A monthlong Gizmodo investigation has uncovered compelling and perplexing new evidence in the search for Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin. According to a cache of documents provided to Gizmodo which were corroborated in interviews, Craig Steven Wright, an Australian businessman based in Sydney, and Dave Kleiman, an American computer forensics expert who died in 2013, were involved in the development of the digital currency.

Wired reported this afternoon that Wright and Kleiman were likely involved in creating Bitcoin. Gizmodo has been following a similar trail for weeks, one that in recent days has included face-to-face confrontations with Wright’s business partners in Sydney and interviews with Kleiman’s closest associates in Palm Beach County, Florida. Gizmodo also obtained confirmation from on-the-record sources that Wright claimed on at least two occasions that he and Kleiman were both involved in the creation of Bitcoin.

In early November 2015, Gizmodo received a series of anonymous tip emails from someone who claimed to not only know the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, but who also claimed to have worked for him. “I hacked Satoshi Naklamoto [sic],” the first message read. “These files are all from his business account. The person is Dr Craig Wright.” What followed was a package of email files apparently pulled directly from an Outlook account belonging to Craig Wright, an Australian academic, computer engineering expert, and serial entrepreneur with a litany of degrees and corporations to his name.

Last year, Wright publicly announced his plan to establish the “world’s first Bitcoin bank.” Wright’s LinkedIn page lists him as the CEO of DeMorgan Ltd, a company whose website describes it as “focused on alternative currency, next generation banking and reputational and educational products with a focus on security and creating a simple user experience.” Among DeMorgan’s subsidiaries, also listed on its website, are C01n, a Bitcoin wallet company; Coin-Exch, a Bitcoin exchange; and Denariuz, the aforementioned Bitcoin bank, and one of the top supercomputers in the world.

Several of the emails and documents sent to Gizmodo point to a close relationship between Wright and Kleiman, a U.S. Army veteran who lived in Palm Beach County, Florida. Kleiman was confined to a wheelchair after a motorcycle accident in 1995, and became a reclusive computer forensics obsessive thereafter. He died broke and in squalor, after suffering from infected bedsores. His body was found decomposing and surrounded by empty alcohol bottles and a loaded handgun. Bloody feces was tracked along the floor, and a bullet hole was found in his mattress, though no spent shell casings were found on the scene. But documents shared with Gizmodo suggest that Kleiman may have possessed a Bitcoin trust worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and seemed to be deeply involved with the currency and Wright’s plans. “Craig, I think you’re mad and this is risky,” Kleiman writes in one 2011 email to Wright. “But I believe in what we are trying to do.”

Writing about Satoshi Nakamoto, the Bitcoin originator’s pseudonym, is a treacherous exercise. Publications like the New York Times, Fast Company, and the New Yorker have taken unsuccessful stabs at Satoshi’s identity. In every instance, the evidence either hasn’t added up or those implicated have issued public denials. And then there was Newsweek, whose 2014 story “The Face Behind Bitcoin” is easily the most disastrous attempt at revealing the identity of Satoshi. The magazine identified a modest California engineer, whose birth name was Satoshi Nakamoto but who went by Dorian, as the creator of Bitcoin. The story resulted in a worldwide media frenzy, a car chase, and—after Dorian’s repeated denials and legal threats—a great deal of embarrassment for Newsweek.

All of which means that the real Satoshi Nakamoto is still out there. And although Bitcoin has yet to upset the free market and establish the crypto-libertarian monetary utopia that its boosters once anticipated, the currency doesn’t appear to be going away: its users span the globe, with some analysts predicting 5 million worldwide by 2019. Bitcoin isn’t just some cryptographic niche. It’s an outrageous, brilliant phenomenon concocted by either a single subversive genius or a group of them. The digital currency went from being worth fractions of a penny in 2009 to $1,200 per coin just four years later, built on a network that makes wiring money anywhere as simple as sending an email, and that aims to singlehandedly render the entire global financial system obsolete. If Satoshi Nakamoto revealed himself to the world, he (or they) would be lauded as one of the greatest living minds of computer science—and the target of incessant, global scrutiny.

Craig Wright is not modest. On the website of Panopticrypt, one of his many companies, Wright describes himself as “certifiably the world’s foremost IT security expert.” In a May 2013 blog post titled “Morning Manifesto,” Craig proclaims to himself and the world:

I will make a solution to problems you have not even thought of and I will do it without YOUR or any state’s permission! I will create things that make your ideas fail as I will not refuse to stop producing. I will not live off or accept welfare and I will not offer you violence. You will have to use violence against me to make me stop however.

And at an October 2015 panel discussion with fellow Bitcoin experts (including Nick Szabo, long suspected by many as being the real Satoshi), Wright is asked to introduce himself. “[I do] a whole lot of things that people don’t realize is possible yet,” he replied. When asked by the moderator for clarification, Wright said that “I’m a bit of everything...I have a masters of law...I have a masters in statistics, a couple doctorates, I forget actually what I’ve got these days.” When asked how he got involved in Bitcoin, Wright pauses before replying: “uhh, I’ve been involved in all of this for a long time...I try and stay...I keep my head down.”

That’s all circumstantial evidence. But the hacked emails and other documents, if authentic, show Wright making repeated claims to being Satoshi Nakamoto over a period of years starting in 2008, before Nakamoto published the now-legendary white paper introducing the world to Bitcoin.

The most persuasive evidence from the apparently hacked account is a message dated January 8th, 2014, which shows Wright emailing three colleagues from satoshi@vistomail.com, the email address that Nakomoto used to regularly communicate with early Bitcoin users and developers. In this thread, with the subject line “Fear of the future,” Satoshi@vistomail.com strategized about lobbying Australian Senator Arthur Sinodinos on the matter of Bitcoin regulation:

The email includes a signature with the name Satoshi Nakamoto and a phone number that belongs to Craig Wright. The reply-to field, which determines where responses to the message will be sent, lists an email address that, according to Google, belongs to Craig Wright. Also included in the cache of messages is this reply from Andrew Sommer, a partner at Sydney-based law firm Clayton Utz, which represented Wright at the time the emails were exchanged:

The hacker-tipster also included multiple PDF files that contain what appear to be a transcript of a meeting about Bitcoin regulation between Wright, his attorney, and the Australian Taxation Office (ATO), as well as the minutes of a subsequent meeting of the ATO and Wright’s attorney. Wright appears to have been trying to persuade the Australian government to treat his Bitcoin holdings as currency, as opposed to an asset subject to greater taxation. Without this regulatory move, his business interests would be scuttled. During an interlude in one such meeting, Wright makes an oddly casual admission of his identity as Satoshi (highlighting added):

A request to confirm the authenticity of the document sent to Auscript, the transcription service whose logo appears at the top of the file, was denied on the basis of company policy. A request sent to the ATO was also denied on the basis of state confidentiality.

Multiple phone calls to Wright suggest that the material is, at the very least, not fabricated: In an initial call placed in November, he said he “couldn’t talk about” the documents we’d received, or the suggestion that he is Satoshi Nakomoto. On a subsequent call, in which lines from his purported emails were read back to him, an audibly unsettled Wright asked “how did you get that?” and stated “you shouldn’t have that.” He also confirmed that the people CCed in the first email were his attorney, accountant, and a coworker at one of his companies, DeMorgan Ltd. After those two calls, Wright stopped answering the phone, did not respond to emails, and made his Twitter account private.

Andrew Sommer, the attorney, refused to comment on the contents of the email or meeting transcripts, but did confirm that Wright was his client.

Contacted by phone, Wright’s ex-wife Lynn recalled her husband working on Bitcoin “many years ago,” but noted that he “didn’t call it Bitcoin” at first, but rather “digital money.” She also confirmed Wright’s friendship with Dave Kleiman: “I knew Dave...I knew they were friends and they talked about stuff, different things that were happening in the geek world...half the time he was taking I wouldn’t listen, hence the ex.” When asked specifically if Wright was the inventor of Bitcoin, Lynn replied “I’m not going to comment on things that we talked on.”

Ramona Watts is Craig Wright’s wife, a director at his company DeMorgan, and a recipient of Wright’s apparent email from Satoshi@vistomail.com. Reached by Gizmodo at their home in an moneyed suburb north of Sydney and asked about Wright’s role in creating Bitcoin, Watts at first only smiled, shook her head, and began to close the door. When asked if Wright was the inventor of Bitcoin, she smiled coyly again and shut the door.

John Chesher was Wright’s accountant, a recipient of his Satoshi email, and was present at one of the ATO meetings. When reached at his apartment via intercom and asked whether he’d ever received an email from Craig Wright using Satoshi Nakamoto’s email address, Chesher responded, “I might’ve...that was a year ago.” When asked if he had ever told the Australian Tax Office that Wright was in possession of a Satoshi-sized Bitcoin sum, he replied, “I may have.”

Ann Wrightson, a former employee of Wright’s who was also present at an ATO meeting, confirmed to Gizmodo that the meetings took place. She noted that she has cut all ties with Wright and Watts and is much happier for it: “Personally, he’s a nice fella, but, um, business-wise, I don’t believe he’s… He’s not a model to aspire to.” We asked Wrightson directly whether Wright had invented Bitcoin, and she demurred: “I’d prefer not to actually incriminate himself or incriminate myself...I’m sure if you’re a reporter, you can find other people to answer that for you.”

When a Gizmodo reporter visited the office of DeMorgan, Wright’s firm, Ramona Watts attempted to steer employees away from speaking to him, as seen above.

A purported email from March 28, 2008, months before Satoshi Nakomoto published the white paper that laid out the Bitcoin framework, appears to show Wright divulging the idea of a “new form of electronic money” to Kleiman for the first time. “I need your help and I need a version of me to make this work that is better than me,” the sender wrote, seemingly presaging the Satoshi persona.

Several years later, after Bitcoin’s value had exploded and the currency had permeated mainstream consciousness — and months before online accounts associated with Satoshi Nakomoto went dark — Wright wrote to Kleiman, with apparent fatigue, about the secrecy around his identity: “I cannot do the Satoshi bit anymore,” he wrote. “They no longer listen. I am better as a myth.”

The hacker also provided a PDF file of what appears to be an unfinished draft of a legal contract between Wright and Kleiman forming a secret Bitcoin trust in the Seychelles, a notorious tax haven in the Indian Ocean. The contract shows Dave Kleiman in receipt of 1,100,111 bitcoin, to be repaid to Craig Wright on January 1, 2020. Several reports, including an oft-cited technical analysis by Bitcoin expert Sergio Demian Lerner, estimate Satoshi Nakamoto’s legendary Bitcoin fortune at around 1 million BTC — a figure that nearly matches the amount in the Seychelles trust. It also lists five PGP keys — files that are used to establish encrypted lines of communication over email — that will be used to manage the trust. Searching for those keys in a public database reveals that one belongs to Wright, one belongs to Kleiman, and two belong to Satoshi Nakamoto.

The contract also contains a clearly incomplete sentence fragment and several other strange details and inconsistencies. On June 9, the date on the document, one bitcoin was valued at roughly $31, meaning that the million-bitcoin cache would have been worth about $31 million U.S., but the document values the sum at just $100,000. The contract also claims that Wright is facing bankruptcy. According to Australian public records, Wright filed for personal insolvency in 2006 and was denied, but records make no reference to an insolvency petition in 2011.

The contract stipulates that if Kleiman should die, “Dr Wright will be returned shares in the Tulip trust and company 15 months after my death at his discretion.” Perhaps most bizarrely, it includes a similar stipulation for Wright’s death, bequeathing all holdings to Ramona Watts, his wife and colleague, minus a sum that would be used “to show the ‘lies and fraud perpetrated by Adam Westwood of the Australian Tax Office,” an Australian government employee whom he blamed for an unfortunate regulatory ruling against one of his Bitcoin-related companies.

In the contract, Kleiman also vows not to divulge “the origins of the satoshin@gmx.com email,” an email account used by Satoshi Nakamoto to publish the research paper announcing Bitcoin the world.

Patrick Paige and Carter Conrad, who run a Palm Beach County business called Computer Forensics, LLC, in which Kleiman was also a partner, formed their own suspicions about Satoshi’s identity after receiving a string of bizarre communications from Wright following Kleiman’s death in 2013.

Days after their friend and partner died, Paige and Conrad sent an email about his passing to a group of associates who may have only known Kleiman through a computer screen. He was rendered paralyzed from the chest down by a motorcycle crash while working for the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department in 1995, and spent the final years of his life hospitalized with a deadly infection of the bacterium MRSA. Against his doctors’ recommendations, Kleiman left the hospital and returned to his home after nearly three years of treatment in 2013, Paige and Conrad said. The infection stopped his heart and killed him just weeks later.

Kleiman’s hospitalization only exacerbated what was already an isolated, sedentary lifestyle. “That motherfucker was on the computer nonstop,” said Paige, meaning that many of Kleiman’s relationships were strictly digital, and those friends wouldn’t be immediately aware of his death.

Among the recipients of that 2013 email was Craig Wright, a man whom Paige and Conrad understood to have a casual working relationship with their late friend. Wright and Kleiman had authored a paper together five years earlier on the mechanics of overwriting hard drive data, and they corresponded sometimes about other technological esoterica. So it was a surprise when, days after sending the email, they came across a mournful video about Kleiman on Wright’s YouTube channel. In the video, Wright narrates footage from Kleiman’s various TV appearances, growing increasingly emotional. By the end, Wright is audibly choking back tears. “I’m proud to say I knew Dave Kleiman,” he concludes. “I’ll miss you, Dave. You were my friend, and I’ll miss you.”

Paige didn’t know what to think of the video, but it wasn’t a total shock that Kleiman had maintained such an intense and largely secretive bond with a peer in a different hemisphere. Stranger, however, was a document that Paige and Conrad received in their business mailbox several months later, which bore an Australian return address and informed them that their late partner was no longer legally affiliated with a company called W&K Info Defense Research. The name was totally unfamiliar to both men, and, because the notice didn’t seem to require any action from them, they ignored it.

According to public records, W&K was founded in Palm Beach County in 2011, with Dave Kleiman as its registered agent and Kleiman’s home address as its place of business. In 2014, after Kleiman’s death, it was reinstated as an LLC with a new registered agent, a new place of business, and Coin-Exch, one of Wright’s companies, listed as an “authorized person.” A document purporting to show minutes of a meeting between Wright’s attorney and the ATO, which was provided to Gizmodo by Wright’s apparent hacker, also makes reference to W&K. In the minutes, Wright’s accountant John Chesher calls W&K “an entity created for the purpose of mining Bitcoins,” and states that Wright and Kleiman founded the company together.

The document also shows Chesher speaking about Wright’s spectacular Bitcoin fortune and indicating that Kleiman may have amassed a similar amount. It reads in part:

Craig Wright had mined a lot of Bitcoins. Craig then took the Bitcoins and put them into a Seychelles Trust. A bit of it was also put into Singapore. This was run out of an entity from the UK. Craig had gotten approximately 1.1 million Bitcoins. There was a point in time, when he had around 10% of all the Bitcoins out there. Mr Kleiman would have had a similar amount. However, Mr Kleiman passed away during that time.

According to Jeremy Gardner, a longtime Bitcoin investor and co-founder of the College Cryptocurrency Network, it is doubtful that anyone but Satoshi could’ve amassed Bitcoin holdings of that size: “I don’t think anyone comes that close, honestly.” However, Gardner also doubts that even Satoshi would still have that many coins:

The only person who could really have a million, and I imagine it’s much less than that, if any at all, is Satoshi. Anyone else who ever came close to owning that much, which I don’t believe ever happened, has long since liquidated a substantial portion of what they held (as the value of their holdings would have have gone up well over 250x).

The only thing zanier than Satoshi Nakamoto’s fabled Bitcoin vault would be the thought of another person possessing “a similar amount”—unless the stockpile was being held in some sort of secret monetary trust.

The next communication that Paige and Conrad received from Wright was stranger still. Emails provided to Gizmodo, the authenticity of which were confirmed by Paige and Conrad, show that in February 2014, 10 months after Kleiman’s death, Wright emailed the pair to tell them about a mysterious project he’d been working on with their friend. As part of this undertaking, Wright wrote, Kleiman had mined an enormous amount of bitcoins—an amount “too large to email.” Wright asked them to ensure that Kleiman’s computers were safe, and to check whether their hard drives contained wallet.dat files, the pieces of software that contain bitcoins and their owners’ account information. On a subsequent phone call with Wright, a baffled Paige asked for more information about the partnership with Kleiman. After that, he said, Wright assumed a clandestine tone. “Can I trust you?”

According to Paige, Wright eventually told him that Kleiman was the creator of Bitcoin. Later, he clarified that the cryptocurrency was invented by a group of people which included Kleiman. If that was true, Kleiman was likely sitting on a fortune when he died in April 2013—even if he were in possession of only half of Satoshi’s fabled million-bitcoin stockpile, that would have been worth about $65,000,000 at the time of his death. Wright made clear to Paige that he wasn’t after the money—he only wanted to make sure that it made its way into Kleiman’s estate and didn’t sit gathering dust in a digital vault.

Paige was stunned by the idea that his friend had achieved such an amazing feat, but when he considered it further, it didn’t fall apart entirely. Paige regularly refers to Kleiman as a genius in conversation, and his expertise in computer security aligns with the skill set that would have been needed to build—or at least contribute to—the bitcoin protocol.

Still, there were major questions. Another 2014 email provided to Gizmodo shows Paige telling Wright that Kleiman mentioned Bitcoin to him just once, and this month said he doesn’t recall the digital currency coming up any other time in his daily conversations with his partner. And according to those who knew him well, Kleiman needed money badly—his house was under foreclosure and he spent nearly three years in a VA hospital before he died. If Dave Kleiman were Satoshi Nakamoto—or one of several Satoshis—wouldn’t he have cashed out at some point?

Shyaam Sundhar, a computer security professional who coauthored an academic paper with Kleiman and Wright in 2008, doubted and expressed dismay at the idea that either man was involved in Bitcoin’s creation. “Our conversations has only been pertaining to HDD project,” he responded to an inquiry via email, referring to their research on hard drive data. “I would hope that what you have stated is mere rumors, since I have never heard any such thing about Craig or Dave.”

Paige and Conrad left the matter unresolved, and Wright stopped calling and emailing them after he made contact with Kleiman’s brother, the executor of Kleiman’s estate. “We knew one day a reporter would come calling,” Paige said. “But we left it at that.”

In November, after being contacted by Gizmodo, Paige emailed Wright to ask whether he planned to release any information about Kleiman’s—and by extension, his own—involvement in creating Bitcoin. “Not yet. We are in the process of finalising some of the research. I was hoping we could be at the point of release before the reporters started sniffing,” Wright responded. He added in a later email, “When it all comes out, there is no way Dave will be left out.”

While he was alive, Kleiman kept an aluminum-encased USB drive on his person at nearly all times. If there really is a cache of Kleiman’s bitcoins or anything else linking him to Satoshi, Paige said, “I guarantee that drive has some shit in it.” According to Paige, when Kleiman died, his brother, Ira Kleiman, took possession of it.

Ira Kleiman declined to speak on the record about whether he is in possession of his brother’s hard drives. Described by acquaintances as guarded and private, Ira Kleiman also refused to meet with a reporter in person or speak over the phone, opting instead to send dozens of cagey and cryptic emails and SMS messages in an exchange that lasted several days. He claimed that after his brother’s death, Wright contacted him and told him that he and Dave Kleiman were involved in creating Bitcoin, and also alleged to possess documents provided to him by several sources that might corroborate the information provided to Gizmodo by Wright’s apparent hacker. However, Kleiman declined to provide any concrete information about those documents or their sources, and would not answer when asked if he believed that Wright had been telling him the truth.

Additional reporting from Sydney by Daniel Strudwick

Top image by Jim Cooke. Contact the authors at andy@gawker.com and biddle@gawker.com.·

Andy Cush public PGP key

PGP fingerprint: 35B1 D6A7 BCED 9F9C C7D3 C9D7 65FA 8F8C 5B62 4809

Sam Biddle Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: E93A 40D1 FA38 4B2B 1477 C855 3DEA F030 F340 E2C7

You thought every war story had already been told? Apparently not. In the new thriller The War Magician, Benedict Cumberbatch will play Jasper Maskelyne, a real-life British magician who used his talents to help the allies during World War II.

As Deadline reports, Tom Cruise was once interested in a Maskelyne biopic, but this vintage film of Maskelyne in action—suavely swallowing an entire package of razor blades—suggests Cumberbatch is probably a much better fit for the role. (And that’s without even considering his upcoming turn as Doctor Strange.)

Here’s what Deadline says about The War Magician, which is based on the book by David Fisher:

Maskelyne put together a dirty dozen-type coterie of illusionists called The Magic Gang. Among other stunts, they created fake tanks and soldiers to give the illusion of troop movement to Nazi spy planes overhead. They used mirrors to shield machine gun nests, disguised tanks as supply trucks, and even managed to create illusions that concealed sites like the Alexandria harbor and Suez Canal, to keep Luftwaffe bombers from blowing them up. Maskelyne’s stunts vexed Gen.Rommel and his unstoppable forces in North Africa and gave the Brits a fighting chance using what the master magician termed “the mass production of tricks, swindles and devices.”

No director has been announced yet, but the script is being written by Gary Whitta, who wrote The Book of Eli and collaborated on the screenplay for After Earth with M. Night Shyamalan.

Top image: Benedict Cumberbatch at a premiere for Black Mass, Oct. 11, 2015. (Photo by Grant Pollard/Invision/AP)

Perhaps in your daily internet wanderings you’ve stumbled across photos of this building and wondered, what the hell is that thing? Well, it’s a museum for cars, and I assure you: It’s perfect.

The overhauled Petersen Automotive Museum, which opened yesterday in Los Angeles, has become LA’s most contentious piece of urban design. It’s already drawn comparisons to Guy Fieri and Michael Bay, which might actually be a selling point for the core audience that comes to see its collection of vintage and movie prop cars. Let’s be honest: Dudes in Hawaiian shirts gawking at the Batmobile are not here for the architecture.

But I was. Like the Broad Museum, which opened earlier this year about six miles east, the Petersen is draped in a similarly polarizing facade. Sure, the Broad is high-concept where the Petersen is populist, but they actually have a lot more in common than it appears: They’re simple boxes slapped with Instagram-ready gift wrap. It’s part of a trend in recent years for LA cultural institutions to wrestle their way into the social media chatter with an architectural style let’s call Wacky Packages. It’s even happening right across the street, where the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s plotting to ooze primordial goo over Wilshire.

While it might be a trend, it’s not really a new idea for Los Angeles, which invented the drive-by design known as programmatic architecture, where buildings looked like what was happening inside to quickly communicate their relevance to people zipping past in automobiles. You’d think this would be an excellent chance to riff on, or perhaps reinvent, this LA concept for this particular museum, but when it comes to the Petersen’s new look, it’s not immediately clear to most people what’s going on inside. The Petersen looks less like mobility-in-motion and more like an ambiguously unspooled Diet Coke can. From the right angle you might get a whiff of chrome. The previous incarnation of the museum, with its tailfin-like appendages, was a bit more obvious.

What is obvious is that the Petersen wanted to make a splash. And if so, then the Petersen made a very odd choice with the architectural firm of Kohn Pedersen Fox, which is known for much more conservative work. But for this project they went full Wacky. At the press event, principal Eugene Kohn claimed the zany scribbles were abstract takes on aerodynamic testing in wind tunnels and the blur of brake lights, to which the audience tilted its heads to the side in unison and said “huh.” Only the chef of the museum’s restaurant, Celestino Drago, who was standing near the stage prepping for a cooking demonstration, was brave enough to ask Kohn where his inspiration truly originated: “So, how much wine did it take?”

Draping the Petersen with ribbons, photo by Zahner

When it came to making this plate of robot spaghetti with red sauce, the real stars here might be the fabricators at Zahner. The Kansas City firm manufactured the curvaceous ribbons using a proprietary method called Zahner Engineered Profiled Panel Systems (ZEPPS) which accurately rendered the computer-generated shapes in hunks of stainless steel that looked like they’d be a bitch to clean. (Pigeon turds were the greatest concern for a group of journalists sitting near me.) Engineers shipped the 308 sections to LA where they were welded to the existing building using a series of of grey prongs.

Which is why the coolest part of the Petersen might be the roof, where you get incredible vistas of the Hollywood Hills framed through this structural nervous system and tangle of oxygenated arteries, as if you’re standing atop a throbbing aorta, Fantastic Voyage-style.

The cherry red web—it’s actually a Ferrari-esque tone; there’s just a whisper of orange—also happens to match LACMA’s newest wing across the street almost to the hue. But this inferred affiliation by architecture also acts like a wayfinding mechanism—Follow the red!—and the Petersen makes grand gestures to the pedestrians who are making their way over from LACMA.

For the first time in decades the Petersen’s Wilshire Boulevard entrance has been reopened, meaning visitors no longer have to walk all the way around the building and begin their museum experience in a dark parking garage. Instead you get the fun experience of stepping behind the rippled skin for a behind-the-scenes peek as you use the sidewalk, the same trick I appreciated seeing at the Broad.

Of course, the New York architects refused to acknowledge that anyone might be doing this, clinging firmly to their stereotypical claims that the building is best appreciated in motion. “No one walks between these buildings,” said Kohn, rather authoritatively, like three times during the press conference, as dozens of people waited to use the crosswalk below.

As for what’s inside the museum itself, there are apparently hundreds of cars. I used to go to the Petersen for the one section focused on how Los Angeles grew thanks to its extensive public transit system, a story which has been condensed into a single interpretive kiosk by Dutch Monaco. All the kitschy exhibits are gone, in fact, replaced with extremely slick interpretive text and graphics by a firm named Scenic Route. It’s all very well done and quite restrained compared to the exterior. But it also felt like I was getting the hard sell. It was like being on the showroom floor of my local Mini dealership (not inside a T-1000’s loofah).

Like a shiny 2016 model that will look outdated in a year, the Petersen’s flashy head-turner of a facade could not be better suited to this moment in history, as we watch the last sputtering gasps of an auto-obsessed culture. Rather ironically, signs all around the building advertise the fact that LA’s Metro Purple Line is burrowing beneath it, with a station opening across the street in a few years that will move the city’s reliance on cars even faster towards irrelevance. Eventually we will all need to go to museums to see personal, human-driven vehicles, and where better to see them than this ostentatious temple to an idea that society no longer worships.

As I walked north on Fairfax toward the bus stop I took one last look back towards the building. Maybe it was the way LA’s afternoon sun reflected on the silvery swirls, but I realized the building reminded me of something else: the opalescent sheen of oil. How fitting then, to glorify the last hurrah of gasoline, just one block away from the ancient fossil fuels seeping from the La Brea Tar Pits—where they belong.

Follow the author at @awalkerinLA

Exterior photos courtesy Petersen Automotive Museum

After a year-long hiatus, we have a robotic explorer around our angry, overheated twin of a planet again! Early this morning the Japanese Space Agency confirmed their audacious plan to use manoeuvring thrusters worked, and now the spacecraft is already sending home new photos.

When the Japanese spacecraft Akatsuki attempted to go into orbit around Venus in 2010, its engine malfunctioned and it missed. Hurtling into space without main engines, the spacecraft appeared doomed. But clever trickery by the engineering team led to a plan to use smaller manoeuvring thrusters to slowly nudge into orbit instead. It took five years to be back in position, but on Sunday night it made a valiant last-ditch effort to get into orbit around Venus and salvage its mission.

Venus in ultraviolet from 684,000 miles(1.1 million kilometers) away. Image credit: JAXA

We knew right away that the jets fired as scheduled, but it took until today to be certain that the change in velocity was enough to get Akatsuki into orbit. After carefully observing telemetry and orbital velocity, the Japanese space agency JAXA confirms the spacecraft is in a higher orbit around Venus than the original plan five years ago, but it’s in orbit. After the next nine days of adjustments, Akatsuki’s orbit will range from 193,000 to 211,000 miles (310,000 to 340,000 kilometres) away from the planet, which is higher than ideal for the instruments but thanks to over-performance of the thrusters over the weekend, in a closer, better orbit than anticipated from the salvage

The first photographs returned from the orbiter are of the planet in ultraviolet captured at the start of orbital insertion. The image captures Venus’s wild clouds, along with the upward diffusion of sulfur dioxide (SO₂ ) from atmospheric circulation. It appears that at least three of five instruments are working perfectly with no degradation despite being well outside their intended lifespan. Akatsuki was designed to spend six months (not five years, six months!) travelling to Venus before starting two years of observations.

This accomplishment is incredible not just because Venus is tragically under-studied, but because of the ingenuity and persistence of the JAXA team in figuring out how to salvage their wayward spacecraft. Congratulations to everyone involved, and we are thoroughly, delightfully impressed!

[JAXA]

Top image: Now that’s the cutest little mission control station ever! Credit: JAXA

Appreciation to @5thstar, a space journalist providing excellent technical translations.

Contact the author at mika.mckinnon@io9.com or follow her at @MikaMcKinnon.

Plus J.J. Abrams reveals why Leia didn’t choose to become a Jedi before the movie. Anthony Russo teases the levity Spider-Man brings to Civil War. Plus, Jeffrey Dean Morgan talks being faithful to the comic book roots of his Walking Dead villain. Spoilers now!

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Unsurprisingly, George Lucas is diplomatic in his verdict on the film, having seen it:

I think the fans are going to love it. It’s very much the kind of movie they’ve been looking for.

[Vulture]

Speaking to IGN, J.J. Abrams reveals why Leia, strongly force-sensitive, chose not to became a Jedi after the climax of Return of the Jedi:

And one of one of the answers was that, simply it was a choice that she made. That her decision to run the Rebellion, and ultimately this Resistance, and consider herself a General as opposed to a Jedi, it was simply a choice that she took. Not that there’s any regret that she could have and didn’t.

But clearly we’ve seen, and we do again, that she is still Force-strong, and is something that is an intrinsic piece of her character.

A new batch of promo pictures has been released—there’s a few more at the link. [Movie Jones]

Note: We’re putting discussion of what appears to be a major spoiler below this series of new images. If you want to avoid it this close to the movie, please skip ahead to the “Captain America: Civil War” segment, and avoid the comments section. Last warning!

Yesterday, an image of an action figure purchased in a Walmart from the next wave of figures based on the movie sparked some major speculation about where Rey ends up at the end of the film. The figure—said image is promptly being scrubbed off of the internet by Disney, hinting at its legitimacy—was dubbed as a “Resistance Outfit” Rey. The outfit itself is a slightly modified version of her costume from the film that was seen in a featurette yesterday, but the figure, and the box’s artwork, both feature Rey with the blue lightsaber of Anakin Skywalker.

There have been rumors surrounding Rey’s force sensitivity for months—even the trailers have hinted it—and even Harrison Ford has let slip that Rey engages in a lightsaber duel during the film. Even though merchandise isn’t usually the most trust worthy source, this seems to all but confirm that Rey is on the path to becoming a Jedi by the end of The Force Awakens. [Jedi News]

Captain America: Civil War

Anthony Russo says that Spider-Man and Ant-Man will give the film some much-needed levity:

Characters like Spider-Man and Ant-Man enter the story a little later and deliver some lighter moments. As per usual, a little balance goes a long way.

[Film School Rejects]

Ant-Man and The Wasp

Peyton Reed discusses adding the Wasp into the mix for the film:

It just happened to be organic for the characters of Ant-Man and Wasp, [so] it worked. Her last line in the movie—‘It’s about damn time’—[is] very much about her specific character and arc in that movie, but it is absolutely about a larger thing. It’s about damn time: We’re going to have a fully realized, very very complicated hero in the next movie who happens to be a woman.

[Yahoo]

Anomalisa

Here’s a poster for Charlie Kaufman’s new animated movie. [/Film]

Game of Thrones

Master of dodging spoiler-y questions Gwendoline Christie jokingly says she knows nothing about the upcoming season:

I mean I’ve wrapped on it but I didn’t read any of it. I just improvised this year. The whole thing.

But then elaborates on its move away from the George R.R. Martin books for source material:

I really love what David Benioff and Dan Weiss are doing. I think they’re creating some really fascinating and intelligent storytelling, and George R.R. Martin is an executive producer on Game of Thrones so nothing is ever without his blessing.

[E! Online]

Emerald City

Joely Richardson has been cast as Glinda the Good Witch in NBCs’ Wizard of Oz show. [TV Insider]

The Walking Dead

Jeffrey Dean Morgan says the show is pushing AMC to keep Negan faithful to his comic book characterization... right down his mile-a-minute swearing:

Look, it’s a speed bump. I’m not going to say it’s an issue because they’re working on it. We’re going to push AMC—the plan is to push them as far as they can because it’s who Negan is. It’s our intention that this character is going to leap off the pages of the comic book. It’s very important that that’s who it is. Some of the characters there’s much more leeway, but Negan is a guy that you want to keep as true as possible, and that would be how I want to play him as well.

The actor also mentioned that he has gotten a hands-on with Negan’s iconic weapon: a baseball bat named “Lucille”. [Entertainment Weekly]

Once Upon A Time

TV Line are reporting that Dorothy Gale will return to the series after her appearance in season 3. However, this time she’ll be played by a new actor, as the character is now in her late 20s and “evolved from ‘the iconic, pig-tailed girl from Kansas’ into ‘a brave warrior for good.’”

Limitless

Here’s a brief press release for “This is your Brian on Drugs”:

When Agent Casey Rooks (Desmond Harrington) and his SWAT team skim 80 NZT pills for themselves from the recovery of stolen inventory, it starts an internal investigation that is viewed through the shifting perspectives of Brian’s immediate circle at the FBI, on LIMITLESS.

[Spoiler TV]

Galavant

Deadline have an exclusive preview of the first song from the next season, unsubtly titled “A New Season.”

Legends of Tomorrow

Finally, the show has revealed the emblem that identifies Hawkman and Hawkwoman.

Additional reporting by Gordon Jackson and Charlie Jane Anders. Image: Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

We’ve got a little while longer to wait for Agent Carter‘s return, thanks to President Obama’s State of the Union address. But we can hold on a little while longer thanks to this delightful snippet featuring Jarvis and Peggy being their usual adorable selves.

The clip was revealed on Twitter yesterday by iTunes TV, and sees Jarvis itching to get back in action with Peggy... despite not being all too fond of the new city they find themselves in.

Oh, the banter. The British accents. The everything, it’s just a reminder of what a goddamn delight Agent Carter was. Actually, this may have made the extra wait even harder.

Agent Carter will be back on ABC on January 19th.

Gizmodo This Australian Says He and His Dead Friend Invented Bitcoin | Gawker Jeb Bush’s Last Resort: Donald Trump Is a Clinton Plant | Black Flag Tiny Rally Car Refuses To Crash | Two Cents Everything You Should Do at the End of the Year to Optimize Your 2015 Taxes |

We also see our protagonist, Sophie (Ruby Barnhill), be afraid of him. Which is all well and god, but “BFG” stands for “Big Friendly Giant,” so we know the hand reaching to grab Sophie probably isn’t going to do her harm.

Spielberg adapting a Roald Dahl novel seems like a match made in heaven, it’s kind of shocking this is the first time we’re seeing it. And this footage, eerie as a it is, makes us want more.

Contact the author at katharine@io9.com.

How do you follow last week’s epic, ridiculous, wonderfully fun Flash/Arrow crossover? You don’t even try to match it. You just make a Christmas episode, throw in a couple of major emotional revelations for a few characters, bring back three great villains, and then add a metric ton of silliness.

“Running to Stand Still,” as its title inadvertently implies, is mostly an inconsequential Flash episode, despite the fact that it begins with Weather Wizard breaking Captain Cold and Mark Hamill’s elder Trickster out of Iron Heights to kill the Flash. But this Rogues team-up isn’t nearly as major as you might hope; Cold immediately abandons them to warn Barry about their vague plan. But how can you be disappointed when the episode provides us not just with Cold rolling his eyes at the Trickster’s over-theatrical villainy, but the sight of him calmly drinking cocoa from an adorable reindeer mug after breaking into Barry’s pad?

I sure couldn’t. But that’s what this episode delivers in spades—a pretty ho-hum story, made up time after time by those bursts of fun The Flash does so well. Here’s how basic the plot is: Once the SuperSTARS discover Weather Wizard and Trickster are on the loose, Cisco comes up with the same weather wand device he created for the season finale that didn’t happen (i.e. when the WW created that tidal wave and Flash stopped it before he went back in time and stopped it even earlier). The Trickster, who Mark Hamill is basically playing as a less clever, less classy version of the Joker from Batman: The Animated Series, highjacks the airwaves for a very Joker-esque message threatening the Flash. Both Patty and the SuperSTARS use the reflection of a “Mr. Jigglewiggle” doll in the Trickster’s eye to deduce his location, which exists solely so the Flash and Patty can meet at the abandoned Mr. Jigglewiggle warehouse, be surrounded by exploding dreidels courtesy of the Trickster, and for the Flash to use his spinny arms to fly them out of there.

Eventually the Weather Wizard uses his powers again, and Barry tracks him down where he discovers that the Trickster, disguised as a mall Santa, has given out hundreds of bombs hidden in presents he’s been giving away to random families. If the Flash doesn’t stand there and let the villains kill him, the Trickster will detonate them all. It’s up to the SuperSTARS to save the day in what I’m pretty sure is the most bullshit science ever featured on The Flash, which I know is saying something. They track down one present, Wells attaches it into a drone and flies it into an interdimensional breach that’s hanging out above Central City, and somehow the present is so magnetized it sucks all the other presents out of people’s homes across the city into the sky, where they detonate harmlessly, allowing the Flash to wrap up the villains and save the day.

It’s super, super dumb. And yet, I don’t care, because the episode still features things like Joe saying “It’s official. Santa hates us” when he discovers the three villains have escaped prison. And Jay Garrick trolling Caitlin by continually asking things like, “What’s Christmas?” and pretending they don’t exist on Earth-2. Or Wells-2 knocking on the door of some random home, having a kid answer, and Wells declaring with total gravity, “Your toys. Give them to me.”

The humor works a lot better than the emotional beat of this storyline, which stems from Patty, since the Weather Wizard (pre-weather powers) killed her dad. Patty goes from bright and cheerful to willing to murder with no apparent emotional shift. After the Flash captures the Weather Wizard, Patty bursts onto the scene to murder the criminal in cold-blood, but a 45-second pep talk from the Flash talks her down off a ledge that she never appeared to be standing anywhere near before tonight. So yeah.

But as I mentioned earlier, the episode still had a few major reveals in store, they just didn’t really have anything to do with the week’s story. The first is that we learn that Zoom has cornered Wells-2 inside STAR Labs (someone probably should have been keeping an eye on that breach in the basement) and demanded his help—but not to kill the Flash. No, Zoom is sending all the semetahumans after Barry to make him faster and stronger, or “fattening him up like a Christmas turkey,” as Wells puts it. Zoom is going to steal all of Barry’s Speed Force and he wants Barry to be as jam-packed with it as possible when he does it.

The bigger reveal, however, is that Iris finally fesses up to Joe that he has a son. Honestly, this storyline is the lynchpin of the episode, as Iris agonizes whether to tell her father, Barry helps her tell him, Joe freaks out, and then Joe accepts this strange twist of fate—and becomes incredibly happy about it. It’s a pretty quick turnaround (not as quick Patty’s brief dalliance into cold-blooded murder) but as usual, Jesse L. Martin sells it effectively. It’s actually hard not to be happy for him at the end of the episode, as he’s so looking forward to meeting his son Wally for the first time… only for Wally to suddenly show up out of nowhere at their West family holiday party.

Flash fans know that Wally West plays a major role in Flash lore, far beyond that of Iris’ half-brother (or, in the case of the comics, her nephew). Given how well the TV team has brought all the other aspects of The Flash to live-action, I’m really excited to see what they have planned now that they have Wally to play with. Alas, we’ll have to wait until next year to find out, my friends. Happy holidays to you all, and if you remember nothing else, remember this: Every Earth has The Godfather, Vito.

Assorted Musings:

• The Trickster’s crayon Flash drawings were adorable. I want them available as computer wallpaper.

• Flash running on that helicopter blade was hella sweet.

• I love the idea of Wells-2 being forced to betray Barry in the exact same way as the original Wells/Thawne—that’s some good thematic resonance—but I would imagine Wells-2 will be secretly working with the SuperSTARS to betray Zoom, and thus Wells is effectively redeemed. I’m down with that.

• Next episode (which appears to be on January 19)—Barry finally tells Patty about being the Flash. Given how great everyone feels after they reveal secrets, it’s shocking it’s taken this long to get her in on the loop.

• Seriously, this episode could have been nothing but The Flash cast flipping me the bird and as long as it included the scene where Captain Cold passive-aggressively complained Barry was out of mini-marshmallows it would still get an A-, minimum.

Contact the author at rob@io9.com.

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You may have heard that The X-Files is coming back in January. If you were a fan when the show was originally on in the ‘90s—or caught it later in syndication or streaming—this is potentially great news. If you missed the whole phenomenon, we’re here for you.

Once again, we venture into the io9 Guide series. The goal is to give a comprehensive, but introductory, at major and minor players in science fiction and fantasy. While it’s intended for newcomers, longtime fans are encouraged to debate us in the comments. Spoilers abound, obviously.

What Is The X-Files?

The X-Files started as TV series that ran for nine seasons (1993-2001), with movies in the middle of the run (in 1998) and after (in 2008). The basic premise is that FBI Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully investigate cases of paranormal phenomena known as, yes, you guessed it, “X-Files.”

On the one side, you’ve got Mulder, who retrieved repressed memories that his sister was abducted when they were both children. That made him a believer, led him to the X-Files, and nuked his career in the FBI. In the pilot, higher ups assign Scully—a forensic pathologist—to keep and eye on him. With her scientific and medical background, she plays the skeptic role on the show.

There’s a meme that pops up when you venture into X-Files fandom (more on that later). And it looks like this:

Scully: Mulder, no.

Mulder: Mulder yes.

Which is a pretty good summation of the characters. The show’s formula was based pretty hard around Mulder being convinced that something spooky was at fault for whatever crime they were investigating and Scully putting the breaks on by bringing up rational explanations.

But the meme is even more about the personalities at play. Mulder was always forging ahead, impulsively and recklessly throwing himself into the path of danger. Scully was the one advocating caution and, god forbid, going by the rules. Also, she ended up running after him and saving the day a fair amount, too.

The show was so, so lucky in the stars they ended up with. David Duchovny gave Mulder charm and humor, which made his beliefs seem less crazy. Gillian Anderson had the insanely difficult task of being the skeptic in a universe where ghosts and aliens were definitely real. Scully was smart and resilient. But her beliefs also evolved over the course of the show... as long as there was evidence.

Anderson and Duchovny weren’t only perfect for their roles individually, their on-screen chemistry was off-the-charts spectacular, which is one of the reasons The X-Files took off as much as it did. The plots could have been immaculate, but no show connects unless the main characters do.

Series creator Chris Carter was less concerned with his characters than he was the stories. In addition to the investigation into the paranormal, the show was also about the cover-up of certain events. Carter credits Watergate with giving him an inherent distrust of government. He combined that with fictional inspirations from Alfred Hitchcock Presents to Outer Limits. Kolchak: The Night Stalker was particularly influential. And it’s thanks to Silence of the Lambs that the show took place at the FBI.

In The X-Files world, Carter took his distrust of government and matured it into paranoia. Of course, Fox Mulder’s paranoia was the result of people actually being out to get him.

Mytharc vs. “Monster of the Week”

Early on, The X-Files began to develop a mythology surrounding the government conspiracy to hide the truth about aliens and a possible invasion. Mulder and Scully’s intrusions into these plans are overwhelmed, episode-wise, with investigations in random places with random supernatural phenomena. Those episodes ranged from the terrifying, like “Irresistable,” to the hilarious, like “Bad Blood.”

In this sense, the two X-Files movies are representative: 1998’s The X-Files (Also known as Fight the Future) was about the mytharc. 2008’s I Want to Believe was about a case that had nothing to do with the conspiracy.

So how much of the mytharc do you need to understand the show? Well, basically, none. By the end of the series, it had become hopelessly convoluted—mainly because it had been pretty well wrapped up in season six. But three more seasons extended the mythology of the show into strange and confusing areas. Not to say that the mytharc was bad; there are a lot of great episodes that only work because they’re building on what’s gone before. “Duane Barry/Ascension” is a standout in that regard.

But the details of the aliens, the government conspiracy, and the plan of the alien “colonists” are not what any newcomer needs to know to understand the X-Files. In the context of the show, you do need to know that Scully was abducted in season two (possibly the best way a show has ever dealt with the pregnancy of an actor), returned comatose, finds a computer chip implanted in her, removes it, gets terminal cancer, and then is healed by Mulder getting another chip to put back in her. Mulder, for his part, eventually does figure out what happened to his sister—abducted, returned to live under the scrutiny of the conspiracy, ran away, and then disappeared into the afterlife—and is himself abducted at the end of season seven... which is about when Scully finds out she’s pregnant with his child.

Mulder comes back. The baby, William, has some full-on superpowers. A bunch of people after him. So his parents give him up for adoption to keep him safe and Mulder goes on the run, joined by Scully at the end of the series. I Want to Believe contrives a way to drop the charges against him.

That basic knowledge will be all you really need to just watch the 2016 revival, but—as in all things—you should really see how the show executes all of it. There are a lot of ups and downs in the series’ 202 episodes, getting much more uneven as the show hits season seven. But when the show is good, it’s great. More than worth the time to binge watch.

Anything else?

In addition to Scully and Mulder, the show populated its world with a number of recurring characters. FBI Assistant Director Walter Skinner (Mitch Pileggi) played exasperated boss to Scully and Mulder. Poor Skinner had to deal with pressure from above (his bosses questioning the utility of the X-Files and the conspiracy interfering) and from below (Mulder flying off the handle.) Despite all that, he’s a reliable ally.

There are also the Lone Gunmen: Byers (Bruce Harwood), Frohike (Tom Braidwood., and Langly (Dean Haglund). They’re a trio of conspiracy theorists and hackers who act as Mulder’s expert advisors in a number of situations. They had their own spinoff, which was canceled, and then they returned to the X-Files and died. Or possibly not, since they’ll be in the revival series.

For almost the entirety of the series, the face of the conspiracy was the unnamed “Cigarette Smoking Man” played by William B. Davis. His presence was mysterious, then malevolent, and then an obstacle to be dealt with. He tells his own backstory—definitely laden with embellishments and then outright lies—in season four’s “Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man.” That’s another episode that displays all the strengths of the show. It’s sort of mythology-related, since it covers the villain, but it’s also sort of a standalone, in that it’s mostly a character study. It’s a fine episode to watch without knowing the show. It’s a great episode for people who’ve seen him lurking at the edges of the early series.

Over the course of the series, the X-Files division closes, opens, re-closes, and reopens a number of times. There are a couple of FBI agents that cycle through when that happens. They range from being conspiracy plants to just agents sent to partner Scully and Mulder. After Mulder was abducted in season seven, Scully gained Agent John Doggett (Robert Patrick), who played skeptic to her believer. Doggett then got his own new partner in Monica Reyes (Annabeth Gish).

The Legacy

Ho-boy, what didn’t the show impact? The X-Files was a cultural juggernaut in the ‘90s. You didn’t have to actively watch the show to know what it was about, and a tall male FBI agent paired with a red-haired female one was instantly recognizable as being a take-off of this show. Whenever there’s a skeptic and believer pair now, it’s been influenced in some way by The X-Files.

The X-Files also hit at exactly the right time to be an influential online fandom. “Shipper” and “shipping” are now common pop culture terms, but they started in X-Files fandom. Being an X-Files fan meant being fluent in a whole new language: MSR (Mulder Scully Romance), NoRomos (No Romance—anti-shippers), X-Philes (fans), UST (Unresolved Sexual Tension). TV Tropes has eight tropes named after the show.

Shows with longstanding mysteries are favorably compared to the show. And if they don’t stick the landing? They are still compared to this show. Russell T. Davies and Joss Whedon both described one of their shows by using The X-Files as a point of comparison.

And let’s not forget that Vince Gilligan, a longtime X-Files producer and writer, hired Bryan Cranston for Breaking Bad after seeing his work on that show.

Birthed from the shattered trust in the government created by Watergate, premiering when conspiracy theories and UFOs were on a cultural high, ending when questioning the government was no longer in vogue, and returning when people know the government can watch everything they do, the X-Files is a show that taps into the public sentiment in a unique way. Beyond that, it was a hothouse that allowed some extremely unique stories and voices to flourish. Few shows have as many great episodes across so many different categories.

So go watch it all. And trust no one.

Screencaps via XF Photos.

Contact the author at katharine@io9.com.

Comic Con is headed to Tokyo, courtesy of Steve Wozniak. It’s the first time the convention will ever be held in Japan, and it’s planned for December 2016. It’s going to be a sister event to the Apple co-founder’s Silicon Valley Comic Con, and the Woz himself appeared in Tokyo last weekend to get people excited. In other words: I know where I’ll be in exactly 51 weeks.

A fleet of alien ships suddenly appears overhead, carrying a mysterious race of visitors with weirdly benevolent intentions: They’re here to fix all of the world’s problems. Great! So what’s the catch? That’s the set-up for Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Childhood’s End, now a Syfy “event series” that kicks off on Monday.

Childhood’s End was published in 1953, 15 years before 2001: A Space Odyssey, and though it’s been bandied about Hollywood over the years, this is the first time it’s been adapted to the screen, with a script by Matthew Graham (Life on Mars), and direction by Nick Hurran (Doctor Who, Sherlock).

Watching the events unfold in the three-part miniseries, it’s pretty incredible how familiar a lot of its images and plot points feel—a testament to how influential Clarke’s book has been on science fiction works that came after it. In a new intro to the novel written a few years before he died, Clarke himself recalls watching the opening scenes of Independence Day and feeling a sense of déjà vu. And Independence Day is certainly evoked here, in turn, when the massive ships arrive and all of humanity stops to gawp and gasp with a mix of wonder and sheer terror.

But that’s not the first scene. In the interest of foreshadowing and building a sense of dread from the start, we open on what appears to be a post-apocalyptic Earth, with astrophysicist Milo Rodricks (Osy Ikhile) speaking into some kind of floating droid about Pop-Tarts and the end of the human race as we know it, a fate that’s more than hinted at by the title. Emotionally, he pleads to his unknown audience: “Don’t forget us.”

So. We have a pretty good inclination as to what will befall the characters in Childhood’s End, most of whom are quite altered from how they’re presented in the novel. Since the TV version is set in the present day, and not 1953, this makes a lot of sense, as does adding new characters to flesh out plot points that are important in the original text. Milo, for instance, builds off the book’s Jan Rodricks; though he’s introduced with a completely different backstory, his motivation is the same: his intense curiosity about where the aliens come from, and his suspicions that Earth’s newfound state of Utopia—no war, no pollution, no need to be a wage slave—will come with a heavy price.

Other significant changes: in the book, the aliens communicate through a UN official; here, they choose a Missouri farmer (played by Under the Dome’s Mike Vogel) whose plainspoken ways endear him to the public. And one of the book’s key themes—the death of religion, since who needs to pray to God when aliens can just magically fix everything instead?—is personified by Peretta Jones (Orange is the New Black’s Yael Stone), a woman whose unwavering commitment to her faith is ultimately her undoing. None of these characters are very complex, but they do offer ways for the audience to connect with Clarke’s complex ideas, and that’s important.

The aliens—or “Overlords,” as they’re called in both book and TV series (on the screen, we see a media mogul played by Colm Meany giving them their headline-grabbing nickname)—are best not discussed in too much detail here. The entire first episode builds toward a reveal of what Karellen, the “Supervisor for Earth,” actually looks like, though since he speaks with the commanding tones of Charles Dance, a.k.a. Game of Thrones’ cruel Tywin Lannister, even those who haven’t read the book might suspect he’s not cute like E.T. (For those who have read the book, seeing Clarke’s written description brought to life still makes quite a dramatic impact.)

As Childhood’s End progresses, its focus narrows and we dive deeper into its various individual stories. Decades pass between the Overlords’ arrival in episode one and the events leading up to Milo’s plea for humanity in episode three, but continuity is helped by the fact that all of the same actors play the same characters and don’t appear to age. (This convenience comes courtesy of the Overlords, who’ve made the quality of life so high that wrinkles and gray hair appear to be mostly a thing of the past.)

It’s clear that Graham, Hurran, and company approached Clarke’s original material with deepest respect. But they were also clearly intent on transforming a 60-year-old book that doesn’t have a ton of dialogue into something that contemporary TV viewers would enjoy. And the miniseries format is an ideal vehicle for Childhood’s End—a feature film would be too compressed, while a full series would take too long to get to the point.

Though the technically glossy Childhood’s End tends to favor obviously broad strokes—playing a tender, maudlin version of “Imagine” over scenes of Earth at the height of its Utopian bliss—it’s unafraid to poke into Clarke’s darker ideas. And since most of the fears and uncertainties Clarke evokes remain timely in the 21st century, they still leave a powerful impression.

Childhood’s End begins Monday, December 14 on Syfy.

Top photo by Narelle Portanier/Syfy; middle photo by Ben King/Syfy

It’s the time of year where many of us are forced to endure awkward holiday party. Instead of one of those, have a non-awkward gif party!

Or 11th.

Contact the author at katharine@io9.com.

At a certain point, as we grow up, we all learn the hard truth that Santa Claus isn’t real. And then, as we grow up some more, we discover that’s a lie, and Santa is totally real. We know this because TV shows—many of them ostensibly for adults—have gone out of their way to show St. Nick as a living, breathing, toy-distributing being. Here are just a few of them.

1) Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, “Season’s Greedings”

The Man of Steel isn’t the only super-powered being helping others in the ‘90s series Lois & Clark. In the show’s first holiday episode, Superman takes a bit of time to fly a sleigh—containing Perry White as an Elvis-themed Santa—around Metropolis. Later, Lois hears someone bellowing “Ho ho ho!” from the sky, and assumes Superman is merely dragging Perry White around some more. However, Clark Kent, standing beside her, is much more confused.

2) ER, “City of Mercy”

This medical drama usually stuck to the drama, but things got a little weird in this 13th season episode. After Morris (played by Scott Grimes) pretends to be Santa for a sick little girl, he’s filled with the Christmas spirit—and kind of annoyed at himself for it. He screams, “There is no freaking Santa Claus!” at which point he immediately sees something in the sky. The camera focuses on Morris, his jaw agape, as sleigh bells jingle and someone cries out “Ho ho ho!” See for yourself.

3) Home Improvement, “Yule Better Watch Out”

This episode of the Tim Allen sitcom begins when Mark, the youngest member of the Taylor clan, write his annual letter to Santa, and his two older brothers Brad and Randy tell him Santa is dead, because Brad and Randy are insufferable assholes. Mark is distraught, as an 8-year-old might be expected to be, until their lovable neighbor Wilson (that guy whose face is never fully seen) comes by as Santa to assure little Mark that his death has been exaggerated. A few hours later, Tim seeing Wilson and thanks him for assuaging his son, only for Wilson to confusedly swear he’s been working in his backyard all afternoon.

4) Might Morphin’ Power Rangers, “I’m Dreaming of a White Ranger”

It’s the holidays in Angel Grove, and Lord Zedd is even more annoyed than usual. He decides to take control of Earth’s children by giving them all special tops that make he can use to mind control them. But where to make these tops? Why, Santa’s Workshop, of course. Zedd sends his brother-in-law Rito Revolto (Rita’s boney bro) to the North Pole to force Santa and his elves to make the tops; the Power Rangers of course head North to face them, despite Santa’s innate magic somehow rendering the Power Rangers powerless. I won’t spoil who wins, but I find it very telling that somehow Santa and the Rangers’ powers are so incompatible.

5) Gilligan’s Island, “Birds Gotta Fly, Fish Gotta Talk”

On their first Christmas away from civilization, the castaways decorate a bamboo tree and discuss what they wish they were getting as presents. When Gilligan makes the obvious wish that everyone would get rescued, suddenly a radio broadcast comes through: a ship is headed their way after some kind of Navy recon device spotted them. It’s a Christmas miracle! Alas, after a series of flashbacks to their first day of the island, it turns out the Navy was talking about another group of survivors stranded on another island. The castaways are down in the dumps until Santa arrives and tells them to be grateful for what they do have (each other and coconuts, mainly). As Santa leaves, everyone assumes it’s the Skipper in disguise except 1) no one on the island has a Santa suit and 2) the Skipper arrives half a minute later from the opposite direction. No one points out how Santa completely ignored Gilligan’s Christmas wish.

6) Doctor Who, “Last Christmas”

Yeah, yeah. We all know in last year’s Doctor Who Christmas special, in which Simon Pegg’s best buddy Nick Frost played St. Nick, that Santa was was technically a dream, as everyone—the Doctor and Clara included—were captured by Dream Crabs, who give their victims pleasant dreams while they devour their brains. Of course, because no Moffat-led Doctor Who episode can be that simple, things get Inception-y, there are dreams within dreams, and Santa is there fighting besides the Doctor throughout all of it. But when everyone returns to reality and Santa appears to return to nonexistence, there’s still the matter of a tangerine on Clara’s windowsill, which Santa had promised to give her earlier in the episode…

7) Night Court, “Santa Goes Downtown”

In what was somehow the very second episode of the ‘80s sitcom, a bum who claims to be Santa Claus is brought before the court for vagrancy. As it turns out, he’s supposedly a man named John Stevens who somehow escapes every December from a psychiatric hospital, but inevitably returns every February. However, this does not explain his omniscience, as he knows anything anyone has ever received for Christmas, the fact that prosecutor Dan Fielding used to be held down by his mother when she gave him medicine, and other very specific facts he shouldn’t and couldn’t possibly know.

8) Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “The Body”

Santa never made a physical appearance in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but in the otherwise harrowing episode “The Body,” the demon Anya casually mentions that Santa Claus is quite real, and is one of the names for a demon that spent the 16th century riding in sleighs, breaking into people’s homes by climbing in their chimneys, and disemboweling children. So… yeah.

9) The Librarians, “And Santa’s Midnight Run”

There’s no subtlety about Santa Claus in the world of The Librarians. He simply exists as an avatar of good will—he stores it up over they year and releases it every Christmas so people stop being so grumpy. In this episode, he’s captured by the Serpent Brotherhood so they can steal all his power, but the Librarians rescue, and Santa gets stabbed by some mistletoe. So he keeps switching into different versions of himself (e.g., Odin-Santa) and other merry mayhem ensues. Really, all you need to know is that Bruce Campbell plays Santa, which alone should make it worth seeking out.

10) Smallville, “Lexmas”

In this rather insane episode, Clark spots a drunk man in a Santa suit about to jump off a building, all because “the Christmas spirit is dead.” Clark rescues him and explains that in fact the soused St. Nick interrupted him as he was delivering presents (at super speed) to the children of Metropolis; the man is so delighted he finds Chloe to help her and Clark to deliver said presents. Once Chloe agrees, this Santa and the presents vanish, and Chloe figures the man must have been the real Santa Claus. Which means that this episode of Smallville began with a Santa so depressed that he was about to commit suicide. Happy holidays, everybody!

H/t to Loree Stark for the feature idea, and to TV Tropes for research help.

Contact the author at rob@io9.com.

It’s been a good week for Tarzan in general—first a look at his latest cinematic incarnation (played by Alexander Skarsgård’s abs), and then a ridiculously wild trailer—but also good news for fans following his comic book escapades! Dynamite’s latest Tarzan book will team him up with the undisputed Queen of the Jungle: Sheena!

Sheena, created by Will Eisner and Jerry Eiger, made her debut in 1937 before shortly getting her own comic book, Sheena, Queen of the Jungle—four years before Wonder Woman made her much vaunted debut—making her the first ever female comic book hero to get her own standalone series. But nearly 80 years of adventure later, she’s making her entrance in Dynamite’s range of pulp revival comics, going toe-to-toe with the legendary Tarzan. We’re proud to announce Lords of the Jungle, right here on io9!

Written by Corrina Bechko with art by Roberto Castro, Lords of the Jungle will see Tarzan and Sheena cross paths when Sheena finds her displaced out of time and space, and suddenly in 1930’s Africa—unsure of whether Tarzan will be a friend or foe. Here’s Bechko on her plan for giving Sheena an update for 2016:

When writing characters like these, it’s always best to be mindful of their history. If they don’t feel like the same people, what’s the point? The flip side of that is remembering that they need to feel fresh and relevant.

The Sheena we’re introducing here is a bit younger than some of the iterations there have been over the years, but she can definitely take care of herself. She’s not someone you’d want to be on the wrong side of in a fight.

Dynamite have been doing a cracking job reviving some legendary pulp heroes for their comics lately, but this sounds like it could be a ton of fun, and a cool way to reintroduce one of comic’s oldest heroes to a modern audience.

Lords of the Jungle #1 will be out March 16th, 2016.

Header image credit: Sheena, Queen of the Jungle #13 cover by Maurice Whitman, 1951

Do you like being able to drive in cars? Do you like the way World War I turned out? Do you not like Nazi collaboration? If your answer to all three questions is “yes,” then Eugene Houdry is your kind of guy.

Eugene Houdry was born in France in 1892 - not an ideal time for anyone who wanted to live to see thirty. Houdry had just enough time to graduate from college, work a little at his family’s metal working business, and do his mandatory military service when World War I broke out in 1914. It’s rather remarkable that he didn’t receive his first major wound until 1917, especially since he served in the tank division. Even at the end of World War I tanks looked like this:

Houdry became obsessed with cars. He came to America after the war, toured race tracks and car companies, and went back to France eager to improve the process of making gasoline. France did not have large petroleum stores, Houdry could see that whoever owned a fuel source for cars owned a huge piece of the future. And by 1910, the world was facing a gas crisis.

Crude oil gets separated into hydrogen-carbon chains. Each chain has different uses, depending on its boiling point. Larger chains are heavier and hence less inclined to boil. Smaller chains with lower boiling points are suitable for gasoline. The only way to get large chains to break down into small ones involved blasting them with heat, which was incredibly expensive and consumed a lot of energy. Supply was not keeping up with demand.

France was entirely out of the loop. All it had was lignite, otherwise known as “brown coal.” Break that into petroleum, and France was in business.

Unfortunately, Houdry utterly failed to do that. He did, however, notice something odd about petroleum that came in contact with a substance called “Fuller’s Earth.” Fuller’s Earth is almost as common as mud. If you have a cat, it’s probably in the cat litter. It may be in your laundry powders or facial cleansers or mud masks. It was first used to clean the grease out of sheep’s wool before it was made into cloth. The aluminum silicate is a magnet for oils.

More importantly, it was a catalyst for oils. The presence of this substance helped break hydrocarbon chains down more easily than ever before. When Houdry came to America, he spent multiple years working with oil companies to perfect a process, still called the Houdry Process, that would turn less oil into more gasoline.

Houdry had time to see his chemical process change the world. By the 1940s, automobiles were everywhere — and unfortunately, so were Nazis. Houdry’s criticism of the Vichy Government in France got his French citizenship revoked. America granted him citizenship in 1942. After all, the “Houdry Unit” of gas companies was converting more oil into fuel than ever, in order to crank out fuel for the vehicles used in the war effort.

Eventually, Houdry became troubled by the inefficiency of cars, and the carbon they were putting into the air. This was well before climate change was an issue, but Houdry knew it wasn’t good for anyone to breathe carbon monoxide. Back to work he went, coming up with a catalyst that allowed cars to burn up residual carbon molecules, increasing the energy output and decreasing how much carbon went into the atmosphere.

Houdry was still hard at work on how to creatively use various catalysts when he died in 1962. He was as modern a thinker as it was possible to be—especially for someone born in the 1800s.

Top Image: Tropenmuseum, part of the National Museum of World Cultures. Lignite Image: Markus Schweiß, gamma correction by Julo

Here’s the pitch: A Rebel and an Imperial fall in love against the backdrop of the entire Star Wars trilogy. Sounds like a winner, right? It is. It’s the plot of Lost Stars by Claudia Gray, one of the first releases from the new Journey to the Force Awakens series of books.

Though the book is aimed at the YA audience, it tells one of the most incisive and eye-opening Star Wars stories to date, illuminating past events, revealing new ones and introducing us to two key new characters in the Star Wars universe: Thane Kyrell and Ciena Ree.

In the book, Thane and Ciena grow up on opposite sides of the tracks on the outer rim planet of Jelucan. Eventually, the farmer and the aristocrat bond over their love of flying, adventure, and the Empire. They become the best of friends and go to the Imperial Academy together. They develop more feelings for each other—but as the Empire grows stronger and stronger, Thane begins to question their methods, while Ciena does not. It leads to a galaxy-spanning romance that starts before A New Hope, and continues through The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi as well as several major events that take place before The Force Awakens.

What makes Lost Stars so good is the detailed, believable story and characters. Since we follow Thane and Ciena from their childhoods, we develop incredible bonds with them. We know who they are front to back, just like they know each other. Rarely do you get to the core of characters like this, especially in the Star Wars universe.

Plus, they’re living through the original trilogy from inside the events we’ve seen on screen. You get to see iconic moments not just from the perspective of these characters, but from the Empire and Rebels alike; we see how their friends react, how their enemies react. It’s a truly awesome experience to read an insider perspective of how Imperials are trained, the movements of the Rebels, what the outside galaxy thinks of Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker and others. We find out how people reacted to the destruction of Alderaan, the battle of Yavin, the battle of Hoth, Cloud City, the Battle of Endor, basically anything you loved from the original Star Wars trilogy is here, but with a twist.

And it’s all set against this passionate, idealistic romance between two very strong characters. Young romance can be so cliché, but tropes like coincidental meetings and melodramatic dialogue feel less stale here.

One gripe I did have with Lost Stars is its length. When you are telling a romance that spans decades, along with the story of the Star Wars universe, that’s obviously a lot of ground to cover, so you understand why Lost Stars feels a little too expansive. Every chapter is just chock full of detail, plot and more that gives the book a very dense feeling. Still, the story is always accessible and Gray’s prose is always simple and pleasing to read.

Eventually though, that massive scope makes the experience that much more satisfying. Lost Stars is a must read for any Star Wars fan looking to get a fix either before The Force Awakens, or after. The book has some awesome connections to the new film, but nothing too spoiler-y. It’s just a nice side dish to the main course of the original trilogy and sequel trilogy too.

http://www.amazon.com/Journey-Star-W...

Contact the author at germain@io9.com.

Perhaps it’s common knowledge among rabid fans of Star Wars and its ever-expanding universe, but we at Jezebel only recently found out that Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o would be playing a tiny, mostly-CGI, 1000-year-old, goggle-wearing alien pirate named Maz Kanata in the newest installment of the series.

On Wookiepedia (which our friends at io9 inform is us a trustworthy source for this kind of thing), they write:

Maz Kanata was a female pirate. She lived for over one thousand years and her eyes, covered with goggles, held a special power. Around thirty years after the Battle of Endor, she owned a castle which played host to travelers, smugglers and other riff raff.

Here’s a clearer shot of Kanata from a recent trailer:

That’s Lupita Nyong’o. Right there. On the left. The little orange alien. In the goggles. With the shocked look on her face. If you are capable of dealing with this revelation, congratulations, because we sure weren’t.

Please enjoy some jokes we made with each other earlier today:

when u just start rolling and ur friend spot u across the club:

when u wake up and u still maz:

when the battle of endor is over n the riff raff is like can i stay with u for a bit:

when u walk into tuesday morning and spot the new shit

when u find out lupita gonna play u in a biopic:

when a dude rubs up on u in the club n then is all apologetic like o sorry miss

Whoops. :(

Contact the author at bobby@jezebel.com.

Image via Lucasfilm. Cool-ass memes via Bobby Finger, Emma Carmichael, and Jia Tolentino.

J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books have become such an integral part of the way we all live our lives, sometimes we take aspects of them for granted. Like, for example, the amazing original cover art by Mary GrandPré. She now has new a colleague: Olly Moss.

Moss, a popular designer in the pop art scene, has created brand new covers for the eBooks of all seven of Rowling’s Harry Potter novels. Check them out.

In typical Moss fashion, each cover blends more than one image, creating almost an optical illusion. On Prisoner of Azkaban, it’s both the shrieking shack and Sirius Black’s animagus form. Goblet of Fire is the tents of the World Cup and flames of the goblet. Order of the Phoenix you may see Hogwarts, or you may see the Phoenix. On Half-Blood Prince you may see Dumbledore casting a spell, or the book at the center of the story. For Deathly Hallows, Harry’s scar is actually Voldemort. And on and on.

These covers are now available on the eBook versions of the series at most major retailers.

Read more on Moss’ process over on Pottermore. And for more on the artist himself, visit his site.

Contact the author at germain@io9.com.