A gleaming female robot from a 1927 silent German film inspired C-3PO and echoes through music videos by Madonna, Lady Gaga and Beyonce, yet the film itself was butchered partly because a character named Hel sounded like a bad word in English. This episode traces Fritz Lang's Metropolis from his 1924 first sight of the New York skyline, through the novel and screenplay by his wife Thea von Harbou, to a dystopia of industrialists above the clouds and workers in catacombs, where the mediator between the head and the hands must be the heart.

We examine H.G. Wells's scathing 1927 review, the 5.3 million Reichsmark budget that got producer Erich Pommer fired, the 17-month shoot, the Schufftan mirror process, Brigitte Helm's suffocating robot suit and burning dress, 500 impoverished Berlin children in freezing water for 14 days, Channing Pollock' ...