“Promise me, Ned.” Olenna Tyrell sits all in black in the water gardens of Dorne, surrounded by beautiful women bent on revenge. “Cersei stole the future from me,” she tells Ellaria. Her enemy’s crime is so vast, so terrible that it cannot be described as the destruction of places or people. Instead it is the transformation, […]
“I lived with him.” Violence is a form of intimacy. To cut into another person’s body, to reveal the secret machinery of their existence, is an incredible violation, yes, but it’s also about the closest, physically, two people can be. The dead of the Battle of Winterfell form a hill together, a single massive edifice […]
When it comes to television shows, a lot tend to follow a successful formula. In the cutthroat world where shows have to survive year to year, it seems that “different” can be a risk not worth taking. However The Booth at the End is different and with the release of the show on DVD we […]
“He died fighting.” The Blackfish dies offscreen in a lonely stairwell, his last words a wry observation that he hasn’t been in a proper sword fight in years and that he’ll most likely embarrass himself. The Waif dies in the dark under Braavos, skewered by the girl she tormented and beat, her face given to […]
“Violence is a disease.” Possession, loss, reclamation; these are mile markers on the endless circuit of war down which great houses and their hapless draftees trudge, marching ever lower on a corkscrew path like a frozen whirlpool, like a huge mouth sucking up men and spitting out corpses. But why? Why keep fighting even, as […]
With the release of The Tunnel, it had a big job to do. Being the remake of The Bridge, it had to make it out of the Nordic Noir show’s shadow. With the first season it arguable managed to do this, but can it do it again with The Tunnel: Sabotage? The Tunnel: Sabotage brings together the team of […]
“It’s not an easy thing, admitting to yourself who you really are.” Fanatics, dragonriders, face-peeling assassins, and the walking dead. ‘Blood of My Blood’, the sixth episode of Game of Thrones‘ riveting sixth season, spent its hour marrying intimate moments of introspection to towering spectacle as deftly as the High Sparrow facilitated his erasure of the […]
“Hodor.” It feels strange to learn something so grave and so terrible in a scene less than a minute long. The Children of the Forest made their own destroyers, sacrificing men on the roots of their heart trees and giving them a new and awful life as the White Walkers, a bitter sword forged to […]
The iconic cop duo Riggs and Murtaugh are back in the all-new FOX series Lethal Weapon, which reboots the hit movie franchise on television, once again following cop duo Riggs and Murtaugh as they work a crime-ridden beat in modern-day Los Angeles. Grief-stricken after the loss of his young wife and unborn child, ex-Navy SEAL-turned-detective […]
So, we are heading quickly towards WWE’s second May PPV, Extreme Rules, and there are lots of rematches from Payback likely to happen at that show. I hope this doesn’t mean the product will be stale for the next month or so, but we shall see. RAW (9th May 2016) Results: Baron Corbin defeated Dolph […]
“Don’t you wish we could go back to the day we left?” The human desire for catharsis is primal and powerful. Hurt, we want succor and revenge. Slighted, we want justice. ‘Book of the Stranger’ is a complex portrait, sometimes lovely, sometimes gruesome, of what those impulses mean and how they impact our lives. In […]
“I fought. I lost. Now I rest.” Alliser Thorne dies steeled with the conviction that, torn between his oath to his Lord Commander and his love and loyalty for the Night’s Watch itself as he sees it, he did the right thing. His dilemma is hardly unique. It’s a permutation, after all, of Jaime’s infamous […]
So, we just had WWE Payback and now we enter a new week of WWE… Let’s go. RAW (2nd May 2016) Results: Cesaro and Kevin Owens wrestled to a no-contest Tyler Breeze pinned Goldust Big Cass & The New Day beat The Dudleys and The Vaudevillains Emma beat Becky Lynch Rusev won a Battle Royale […]
So, the post-WrestleMania PPV, Payback, has happened (over a week ago now) and it was a night of good, bad and in-between but it was fresh and had a feel of something new, like WWE are making an effort to build new stars (finally). Results: Kick-Off Show: Kalisto retained his US Title against Ryback Kick-Off […]
“I wasn’t drowning, I was home.” Bran Stark stands among the dead. Watching his father, uncle, and aunt at play through the power of his second sight, he is bewitched by the idea of returning to a family lost to him forever. But when he returns unwillingly to the waking world he is confronted at […]
We are quickly approaching WWE Payback, and this week will be the “final sell” before the PPV. Let’s see what WWE can offer to get us to watch their annual May event. RAW (25th April 2016) Results: AJ Styles pinned Sheamus Karl Anderson & Luke Gallows beat The Uso’s in their RAW debut Sami Zayn […]
This week we stay on the road to Payback in the aftermath of WrestleMania season. The roster has been shuffled up a little and some new faces are plodding around Raw, Smackdown and NXT. Let’s see what this past week brought us, shall we? RAW (18th April 2016) Results: Chris Jericho beat Sami Zayn via […]
“All I could think about when she died was what would happen to her now. every day, every night, what does mama look like now? Has she started to bloat? Has her skin turned black? Have her lips peeled back from her teeth?” Cersei’s monologue about her childhood obsession with her mother’s corpse is ‘The Red […]
“DON’T.” The unknown messenger’s letter to Mike is a road sign as plain as any you could ask for. Passing it means oblivion, the annihilation of the self through the act of murder, and in the end Mike is still, for now, the man who can’t pull the trigger. He has maybe ten lines in […]
“Whatever happens tonight, I remain confused.” Vinyl closes its first season by cutting back and forth between Richie and Zak across a crowded room. It’s meant to remind us that the two men share a few too many secrets, and that the burden of guilt on Richie’s shoulders is far from lifted. It’s also almost completely […]
“Who’s the guy who won’t pull the trigger?” You can’t change the consequences of your actions. You can’t uncrack your brother’s skull or drag a kind-hearted stranger whose face you never saw out of his unmarked desert grave. Whatever joy you had before from the actions that led you to that one un-take-backable moment is tainted […]
“Stop covering your cock!” A fistfight in an elevator, a rock ‘n roll threesome, an indoor bat hunt, and some literally balls-out photography gave ‘Rock And Roll Queen,’ this week’s swing-for-the-fences episode of Vinyl, more than its share of lustful life. It’s an episode that bucks blandly traditional band narratives, tossing aside the dull idea of […]
