In a similar vein, the Alexander expansion for the original Rome: Total War was so much easier when you simply cheated to play as the Persians instead and sank the Conqueror's entire army the moment it left port.

For a good, well-substantiated instance of mass hysteria in a convent situation, you should have a read about the Loudun possessions and the trial of Urbain Grandier. Aldous Huxley, of all people, wrote a book about it, and it's a really interesting interplay of religion, politics and personal squabbles in the…

I hated its contrived ending, but honestly, I didn't think it was too hot of a film before then, either.

See, this is the limitation of this conceit, as I would happily skip over most of the back-half of S3 - including the boxing episode - and watch the first four-fifths of S4.

Christ, that fucking serial killer angle. Never has my love for characters in a show so rapidly depleted. I could just, just about buy McNulty coming up with it in a state of alcohol-addled insanity, but when he kept going with it even after sobering up, and even somehow managed to get Lester - the most…

I thought the first half of Homeland's second series was pretty decent, when they were burning through light-years worth of plot every episode. But it became clear that this was unsustainable, and once it had drained itself of its central conceit, it just became a dumb, tension-less retread of 24.

The actual separation of the firms is great, weirdly high-stakes stuff, not least because it pits equally sympathetic characters against each other in a very TGW way.

I'm about to get my boyfriend to watch Twin Peaks so we can watch the new season together, and I'm very tempted to just tell him to skip ahead after a certain plot development in Series 2 to the finale and never look back.

To be honest, that criticism holds equally well for the first half of Full Metal Jacket, which is just a very handsomely-directed series of training scenes without any real purpose or overall unity.

That tacked-on Doolittle Raid sequence is awful.

AlienCubed is very inessential, and it commits my cardinal pop-culture sin of invalidating the ending of the previous film for no good reason, but it's not a bad film.

Unfortunately, my particular cut-off point is about two-thirds of the way through The Name of the Wind, which was when I just completely lost interest in the whole series.

I did enjoy that her raging unpleasantness was never dispelled, merely productively diverted into politics.

The BBC did an adaptation a while back starring Moanin Myrtle, which modernised the premise. I might be misremembering it, but I think it worked quite well at skimming over the more troubling aspects of the original play, by making it more of a 'break the haughty' process than the submission of a single woman to…

I'm sorry for your loss. Obviously, I'm not going to tell you that you shouldn't be offended by something has touched upon personal tragedy. But dark topics are often employed for comedic purposes.

How can you be so utterly blind to the evils of one particular world-system, while blind to everything but the evils of another world-system?

Ah yes, the disintegration of the world's largest area for the free movement of trade and people is bound to be great news for the average joe, not least when it precedes the mass haemorrhaging of European economies, the collapse in trade and exchange, and massive inflation and stagnation.

The EU is an independent institution from the USA, whose political and economic cohesion is in fact a third-way alternative to American hegemony, not its supporting prop.

So he's trying to 'do something about it' by indiscriminately boycotting the cultural products of a country of over 60 million people, many of whom opposed Brexit? Specifically, he's singling out the BBC, even though its the bête noire of the Brexiteers.

To be honest, people keep bringing up the EU's treatment of Greece as the original sin, but as heartless and misguided as the austerity regime is, Greece didn't have to accept a massive bailout package. The fact that even Syriza is still playing by the EU's playbook shows that there was no capacity in that country's…