Stephen Jones - Best New Horror #26

Claire Randall played a married battlefield nurse in 1945 who was mysteriously transported back to 18th-century Scotland in Starz’s Outlander , based on the romance novels by Diana Gabaldon.

The two-hour finale of Season 3 of ABC’s increasingly convoluted Once Upon a Time saw Emma (Jennifer Morrison) and Hook (Colin O’Donoghue) transported into the past, while the evil Snow Queen (Elizabeth Mitchell) turned up in Storybrooke and cast the Spell of Shattered Sight over the fairy-tale inhabitants during the fourth season.

Nobody really needed yet another version of the story, let alone Peter Pan Live! , a musical adaptation on NBC in December starring Christopher Walken as Captain Hook and Allison Williams as the titular boy who never grew up.

When he wasn’t working on The Librarians , Noah Wyle was off starring in and co-producing (along with Steven Spielberg) TNT’s relentlessly grim Falling Skies , in which Tom Mason and his bickering companions escaped an alien prison-camp, but still had to contend with the hybrid Lexi’s growing powers as they planned to destroy an Espheni base on the Moon.

Also executive produced by the busy Mr Spielberg, Halle Berry’s astronaut returned to Earth after a thirteen-month solo space mission to discover tat she was pregnant in CBS-TV’s Extant , which also included sub-plots involving a creepy cyborg child and some kind of corporate conspiracy.

The second season of the same network’s Under the Dome , yet another Spielberg-produced series, kicked off with a game-changing episode scripted by executive producer Stephen King (who had a cameo) in which a major character was shockingly murdered. It then went downhill from there, as the endlessly bickering inhabitants of Chester’s Mill discovered a mysterious tunnel that led to the world outside the increasingly inhospitable dome.

In a near-future dystopian world facing extinction, 100 embryos were successfully fertilised and put up for surrogacy in Lifetime’s ten-part series The Lottery , supposedly inspired by Shirley Jackson’s superior short story.

Eric Dane commanded the crew of naval destroyer USS Nathan James in a world where a pandemic virus had destroyed most of the Earth’s population in TNT’s The Last Ship , while the J.J. Abrams-produced post-apocalyptic series Revolution dragged on for a second series on NBC, as the two factions of survivors continued to battle it out for supremacy in a world without electricity.

Troubled detective John Kennex (Karl Urban) and his android partner (Michael Ealy) ended their futuristic investigations after just thirteen episodes when the Fox Network cancelled Abrams’ other series, derivative Almost Human .

New York City was destroyed in the second season of Syfy’s post-apocalyptic Western-with-aliens Defiance , while the second season of Channel 4’s conspiracy thriller Utopia revealed where the humanity-sterilising virus “Janus” originated and how it came to turn up in the DNA of Jessica Hyde (Fiona O’Shaughnessy).

Norman Bates (Freddie Highmore) finally recalled killing his high school teacher, but his dysfunctional mother (Vera Farmiga) wouldn’t believe him in the soporific Season 2 of the A&E Network’s Bates Motel .

Troubled FBI agent Ryan Hardy (Kevin Bacon) discovered that Joe Carroll (James Purefoy) was still alive and controlling another cult of serial killers in the second season of Fox’s The Following , while pretty much everybody had finally worked out that Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) was not only a good chef but also a sophisticated serial killer by the end of Season 2 of NBC-TV’s elegant Hannibal .

Confusingly credited to “Michael Marshall Smith”, BBC America’s bleak eight-episode Intruders was actually based on a novel published under the genre author’s mainstream pen-name, “Michael Marshall”. A former LAPD cop (British actor John Simm, with an unconvincing and unnecessary American accent) discovered that his wife (Mira Sorvino) was actually part of a secret immortality cult. Child actress Millie Bobby Brown stood out in a cast that also included James Frain and Robert Forster as a pair of hit men.

Having had to consult with Moriarty (the wonderful Natalie Dormer), deal with the inflated ego of Gareth Lestrade (Sean Pertwee) and prove his brother Mycroft (Rhys Ifans) innocent of treason, the second season of CBS-TV’s entertaining Elementary ended with Johnny Lee Miller’s Holmes and Lucy Liu’s Watson going their separate ways. For Season 3, Holmes returned to New York City with a damaged new protégé (Ophelia Lovibond) and investigated a case where an A.I. computer was suspected of murdering its creator.

In yet another twist on the TV detective genre, charming Welsh actor Ioan Gruffud played immortal medical examiner Henry Morgan, who teamed up with glamorous NYPD Detective Jo Martinez (Alana De La Garza) to solve crimes with his Holmesian deductions in ABC’s cosy Forever . The supporting cast included veteran Judd Hirsch as Henry’s older-looking son.

A Texas death row escapee (Jake McLaughlin) found himself protecting a 10-year-old girl with paranormal powers (the oddly named Johnny Sequoyah) from Kyle MacLachlan’s sinister billionaire scientist in NBC-TV’s Believe , which lasted for just thirteen episodes despite counting co-creator Alfonso Cuarón (who also directed the pilot) and J.J. Abrams amongst its numerous producers.

Josh Holloway’s high-tec operative had a super-computer microchip imbedded in his brain in CBS-TV’s by-the-numbers spy drama, Intelligence .

Having started out on shaky ground, ABC’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. returned after the Christmas hiatus with more focussed plot-lines that firmly tied Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg) and his team into the Marvel’s Thor , Captain America and Guardians of the Galaxy movie franchises, as Nick Fury’s disappearance and HYDRA’s infiltration destroyed all trust in the organisation.

Unfortunately, Season 2 quickly lost its way again as the rogue agents investigated a subterranean alien city and uncovered the annoying Skye’s (Chloe Bennet) hidden past.

As female crime-fighter The Canary (Caity Lotz) was murdered by a mysterious assassin, The CW’s increasingly grim and flashback-laden Arrow introduced Brandon Routh’s future superhero The Atom. Meanwhile, crossover series The Flash featured another DC Comics superhero (played by the likeable Grant Gustin) trying to prove that his father (original 1990s TV Flash, John Wesley Shipp) was not responsible for the death of his mother.

Fox Network’s Gotham got off to a painfully slow start, despite being a prequel to the Batman story. It followed idealistic detective James Gordon (Ben McKenzie) and his more cynical partner Harvey Bullock (Donal Logue) as they attempted to clean up the corruption and crime in Gotham City. The only fun was in identifying such proto-villains as Cat Woman, The Penguin, The Riddler and Two-Face before they were infamous, while Sean Pertwee turned up as an unusually hardened Alfred Pennyworth, Bruce Wayne’s faithful butler.

Also based on a DC Comics character, Constantine starred miscast Welsh actor Matt Ryan as the eponymous down-at-heel psychic detective investigating ghosts and demons. NBC wisely cancelled the show after just thirteen episodes.

For the all-important young adult demographic, the networks continued to churn out insipid series based on well-established genre concepts: Stefan (Paul Wesley) and Elena (the usually glum Nina Dobrev) got to experience an inevitable It’s a Wonderful Life episode in Season 5 of The CW’s The Vampire Diaries , while the sixth season opened with Mystic Falls a supernatural-free zone and Damon (Ian Somerhalder) and Bonnie (Kat Graham) trapped on the Other Side.