One of our favorite escapes from overtly paranormal programming is the quirky romantic-comedy, murder mystery procedural, Castle. Among the pleasures of Castle — besides Nathan Fillion’s goofy charm and Stana Katic’s beauty, brains and balls — is that Castle flirts often with the spooky. Over its eight seasons, Castle has dealt with cases that seem to wander into the territory of ghosts, magic, zombies, genies, even Bigfoot. As this week’s episode, “Hell to Pay,” opens the killer in question appears to be demonic, perhaps even the Anti-Christ himself.

In a young year already slammed with musical deaths — David Bowie, Glenn Frey, Lemmy, Keith Emerson, George Martin, Merle Haggard, Maurice White, Paul Kantner — we now face the staggering blow that Prince, perhaps the greatest overall musician of his generation, is suddenly gone at the far too young age of 57.

Then it occurred to me that the real victim of this terror tactic is Schrödinger’s cat. The victim — whoever it is — is in a state of suspended animation, both alive and dead, for seven freaking months until Season 7 begins, just like in the famous thought experiment. To recap the experiment, loathed by cat lovers everywhere: we put a living cat into a steel chamber along with a vial of hydrocyanic acid. There is a tiny amount of hydrocyanic acid, a radioactive substance, in the chamber. If even a single atom of the substance decays during the test period, it will trip a hammer, which will break the vial and kill the cat.

An entire nation of The Walking Dead watchers is feeling very twitchy and jumpy right about now as the hours tick down to what is arguably the most anticipated episode ever of AMC’s unlikely smash hit. Why so edgy? Since it was announced last November that Jeffrey Dean Morgan would play Negan, the dreaded leader of the villainous Saviors, and make his appearance in the final episode of Season 6, there has been constant speculation as to the consequences of that freighted debut.

She wakes up injured but patched up and, alarmingly, chained to the wall in a serious underground bunker with ponderous, middle-aged Howard — a kind of anti-Santa Claus — and a young man named Emmett (John Gallagher Jr), who helped Howard build the bunker and was injured, he says, “fighting his way in.” Howard — a former Navy man and doomsday prepper — claims that there has been an apocalyptic attack, that the air outside is poisoned, that he has rescued rather than kidnapped Michelle, and that he would appreciate some appreciation.

It is ironic but somehow fitting that St. Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland, synonymous with all things Irish, when in fact he wasn’t even Irish. Patrick was born around A.D. 390 in Roman Britain to a wealthy family and led a life of casual privilege until he was kidnapped by raiders at the age of 16 and spirited away to Ireland, where he spent more than six windswept, chilly years as a slave tending sheep in the vicinity of Killala.

Is it sacrilegious to sympathize with the devil? Is it legitimate to humanize Lucifer under the pretense that he has “retired” from running hell and is now slumming with the humans as a nightclub owner in Los Angeles? Most transgressive of all, is it acceptable to present the scheming Fallen Angel as a seeker of justice and champion of personal responsibility? That’s exactly what Fox is doing with its new show Lucifer, Mondays at 9/8c.

Most importantly, THE X-FILES 2016 has seen the reestablishment of David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson’s Mulder and Scully as one of the most iconic pairs in TV history. Other than the rather joyless opening ep, which was perhaps inevitably heavy on exposition and table setting, this has been an immensely satisfying season with a wider emotional range than we have seen before from the stars and their characters. That emotional range has been built upon a potentially very sensitive matter: their respective mid-life crises.

The Bride of Frankenstein, as all classic horror and monster fans know, is the 1935 sequel to Frankenstein, directed by James Whale and starring an ethereal Elsa Lanchester in dual roles as the Bride and Mary Shelley, and Boris Karloff as the Monster. Why? Because the Monster demanded a mate!

The music and laconic persona of Glenn Frey is profoundly tangled with these memories in my mind. May he rest in easy peacefulness.