He survived a catastrophic stagecoach crash, dangled over 2,000-foot cliffs in Yosemite for a photograph, shot a man point blank in a premeditated killing and walked free, and along the way invented the technology that made movies, replays, and GIFs possible. This episode traces the almost unbelievable life of Eadweard Muybridge, born Edward James Muggeridge in England in 1830, who started out as a perfectly ordinary San Francisco bookseller before an 1860 accident in Texas left him with a nine-day memory gap, double vision, and what modern experts suspect was severe damage to the orbitofrontal cortex.

We follow his reinvention as the photographer Helios, his manipulated skies and fake moons, and his 1872 hiring by Leland Stanford to settle whether a galloping horse ever has all four hooves off the ground. Along the way we cover the discovery of his wife Flora’s affair with Harry Larkins, the shooting in Calistoga, the 1875 trial that ended in an acquittal for justifiable homicide, the 1878 battery of 12 tripwire cameras in Palo Alto, the zoopraxiscope, and the 100,000 biomechanics images he made at the University of Pennsylvania.

• How the stagecoach crash and Sir William Gull’s prescription to spend time outdoors redirected his life
• The Stanford horse experiment and why centuries of painters had drawn galloping horses wrong
• The Larkins killing, the sabotaged insanity defense, and the jury’s verdict
• Stanford’s book that left Muybridge’s name off, and the lawsuit that went nowhere
• His influence on Edison, Degas, Duchamp, Francis Bacon, and The Matrix’s bullet time effect