Kid Flash has left town and the show (at least as a series regular), so why not tell his story all over again? That’s what happens in “Block,” in which Barry once again finds himself mentoring a headstrong, over-eager young speedster who is also a member of the family. The episode hits some familiar beats along the…

The fifth season premiere picks up exactly where we left off, with Team Flash celebrating the new addition to the family—a celebration that’s interrupted when another new addition to the family unexpectedly crashes the party. As you no doubt recall from the fourth season finale, this is Nora, future daughter of Barry…

One question kept running through my head toward the end of The Man In The High Castle’s season finale, “Jahr Null”: Do these scenes belong in the same show? Early on we’re treated to the most spectacular science fiction sequence of the series as the massive Nazi machine designed to open the portal between worlds is…

The clock is running out on the season (and has completely run out for one character, but more on that later), and “Baku” provides what we more or less expect from a penultimate episode in the age of premium television. By the end, everything is in place for whatever finale fireworks are planned. Those will no doubt…

Inevitably, if a series lasts long enough, the narrative problem of servicing all the characters arises. The actors are under contract, they’re getting paid, so the creative team either has to kill them off or keep them busy somehow. Some of those choices will end up being considerably less compelling than others.…

Well, this is an odd one. “Excess Animus” is largely concerned with moving pieces into place for the homestretch of the season, so we get a number of reunions as well as quite a bit of repetitious exposition. But there are also a couple of dream sequences, as well as the hardest push yet in the direction of science…

After all the fireworks of the previous episode, it’s not much of a surprise that “History Ends” eases back on the throttle quite a bit. It’s an hour full of quieter moments (at least until the end), some more effective than others. That’s largely dependent on how invested you are in the characters involved...but not…

One of the most evident changes in The Man In The High Castle this year is the accelerated pace. Several times this season I’ve been caught off guard by how quickly storylines have been resolved or twisted into intriguing new directions. Take all the action surrounding the Reich’s high command in this episode alone:…

“They think this world is normal.”

Films have been key to The Man In The High Castle since the first reel from another world was introduced at the very beginning, but they’ve never been as omnipresent as they are in “Sensô Kôi.” (I’d love to tell you what that means, but Google Translate has failed me.) Juliana is watching one set at Tagomi’s house,…

Juliana, we are told, is the key to everything. She’s the one person who appears in all the films, regardless of which world they came from. (She even turned up in Abendsen’s fake as a child, surely a harbinger of her future importance if ever there was one.) Indeed, it’s becoming clear that she possesses a mystical…

Given the nearly two-year hiatus between seasons of The Man In The High Castle, and the resolution of the production turmoil that left the series without a showrunner for much of the second season (Eric Overmyer, previously of Bosch, is now on board as executive producer), viewers might be expecting a substantial…

“In October of 2014, a white police officer fatally shot a black teenager on the streets of Chicago,” states the first line of 16 Shots’ description before expounding. Now almost 15 episodes in, the podcast (a collaboration between WBEZ Chicago and the Chicago Tribune) continues in that pattern, letting statements hit…

For the last half of the third season of Billions, we’ve been watching two separate shows interweaved, connected only by the character of Wendy Rhoades. There was a tantalizing moment, about halfway through it, when Chuck and Axe set aside their mutual animosity in order to settle a matter that had become an enormous…

If the back half of season three has been considerably less compelling than what has come before—and I think it has been, while still offering up some genuinely entertaining moments—it may be an unavoidable side effect of building a show around two antagonistic characters. They can’t always be coming after each other…

Because The A.V. Club knows that TV shows keep going even if we’re not writing at length about them, we’re experimenting with discussion posts. For certain shows, one of our TV writers will publish some brief thoughts about the latest episode, and open the comments for readers…

We knew it would come down to this in the end: All you need is love. Exactly how that would manifest itself in the fourth season finale “We Are The Flash” is something I never would have been able to predict, and I’m not certain it made any sense at all. But it was fast-paced, exciting, suspenseful, and full-on comic…

The downside to wrapping up your major storylines in the middle of a season is that it can take a while to get ramped back up again. In the case of Billions, the creative team appears content to take the show’s central conflict off the back burner entirely and stow it in the freezer. Instead, Chuck and Axe have each…