one good eye' - is tracking down 'Rosalind Price', the woman behind the armed bastards, who are later named as ATCU - Advanced Threat Countermeasures Unit. She proves to be resourceful and dangerous, but Coulson and Hunter elude her guards while she takes a phone call and the confrontation is a no-score draw in the end, with the only significant outcome the realisation for both that someone else is killing Inhumans.

Mac: "And I need a bigger gun, I guess. Or my axe. Or maybe a shotgun-axe
combination of some sort."

Struggling to acclimatise Joey, the new Inhuman, to the idea that just because he has to break contact with everyone he knows and go back in the closet (that's right, we have a gay character and right out of the gate he's being told to hide who he is,) Daisy decides to have another go at recruiting Lincoln to continue his work with SHIELD. He's not happy to see her, especially when the hospital where he works is suddenly attacked by a giant spiny dude looking for 'the Inhuman'. He kinda shrugs off Daisy and Lincoln's powers, merely retreating by melting through walls when faced with a combined barrage.

Bobbi is kind of benched for this episode. Still recovering from last season's injuries, she's working in the lab, covering for Fitz and arguing with Hunter about their relationship and his determination to track down Ward.

Fitz is all recovered from last Season's brain damage, but obsessed with getting Simmons back from the monolith that ate her. He does some bad ass shit in Morocco to secure a scroll which is said to describe the monolith, and which ends up containing a single word in Hebrew: Death. As another side note, Fitz reads Hebrew. Coulson encourages him to let go, but he rages at the dangerous monolith and we cut to Simmons, who is...

Yeah; this is awesome.

'Laws of Nature' is a decent opening. There's a lot of plot dropping and procedural stuff, and I would like to see May back sooner rather than later. It would also be good to see more dynamic stuff from the Inhumans than Daisy and Lincoln just holding their hands out at Hans my Hedgehog while he charges along a corridor. For the entire episode, I did not hate Daisy nor resent her screen time, so that's progress.

Moving forward, I have high hopes for Simmons' subplot, but Ward vs. Hunter is a confrontation I would pay not to see.

* In fairness, they have said that the effects are in other parts of the ecosystem, so we don't keep going to the fish oil.
** I now want to see the lost episode where SHIELD breach the chocolate factory to free the Oompa Loompa slave workforce.

Shadowhunters - 'The Mortal Cup'

Like, 90% of the images which come up searching for 'Shadowhunters TV
series' are fan-made fantasy casting posters.

This year, Netflix brings us the series based on the movie based on the books! Or possibly just the series based on the books ignoring the movie. Whatever; when the movie version of City of Bones crashed and burned, the planned sequels went into the can, and now Netflix has nabbed the rights (or rather, are funding the original filmmakers to produce this series. Or maybe it's another network entirely, as despite the version I saw calling itself a Netflix original, Wikipedia lists the network as Freeform.)

Clary Fray is an ordinary teenager(TM), just turning 18 and gaining admission to Brooklyn Academy of Arts thanks to her hugely generic monster drawings. She also possesses the ability to turn actual biscotti into pencil drawings of biscotti. Out celebrating her birthday with her love triangle (best bud with a crush Simon and the girl who fancies him,) she almost literally runs into a trio of broody goths that no-one else can see and stumbles on them cutting up a room full of demons.

Now, one of the big changes for the series is that we depart quite a bit from Clary's viewpoint, so we've already seen these three - self-absorbed Jace, moody Alex and exhibitionist Isabelle - tool up to hunt a shapeshifting demon who has been draining blood from humans. They are Shadowhunters, working from a high-tech ops centre with a sizable staff (a big change from the movie,) and Clary's mother explains - badly - that Clary is also a Shadowhunter, gives her a glowy wand thing called a styla, and pushes her through a magic door while she gets captured by 'the Circle'. Clary goes to her mother's friend Luke, but hears him telling a couple of Circle members that he doesn't give a crap about her, he's just been trying to get the Mortal Cup for 'his people' (a loaded phrase, as TV Luke is black, and also a cop rather than a bookshop owner.)

Look again; the bookseller is now a cop.

Clary goes home and is bitten by a demon in the shape of her neighbour, but rescued by Jace and taken to Shadowhunter HQ. Simon traces her with some modern version of Googlestalk and we close with her choosing whether to stick with the weirdoes or go home with Simon.

Meanwhile, archbaddy Valentine is obsessing over Jocelyn Fray and the fact that she has a daughter in his evil lair-type base in Chernobyl.

There are some left-field decisions in this adaptation: Luke Garroway, Werewolf Cop; Chernobyl; the mass of touchscreen technology in the Institute; and a flashback which lets us know that Jocelyn has been having Magnus Bane monkey with Clary's memories right out of the gate. Also Werewolf Cop*.

On the plus side, the characters are a little less self-consciously joyless in this version, even Alex, who is basically made of brood. Overall, the aesthetic is much the same as the movie (unsurprisingly, coming from the same production company,) although Clary's hair is changed from dark red to bright orange. The series has some potential, so long as the budget doesn't start to bite too hard.

* I suspect that this may tie in later to a more episodic style of storytelling once the series is established, with Luke-as-cop able to explain his presence at crime scenes and the like.

Beowulf - 'Episode 1'

Lady Blacksmith, Dead Stuntcasting, Sir Not Appearing in Episode 1, Beowulf, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Cheeky McSidekick, Prince Sneerface and the Queen

As the opening credits of Beowulf : Return to the Shieldlands begin and animated gripping beasts crawl across stylised Viking artwork, one thing is clear: This series really wants to be Game of Thrones.

Young Beowulf puts an axe in a troll's head after it kills his father, and is adopted by Hrothgar, King of Heorot (pronounced 'Eret', apparently.) Years later, after being banished for reasons which remain obscure for almost the entire episode (he didn't get on with his less capable foster brother Prince Sneerface and the Queen clearly knew that he was actually Hrothgar's son,) he returns to pay his last respects to the dead king. There's a fight and we meet the Queen, grown up Prince Sneerface and his healer girlfriend Thoroughly Modern Millie*. The Queen is, it turns out, now the Thane of Heorot, part of a sweeping tide of feminism which also sees a female blacksmith and TMM as the chief healer.

While Beowulf's rogue Cheeky McSidekick marries the blacksmith's mum so that... All right, I'm not sure on this one. It might just be to annoy the blacksmith. He doesn't seem set on settling down at all. Anyway, while that is going on, Beowulf find the Reeve murdered, apparently by a mudborn - a sort of goblin-ape - which runs off chasing TMM while Prince Sneerface is busy arresting Beowulf for murder. Cheeky McSidekick interrupts the execution and they hare off to rescue TMM, although the mudborn isn't trying to hurt her, instead saving her from a barghest (a hybrid of wolf and CGI) and seemingly trying for some King Kong action.) It gets in a fight with Beowulf and loses half a hand.

Back at the ranch, TMM goes all CSI Heorot and discovers that the Reeve was actually stabbed, and apparently using a weapon with a round profile, which honestly ought to be pretty easy to track down in nth century Denmark**. You'd think someone might have checked that before condemning the man with only flat-bladed weapons.

Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands is not desperately bad - by which I mean it's a lot better than, say, Olympus, more or less the definition of damning with faint praise - but it's not anything resembling good. The acting is decent, the plot has a few twists, and the fights are okay - when the camera isn't juddering with each impact, which could really get old - but there's nothing much to distinguish it and on the whole it's - so far - pretty standard and predictable fare. It really, really wants to be Game of Thrones, but in many ways represents everything that Game of Thrones is a reaction to, from intrusively modern sensibilities to the small, core cast and straightforward plotting.

* So, obviously the names haven't impacted on me in this thing, and healer chick is the ridiculously liberal one speaking the modern sensibilities.
** The blurb says Britain, and since Beowulf clearly isn't a Geat I can't swear that Heorot hasn't moved.

Supergirl - 'Hostile Takeover'

I picked this shot for Benoist's portrayal of Kara's shock at seeing how far she
could go, but all I can think now is that it has so much lens flare JJ Abrams is
like, dude.

Astra calls on Supergirl and tries to recruit her to 'the cause'. She fails, which isn't entirely surprising given her complete failure to actually explain what it is. Like, at all.

Cat's emails get hacked, leading to a series of embarrassing revelations in the Daily Planet, which is apparently the sort of hack rag that buys scurrilous dirt on competitors in this version of the DC Universe. Kara, James and Winn - described to Kara by Cat as 'that handsome hobbit who own more cardigans than you do.' - are tasked with finding the hacker and making sure there is nothing else embarrassing in the stolen data. In the process, Kara learns that Cat has another, older son whom she supports but does not know, and having overheard the CEO of CatCo plotting to remove Cat, guides her team to unveil him as the hacker.

Astra has a heart to heart with her husband, Non, who is not the near-mute idiot of the old movies, but does believe that Astra needs to recruit Kara or kill her. Astra calls Kara out for a fight, and is ultimately beaten down and locked up by the DEO. There, she tries to convince Kara that she was just trying to save Krypton when Allura betrayed her, using Kara as bait to trap her and prevent her letting people know that Krypton was doomed. Kara is enraged that her mother might have used her.

Reviewing the footage of the fight, Alex realises that Astra threw the fight. Hank/Jonn can't get anything out of her, as Kryptonians are immune to his telepathic abilities, which Superman apparently finds hilarious. Alex is just disturbed to learn that he can read minds.

Cat works out who Kara really is.

Astra's capture turns out to be a distraction, while her forces attack Max Lord's tower. A battle royale ensues, with several DEO agents downed and some aliens, before Kara arrives to go head to head with Non and...

Oh, that's the mid-season closer. DRAMAH!

The Librarians - '...and the Point of Salvation', '...and the Happily Ever Afters' and '...and the Final Curtain'

Serious Ezekiel

A triple bill of The Librarians to close out Season 2, and oh my it is glorious.

'..and the Point of Salvation' takes the team to a quantum computing research facility on the verge of disaster. Faced with a series of almost nonsensical trials, Librarians die again and again, only to return to the back door, and only Ezekiel remembers. At first assuming a time loop, he comes to realise that they are actually trapped in a computer game thanks to an overload in a quantum computer driven by a nugget of scary Atlantis quartz.

"I can't watch you die anymore."

As he struggles to get the whole team through the 'level' safely, Ezekiel begins to be worn down by seeing his friends die, over and over again, even as he draws on all of their abilities to help him overcome each of the game's challenges. Eventually, he just takes to locking them in while he chases the answer.

MVL of the Week

Hands down, this is Ezekiel's show. I'm so torn on his reversion to original Ezekiel after he sacrifices himself at the last hurdle. On the one hand, I hate to see character development undone; on the other, I can see that this was a lot of development to drop on other writers through one episode. For myself, I choose to believe that Ezekiel retains some subconscious knowledge of what happened, influencing his role in the coming episodes.

Honorable mention to Jake for commiserating with Ezekiel when he realises that the rest of the team have become Ezekiel's escort mission.

Also, I love the title, referring both to Ezekiel saving the team and to the literal save point at which they constantly respawn.

Meet the new team, same as the old team. Almost.

At the close of the episode, Jenkins learns that Prospero's plan is starting now, and runs to warn the Librarians - just too late - that they are walking into a trap. Then something goes wibbly and Jenkins acts as if all were normal.

In '...and the Happily Ever Afters', Flynn Carson returns to the Library to find that the team are gone and Jenkins doesn't remember them. He tracks his friends to Cicely, Washington, where Eve is apparently the Sheriff, working with ladies' man, saviour of world heritage and polymath professor Jake, astronaut, science teacher and barista Cassandra and Special Agent Ezekiel Stone, head of the FBI field office on an island of 2000 people which has its own university to safeguard their home. Also on the team is Mayor James Moriarty, Eve's perfect boyfriend.

"And this guy! Special agent? He's like fifteen! And Australian! How could he be FBI?"

Flynn and Jenkins deduce that the team are under a spell which creates a perfect life for each of them; an ideal happy ever after. They then run into Ariel, currently on the run and appearing not as a tiny sprite but an adorable bovver booted Scots pixie, who explains that she isn't fictional (although she seems to struggle to remember that the Librarians aren't just characters in some story*) but is a real fairy who was ensnared by Prospero.

With the team deciding that Flynn and Ariel have stolen Cicely's beloved totem pole, Flynn lures them back to the Library and confronts them with their real lives, but to break the spell for good they have to formally reject the new stories. Once this is done, however, they find themselves locked out of the Library itself, until Eve cracks the last piece of the puzzle: She has rejected her new story, as have the other Librarians, but Flynn is still under the spell, which has given him his happy ever after: Being the Librarian, faced by a life of adventure and puzzles that no-one else can solve.

MVL of the Week

This is another Flynn week, not only cracking the main mystery, but beginning to repair his relationship with Eve. We're also saved from an overly indulgent big name star love in as the denouement rebalances the entire episode to show Eve and Flynn in particular as equals, and for her to save him with a 'true love's' kiss. Also, each of the main team is a delight in their new role, especially Ezekiel Jones, FBI, who introduces himself by swaggering into the room and announcing straight-faced: "I'm a rule-breaking maverick, but I get results."

Time travel has its own special embarrassments.

'...and the Final Curtain' wraps up the season with a bit of time travel, as Eve identifies a note found in place of Prospero's broken staff as being written in Flynn's left-handed handwriting and they determine that they have to use one of the Library's many confiscated time machines to snag the staff and undo the spell which Prospero has cast to return the world to primordial forest.

Things go awry when the time machine implodes, trapping Eve and Flynn in the past, and the remaining Librarians begin to follow a trail of clues embedded in the original note by Flynn to seek a means to defeat Prospero in the present. In the past, Flynn and Eve encounter Moriarty, now apparently turned on his master, and Shakespeare, who is composing his final play: The Triumph of Prospero using a pen carved form the wood of the Tree of Knowledge and given to him by John Dee.

Shakespeare's bitterness at his impending enforced retirement allows the spirit of Prospero to inhabit his form, meshing the wizard's fictional power with the author's imagination and ambition. With Moriarty's help, Flynn and Baird steal and drown Prospero's book, and when the Wizard in turn tries to drown Baird she is rescued by the Lady of the Lake, who gives her Excalibur to give to Flynn to break the staff. I will not lie; I squeed a bit when Cal came back and knew his old buddy Flynn, even more than when Moriarty comes good at the last and sacrifices himself for Eve.

In the present day, Jenkins uses the clues from the past to set up an exorcism, and the Librarians use Shakespeare's words to force Prospero from his creator's body, each choosing a quotation which encompasses their greatest lesson. Temporal inertia then draws Shakespeare back to the past, but Eve and Flynn are trapped; at least until a locked door in the Library yields to Eve's name and reveals a statue of Eve and Flynn, which comes to life.

Oh, gosh; I enjoyed this. '...and the Final Curtain' is so dense and full of call backs, but still manages to be a pacy adventure. Seriously, Doctor Who could learn from this series when it comes to mixing episodic and arc stories in a 45 minute format.

MVL of the Week

This week, it's everyone, as the show once more delivers a proper ensemble mystery. Flynn gets more solo time, but the three in the present work together to solve the puzzles left behind, and deliver their knockout punches with not-so-subtle reference to their own growth as characters (Caesar's rejection of death's power, Kent's self-knowledge in Lear, and Prince Hal putting on the character of the fool to wow people when he becomes Henry V.)

The Librarians has been renewed for Season 3, and I for one say huzzah and don't much care who hears me do it.

* A twisty bit of metafiction that is thankfully managed without a single comedy turn to camera.

Jessica Jones - 'AKA You're a Winner'

I love these helmets. They're so... WWII.

Jessica's Kilgrave hunt is once more interrupted as Luke hires her to find someone, the brother of a friend, he says, but Jessica suspects something more behind it. This gives us a chance to see Jessica get her PI on, but when it turns out that he's doing this in exchange for information on the death of his wife, whom Jessica murdered on Kilgrave's instruction, she might be wishing she wasn't so good.

Meanwhile, Hope has been beaten up in prison, which she turns out to have paid for in an attempt to miscarry Kilgrave's child. Jessica promises to do a number on Jeri's wife in order to secure the divorce if Jeri will arrange an abortion for Hope. If this wasn't bleak enough, Jeri bribes the prison doctor to have the foetus delivered to a lab for reasons, perhaps trying to recoup some of her costs by flogging super-stem cells to nuHydra (and I find it weird and slightly sad to contemplate that this series exists in the same universe as Grant Ward.)

Jessica tries to get a jump on Luke and secure the information ahead of him, but it turns out to be incriminating evidence against the bus driver. When Luke sets out for revenge, Jessica tries to stop him, eventually confessing her own guilt - that Kilgrave made her dig up something that Luke's wife had buried, then kill her. Luke... takes it better than he might have done, I guess, but not well.

And Kilgrave uses his power to win a million at poker so he can buy a house, peeling back the wallpaper to reveal Jessica's growth chart. It was at this point that I decided when we move we're sanding down the door frame with Arya's growth marks on, just in case.

Jessica Jones continues to be dark and compelling in equal measure. I'm a little disappointed that as well as being unbreakable, Luke is shown to be stronger than Jessica, but it's a minor quibble given that Jessica's powers aren't her defining quality.

Sherlock - The Abominable Bride

"What if we set an episode of our modern setting of a famous Victorian series
in the Victorian era?"

In the foggy streets of Victorian England, a woman commits a very public suicide and then shoots her husband dead. This is a job for the Baker Street detective and his stalwart assistant, but what does it have to do with women's suffrage, John Watson's marriage or the suicide of criminal genius Jim Moriarty in 2012?

'The Abominable Bride' is a massively high concept episode of the BBCs question to which Elementary is the US answer. Now, Sherlock is a series which has suffered from being 'the other project' for practically everyone involved, taking second fiddle to Stephen Moffat's run on Doctor Who, Mark Gatiss being the rogue genius of our age, Benedict Cumberbatch becoming an international sex god and Martin Freeman being down and out in Minnesota and Middle Earth. In this respect 'The Abominable Bride' scores highly over the regular episodes simply because everyone involved seems to be 100% on board for a one off instead of the decidedly more mixed quality of the series episodes.

And I do think this one works. It's a weirdly meta approach with a couple of neat if not unpredictable twists, and leans hard on the strength of the relationship between John and Sherlock, which for reasons can be allowed to be more equal here than in the regular series. The plot is a little more explicitly gruesome than an authentic Holmes story, but not significantly more baroque and decidedly more sympatico with the canon than that Silk Stocking bullshit with Rupert Everett they did a few years back (although that was written by someone who clearly hated Holmes as a character on every conceivable level.)

'The Abominable Bride' was a good outing for an inconsistent show, which is a lot better than a disappointing instance of an otherwise consistently good one.

Sleepy Hollow - 'Kali Yuga'

Jaime Murray; professional bitch monster.

The Witnesses are in trouble when a Hindu vengeance beast called a vetala comes to town, and turns out to be Hawley's long-lost foster mother. This relationship is creepy as hell, which is not entirely surprising given that there is all of eight years between them and Carmilla Pines (played by genre fiction's go-to bitch from Hell, the probably quite lovely in real life Jaime Murray) not only shares a name with literature's first lady of the vampires, but was a murderess even before she got turned into an undead thuggee acid-monster.

'Kali Yuga' is another in the post-Moloch run of fairly slight episodic entries in the Sleepy Hollow canon, as the show wrestles with what smells of editorial mandate: less arc, more sexy. On the plus side, while Ichabod and Abbie are at their most ineffectual, this prompts a confrontation which (hopefully) resolves their growing distance over the past few episodes. It's not just the show that has been losing focus since Moloch was destroyed. Better still, Hawley sets off to track down and destroy his creepy oedipal mentor monster, which means we don't have to have him knocking around Sleepy Hollow being an irritating nth wheel.

Irving is released, some new evidence having completely exonerated him somehow. Katrina gives him a spiritual and determines he is Horseman free, but he also appears to lack a reflection. I'm not sure this is because he is a body and mind without a soul or just because Katrina is pulling some dodgy shenanigans, since the show now seems unsure what to do with her outside of the occasional spotlight episode.

The highlight of the show remains the chemistry between the leads and Ichabod's young old man grumbling, which is why I'm pleased to see the tension resolved; it just wasn't as much fun. This week, Ichabod hates yoga and the Witnesses cement their renewed partnership by belting out a slightly awkward 'Proud Mary' at karaoke night.