After the winter finalé of Once Upon a Time, I am left with both hope and skepticism. While this latest episode managed to retain a sense of cohesion and resolved a few of the perplexing concepts of the plot, quite a few issues with this popular series still remain. Despite some mediocre acting, a scattered and sometimes illogical trajectory, an overwhelming abundance of characters and unclear character motivations, Once Upon a Time still keeps me coming back for more. But why? What is it about this world of fairy tale (and Disney, and Arthurian, and Gothic novel) characters that remains so compelling?

As the seventh season of Dexter unfolds on Showtime, with an eighth and final season scheduled for late 2013, it seems like as good a time as any to look back at each season of the series. Since this is the internet, and since rank-order is the best way I know to organize my opinions about most things, I present below my tour through Dexter’s first six seasons. Of course this is entirely my opinion, and I encourage vocal disagreement. It’s hard not to want to just start talking about the quality of season seven and where it might end up ranking in this list… but let’s try our best not to.

I am currently making an effort to watch Fringe, which is streaming on Amazon Prime (and probably Netflix). By currently, I mean at this moment—it’s on in the background as I write this.

I began my interaction with Fringe when it premiered five years ago; as a Lost fanatic, I was drawn to the JJ-Abram-ness of the enterprise. I dutifully watched through the middle of the first season, then just never came back.

As a viewer of serials, I find myself incredibly impatient with procedurals, and while even in those early episodes I could sense elements of The X-Files in Fringe’s blend of procedural and serial, it just didn’t take. There were just too many episodes that began with someone turning into a pile of slime.

The new season of The Walking Dead has, if possible, been overshadowed by its incredible surge in ratings. One reason for this trend is that the ratings truly are incredible. In terms of total viewers, the first two seasons were impressive for cable—averaging 5.24 and 6.90 million viewers, respectively. Despite off-screen production turmoil—news stories chronicled the battle for AMC’s funds among its various series, particularly with respect to the enormous cost of Mad Men in relation to its inferior ratings—ratings went up during and between seasons.

However, the beginning of the third season last month saw an incredible jump, with the premiere drawing 10.87 million viewers, including an unbelievable (it’s true, it’s on Wikipedia!) 5.4 million viewers in the coveted 18-49 demo, with the number growing even larger when factoring in re-airings, DVR viewership, etc. It’s amazing how impressive these numbers are, as these demo numbers (which it has basically maintained through the first half of the current half-season) are higher than any broadcast demo numbers, outside of football.

The Chile of Patricio Guzmán’s childhood is long gone, a collective history he’s explored in other films. But Nostalgia for the Light (Nostalgia de la luz), premiering on PBS on 25 October, looks at that history in brilliant new ways, articulating two searches for the past. One is a pursuit of scientific knowledge, the evidence to support theories of how life began and what might be coming for the planet earth; it’s conducted by astronomers via the world’s largest optical telescope (called the European Extremely Large Telescope, or E-ELT) located in Chile’s Atacama desert. The other, ongoing since 1990, is undertaken by the relatives of victims of August Pinochet’s dictatorship: they seek remains and stories, knowledge of how their loved ones died. Both searches, the film points out, involve bodies, material and celestial, and both are endless.