We all know ordering online can throw up booby traps. Who hasn’t been caught out by the occasional indiscreet delivery exposing their hitherto unsuspected “adventurous” side? It’s all very well returning to sender the items you’ve realised could bring lasting shame if discovered: DIY appendage extensions; signed photos of Manchester United footballers. But what if online purchases could fundamentally change the future – and not positively? That’s the unwritten guarantee that comes with the goods featured in Taiwanese thriller Futmalls.com (Netflix; series one now available), in which a largely untraceable, dark-web depository of the same name supplies items, some from decades into the future, that can warp the course of present-day events. Crime with sci-fi characteristics can be made to pay, but not as one might expect. Bestselling novelist Bai Yong-li (played by Allison Lin) discovers this to her horror in the opening, three-part mystery, in which she takes a short cut to affluence and adoration. Having stolen another writer’s prospects to glorify herself, she will, in morality-tale fashion, pay the price later, when an unexpected bill falls due. Inventively keeping the viewer off-balance as clues linking separate stories emerge, the series creeps into increasingly sinister territory. Dangers deepen, plots thicken and psychological terrors take hold when “internet influencers”, happy to plug unsafe products for cash while live streaming to the gullible, begin to disappear. Product placement, always insidious, should come with a health warning. Central to the recurring cast are Bryan Chang Shu-hao as detective Zhao Xu-zhen, Eugenie Liu as psychiatrist Yang Nian-jun and Ivy Shao as Bai Yong-xin, less cynical streamer than conscience of the internet. Generally on the side of the good guys, they tie the episodes together but aren’t immune themselves to the charms of the outlandish must-haves of the future. So: which goodies would take your fancy at Futmalls.com ? Be careful what you wish for. Allen v. Farrow Woody Allen could undoubtedly have come up with a better way of returning to the world’s screens than a documentary dissecting the scandal that has torpedoed his career and possibly his life. But when their film contracts have been cancelled, vilified beggars can hardly be genre choosers. Not that Allen appears in or cooperated with the makers of Allen v. Farrow , a four-part, years-in-the-production exposé featuring witnesses, lawyers, film critics and his former partner, Mia Farrow, plus her friends and family (continuing on HBO Go, Mondays at 10am; re-runs on HBO at 10pm). The accounts of Allen’s alleged actions are appalling, the details damning: the director, it is claimed, sexually abused Dylan, adopted daughter of Allen and Farrow, when she was seven. Dylan bravely reiterates the accusation (which Allen denies). But those accounts are also uneven, with Allen’s chief “contributions” being taped phone calls, press conference footage and self-narrated excerpts from his 2020 memoir, Apropos of Nothing . Interviews with Farrow and liberal use of her home movies suggest an idyll shattered by a paedophile – an image exploded by an account briefly cited here and written by son Moses Farrow (another documentary non-participant) in 2018, alleging that physical and mental cruelties were common in the Farrow household and emphasising his father’s innocence. He also asserts that Farrow, furious and vengeful having discovered Allen’s affair with Soon-Yi (Farrow’s adopted daughter, now Allen’s wife), coached Dylan in her revelations. None of which proves anything, no matter how sordid the affair, however many Hollywood names have denounced the bête noire of the day, or how vicious Allen’s condemnation by the social media court of public opinion. Perhaps the truth will out eventually, but it remains tantalisingly beyond the reach of this investigation.