This wouldn’t be an episode of “Spartacus” without our title character. Spartacus is leading his band south, keeping his word to Crixus that they would find Naevia. Along the way they free Roman house slaves, and those who want to stay with the band are taken in. They do run into one slave named Tiberius, who attacks Spartacus for killing his Dominus. Spartacus spares him and begins instead teaching him to fight. This in turn shows Tiberius that while his station was high within the slave ladder of the Roman house, he was still just a slave. This is simply a step by Spartacus to create an army that is united by allegiance to the same cause.

Illithya is still in Capua with Claudias Glaber, as well as a cleaned-up Lucretria. Knowing that somewhere in the broken Domina’s mind is the knowledge of her murdering Licinia (Spartacus: Blood and Sand), Illithya has begun testing what Lucretia remembers. She’s regaining bits and pieces, and that is clearly unsettling to Illithya. It’s going to be interesting to watch this relationship unfold for what it is as Lucretia regains her memories. Glaber is still hunting the rogue band of slaves, but now is also dealing with Seppius in hopes of an allegience. Seppius has enough men to go after Spartacus and win, where Glaber does not, but the talks between the praetor and citizen are quickly deteriorating. It’s also revealed in this episode the identity of the person who brings Oenomaus out of The Pit and back to the House of Batiatus to stand before Glaber.

“Spartacus: Vengeance” is shown on Starz every Friday at 10e/9c. If you haven’t already set it to record weekly, you really should.

“Vengeance” picks up a short while after “Blood and Sand” ended. The House of Batiatus has fallen at the hand of the gladiators. Quintis Batiatus is dead, his pregnant wife Lucretia has been stabbed by her gladiator-lover Crixus and left for dead, and their runaway fighters have been killing every Roman in Capua they have encountered. Spartacus is seeking revenge on Gaius Claudius Glaber (played by Craig Parker) and his wife Illithia (played by the amazing Viva Bianca), while Crixus is determined to find his love Naevia, This strife between Crixus and Spartacus is causing a rift in the ragtag band, and is setting the scene for what can only be an eventual split. Spartacus sees this, and begins sending off as many of the freed slaves as he can to seek freedom away from Capua. Glaber, who has been sent back to Capua from Rome to take down Spartacus, has taken up residence in the House of Batiatus with his reluctant- and now pregnant wife- Illithia and has set about rounding up as many of the fugitives as he can. He captures a band of slaves, and the only survivor of his wrath is Aurelia, the widow of Spartacus’ best friend (who died when Spartacus was ordered to kill him during what was supposed to be a friendly match- who said history was boring?). Aurelia is paraded through the streets and Glaber lets it be known that she will be summarily tortured until she gives up the location of Spartacus. It’s also discovered that not all who were involved in the massacre from “Blood and Sand” have perished, and that past sins have a way of resurfacing.

Like its predecessors, “Vengeance” does not shy away from graphic sex and violence, which may at times seem gratuitous, so of course this is not something to watch with the kiddos. The story itself progresses rather quickly and the characters are so well-written and so well-acted that the hour passes and you are left yearning for the next one. Or, if you are like me, you are cursing Starz for not being able to make the week move quickly enough so you can find out what happens next. I was literally counting down the days for the premiere. It’s that good of a show.

“Spartacus: Vengeance” is shown on Fridays at 10p/9p CST on Starz. For further information, check out the official website at http://www.starz.com/originals/Spartacus

In its early inception, Smash was the brain child of Steven Spielberg himself, who wanted to do a show about Broadway. Originally picked up by Showtime, Smash was going to be a grittier look backstage on a Broadway production. Spielberg wanted an entire musical written just for the show and if the musical was good enough, he would actually produce the live Broadway production of it. Now on NBC, the show is much more family friendly, but still has all of the backstage backstabbing and drama that is commonplace with every theater production.

The show has a large cast of characters and all of their stories are thrown at you pretty quick. Debra Messing plays Julia, one half of a successful Broadway songwriting duo, who has decided to take a break from the biz to focus on her family and adopting a baby. When the other half of the duo Tom (Christian Borle) gets an inspired idea to make a musical based on Marilyn Monroe, Julie can’t resist helping him write. The two get involved with Eileen Rand (Anjelica Huston), a well-known Broadway producer who is going through a messy divorce and trying to make a name for herself on her own. The three of them begin casting so they can sell the idea of this musical and create demo versions of the songs.

Karen (Katharine McPhee), a Midwestern girl waitressing in New York while trying to get her big break, hears of the audition and goes for it. A veteran Broadway actress named Ivy (Megan Hilty) also sees this as her chance to star in a musical, and the audition process quickly is whittled down to these two very different ladies. Possibly not coincidentally though, Ivy gets the part after sleeping with Derek Willis (Jack Davenport) the director, and Karen is given a role in the ensemble.

The show is muddled with so many characters and storylines that it’s difficult to keep up. Honestly, I couldn’t even remember the name of Katharine McPhee’s character until the third episode. So much is going on that it’s a relief when the big musical numbers happen, because it gives some time to really enjoy what the show is about – musicals. With songs written by Mark Shaiman (Hairspray, Catch Me If You Can, South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, and many more) and Scott Wittman (collaborator with Shaiman on Hairspray and Catch Me If You Can), of course the music is incredible. Spielberg has assembled the best of the best to work on this show.

NBC was kind enough to send the first four episodes to Red Carpet Crash for review, and by the end of those first four episodes, the Marilyn Monroe musical is really shaping up nicely. I can see this actually becoming a musical that I would enjoy seeing (and I love musicals). At the end of the first episode, Katharine McPhee and Megan Hilty (who played Glinda in Wicked on Broadway) sing “Let Me Be Your Star” as they both prepare for their big audition as Marilyn. That song embodies everything about the show, from their getting ready, to their dreams of being a Broadway star.

There’s a song called “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” that Ivy sings with Michael (Will Chase) who has been cast in the musical as Joe DiMaggio; it’s reminiscent of “Somewhere That’s Green” from Little Shop of Horrors. There’s a USO number that Ivy performs in front of would-be investors (including guest star Nick Jonas) that brings the house down. Much like people have said about Marilyn herself, when Ivy is singing, it’s hard to take your eyes off of her. She’s magnetic. There’s another song called “The 20th Century Fox Mambo” that sounds silly in song title, but it’s so well performed and choreographed. These original songs are going to be a hit on itunes. And not just the original songs, but the amazing covers of songs such as “Grenade” by Bruno Mars and “Rumor Has It” by Adele.

Smash is a little slow going in storyline, but it’s always hard to tell how good a show is going to be by the first few episodes. With upcoming guest stars like Uma Thurman as a big Hollywood actress interested in the part of Marilyn for herself, and Broadway icon Bernadette Peters as Ivy’s mother, the show is only going to get more interesting. Hopefully it can flesh out all of the characters a little better over the remainder of the first season, but those songs are enough to snare even the most closeted Broadway fan.

So is “Touch” a “24″ redux? I’m here to tell you that it’s not even close. There are really three things that they have in common: Sutherland, cell phones, and the fact that yes, Sutherland races off to do save…something. Or someone. That is the first big mystery, which involves a mute autistic child obsessed with numbers.

Sutherland is Martin Bohm, a former journalist turned cab driver/dock worker/baggage handler, who lost his wife on September 11th. He was left alone to care for his now 10-year old son, Jake, who happens to be autistic and mute. We quickly see the difficulty in this as Jake causes a problem while at school, thus inviting child protection services to investigate whether or not Martin can provide a proper home for his troubled son. Clea Hopkins (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is the social worker sent to find out exactly how the Bohm’s are doing. In Clea’s initial meeting with Jake, we learn that not only does he not speak, Jake refuses to allow anyone to touch him. If so, Martin explains that she will have to “peel him off the ceiling”.

It turns out that Jake likes to collect cell phones. He also is constantly counting things, writing down numbers, or re-setting clocks to certain times. Martin always felt these were just random things happening inside his autistic son’s mind, but after a little investigating and a few strange coincidences, he realizes that Jake is trying to communicate things to him. Martin meets with Professor Arthur DeWitt (a blink and miss it role for Danny Glover) and learns that Jake is far more complex than anyone ever realized.

For fear of completely ruining what is really a fantastic pilot episode of a show, there’s not much more I can say. There are several characters involved in this first hour. An Irish girl singing karaoke, an English restaurant appliance salesman, and a teenager in Baghdad are all intricately involved in this fantastic occurrence all revolving around the number 318 that Jake has been transfixed on. Also, Titus Welliver (who was The Man In Black on “Lost”) has a role to play and it is the biggest emotional hammer that I’ve been hit with on a television show since “Lost”.

“Touch” is another show from Tim Kring, who last brought us “Heroes”. We all know how that one went, amazing first season to quickly fizzle out into nothing. That should not keep you from “Touch”. Of course this show could go down the same path, but that is the case with any new show. The promise of this pilot, which is the best I’ve seen since “Lost”, is more than enough reason to get involved. If anything, there may not be anything on television this year that will have more emotional impact than the last 15 minutes of this first episode.

The fact is that Alcatraz Federal Prison was closed in 1963 because the cost to the United States Government was nearly three times that of other prisons. But…what if that wasn’t the case? What if a pair of guards went out to the prison island and every single living soul there mysteriously disappeared? All the inmates, the guards, in fact, 302 total people just up and vanished. Then, in an effort to hide this unexplainable event (or is it?), the government decided to just falsify deaths and prison transfers to shut the prison down. What if that is what really happened?

That is exactly what the new Fox show “Alcatraz” is going to investigate. As this is a show with it’s production under the J.J. Abrams Bad Robot shingle, one can expect lots of twists and turns and hopefully, a satisfying payoff to the real mystery this show is based on: Where the hell did these people go?

After we are brought up to speed on everyone disappearing, we quickly meet San Francisco homicide detective Sarah Madsen (Sarah Jones). She is still dealing with the death of her partner and stumbles onto the Alcatraz mystery while investigating the murder of a former Alcatraz prison warden. The warden was murdered by Jack Sylvane, one of the inmates who just showed up in an Alcatraz cell one morning with a wad of cash, a boat ticket, and a key in his pocket. How did he get there? Who is helping him?

Sarah enlists the help of Dr. Diego Soto (Jorge Garcia), who is a comic book writer and author of a handful of books about Alcatraz and the inmates that were incarcerated there. They quickly discover a room at Alcatraz with several boxes of files that just happen to be sitting around at the former prison, but they are quickly gassed and knocked out. They wake up to learn they were gassed by Emerson Hauser (Sam Neill), a FBI agent that has a super secret headquarters at the prison. He is investigating the return of the people that disappeared from the island, which he and his assistant, Lucy (Parminda Nagra), oddly seem to expect.

They work together, somewhat unwillingly, and apprehend Sylvane. Hauser then takes Sylvane to a super secret bunker in the forest, which has an exact replica of the Alcatraz prison built in it. Hauser clearly has some deep personal motivation and wants to re-apprehend all of the criminals that vanished.

It all sounds pretty intriguing doesn’t it? While the overall story and mysteries to unearth are definitely exciting, the execution of the first two episodes seemed very, well, episodic. In two episodes, the gang has apprehended two former inmates. If formula holds, can we expect each episode to say “here’s a former inmate, let’s go catch him”? It’s feels like your basic non-serialized show, such as “CSI”, with little snippets of backstory dropped in from time to time. The biggest revelation in two hours so far is that Lucy has not aged and was at Alcatraz back in the 1960s, working as a prison doctor.

The star of the show, Sarah Jones, seemed very one dimensional. Sure, there is some room for growth as her grandfather was an inmate at Alcatraz that disappeared and his re-appearance played a hand in her partner’s death. But, right now, she’s a young, ambitious police officer without much motivation other than she seems to really, really love being a detective. Jorge Garcia is doing his best to not be Hurley and he’s been good so far. Unfortunately, he is too much of a narrative aid, like he is “the audience”, processing information and letting us know how to follow it.

Without a doubt, the most interesting character is Sam Neill’s Hauser. Not only is he splendidly mysterious and sinister, he’s doing it without being off-putting. Hauser is clearly in love with Lucy, whom he definitely met while he was a young prison guard (one of the two guards that discovered the initial disappearance) at Alcatraz in the ’60s. It doesn’t take a screenwriter to know that Hauser wants to find out exactly what happened on the island, as it robbed him of Lucy, who was only returned almost 50 years later.

“Alcatraz” may require some patience. The formulaic case-by-case TV show is a bit stale, but if “Alcatraz” follows an “X-Files” type blueprint in which there are stand-alone shows then a big mythology dump, it could definitely work. However, if we are served one inmate per episode, it could get a bit tedious. It’s worth checking out now for sure, but this is a show that could easily lose an audience if it doesn’t pick things up and give us more character development.

Steampunk is a sub-genre of science fiction, fantasy, alternate history, and speculative fiction that came into prominence during the 1980s and early 1990s. Steampunk involves a setting where steam power is still widely used—usually Victorian era Britain—that incorporates elements of either science fiction or fantasy. Works of steampunk often feature anachronistic technology or futuristic innovations as Victorians may have envisioned them, based on a Victorian perspective on fashion, culture, architectural style, art, etc. This technology may include such fictional machines as those found in the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne.

Many movies such as ‘Steamboy’ and even the modern Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes films have be influenced by the movement. Check out the trailer for a documentary that has landed on my must see list.

Facebook users can head to the C Yourself app and add a photo of themselves with a “C ” to the growing number of supporters in the album.

Anyone can upload their photos directly through the Facebook app, or by using Instagram and tagging the photo with #CYourself. For each photo uploaded and shared, SHOWTIME will make a $5 donation to the American Cancer Society.

Visitors to the app can vote on their favorite pic, and the “most creative” photo as selected by SHOWTIME staffers will receive a $5,000 cash prize.

Additionally, if new SHOWTIME subscribers on DIRECTV choose to donate their promotional $25 gift card to the ACS, both the network and satellite provider match the donation, equaling $75 going to fund cancer research and community support.

The campaign runs concurrently with the second season premiere of “The Big C,” which stars Laura Linney as a teacher dealing with a Stage 4 melanoma diagnosis and the fallout in her personal and professional life. The series returns Monday nights at 10:30 pm ET (9:30 pm CT) beginning June 27.

The fourth season, which picks up right where last season ended, premieres on Sunday, June 26.