TV | The Doctor is dead. Long live the Doctor. You can hardly run 35 seasons of the same TV show without swapping lead actors every once in a while. And so DOCTOR WHO (BBC America, Saturdays, 8 pm) has killed off its zany, space-faring adventurer (at least) 11 times, and each time he's been regenerated with a new face. After several rounds casting baby-skinned dreamboats in the role, this season they've gone with wrinkly old Peter Capaldi, best known as foul-mouthed political operative Malcolm Tucker on The Thick of It. Expect fury and wrath across all of time and space.
GAME | Those guitar-playing animatronic creatures aren't so bad in the daytime. A little dorky, sure, but certainly not completely pants-wetting terrifying. By night, however, when you're completely alone? And they move? That's a different story. In FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY'S (Steam, Amazon) you're a night watchman pulling the graveyard shift at a Chuck E. Cheese's-type pizza emporium. The robotic creatures awake, creeping closer whenever you look away. All you can do from your little terminal to stop them is close doors, turn on lights, and watch from the cameras. Your power supply is dwindling. And the creatures keep coming...
BOOK | In THE MAGICIAN'S LAND, Time magazine writer Lev Grossman brings his widely praised Magicians series to a close. Both homage to and deconstruction of the Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter, Grossman populates its Hogwarts and Narnia equivalents with twenty-somethings just as selfish, self-absorbed, entitled and angsty as you and me. This has the side effect of making the reader occasionally hate the characters, but also offers a lot more insight into humanity than the typical magical romp. Grossman excels equally at world-building and character-building, understanding why wish fulfillment is so seductive and so dangerous.
