As a teaser for the X-Files revival, which premieres January 24, Fox has put a 21-minute featurette online called “Re-Opened” which gives a primer on the original series for new viewers and a tantalizing look at the six new episodes for the old fans.
Not everything is new. For example, we knew that the first and last episodes of the revival are mythology episodes and the middle four are standalone episodes. Although we now know that the reason both episode one and six are called “My Struggle” is because the first one is about Mulder’s struggle and the last about Scully’s. We also hear that they play with the original mythology for the show and will explain how the Cigarette Smoking Man could appear in the revival after what looked like his demise at the end of the original run.
There’s a ton of new footage in this. Four people on fire, Mulder flung down a hallway, a teary Scully promising to be by Mulder’s side, a description of a horned beast attack, a lizard creature running away from the FBI... there’s a lot here.
There’s a lot to like about MTV’s live-action adaptation of Terry Brooks’ Shannara book series . But it’s also very much an epic fantasy TV series made by MTV, which begs the question: Who is The Shannara Chronicles really for? Because the show may be too fantastic for normal MTV audiences, but also too MTV-ish for most fantasy fans.
Here’s our spoiler-free review.
Imagine if Peter Jackson had hired the cast of any of MTV’s current high school dramas to be in his Lord of the Rings movies—that’s The Shannara Chronicles. It’s almost exclusively a collection of extremely attractive young white people who, despite wearing elf ears and being forced to discuss magic stones and demon-imprisoning trees, give zero sense that they’re living in a post-apocalyptic world full of magic. They talk and act exactly as they would, if they were starring in a modern high-school drama. In addition, their outfits tend to be things that look very much like modern jeans, slacks and hoodies.
This is very weird—because otherwise the show has gone all out to bring the fantasy realm of Shannara to life. It’s filmed in New Zealand, giving the show the same otherworldly setting that Lord of the Rings had. The CG for the fantasy locations is top-notch, and all the sets are well-designed and well-utilized. The VFX for the magic and monsters also looks above and beyond what I would have expected for this type of basic cable series.
The crazy part? Somehow, this dichotomy actually works. My recollection of Terry Brooks’ Shannara series is mainly that 1) it was an extremely generic carbon-copy of the Lord of the Rings, and 2) the characters were flat. But there’s something weirdly compelling about seeing what seem to be utterly normal teens arguing about whether the sacred Ellcrys tree is actually preventing the evil Darda Mor from unleashing his hellish demon army. It even makes sense, in a way, since Shannara is set in the future of Earth; if there was ever a fantasy series where the heroes could act totally mundane and wear hoodies, Shannara is it. If nothing else, this strange combination makes the TV adaptation unique—certainly more so than its source material.
And honestly, The Shannara Chronicles’ biggest problem is its source material, because the story is about as standard as fantasy series come. A seemingly normal farm boy with a secret heritage? Check. Strong-willed princess? Check. Older mentor who represents the last of a heroic order? Check. A monstrous bad guy set on destroying the world? Check. A magic item that can stop the bad guy, that only the farm boy can use? Big check.
But just because you know the story doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy The Shannara Chronicles for what it is: a pleasant adventure series, with a strange sort of charm to it. It may not be the teenage Game of Thrones that MTV was possibly hoping for. But if you’re looking for more elves and magic and demons on TV, you should definitely give Shannara a try.
Just keep in mind the elves will probably be wearing hoodies.
Peggy and Jarvis may be in a brand new city, but the action seems to have traveled with them. If there is one thing Peggy Carter does everywhere she goes, it’s kick ass.
Despite all of the fighting, the most striking mystery is this glowing man:
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In case you forgot that this wasn’t just a Cold War spy show, this is a reminder that there’s comic book science at work in Agent Carter.
Every year the Syfy channel plays a Twilight Zone marathon over New Year’s. But this year they’re starting the festivities early. The first episode airs at 7pm this Wednesday, December 30th. We’ve compiled a schedule so you can catch your favorites, along with links to Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon for all you cordcutters.
The good news? This year Syfy is airing every single episode—all 156 of them, in order. The bad news? There’s a little interruption to the marathon when they air two hours of WWE Smackdown on New Year’s Eve.
But if you’re desperately looking for a way to spend those Amazon Bux™ that your robotic grandmother got you for Christmas, you can pick up the complete set of the Twilight Zone on DVD and Blu-ray.
All times are Eastern/Pacific, and some of the descriptions are spoilery (not to mention ridiculous). But if you’re going to complain about spoilers for a 50-year old TV show, you can go twilight yerself.
Happy New Year, fellow Twilight Zone fans!
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Dec 30th, 7:00 PM: Where is Everybody?
The one where a test pilot doesn’t remember where he is and has no idea why the town he’s wandering is vacant.
The one where a man can’t go to sleep for fear of dying which would be pretty awful because you can die from not sleeping so he doesn’t really have many options.
The one where a guy just living his life doesn’t realize that he’s an actor doing everything for the camera but it’s not an exact Truman Show kind of thing.
The one where a big city business man falls asleep during his commute and dreams of a small town community of the past, then gets a chance to go there if he wants.
The one where a man buys a love potion to make a woman fall in love with him and there are no unintended consequences at all and everything goes just fine.
The one where a suicidal trumpet player has no qualms with playing his loud instrument outside in a big city and strangely doesn’t get shot by people annoyed with him.
The one where a woman is horrified by her father’s humanoid robot servants, but it’s all cool because you get to hear Rod Serling pronounce “robot” all funny like they did in the 1960s.
The one where a used car salesman loses his ability to lie, which sounds amazingly similar to a Jim Carrey movie that would be released like three decades later.
The one where an old man has a radio that plays programs from long ago, which was novel before the internet allowed you to listen to everything human beings have ever recorded.
The one where a man from olden times leaves his wagon train to go find help for his son but he slips into the future and what he finds is that future people aren’t so bad after all.
The one where criminals steal a bunch of gold and then put themselves in suspended animation so that they can spend their gold in the future and give it to Ron Paul 2012.
The one where a dude builds a nuclear fallout shelter and his neighbors make fun of him but then of course they all want to use it because shit’s about to go down.
The one where a guy plays pool against a ghost to prove that he really is the best of all time but even if he wins he’ll have to say that he beat a ghost which is a hard thing to prove when you think about it.
The one where a guy who looks an awful lot like Fidel Castro discovers that a magic mirror can tell him where his next assassination attempt might be coming from.
The one where a hunter comes back from a hunt and nobody can see or hear him because he’s probably dead, which is unfortunate because he’d really prefer to be alive.
The one where a reporter stumbles upon a small town where everybody is acting weird and they’ve all got magic healing and duplicating technology that they won’t share with the outside world.
The one where Dennis Hopper is a neo-Nazi whose only real friend is Jewish and survived the Holocaust, but Hopper’s hate is driven by an overwhelming fear and a shadowy figure that looks an awful lot like Hitler.
The one where a young girl loses her parents in a fire but she was raised to communicate only telepathically so you can see how her adjustment to living in the outside world might be a bit difficult.
The one where a newspaper editor sells his soul to Satan, who’s actually pretty pushy about the whole thing and keeps lighting his cigars with his finger.
The one where a physicist builds a time machine and tries to kill Hitler and stuff but fails and is so fed up with the 20th century that he goes back in time to 1881 to live what he assumes will be a better life.
Jan 2nd, 1:00 PM: Of Late I Think of Cliffordville
The one where an evil old business tycoon sells his soul to go back in time, return to his hometown, and build his empire all over again, but nothing works out quite the way he thought.
Jan 2nd, 2:00 PM: The Incredible World of Horace Ford
The one where a 38-year-old toy designer longs for the simplicity of his youth but discovers by way of time travel that romanticizing your childhood is pretty childish.
The one where a group of humans have been stranded on a distant planet for 30 years but when help finally arrives to bring everybody back to Earth the new settlement’s de facto leader can’t deal with giving up his authority.
The one where a couple book a cruise on an old ship to try and rekindle their marriage but just as they’re starting to have some fun they slowly discover that they’re not supposed to be on that ship.
The one where TV sponsors literally rewrite Shakespeare and Rod Serling takes some not so subtle jabs at both hack TV writers and the advertisers who want to dictate what he gets to put on the air.
The one where the future is filled with robot boxers but a faulty robot means that a human is going to have to fill in if our hero doesn’t want to lose a bunch of money.
The one where Captain Kirk starts seeing something on the wing of a plane that’s probably just a teddy bear that’s come to life oh god why is he shooting at it oh god why.
The one where a guy is about to go on a 20-year space mission in suspended animation but falls in love with a woman so he makes plans to make sure they’re the same age when he comes back.
Jan 3rd, 2:00 AM: Number Twelve Looks Just Like You
The one where “old” people take new bodies in a utopian future where nobody ever gets old which sounds awesome because in reality we’ll all be dead really soon.
The one where the boss fires everyone in favor of computers until there’s nobody left to make everything more efficient and the company lives happily ever after.
The wait has been agonizing. Time has moved as slowly as if we were trapped inside an overclocked computer simulation. But at last, the best science fiction show on broadcast TV in recent years will be complete on Netflix. A spokesperson confirms Person of Interest season four is available starting Dec. 30.
Fallout 4 expectsyou to commit murder. While you can occasionally avoid killing others, the wasteland is ruthless and demands violence. That’s how Bethesda intended the game to be played, anyway—but clever players are finding ways around it.
Back in July 2015, The Guardian interviewed Todd Howard, Fallout 4’s game director. Howard was asked about what playstyles the game would support—traditionally, Fallout games let players approach problems in a variety of ways, many of which do not require killing anyone. Fallout 4 is different.
“I can’t tell you that you can play the whole game without violence – that’s not necessarily a goal of ours,” Howard told The Guardian.
Sure enough, there are portions of Fallout 4 where the story railroads the player into killing certain key characters. You’d think, then, that it would be impossible to finish the game without having your kill counter show a few bodies here and there. But you’d be wrong.
Ever since the release of Fallout 4, dedicated players have been working tirelessly to find a way to beat the game with zero kills. One particular player, Kyle Hinckley, stands above the rest, though: not only has he completed Fallout 4 with zero kills, he managed to do so on Survival, the hardest mode available. And he documented the entire thing on video, to boot, so his zero kill claim is entirely verifiable. Via Hinckley’s “The Weirdist” channel, here’s the first episode of his no-kill run of Fallout 4.
“The thing about Todd Howard is, even he doesn’t know what his games are capable of,” Hinckley told me in an interview.
Getting to this point wasn’t easy. “My first attempt was dismal,” Hinckley admitted. “I got discouraged immediately on the first quest, which insists all the raiders in [one of the early missions] die.” Hinckley was stubborn, though, and he kept trying. He eventually found out that the raiders on that mission could actually be left alone, and this revelation allowed him to move forward. Unfortunately, on that particular run, he poured 75 hours into a playthrough only to find out that he backed the wrong faction. It was a mistake that cost him six lives, which is no good for a zero kill run.
So he started a new character. This one would be called Dizzy, and Hinckley was determined to make sure she was incapable of killing even lowly Radroaches.
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Dizzy is built for mind games. Think of her as the Kilgrave of the Commonwealth. With a high charisma stat, Dizzy can convince humans and Deathclaws alike to calm down. Better yet, Dizzy eventually gains the power to turn people against each other in a murderous rage, all without having to fire a single shot.
Oh, just because this is a no-kill run doesn’t necessarily mean no blood will be spilled. People do die in Hinckley’s playthrough of Fallout 4. He just finds ways to make the game blame other people, while retaining this gem:
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“It’s not about whether or not I’m against violence, because the game doesn’t give you like Fallout: New Vegas-esque abilities to avoid violence completely,” Hinckley said in a video. “All that matters to us is [that the game doesn’t count any kills.]...Robots, turrets, legendary enemies, synths, all this shit. Zeroes. All the way down the line.
“That’s what we want. That’s all we want. If we can do that, that’s a pretty crazy achievement. That’s something that most people have already dismissed as being impossible.”
While this may seem like cheating—it’s not technically a pacifist run, given how many bodies pile up by the time the credits roll—Kyle Hinckley’s playthrough of Fallout 4 is still a fascinating look at the ways players bend and break games to do their bidding.
At first, the strategies for pacifism are simple enough. He exits the vault without killing anything just by trapping Radroaches in certain areas of the map, where they can no longer follow him. Later, he kites enemies straight into other NPCs, so they start fights with each other.
The start is easy. Everything that comes afterward, though, is a trip. Most of the XP granted in Fallout 4 comes from combat. That’s not an option for Hinckley, though, so he starts the game out by focusing on settlements. He builds the same structure over and over again, dozens of times, to grind out enough experience to get to level ten—which is high enough to have some of the basic, necessary perks required for a no-kill run. This is as excruciating as it sounds, especially when you consider what little XP building stuff grants you in the first place.
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The entire thing is a test of patience. The run makes ample use of save scumming, that is, the practice of saving before taking an important action and then reloading if it fails. Fallout 4 has a perk called “Wasteland Whisperer” which lets the player pacify enemies—instead of attacking the player, the enemy will simply put their hands up. However, having the perk doesn’t guarantee it’ll work. It just gives you a chance of calming down your enemies, and Hinckley can’t rely on a dice roll to complete the game with zero kills. So he reloads and tries, tries again, until it actually goes through.
It’s a brute-force method, yes. Like I said earlier, Fallout 4really doesn’t want you to play the game this way, and all of its mechanics ensure that, at some point during a normal playthrough, you’ll have to lodge bullets into someone’s noggin. Even if you take the so-called peaceful perks.
So Hinckley gets creative. At one point during his playthrough, you can watch him repeatedly pickpocket a NPC—but he’s not trying to steal from that character. Rather, he’s trying to give that character better gear, so that they might have a chance of killing a particularly troubling enemy. Except Hinckley is repeatedly caught attempting this trick, and it’s hilarious to watch an otherwise friendly NPC turn on a character that’s only trying to help.
Sometimes, though, forcing a no-kill playthrough makes Fallout 4 lose its shit. There’s a quest in Fallout 4 where the player must save a companion, Nick Valentine, from a vault. Nick Valentine goes into the vault searching for a missing dame, only to find out she had actually run off with a mobster type, Skinny Malone. At the end of this level, the player has a confrontation with both Malone and the dame. You have a few options. You can attack everyone. You can convince the damsel to turn on her lover. Or, you can convince the damsel to leave without having to hurt anybody.
In a no-kill playthrough, the last option seems like the most one to pick, right? As Hinckley progresses through his playthrough, though, it becomes obvious that the game literally doesn’t know how to deal with a player who pacifies everyone into submission. So, he starts experiencing weird audio problems related to that peaceful mechanic. More notably, though, when he convinces the dame to leave, the game bizarrely spawns an enemy where it shouldn’t, and this forces the peaceful encounter to become violent once more. Normally, this wrinkle can be dealt with fine—Hinckley can simply pacify the characters again. The problem is, after calming everyone down, the game borks itself. Characters won’t continue their dialogue like they’re supposed to at that point. Nick Valentine refuses to actually leave the vault, even if there’s nothing stopping him from doing so. Hinckley becomes so desperate after this happens, he tries to physically push Nick out of the vault by force. It doesn’t work.
In this case, one of Fallout 4’s rare “talking your way out of it” options broke down because the player tried going through the entire game in a peaceful manner. The only way Hinckley could actually complete the quest was by picking the violent option, thereby starting a firefight that he couldn’t actually participate in. Worse, he had to stop his own companion from taking shots at anyone, because companion kills are logged as player kills. It took a ton of tries, but eventually the AI found a way to kill itself without any intervention. It’s amazing.
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The biggest hurdle of all, however, has to be the part of Fallout 4 where the player has to kill a character known as Kellogg, the player’s arch-nemesis. Hinckley has to come up with a way to finish the game without personally killing the game’s main villain, absurdly enough.
Hinckley, miraculously, still works through it. He does so by luring Kellogg into a series of mines—not to kill Kellogg, but rather, to get his health down enough. Once past a certain threshold, however, Kellogg will start trying to heal himself (the bastard!). To stop that, Hinckley pops a cryo mine, a weapon that freezes enemies in place. This, in turn, gives the other enemies in the room, which Hinckley has brainwashed to fight for him, a chance to kill Kellogg where he stands. What you have to understand here is, the chances of pulling his off without a hitch—getting all the characters in the right place, having the pacify/incite mechanics pop without fail, and then having the AI successfully kill someone despite their terrible pathing and bad aim—is extremely difficult. The fight took five hours. Five entire hours.
“THANK FUCK,” Hinckley exclaims at the end of the ordeal. “What a shit show,” he proclaims.
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“I’d love to ask [Todd Howard why pacifism is so difficult in this Fallout,” Hinckley told me in an interview.
“I’m a little disappointed in the lack of diplomatic solutions in this game, it’s a lonely departure from the rest of the Fallout series,” Hinckley said. “My version of pacifism isn’t really diplomatic, it’s more exploitative of the game mechanics to achieve a zero-kill record. In other [Fallout] games, you had a lot of alternatives for bypassing the combat, whether it was with sneaking, speech checks, or a back door opened with lockpicking and hacking. In fact, in previous games (at least 3 and NV), your companion kills didn’t count towards your record either.”
Hinckley says that he felt sad when he found out how much Fallout 4 focused on combat—it made him feel like the developers forgot about about players like him, who have stuck with the series for a long time. In a way, Hinckley saw his no-kill playthrough as a way of showing the world that he refuses to be forgotten.
Hinckley’s run isn’t perfect. Already, other players are theorycrafting better, less painful methods of dealing with certain portions of the game. But this is it for Hinckley. While his time could be improved, he can’t actually do better than the zero kills he already achieved.
“I wish I could’ve brought myself to use a mod to simply bypass the reload-reload-reload quality of much of the videos,” Hinckley remarked. “But, that would have been seen as cheating, and I would rather torture than cheat.”
“It was a little aggravating to reload as many as twenty or thirty times on a quest completion, but the fun came from putting problems behind me, rather than solving them outright,” Hinckley said. “However, the sense of relief that I got from the synth killing Kellogg will never be matched by another struggle with this game. Knowing how to beat a game without doing personal damage goes a long, long way toward understanding what lies under the veneer of combat that Fallout 4 is associated with.”
You can watch the finale of Hinckley’s no-kill Fallout 4 run here:
By the hoary hosts of hoggoth, it’s the Sorcerer Supreme! We’ve had set pictures, and teasing glimpses through concept art, but this is it: our first official look at how Benedict Cumberbatch will appear as the master of all things mystical in the Marvel universe. That beard. That cloak. That magic! Oh my.
Entertainment Weekly has put our first look at Strange in action on the front of its January cover, promising a full set report on the film when it hits stands on January 8th. Check it out below:
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Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising at this point, but I am genuinely shocked at how close this adheres to Strange’s classic costume from the comics—it’s all there, the color scheme, the cloak, the eye of Agamotto dangling from his neck, It’s all there—right down to Strange’s greying hair. It really has leapt off the page of a Doctor Strange comic into real life, and it looks great.
And the magic! In a brief quote from the report, Cumberbatch discusses doing all the wild gesticulations that defines Strange’s spell-slinging in the comics, so even that’s sounding faithful too:
I’m still in the infancy of learning all that. It was like, okay, I’ve got to keep throwing these poses, these spells, these rune-casting things, everything he does physically. I’m thinking, there’s going to be a huge amount of speculation and intrigue over the positioning of that finger as opposed to it being there, or there. And I’m still working on that. We haven’t played any of those scenes yet. I felt really self-conscious. But, then, by the end, it was great. It’s like anything, you just have to experiment.
The sorcerer supreme sounds like he’s in very good hands.
Updated: Entertainment Weekly has also confirmed that Mads Mikkelsen (Hannibal) will be playing the main villain of the movie. Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige says that he’ll be a “sorcerer who breaks off into his own sect” who “believes that the Ancient One is just protecting her own power base and that the world may be better off if we were to allow some of these other things through.” The name of the character is still under wraps, with executive producer Stephen Broussard saying that no one has quite guessed his character yet.
There are also new photos to add to the cover shot of Cumberbatch. You can see the rest on Entertainment Weekly, but there is a shot of the Chamber of Relics:
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And what looks like concept art of Dr. Strange after the accident that ends his surgery career:
Ash vs Evil Dead ends its glorious first season on Saturday night. Prep yourself for maximum season-finale enjoyment with Starz’ mini-marathon, which will air three episodes a night tonight, tomorrow, and Wednesday leading up to the big finish (preview below)—which looks blood-soaked and absolutely bonkers.
Here’s the complete schedule:
MARATHON TUNE-IN INFORMATION:
Monday, December 28th at 9:00 PM PT/ ET - “ASH vs EVIL DEAD” episodes 101-103
Tuesday, December 29th at 9:00 PM PT/ET - “ASH vs EVIL DEAD” episodes 104-106
Wednesday, December 30th at 9:00 PM PT / ET - “ASH vs EVIL DEAD” episodes 107-109
Saturday, January 2nd at 9:00 PM PT /ET - “ASH vs EVIL DEAD” episode 110 – Season Finale
Beijing and Delhi are both planning major initiatives to kick cars off their streets, at least part of the time. Now even cities that aren’t famous for their pollution are taking drastic measures to clean up their air. Today, Milan’s streets are filled with bikes and pedestrians as part of three-day car ban.
Milan is blanketed in a thick smog that’s created unhealthy air quality conditions for the past 31 days. This is due to excessively warm, dry weather that’s persisted for several weeks—parts of Italy have not seen rain for almost two months. Many cities in China and India have been experimenting with limiting cars in their downtowns to curb dangerous levels of particulate matter in the atmosphere.
Smog in Milan has been so bad that residents are posting photos with captions like “This is not Beijing” and rejoicing in the car-free streets today
The Italian city’s “no-car” days are rather conservative, ordering only private vehicles off the streets for six hours a day. The 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. window doesn’t interfere with major commute times and will only last three days, Monday through Wednesday, of this week. In addition, the city is offering a discount on public transit to encourage more people to ride the trains and buses instead of drive.
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Surprisingly, a six-hour daily ban on vehicles is enough to make a difference. Studies by UCLA that tested pollution levels during CicLAvia, Los Angeles’s regularly scheduled car-free festival days, showed dramatic drops in particulate matter. In fact, in the immediate neighborhoods where cars were banned, drops of the most dangerous particular matter, the kind measuring 2.5 micrometers or smaller, declined by a whopping 49 percent. But as soon as the cars come back, so does the pollution.
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Europe has been dealing with some pretty nasty smog throughout 2015, with Paris experimenting with limiting cars during the week as well as adding some “fun” car-free days as well. Down south, Rome is restricting cars in its downtown to alternate day access using odd and even plate numbers until weather patterns change. Florence has limited cars in its city center through New Year’s Eve. And in a move that may be more detrimental to the Italian way of life, Naples has banned wood-fired pizza ovens in the short term.
Anyone else feel like The Librarians could have focused on standalone episodes this season and been better off? “And the Final Curtain” did nothing to justify Prospero’s existence as a villain and was really an excuse to travel through time and meet Shakespeare.
Spoilers...
If nothing else, season two of The Librarians proved that you don’t always need a Big Bad to make a show work. If all of Prospero’s parts of this season were excised from the show, what would we have lost? Not much, since pretty much every plot on this show can be justified with “magic.” They even have the characters say that.
The plot of “And the Final Curtain” is that Baird and Flynn go back in time to stop Prospero from taking over the world. Only they find out that Shakespeare’s not writing The Tempest, he’s writing The Triumph of Prospero, which will bring the character to life and give him unchecked power. In the present, Jenkins, Cassandra, Jake, and Ezekiel find clues that Baird and Flynn left them from the past. This allows them to defeat Prospero but also strands Baird and Flynn in the past.
Also, Moriarty dies. Which I would have cared about more if the character had been developed at all, rather than just flirting with Eve all season. And not being particularly cunning or smart like Moriarty should be.
I also did not care that much if Baird and Flynn stayed stranded in the past. They have always been the weakest characters in this team. The development of Stone’s art and history credibility, Cassandra’s “mathemagics,” and Ezekiel’s tiny conscience and far more compelling than Baird and Flynn’s relationship. I groaned when they showed up in the frozen kiss statue at the end. Leave them in the past. I would have rather seen the team struggle forward without them. That would have been an interesting development for season three.
As always, The Librarians has more than enough to engage the audience. Eve’s reaction to the smell of the past—which is definitely the first thing a modern person would notice—is great. “Like if bad ham drank burnt coffee and then jogged five miles in old underwear it never took off ever,” is very evocative of a stench. So was her running gag about hating all the paradoxes of time travel.
As usual, Jenkins stole the show by reminiscing about what it might be like to see his old friend King Arthur again. John Larroquette was so good in this scene, I wish the prophecy had meant Arthur. (It was Flynn who would wield Excalibur again. Of course. Much less interesting.)
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We already know we’ve got another season coming, and I’m hoping they ditch the idea of having a single villain for it. The Librarians is a fun show. At its heart, it’s one where character arcs are more important than single plot arcs. So let’s focus on that next season.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens is absolutely bursting with cool set pieces. But you didn’t see half the insane stuff the movie’s production team came up with. Early versions of the story were full of Darth Vader’s ghost, an underwater Death Star, and more. Here are 13 things they left out of Episode VII.
Warning: There are a few minor spoilers for The Force Awakens below, in the context of discussing what isn’t in the movie.
There are also tons of insights into the creative process of putting this film together, and the incredible amounts of brainstorming and imagining that the artists were doing. While Michael Arndt, and later Lawrence Kasdan and J.J. Abrams, were creating the script, some of the best concept artists on the planet were coming up with some fascinating visions for what a new Star Wars could look like. Every page of this book contains not just beautiful art, but also some really cool details about how the team thought of this far-away galaxy, decades after Return of the Jedi.
So here are the storylines that they seriously considered having in The Force Awakens, but ended up leaving out. (Alas, we can’t actually reproduce all the art we’re describing here, but you can always buy the book and see it for yourself!)
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1) The main villain was called the Jedi Killer.
Early artwork of him shows a tall character with red skin and a monocle over one eye. Then the artists were asked to “Boba up” the Jedi Killer, and he started to look a bit more like Kylo Ren. Also, the “Jedi Killer” was supposed to gain power from eating sun energy. There’s art showing him going into his meditation chamber, which is exposed to a star that is very nearby, and the Jedi Killer absorbs the star’s energy.
There’s also one tantalizing piece of concept art of Darth Talon, the villain from the Star Wars: Legacy comics. So maybe they were considering bringing her into the “main” continuity for a moment.
Plus, early designs for Kylo Ren saw him as a literal Darth Vader impersonator—J.J. Abrams liked the idea that someone was impersonating Darth Vader in order to mess with Luke Skywalker’s head.
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2) We could have gone to an ice world, with an active volcano.
One early piece of concept art shows a new version of AT-ATs, walking in a snowy landscape with red-hot lava pouring out of an active volcano right behind them. Early on, Michael Arndt was really interested in the motif of “fire and ice,” and wanted to have one character wield a double lightsaber, where one side was red and the other side was blue.
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3) Luke Skywalker got up to some crazy shit.
Kathleen Kennedy had this idea for a sequence where Luke is being swallowed by sand—the sand is pouring on top of him, burying him, and he just lays there, not reacting. Until he suddenly opens his eyes, and it’s spooky as hell. There’s a pretty haunting illustration of this. Also, there are pictures of Luke looking more like a ghost.
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4) We could have finally visited Darth Vader’s castle
There were plans, in the Original Trilogy, to visit the castle where Darth Vader lives when he’s not force-choking Imperial officers. We never made it there back then—but we could have gone to Vader’s castle in The Force Awakens. There’s some pretty sweet concept art of Vader’s crash pad.
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5) The second Death Star ends up underwater
Originally, the idea of a planet full of space debris included a lot more stuff from the Original Trilogy. And instead of the desert world of Jakku, it was a swampy place, with an ocean. Part of the second Death Star, from Return of the Jedi, ends up at the bottom of the ocean, including the Emperor’s Tower. Rey (who was called Kira at this point) has to dive into that ocean and swim inside the Emperor’s Tower and find the map that shows where the Jedi are, and where Luke is hiding. There’s also beautiful concept art of the Emperor’s sunken chamber, with bodies floating around.
And the Millennium Falcon was going to dive under the water, to find the Death Star wreckage, and possibly also rescue Kira.
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6) Space pirates!
At one point, there were apparently space pirates. They capture the Millennium Falcon. They attack our heroes. They even force Rey (who was known as Kira back then) to walk the plank off their spaceship, over a large body of water.
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7) Anakin Skywalker’s ghost could have come back
There’s concept art of Hayden Christensen as a Force ghost talking to Luke Skywalker. Artist Ian McCaig says that he was inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s famous quote that to light a candle is also to cast a shadow. So Luke returning could have brought Anakin back, as well. And there’s concept art of Anakin’s Force ghost phasing back and forth between Anakin and Darth Vader, as he flows between the two different versions of the character. This symbolizes the fact that Luke Skywalker is the first person ever to acknowledge his own dark side, rather than rejecting it, which has turned Luke into a “whole new entity.”
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8) Poe Dameron could have been a Jedi. Or bounty hunter.
He was originally called “John Doe,” which would have been an unusually non-descript name for a Star Wars character. And at first, he was possibly a Jedi. Then he became a bounty hunter—so they toyed with giving him a Wookiee sidekick.
9) The opening sequence could have spoofed the start of A New Hope
J.J. Abrams was keen on the idea that the opening of Episode VII should be familiar, but with a twist. So they storyboarded an opening sequence where a star destroyer soars over a planet, and it looks just like the opening to A New Hope... until you see that the star destroyer has a huge hole in its underbelly. And scavengers are pulling stuff out of it into a small spaceship, until they have an accident and crash on the planet.
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10) The “Planet Killer” could have been based on Dantooine
Instead of just a random snow planet, we could have gone to the planet where the Rebels were based back in Episode IV. The Imperials have taken over and rebuilt the facility into their own base. And that volcano we mentioned earlier? The planet-killer would have fired out of it. Also, the planet-killer was called the “Doom Star” at one point.
There’s also a killer new design for an AT-AT with a head more like a hammerhead shark.
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11) Finn would have defected after seeing some Rebels flushed out the airlock
Instead of the massacre we witness at the beginning of the film, Finn (who was called “Sam”), would have defected after seeing some captured Rebels executed. There’s concept art of the Rebels being lined up by a firing squad... and then their bodies floating in space, as Sam watches in horror.
Also, after “Sam” and “John Doe” crash their TIE fighter on the planet, John Doe chooses to leave Sam behind. And then instead of what happens next in the actual film, Sam gets rescued by members of an “indigenous alien tribe” who take him back to their village and “perform a healing ritual,” so that “Sam is reborn a hero.” (Sam is also white in all of this concept art, and John Doe is black.)
There’s one piece of concept art that shows Sam’s Stormtrooper helmet, still stained with the bloody handprint of his friend, but it’s being worn by the alien that’s just rescued him—and it freaks Sam out.
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12) The Resistance has a weapon called the Warhammer
And it’s a ginormous ship that has a massively armored front, that can penetrate a planet’s shields and then deploy smaller ships through the hole it’s made. There’s lots of concept art of the Warhammer coming down and busting a planet’s defenses open.
13) Supreme Leader Snoke was almost female
They were toying with ways to make the main villain less like the Emperor, and J.J. Abrams didn’t want Snoke to be old and decrepit like Palpatine. And at one point, they almost made Snoke female. They also toyed with the idea that Snoke is incredibly beautiful to look at, like a marble statue, but then you realize the Dark Side has consumed him and turned him into something ghoulish.
One of the big cinematic losses of 2015 was Christopher Lee, whose decades-long career was filled with iconic performances. But the role that Lee played so memorably in Lord of the Rings wasn’t his first choice.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly that’s filled with fond memories of Lee, Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson admits he wanted Lee to play Saruman the White from the start, despite hearing that the actor wasn’t interested in any more villain roles.
A very awkward 30 minutes followed, with Fran and I trying our best to explain to a rather peeved Christopher Lee that we were already talking to Ian McKellen about Gandalf — but what an incredible Saruman he would be!
Chris wasn’t hearing a bar of it, and eventually commanded us to turn on the video camera so he could audition for Gandalf ... Eventually we confirmed Ian for Gandalf and officially offered Chris the Saruman role. We started shooting, and whenever we discussed Saruman’s scenes with Chris, he would always feel the need to say, “You must understand, Peter — he’s really not an evil man.’ He was carrying some heavy scars of Dracula of his own, and I felt it quite strongly.
Chris also let Ian McKellen know that he had really been hoping to play Gandalf. At one point during the shoot, Chris said, ‘I’m perfectly happy to be in an ‘Ian McKellen film.” Ian immediately turned to Chris, and with great affection he replied, ‘But not as thrilled as I am — to be in a ‘Christopher Lee movie’!’
That was the bittersweet reality with Chris — while he regarded his cinematic history with a certain amount of disdain, everyone around him had the opposite opinion.
Read the entire interview here—it’s well worth it; Jackson waxes rather charmingly about his long-standing admiration of Lee and love of Hammer horror movies, and shares several anecdotes about his relationship with the star.
Last Friday’s Doctor Who Christmas special was a fascinating look at the contradictions of River Song. But it also gave her some much-needed closure, and her pairing with Peter Capaldi finally made the Doctor’s relationship with River feel like it had some weight.
Over in Vanity Fair, Joanna Robinson talks to actor Alex Kingston and writer Steven Moffat. And Kingston seems particularly glad that River Song finally got a better swansong than her previous appearance, in the Matt Smith episode “The Name of the Doctor.”
Kingston sort of hints that she thought her chemistry was better with Capaldi than with Smith, saying: “I described working with Matt, Karen [Gillan], and Arthur [Darvill] as spending a day with a basket of puppies. But with Peter its very different because he’s much more focused.”
She also says that “The Name of the Doctor” was a bit frustrating for her, because it wasn’t even clear what she was doing there. “I didn’t really know my role in it. For me, it was sort of a strange episode. It ended in a way that I felt I was somewhat left hanging with no idea or confirmation or anything that my character would be back.”
Robinson (who also did a great piece about Rey in Star Wars) also puts her finger on why River Song’s arc during Matt Smith’s era bothered me so much. The relationship “sometimes felt one-sided and rarely felt particularly loving,” as Robinson points out. I had sort of repressed the fact that just before the Doctor marries River Song, he berates her: “It’s stupid. You embarrass me. Why do you have to be this?” And it’s really true, as Robinson writes, that “Matt Smith’s treatment of her was often combative or exasperated.”
But it’s also true that seeing Capaldi’s Doctor with River Song, and seeing his acknowledgement of his feelings for her, goes a long, long way towards making that relationship more like what it always should have been.
Robinson’s article also includes an interesting confession from Moffat, who says he thought “The Husbands of River Song” might be his last time writing for Doctor Who, and he just wanted to write River Song one last time. And there’s tons more in there. The whole thing is very much worth reading. [Vanity Fair]
Sherlock returns for one night only! Galavant is back for season two! And all Hell is finally unleashed in the season finale of Ash vs Evil Dead! There’s also a ton of New Year’s marathons. And just what the heck is Yokai Watch, anyway? All this, and more, on This Week’s TV!
Tonight
Yo-Kai Watch (5PM, DISNEY XD)
Catch the series that’s outselling Star Wars in Japan! It’s about a boy with a “ghost watch” that alerts him to the presence of Yokai: ghosts responsible for life’s little setbacks and your own inexplicable behaviors (mood swings, cancelling plans, buying things you don’t need, etc.).
Today’s episode is all about the anxiety of ordering food at a restaurant! It introduces the yokai Chatalie: a ghost whose presence will turn you into one of those “all talk, no action” people. Recommended for fans of Digimon and 70’s-era Woody Allen movies.
Little Darlings (11:45PM, TCM)
A rare screening of this film’s theatrical cut! Though not explicitly science fiction, Little Darlings is a cute, ultimately sex positive coming of age film where the young girls are our horny leads. There’s never been anything like it!
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Tuesday
Ray Harryhausen Movie Marathon (6:30AM, TCM)
Kicking off with It Came from Beneath the Sea, witness twelve full hours of stop-motion monster mastery! Includes 20 Million Miles to Earth, The Valley of Gwangi, One Million Years BC, Mysterious Island, 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts!
Yo-Kai Watch (5PM, DISNEY XD)
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Today’s episode introduces Dazzabel, the Yokai who loves gaudy clothing. If she inspirits you, you’ll start dressing like an asshole, too!
The Expanse (10PM, SYFY)
“Holden and crew are caught in the middle of a desperate battle as mysterious war ships attack and board the Donnager. As Miller continues to investigate Julie Mao, his partner Havelock continues to go missing.”
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Wednesday
Yo-Kai Watch, (5PM, DISNEY XD)
Introduces Babblong. He’ll make you tell boring stories about your uncle, or that time you went towel shopping.
Twilight Zone Marathon (7PM, SYFY)
SYFY’s annual New Year’s marathon of classic Twilight Zone episodes! However, they’ll be facing some competition this year...scroll down to “Thursday” to see what I mean.
Team Ninja Warrior (11PM, ESQUIRE)
A special presentation of the new US Ninja Warrior series, airing on the venerable Esquire Network— the chimera risen from the ashes of G4 and Style (Do not expect reruns of Thunderbirds or Ab Fab, I take it.)
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Thursday
Yo-Kai Watch (5PM, DISNEY XD)
Dueling Yokai work their magic at a beach party.
The New Twilight Zone Marathon (6AM, El REY)
Not to be outdone, El Rey is airing a marathon of the 80’s, 90’s and 00’s incarnations of The Twilight Zone! Don’t underestimate these followup series, whose writers included George R.R. Martin: excellent episodes are all over The New Twilight Zone, and I suggest you keep your eyes peeled for Something in the Walls.
Thin Man Marathon (8PM, TCM)
The entire saga of Nick and Nora Charles enfolds on New Year’s Eve!
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Friday
Science-Fiction Movie Marathon (6:45AM, TCM)
Things to Come, Soylent Green, The Fly (1958), Them!, Time After Time, The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) & Close Encounters of the Third Kind!
Not a bad way to start the New Year.
Sherlock: The Abominable Bride (9PM, PBS)
The one you’re waiting for! A Victorian-Gothic period piece NOT based on an Arthur Conan-Doyle story! Suicide, surely? Perhaps not…
If you enjoy this episode, I recommend tracking down August Derleth’s Sherlock Holmes pastiche story collections, starring his character “Solar Pons”. They’re a bit stranger than the real thing.
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Saturday
Ash vs. Evil Dead (9PM, STARZ)
Season finale! And yes, there WILL BE a season two!
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Sunday
The Simpsons (8PM, FOX)
Lisa accidentally creates sentient artificial intelligence when her new app that allows users to predict the impact of whatever they post online becomes self-aware. In the “B” story, Homer gets a job washing dishes.
Galavant (8PM, ABC)
Season premiere! It’s called “A New Season…Suck it, Cancellation Bear!” A reference that was more timely eleven months ago.
Downton Abbey (9PM, PBS)
The final season premieres—if you haven’t downloaded it already!
Robot Chicken (12AM, CARTOON)
“The Purge gets under way, and the unbreakable laws are broken. Plus, the Predator and the Bachelor seek to emerge victorious in the battle of the Ex X’s.”
Cartoon Network has done excellent work making fun of The Purge lately, and I expect Robot Chicken will retain that hot streak.
If you’re looking for an elegant, unique, and entertaining desktop accessory to enhance your desk at the office—something a bit classier than a drinking bird, and less familiar than a Newton’s Cradle—the PhiTOP could be the toy you’re looking for.
Its creator, Kenneth Brecher, prefers to think of it as a “philosophical toy” that “does for angular momentum what Newton’s Cradle does for linear momentum.” Brecher is a professor of physics and astronomy with a longstanding interest in the science of spinning things, whether they be electrons and protons, or planets and stars in the universe—or spinning tops. When his PhiTOP spins horizontally, it rises to a standing position before settling back down 2-3 minutes later—surprisingly counter-intuitive behavior, unless one has taken a few physics classes.
Earlier this year, Brecher began experimenting with various egg-shaped objects to see which ones were the most interesting from a spinning perspective. “By interesting I mean, when spun from a horizontal position, they would rapidly rise, stand erect, spin at a different rate and then gracefully settle down to a static horizontal position,” he wrote in his Kickstarter description. “I found that objects with the ratio greater than about 2 to1 will not stand up and spin stably; those with the ratio less than about 1.4 display erratic and less visually pleasing and interesting behavior.”
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In the end, he settled on so-called prolate ellipsoids, specifically those with a length-to-width ratio of about 1.6—which happens to be roughly the same as the Golden Ratio (a.k.a. the “divine proportion,” designated by the Greek letter phi): 1.618. That’s why he called his resulting spinning toy a PhiTOP.
Brecher raised over $11,000 on Kickstarter to fund his PhiTOP venture, and shipped the first batch of first-edition aluminum and brass toys to backers just in time for Christmas. If you weren’t among one of the lucky recipients, you can always place an order for the second round of PhiTOP toys, slated January and February.
In the meantime, savor this short video on the physics of spinning tops Brecher made last year to accompany a presentation he gave at a South Korean conference on art and mathematics:
Civil War teasers hint at not one death, but two. Chris Carter explains why Mulder and Scully can’t be together in the new X-Files. Plus, filming from the set of Wonder Woman, cool new Legends of Tomorrow footage, and a new clone on Orphan Black. So many Spoilers!
Doctor Strange
As part of Entertainment Weekly’s ongoing coverage of the film, Kevin Feige and Stephen Broussard tease the role Rachel McAdams plays (long-rumored to be Linda Carter) in the film:
Feige: Rachel McAdams plays a fellow surgeon that has a history with Strange and is his sort of lynchpin to his old life, once he steps into he role of a sorcerer. She is someone he connects with at the beginning, and reconnects with, and helps anchor his humanity.
Broussard: Rachel McAdams is sort of [Doctor Strange’s] contemporary in the modern-day New York world, before and after he goes on this crazy journey. So, she sees him before, she sees him after. She’s kind of this audience point of view.
Elsewhere in the Magazine, Feige also teases a mind-bending sequence which sees Stephen Strange travel through the entirety of the Marvel multiverse in the blink of an eye:
[The] sequence culminates in what we, behind-the-scenes, refer to as the ‘Magical Mystery Tour,’ which literally takes him in a shocking and very fast way through the multiverse. The images can be just as trippy — for lack of a better term — as those Ditko images were in the past. So, that, we hope, is going to set this movie apart from any of the other movies. And, from any other movie.
While Benedict Cumberbatch praises the dynamic hand movements that are Strange’s signature spell-casting moves:
These gestures are ways of creating the magic. It’s a beautiful thing, it’s balletic, it’s very dynamic. And once the boys in the backroom get to work on it, there’s going to be crazy s–t going on.
Youtube podcast The Hashtag Show claim that the film starts and ends with Funerals—the first (get your tissues out) is indeed for the elderly Peggy Carter in the modern timeline of the Marvel films, and will be attended by Sharon Carter and Steve Rogers.
But they then go on to say that the film ends with the Funeral for Captain America himself, a callback to the character’s death in the Civil War comic (he... got better). Apparently the final moments of the film will see Cap implore to the Government to protect the heroes that sided with him against the Sokovia Accords in exchange for him turning himself in—only for him to be assassinated in custody, uniting both sides of the Civil War in grief.
The show further notes that while Steve Rogers may perish, the seeds are sown for multiple other characters to take on the Captain America mantle: Bucky, Sam Wilson, and even Sharon Carter all pick up the shield at some point in the film.
Suicide Squad
Adam Beach fleshes out his rope-swinging mercenary, Slipknot:
My version is basically a guy who’s just pissed off to be there, he’s an angry boy, but ya know, he’s like everybody else, he is a hired mercenary, assassin killer, so you know that paying the right money and he’ll get the job done. And as long as I kept that nature about him that he can in any minute hang you with his ropes or stab you in the back, he is as worse as the Joker and Deadshot and Harley Quinn.
I’m kind of in this heavy rope gear, I’m basically like if sh*t happens, I’m like the escape plan, I’ll get everybody out of there.“ive me a rope and I can fight with it, I can tie you up.
They were teaching me a move where if you try to throw a punch, I can use a rope to grab that punch, put the rope around your neck and just drop my weight and it snaps your neck. There’s a lot of martial art skills you can use with the rope and it was pretty cool, man!
Here’s a few new clips from filming, featuring Chris Pine’s Steve Trevor guiding Gal Gadot’s Diana through a crowded, World War One-era street.
The X-Files
Chris Carter explains why separating Mulder and Scully off-screen works for the show’s revival:
I thought it was honest. And I thought it was an interesting thing to explore, as well as a way to put tension into the idea that the X-Files would be more difficult to reopen if they were split up versus together.
Robert Kirkman tells EW what to expect from the series in comparison to The Walking Dead:
If The Walking Dead is the zombie movie that never ends — about these people surviving for years and years in a way you’ve never seen in a zombie movie before. Outcast is about people treating demonic possession as a solvable problem. So as opposed to performing an exorcism and leaving, packing up your stuff like, “Call me up when the next one happens,” these people are going to be engaged in what’s actually going on, how to prevent it, and how to stop it once and for all.
There’s more at the link—including a new picture from the series.
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Orphan Black
The next season of the show will introduce a new Clone to the club—a mysterious masked girl known only as “M.K.” Revealed to Entertainment Weekly, M.K. (who is, naturally, played by Tatiana Maslany) is, according to Orphan Black co-creater John Fawcett, a secretive character:
She’s very security conscious. She knows more than Sarah does so she knows how dangerous the whole thing is. She’s purposefully avoided contact with the sisters to keep herself safe, and Sarah is now trying to draw her out of the shadows and trying to utilize the information that she has so that Sarah can follow her own mystery and fill in the blanks and protect Alison and protect Cosima from Neolution. But this girl is very unwilling.
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The 100
Here’s a few new pictures from the season three premiere “Wahanda Part One”—more at the link. [Spoiler TV]
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Legends of Tomorrow
The legends pick a fight with, err, “Boba Fett” in a new trailer.
Supergirl
Finally, here’s a gallery of new pictures from the show’s midseason return, “Blood Bonds”—once again, more at the link. [Buddy TV]
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Additional reporting by Gordon Jackson and Charlie Jane Anders. Image: Doctor Strange.
We’re coming up on the 20th anniversary of Twelve Monkeys, still one of the best time-travel movies. But we’re only just beginning to get to the bottom of what’s really going on in this film. There’s one wild, tantalizing theory that could explain Cole’s time-travel and the plague—watch us try to make sense of it!
So how does the VertiGo seemingly defy gravity? Atop the robot is a pair of steerable propellers that generate thrust, which pushes the vehicle against the wall. and keeps it from falling.
The propellers work similar to spoilers and other aerodynamic features on cars, which generate downward forces to help keep a race car pressed to the road to improve traction. But because the propellers on top of VertiGo can be steered, the robot can easily transition from horizontal to vertical surfaces, and back again. And neither surface has to be smooth for the robot to be able to ‘stick’ to it. As long as it has enough batteries to keep those props spinning, gravity doesn’t have a chance.
