TV

Dexter
5x04 Beauty and the Beast
And the plot proper finally gets underway. This seems to have provoked complaints in some circles, but personally I like the slightly different tack they've taken to storytelling. When your whole season is always one long story, it makes sense to change it up -- it makes it a "novel for television" and all that, and we expect such basic variation of format in novels in a series, so what's wrong with it on TV? Nothing. It's grand. So there.
(Incidentally, I'm a little surprised it's taken them until the fifth season to use that episode title.)

Law & Order: UK
5x06 Deal [season finale]
Ooh, cliffhanger! Considering Jamie Bamber has since been in a (failed, sadly) US pilot and has a US guest spot or two lined up, I wouldn't be surprised if the resolution to said cliffhanger is the obvious. Then again, maybe the plan was to shoot L&O in US filming gaps. I guess we'll find out whenever series six begins... which, according to this, is very soon in the US (where it'll just continue on as one long series). How annoying.
[Watch it (again) on ITV Player.]

My Favourite Joke
Episode 4 (of 6)
Lots of old stuff in this one. I don't mind -- I'm more likely to discover stuff I've not seen -- but it does make their inability to play the clips in full all the more frustrating.
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Fiction

Torchwood: Long Time Dead by Sarah Pinborough
Prologue
Chapters 1-4

This had to be the oddest choice of subject for the three Miracle Day prequel novels: it's conceivable that we might want to know how Gwen and Rhys got from the end of Children of Earth to their seclusion at the start of Miracle Day; it's conceivable we might like to learn more about Rex before we met him getting stabbed through the chest in a road accident; but do we really need a second revival of Suzie Costello and a peripheral connection to PC Andy? Well, we'll see -- great novels have been written for lesser reasons.

There's a slight potential problem/irritation for readers, though, in my opinion: by making the lead hero character a new one, DI Tom Cutler, we're ahead of him. A few chapters in and he has a weird fascination with the remains of the Hub and a figure he half remembers dressed in a Second World War greatcoat. If you're enough of a Torchwood fan to buy this novel, it's eminently obvious he's been Retconned and that figure is Jack even before the coat is mentioned. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe there's some twist here, but if there isn't and this goes too long… well, you need a good idea to make it still work when the reader is five steps ahead of your characters.

Articles

A closer look at DC’s ‘New 52′ commercial by Kevin Melrose
(from Robot 6 at Comic Book Resources)
DC's promised big push for their relaunched New 52 begins with this, the TV commercial. Unfortunately, for all the reasons Melrose points out, it really isn't very good.