The Agents Of SHIELD one was absolutely fantastic, and pretty funny. It knows its audience, knows the audience knows these episodes, and does things a bit differently or amusingly.

But I quite like Red Dwarf's riff on them in Future Echoes. Only the second episode ever, it takes the concept - seeing the future - and makes it immediate. Rather than experiencing the future all as one before returning to the start, the episode says "here's a quick bit of the future, now here you are again experiencing it from the start - and nothing you do will change the outcome".

This is best illustrated by Lister finding the Cat with a broken tooth in a "future echo'". He doesn't know what caused it, but decides he can change the future by preventing the Cat from breaking his tooth. Realising the Cat is about to try eating his robot goldfish and breaking his tooth on that, Lister wrestles the robot goldfish away from the Cat, and in the struggle breaks the Cat's tooth.

Harold Finch.

I'd watch Muppets Kill A Mockingbird. So long as Sweetums plays Boo Radley.

I'd say D'Argo and Chiana from Farscape (mainly because someone's already said John and Aeryn).

So during a standard body-swap episode they do the obvious thing everyone would do in a body of the opposite gender, and decide they quite like each other. They have a relationship (mostly based on sex) which doesn't get a lot of attention, until Chiana decides to sleep with D'Argo's son (for unknown reasons).

Takes them probably over a season to start getting back together (I can't even recall when it happened), but in the end Chiana is pretty distraught at D'Argo's death.

Just seemed like a good "background" relationship to me.

I just like it when Eddie is in hospital and is seemingly hallucinating Lady Penelope at her bedside.

It depends on the feel you want for a show. For instance, Brooklyn 9-9 tries to make itself appear serious and keep a good pace flowing while it is actually pretty zany and wacky. Adding a laugh track, either canned or from a studio audience, would make it a completely different show.

Red Dwarf, probably my favourite show, has a studio audience (which I was part of). This show uses little jokes a lot, then big jokes infrequently. In series 7 they tried it "canned" and released a version with no laughter. It was awful.

I favour it, depending on the show. Most of the comedies I watch have one, and were recorded in front of a studio audience (or an audience shown the bits that they couldn't see live in a studio).

No, IT Crowd was a studio audience.

(I always thought "canned" laughter was laughter from just a library of laughter, in that nobody has seen it and laughed, the editors just decided "let's add some laughter here")

I don't think Last Of The Summer Wine will have been "canned" laughter but I don't think it will have been studio either - mainly because nigh-on all of it is shot outside around Holmfirth (great little town, been there a few times). More likely an audience is shown the recording.

I've been in one. We weren't.

Great episode, currently doing a rewatch and got it coming up (it'll take a few weeks to get to it though).

Basement may have a little window at the top, and you fall upwards...

You'd "like" too many posts while you're there?

The final few episodes of season 2 of Farscape, right through to the end of season 3. If you can ignore one or two of the more mediocre season 3 episodes, this is remarkably strong.

You go from the Shadow Depository heist and the diagnosan planet, to getting stuck inside a wormhole, the amazing Different Destinations, seeing Crichton get twinned, the stuff between Moya and Talyn, some decent (and not so decent) filler, until what's left of both crews reunite for the attempt to sabotage Scorpius' project and the heart-wrenching Dog With Two Bones.

$2 million per episode? I'm sure a lot of animated shows would kill for that money.

On the plus side - this looks cool. I'm genuinely quite excited.

However - where is Milly?!?

This seems to be based around it, though I don't believe this character was in it.

Brian and Kevin's books are passable, so long as you don't compare them to Frank's. The original Dune, for instance, was self-contained and a good little adventure with lots of other stuff, but it seldom flitted from the main adventures of Paul - and when it did so, it did so with purpose.

By comparison, Brian and Kevin's are all "trilogies" and try to tell a multitude of branching storylines, taking place in a myriad of differing locations. It can be quite disjointed - in one chapter you can be in a space battle, and in the next a princess wonders what to wear to the ball. The tease is that storylines will come together but that rarely happens, and is rarely satisfactory.

Although their latest trilogy, the Caladan trilogy, does reduce this significantly. It does, however, have a fair few bits of bad "wtf" writing, as in one instance Hawat hypnotised Paul in the middle of the street to believe the Baron is about to kill everyone, for shits and giggles obvs.

Frank Herbert's books are left untouched by Brian and Kevin's, if only because it is impossible to confuse the two. Brian and Kevin just don't have the plots and are a very different style of writing. You can read the six core Dune books perfectly well without reading Brian and Kevin's - they add nothing - and whenever anyone nee to the Dune series suggests reading in "chronological" order - so 12 Brian and Kevin books before getting to Dune - we will advise them to rethink and go publication order.

So if you can accept them for being "stories in the same universe as Dune", rather than any sort of continuation, then you can get some enjoyment out of them. There is some bad writing in them - and I've reviewed the three most recent - but if you can plot through it, and the endless recounting of motivation (that really annoys me, and I begin to wonder if it was done just got padding, as each chapter the characters seem to want to recount the story so far a lot of the time), then they're entertaining brain fodder.