-A-

Added to which, what else can they do? They're in serious danger of relegation as things stand. Kinnear isn't going to be able to do much this season. Calderwood and Hughton and both decent influences but the end of the season is the time when coaching skills become less significant and mentality is crucial. Shearer on board will keep the fans in full voice, the stadium full and the team focused. I think appointing him at any other point in the season would have been madness, but bringing him in with 8 games lefts to try and ride the wave of honeymoon excitement could be the right decision. They've got a horrific run-in and without this kind of momentum they'd be capitulating against the likes of Liverpool, Chelsea and Villa.

I hope they get relegated and sell Gutierrez to us for £3-4m. That would be awesome. For the entire way the club has been run and behaved itself over the last few years I think Newcastle deserve to be relegated. The vast majority of the fans are totally deluded and the way they've treated Allardyce, Ashley and Wise is ludicrous. Yeah, Wise is a horrible little cunt, but he's not bad at his job. Too many Newcastle fans subscribe to the simple idea that every bad signing is his and every good signing is the handiwork of Kinnear/Keegan. They call for more investment and totally ignore the fact that he's working on the balance sheet, paying off debts and tidying up Shepherd's mess. Relegation is a horrible thing to happen to any club and they all have some honest fans, but I don't think Newcastle deserve to stay up over clubs like Pompey and Hull. Let them get relegated, spend a year or two in the Championship using their resources to sort the club out on and off the pitch and then come back as a proper, functioning club.

What do you mean? I'm pretty sure the original shot we saw of him poking his nose around a DHARMA station under construction was a glimpse of what he was going to be up to later in the show's timeline. I think we'll find out that either that happened shortly after last time we saw him and he's fucked off to some other period in time; or he'll come back during the time period we're watching at the moment and do it. There aren't two Faradays walking around in the 70s.

Not if the bomb goes off We've cracked it.

I guess that it'll go off in the distant past or future. I dunno, you can't have a massive bomb around and keep talking about defusing it without it blowing up at some point, can you? I honestly can't recall what the Faraday is doing at the moment. He was there for the moment with young Charlotte and then he just disappeared. Could he be with the Others? Off in the wider world somewhere? I dunno. It's the same with the assorted group of survivors that we're not supposed to care about, including Rose and Bernard as you say. IIRC we last saw them after the beach camp was attacked with flaming arrows and they were told to head to the caves ... or the creek. I can't remember.

It does seem like the purge might be the logical conclusion to this season just as getting off the island was the culmination of last season. It's definitely not as cast iron as that, but what else could we be heading towards? They've mentioned the hydrogen bomb a few times, I have a feeling that's going to explode at some point but there's no reason to guess when that'll be. What's Faraday up to again? I remember a scene when he was dressed in a DHARMA uniform and investigating the time shifting apparatus, could that be a pivotal moment?

It's almost definitely finished, I think. It's not because of how it ended though, it's because of how the creators have described it ('we told all the story we wanted to' etc.) I think the ratings were declining as well and they've moved on to Generation Kill. David Simon, the creator of The Wire, is supposed to be making a new show based on the rebuilding of New Orleans (or something similar) which sounds like it could be similar to this, though.

Holy shit, Thomas Hitzlsperger has possibly the most flawless accent of any foreigner I've ever heard! They're repeating a few clips of him at a press conference on SSN if anyone hears it.

That's actually one of the biggest reasons the show got terrible ratings in the US, apparently. The creator said something like 'when 60-70% of your cast is African-American a certain percentage of the audience just tunes out.' Turns out I love the blacks.

Does anyone else have an exact moment when they fell in love with the show (without spoilers)? I remember it clearly because it was such a surprise to me. I'm ridiculously cynical when it comes to TV and I was totally hooked by episode 6/7, the moment with Spoiler: Click here to viewBubbles at the AA meeting with Waylon. I'm not sentimental, dammit. I swear

If you look for illegal methods the files you get are absolutely amazing. I've since bought the DVDs and the torrent you get is pretty much exactly the same quality and the files are only something like 180MB for each 60+ minute episode, it's extraordinary.

I didn't even question the fact that she was a 14 year old boy until one of the other characters specifically said 'she' or something. She's also clearly the black Boomhauer.

I'm not sure who you mean. Was it one of the two cops who work with the female officer and miss the second gun? If so that's Herc. The fact that you managed to get more than 20 minutes into the show means you're probably going to like it. Nobody thinks it's the greatest thing ever after the first couple of episodes. EDIT: Yeah, I was pretty much the same though many of my friends (that I've cajoled into watching the programme) had trouble with it. The only character I had real trouble with was Snoop - looking back on it I think I missed about half of her dialogue but because it's The Wire it didn't really matter.

Suits and black people. And sometimes black people in suits EDIT: This is what I said on another site about the problem of not remembering who the fuck everyone is and not being able to understand a word some of them are saying:

Stringer Bell is the scariest motherfucker alive. It's weird, everyone looks young as you say but the image itself is really good. You can usually get a sense for when something's more than a couple of years old by the quality and I'd never guess this is 7/8 years old. EDIT: And just as bizarre seeing him ride around on a tiny scooter in Rock n Rolla or whatever that film was called. Hearing him speak in a Brixton accent just isn't right

I feel like this should really involve a team I support, but it's got to be the Liverpool/Milan Champions League Final in Istanbul. I was watching it with a casual Manchester United fan and despite the fact that neither of us supported Liverpool (and he should have been pretty cynical about them) we couldn't believe our eyes at the beginning of the second half. We literally leapt out of our seats when the third goal went in - definitely one of the most unbelievable sporting moments I can possibly envisage.

Yeah, that's basically what I think as well. The first couple of season were really good but I kind of lost interest during the third one. The supporting characters are what make the show and there are some phenomenal scenes. The scene with Doug and Dean in the toilet (no spoilers...) had me on the verge of crying with laughter.

Well, they've definitely been addressing it through his birth and talking about his parentage. It'll take some more timeshifting to get serious answers - though if the purge happens this season somehow I guess he'll be involved as a youngster.

Just topping this because it starts tonight. Episodes are on at 11:20 every day this week, so it's a Sky+ job if you've got that. I cannot praise this show enough, anyone in any doubt, please give it a chance.

I rewatched season 1 recently and remembered a couple of things to do with the island's resurrections. Firstly, Christian supposedly died by alcohol-induced heart attack. I remember thinking at the time that that was odd, but it kind of drifted away. Secondly, I'd totally forgotten about the time Ethan kidnapped Charlie and Claire and ended up hanging Charlie to the point where he was dead for several minutes before Jack resuscitated him. Not really sure whether that's a true example of the island bringing someone back, but it's at least another example of someone surviving death.

Also, one on gambling in Vegas which was pretty good but unremarkable. K - will definitely check that out. Found the whole group fascinating because they actually made attempts to justify what they were saying even if Fred Phelps himself is a complete moron.

Definitely have to echo the love for Louis Theroux. He's English but almost all of his documentaries are based in America and he usually investigates some really bizarre sub-culture. He's done swingers, alien investigators and even trained at the WCW Power Plant, meeting the likes of Roddy Piper and being forced to run 'til he puked so he didn't think wrestling was fake. I'd also highly recommend America's Most Hated Family, where he stays with the Westboro Baptist Church and travels around with them picketing the funerals of dead soldiers. If you're really after gangland stuff, he recently did a programme called Law and Disorder in Philadelphia where he travelled around with some cops and investigated the policing policies in general. I'd also really, really recommend his Weird Weekends show on black nationalism where he visited the whole spectrum of activists, from spending quite a lot of time with Al Sharpton through to some nutcases who thought Shakespeare was black.

30 second preview From the article beneath and the clip itself this looks like it could be appalling

The first one that jumped to mind was definitely System Shock 2 and I can think of exactly the scene Scott was describing. The walls ... Other than that, Doom 3 and Condemned 2 for sure. I couldn't make it far through Doom at all and I really wanted to. Didn't really find Fallout 3 that scary at all, but I wasn't really as immersed in that game as I should have been.

I honestly think there is something proofoundly wrong with Ljungberg health-wise. I can't remember specifically (did he have knee problems? I remember broken ribs) but he went from playing 25 games for West Ham in one season to getting paid £5m+ to get rid of him ASAP. Part of that was that he was horrendously overpaid, but I can't see why we'd have thrown away a lump sum on a player who was still only 30. General injury-proneness doesn't really cover it.