Is there anything Vin Diesel can’t will into existence? His 2009 return to the Fast and Furious fold helped turn that franchise into a monster. He’s got a xXx sequel on the way, and has already made two sequels to Pitch Black. Now, that latter world will expand into TV.

Diesel just signed a new deal with Universal TV. One of his first moves will be developing a TV show described as a “complement” to his Riddick films. Those consist of Pitch Black, The Chronicles of Riddick and Riddick, which follow a unusually brutal and talented killer alien fugitive who can see in the dark.

There’s no word if Diesel will reprise his character on the show. But odds are this will be Merc City, a show he talked about last month. It’ll follow “the Mercs and Bounty Hunters of the Riddick Universe.” In that same Instagram post, he also said that director David Twohy was writing a fourth Riddick movie, to be titled Furia.

[TV Line]

Contact the author at germain@io9.com.

Adam Driver, until recently best known for his work on the HBO hit series Girls, was a U.S. Marine before becoming an actor and eventually becoming The Force Awakens’ primary villain, the masked Kylo Ren. He briefly recounted this crazy journey on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon last week.

http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/compared-star-...

Although Driver wanted to go to college for acting after graduating from High School in 2001, his grades kept him from getting into the schools he wanted. He even began a journey to L.A. to pursue his dream without any money in his pocket, when his car broke down and he had to return to his hometown in Indiana.

After doing a series of not so glamorous jobs, Driver was looking for something more in life. Then the events of 9/11 unfolded, and he was compelled to join the Marine Corps.

The now famous actor finally got to California, albeit via the completion of boot camp and getting orders to be stationed at Camp Pendleton. There he became an 81mm mortar man with the 1st Battalion, 1st Marines.

Driver said he enjoyed being part of grunt life in the USMC, and his unit was training for war as America’s response to the 9/11 attacks remained a fluid affair. Then he was involved in a mountain-bike accident that left his sternum shattered. He tried to stay in but was medically discharged before reaching his third year with the Marines. He felt as if he had let his unit down and the Marine Corps, not staying in for four years and not going into combat, but there was nothing he could do about it.

He then attended the University of Indianapolis to build up his academics so that he could apply to the prestigious Julliard School of the performing arts. He got accepted and found that his military service greatly helped with his ability to excel at acting.

Read the entire story of how he went from an acting student with no money living in New York to a star in what will be one of the biggest blockbusters of all time, and how it all related back to his experience as a Marine in this fascinating piece from the Military Times.

http://www.militarytimes.com/story/military...

Top shot of Kylo Ren via StarWars.com

Contact the author at Tyler@jalopnik.com.

Lisa Goldstein has an incredible track record as a fantasy writer, including the award-winning The Red Magician and the beautiful collection Travelers in Magic. Now she’s written a science fiction book about time travel, Weighing Shadows—and it’s just as mythic and strange in its own way.

http://www.amazon.com/Weighing-Shado...

Without giving too much away, Weighing Shadows is about a woman named Ann, who’s sort of a paranoid uber-hacker who keeps to herself and holds down a terrible job. Until one day, Ann gets recruited to join a mysterious organization of time travelers called Transformations Incorporated. The company is actually run by people from the future, the 24th century in fact, but they need people from the early 21st century to go back in time to various points in history and make small changes.

The future world of 2327 is suffering from huge environmental problems, and the human race doesn’t have a terribly bright future—but making even tiny changes to the past can result in huge alterations to the future. So Ann and her colleagues are sent back on missions that are often as simple as cutting an axel on a cart, or moving a vase from one table to another, causing the future to be reshaped. Except that Ann quickly begins to suspect that her company’s agenda isn’t as benign as she’d been led to believe.

Oh, and this is a world where you can absolutely change the past, and there’s only one cohesive timeline—so whatever changes you make, you’re stuck with. (I always like that form of time travel, personally.)

There are a few things that make Weighing Shadows unique among time-travel books. First, the notion of someone from the present being recruited by people from the future to change the past is a nifty concept that opens up all sorts of questions about agendas, but also perspectives on the past. In some ways, the people of 2015 turn out to be more similar to the people of medieval Europe than we do to the people of 2327, but in other ways we’re much more like our descendants than our ancestors.

But also, the time periods that Ann visits provide an opportunity to show how much more complicated and multi-layered societies were in the past, including some civilizations that we think of in simplistic, brutal terms. Ann visits ancient Crete, which turns out to be a matriarchal civilization whose customs defy our ideas about monarchy and democracy. Similarly, trips to ancient Alexandria and medieval France reveal societies that are in constant flux, in which some elements of the society are surprisingly open and others are more repressive.

In Weighing Shadows, you discover that the reason why changing the past is so relatively easy is because societies are, in general, surprisingly easy to tip in one direction or another. Every society has elements that are pushing them down a more progressive or permissive path, alongside elements that are pushing in a more repressive direction. It’s this struggle that Ann finds herself possibly on the wrong side of, and the book takes an overtly feminist turn that may seem preachy to some readers. But the best moments in Weighing Shadows are downright creepy, as we get glimpses of what it looks like when the worst instincts of human nature end up holding sway.

Ann is a uniquely disaffected protagonist, who’s scarred by her terrible relationship with her mother and has problems with authority—and it’s fascinating to watch someone like that go back in time and try to pass unnoticed in various periods of history. She feels vividly drawn even when her circumstances are somewhat sketchy.

Much like Goldstein’s last book, The Uncertain Places, Weighing Shadows is written in a sort of exaggeratedly matter-of-fact, simple tone in which events just sort of happen, one after the other, with no pause to consider how strange they are. It reminds me a bit of the pointedly simple style of the last few Gene Wolfe books, to a similar effect.

The Uncertain Places was one of my favorite books by Goldstein, and Weighing Shadows isn’t quite as much fun—but it is a very unique spin on time travel, dystopia, and the abuse of power. Anybody who loves time travel stories and wonders about the ramifications of changing the past will get a huge kick out of Weighing Shadows.

Get it from Amazon, BN, Mysterious Galaxy, Indiebound or Worldcat.

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All The Birds in the Sky, coming in January from Tor Books. Follow her on Twitter, and email her.

Movies use the same footage as other movies. They use the same sets. And yes, they use the same props too. Screen Rant reveals movies that have lifted props from other films in their latest video list and it shows how The Avengers used the same plane as True Lies, how Back to the Future’s Mr. Fusion was a Krups coffee maker, which was also used in Alien, and how Terminator 2 used the same weapon as Predator.

Find out more props used in multiple movies below. Some of them are obvious shout of inspiration and/or purposefully linked for the universe but all are interesting nonetheless.

SPLOID is delicious brain candy. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, andYouTube.

Hammer Film Productions’ heyday spanned the 1950s through the 1970s, with gloriously gothic takes on classic monster stories that starred Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, and other British stars of the day. Here’s our take on the studio’s best and worst ... though even “bad” Hammer films do have their cheesy merits.

The Best!

1. The Curse of Frankenstein

Hammer made its first color horror film in 1957, and the color was blood red. A wild-eyed Cushing plays the diabolical Swiss doctor Baron Victor Frankenstein; a melty-faced Lee (who doesn’t really appear in the below trailer) plays the made-from-dead-body-parts monster. Everything about the film—directed by Hammer regular Terence Fisher—is wonderfully theatrical, and fortunately for Hammer and creature-feature devotees, it was a mega-huge hit.

http://www.amazon.com/Curse-Frankens...

2. Curse of the Werewolf

Fisher directs a rakish and intense young Oliver Reed—who’d soon go on to become one of cinema’s most legendary hellraisers—in Hammer’s 1961 take on the moon-crazed beast.

http://www.amazon.com/Werewolf-Paran...

3. Plague of the Zombies

Two years before George A. Romero terrorized the Pennsylvania countryside with the living dead, Hammer unleashed same on the spooky English moors, circa Victorian times. Witchcraft! Voodoo! Fox hunting? Yes! An essential not just for Hammer fans, but zombie completists, too.

http://www.amazon.com/Hammer-Horror-...

4. Quatermass and the Pit

Released stateside with the even-more-evocative title Five Million Years to Earth, 1967’s Quatermass and the Pit was the third in a series based on a BBC TV show also called Quatermass and the Pit. It’s the most science fiction-leaning entry on this list, and is about the discovery of an ancient alien race who’re still highly capable of wreaking mad havoc among humankind. Hellish havoc, you might even say.

http://www.amazon.com/Hammer-Horror-...

5. Dracula, a.k.a. Horror of Dracula

Another Fisher-Cushing-Lee collaboration, this 1958 thriller followed up on The Curse of Frankenstein’s success with another classic monster. (“Horror of” was added to the title in America to make sure Bela Lugosi fans knew which version they were getting.) Lee plays the Count; Cushing plays his nemesis, Van Helsing; and a youngish Michael “Alfred Pennyworth” Gough plays a man whose wife and sister-in-law are threatened by you-know-who’s fondness for fine young throats.

http://www.amazon.com/Horror-Dracula...

6. Taste of Fear, a.k.a. Scream of Fear

Hammer’s twist-filled, 1961 black-and-white thriller features Christopher Lee in a supporting role, but the main focus is American star Susan Strasberg, who’s great as a young, rich, wheelchair-bound woman who may or may not be slowing losing her mind.

http://www.amazon.com/Icons-Horror-C...

7. The Devil Rides Out, aka The Devil’s Bride

Fisher directs Lee again, but this time it’s from a script by Richard Matheson (adapted from Dennis Wheatley’s novel). And the evil monster here is the big daddy of ’em all, with the most photogenic cult of followers, too: SATAN!

http://www.amazon.com/Hammer-Horror-...

8. Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires

Hammer’s final Dracula movie (which stars Cushing as Van Helsing, but not Lee, who’d given up his fangs in 1973 for reasons we’ll explain below) came out in 1974. It was a collaboration with Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers Studio, and at the time, the mash-up of vampires and martial arts might have confused audiences and critics a bit. But in today’s currency, that combo spells cult movie gold. As in Golden Vampires.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Legend-7-G...

9. The Vampire Lovers

The first of the “Karnstein Trilogy,” this titillating 1970 entry takes its tale from the 1872 novella Carmilla, one of the earliest works of vampire fiction. Peter Cushing co-stars (although not, in this different setting, as Van Helsing), but the picture belongs to Ingrid Pitt, who plays Marcilla/Carmilla, the seductive vamp who (scandalously, in 1970) plucks female victims—though really, she’ll take down anyone who gets in her way.

http://www.amazon.com/Vampire-Lovers...

10. Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde

When scientist Dr. Jekyll (Ralph Bates) transforms, he becomes the super-hot and sinister Sister Hyde (Martine Beswick)! That concept along would be amazing enough, but this winning 1971 film also manages to get Jack the Ripper and body-snatching duo Burke and Hare into the story, too.

http://www.amazon.com/Jekyll-Sister-...

And the Hmmmm...

Dracula A.D. 1972 and The Satanic Rites of Dracula

Here we have two films that dared to wonder what would happen if Cushing’s Van Helsing and Lee’s Dracula existed not in Victorian England, but in early-1970s swingin’ London. The two films are linked in setting and with similar characters ... and also by not being very good movies—especially when compared to the stellar filmography that preceded them. After Satanic Rites, an over-it Lee hung up his cape, ending his 15-year reign as Hammer’s go-to vampire.

http://www.amazon.com/Film-Favorites...

http://www.amazon.com/Satanic-Rites-...

Back when Star Wars was brand new and nobody knew what it was, Mark Hamill had to go on the BBC’s iconic children’s show Blue Peter and explain it to the kids. And his explanation is just perfect.

As transcribed by the Radio Times, Hamill explains:

“It’s the stuff that fairytales are made of. We have a fairy princess, we have an innocent farm boy who yearns for adventure. Alec Guinness is a wise old wizard who teaches me a mystical Force, somewhat like Merlin would teach a young King Arthur. Harrison Ford plays Han Solo, a cynical space pirate who we hire to transport us through the galaxy.”

The whole interview is great, including the part where Hamill bemoans the fact that he had no scenes with Peter Cushing—so Hamill had to sneak onto the set during two days when Cushing was filming, just to watch him work. And Hamill had to get Cushing to sign some posters, because he’s a fan at heart. Awww.

And here’s more of the Star Wars stars on Blue Peter, for the Empire Strikes Back, in which R2D2 and C-3PO get compared to the Daleks:

And here’s C-3PO on the Noel Edmonds show Swap Shop:

These clips come via a new program(me), called Star Wars at the BBC, which you can watch in its entirety here.

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All The Birds in the Sky, coming in January from Tor Books. Follow her on Twitter, and email her.

No, Doctor Strange will probably not feature a Spider-Man cameo. The Flash casts another comic book villain. Lev Grossman teases the differences between The Magicians books and the show. Plus, good news for The Librarians, the stunts of The Force Awakens, and Black Mirror starts casting. So many Spoilers!

Captain America: Civil War

Marvel have released a new synopsis for the film:

Marvel’s “Captain America: Civil War” finds Steve Rogers leading the newly formed team of Avengers in their continued efforts to safeguard humanity. But after another incident involving the Avengers results in collateral damage, political pressure mounts to install a system of accountability, headed by a governing body to oversee and direct the team. The new status quo fractures the Avengers, resulting in two camps—one led by Steve Rogers and his desire for the Avengers to remain free to defend humanity without government interference, and the other following Tony Stark’s surprising decision to support government oversight and accountability.

[Comicbook.com]

The Titan

Orange Is The New Black star Taylor Schilling has been cast against Sam Worthington in this near-future set movie about a military family who participate in genetic modification trials to prepare humanity to live in space. [Deadline]

Doctor Strange

Marvel Co-President Louis D’Esposito has shared another picture from the set, this time featuring himself and new Spider-Man actor Tom Holland. Naturally, this has led to speculation that Spider-Man will appear in the movie—but do you think Marvel would reveal that kind of cameo from an early tweet from the set? Highly unlikely.

The Little Mermaid

The Wrap is reporting that director Rebecca Thomas is in talks to helm the live action adaptation of the classic tale for Universal.

Han Solo Anthology

Lawrence Kasdan offers a minor update on the film:

Yes, and we’re actually quite far along. My son [Jon] and I have written the story about young Han Solo. Chris Miller and Phil Lord are going to direct it, and we’re still working on the script. It’s still developing. It should be crazy because those guys are amazingly talented and you don’t know what they’re going to do. What they did with “LEGO” was amazing. So that should be a crazy movie.

[CBR]

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Here’s another featurette, this time focusing on the stunt work on the film.

Supergirl

Hank Henshaw/Martian Manhunter actor David Harewood says that the White Martians—a species from the comics on Mars who wiped out the green martian race of J’onn J’onnz, leading to his arrival on Earth as Martian Manhunter—are going to play a part in the show:

In Episode 11, we have a visitor from another planet who’s a White Martian. There are two Martian species - it feels really weird talking about this (laughs) I’ve not been able to say anything about it - there is a Green Martian species and a White Martian species and the White Martians, in our story, are responsible for the death of the whole of the Green Martians. It was a fire and they burned them and we get to see a lot of that.

[Comicbook.com]

Game of Thrones

In an interview with wetpaint, Natalie Dormer briefly teases the sixth season:

Gone off piste — we don’t have the books any more … This is Dan and David’s first independent season without the penmanship of George R.R. [Martin]. It’s going to be very interesting for the fans to see. It’s completely fresh snow to step into.

The Flash

Adam Stafford has been cast as the DC comics villain Geomancer, who will appear in episodes 13 and 14 of the current season. Described as “a dangerous meta-human with the unique ability to create earthquakes,” Geomancer was briefly a villainous member of the Injustice Society. [CBR]

The Librarians

Rejoice! The show has been renewed for a third season by TNT. [TV Line]

The Magicians

Magicians author Lev Grossman briefly hits on the difference between the show and the books in a new post on his website:

For example: the characters are a few years older than in the books – they’re entering graduate school rather than college. Also in the books we don’t learn about Julia’s life and her world until the second book, but in the show she’s a major character from the start. And Janet’s name is Margo. Penny is way more badass than Penny in the books. Also there’s an extra Physical Kid whose name is Kady.

Some things from the books don’t happen, some things happen differently, and other things happen that are nowhere in the books. When you see this stuff you may find yourself asking, why, great triple-horned god, why?

The answer to all of this is basically, because of TV. It’s a different medium, and you tell stories differently there. Not everything translates directly.

Black Mirror

The new Netflix-incarnation of the series has begun casting: Mackenzie Davis (The Martian) and Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Doctor Who, Belle) have allegedly been cast. [Den of Geek]

Galavant

Here’s a bevy of new pictures from the premiere episode, “A New Season... AKA Suck It, Cancellation Bear”—you can find more at the link. [Spoiler TV]

Shadowhunters

TV Line has an exclusive featurette featuring the cast and crew discussing the lexicon of the show.

Doctor Who

Finally, here’s a couple of new pictures from the Christmas Special, “The Husbands of River Song”. [Blogtor Who]

Additional reporting by Gordon Jackson and Charlie Jane Anders. Image: Supergirl.

Alan Tudyk and Nathan Fillion’s Con Man already had a bit of a twisty turn-y satirical premise—it was a series about actors in another series within it, a Firefly-esque show called Spectrum cancelled before its time. But now Spectrum is going to live on in our world, if not in Con Man’s, as a new comic miniseries.

http://io9.gizmodo.com/con-man-satiri...

Tudyk will co-write the Spectrum comic with Canadian author and fellow Con Man producer PJ Haarsma, with art provided by Sarah Stone, for Automatic Publishing. Spectrum follows the adventures of starship Captain James Raaker (played in Con Man’s world by actor Jack Moore—Nathan Fillion himself), commanding an experimental spaceship as Earth’s last hope following a catastrophic alien invasion.

It’s such a weird idea—but the idea of Tudyk creating his own sci-fi comic that is vaguely Firefly in a roundabout way is delightful.

The miniseries will last for four issues, with the special “#0” debut releasing for free as part of the annual celebration for Free Comic Book Day on May 7th, 2016.

[Via CBR]

The HoloLens headset from Microsoft is the world’s first untethered wearable that generates holograms before your eyes. It’s been nearly a year since we first strapped on a prototype, and as the tech goliath prepares to unleash a first batch of units to developers in the coming months, I was invited to check out just how far the technology has come.

Starting today, Microsoft’s letting developers flock to their flagship store in New York City to try out the same demos I did a few days ago. I should be clear:I tried a version of the headset that’s very similar to what will ultimately ship, but as always, no gadget is final until you’re pulling it out of the box.

First, a little bit about how it works. With the HoloLens, the “cursor” is your eyes. You look around a real room you’re in and select holographic images that appear in your goggles by hovering the cursor in the middle of your field of vision over the object. To interact with the object, you “air tap.” In front of the goggles, point your index in the air and then make a fast swipe down motion. Voice commands are also at your disposal.

Here at Gizmodo, we’ve had hands-on the headset before. And there are still a few pitfalls that still exist: The field-of-vision is still narrow, meaning you can only see holograms directly in front of you. The headset still feels a bit top-heavy, and the adjustment wheel on the strap that goes around the back of your head snags your hair while you rotate it to tighten the thing.

But, there are many improvements, too. I didn’t see any of the distracting rainbow-like effects at the corner of the goggles, as we did in a previous hands-on opportunity. I also didn’t notice any reflective objects in the room bouncing back light that distracted from the illusion. Actual objects looked like actual objects, and the holograms looked like holograms. While I didn’t participate in previous Gizmodo firsthand tests, I didn’t think that you had to move your head too much in order to move the “cursor” that floats in front of your eyes to select menu items, as we previously reported.

This week, I got to play Project X—now called Project X-Ray—for the very first time, the dope-as-hell AR video game that the company demoed on stage back in October. Slip HoloLens on, and malicious alien robots tunnel through your breakfast nook’s walls and unload lasers of doom at you. It’s your job to gun ‘em down. It’s Halo meets laser tag.

In the game, enemy alien robots explode through the real walls in the room in AR, leaving you to physically scramble around the room to track them down, physically maneuvering to avoid their beams. It’s fun! There were a couple moments when I felt like the image signal flowing before my eyes was kind of weak; like, the AR images were kind of faint and flickery. Overall though, it was intuitive to use with the handheld controller that was provided. The actual gameplay was precise and responsive, as well. Foes disappeared as soon as they were hit, with the same instant feedback you’d find in a traditional video game.

You might be wondering, how’s this any better than virtual reality? It’s a good question! To me, virtual and augmented realities are apples-and-oranges. While VR is like being cocooned in an 360-degree IMAX planetarium, AR blurs the line between the actual and the virtual worlds more than VR does. It’s just a different kind of fun to see bloodthirsty extraterrestrials orbiting your buddy’s head in real life, or plowing through your family portrait from ‘91 hanging on your parents’ foyer wall and then opening fire.

I’ve truly never played a video game like Project X-Ray before, and so long as Microsoft can make the experience glitch-and-gimmick free, the creative opportunities for developers are limitless. Imagine swinging an AR golf club in your backyard and seeing a holographic golf ball rocket into your annoying neighbor’s window, or setting off holographic fireworks into a night sky.

I will say that, out of all three of the HoloLens demos I was treated to, Project X-Ray was by far the glitchiest. Granted, the action was all extremely frantic: Enemies buzzed around me constantly and quickly, which required actual dodging and hopping and pivoting to parry their unending sortie. During all that, it was sometimes hard to keep track of them all because the holograms of my robotic flying foes got weak, started flickering, or were hard to follow in that dinky field of vision. It was just revealed back in October, and it’s the newest of the three demos, so it’s understandable that it’s less polished than the rest.

Next up, Microsoft showed me a demo of what it calls “holographic storytelling.” The idea here is that you can replace boring PowerPoints with holograms. (How appropriate for Microsoft!) In the demo, I stepped into a fictional boardroom pitch for a luxury watch. I looked at real table in the room and saw a large hologram watch blown up to the size of a golden retriever. It looked realistic, but it was also not a totally convincing illusion. The watch was supposed to be directly on the table, but instead the image was canted off-center and appeared to be falling off the edge.

From there, I could move the cursor with my eyes to different points of interest on the watch. For example when I looked at the band, a pop up told me what the links were made of. In another spot I was given info about the battery.

The really cool thing about this, from a business presentation standpoint, is that you can actually see where your audience is looking at the hologram—assuming they’re also wearing a HoloLens set, that is. You can also transform the hologram so that it looks like a heat map: The redder parts of the “object” are where more people look. In my case, the big watch face was a focal point of the hypothetical audience.

For the final demo, I was shown a 3D graphics suite called HoloStudio. Here, you can download a 3D project you’ve already created on a computer, create a hologram out of it, and then tweak it in augmented reality. When you’re tinkering, you can send the project back to your computer or a 3D printer.

The first thing you have to do before you turn the real room into an AR workshop for 3D holograms is “scan” the space. This tells the software where you can place your finished creations in the real room. For example, you’ll be able to stick your homemade AR sign on a wall next to a real-life painting, or on an odder shape, like the top of an end table or the side of a sofa.

My demo consisted of a cartoony, underwater dive scene inspired by Hawaii. There were small blue fish, a couple of human divers, sand, lots of coral, plants, anemones, and other undersea critters. At first, it was a tiny, diorama hologram—but I could blow it up so that it filled the room until I was inside the underwater scene. I could then use my eye-cursor to select one of the fish, copy and paste him around the vignette. I even blew one of them up to pony-sized proportions. In another scene, I was able to spray paint a Star Wars X-Wing orange.

All in all, I can honestly say that this was unlike anything I’ve experienced before. There’s still plenty to be skeptical of: That peskily narrow field of vision needs to be made way bigger to achieve the same level of immersion as VR—that still hasn’t changed, and needs to be addressed. And the quality of the holograms themselves, as well as the accuracy of their placements in the rooms, were at times unreliable and inconsistent, so that needs work. Plus, HoloLens will only be available to developers and commercial buyers in North America for $3,000 a pop in quarter one of 2016, so it’ll be a while before it’s even available to Joe Schmoe consumers like you and me.

Until then, know that holograms are here, and that some of the biggest tech companies on planet Earth are working to get them in our hands—even the ones that are staticky and flickering. As my colleague Brent Rose said: “I’m so glad I lived long enough to make it to the future.” Me too, dude.

All images courtesy Microsoft

Contact the author at bryan@gizmodo.com, or follow him on Twitter.

Every year in video games brings with it some lovely surprises, but every year also brings some sorry disappointments.

At the end of each year, we like to take a moment to look back and complain about all the things that bummed us out. Hey, it’s part of the healing process! We let loose our bile ducts in 2012, 2013, and 2014, and we’re back to do it again for another year.

After polling all of Kotaku’s staff for input, here are our biggest disappointments of 2015.

Arkham Knight’s PC Version Is So Busted It Gets Pulled

We’ve never seen anything like it: Rocksteady and Warner Bros. released Batman: Arkham Knight on PC and the port was so totally fucked that they actually stopped selling it and took it back to the shop for improvements.

This was a loser across the board—a good game was totally hobbled by seemingly foreseeable performance problems, and the experience no doubt soured the ambitious, impressive Arkham Knight for a lot of PC users. When the PC version finally resurfaced several months later, it was improved, but far from “fixed,” and the publisher eventually offered refunds to anyone who wanted one.

Too Much Bragging About Timed Exclusive DLC

2015 was yet another year where the folks at Sony and Microsoft dedicated a lot of press-conference time to boasting about the games for which they’d secured console-exclusive downloadable content. We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: timed exclusive DLC is bullshit. Funding and publishing first-party exclusive games for your console? Cool. Doing some deals and (presumably) helping bankroll third-party games in exchange for timed exclusivity? Not ideal, but whatever. Inking agreements that time-lock certain characters, missions, and downloadable extras to a certain console, meaning that anyone who plays on a different platform has a lesser experience? Argh.

The Order: 1886 Lands With A Thud

When it was first introduced, The Order: 1886’s high-concept premise and gorgeous aesthetic were promising. The Knights of the Round Table have lived hundreds of years, and are now using souped-up Tesla guns to battle supernatural forces in Victorian London? Hell yes, sign us up. Unfortunately, the finished game was a brief, thrown-together mess full of repeated ideas, undercooked mechanics, and dudes with guns in place of supernatural beasts. The biggest bummer of all was the pervasive sense that this game could’ve been great.

The New 3DS Gets Literally Two Exclusive Games

It was exciting when Nintendo launched a whole new 3DS this year, even if they did decide to name it “The New 3DS.” But it was too bad that the system still has so few games that take advantage of its increased processing power. This year, the handheld got a total of two New 3DS-Only games: a port of Xenoblade Chronicles and a port of The Binding Of Isaac. Yeesh. It’s understandable that Nintendo wouldn’t be keen to split its 3DS player base too aggressively, and it’s true that the New 3DS makes regular 3DS games look better in 3D, load faster and supports Amiibos without a dongle. It still would’ve been nice to be given a couple more reasons to feel good about shelling out for this thing.

Metal Gear Solid V’s Story Falls Apart

How strange that Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, a 2015 standout and one of the best stealth games ever made, could still wind up on our disappointments list. But here we are: Billed as an epic final chapter in the decades-long Metal Gear saga, The Phantom Pain started strong and then took a bizarre left-turn toward nowheresville, sputtering into its final act with a collection of recycled missions and a hodgepodge of increasingly disconnected cutscenes. What a shame that such a storied saga should reach such great heights, then collapse with the summit in view.

Cool Competitive Multiplayer Games Can’t Get Traction

Whatever the reason—overpriced games, oversaturated gamers, bad marketing, a lack of persistent progression—it’s a shame to see more and more competitive multiplayer-only games launching to some fanfare before quickly losing momentum and failing to curate a lasting community. Without enough players, it’s difficult for anyone to find a full match, let alone actually enjoy the game. It happened last year with Titanfall, near the start of this year with Evolve, and we’re worried it’s going to happen again with newer games like Star Wars: Battlefront and Rainbow Six: Siege. These are fun games with plenty to offer, but if the people who make them can’t figure out how to make it easy for players to start—and want to continue—playing, they’ll peter out well before they meet their full potential.

Nintendo Tramples YouTubers

YouTube is still somewhat uncharted territory when it comes to copyright regulations and fair use, so it makes sense that game publishers would be experimenting with the best ways to keep an eye on how people profit from their intellectual properties. Nintendo, however, got more than a little overzealous in 2015.

Their iron-fisted approach to YouTube regulation hurt the speedrunning community in particular, with some very cool Nintendo-related channels getting hit with onerous copyright claims. Nintendo’s own “Creator’s Program,” which required YouTubers to kiss the ring and register their videos or channels with Nintendo before sharing ad revenue with the company, pretty much pissed everyone off.

As the moderately well-known pizza enthusiast PewDiePie put it, in an age when there are so many games for popular Let’s Players to choose from, Nintendo’s games just went to the bottom of a lot of lists. This kind of stuff threatens to erode some of the mountain of good will Nintendo has built over the years.

Silent Hills Is Cancelled Harder Than A Game Has Ever Been Cancelled

On our “best surprises” list last year, we had this to say about the then-just-announced Hideo Kojima/Guillermo Del Toro Silent Hills collaboration: “The whole thing sounds like some sort of outlandish joke one of us would make up a few drinks into a Kotaku meetup.” It was too amazing, too wild, too good to be true. And then it simply… wasn’t. Konami cancelled the game. The super team-up was over. Kojima would never make a Silent Hill game. And most distressingly, the ingenious promotional horror experiment P.T. was eradicated from all servers, now only surviving on the PS4s of those who downloaded it and saved it on their hard drives. Del Toro said it best, when asked about the whole situation: “Makes no fucking sense at all.”

Actually, you know what? Here’s a disappointment for you:

Konami

Good god, Konami sure fucked it up this year. It’s not like they haven’t ever fucked it up in past years, but these guys just completely drove the bus off the cliff in 2015. Where to even begin? There’s the whole Silent Hills thing, which we just went over. There’s the report that they’ve been treating their staff like prisoners, monitoring their every move and reassigning less “useful” game developers to be janitors and security guards.

And then there’s the colossal clusterfuck that was Metal Gear Solid V, wherein the publisher struck beloved director Hideo Kojima’s name from the box, removed him entirely from any public mention of the game, reportedly had their lawyers bar him from receiving an award at The Game Awards in America while sending PR flacks to accept Japanese awards on his behalf, all before finally, finally setting him free. They did all that to the guy who helmed one of the most amazing, ambitious, wildly entertaining games in recent memory—a game for which their PR flacks will continue to accept awards for months and years to come. It’s likely that there’s more to this whole story than we know, but it’s hard not to look at it all and think, man, Konami really does suck.

Phantom Dust Disappears Like A Phantom, Made Of Dust

Speaking of development woes, it was a bummer that Darkside Games’ Phantom Dust reboot vanished into thin air so soon after it surprised everyone at E3 2014. It was even more of a bummer to learn the messy behind-the-scenes story, and to see just how doomed Darkside’s project was almost from the start. Phantom Dust deserved better, man.

PC Gamers Get The Worst Final Fantasys

Final Fantasy has always been associated more with consoles than with PC, but that doesn’t mean PC gamers deserve garbage ports of the series’ older entries. This year, the PC got new versions of Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy VI, but not the lovely, pixelated creations that so many of us fell in love with. Nope, both PC versions have the gaudy high-res graphics that Square Enix added to their inexplicably fugly iOS ports.

No Red Dead Redemption Anywhere

Look, we don’t need Rockstar to announce Red Dead Redemption 2. We don’t need them to announce that the last-gen RDR is finally being ported to PC and current-gen consoles. We don’t need to replay John Marston’s adventure in HD, or even just to have Microsoft and Rockstar announce backwards compatibility so we can play the Xbox 360 version on Xbox One. We don’t need any of that, but it would make us so, so happy. Rockstar, don’t you want the whole world to be happy? It would appear that you do not.

No Single-Player Grand Theft Auto Expansions, Either

Several people on our staff really like GTA Online, when we can find time to play. It can be good for a laugh, some of the new modes are fun, and the heists they added earlier this year are often brilliant. But that doesn’t mean we stopped wanting single-player DLC for GTA V. Rockstar’s two episodic expansions for GTA IV were terrific. We were all very excited to see what else they could do in Los Santos, but it just didn’t happen in 2015. No announcements, no news, and definitely no new San Andreas adventures.

Fallout 4 Doesn’t Quite Set The World On Fire

It’s not that Fallout 4 was bad, or even mediocre—it was really cool, admirably open-ended, fun to explore and mess around with, and sometimes even unforgettable. But there was still something disappointing about it, some combination of the dated engine, the awful animations, the same old shonky performance issues, the stripped-down role-playing and dialogue systems, the well-meaning but ultimately frustrating main storyline, and the hair-tearingly wretched user interface. Fallout 4 is an exceptional game in a lot of ways, but for many of us, its sharpest qualities were often dulled by a thin gauze of discontent.

I Didn’t Finish Suikoden II

Just about every day, my colleague Jason Schreier asks me if I’ve played more Suikoden II. I’m sorry, Jason. I just haven’t had time. I know you’re disappointed; everyone is. I’m not sure what to say, other than that I’m sorry and I’ll try to do better.

I haven’t played any more Trails In The Sky, either.

I’m sorry.

Halo 5’s Story Is A Big Wet Noodle

Hey, remember how Halo 5’s story was hyped as this extended chase sequence where one hero—Jameson Locke—was hunting down the other hero—series star Master Chief—for a mysterious crime the Chief may or may not have committed? Remember how they made this whole surprisingly clever, Serial-inspired podcast series to promote it? Oh man, it was gonna be so cool! Two squads, eight heroes, and one hell of a firefight, amirite?

Except no, the story was actually a big wet noodle that the game expected us to somehow eat with a spoon. Did you want Locke and Chief to have an epic, playable showdown? Sorry! Did you want a villain whose motivations made sense? Too bad! Did you want to be able to follow the narrative without having to read a bunch of tie-in books? Oh, well! Were you hoping to fight the same copy/pasted boss over and over and over again? Sorr—oh, actually, cool, in that case you’re covered.

Valve And Bethesda Blow Their Paid Mods Experiment

Modders deserve to sell their work, if they’d like to. No one really disputes that. But the various ways that whole notion might work are certainly up for debate, and Valve’s first go at a paid modding marketplace—aided by Skyrim developer Bethesda—was a serious misfire. The whole initiative seemed half-thought-out, and there were so many questions raised—questions that apparently had no good answers—that Valve and Bethesda shut the service down less than a week after starting it. Hopefully someone somewhere will come up with a way for modders to get paid for their work, but it was dispiriting to see the first bona fide attempt fail so thoroughly.

Those were the things that disappointed us the most this year, but we’re sure you have plenty of disappointments of your own. Feel free to list ‘em in the comments below, and as usual, if one of your biggest 2015 disappointments was “Kotaku,” we promise we’ll do better next year.

To contact the author of this post, write to kirk@kotaku.com.

Konami joke image via @tortoiseontour.

Have you been waiting in line for days to see the new Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens? Of course you haven’t. You bought your tickets online like a normal person. But there once was a time when buying tickets online wasn’t even possible. Below we have pictures of those poor chumps from the Olden Times™ who had to buy tickets after waiting in line — sometimes for weeks.

Star Wars: A New Hope

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The Empire Strikes Back

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Return of the Jedi

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The Phantom Menace

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Attack of the Clones

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Revenge of the Sith

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Superman is having a rough time in comics lately. In an attempt to make the character feel more human, he’s lost some of his power, he’s been exposed to the world—but the excellent “Young Superman” anthology series American Alien shows Clark’s humanity in a real, earnest way by examining his formative years.

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Spoilers ahead for Superman: American Alien #2, by Max Landis and Tommy Lee Edwards.

The second issue of American Alien moves on from the young Clark Kent we saw learning to fly in the first book to giving us a slice of an optimistic, bright little boy. As a teenager, Clark is, outwardly, totally different. He argues with his parents. He flirts with girls. Hangs out with friends he probably shouldn’t hang with, drinking beer he definitely shouldn’t be drinking. He even admits to using his X-Ray vision to take some cheeky looks at people.

This is the Clark we witness throughout much of this story—not a hero, just a boy, a teenager. And yet, it’s fascinating that threaded through all that normalcy there’s an essential Superman-ish qualities that shines through in Landis’ pitch-perfect characterisation of Clark—combined with the sketchy brilliant linework of Tommy Lee Edwards, whose masterful shading gives each character, and the environment of Smallville a lived-in, darker aesthetic that perfectly fits the tone of the story—that makes this sullen teen still feel like the wide-eyed kid with acceptance issues that we met in the first issue. He might not be it yet, but at this character’s core is the element that will turn him into the Man of Steel.

That really comes into play when Clark is deeply thrust into the dark underbelly of the story. A small gang of drug-dealing criminals returns to Smallville for a spate of bloody crimes—a cop shot on the outskirts of town, an innocent family executed in a gas station—and eventually to take the family of said gang’s leader, Owen, hostage. At first, Clark tries to stay out of it, to keep himself away from the police, even when the Sheriff (who knows that Clark is an alien) begs him for help. But that desire to do good can never really keep him away—even though it has some pretty disastrous consequences.

Clark goes to confront the gang, and in the process, gets shot at, revealing his impervious skin. And in a moment of anger and fear, his heat vision bursts out—gruesomely slicing the arms off one of the crooks.

In the fallout of the incident, Clark lashes out at both the Sheriff and his adoptive mother, in typically teenaged fashion—crying out that maybe he shouldn’t be protected, because he’s dangerous and can defend himself, running off when Martha Kent offhandedly remarks that she just wants her son to act like a “normal human teenager”—as he tries to reconcile the innocence of his desire to do good with the tumult of emotions and anger inside him that drove him to do what he did. It ultimately ends with Clark reconciling on the roof of the Kent farm with his mom, thankful that even with the way it turned out, even how it made him feel, glad that he saved people’s lives.

It’s a painful, relatable vulnerability that totally works for Clark in a way that his current adult version just isn’t getting. It makes you understand the person he will grow up into. It makes him feel human in a way that current Superman stories aren’t quite hitting the mark.

Turning the current Clark Kent into a lesser Superman doesn’t make him appear more human to his readers. But examining this young, fragile Clark as he gets to grow up, come into his powers and ultimately his heroic identity, does—we’re seeing a human turn into a superhero, rather than a superhero being made human. It’s far more fascinating, and so far, it’s making American Alien the only must-read Superman comic that DC have right now.

Here’s an old Imperial Stormtrooper from the original Star Wars trilogy turning itself into a new First Order Stormtrooper from Star Wars: The Force Awakens in one sweet GIF. Made by GadgetLove, they say that the “size difference of the two designs makes it look as if they are breathing in and out while evolving.”

SPLOID is delicious brain candy. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, andYouTube.

“Viral” marketing has always straddled the line between “it’s kind of cute that they made a website for The Daily Bugle” and “that seems kind of desperate.” But with Batman v Superman, “viral” marketing has reached its absolute nadir.

I cannot emphasize the scare quotes around “viral” enough. Even when it actually is the case that something gains inexplicable popularity through pure serendipity, adding the word “marketing” gives it a whole new level of misery. Saying “viral marketing” out loud leaves a bad taste.

We’ve had a couple of years of fake websites for fake companies in movies and TV. But what’s going on with Lex Luthor in Batman v. Superman is beyond the pale.

Remember when “LexCorp” sponsored free wifi at New York Comic Con? Nothing like forcing the con to pretend LexCorp is a real thing on their FAQ page:

Yes. Free WiFi throughout the Javits Center will be provided by LexCorp Industries.

LexCorp unites humanity through technology. We believe in technology as a means of communication, unification and a source of inspiration. To access the WiFi on-site at the Javits Center, connect to the “LexCorp” network from the list of available networks.

You will automatically be redirected to the LexCorp WiFi login page where you can enter your email address and click “CONNECT” to gain access to the network. LexCorp – together, we can build a better world.

You know what doesn’t sound ominous at all? Giving your e-mail address to LexCorp. And it wasn’t at all frustrating that the wifi had connectivity problems, so you were forced to give to them multiple times. And watch a video commercial for LexCorp. And not one that told you anything about Batman v Superman. Just one with the LexCorp logo. It was miserable branding.

That was bad and annoying, but the sponsored content on Fortune and Wired is a whole new level of strange. Fortune’s came out on October 5 and is a profile on Lex Luthor. It’s not a video of Jesse Eisenberg in character as Lex Luthor. It’s a written “article” about the life of fictional character Lex Luthor. And it is exactly as infuriating as it sounds. Here’s a representative sample:

As we patiently wait our turn at the complimentary LexCorp vegan food truck (this day’s fare: pesto-olive pizza with raw almond crust), the son of Alexander Luthor Sr. – Lex Luthor – explains the evolution of LexCorp.

Complimentary LexCorp vegan food truck. Turn that over in your head for a bit. Turning LexCorp into a parody of a hip Silicon Valley workspace doesn’t really sell the whole “he’s the villain” angle. Mostly, it just reminds us that Eisenberg did this role already in a better movie.

Want to see the dastardly Lex Luthor fall even more in your esteem? Here you go!

“Well, Dad was a complicated guy,” his down-to-Earth son notes as we pass a tasteful display of his world-famous collection of meteorite crystals. “He came from a country where the government, in the guise of protector, had absolute control over the citizens. That drove him. I get it. Heck, I’d hate to see that sort of thing happen over here.”

“Heck,” he says. And “darn” and “shoot,” I’m sure.

As for the accusations of a few fringe outliers who accuse him of being a “war monger,” Luthor just laughs them off. “I don’t know very many ‘war mongers’ who have a foosball table in the conference room.”

This is the content meant to sell us on Batman v Superman. It is not doing a good job. In fact, it is doing active harm. Because it is impossible to take Lex seriously now. It’s also impossible to take seriously a world where this article exists. It ends with, “It’s just lucky for us that, whatever the dangers lurking for us today, we have on our side Lex Luthor, a man of tomorrow.” No. Stop.

Which brings us to Wired’s “interview.” Not only is Lex going to take a beating this time, the fake interview is conducted by Ron Troupe, another DC character. Who, in the fictional world of this bit of advertising, works at Wired, I guess.

THE ELEVATOR DOORS open and I step into the opulent Royal Penthouse Suite at the Park Metropolis Downtown. Eleven lavish bedrooms, each with its own floor-to-ceiling Italian marble bath, a 100-seat cinema/lecture hall, a four-lane bowling alley (two standard American, one duckpin, one Belgian feather), twin helipads and its own private Caffè Bene. In other words: exactly what you’d expect for $95,000 a night.

Of course, no one’s actually staying here. This is just the space he’s rented for my fifteen-minutes-but-more-like-ten, no-holds-barred-except-several interview.

If I didn’t know better, I’d think billionaire tech wunderkind Lex Luthor was trying to intimidate me.

A) Caffè Bene! Two for one in the advertising in this piece! B) $95,000 a night. Lex is a fucking moron for how he spends money. C) Of course he’s trying to be intimidating. He’s Lex Fucking Luthor. But wait! There’s more!

RON TROUPE: Nice digs.

LEX LUTHOR: We’re not doing that.

RON TROUPE: Doing what?

LEX LUTHOR: We’re not opening with a wide-eyed layman’s description of the hotel room that makes me look unrelatable just to set up a dramatic twist wherein, lo and behold, you discover I’m surprisingly down-to-earth because I know the score of the last Metros game.

RON TROUPE: Do you?

LEX LUTHOR: Metros 102, Guardsmen 86.

RON TROUPE: Weird. (it’s the correct “relatable” small talk, but coming out of him, it sounds less like a basketball score than a set of algebraic integers.)

Holy mother of god, someone tried to write like Sorkin. It’s so not clever that it’s physically painful. And, once again, while the Eisenberg version of Mark Zuckerberg was good in The Social Network, it’s not exactly intimidating. I also question the constant reminders of better movies in the ad campaigns for your superhero movie.

The entire fake interview is like this. The good news is that, unlike the Fortune piece, Lex does not sound like a squeaky clean child. The bad news is that he sounds vaguely like he should be standing on a street corner with a sign reading “The end is near!”

Look at it from the other side: today, there are more criminals than ever. If you’re a criminal, that means more competition. So if you’re going to survive in that economy, you have to be better; you have to edge out your rivals. Shouldn’t the same be true for those on the side of the law? If justice is going to survive in the new global paradigm, we have to get better, invest in new disruptive technologies, think outside Pandora’s Box. Who has the resources to do it? The government? No; the only thing holding that old purse together is a thick layer of impenetrable red tape. Vigilantes like the Batman? Not unless they have access to vast amounts of untold riches.

Or possibly one with a racist epithet:

LEX LUTHOR: We should all be careful when we elevate anyone, human or alien, to “super” status.

RON TROUPE: Because we’re all equal.

LEX LUTHOR: Well that’s just absurd. No – I’m saying we need to be selective and elevate the right people. The right human people.

Congratulations, Warner Brothers! You’ve ruined Lex Luthor before anyone even saw your movie. Instead of letting it speak for itself, you poured resources into created hundreds of fake words about a fake character and a fake company. Instead of letting the audience fill in the blanks when they see the movie, you’ve packed it full of vegan food trucks and human-first propaganda. The only satisfactory movie now is one where Lex is just punched in face for two hours.

And it kind of seems like they know they’ve just shot themselves in the foot. Because this bit of meta-commentary is in the Wired “interview”:

LEX LUTHOR: Well, he is. In fact, I’d say [Superman is] all too human. Any objective analyst will tell you that his brand of justice, vigilantism, is painfully outmoded, designed to be effective in an age when the law carried billy clubs because crime carried knives. The most dangerous guy on the street worked in the shadows because he was cowardly and superstitious. That’s all you needed to play upon in order to disrupt their operations. You want to clean up the streets? Dress up like the boogeyman, switch on a fog machine and lower your voice.

RON TROUPE: When you put it that way, it sounds ridiculous.

LEX LUTHOR: It didn’t when the Batman first appeared, but that was a long time ago. This is a new world, Ron, and it’s time to get serious.

“It sounds ridiculous.” YES IT DOES. And pointing out that the whole premise is ridiculous doesn’t get you points. Neither does having your villain say “it’s time to get serious” when “being too serious” was a major criticism of the last film.

This needs to stop. Lex Luthor isn’t a real person, and pretending he is makes the whole endeavor look insane. Even if these were well-written—which they certainly aren’t—they’d still be doing an awful lot of telling and not showing. Stop it.

Image: Warner Bros.

Contact the author at katharine@io9.com.

We’ve written about Universal’s hoped-for dream casting of Angelina Jolie Pitt in the Bride of Frankenstein remake. Now, Variety cites anonymous sources that the studio would love for Jolie to direct as well—and actually confirms one bit of news about the film, too: it’ll be written by blockbuster veteran David Koepp.

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Screenwriter Koepp has worked on Jurassic Park, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, Mission: Impossible, Panic Room, War of the Worlds, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, among others. He’s also directed films like Stir of Echoes (which he also wrote), and uh, Mortdecai.

The Variety piece goes on to note that Jolie Pitt is waiting to read the script before she commits to the project, and reminds of this tidbit:

The film is part of the studio’s endeavor to expand and unify a network of classic monsters led by narrative architects Alex Kurtzman and Chris Morgan. Like so many of its current monster movies, plot details are under wraps. “Bride of Frankenstein” is set in the present day in order for the film’s characters to have cross-over capabilities with other monster movies.

If a mega-star like Jolie Pitt comes aboard, will she get more screen time than Elsa Lanchester did in the 1935 James Whale original? And how’s Koepp gonna write a modern Dr. Pretorious? We’ll be keeping an eye on this one for sure.

This year’s genre television gave us high highs and low lows—sometimes on the same show! In no particular order, we’ve rounded up the year’s best moments, along with some of the absolute worst. SPOILERS AHEAD.

The Best of the Best

Doctor Who: Clara and Ashildr in the diner TARDIS

Clara Oswald’s final season as a companion in Doctor Who was alternately great and frustrating. But the bit with Clara and Ashildr flying through space in their own TARDIS makes us smile.

Person of Interest: “If-Then-Else”

Person of Interest is a reliably good show, but “If-Then-Else” was a whole new level of amazing. It went into the Machine’s mind to show it simulating possible outcomes. There was drama and humor in equal bunches, and it really was a reward for the fans.

Daredevil: The hallway fight

The fights in Daredevil were one of the highlights of the show, but one stood out above the rest: the hallway fight.

Supergirl: Punching a car and bonding about rage

Supergirl has had some ups and downs, but this moment, where Kara and James talk about how societal expectations mean that they can’t really express their anger, is the best they’ve ever done.

Agent Carter: Peggy gets her due

While we, the audience, knew that Peggy was great, the rest of the SSR didn’t. So when a mission finally let all the new characters see her as the hero she is, it was exactly what was needed.

Game of Thrones: Hardhome

Just when we were getting tired, Game of Thrones decided to prove that no one could do a giant set piece quite like they can.

Z Nation: Zombie George R. R. Martin finishes A Song of Ice and Fire

Some cameos are perfect. And Z Nation’s proof that the zombie apocalypse didn’t stop George R.R. Martin from writing is one of them.

Agents of SHIELD: Fitz and Simmons finally get together

This was a long time coming.

Gotham: Fish Mooney scoops out her own eye

Gotham is at its best when it just goes for balls-to-the-wall crazy. And nothing was more shocking than Fish Mooney removing her own eye so that no one else could have it.

Mr. Robot: Darlene is Elliot’s sister

After everything, Elliot finally connects with someone who is a good match for him. Of course, he only remembers that she’s his sister after he kisses her. It’s a perfect reveal to once again make us question Elliot’s mind.

Helix: Pays tribute to Andy Griffith

If you want a better scene showing that a character has retreated into a fantasy world where his son isn’t dead, a hallucination where they re-enact the opening to The Andy Giffith Show (complete with music!) can’t really beat it.

Flash: Gorilla Grodd

The fact that Flash can make a super-intelligent, psychic gorilla into a reasonable thing is a goddamn miracle.

Star Wars Rebels: Darth Vader shows up

If anything could better set up the world of Star Wars Rebels than Darth Vader showing up to lay the smack down, we don’t know what it is.

American Horror Story: Hotel: Lady Gaga

In this Jessica Lange-free season, what seemed like stunt casting at first has been absolutely perfect for the show, with Lady Gaga as the ruthless yet vulnerable vampire, the Countess. Her insanely gorgeous costumes alone make the show a weekly must-watch—and help make up for any shortcomings she might have in the acting department.

The Leftovers: “International Assassin.”

The weirdest episode in a show that held nothing back; it’s when the main character, Kevin Garvey, kills himself so he can take down the ghost that’s been haunting his mind on her turf. The afterlife looks like a sterile business hotel and Kevin’s role to play is that of an assassin, sent to kill a presidential candidate (played by his adversary — or is it?). The journey he takes there is supremely strange and ends with him throwing a little girl down a well before coming back to life. That sounds extremely bizarre but somehow in the context of the show it all makes sense.

The Librarians: Jenkins and de-aged Lancelot fight in the season finale

The sword fight in the season one finale of The Librarians had everything: John Larrroquette issuing droll put downs and Jerry O’Connell chewing all of the scenery.

iZombie: The greatest alibi of all time

When you’re accused of using a mascot outfit to kill someone, what better alibi is there than claiming you’re a furry? None.

Arrow: Sara Lance attacks Thea Queen

This season’s greatest fight sequence was in “Haunted.” In it, a soulless, hyper-violent Sara Lance attacks Thea Queen. The fight is intense, moves through several rooms, and turns from a fight to a chase as Thea stops even trying to fight and instead desperately tries to get away.

Outlander: Geillis reveals that she’s from the future, too

“The Devil’s Mark” was one of the most layered episodes that Outlander did in its first season. Geillis uses her smallpox vaccine scar to “prove” she’s a witch, and, in doing so, sacrifices her life and her unborn child’s life to save Claire’s. It was a great reveal and a moment of true bravery on Geillis’ part.

Hannibal: Bedelia waits for Hannibal to come back and finish his dinner

Pinning down a single moment of Hannibal’s superb final season is almost impossible. But the one we have to pick is also the last thing we ever saw: Bedelia Du Maurier sitting at a lavish dinner table with her own leg as the main course. The table is set for three, which seems to hint that Hannibal and Will Graham survived their little tumble. One last beautiful and gruesome image from a show that had many.

Ash vs. Evil Dead: Ash fights an evil princess doll

This moment from the pilot sold us on the whole series. A creepy and funny visual gag which proved that the show was going to be everything we hoped it would.

Jessica Jones: Jessica and Luke’s first sex scene

Yeah, there’s the prurient sex angle to this one. But there’s also the fact that we finally see two characters get right down to it when they meet without dragging it out. And the show even accounted for the ways their superpowers would come into play.

The Worst of the Worst

Game of Thrones: Ramsay rapes Sansa

This was, for a lot of people, the moment when Game of Thrones finally went too far. It was unnecessary, brutal, and served only to remind us that a character we knew was vile was, in fact, a bad man. Nothing about it was good and the backlash it generated was actually deserved.

Under the Dome: Sex heals a stab wound

Even for Under the Dome, this was awful. Hilarious in its badness, but bad nonetheless.

CSI: Cyber: the team tackles Black Lives Matter

This was not a topic to rip from the headlines. It was especially not one to give the “he’s actually alive and wasn’t brutalized by police!” twist to. If the victim of your Black Lives Matter episode is white law enforcement, stop. Just stop.

Outlander: Jamie spanks Claire

There was a certain point in the first season of Outlander where the constant threats of sexual violence started to ruin the show. The turning point was definitely when Jamie takes a belt to Claire while other characters joke about it. It may be a big scene from the book, but the show blew past it in a very upsetting way. And it was all downhill from there.

Falling Skies: the alien tentacles magically resurrecting Anne

Bad worldbuilding and bad characterization means that Anne ended up randomly pregnant, dying, and coming back from the dead thanks to magic alien tentacles.

Supergirl: Blurry Superman shows up

Superman keeps showing up in this show, but always as a blur. He’s there, you see, but he can’t actually be a character. This is one instance where just never showing him would be better.

Jessica Jones: Detective Clemmons dies

Jessica Jones repeated the exact same arc for this character that Daredevil had for Ben Urich. Which would have been bad enough. But then there’s the fact that killing off the older black character twice in the same year is not a good habit to get into.

Continuum: Alec’s girlfriend Emily leaves him

This happens because Alec’s son from an alternate future says she’s not his mother. Which, OF COURSE she’s not his mother, it’s an alternate future. Get over it.

Agents of SHIELD: Raina the self-pitying hedgehog mutant

There’s nothing quite so unpleasant as a compelling villain becoming a whiner. Raina got the powers she wanted, but the change to her looks was just too much to handle.

Sense8: Everybody re-experiences their own birth

While taking ecstasy in the concert hall. For like 15 minutes.

Dig: Jason Isaacs goes skinny dipping in a religious site with a girl who looks exactly like his daughter

Pseudo-incest and desecration of a religious location. Creepy and offensive.

Flash: Barry’s dad takes off immediately after spending 15 years in jail rather than spend an afternoon with his son

Trying to free his father was the thing that motivated Barry. So it’s kind of weird that when that happened, Henry just booked it so Barry could be the best Flash he can be.

The Walking Dead: Glenn’s bullshit “death”

It wasn’t just that the show let the audience leap to the wrong conclusion. The show cheated by using every trick in the book to make it look like Glenn was dead. They traded on their reputation for actually killing people and then went back on it.

Gotham: Gordon murders an unarmed, helpless man

You know how Jim Gordon was originally the only good cop in Gotham? Yeah, Gotham got tired of that and just had him gather a murder posse and kill a dude. And then he gets engaged! Too bad Batman’s still a child and can’t bring Gordon to justice.

Stitcher: the sexual harassment vibe of making Kirsten wear a sexy catsuit, and she wakes up in some dude’s bed after passing out

In addition, Kristen’s “safety code” is to express her love for Linus, the skeevy sysadmin. Later, we discover the only other person to be plugged into that machine nearly died, which makes the notion that she has to type a bunch of sophomoric crap to be rescued even more heinous.

True Detective: Colin Farrell’s character looks dead ... only to wheeze to life at the start of episode three

What a tease. Really the most let-down moment of an overall disappointing show that could have built on the overwhelming enthusiasm for season one, but instead raised suspicions that season one’s success was a one-off fluke.

iZombie: Major’s drug addiction

Remember how Major was so depressed that he’d been blackmailed into hunting zombies down that he started doing drugs to deal? Neither does the show, since it lasted barely two episodes. At least they cut short a plot we had no interest in continuing to watch.

Arrow: Deadshot’s backstory is revealed, and it’s super-stupid

The episode “Suicidal Tendencies” includes a flashback sequence so terrible it should come with a medical warning that it induces violent, uncontrollable eye-rolling. Floyd Lawton, loving husband and father, pulls a gun on his wife over a dispute about a sandwich. His wife then calls the police while making eye contact with the man who just threatened her with a gun. Nothing like aiming for high drama and coming off silly instead.

Minority Report: The Washington Redclouds

It’s hard to pick just one awful moment from this dumpster fire of a television show, but this one is a true representative of everything awful about Minority Report. This show was so in love with being clever about the future, it was littered with lingering shots that read like parodies of the future. This one, where we see that we’ve only got four years to go before the Washington Redskins rebrands as the Washington Redclouds, is one of the worst.

Thanks to Charlie Jane Anders, Cheryl Eddy, Rob Bricken, Bryan Lufkin, Germain Lussier, and Esther Inglis-Arkell for their suggestions!

Contact the author at katharine@io9.com.

For months, we have pored over every screenshot, every glimpse of footage, and every toy package relating to Star Wars: The Force Awakens. But did we miss the Kurt Vonnegut shout-out? Or are we just seeing things?

Earlier today, we were discussing great books that defy genre categories, including Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions. So we were obliged by law to post a picture of Kurt Vonnegut’s anus, as sketched by Vonnegut himself:

And then commenter lightninglouie reminded us where we’d seen that image recently, saying, “Hey, whaddaya know?”

Could this be the secret meaning behind the First Order? Are the villains of the new movie actually motivated by an obsession with Kurt Vonnegut’s unmentionable regions? Do we finally know the real origins of Supreme Leader Snoke? It all makes sense now! (Or maybe it doesn’t. We’ll take either answer, really.)

Contact the author at charliejane@io9.com and follow her on Twitter @CharlieJane

I saw Star Wars in the movie theater in 1977, the summer before I turned six. Then I saw it again, and again, and again. Pace Joseph Campbell, the mythology of my childhood was structured around the movie, rather than vice versa. So my parents’ attic ended up with a lot of Star Wars toys in it.

12. Hoth rebel base

The big gun was OK, but in the absence of any AT-ATs, there wasn’t much to do besides flip a switch to knock down the ice bridge.

11. Imperial guard

I didn’t ever consciously decide that I was getting too old for action figures when Return of the Jedi came out. And I did get the red-robed imperial guard. But I never bothered buying an Ewok.

10. TIE fighter pilot

Kenner didn’t put out a TIE pilot figure till it was almost time for Return of the Jedi, so long before that I just took one of the stormtroopers and colored all over it with a black permanent marker. You can’t not have a TIE fighter pilot.

9. Bossk

Bossk definitely belonged to my brother. I liked him because he had a fantastic blaster shaped like a sawed-off shotgun. More importantly, till Return of the Jedi came out, nobody knew what Jabba the Hutt even looked like, so Bossk filled the part. I still think he’s a better space gangster than the giant slug was.

8. Landspeeder

This was the first Star Wars vehicle anybody brought to school in first grade and also the first one I had. The wheels on the undercarriage demanded a little too much suspension of disbelief, but the super-bouncy floating suspension mostly made up for that.

7. Slave I

The Millennium Falcon was outside our price range, so Boba Fett’s Slave I was the most imposing ship in our armada. Its cargo capacity was unbelievable; we could jam it full of action figures indefinitely. My kid was playing with the swinging pilot seat and dislodged a Jawa that had been hidden up there for 30 years.

6. Snowspeeder

The guns had clear tubes in them that lit up, and the rear-facing second seat was exactly right.

5. Han Solo blaster

I was blond and younger so I was always Luke to my brother’s Han, but somehow I was the one who ended up with the blaster. Obviously Greedo never got the chance to shoot first.

4. Jawa

Tiny action figures were the greatest action figures.

3. Boba Fett

In a routine elementary-school gift swap before The Empire Strikes Back, I reached in the grab bag and came away with Boba Fett. At the time, he was a mail-away figure. It was like finding the golden ticket in a Wonka Whipple-Scrumptious Fudgemallow Delight. I still don’t know how it ever got in there.

2. X-wing fighter

I was born the day after Labor Day, so my birthday always floated around the first day of school. I have a bitter and vivid memory, so clear it might be fabricated, of sitting in the back row of second grade in a new school, thinking miserably about my new X-wing sitting at home not being played with.

1. TIE fighter

I would not have thought the TIE fighter was the greatest Star Wars toy I had ever known, but when I dug one out of the attic and opened those little doors on top, it hit with unimaginable Proustian power, and 35 years disappeared instantly.

Contact the author at scocca@gawker.com

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As one of the most anticipated movies of all time, it’s not surprising that The Force Awakens has inspired hundreds of rumors from fans, desperate to know what’s going to happen a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. As it turns out, there are at least a dozen or so of these rumors that are utterly, completely insane, and we’ve collected them here.

Warning: Although all of these rumors are bonkers, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re all false. So if you’re trying to stay completely spoiler-free, you might want to stop reading, just in case!

1) Kylo Ren is actually Luke Skywalker.

There have been rumors that Luke Skywalker will have turned to the Dark Side ever since Episode VII was first announced. I think that’s unlikely—I doubt Lucasfilm wants to negate his heroic journey from the original trilogy by making him evil—but it’s still within the realm of possibility. But additionally, there’s a surprisingly popular version of this rumor that adds that somehow Luke is the guy wielding the cross-hilted red lightsaber. This is nonsense. While obviously I wouldn’t put it past J.J. Abrams to lie to fans about characters’ true identities (he’s certainly done it before) we’ve seen actual photos of actor Adam Driver in Kylo Ren’s costume, sometimes without his helmet. Also, if you just look at Ren’s body and movement, it’s very clearly not 64-year-old Mark Hamill in that outfit.

2) Han and Chewbecca have traded the Millennium Falcon in for a Star Destroyer.

A Super Star Destroyer, to be exact. Why would they do this? No idea. How would they get one? No clue. Even if they had one, how do two people “pilot” a ship that supposedly requires 280,000 minimum crew members to operate? What the hell would they even be doing with one? This particular rumor came from Badass Digest, which also said that Poe Dameron was The Force Awakens’ version of Lando, and would even be wearing a cape. Since that definitely isn’t true, I think we can also safely say Han and Chewie are sticking with the Falcon.

3) Finn is Han Solo’s son.

Although pretty much every character in The Force Awakens has at one point been rumored to be related to Luke, Leia, Han, Lando, the Emperor, and pretty much every other character in the original trilogy, I’d like to take a moment to share this particular theorized relationship, because it is so delightfully nuts. This unlikely possibility came into being after Marvel’s Star Wars #6 comic, which revealed Han Solo was at someone point married to a woman named Sana, a character who is black. While obviously this would account for certain physical differences between Han and Finn, this is clearly a case of assuming all black people in the Star Wars universe are related (obviously, Finn has frequently been rumored to be Lando’s son as well). More importantly, we know that Finn starts out as a Stormtrooper. Can you imagine Han Solo letting his kid work for the remnants of the Empire? Also, can you imagine Disney telling mass audiences that Han Solo was married to someone other than Leia, had a kid, and has spent the last 30 years as a deadbeat dad? It’s one thing to bring it up in a comic; it’s an entirely different deal to bring up on-screen in a $200 million movie.

4) Luke’s lightsaber is some kind of literal key.

We know that Luke’s blue lightsaber, the one he lost during his duel with Vader during The Empire Strikes Back, is somehow found during The Force Awakens, and many story rumors have hinted that it specifically is what sets the plot of the movie in motion. This is probably true. What isn’t true is that Luke’s old lightsaber is needed because it is a key to some kind of special Jedi tomb. So, uh, when exactly would this tomb have been created? I mean, Anakin presumably built his own lightsaber, like most Jedi do, and then Luke lost it in ESB. You’d think if Anakin, Obi-Wan or Luke let someone borrow it to craft a corresponding lock for some random Jedi tomb, it’s the sort of the thing that probably should have come up in the first six movies. Also, a lightsaber isn’t particularly key-like. It’d be like making a gun a key. Sure, you technically could, but using a regular key sounds so much more practical.

5) Luke started a new Jedi Academy and then the Knights of Ren wiped it out.

This rumor is crazy, but it’s not actually impossible. Many rumors say when The Force Awakens begins, Luke has been missing or gone in hiding for many years. Sometimes it’s because he’s afraid of his massive Force powers, sometimes it’s because he’s in penance for something. This specific rumor states that Luke actually did start to rebuild the Jedi Academy, only to have the Knights of Ren slaughter all his padawans. That sort of tragedy would certainly be enough to make Luke to give up on his dream of bringing back the Jedi order and/or go into hiding. Still, if this is true, that will make three out of seven Star Wars movies that features the wholesale slaughter of children, which would be crazy all by itself.

6) Pussy Riot appears in the film.

Lots of people have been rumors to be starring in the film. There are still people who are certain Daniel Craig is playing a Stormtrooper. People are still convinced Benedict Cumberbatch will appear, even though the voice from the first trailer that sounds so Cumberbatch-y has been confirmed as Andy Serkis. And one rumored guest star—Simon Pegg—actually turned out to be true! All that said, no matter how sympathetic J.J. Abrams and other Disney executives may be to the Russian punk group Pussy Riot’s fight for women’s and LGBT rights, I am 100% certain that Disney does not want any media coverage for their kid-targeted, family friendly, possibly billion-dollar-grossing movie to include any mentions of the word “pussy” for any reason.

7) The rebels have their own megaweapon.

The idea that the New Republic would, in fear of the remnants of the Empire building a new Death Star or a similarly terrifying weapon of mass destruction, build a terrifying weapon of mass destruction of their own doesn’t seem beyond the realm of possibility. It could also explain why our heroes are calling themselves the Resistance—seeing the New Republic fall into the same traps that the Empire did, Leia and the others could have split off in disapproval. However, it would be a major bummer for fans to learn that Leia and the Rebel Alliance’s work in the original trilogy was for nothing. Happily, there’s another rumored reason for why the Resistance exists, and it’s plausible enough that I won’t mention it here, because it is most likely an actual spoiler.

8) Max Von Sydow is playing a character from the prequels.

We know very little about who the 86-year-old actor is playing, although most rumors peg him as living on Jakku as a sort of mentor to Rey. Other rumors says his body is mostly cyborgized, and still others say that he’s playing a character from the prequels. There’s no telling whch character this may be, but given that these sequels have shown no connections to the prequel trilogy in the slightest, having one a prequel person return as an elderly cyborg is pretty crazy. If you want to make a guess of your own, TFA takes places 52 years after Revenge of the Sith, so presumably look for a character who was in their 30s then.

9) Max Von Sydow is playing Boba Fett.

Although Boba Fett is technically a character in the prequels, I don’t think anyone considers him a “prequel character.” This is why I separated it from the above rumor, but also because this idea is extra bonkers. Boba Fett is like 10 in Attack of the Clones; since TFA is 52 years later, that would make Boba 62, which Von Sydow is nearly 25 years too old. I have no doubt that Boba Fett survives the Sarlacc Pit in the new canon; the Star Wars: Aftermath book isn’t particularly subtle about it. But that doesn’t mean Boba Fett needs to be in every Star Wars movie. We didn’t need to see Boba Fett’s childhood, and we don’t need to see him in his old age. Surely Abrams and Disney have learned that, if nothing else.

10) Darth Vader will be resurrected.

Just because this theory comes from my friend and co-worker Germain Lussier doesn’t mean it isn’t bonkers. I don’t care how well reasoned his argument is, or how much evidence he has (and he has a disturbing amount). If Kylo Ren can actually bring Darth Vader back from the dead—like, suck his Force Ghost out of the Force and put it in a new/cloned body—the Star Wars universe will be immediately broken. Once death is not permanent, then why should we be concerned if any character dies? It’s the exact same problem superhero stories have had forever. (The fact that Jedi can become Force Ghosts for an indefinite amount of time is problematic enough.) Additionally, Luke managed to redeem Anakin at the end of Return of the Jedi; in fact, Anakin’s fall and redemption was the whole damn point of all six movies. Would J.J. Abrams undo all of that just because he can’t think of a new bad guy? I certainly hope not.

11) Luke kills Han.

Supposedly one major original trilogy character is going to die in The Force Awakens; I won’t say who all the options that have been floated around, just in case this is true. I will say we’re in no danger of seeing Luke murder Han in cold blood. The story was that an enraged Luke will kill Han while he tries to protect Kylo Ren, although this rumor came before we knew Kylo Ren’s identity or even that he had a crazy lightsaber. There is no way that Lucasfilm turns the franchise’s biggest hero into its biggest villain. Not only would it clearly be done for solely shock value, it would actually taint the original trilogy even more than the prequels did. There’s never going to be a Harry Potter sequel where Harry Potter shoots down Ron Weasley, nor is there going to be a Spider-Man comic or movie where Peter Parker slits Aunt May’s throat, and there’s no chance of Luke murdering his best friend Han.

12) Jar Jar Binks will return as a Sith Lord.

You may have heard this rumor floating around as part of a larger “Jar Jar was secretly an evil Force user in league with Palpatine” theory. We have gotten many, many emails about this, asking why we haven’t covered it. The answer is because it’s the stupidest goddamn thing I’ve ever heard of. It exists only by taking the established facts of the movies and ascribing wholly unsupported ideas and completely unproven motivations to them. I could say that Padme was also a secret evil Force user who’s plan was to have sex with Anakin until he turned evil and we just never saw any evidence of this in the movies, and it is just as legitimate. Not only is this theory not true, even if it were, turning Jar Jar into the evil mastermind of the Star Wars universe is the only sure way to make the sequels suck worse than the prequels. Only one person on this planet who likes Jar Jar Binks, enough to put him in the movies, and that was George Lucas. Even he only felt comfortable giving Jar Jar a few more seconds of screentime after the vitriol he received for The Phantom Menace. The only way J.J. Abrams would include Jar Jar in the sequels is as a bleached skeleton.

13) Someone says “I have a bad feeling about this.”

I mean, some rumors are just so absurd they don’t even need to be dignified with a response.

Contact the author at rob@io9.com.

George Orwell had a known penchant for borrowing from other authors—his dystopian novel 1984 owes a clear debt to a number of works, including We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, for example. But did his other famous work, Animal Farm, also owe a huge debt to a Russian author?

That’s the claim in a new Harper’s Magazine article by John Reed, an author who previously aroused some controversy with his unauthorized sequel to Animal Farm back in 2001. Reed, whose Animal Farm sequel/pastiche was aimed at showing how Animal Farm was “outmoded” as a weapon in Cold War 2.0—the war against terrorism.

In the course of that debate, Reed stumbled on the claim that Orwell had borrowed large parts of Animal Farm from a story called “Animal Riot” by Nikolai Kostomarov, a 19th century author and friend of Tolstoy. The plots of the works are pretty similar, though there’s no evidence that Orwell knew of “Animal Riot.” But Reed is able to show, paragraph by paragraph, how the opening sections of both works follow a similar format and structure. Doesn’t prove anything—but it’s sort of fascinating to think that the precursor to Animal Farm was an allegory that, for a while at least, was held up as an important story in Russia immediately after the 1917 revolution.

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All The Birds in the Sky, coming in January from Tor Books. Follow her on Twitter, and email her.