Will Star Wars TV always be this way?
The Book Of Boba Fett underscores a worrying trend towards Disney Plus’ shallow toy box ambitions.
TV Features Bo-Katan Kryze
In the recent past of the Star Wars franchise, the screens have gotten smaller and so has its galaxy. This isn’t a new phenomenon; the saga has often had proximity issues in terms of how its vast roster of characters tend to pop up in each other’s lives whether the story needs them to or not. Darth Maul (Ray Park) made an unexpected cameo at the end of Solo: A Star Wars Story, a bewildering appearance (if you hadn’t watched a pair of animated spin-offs, that is) that promised exciting things, and wound up becoming a peculiar narrative cul-de-sac. Yoda teamed up with Chewbacca, briefly, in Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge Of The Sith, for no serious reason other than it was easy to do and the timeline favored the pairing. The expanse of Star Wars has always felt more like the volume of a toy box. Does Star Wars TV have to be just as small?
It doesn’t. In fact, the first year of Star Wars television felt like an invigorating blast of Hoth-frosted air because it didn’t bother with familiar faces from the wider canon. Each episode from The Mandalorian’s first season had the patience of an hours-long spaghetti Western, with lengthy, gorgeously crafted shots of Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) hustling from one dangerous mission to the next, his diminutive green friend (then known only as “The Child”) trilling softly behind him.
The Mandalorian staked a claim on outposts never before seen in the broader Star Wars galaxy, and jettisoned legacy characters in favor of creating intriguing and memorable new ones: Nick Nolte’s Ugnaught hermit Kuiil, Amy Sedaris’ jovial (if dodgy) mechanic Peli Motto, Bill Burr’s rough-and-tumble Migs Mayfeld; the list of stand-outs goes on. As Lucasfilm’s first live-action Star Wars series, The Mandalorian felt like it was on the cusp of something new; beyond its bleeding edge behind-the-scenes innovations, it made Star Wars feel bigger and more mysterious than it had in a generation.
Which is why season two of The Mandalorian makes the first look almost experimental by comparison. Where season one took risks, season two burrowed into the toy box and pulled out fan-favorites from other Star Wars stories such as Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson), Bo-Katan Kryze (Katee Sackhoff), Boba Fett (Temuera Morrison), and perhaps most controversially, Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill, kind of).
Looking back, the lack of a cameo conga line played a large part in giving The Mandalorian’s first season drive and a sense of purpose. The same can’t be said of Mando season two, which indulged scenic detours to easy thrills—it went to work setting up the next batch of Star Wars shows as soon as it could—instead of steering the Razor Crest towards uncharted territory. By the time the season-two finale rolled around, the show known and lauded for its minimal approach was getting crowded. It’s interesting that Mandalorian showrunner Jon Favreau also directed Iron Man 2, itself a sequel to a successful, paradigm-shifting story (Iron Man, which Favreau also helmed) that got bogged down in various plot threads designed to set up future sagas.
Character-stacking is a trend we’re seeing more and more from Star Wars television, and not even its animated offerings are immune. Star Wars: The Bad Batch tackled the fallout of Emperor Palpatine’s (Ian McDiarmid) catastrophic Order 66 by zeroing in on an elite squad of clone troopers known as Clone Force 99: Hunter, Echo, Wrecker, Tech, and Crosshair (all voiced by Dee Bradley Baker) as well as the mysterious (and chipper!) clone Omega (Michelle Ang). At least, it did in the beginning: In its crackerjack first episode, Crosshair betrays the Batch and joins the Empire, an act they believed at the time to be triggered by the same mechanisms that turned the Republic’s clone army against the Jedi. It was a chance for Star Wars to follow Crosshair into the chaotic transfer of power from the Republic to the newly forged Empire, as well as a chance to learn how this turn of events affected the sharpshooter and his former brother-in-arms, Hunter.
Instead, The Bad Batch largely stuffed the Crosshair-Hunter character work into the periphery for the majority of the season and outright ignored other dramatically rich plot points, such as Echo’s traumatic transformation during the final season of Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Instead, popular characters from other Star Wars shows, like Rebels’ Hera Syndulla, were given full episode origin stories that pulled the show far, far away from the crew of the Havoc Marauder, characters we were tasked with caring about as they cruised around searching for a new life in a deadly galaxy. For that week at least, Clone Force 99 were made guest stars in their own TV show.
Which brings us to The Book Of Boba Fett, a series that gleefully digs into that Star Wars toy box and pulls out ringers from Disney’s broad line of animated series, comic books, and films. Some arrive quite naturally to the show, like the Wookie gladiator-turned-hired-muscle Black Krrsantan (who first appeared in Marvel’s 2015 Darth Vader comic), while others show up and utterly disrupt Boba Fett’s first real crack at becoming an actual character himself—to say nothing of robbing what little momentum Fett’s soft gangster story arc had.
It’s really quite stunning: Din Djarin and his plucky little pal Grogu hijack the fifth and sixth episodes of Boba Fett to set up their own third season (effectively lending warmth and tenderness to a show largely bereft of it, but still), and a surprise appearance by Rosario Dawson seeds the upcoming Ahsoka series. In these episodes we’re also reunited with Luke Skywalker, an uncanny fusion of stand-in, deep fake technology, and AI-constructed voice work that is handily the most egregious inclusion to the show, a hollowed-out forgery of a bygone character whose auto-tuned cadence is a chillingly robotic sign of even more creepy resurrections to come. (Seriously, guys, Sebastian Stan isn’t too busy for Star Wars.)
This might not bother a large contingent of the faithful who consider dusting off beloved action figures and smashing them together to be a feature of Star Wars, not a bug. Visceral thrills and warm feelings leased from well-loved stories, doled out at the cost of drama and substantial change—depending on your point of view, this could complicate the prospects of future Star Wars projects, even those that aren’t at first blush related to the Skywalker Saga, such as The Acolyte, a “mystery-thriller” that will venture into the fabled final days of the High Republic. How will Lucasfilm tie this story, which takes place 200 years before Anakin Skywalker was conjured out of thin air, to the more familiar, fan-friendly trappings of the original Star Wars trilogy? There’s a chance that it won’t.
Less certain is how Disney+’s hotly anticipated series, Obi-Wan Kenobi (set for a May 25 release), will handle its balance of story and character when we already know that the show will include Hayden Christensen’s Darth Vader, a surprise inclusion that fudges with established lore for the sake of freaking its audience out. (Vader’s line in A New Hope—“When I left you I was but the learner. Now, I am the master”—is now doing a lot more work than it was likely originally meant to.)
Star Wars might be looking to the future with technological leaps that have already changed the way ambitious genre television gets made, but it sure feels like it’s terrified of letting go of the past. Not helping matters is the chaotically mixed reaction to Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which showed a rift in the fandom that separates those who yearn for something different from this decades-old saga and those who like the way things are just fine.
With every step towards something innovative and daring, Star Wars takes two steps back. World-famous Mandalorian bucket head and floppy green Yoda ears aside, Din Djarin and Grogu are special because they represent a boldness for which Star Wars isn’t generally known these days. Charting a course to unknowable new frontiers alongside characters who aren’t already printed on our frayed security blankets—now that is the way, not just for the future of Star Wars television, but for Star Wars as a whole.
476 Comments
AFAIK Obi-Wan Kenobi is being written by Joby Harold, so I guess we’ll soon see if a different writer can make something different compared to Filoni/Favreau (who’s work I’ve enjoyed for the most part).
Writer 6 creditsHiccups
(pre-production)
2023
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
(story) (post-production)
2022
Obi-Wan Kenobi
(TV Mini Series) (writer – 6 episodes) (post-production)
2021
Army of the Dead
(screenplay by)
2017
King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
(screenplay by) / (story by)
2007
Awake
(written by)
That… does not instill a great deal of confidence…
I know. But he was also executive producer on Edge of Tomorrow, John Wick 3, and the series Underground, and he’s executive producing Kenobi so… like I said, we’ll see…
I trust you know Executive Producer is basically an honorary title to a financier?
Sure, but my understanding is that they also have a significant say over what’s in a show.
that is a list of OOF…
Jesus, yeah. Whose idiot nephew is he?
His one and only directing credit (2007) starred Hayden Christensen…?
Look, my brother did the best he could raising that boy, and I just feel sorry for him, okay?
It’s waaay too early to worry about this imho. We’ve had basically two shows; The Mandalorian – good. BoBF – not so good.
I’ll wait for comparisons after Kenobi (which I’m expecting a lot out of…don’t let me down Star Wars), Andor (I loved Rogue One…don’t let me down Star Wars) and Ahsoka. I’m not as excited about that one so if it’s disappointing, eh.
From what I’ve heard there’s quite a bit of new stuff coming that each could take Star Wars TV into new directions. For example, there’s meant to be a show set in the High Republic era with a Stranger Things vibe that they’re currently casting 12 year olds for.
But I agree, it’s too early to tell. I think Kenobi should be (has to be) something special. And if it isn’t then that’d just be a real shame.
“For example, there’s meant to be a show set in the High Republic era with a Stranger Things vibe”.“But I was going to go to Tosche Station to get Eggos!”
The concern isn’t about the shows being good, it’s about them all blending in together until it’s a full mess. It’s not too early to worry about that after 2 whole seasons of the shows we have doing exactly that
It’s two shows. I’m not worrying. Yet.
And a third one mentioned in the article – The Bad Batch (also not so good IMO). But there is another – Star Wars Visions – which is the most refreshing thing Star Wars has done since Mandalorian S1.
Hell, Visions is one of the best SW products in the past 4 decades.
I disagree. Visions also exudes a very small and narrow view of the Star Wars universe as nearly every single short centered around the conflict between Jedi and the Sith, good and evil. The animation and design itself may be neat and exciting but it still plays out like they only ever watched the last 10 minutes of a Star Wars movie, most notably the prequel trilogy and that was their takeaway.
The first episode of Visions was the only one we could sit through. The rest may have used interesting visual styles, but the storytelling was straight up garbage.
Agreed. There were 2, possibly three episodes of Visions that were decent. The rest was pretty ridiculous. Take a really loose story concept and then animate it in a particular anime style. They just didn’t connect with me.
I did like the one, I can’t remember what order it was in, where there were a some street rats about to be executed by Jabba until he convinced him to let his band perform in front of him. It was a fun, lighthearted jam even if it ended with him gripping a lightsaber.
Also, good God, I didn’t know people could care so much Kyber crystals!
Visions was 9 stories by 9 completely different teams, working independently from each other. It’s not remotely surprising that 9 different teams, especially anime studios/artists, decided to focus on the Jedi, which is literally what defines the SW universe and sets it apart from every other space-centric property in existence. Sure, it would have been cool to throw in a smuggler-centric episode perhaps, but since the Jedi/Force are literally what the entire franchise is about, their presence throughout Visions is a feature, not a bug. Complaining about that feels akin to going to Yankee Stadium and being annoyed they’re not playing soccer.Out of the nine episodes, 4 were straight up great, 3 were good and only 1-2 were just okay.
Complaining about that feels akin to going to Yankee Stadium and being annoyed they’re not playing soccer.
I would say it feels akin to going to Yankee Stadium and being annoyed because there are no basemen or outfielders, just a pitcher and a batter.
Bad Batch was alright, but definitely not to the standards we had all set for it IMO. Though Visions was really cool.
OK, but we do know something about the upcoming shows: unlike The Mandolorian, their central characters are people we already know. I’m excited about Obi-Wan Kenobi as well, but it’s about a character who has appeared prominently in the original trilogy, the prequel trilogy, an animated movie, and an animated TV show. The show apparently will include prominent roles for Dark Vader, Owen and Beru Lars, and Bail Organa, all played by the actors who played them in the prequels. Safe to say that it will have some of the “sandbox” quality the author is talking about.
I am still not down with even one second of Vader screen time in this show.
When it comes to that, I think you have the moral high ground. And, as you know, no one can lose once they have the high ground.
You’re forgetting the plot. No one can lose once they have the high ground (if that’s what the plot dictates).
I’m just excited to have another series set in entire galaxy (The Milky Way has ~400B stars) that’s taking place on the remote outer rim desert planet Tatooine! I mean part of TFA was set on a desolate out of the way desert planet named Jakku, and lots of The Mandalorian takes place on a desolate out of the way desert planet named Nevarro, but they ain’t Tatooine. Go Tatooine!
The whole “toybox/sandbox/whatever” metaphor (as mentioned in the article) entirely misses the real problem: the narrative, characterization, and dialogue need to be competent. When you omit 90% of the narrative scaffolding elements that your story would need to make sense, all your characters act like they’re brain-damaged, and you write dialogue that would make Ed Wood flinch, whether or not you’re on Tatooine again or hanging out with Skywalkers again is completely irrelevant. That’s the last problem to solve.Mando S1 made a lot of questionable narrative choices, and frankly Din isn’t much of a character, but at least it was mostly tolerable. Season 2 was a train wreck and, somehow, TBOBF was far worse. (Even the Din episodes in TBOBF weren’t any better than the S2 episodes, and in some ways were even dumber.)
Boba Fett certainly struggles with narrative, characterization, and dialogue issues as well, but I do think some of that is related to the sandbox problem. Disney wanted to do a show about Boba Fett because he is cool and popular, not because there was necessarily a compelling story to tell. Fennec Shand was added because she comes from an existing property, not because she is especially interesting or contrasts well with Boba Fett. (She doesn’t.) The Pykes are the villains because they come from an existing property, not because they’re particularly interesting or have something interesting to say about Boba Fett as a character. (They aren’t, and they don’t.) And on and on. All these problems overlap. It’s hard to have good characterization if you don’t know what you’re trying to tell us about a character. It’s hard to have good dialogue if the characters and their motivations are all undefined.
It’s hard to have good characterization if you don’t know what you’re
trying to tell us about a character. It’s hard to have good dialogue if
the characters and their motivations are all undefined.Right, but… a competent writer could do all this. Saying that it would be unmanageably difficult merely because Fett is a preexisting character is, frankly, nonsense.
Yep BoBF is glorified IP management. Image first, story second
I feel the same way when people moan about fan-service (even though I’m sure I’ve complained about it in the past as well). Fan-service isn’t necessarily bad, if it’s supported by decent writing, strong characterisation, compelling dialogue, et cetera. In those situations, fan service can even be very satisfying. But like everything else, it’s the fundamentals of the craft that matter above everything else.
The problem with Andor is that they showed the character dying. And to many fans, that will always make this show a ‘prequel.’ And there’s nothing that a significant portion of the viewing audience hates more than ‘prequels.’
Technically, Kenobi is a prequel too. But that’s been advertised as a one and done season. If that’s what people are worried about, I feel bad for them!I’ve waited my whole life for Star Wars tv shows. And now we have them. One great, one meh. But as we’ve seen in the past, nothing like a bunch of whiny SW “fans” to just shit on the whole thing. Awesome.
It’s not the quality but the crossbreeding at all that’s an issue. Even if BoBF was good, I was probably going to skip it entirely because I just have zero interest in Boba Fett as a character, and think resurrecting him was a lame copout in both the original EU and the new Disney canon.But no, it turns out BoBF is effectively Mandalorian season 2.5 so regardless of interest, and regardless of quality, I kinda have to watch at least part of it to be up to speed.
I don’t think it’s too early. You’ve had two shows. One with mostly new characters, and one with a bunch of fan favorites. The others coming up center around fan favorites. It seems as if Star Wars just decided to pump out nostalgia instead of story. And that does seem to be the split in fans. Something new vs. more of the same.
I agree that, in terms of TV, it’s too soon, but for Star Wars overall, it’s still on point. It’s an issue my brother and I actually just talked about. He’s feeling like he’s out of the new universe.As a kid, the movies were OK, but I got into Star Wars because of the expanded universe, namely the short stories (if it’s not obvious from my name). There’s a whole universe out there, but we tend to focus so much of the non-game media in the same parts with the same families that it’s, frankly, boring most of the time. I just rewatched seasons 1 and 2 of the Mandalorian and the whole tone of the show changed at Season 2 Episode 1. Immediately Grogu is wheeled out and gets close-ups like the ewoks in Return of the Jedi, not so much because he’s doing something worthwhile, but for cute antics and screentime to push products. ***SPOILERS***Book of Boba Fett was especially bad because it pulled cameos largely from the same areas as usual. I assumed it would happen, but the cyborg storylines could have included Dengar, who is originally a big part of Fett’s “after the Sarlacc” storyline. The cyborg stuff isn’t even good. After after we all had to connect to people via the internet due to COVID, Dengar’s story of needing to jack into someone to regain an emotional range beyond just “angry” which was burned away from him is something I think people could relate to. It would have brought back the “science” part of sci-fi a bit, and brought in Manaroo, an alien whose culture uses cybernetics to literally share thoughts and feelings with others. ***END SPOILERS***At this point, I actually wish they’d start turning some of the Bioware Old Republic stuff into movies, or move us into a place where we can really start having grey jedi.
While I know people that watch all the Star Wars shows, the universal consensus is that, while enjoying flavor of the moment status, the quality of the shows come off as aggressively okay. I just can’t be bothered to conjure interest for a brand that gets more diluted the more Disney mines from it. Boba Fett was a glorified minion who had like 6 lines in the original trilogy and he died falling into a hole in the ground. I’ll never understand why anyone would care enough about that guy to want to retcon his death or be interested in his adventures. It would be easier to give these shows a chance if there was critics, fan passion, something, anything, to make me think that these were anything but assembly line product.
I think if you’re going to make a Boba Fett show, that would be fine–but you do need to actually have that show make an argument for why this guy (who had six lines and fell into a hole) is interesting and worth following around. Turns out they didn’t really think he was that interesting either–which raises the obvious question of why they bothered!
Same reason people noticed him in the originals; he had a cool suit that could sell toys.
His ending could still be flying into a hole in the ground. No reason he couldn’t have regular bounty hunter adventures for many years before running into people he shouldn’t have fucked with.
Nothing about this is new. Literally everything in all of the Star Wars universe since Return of the Jedi has been about toy sales rather than coherent storytelling.Quit expecting better from Stars R Us – they sold out four decades ago.
As I’ve said elsewhere, I totally agree with this and Socrates’ statement just above. The interesting question is why the MCU hasn’t gone this route (agressive toy selling).
Toys really don’t sell much anymore. Kids don’t care nearly to the degree our generation did. They have electronic devices. They age out of toys faster. The market is shrinking rapidly. SW toys are marketed primarily at adults these days.
*cough* Collectibles 😀
Kids actually still play with a lot of toys nowadays, but the problem is lack of access. Toys R Us closing (which wasn’t due to nobody buying things from them) had a HUGE effect on the market, and basically shifted things entirely on Walmart and Target, who dedicate 1/10th the shelf space to toys. And Walmart’s notorious for their absolutely terrible stock for toys.
Factor in higher prices on plastic manufacturing and the COVID-related supply issues, it becomes too expensive to make brand-new non-licensed toylines even if the demand is there. Amazon doesn’t help either because even brand new toys have their prices jacked way up compared to retail.
“Toys R Us closing (which wasn’t due to nobody buying things from them)”.No, it had to do with Mitt Romney, in ways I still find bizarre and depressing.
Legos seem to be the only exception. My kids definitely liked toys, but the new massive Lego sets (SW and otherwise) were always huge hits that I was happy to provide.
To go slightly off topic, I’m kind of disappointed that Lego went down that route as hard as they have. When I was growing up, it was much easier to mix and match Lego sets to come up with something new. It might have been stupid looking to any adults but as a kid it was wonderful. Now the parts for Lego kits seem to be so specialised that it’s hard to try and repurpose them in a creative way. Things like the Star Wars and Marvel sets are particularly egregious for this.
In a weird way, it feels like the Lego Movie was written about a generation too late
Current Lego kits are toys you assemble yourself. I was able to track down some big block sets that my kids used the old fashioned way, but the results were so much less cool looking than an imperial shuttle.
Yeah, I’d agree with that, even things like hospitals and cars look much cooler now than my old sets, it just feels like it has cost too much of the old fluidity – sort of like the proper sets look too good now to have a self built model put next to them. When we had a limited number of block types and colours, it was OK to look a bit of a mess. My nephew has a really cool passenger plane and you just can’t make anything that looks that good without the dedicated wing pieces
Speaking as a parent of a six year old: My son loves Legos, Magnatiles, board and card games both old school and new, puzzles and cars. He does play video games as well. He loves Minecraft, Ark, and for a while racing games and Rayman. He also has a Nana who works at an indie toy store, so she knows the hot ticket items. Anything building or to do with outer space. As for Legos, I prefer to buy ones that aren’t from franchises. Every once in a while I will (for example he has a Mickey Mouse racetrack), but I’d rather hear what he comes up with his own imagination. I just try to keep it balanced.
We operated the same way when ours were younger, and still play board/card games. Video games are inevitable, so you just have to be willing to parent by imposing reasonable time restrictions.
Get your character popular enough to appear in Fortnite then
Are you unfamiliar with Marvel Legends?
Not anymore… 🙂
If you’ve been in the children’s areas of Target in the last few years, I can assure you that there are infinite numbers of Marvel toys, Marvel apparel, and Marvel games for the under-10 set. No single item is as ubiquitous as Star Wars action figures were a few decades ago, but that reflects shifts in how they monetize children’s attention.
I’m pretty sure the whole thing was about toys since the new hope. I mean as a kid from the eighties SW toys were hot as shit.
Have you ever met a Star Wars fan? They don’t want to be challenged, they just want to be wrapped in a familiar blanket.
Star Trek fans are like this, too, and it’s exasperating.
At least Star Wars was happy to be empty, but fun nonsense for a while. I think the worst thing about Star Trek is how self-importantly it is regarded by the fans. Yeah, the original series did some groundbreaking stuff like the kiss between Kirk and Uhura, but it also had some really puerile worldbuilding (which YouTuber Tom Scott referred to as magical space communism, in a tongue in cheek way but I don’t think he was wrong). I’m somewhat liberal (I would like to see state owned and operated drug manufacturing to cater for generics, and give slack drug manufacturing capacity in case of a future crisis) but the last times I watched a Star Trek show, I found myself feeling like the alien races existed just to show the superiority of the Federations beliefs)
It was certainly a challenge to sit through Picard.
It’s sad because all of these stories were themselves once new and innovative.
Disagree, since many Trek fans (especially over the past two decades) have embraced the “different” DS9 while rejecting the “blanket” of the bland, overly familiar Voyager. Not everyone, of course. but a good chunk of the fanbase.I’m fine with the way Discovery is “different” than Trek that came before. It also just happens to be a pretty lousy show most of the time.And I loathed “Picard”, despite showcasing the very “familiar” appearance of arguably one of my favorite characters in all of TV.
What is considered “challenging?”
Literally anything new or unexpected
The more I think about the Book of Boba Fett the angrier I get at it. Not because of the piss poor quality, but because I think they’ve been really unfair to Mandalorian fans.Generally, I’m under the belief that if you watch a TV show, you should have the expectation that important plot developments will happen on that show. But instead of just having cameos from Mando and Baby Yoda, which would have been one thing, they actually completely undid the season 2 finale. Those are major plot developments. Now, if someone didn’t watch Boba Fett, they’ll be totally lost when the show they do watch comes back. And I think it really sucks to force people to watch 7 hours of another show (especially a shitty one) so they aren’t behind.Is that the future of TV? I really hope not. I resent it and I don’t think it’s sustainable.
Yeah, it’s going to be annoying as fuck on rewatch to end season 2 on an emotional note, then have everything jarringly back to status quo when season 3 starts, only to remember I have to sift through Boba Fett to find the important developments. Future me will be googling which episodes specifically I have to go back to, I know it. It shouldn’t be that complicated if you’re making actual art.
fortunately, it’s not a random smattering- its three episodes, all in a row. 4-7.
Replace sifting with just treating the last couple of episodes of Boba Fett as Mandalorian episodes.Although, I’m guessing it’s going to be reciprocal and we’ll get more Boba Fett stuff in season 3 of the Mandalorian, which I suppose would mean both shows should be treated as one show instead.
Yeah, how will they possibly make money on a show you plan on watching twice because you hate it?
OP and I have both been clear that we like The Mandalorian? Where are you getting that I hate it? You can have criticisms of a thing without wanting it cancelled.
Totally agree. You don’t have Sam and Diane get married in an episode of “Wings” for fuck’s sake. To say nothing of the fact that rushing Grogu and Mando back together so quickly basically ruined the entire point of the two seasons of Mando up to that point. Why bother having Grogu leave if you’re going to IMMEDIATELY walk it back. Ugh.
Because baby yoda toys make tonnes of money. That is the exact correct answer to your question.
I also think the presence of Grogu constrains the story in ways that aren’t good. If the Mandolorian has Grogu with him, then his storylines naturally tends to be about protecting Grogu. By the second season, you could already see the exhaustion of that story. It’s not like I thought we were never going to see Grogu again —his relationship with the Mandolorian is the heart of the story. But I thought maybe we’d get Season 3 to actually miss him, to let the Mandolorian do different things without a kid, and to have both characters be somewhat different when they were reunited.
I think that would have been the best choice. Or do a time jump or something. Not literally have Mando and Grogo reunite after what felt like two weeks apart. The episode had as much dramatic weight as a kid leaving summer camp early because he got homesick.
That’s a very good point about Sam and Diane… but the upside to getting spoiled about grogu leaving Luke (which I’m guessing is what happened) is that now I can watch S3 of Mandalorian without bothering to watch Boba Fett. Hopefully it’s more Mandalorian-specific plots and not so connected to the Jedis and existing characters. I really liked the parts of S1 that were just Mando going around doing random bounty hunter stuff.
Okay but also let’s keep going with your idea and imagine how completely bonkers it would’ve been if Sam and Diane DID get married in an episode of Wings and then the next episode of Cheers just picked up from there? I kinda want to see how that would’ve gone down if only for the amount of chaos it would create.
Fair enough.
there truly aren’t enough Cheers / Wings references in modern pop-culture discourse
Always happy to contribute to the discourse!
Why bother having Grogu leave if you’re going to IMMEDIATELY walk it back. Ugh.It’s a grand old Star Wars tradition!
Not only that but I felt the Luke Skywalker appearance in the S2 finale of Mando was quite restrained and poignant. Giving him further screentime as a dead-eyed android with a disembodied voice only diminishes the S2 appearance.
Exactly. It totally diminishes his appearance from Mando S2.
Reminds me of Marvel comics, where they’d have a crossover story into other comics I didn’t read, so either you just dealt with the weird continuity break, or you picked up 2 extra titles one month.I guess the latter will be what we do, even though we’ve skipped BoBF so far, we’ll eventually watch it before Mandalorian S3 (“Really? I have to read Thor and Avengers now?”).Hahaha, I wonder if Mandalorian S3 will have a “Previously on …” that shows content of S1/S2 and BoBF S1?
Marvel and Star Wars both need little comic book style pop-ups in the corner of the screen when a reference to another show/movie is made.Like, a little cartoon Stan Lee/Dave Filoni pops up: “Hey True Believers, see S01E06 of The Book of Boba Fett to learn more. Excelsior!”
It’s the whole marketing drive of the MCU, it didn’t just stop at the comics. Increasingly the movies will refer to things that happened in other ones by the studio.
Reminds me of Marvel comics, where they’d have a crossover story into other comics I didn’t read, so either you just dealt with the weird continuity break, or you picked up 2 extra titles one month.Star Wars was already quite guilty of that themselves even when they weren’t under Marvel’s umbrella lol.Granted that has in fact gotten worse since their return to Marvel, so I guess that counts for something too.
I wonder if Mandalorian S3 will have a “Previously on …” that shows content of S1/S2 and BoBF S1Maybe? But if not… that’s what YouTube recappers are for!
Which is weird because with comics it make (annoying) sense from a marketing perspective to try and make people buy issues outside of the series they normally follow. But with this it’s all on D+, which doesn’t rely on advertising and thus not on viewing numbers, so it doesn’t make sense to require cross-content viewing.
Yeah, the model seems a little different, and I’d suspect what Disney wants, is deeper engagement in their content, i.e., less about selling more (like a comic) and more about long[er] term retention (if you’re thinking about services to keep/cancel, more you watch, the more you’re committed to a service).If you like one show and can watch it in a week, cancel, and just pick up D+ again when the next season airs. If you’ve got characters and story integrated across several shows, that air over several months, you’d be way more inclined to maintain your subscription the whole time, and with all the information that leaks on the internet, you want to keep up in real time (hell, I’ve already read spoilers for BoBF/TM just from article headlines).
One thing that the Marvel movies have largely understood though, is that you don’t have key character development happen in a story that’s not explicitly centered around the guest character. Spider-Man was an extended cameo in Civil War, and even though T’Challa became kingly in it as well, he kind of forgot all of that for the Black Panther movie. Same cannot be said for Star Wars.
Yeah, i had to tell my parents who loved Mando but haven’t watched Boba that they really should watch the last 2-3 eps of Boba. of course helps that everybody has what a year to catch up before Mando S3?
Disney’s gone mad drunk with power. They’re doing the same thing with Doctor Strange 2. Somehow they expect fans to have seen the What If… cartoon as somewhat required viewing which is…. an exhausting thing to expect of fans.
I tend to agree with you. I think Disney would reply that they’re creating a shared universe, much like the Marvel universe. If you’re a fan of, say, Captain America, and only watch his movies, you’re going to be pretty confused when you jump right from Captain America to Winter Soldier. And Marvel’s answer to that is, “Well, don’t watch them that way.”
Not only that but now the MCU D+ shows tie into the movies and the movies tie into them. Like going on your example of Captain America, if you go from Civil War to CA4 you might be lost as to why Steve is gone and Sam is suddenly Captain America. That’s what makes me wonder how Dr Strange will play out. So far from the trailers it looks like they’re hoping you watched Loki and WandaVision.
>>> If you’re a fan of, say, Captain America, and only watch his movies, you’re going to be pretty confused when you jump right from Captain America to Winter Soldier. In fact the Marvel folks work REALLY HARD to make sure that you can do just that, to the point that developments in the crossover films sometimes get a little walked back or glossed over — the most egregious being Iron Man blowing up his suits at the end of IM3 and have a monologue about not needing them and walking away from all the superheroics to… showing up in Avengers 2 flying around blasting hand cannons, with nary a mention of any of that, ever again. (Though maybe letting the Iron Man sequels largely fall down the memory hole is for the best, anyway.) Or how we’re all just going to pretend The Blip wouldn’t have turned society totally upside down.I even recall an interview with someone (one of the Russo brothers, maybe? Or Feige himself) about the process of scriptwriting, where they take a pass for, say, Captain that’s just for people who watched the Cap movies, and then another for people who just watched the big team-up movies, for each of the characters that have their own series to follow, to make sure that if anything actually important DID come out of nowhere, there’s a line or a foothold or SOMETHING so that folks aren’t totally lost.So for your Cap-only watcher, all the stuff they really need to know that wasn’t introduced in FA is that Black Widow is an Action Spy Lady who works for Nick Fury’s SHIELD, which is a big government spy/defense agency with comic-booky tech that Cap also (sort-of) answers to. And for that person, whatever of this can’t be intuited by that heartbreaking scene in Times Square at the end of FA is explicitly covered by the time they’ve made it through the hijacked boat rescue about eight minutes into WS.Similarly, you can go straight from Spider-Man: Homecoming to Far From Home (a much bigger plot leap!) and let the first five minutes catch you up: Tony’s dead and Peter has some Big Feelings about that, the Blip happened and then un-happened, but all our main characters conveniently got co-blipped so no high schooler from the first movie is suddenly a college graduate, haha that was weird but let’s all go to Europe! Will you miss some nuance and references? Are you gonna wonder why you’re watching bald Jeff Daniels yell at that smaller bald guy about scraps in a cave? Sure, but all you really need to know is that these are disgruntled ex-employees that are out for revenge against the superheroes that bossed them around and took credit for their work, which is basically what Jake Gyllenhaal straight-up says and, if anything, is a straight thematic through-line from Vulture’s working-class schmo POV in the first movie.This kind of writing is definitely not easy, and there are certainly mistakes and weirdness that happens as a result (Thor taking a moment out of the action to go get some visions in a cave bath being the chief bit of dumb franchise maintenance), but it clearly works, as the films are largely both critical and commercial successes, with the only difference among them being how MUCH money and plaudits they rake in.
You would think movies based on comics would have learned the lessons of comics. Unless I am remembering my comic book days wrong, I feel like they really crashed when you had to start reading four, six, or ten books a year just to follow a single storyline. Sure, it’s great for your profits at first, but the majority of customers who just want to read Batman get annoyed after a while with having to pick up Nightwing, Batgirl, Killer Croc and The Batcave Computer’s Random Musings too.
Now Disney is going down the same route, where they will just burn their audience out with the sheer weight of content they’re expected to have seen in order to watch a new movie. Just think about the idea of jumping in as a new viewer to, say Avengers Infinity War.
Yeah this made me especially angry because, up until Mando shows up, the Boba Fett series has been a slog to get through and almost totally stands on its own apart from the main continuity. If they wanted to make a boring Boba Fett limited series where they recreate the Jabba’s Palace set and clone stamp all the extras from ROTJ, fine. I can decide as a viewer that I don’t care about the mechanics of how Boba escaped the Sarlaac Pit and became the head of a criminal empire that views crime as immoral.But once Disney starts bringing in beloved characters from other, superior shows and making significant changes to both the characters and plot, they’re saying I *must* watch every episode of every spinoff no matter how boring or poorly conceived, in order to keep track of the series I’m actually interested in.What if the Ashoka series is just eight hours of Rosario Dawson clipping her toenails, but then in the ninth episode she kills Luke Skywalker and it turns out the Luke from TLJ is really a clone? This approach breaks trust with the viewer.
Disney saw it work for Marvel. If you didn’t watch Captain America: Civil War, you missed a lot of the details before Avengers: Endgame. It seems they’re taking a similar approach with their Star Wars franchise now too.
This is still an improvement on how the Clone Wars TV show did it. (where you got episodes in such a madness order that fans had to make their own watch orders just to make sense of it.)
I mean, this has been par for the course for Disney’s MCU for over a decade. You’re surprised by it just now?
Feel different to do it with TV rather than movies. You get, what, two Marvel movies a year, typically? So, that’s like 4 hours of your time. You watch a 2 hour movie and you’re done. This is almost twice the length, and it’s a two month commitment to sit down and watch each episode weekly. It’s asking way more.
Watch a 2 hour movie and you’re done? Are you kidding? I mean right off the bat it seems like Wanda/Vision will tie heavily into the new Dr. Strange movie. And I am 100% certain the other MCU tv shows will play a part in the future of the films as well. Not to mention the fact that they now seem determined to pull in elements from the What If? show and all of the Sony content from the past. No Way Home relies on at least a passing knowledge of both the Garfield and Maguire franchises and now they seem to be bringing in Patrick Stewart/Professor X meaning we are likely also dragging the entire Xmen franchise history in to boot? It’s a lot to keep track of
Is it really that hard to just know that Wanda did a bad thing and is stronger now, there are other realities that include an evil Dr. Strange, and be good? I have no intention of watching What If and I’m pretty sure I’m going to be fine.I didn’t need to know shit about Garfield and Maguire to enjoy No Way Home, except that they were Spider-Men from other universes. I missed some easter eggs and callbacks, big whoop.
Well, I wouldn’t have known any of that about Wanda if you hadn’t told me so it does matter?And again, exactly like Star Wars… And context does matter. You wouldn’t have gotten even half of the emotional impact of Endgame without being intimately aware of the movies that set the groundwork for it. The Thanos saga was built up to over the course of several films and while not absolutely necessary, they provide an absolute ton of context for the final 2 Avengers movies. Adding the Multiverse to the equation only makes the problem that much worse.
But the Dr. Strange movie will probably tell you that one sentence to explain what’s up with Wanda so you can enjoy the Dr. Strange movie, so it doesn’t matter. The trailer basically explained it already. You may not get all the emotional impact, but that’s the bonus of watching all this stuff. On the other hand, if you don’t really care, you can watch Endgame and have a fun superhero movie with some spectacle fighting. To complain that you have to watch everything in order to maximize your enjoyment seems contradictory. You either care about it or don’t.
Marvel typically gets three movies out a year. This is almost twice the length, and it’s a two month commitment to sit down and watch each episode weekly.What does this even mean? That’s… TV and what it has been since it’s inception. It’s 30-45 minutes out of a week that you can watch at your convenience. You don’t even have to tune in at a specified time like normal TV. That’s not a “commitment” in any sense of the word.
i read somewhere that marvel put out almost as much content in 2021 as they put out between 2008-2019.
Like it or not, I think it’s something that you’ll have to deal with going forward if you want to be a fan of franchise shared universes. Marvel long ago shed any accommodation for those who haven’t seen the prior chapters and that expectation has expanded into its Disney+ series. (The trailers alone tell us you’ll miss half of what’s going on in Dr. Strange 2 if you didn’t see WandaVision, What If…?, and I’d put money on Loki as well.) Far from being unsustainable or unprofitable it appears to have VERY effectively answered the question “how do you move this forward after your first main story arc is over and three of your main characters are dead?”
Whether we like it or not or think it’s fair or not is immaterial. It is the way things are going, it appears sustainable, and neither of those is going to respond to our wishes.
Like the creators of boba straight up said it was going to be treated like Mando Season 2.5. Information given out waaay before the show was released. Thats like reading the third book in a series first and getting mad at the author because you didnt bother to read the basic description.
I watched the first two Book of Boba Fett episodes before getting bored with it and quitting. Can I just watch the two secret Mandalorian episodes in the middle of it without watching anything else from BoBF, and not be totally lost while watching them?
Episode 5 is literally just an episode of The Mandalorian. 6 has a bit more of the Boba Fett story, but only for about five minutes in the middle.
You can watch the last 3 episode of Boba Fett and you’re good
Can I just watch the two secret Mandalorian episodes in the middle of it without watching anything else from BoBF, and not be totally lost while watchReally, you’ve gotta watch the last 3 episodes to be totally caught up for Mando’s next season: the final scene of Boba’s show is all about Baby Yoda. And at because this show is only 7 episodes total, that basically means you’re watching the entire second half of it.Thankfully you don’t need to watch the first half to understand the second half, because there is so little plot or character development that gets paid off in the second half (only a single Chekhov’s gun, I think).
Episode 4 ends with Boba saying that he has money but he needs muscle, and then then the music plays Mando’s theme. Episode 5 is straight up an episode of Mando’s show that ends with someone telling him that Boba wants to hire him as muscle. Episode 6 is almost entirely a Mando episode as well, only ending with other characters from Mando’s show deciding if they’ll help Boba as well. And then the finale episode is just a long battle, with all the context coming from the “previously on…” segment.
I think you can probably treat BoBF episodes 5-7 as Mandalorian episodes with some weird emphasis on rando supporting characters in episode 7 and be okay. Episode 7 is mostly a big fight, anyway.
Whether they call it Book of Boba Fett or Mandalorian or whatever you’re basically watching, Star Wars: The TV Series after Return of the Jedi. I expect everything to be relevant to each other in the future. Just like every Marvel movie connects.
I think they legitimately thought that there would be 100% crossover between viewers of Mando and Boba Fett. They didn’t seem to consider that someone (like me) would eagerly watch every episode of Mando as soon as it dropped, but then watch only one episode of Boba Fett because it sucked really, really badly. I wanted Mando season 3, but now, maybe I don’t.
I agree, buuuuut…in the end, I liked how now we don’t have to waste two episodes of The Madalorian with Mando and Grogu getting back together.
I’ll probably just read the plot description on wikipedia to catch myself up for Mando season 3. As a 90s nerd I’m very used to comic (and occasional tv) crossovers for media I didn’t consume affecting media I did consume, and just having to roll with it.This was especially common in the X-Men, where a character would exit the main series for their own title, then come back a couple years later as like a gas trapped in a bottle, or a hairier version of themselves.
If they had put a mando-centric episode to start BoBF, they could have just used it as Mandalorian S3I enjoyed the Boba focused story and how he got from the movies to D+, but they were working with like 3 episodes of material and really did it a disservice by just using it as a showcase for other shows.
This. I loved Mandolorian (well, the first season anyway) and have no desire at all to watch Boba Fett, but now I feel obligated to watch Fett so I know what’s going to happen next season on Mandolorian. Star Wars was so much better when it was just three movies and a bunch of toys.
The Book of Boba Fett is actually The Mandalorian S3. The more people realize this the more sense it makes.This series wasn’t supposed to be some grand side story — it’s part of a much larger narrative.
You’re looking at Star Wars the wrong way. People forget that Star Wars premiered as a
Saturday Buck Rogers / Flash Gordorn Matinee Serial Reel. It literally
started and ended in the middle of nowhere. The bad guy came in one end
and went out the other end. There was no beginning and no end to the
story. It was a flash in the pan story, like a snap shot in time. It
was not intended to be “Deep”. It was intended to be like a pulp reel.
Star Wars actually had a very well-defined beginning and end. Yes, it implied a history within its universe (as any decent movie should), but the rest of your comment is kinda dumb.
It’s amazing how many comments here have nothing to do with the article. It isn’t “Boba Fett was bad” or “the story is incoherent” it’s a well thought out critique of how they’re handling the extended universe, which is especially relevant given how franchise-heavy all our media is these days. Read beyond the title
This is online discourse. Everyone is going to reply to your article or your tweet talking about their thing that probably is not very related. If you talk about losses in Disneyplus, comments will talk about why they ceased their subscription. If the article is about invasion of Ukrainian, comments will be someone talking about their personal experience with an Ukrainian in law or neighbour. Anyway, I just did the same.
Exactly my point. What pisses me off about this Ukraine situation is that they’re just lazily reusing the same bad guys from the old crises we all have nostalgia about. Really? Russians? Again? There better be some surprising twists coming or I’m cancelling my CNN subscription.
I see what you mean, but I just have never been impressed with dry-brining my turkeys at Thanksgiving. Wet brine for me, all the way.
I hate when people call a turkey “the bird” for two fucking weeks out of the year
Let’s just admit it, hot dogs are a sandwich!
Chicago Style pizza isn’t that bad! There I said it!
It’s honestly not. I love the extra sauce actually. And depending on the place, the crust and dough is just the absolute tits.
Hot dogs are DEFINITELY sandwiches, and pizza is just an open-faced sandwich.
So is a golf club with a loft between 54 and 56 degrees.
No, a hot dog is a taco. Cube rule.
Waffles are just vehicles for butter and syrup!
Hot dogs are a sandwich if the bun is two separate pieces.
Agreed, it’s a variation of a sub sandwich: a bread bun split lengthwise with meat and optional toppings (cheese and/or condiments) in the split.Now a taco, that’s a serious debate.
But you’re dodging the real question: How are we supposed to fund our roads and bridges?
Honestly, it’s been pretty boring since the Trump arc ended. No major villain to root against, and they’ve beaten the COVID stuff to death.
I heard they were originally going to go with a Scandinavian aggressor this time, but IKEA threatened to pull their sponsorship.
That’s a shame, it was fairly easy putting their sponsorship together.
The critique is only relevant to 4% of humanity who are diaper shitting toxic fandom. None of the criticisms even existed for people who never heard of Ahsoka Tano or Bo Katan. This doesn’t matter.
Whether the extended universe plays in the same sandbox or toybox or whatever is totally irrelevant if the narrative, characterization, and dialogue in your shows are totally incompetent. It’s like worrying that the parsley garnish on your steak doesn’t quite complement the steak’s flavor, when the steak itself is a pile of desiccated ash.
Sure, but a lot of the comments here are saying that the focus on that is immaterial compared to quality. The MCU, for example, with few exceptions, makes FAR better product using much of the same toybox-bullshit-cameo parades. Why? Because they’re ok-to-excellent blockbuster films. They’re not JUST toybox-bullshit-cameo parades, which many of these Star Wars episodes seem to be.
Charitably to the author, and uncharitably to the commenters, you’re arguing they didn’t read the article. Reverse the charity, and one could just as easily argue they did read the article and simply found its arguments wanting.
Also, I’ve said it before, but Marvel understands that meaningful character development can’t happen in a story that isn’t explicitly about that character. Which does not seem to be the case for the Star Wars shows. I don’t *care* that this character is from The Clone Wars, give me a reason to care *now*.
There was a point in final act of the Last Jedi where I realized that I had no idea what was going to happen next. That’s a feeling I had never felt before with Star Wars, and I haven’t felt it since. Just because of that, TLJ was my favorite SW media since ESB.
My hope was that at the end of TLJ that Kylo Ren had become the Big Bad, ala Ulic Qel-Droma from the old comics, going full conqueror mode like an evil Alexander the Great.
Evidently I also had no idea what was going to happen next.
Arguably that’s because even the people writing the movies didn’t know what was going to happen next, or even who would be writing the next one.
I think that’s because J.J. Abrams, who took over again after, also had no idea what happens next because he’s kind of a hack and only knows how to ape what came before without really adding anything innovative.Hence, Luke’s scene in RoS: “Ah, all that stuff I was saying before about how the force doesn’t belong to you and stuff? Blah, forget that. Go kill people with your laser sword.”God that movie sucked.
I think what happened there was, when JJ made TFA he had a specific plan in mind for the middle chapter, one that was totally unoriginal — Snoke would reveal he’s really Darth Plagueis (and survive to the third movie), and Rey would be revealed as Palpatine’s granddaughter or whatever, after this had been hinted at throughout the second movie. Rian Johnson saw those notes and thought “that shit is stupid!” and did his own thing, killing off Snoke and revealing that Rey is nobody.Both of those ideas were interesting, the problem is that when JJ was rehired for the third one, he was angry that his outline had been discarded and he didn’t feel any obligation to follow up on Rian’s story. So he included a lot of clunky dialogue and plot mechanics to walk everything back to the story he originally planned.Rian Johnson shouldn’t have been allowed to stray that far off the path, but then once he did so, JJ shouldn’t have been allowed to steer back onto the path.
I’m with you until the last paragraph. I don’t think a dumb path should have been charted in the first place. I think this has been said to death already, but hiring three different directors for the trilogy of new movies is fine. But, there should be a throughline for the writing of the trilogy where everyone’s sure the story is a cohesive, linear narrative. They didn’t do that part. They let the directors also be writers and just do whatever they wanted.The Last Jedi is a better movie, in my opinion, than Abram’s because of its originality. Yeah, it definitely didn’t sit well with some of the people who are all about Lucas’ worldbuilding and connecting the dots for everything because it chooses to handwave things like Snoke. But, that is a decision that is kind of bold, especially because a lot of the problem with Star Wars, as this article points out, is that the galaxy is supposedly really big and unruly, and yet it keeps getting reduced down to the same actors playing all the parts. To decide that Rey is nobody, that Snoke’s just some evil shithead in a galaxy full of evil shitheads, etc., is actually a very bold direction to go for the series.
The thing with TLJ is that if you removed Rey, Kylo and Snoke, the story would make a lot more sense (using just the films, Rey’s time spent training before going off to Kylo’s side makes no sense whatsoever). As is, they just felt like they were forced into the story to justify it being part of the sequel trilogy. Without them, it’d wind up being like Rogue One.
“(using just the films, Rey’s time spent training before going off to Kylo’s side makes no sense whatsoever)“Not sure what you mean there? It was telegraphed through TFA and in the start of TLJ that Rey was there to try to recruit Luke to the resistance. She stayed to train with him to become a Jedi, but when she communicated with Kylo and knew his position, etc., she leaves to go stop him, but Luke doesn’t go with her. So she didn’t succeed in recruiting Luke, but goes anyway – a little like Luke did back in The Empire Strikes Back – because now she’s got some training.I don’t really think Rey and Ren are forced, either. I think the fact the movies have no throughline with what to do with the Jedi and Rey, etc., means that, by extension, the plot with Rey, Kylo, and Snoke ultimately doesn’t really go anywhere by the end of the trilogy, partly because Abrams makes some dumb decisions, like Rey being a palpatine, etc. I also don’t like the conceit of Rey being a powerful sensitive despite the fact she had little training.
As of the end of The Last Jedi, I understood Rey as representing a new type of Force user, one without any sort of special parentage or position or official Jedi status, and she was going to help lead other Force users like herself to overthrow not just the First Order, but also the corrupt society we see in Canto Bight. I assumed all that was going to be central to the third movie.Rey’s progression in The Last Jedi, on that understanding, was not dispensable, it was critical. As in, you couldn’t just leap from Rey discovering her Force powers in The Force Awakens to Rey becoming that sort of revolutionary leader. And in fact both the time she spent with Luke and the time she spent with Kylo in The Last Jedi helped take her to that sort of starting point for my anticipated third movie.Then the third movie abandons all of that, and it is true in retrospect that the third movie makes a lot of what happens with Rey in The Last Jedi seem pointless. But that is because the story was changed (and very much for the worse). A different, better story would have kept all that relevant and necessary.
The thing is, Rey would only represent a new style of Force user if you simply stuck to the primary films. As soon as you delve into the tv shows, comics, and sidestories, she would stop being unique. The various shows and films are full of force users without parentage, position, or status. We even got to see one in Rogue One though he was more of a washout of the Jedi.Before the sequel trilogy, we even had plenty of differing force user sects that weren’t Jedi or Sith but aligned with Dark/Light. Right now, I think only the ones shown/mentioned in the Clone Wars animated show are still considered canon.
My point with the whole separation of Rey/Kylo/Snoke from the rest of the film was that removing them from the film results in something similar to Rogue One and would allow adequate pacing and development for the Finn/Rose/Poe/Leia/Huldo stories. You could actually shove all that into it’s own film titled something like Resistance: A Star Wars Story and it’d make more sense. It’d also allow ‘The Last Jedi’ to give Rei/Kylo and Snoke’s situation the time needed to flesh out the characters instead of making everything seem impulsive.
I’m not going to go so far as to say TLJ is a good movie. I like Rey’s storyline. I despise the storyline with Rose and Finn, and I despise the existence of the Holdo maneuver. I like curmudgeon Luke making a fool of Kylo. I hated him being killed off.That movie needed a rewrite before they let it be filmed.
J.J. Abrams, who took over again after, also had no idea what happens next because he’s kind of a hack and only knows how to ape what came before without really adding anything innovative.
This has been his entire career. Don’t get me wrong, I have enjoyed his work in the past, but after it was shown that he had zero idea what anything meant in LOST and set up a show where the entire premise of the writing was “just wing that mother,” I learned to be very wary of anything he did. Add to that his disastrous take on Star Trek (which I damn with faint praise by naming it his best Star Wars movie), I knew that a trilogy in a beloved franchise was going to be an absolute shit-show.
It’s obvious he didn’t get Star Trek, and even moreso with Star Wars. Disney hired a big name that everyone was riding the dick of, and it blew up in their face because they did zero homework (or worse, they did, and were also taken by the hype). Rian Johnson turned in a turd, but it was a slightly more solid and less smelly turd than the one he had to work with, and then JJA decided that he didn’t like how someone had not stuck to all the notes he didn’t write, and retconned everything, hoping he could win over fans by giving everyone the dry, disinterested handjob version of “fan service.”
Well, he did become the Big Bad at the end of TLJ. He killed Snoke and Hux wasn’t going to do anything to stop Kylo. And that was really intriguing. It’s just too bad JJ (and a lot of fans) didn’t like it.
But no one had a reason to actually listen to him. Stormtroopers were already shown to work around him. Phasma and Hux were the ones that were actually part of the command structure. Even his ‘Knights of Ren’ were such non-entities they might as well have been Stormtroopers.
Kylo becoming the Big Bad was undercut by his utter failure in his debut of the role during the last third of TLJ. You can’t take your Big Bad seriously if his first outing AS said Big Bad results in him acting like a whiny baby and getting massively outplayed by the heroes.
Hasn’t the last 6 years of American politics proven how dangerous an emotional, ill tempered, unskilled person can be?
Yes, but I was one of those Americans that didn’t need to see proof, I knew that making the host of a reality tv show president was a recipe for disaster.
So Kylo isn’t really responsible for Holdo’s maneuver working. He actually is responsible for being fooled by Luke, but by that point the Resistance is (apparently) down to just a tiny group of survivors, and saving them costs Luke his life. So objectively, Kylo is not doing all that poorly as Supreme Leader at that point. He does need to hunt down the last of the Resistance, but it has (apparently) been eliminated as a meaningful military force. And the most important Force threat has also been eliminated.In fact, The Last Jedi really leans on Leia telling Rey the Resistance can be rebuilt, and the stableboy moving the broom with the Force, to give us hope at the end of the movie. That stableboy thing in particular fits with Rey (apparently) having no special ancestry, implying she could be the leader of some democratized, non-Jedi, users of the Force.That obviously was all dumped in the next movie. But if it had been the setup for the third movie, I think that alternative story could have featured Kylo as a very threatening, apparently dominant, antagonist, who could only be beat by some sort of general populist uprising involving many more “surprising” Force users like Rey.
The problem is that, again, Kylo himself didn’t really do any of that. Yea, he ended up killing Luke, but he did so in the most pathetic way possible and let his ego get the better of him. After all, what was stopping him from ordering the massive army behind him to go ahead and find the rest of the rebels while he took care of Luke?
Force Awakens clearly established that Kylo was still greatly immature, likely as a further excuse for why he doesn’t kill Rey immediately during their fight (in addition to his injury) with the end of the movie indicating that he was going to finish his training. Only for Last Jedi to completely drop that and say all Kylo needs to do is kill Leia and/or Rey to be a full Sith Lord.
I chuckled at Kylo’s tantrums in Force Awakens, but I could see him maturing and being a strong dangerous foe in future films. Last Jedi just made him a laughing stock that’s impossible to take seriously.
And don’t get me started on the “Only the Skywalkers can be special” bullshit that wasn’t an issue at all until it magically appeared after Force Awakens.
So Kylo officially takes over as Supreme Leader after Holdo pulls off her suicide mission (Kylo at the time is still contesting over Luke’s lightsaber with Rey).At that point, the Resistance still has a decent number of people and an armored base left. But they get whittled down by Kylo’s military forces to just a few survivors fleeing on the Falcon by the end. And again, Luke dies, which I think is supposed to be a big deal strategically. And he did do the personal work necessary to take control of those military forces. Now to be sure, Kylo doesn’t really have to do anything special to make all that happen AFTER he takes control, since he enjoys an overwhelming military advantage at that point. But objectively, I think that still looks like winning.
Sure, in a macro sense, but then you look at the details. He had a clear military advantage, but then got so distracted by the Millennium Falcon, a ship that is basically powerless against AT-STs, that the Resistance was allowed to regroup. Then he basically ignored Finn and Rose after they miraculously survived Rose’s idiotic suicide attempt. And after they destroyed the wall of the base, basically trapping the last of the Resistance inside, all Kylo had to do was order his ground troops to storm the place while he took on Luke. Yes, Kylo had no idea Luke was an illusion, but with Kylo keeping Luke’s attention, the Skywalker wouldn’t have been able to deal with all of the Imperial troops. But Kylo let his emotions take ahold of him and refused to use proper strategy. The film SHOULD have ended with Rey and Chewbacca as the last members of the Resistance.Then again, even when Snoke was in charge, they didn’t even bother to use a basic-ass pincer attack to finish off the Raddius, so military strategy isn’t exactly the First Order’s forte.
I agree in retrospect that Kylo should have ordered a simultaneous ground assault on the base, but as I recall he had no reason to believe there was a way for them to escape. Even the Resistance originally believes there is only one way out, and while I don’t recall if this is made explicit, it is reasonable Kylo may have had intelligence to that effect (given the way he conducts the assault). The Resistance then just gets lucky following that crystal fox thingy, combined with Rey having the Force juice to move all those rocks. Again, in retrospect Kylo should not even have taken the risk of something flukey like that happening, but I don’t think that is a fatally stupid sort of mistake—even good military leaders make mistakes like that.And things like not even caring about Finn or Rose are fine because to him they are just individual grunts and should be no real threat to Kylo.
No one in the First Order actually has a reason to listen to Kylo though. By the end of TLJ, he’s just an unstable wanna-be Sith that ceases being a threat once you get out of force push/pull range of him.
So obviously the movie thought the scene with Hux where Hux says there is now no Supreme Leader and then Kylo uses the Force on him is sufficient to establish why they accepted Kylo as Supreme Leader.I think you are suggesting that is not really a rational explanation, but I don’t know if that is so implausible within this sort of fascist/authoritarian organization. That type of structure requires a sort of mystical leader at the top, one the lower-level members of the organization can accept as having a special natural right to being leader, and who is destined to lead them to their anticipated greatness. Indeed, when Hux says to Kylo they have no ruler, he doesn’t sound happy—he sounds frightened and upset. And when Kylo starts choking him and Hux then says, “Long live the Supreme Leader,” he sounds relieved.Which makes sense, because fascists like Hux ultimately WANT to have a Supreme Leader in whom they can place their faith.OK, so next time we see them together, Hux is happily serving Kylo. And I do think that is exactly what Hux wanted.
I would point out that TLJ turns Hux (and pretty much most of the First Order’s leadership) into a joke character thanks to Snoke trolling him. It purposely reduces the First Order’s characters to one-note characters and ignores their established strengths and lore. Another example of this is Phasma, who should’ve massacred Finn without taking any actual damage to her armor going by her lore.
In TFA we saw Hux was more characterized like the Empire’s officers (though he was extremely overdramatic), in that he grudgingly tolerated Kylo because of Snoke’s orders but clearly had no respect for him and thought his ideas/actions were dumb. The setup was the same as the original trilogy with Vader, except Vader routinely threatened and killed people into compliance. It also helped that Vader also has a history of surviving everything and hunting down people like a telekinetic Terminator, something that Kylo lacked.
With Snoke dead, there was nothing protecting Kylo from being ditched by The First Order. A competent commander could’ve probably left him stranded somewhere or outright had him killed since he was frequently shown to only survive thanks to plot armor and people deciding to fight him one at a time in melee range.
That is a fascinating spin that, in one sentence, is already far more interesting than anything in the sequels put together. Hell, it even goes back to the Jedi in the prequels fucking things up by being too strict with who is and isn’t a Jedi and inadvertently creating Darth Vader in the process.
You could if he accessed some Sith Holocrons or something that were in Snoke’s possession. I believe the lore behind Snoke pre-RoS had him as a dark side practitioner that Palpatine was unaware of until sometime around the second Death Star. Snoke having Holocrons that predate Sidious’ line that followed the ‘Rule of Two’ could’ve been a way to have both Kylo and Rey studying the Force using sources from the initial formation of both orders.
That’s one of my biggest problems with TLJ and I’m surprised people don’t bring it up more. The movie teases us with the promise that Kylo Ben could be something different, neither Sith or Jedi, not following the old rules…then he just makes the same old “join me and together we will rule…” speech to Rey and continues to act like a brat for the rest of the movie.
Yeah Darth Vader sure kicked ass at the end of Ep 4. Letting Han shoot him out of the sky and allowing the Death Star to get all blowed up. The rebellion was playing right into his hands.
But then again, you can’t have your heroes ever look like they might fail, or even do anything wrong. FFS, look no further than that ridiculous fakeout with Chewie in RoS. Absolutely no one believed that was going to stick, even for the 45 seconds it took for them to reveal he was fine.
I wish they could have kept Kylo Ren as the main villain in IX. Having his motivation be “the dogma of the past has held us back” (to tie in with his “let go” to Rey) is a great reason for him to both break with Luke and kill Snoke.
I mean, to be fair, that is obviously what The Last Jedi was establishing: Ben Solo is gone and only Kylo Ren remains. Most of his character development in that movie is done in an effort to establish that.Rise of Skywalker just decided they didn’t like that idea and pivoted. I’ll say this: Rise of Skywalker is bad and Kylo Ren’s redemption arc isn’t great, but that scene when he magically grabs Rey’s lightsaber out of thin air and responds to the shocked Knights of Ren by giving a little bow is genuinely charming.Yeah, that’s pretty much all I’ve got.
I had a thought that maybe Hux would revolt against Kylo taking over, and there’d be a civil war in the First Order between the two sides. This would give the Resistance a chance to gather some strength and hit back, with Rey finding Force sensitives to turn into a new Jedi order, Finn recruiting escaped or abandoned Stormtroopers, and Poe having to learn some actual diplomacy to get support from a fractured and fearful galaxy of planets.
The real problem is, NOBODY had an idea what was going to happen next.
Someone at Lucasdisney should have had at least a rough outline or something.
They had an idea, they had plenty of ideas on what happened next; it was just up to us as the audience to decide which is lame and an awful shift into what fandom and these huge franchises have become. The creative and the financial sides are intertwined more than ever; so almost no decisions were made in Rise of the Skywalker. Like even the ending was like; “Hey do you guys like Lando??? How about this woman he met?? Is she Lando’s daughter??? Maybe she’ll be his lover??? Would you buy DisneyPlus to watch a Lando show? How about an Oscar Isaac show???”The entirety of that third movie felt like it should’ve come with a questionnaire at the end that asked what parts of the film you would enjoy watching a continuation of. That’s what made the second film of the new trilogy much more exciting. It’s not perfect by any means but there’s some decisive things about the lore said in that. There’s the feeling that the status quo has changed. The Jedi Order is shown to be a flawed (somewhat fanatical) institutional force in a way that the prequel series alluded to but never fully fleshed out. Benecio del Toro emerges as a new villain (and just as quickly exits). There’s a real element of change in that film but it didn’t sit right with people and so it had to be immediately undone. Even down to Finn basically brushing off Rose in the third film.
I think the demand for an outline is unfair. Lucas made up most of Star Wars as he went along. Johnson went in a without an outline on Last Jedi. For me the problem isn’t that the lack of a plan, it’s that they weren’t willing to take any big risks in the third one. Combine that with a rushed production and the death of an actor they’d planned to build the movie around and disaster was inevitable.
Yeah, I think it is easy to overcomplicate this.Abrams/Disney made a bad movie with The Rise of Skywalker. But I think there are many different ways a better movie could have been made. And I am specifically willing to admit that although I would personally have loved the third movie to keep running with the themes of The Last Jedi, it was probably possible to make a third movie that didn’t do that but which also nonetheless did not suck.So a lot of why The Rise of Skywalker sucked was just that they made a bad movie. Which happens, although it is particularly disappointing when it happens in such a high profile context.
Lucas didn’t have a firm plan, but at least it was all from the brain of one guy. He didn’t just hand off the reigns to Spielberg or whoever and say “Here you go, go nuts.”
I think the demand for an outline is unfair. Lucas made up most of Star Wars as he went along. That’s not a ringing endorsement considering Lucas went 2 for 6 in making a half decent movie. Also, I don’t think that even applies to prequel trilogy because he did have that outlined. It not unfair to demand an outline. On the contrary, it’s wildly negligent for a company to move forward with a nearly billion dollar, three movie project without having a clue what the fucking story actually is. There will be eventually be books written about what a production debacle this was.
Lucas made up most of Star Wars as he went along.That’s the key point, though; Lucas made it up as he went along. He was still, for better or worse, the key guiding creative vision throughout the whole thing. Sure, Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan wrote Empire and Irvin Kershner directed it, but there’s a reason Lucas still has the “story by” credit, and he’s back on writing duties in Jedi. His voice and his ideas are clearly in charge, or at least present, throughout the whole thing.The sequel trilogy, conversely, is like one of those round robin stories where no one discusses anything leading to one person starting it with one idea, the next person throwing it out and going in a completely different direction, then the next person having to wrestle it all back together. Maybe having a showrunner-like guide wouldn’t have necessarily helped, but it couldn’t hurt either. Even if they were going to get different teams in for each one, those films badly needed some kind of “story by” credit situation.
The whole “didn’t have a plan” narrative needs to go away, because it’s
not nearly as explanatory as the sequel trilogy’s critics want to
believe. Look, I’m not here to argue that the ST is the most cohesive
trilogy ever, but there really was a plan. This is not even touching the fact that the OT didn’t have “a plan” people loved it, the PT did have “a plan,” and people panned it.
JJ was going to collaborate with Rian, who was going to collaborate with Trevorrow. “Duel of the Fates” was already written before TLJ came out, and arguably is war more cohesive an end cap than Rise of Skywalker. Disney also had Lucas’ original treatment which featured Kira, who more or less became Rey, and “Col. Kurtz Luke” who had gone into exile after the betrayal of one of his students….sounds awfully familiar, no? (even the pre-Disney concept art closely matches TLJ) So if folks are still mad at Luke’s disgruntled retreat, blame Lucas, not Rian Johnson.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, but I’m staggered by the fact that no one bothered to so much as write an outline simple enough to fit on a cocktail napkin for three films with a combined budget of close to a billion dollars.
This, exactly. Yes, TLJ had problems, but it also surprised me in a way no Star Wars movie has since 8 year old me sank back in my seat in bewildered defeat and confusion when the credits came up at the end of Empire Strikes Back. That alone puts it as my favorite of the sequel trilogy. It went new places.
TLJ said “you know, Star Wars can tell a lot of different stories” and RotS responded with “nah.”
I think telling something different in Star Wars is a good thing and something I’d look forward to (I sure am bored with them explaining/showing how things happened, like Han Solo’s history in his movie and seeing how Boba Fett escaped the Sarlacc Pit). I just don’t think part 2 of a trilogy is a good place to start doing it.
At the same time TLJ also said “Everyone is an idiot. The main characters are all massive idiots. Here’s a Benicio Del Toro cameo. Huldo gets a space opera anime sacrifice. Nothing else matters.” like it didn’t actually want to be part of a trilogy. All it accomplished was wiping the entire board clean and leaving a third film with a need to either introduce a new major villain or make it feasible for the First Order to actually follow Kylo Ren instead of ditching his tantrum-having craziness on the first uncharted planet they passed.
RoS definitely crapped the bed and I still believe they should’ve just had the guts to make it a 4-film series if they were going to backtrack and retread as much as they did. RoS just felt like two movies mashed together at 2x speed with some important missing parts to make any of it make sense.
Too bad it didn’t say “you know, Star Wars can tell a lot of different stories WELL”.
‘”TLJ said “you know, Star Wars can tell a lot of different stories” and RotS responded with “nah.” “’@Dr. Emilio Lizardo, You know the problem with using acronyms for title references is? One slip of a letter and they could be read as an entirely different title. And Star Wars in particular does this form of reference no favors. I mean RotS does exist but it reads as Revenge Of The Sith. I’m pretty sure what you really meant was to reference The Rise Of Skywalker; but its acronym would be TROS. All this is to say darn do they need to loosen up a little more with Star Wars, to paraphrase the article a little. When even the movie title reference acronyms are not distinct enough its time to get a little more creative.
I mean, there was a brief moment where I assumed Poe’s mutiny (leading to deaths of thousands) might have some consequences for him, but then they patted him on the head, so I guess I didn’t know what was going to happen either.
Because he failed, and the next movie should have shown him learning from his failure. Failure, and learning from it, was the entire theme of the movie – Poe failed as an officer, Fin and Rose failed on their mission, Rey failed to redeem Kylo, and of course, the whole story was set in motion by Luke’s failure as a teacher. It’s not like it was all that subtle – Force Ghost Yoda basically came out and said it in so many words.I guess we’re not used to having themes, motifs and subtext in Star Wars films. And now we never will again.
There is a longstanding issue of failure in films. William Goldman wrote about a scene in which a character was drowning and was saved by his girlfriend – the actor involved would demand that it was changed to show he was faking his own drowning to help his girlfriend get confidence in her own swimming skills, and I don’t think Hollywood has evolved much in the past few decades.
It’s one reason I hated the ending of Breaking Bad – it felt like such BS to have White show up, with magical new engineering skills that the A-Team and McGuyver would be proud of, to have a heroic last stand like a western anti-hero. A true ending would have been bleaker, but studios believe audiences want that ending to at least be vaguely happy, and so we don’t often get to deal with failure in film or TV. They even did this dumb not-quite-retcon in the Infinity War where everybody was brought back to life even though suddenly there would be far more people than food was being produced for, but the writing for that wasn’t exactly smart…
It might’ve helped if they didn’t instantly fail though. Finn/Rose and Rey failed as soon as they landed. Poe succeeded at the start but got the offensive fleet destroyed entirely. Then he succeeded in his mutiny but it was pointless given the situation anyway.
Finn/Rose’s plan went awry as soon as they landed, but they adapted and managed to get as far as the inside of the enemy flagship – not bad for a pair of perfectly ordinary people. Rey didn’t fail completely – she got Snoke killed, and she caused serious psychological damage to Kylo (would he have tried to fight Luke if he hadn’t rejected him?). As for Poe, he was obviously being groomed to be the next leader of the Resistance; he just needed to grow up and learn to use his head, and to do that, he needed to fail at something once in his life.
They got into the enemy flagship thanks to heaps of plot armor. Despite failing because of parking, they just happened to share a cell with a guy who could do everything the guy they needed could. Said person was also used to drive home the ham-fisted war profiteering/shades of gray angle that brought nothing to the film other while simultaneously tying things back to Rose’s dead sister and their pendant. Then he betrays them leading to them getting most of the Resistance killed. Del Toro’s character was an extremely forced inclusion to further the plot while going off on a tangent that didn’t bring anything to the setting.
Given Kylo’s prior behavior, he definitely would’ve tried to fight Luke. Snoke was the one to do the real damage to Kylo simply because he was reduced to being little more than a Force Troll who outright tells Kylo how to kill him by narrating it. Rey is… well her time spent training is really undefined and deciding to bail on training to help someone she previously was trying her best to murder (because he murdered one of her friends, severely wounded another, and was actively trying to kill her) is the dumbest thing ever.
Everything Poe did proved pointless.
Snoke never even got the chance to be an actual villain and was essentially a being who spent TLJ trolling Kylo, Rey, and Hux. He just sorta monologued everything, even his own death.
The Knights of Ren got no development at all in TLJ (or RoS) and might as well not exist.
Though a big issue with the sequel trilogy is that it misuses the opening credits crawl to just bypass crucial plot points and setup. RoS was definitely the worst with it since the actual Palpatine reveal got put into Fortnite instead of on an actual big screen.
This. TLJ does new things, but it doesn’t do any of them particularly well. It most just flips the game board over and tries to pretend that the resulting mess is more interesting than finding shading and nuance in the established rules.
TLJ just opened so many possibilities that I assumed, clearly incorrectly, that they had mapped something interesting for ROS. I’ve posted this before, but it only makes logical sense that there is some ability in every person to tap into the Force if it is indeed what binds us all together. Some corral and control it far better than others, like any other human (or whatever creature we’re talking about) attribute. Rey coming from nothing instead of being one of a handful of galactic royal families tracked that perfectly. But noooooo…
Which royal family is Obi-Wan from? I wasn’t aware that the Kenobis were so important. The Windus, now there’s a royal family we all know! And the Skywalkers, who could be more privileged than them?
Yea, it was such a refreshing change for Last Jedi to say that. Completely ignoring that the prequel trilogy actually showed that in action all over the damn place. Nope. No other powerful Jedi until Darth Vader came around.
I had the same feeling, but it wasn’t one I’d never had with Star Wars before, it was just one I hadn’t had since I first saw Empire. To me, TLJ always felt like a return to what Star Wars had once been.
That was kind of the problem with TLJ for a certain hardcore audience – it tried to get rid of a lot of the really dumb world building that blights Star Wars. The Jedi order and the Sith are both such weak fan-fiction that if you tried presenting the work to adults, they’d go “this is stupid!”. I was so excited by the idea that they were making entirely new force factions only for it to be completely forgotten. I’d loved the idea that it was suddenly OK for Star Wars to become a proper universe, and not just the adventures of the Skywalker family…
Now I just watch it out of idle curiosity hoping a quality new sci-fi franchise comes along, wishing Babylon 5 had had the success it deserved
I loved that Kylo didn’t turn good. Rey wasn’t related to a famous character, her parents were “no one”. And I especially loved that it opened up to how The Force could be tapped into by anyone if they could sense it, which channels into Obi-Wan’s explanation of it back in A New Hope (and again played into Rey’s developing arc that just because she didn’t come from Jedi blood doesn’t mean she couldn’t be one anyway). The ending sequence of the kid on Canto Bight summoning the broom and looking to the stars is one of my favorite final shots in any movie, built on an idea that the world and the Force wasn’t just limited to the bloodlines we’ve seen in the SW universe.Then RoS was like, “Actually, everything is still connected whether it makes sense or not”
Honestly, even with TLJ I figured Rey was some sort of manufactured clone or another Anakin situation. Her being able to just delve in the dark side area with no ill effects to the point of scaring Luke seemed like something that should’ve been a major plot point. It showing her only reflections of herself kinda seemed like they could’ve made her another balance bringer while also giving TFA and TLJ’s titles some real meaning.
“Oh, and that stable boy? He was, uh, Obi-Wan’s … grand-nephew. Yeah.”
Star Wars has always had the position that anyone who was force sensitive could access the force. Luke was just a farmer turned hero until he suddenly wasn’t. We were supposed to believe that all the Jedi were inbred aristocrats all along?I think that’s always been praise for TLJ that’s fallen the most flat. We’ve all been aware of the fact that anyone can be a Jedi this entire time. Anakin could have been a dirty little desert rat this whole time if we assume Shmi was just a little crazy. Just because Qui-Gon bought into the space jesus story doesn’t mean we have to.
Yeah, just destroying the whole midichlorians/force royalty bullshit would have been a nice move.
There was a point in final act of the Last Jedi where I realized that this was all bullshit and had nothing to do with Star Wars and I got angry and I seriously considered getting up and leaving and regret that I didn’t and I refuse to watch the third of that insulting series.
Was it when Finn and Rose’s entire plotline wound up being a War Profiteering message that simply gave a cameo to someone who gets a ton of people killed with no consequences whatsoever? Or when trying to figure out how much time Rey actually spent training before going off to… get instantly captured by a guy who repeatedly said he didn’t want to be ‘saved’? Maybe it was when Poe led a mutiny with no consequences whatsoever because the movie spent it’s entire runtime saying “suicidal plans that shouldn’t work, don’t work and only get people killed” before ending with Luke doing that exact thing before spontaneously vanishing?
LOL, found the whiny child who doesn’t want to see anything change
The franchise really did feel open at that point. It was nice.
The one mistake TLJ made was it left us in a cliffhanger situation with no reasonable path open for the protagonists to win in the time span of a single remaining film. There was no immediate way for 20 members of the Resistance to mount an endgame. The only other reasonable option was to have the last movie take place 10 years later. That left JJ Abrams no option but to erase TLJ completely.
The rabid, vitriolic, vocal hate that TLJ got probably ended up hurting the franchise than anything in the film. It basically signaled to everyone running the show to keep their heads down and make the fans happy as easily as possible.
TLJ isn’t perfect, though I loved it. It felt like a true throwback to the 80s in its scope and visuals. And it ended up exposing the whole sequel trilogy as lacking any sort of guiding vision- it threw curveballs, and nobody was equipped to actually hit them. And so we got “Somehow, Palpatine returned,” and the frantic retconning of anything that could’ve rubbed the rabid fanbase the wrong way. Because JJ Abrams is great with setting up questions but terrible at actually having to answer them.
It definitely showed a lack of overall vision for the trilogy.
I’d still argue that TFA was a good start but that TLJ really didn’t seem like it wanted to be a part of a trilogy. The overall theme of the film felt more like something that should’ve been a sidestory like Rogue One and focused mainly on the Resistance members and First Order while Rey and Kylo were sidelined. It shoved in war profiteering, shades of grey, ignoring the past, etc, all things that really didn’t fit the theme of the mainline trilogies or even most of it’s own movie. Even the duel between Phasma and Finn seemed like something that really needed more development considering how the tie-in novels/comics/lore hyped up Phasma.
Plus the movie went hard in subverting franchise tropes, arguably too hard. Like it repeatedly punished the ‘hero’s doing suicidal plans that somehow work out ’ trope by getting a ton of people killed pointlessly each time. Poe gets the Resistance’s offensive force massacred at the start of the film. Rei just wanders into captivity for an unrepentant repeat murderer because even after he warns her away. Finn and Rose instantly failed their mission because they couldn’t be bothered to park legally and then get most of the Resistance killed. Poe led a mutiny that actually worked but was pointless anyway.
It’s like TLJ was designed to be an Anti-Star Wars film but someone made the mistake of making it part of the primary trilogy setup even after they established a sidestory brand (that would die with Solo because someone thought people actually cared about Han’s past).
“Somehow, Palpatine returned.”*moment’s silence*“Oh, we thought you were going to elaborate on that.”
THE DEAD SPEAK!
“ JJ Abrams is great with setting up questions but terrible at actually having to answer them”It’s pretty damning on the DVD commentary for TLJ that Rian straight up says JJ had no idea why Luke was in exile on that island and that Rian basically had to connect the dots himself.
Considering 2/3rds of TLJ was pointless nonsense, I, too, didn’t know what was going to happen. But that wasn’t a good thing.
There was no point in TLJ where we didn’t know exactly what was going to happen. There’s no way Disney was going to end the Skywalker saga with Ben going unredeemed. It was an interesting twist but ultimately a waste of time. TLJ is bad because of all the giant plot holes, the lack of anything wonderous, the poor pacing, the limited environments, and the missed opportunities. It just poorly remixed Empire right down to the snow/sand speeders fighting the walkers, the space chase, a casino city stand in for cloud city. It was a worse rip off of an old movie than E7. We all like what we like but there were many parts of TLJ that are objectively bad.
Same boat here. While The Last Jedi isn’t without its faults, it at least tried to take the series into the unknown, into new territories. It tried moving things in a different direction and that felt nice to me. The movie still had those old characters in it, but they were still riding in the backseat, only to serve the story of those new characters, mostly.The Force Awakens had a bit more fan service to it, but it didn’t bother me because it was the first new Star Wars movie in a long time and trying to feel “familiar” to fans was somewhat ok to me. Still, it wasn’t overdone. Again, movie is not without its faults, but I still liked it for what it was.But the Rise of Skywalker ruined everything by turning the movie into a fan service festival. Old characters popping up because OF COURSE. And also, lousy story where what’s hinted as dramatic gets retconned minutes later because OF COURSE. It felt like they were trying to negate the previous movie at times. It felt improvised, and it felt like they had to somehow close story arcs for f*cking everything. What this did was make the main characters of the new trilogy in service of the old ones. It felt like the main characters were dragged into a conflict and story that wasn’t theirs.It is still, to this date, the only Star Wars movie I don’t have in my collection. I’ll get it someday for the sake of completing my collection, but I’m in no rush to spend more money on it than I already did at the theatre.—-Now… I LOVED the Mandalorian. Especially the first season. FINALLY, it felt like the Star Wars universe was able to exist without Skywalker drama in sight, or any familiar character. This was fresh. There were only hints at events and things we knew about, and it was awesome for that.But then came season two, and while good in its own right, and as cool the ending was, it felt like they had to make the galaxy small again, like nothing can happen without involving familiar faces. Cool to see those characters, but at the same time, it almost means that new Star Wars content cannot be “it’s own thing” and tell other stories. It ALWAYS has to, somehow, tie their stories into other’s.The Book of Boba Fett was “ok” to me up until it started to feel like The Mandalorian season 2.5. Again, a show that wasn’t given the chance to be “it’s own thing”, it had to tie itself to other stories of known Star Wars characters (beside its main character of course).I mean, I love the old Star Wars characters too, bought the movies many times in different formats, have many books about those movies too, T-shirts and other collectibles, but I’d like to see new stories and things taken into different directions before it starts feeling like a soap opera where everyone is stupidly related to everyone else.
Frankly, I’m getting burned out on Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel, GOT and LOTR as their owners try to wring every last dime they can from each franchise as they spin off show after show diluting the originality of the original works. My attitude towards “The Book of Boba Fet,” was, “Do I have to watch this too?” Sure, many of these spin-offs were good, but can we have something original any time soon?
TLJ was dogshit.
I’ve thought about the ending to TLJ so many times since I saw it, and have come up with a number of different ways the story could continue from there. It really gave a sense of the game being changed for ‘Star Wars’, and that was thrilling.Ah, what might have been.
all of those words are wrong
TLJ was my least favorite Star Wars media ever, just because for a good 70% of the film, I didn’t have the slightest clue what was going on, and the other 30%, Luke was… well, not Luke.
Johnson sought to destroy SW convention but forgot that you have to have a coherent plot and follow in-universe rules (e.g. since when can Force Sensitives survive the vacuum of space?).
He succeeded in destroying convention but also everything that makes Star Wars Star Wars.To wit: he fucked up the sequel trilogy hard and did it maliciously while Kennedy, et al. let it happen (because of hubris).
TLJ may have been surprising, and done some really cool new things, but it still didn’t really advance the plot and it still made some tragic mistakes with Luke’s arc.
Right there with you. TLJ is the only Star Was thing that made me feel anything since the Disney acquisition. And it was precisely because for the first time, somebody was fulfilling the promise of this series being helmed by new people – new ideas and concepts. But hey, streaming TV shows about all of your favs!
My only real issue with TLJ is that it’s not exactly clear what the scale and stakes of any of this is. The Republic capital got blown up real good, as did Starkiller base, and now the Resistance is being chased by the First Order. But exactly how big are those entities? Is this it? I think that’s it for the Resistance but what about the First Order? Are they down to Kylo Ren and 30 or so walkers? If so, well, who gives a shit about any of this? These are basically the Jets and the Sharks at this point. Personally, I feel that if some decently large and well-equipped band of fascists blew up the capital, but were immediately hobbled, I don’t know, the Distant Confederation of Gassy Planets would round up a few dozen cruisers and help Take Care of Those Bastards. IDK……..And for the whole trilogy, this is a big problem. The galaxy is very, very, very enormous, and based on the text of the films I have no clue whether any of this really, actually matters in the scale of things. But, putting that aside, TLJ has some interesting visuals and does something very bold by untethering Rey from any kind of superpower Jedi bloodline. She’s just a person, with remarkable powers. She’s not the chosen one, she’s not so-and-so’s daughter, she’s just some nobody who is One With the Force. And that’s cool! RoS is an utterly vacuous, dumb, lazy, cowardly pile of garbage designed not to piss off The Fans but, by being vacuous, dumb, lazy, and a cowardly piece of garbage, pisses off everyone. This trilogy was an utter failure. Full stop.
Unfortunately, the feeling I got from The Last Jedi was that Johnson both didn’t know and didn’t care what was going to happen next.
I think you’re overstating just how “bold” and innovative “The Mandalorian” really was. I mean, I guess the sheer act of having an SW product without any Skywalker connection (at least at first) is kinda/sort bold-ish, but only a little. It shouldn’t be that hard to imagine such a thing in a vast galaxy, but I guess it is…?But that first season was a pretty shambling affair, with underwritten characters and a loose, lazy narrative. As for “bold” and “new”, Mando was, by design, meant to be Boba Fett in all but name. Hey, here’s a show about an extremely popular minor character from the franchise that everyone is already disposed to love. We’re just changing the name and a few very minor details.
That said, it’s definitely leagues better than BOBF and with its own ouroboros second season, with its endless parade of cameos and callbacks and backdoor pilots.
Agreed, I especially remember all the eye rolling about them going to Tatooine in s1, course back then we had no idea how silly that would get later.
This. I fully agree with the analysis here, except in that I think it is far, far too kind to that first season of The Mandalorian.
The Boba Fett stuff underscores how much of Star Wars lives in the audience’s imagination. In the Original Trilogy, Boba Fett has a meeting with Darth Vader, then patiently follows the Falcon to Bespin, then stands next to Vader while Vader captures Han Solo and freezes him in Carbonite, then stands around Jabba’s palace, then hangs out on Jabba’s sail barge, then uses his jetpack one time before Han Solo accidentally knocks him into the Sarlaac. He’s arguably the most chill character in the whole trilogy.
My thoughts exactly. Making up some sort of honor-bound warrior tribe who lived by a “way” who were scrupulous bounty hunters was frankly silly.
God, now I’m imagining a prequel story where Boba Fett is a social climber who got into bounty hunting because it was a good way to hobnob with Imperial officials and flirt with Twi’leks.
Yeah. More reputation than actual substance.
While i thoroughly enjoyed Mando S1, i agree that calling Mando “bold and innovative” is a bit of a stretch. It was great for the inner 10 year-old (much as i hate that expression) without the plot and dialogue being eyeroll-inducing (ymmv). Helps that Mando/Grogu tend to be very light on any dialogue, period…. whereas everytime Boba and Fennec spoke, they came across as idiots.
So I agree The Mandalorian S1 sort of leans on the (barebones) character of Boba Fett to leap right into the story without much explanation. He is a loner bounty hunter, got it, let’s go!Same basic deal with The Child/Grogu. He is a baby Yoda with Force powers, got it, let’s go!During the course of the season, though, things move in new directions. We meet the Armorer and learn about Mandalorian history and culture, which has nothing to do with Boba Fett as far as we know. Dr. Pershing, the Client, and eventually Moff Gideon are Imperial antagonists, but with some new sort of plot involving the Child, all of which is consistent with them being an Imperial remnant and not just minions in the former Empire. We meet Karga, Kuili, IG-11, Dune, Motto, Shand, and Mayfield, all of whom are or will become recurring characters. And then at the end we see the Darksaber in Gideon’s possession, which means the Mandalore part of the story and the Imperial remnant part of the story are somehow intertwined.So regardless of how well you think all this was executed, the narrative result is by the end of Season 1, this is not really still a Boba Fett story in any meaningful way. It has become a story when The Mandalorian actually being Mandalorian is critically important to the story. And there is an accumulation of new good guys and bad guys (admittedly some of whom get killed off, but others survive) who are basically from a previously unexplored (in live action) period in the Star Wars universe. And we are led to believe it is all going to keep unfolding in new ways.
To date, Dr. Pershing is the most interesting and complex character in all of the SW live-action TV series.
Yeah, personally I found season 2 much more exciting that season 1. Season 1 had its moments for sure, and it introduced a bunch of new characters in a part of the timeline we hadn’t seen before – so for all of that it was cool. But just as how BoBF had episodes where Boba didn’t even appear, season 1 of Mando also had episodes that did nothing to drive the story forward.
Hell, Mando has multiple episodes in each season that aren’t part of the larger narrative, they’re just standalones. Which should be okay in theory. But when the central narrative is so thin and the episode count so low, I couldn’t help but yearn for more sophisticated, urgent storytelling instead of the loose, lackadaisical rambles that the show gave us.
I’m enjoying the Mandalorian, but to me the entire concept of them as some sort of order makes no sense. Boba Fett was one of several bounty hunters hired to track Han and company. He had cool armor that I’m sure was helpful in doing his job. Same with the jetpack. His helmet was just a helmet and he probably needed it to breath on certain planets. There’s nothing to suggest he was some sort of badass warrior. He was just clever in how he went about tracking the Falcon. Their entire society holds up to scrutiny about as well as John Wick’s underground hitman world.
So just to be clear, and spoiler alert:We learn in Season 2 that Din’s group of Mandalorians are a fringe cult. There are other Mandalorians who are very different and do not follow The Way as defined by Din’s group.And then Boba isn’t even one of those—Jango was a Mandalorian foundling, and Boba wore his armor, but Boba himself is not a Mandalorian and refuses to follow the Mandalorian Creed.
Now, that doesn’t quite mean that Din’s Mandalorians are truly a plausible group. But at least we are not supposed to believe they represent Mandalorians in general, nor Boba.
That actually makes me feel better.
Again, a bit spoilery, but: a lot of Season 2 actually involves Din learning more about greater Mandalorian society, and then violating the rules of his fringe cult (usually for very compelling reasons, but still). He is then forced to confess this to The Armorer in BoBF, and she is not exactly forgiving about it.So they really made that into a major narrative arc, and it has become one of my favorite parts of his story so far.
Trash take.
I mean, I agree, but considering all of the the other SW stuff, which has been hyper-focused on the skywalker saga, and retelling the exact same star wars stories, it was a DRAMATIC departure for Disney.That they immediately began undoing in S2, and the rest, as the article points out.
Yeah the narrative about Season 1 is basically thrown out the window at the end of Season 1 when they find a force user/Baby Yoda. I loved what we got but I also kind of wanted to just follow around a bounty hunter for a season. They immediately connected it to the rest of the saga.
Well, Baby Yoda is introduced at the end of the first episode, not the first season. It’s literally what the show is about.Personally, the idea of a show about a “badass” doing badass things, as many fans over clamor for (not trying to put you in bad company) is boring, though. It’s not a show. It’s crappy fan fic. It’s why people want a Vader movie because the idea of a whole movie of Vader killing Jedi is “Kewl.”The Mandalorian, both the show and the character, are only interesting specifically because he WAS a stoic badass who changed his stripes when he met a defenseless cuddly baby alien and decided it was more important to help him than stick with his boring badass code.
Yeah, I have a lot of respect for why classic story types are such classics, and the “lone wolf and cub” story is such a classic because it works (in addition to the actual Lone Wolf and Cub, see also True Grit, Logan, and so on).Now to be sure, there is also a classic story type where a lone stranger rides into town, reluctantly gets dragged into violently helping out the townsfolk, maybe boffs a local hottie, then rides out again at the end to get to the next town. And Amazon apparently just had a hit with Reacher following THAT formula.But I don’t necessarily think The Mandalorian would have been a better show following Reacher’s formula instead.And I am dead sure Disney is f’n THRILLED with how popular this particular “cub” became.
The author doesn’t quite reach the endzone, but I think the fact that their complaint is “Star Wars feels like playing with the same toys over and over, and the Mandalorian felt fresh and vital before walking back to the Familiar Favorites,” while ignoring the fact that Mando and Grogu are reconfigurations of Familiar Favorites. The fact that The Mandalorian managed to mix things up enough while still hitting enough nostalgia touchstones just lightly enough is notable. I don’t think it’s the Second Coming as some adulate, but it was fun, interesting Star Wars.I think it’s a fair concern; I’m completely turned off by Boba Fett because he’s only interesting to me as a mystery and Attack of the Clones already fooled me once. I’m cautious about Kenobi because it feels too familiar and if I see Tatooine one more time I’ma gonna puke. In my opinion it feels like they hurled open the gates of possibility, just to retreat to the corral.
Eh, I thought Mando S1 was great, and I liked S2 as well. Can’t really say the same about the Book of Boba lmao.
Endless parade of cameos? Wut?
Yeah I was gonna say, it’s bold by being a very stripped-down (and mercifully mostly cameo-free) version of Star Wars. Star Wars on the fringes, which is what a lot of us have always wanted.
The acting was just so shitty in Mandalorian. Amy Sedaris, who I love, came off as having spent all her time in makeup so she had to read off cue cards. Bill Burr was even worse (but the only thing he’s even been good in is Breaking Bad).Mandalorian gets filed for me with the old Xena and Hercules shows, just based on cooler IP and with better effects budget.(The droid was pretty good. Presumably Taika Waititi would have to be actively trying to suck in order to give a bad performance.)I haven’t watched Boba Fett. I probably will at some point, but it doesn’t have much draw for me.
Here’s the problem with new Star Wars media.
The Mandalorian wasn’t bold and innovative. It was very straightforward! It was “Lone Wolf and Cub In A Space Western.” It was exactly what the original Star Wars movies were: mash-ups of sci-fi serials, westerns and samurai movies.
What it was, though, was a mash-up we hadn’t seen yet. Nothing groundbreaking, but a real good show. The movies are still telling the same Evil Empire vs Scrappy Rebels which we’ve seen many times already – and who cares if the good guys win, if the Evil Empire is still gonna be in power 30 years later regardless?
One doesn’t need to break the mold to make a good Star Wars product. They just need to use a different mold for crying out loud.
I agree with everything except the “it was a really good show,” part. It was an okay show that was fitfully good and mostly kinda okay.
Eh, that’s fair.
Can I just say I fucking hate, hate, HATE the idea of Obi Wan and Vader meeting between ROTS and Star Wars.
It’s absolutely against the canon, even if never quite explicitly stated.
Look, let Disney do what they want to do with the franchise, give us more movies, more TV, go crazy. But at least please respect the intentions and integrity of the original Lucas movies. Don’t go retconning that shit for your dumb streamer shows. Ugh.
I bet Obi will also encounter Asokha, the great absentee from the roginal trilogy by now. 😉 And why not a cameo from Jedi Fallen order?? I bet those two are still around doing.. something. :DCheers
Oh, I hadn’t even consider Ahsoka. Ugh, I find the rush to put Ahsoka all over live action SW to be annoying. I like the character well enough, but was never a massive stan and I am not sold on Rosario’s interpretation of the character. She just doesn’t “feel” like the same character to me.
Testify. I absolutely hate it.
Thank you.
You could just not watch Kenobi. The only person claiming that it changes the original films is you. It is totally up to your own perception here but…. I really feel that I have to spell out for you that in no way are they planning on changing A New Hope or entering our brains and changing our memories of it so there really shouldn’t be any reason for you to be upset here if you just manage your perspective better.
I’m sure there’s some other straw man for you to be this upset about elsewhere.
Or you could correctly use the phrase “straw man” next time.
Canon means nothing with Star Wars:
“He was already a great pilot when I met him” doesn’t mean he was some amazing 8 year old who could win races in a self built vehicle, build a droid with 6 million forms of communication, destroy a key installation by random joystick motion and button presses… Quite how Obi Wan needed to be told “No, there is another” when the other was apparently the twin of the one he knew about and played a role in hiding is a question too
Or maybe a sign that Star Wars was always being re-written on the fly with very little thought about world building…
Let Lucas retcon his own shit. Yes, there are countless inconsistencies between the OT and the PT and many of them are downright awful. But it was at least his baby. New SW writers: If you can’t make your SW property interesting without stepping on some element of what came before, you’re just a bad fucking writer. Be better!
It doesn’t matter whose property it is – “If you can’t make your property interesting without stepping on some
element of what came before, you’re just a bad fucking writer. Be
better”. Look at the guy behind the writing for the Highlander franchise for another example!
They struggled with consistency even with the OT, and a lot of the Star Wars world building was done in spin-off projects by other people which is why it’s such an empty mess, which is why there is no point saying to respect the integrity of the Lucas films. They had none. The first spin off novel had significant romantic/flirty interactions between Luke and Leia, and if you pay attention, there are little oddities between the OT films too.
Lucas was just a terrible writer, Harrison Ford even called him out for this on set, but too many SW fans are blinded by nostalgia and treat the films far too seriously. They’re a dumb fun mess, then the PT were just a complete mess, so I can’t fault Disney for trying to create something more coherent and expansive by throwing out a lot of the tripe, even if it was doomed because of elements in the fanbase
My only hope is that it’ll be flashbacks or as a coinciding-but-not-intersecting plot. Not least because casting Christensen as merely the guy in the black armor when the stunt people aren’t in there would be one of the stupidest things ever.
I don’t get how it could be anything but flashbacks…even in RotS, once he was in the armor, it was no longer Christensen…so how is he supposed to show up?
In a recent interview, Ewan said Hayden was back playing “Anakin.” Lots of ways to interpret that, but I’m hoping against hope that it’s just flashbacks and/or dream sequences and that he doesn’t square off against proper Vader in the actual “real” timeline.
I’m sorry, but what other ambitions is Disney supposed to have?! You seemingly like Marvel / Star Wars 6-episode series, but then you complain they’re simple and derivative. Heven forbid there should be more Star Wars movies… but then you complain of the studio’s lack of producing popular content away from the Skywalker saga. WHICH IS IT, A.V. CLUB?!
The words simple and derivative don’t appear in this article
You don’t have to say the words to imply it.
What if – hear me out – Lucasfilm made… a good Star Wars movie.
I think the A.V. Club wants something new and fresh but for some reason they’ve pre-decided that it’s hopeless to expect new IPs to come into existence therefore they’re forcing what they want (which is decidedly not Star Wars) to be a Star Wars. And their furthermore insulting the intelligence of people who appreciate the “toy boy” because they’re mad Star Wars isn’t another thing. Passive aggressively calling out the people who do actually like Star Wars seems an odd way for the A.V. Club to express this but, here we are.
Simple – acknowledgement that the galaxy is a really big place inhabited by billions (trillions?) of characters who don’t and won’t ever know each other but could make for interesting stories, pulling from what we know about the SW universe without needing cameos. The current approach suggests there are like 50 important people total. Rogue One was great because we knew there was a story behind how the Death Star plans were stolen and provided to the rebels. But other than the very ending with Akbar watching them get wiped out from his ship and the appearances by Leia and Vader, no one else had ever been seen or even spoken of before. And it’s the best SW-adjacent production so far by a wide margin.
This is and has always been a bizarre critique leveled only at Star Wars. I SUSPECT it’s a holdover from the EU when we really did get several anthology books and some backstory prequels for characters like Han and Lando that showed a bigger universe. But it is, for some reason VERY specific to Star Wars. No one complains that Dune, another galaxy spanning Empire, is only about Arrakis and the Atreides family. No one complains that the MCU, despite being literally galaxy spanning (and soon multiverse spanning) is mostly about a handful of people. No one complains that in Star Trek it appears Starfleet has roughly one important crew/ship at a time (and they can’t help leaning into that even when it’s supposed to be about an UNIMPORTANT ship, like Lower Decks.) The reason is you can’t tell a narrative that way, and you REALLY can’t do it on the screen. The first complaints about Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time or George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire were how expansive and all over the place the narrative and mythology got; both required dramatic cuts for TV.
Rogue One felt like a genuinely new frontier for SW, something that finally focused on the people fighting for a better world that we never got to hear about. I don’t know how the entire rest of the galaxy can be ignored to favor just the handful of people they keep bringing up over and over for the sake of old fans saying “hey i know that character/ i get that reference”.The High Republic comics are not bad, but I’m also tired of the jedi as a whole and honestly traditional jedi ideology needs to die off. long live the sith
These shows will continue until the moment one bombs, and then they’re gone. That’s how Disney works now.
If Rise of the Skywalker didn’t bomb… there’s no hope they’ll ever stop doing these.Cheers
It wasn’t Rise of Skywalker that shuttered Star Wars movies. It was Solo. Remember how they had all these huge trilogy plans that amounted to nothing after then?
And Solo didn’t bomb (in relative terms) because people didn’t want a movie about Han. It’s because they miscast the lead (sorry Alden, like your work in general but this was a misfire) and made the movie a Greatest Hits of every single thing we knew about the guy from the very first SW movie.
Yeah, I still maintain Solo could have been pretty satisfying as a streaming series, which would have allowed the various backstory beats to be better thought out, and MUCH better paced out.But Solo was conceived years before that would have been considered a serious option, back when they thought these planned “anthology” origin stories should obviously be feature films.Oh well.
Im more concerned about what we see in Lucasfilm production logo – masks, helmets, droids, but not people, played by actors whose faces they can’t as easily own.
I feel like Star Wars is way too beholden to nostalgia to ever grow in the way that it could. Like…I’m kinda fucking done with the Skywalkers. I do not need to see another Skywalker again. Massive galaxy filled with worlds, tribes, cultures, lore, etc., and everything more or less hinges on one fucking family. Like, NO. Enough already.But, hey, apparently “She’s not a SKYWALKER, she’s a PALPATINE!” is supposed to be better.
I would have liked it better if Rey were somehow the offspring of some forbidden Obi Wan/Satine Kryze action. Not sure how they would have worked that out, given the duchess’ fate, but it’s a space opera. They could have tried harder.
I was really holding out that Rey would end up being a Fisto.
I’ll pile on and say they’re too beholden to their *canon* as well. We don’t *need the exact same actor from Episode 2 and TCW to play Boba Fett; he’s out of shape and not a convincing action hero. Have Fett keep his helmet on and use a stand-in if his cool-sounding voice is that important.
I feel like Star Wars is way too beholden to nostalgia to ever grow in the way that it could.As a Star Trek fan, I agree. Star Wars’ most loved productions (until The Mandalorian came along) have always been the ones with the closest connection to the original trilogy. The ships, characters, plot lines.. all of it. In short, the franchise has a very shallow gene pool.With Star Trek, you’ve had a lot more variety in crews, time periods, etc. and going back to the era of the original series was only a necessary crutch in 2009 when Paramount needed a film to bring the franchise back from the dead.
I like how they can all blend in to each other, maybe this is just new ways to tell stories 🙂
The thing that’s really turning off subscribers/SW Fans is the Woke bullshit Disney puts into every project now. The numbers are already showing the decline for this type of drivel.
Serious question: How does this site expect people to read their stories when a giant ad takes over 80% screen?
There are browser plugins for that.
Cannot make everyone happy.For people that enjoyed the various other content and watch it all, you see characters come and go as needed and overlapping stories. To some of us this is great.
^Only normal comment in the whole section
They lost me when they brought Spock back after killing him.
And yet, the entire premise of Season 1 was based around a tiny Force-sensitive version of a Jedi Master who appeared in the majority of Star Wars movies up to that point. I think a regular ass “Baby Bith” or something similarly unconnected to the wider canon would have gone over like a lead balloon. In these episodes we’re also reunited with Luke Skywalker, an uncanny fusion of stand-in, deep fake technology, and AI-constructed voice work that is handily the most egregious inclusion to the show, a hollowed-out forgery of a bygone character whose auto-tuned cadence is a chillingly robotic sign of even more creepy resurrections to come. (Seriously, guys, Sebastian Stan isn’t too busy for )We’ll have to agree to disagree. Dealing in this time frame with Force-sensitive characters makes his appearance almost a necessity. And again, if you didn’t want a Force-sensitive character, than you have to take “Baby Yoda” off the table in season 1, which makes for an entirely different show. As such, I’d rather have this Luke vs. an actor that kind of looks like Luke. Let’s face it, SebStan is a great doppleganger for younger Luke, but he’s not Luke. He sounds nothing like him and has none of the same mannerisms. And to be honest, I was kind of amazed at how well Luuke worked. His scene at the end of Mando season 2 was REAL dodgy, but this version blew me away. No, it’s not perfect, but it’s close enough for me to enjoy the types of scenes I only imagined when I was a kid. And it’s only going to get better with subsequent appearances as they iron out the wrinkles.FWIW, I have dreamed of having Star Wars stories on my television since I was a kid. Now we are getting them. They aren’t always perfect but the sheer level of bitching about it is really depressing.
I’ve been dreaming about flying cars since BTF 2 but if they debuted next year getting .0003 mpg with shit maneuverability and a 25% chance to just not turn on, I wouldn’t be grateful and shut up about it. I’d accurately point out that they suck ass.
FWIW, I have dreamed of having Star Wars stories on my television since I was a kid.That dream came true for me when I was 8 years old: It was all we had back then, and we LOVED it!
Let’s face it, SebStan is a great doppleganger for younger Luke, but he’s not Luke. He sounds nothing like him and has none of the same mannerisms.You could say that about the digital mannequin they’ve got playing Luke now, though.
This. It’s not just that Luke is CGI, it’s they somehow turned Mark Hamill into a bad voice actor, and he’s literally just supposed to be playing himself.
You could say that about the digital mannequin they’ve got playing Luke now
No I couldn’t. That’s a ~30 year old Mark Hammill and each time he appears it’s better and better quality.
Fair enough for you, but I couldn’t disagree more.
You could say that about the digital mannequin they’ve got playing Luke now, though.I have to give them credit – the digital Luke we saw at length in TBoBF was eerily realistic, especially the correct-sounding voice. Yeah, the mouth of a digital face still needs some work, but as long as you don’t show it too often? You still find yourself looking at the screen in awe.
“I have dreamed of having Star Wars stories on my television since I was a kid. Now we are getting them. They aren’t always perfect but the sheer level of bitching about it is really depressing.”The internet has made everyone into horrible nerds and horrible nerds always spoil good things. -A Horrible Nerd
Horrible nerds spoiling being a nerd is perhaps their worst crime of all!Well, except for all the racism and misogyny. But ruining the concept of being a nerd is a solid #3!
Damn nerds, they ruuuned Nerdland!
“Let’s face it, SebStan is a great doppleganger for younger Luke, but he’s not Luke. He sounds nothing like him and has none of the same mannerisms.”Well, you see Stan is an actor, and they do this thing called acting, where they use mannerisms different to their own to portray a character. They can even change the way they speak to sound more like the person or character they’re acting as.
To a point. People more or less accepted Alden as young Han. But we had never seen “young Han,” so there was a bit of an allowance there. We’ve seen Luke. In fact we’ve seen this exact Luke and Stan isn’t him, memes notwithstanding. All the acting in the world isn’t going to make his voice into Luke’s voice. That’s my opinion of course. You’d obviously be fine with it.
I sometimes treat my spouse as an independent focus group of one, and her reaction to the “deep fake” Luke in BoBF was quite positive. She thought it was shockingly close and found it easy to just watch the episode accepting she was watching Luke.Now, others might be equally fine with a recast, and some of those still might prefer a recast. But my feeling is when people like my wife are just going with the “deep fake” approach, they have likely gotten the technology to the point where it is a safer choice than a recast.
I did think the voice needed a bit more work. Obviously it’s computer generated and people pointed out it was a little slow and deliberate. But I thought that tracked pretty closely with the more slow and deliberate way he spoke in RotJ. He was trying on that Jedi gravitas. In that respect I thought the voice was pretty close. Closer than SebStan’s would ever be anyway.
I’ll go out on a flaming limb and say that the computer delivered its lines for Luke with more life than Ming Na Wen does as Fennec Shand. I like Ming-na Wen, I just think directors need to stop telling her to be emotionless in everything she does because it’s not working.
I don’t understand ppl who get upset when other ppl bitch. If you really liked this you wouldn’t care. Deep down, you know it’s shit. This is why you’re bothered.
You must be new to the Internet if you think that is true lmao
a surprise appearance by Rosario Dawson
except it’s not a surprise because ramming unrelated characters into the show to promote other shows is all these shows do at this point.
I mean, I’m not even really sure what purpose she had in the Boba Fett episode.It’s one thing if she was there helping building temples or whatnot, but it was so heavily implied that that’s NOT why she was there. Her only purpose seemed to be the butler answering the door so as to not interrupt the master.it was like “oh crap, there’s someone coming to visit Luke, I better get over there, run interference, and provide needed exposition!”
Her purpose was to be someone who could talk to Luke about the Jedi for the benefit of us, the audience.
But then…have her being there….doing things. Actually helping build the temple. Helping training some others. Filing Luke’s tax-exempt religious status. Something.Not “Whelp, the Mandalorian left. Time for me to go! See ya!” It’s sloppy fan-service, not good writing.
I agree it is not good writing, but I am not sure I agree it is just fan service. Again, Ahsoka being there is important narratively because she has relationships with both Din and Luke respectively that allows her to have important conversations with them that further the story and lead up to the audience understanding why Grogu needs to make a choice and what is at stake in that choice. And there really isn’t another character that makes sense for that narrative role.And I don’t think it is an inherent plot problem she would visit Luke and Grogu at some point, given what we already know about her from her episode on The Mandalorian. It is not necessarily clear what relationship Ahsoka might have with other Jedi/Luke during her first appearance, but she is the one who points the Mandalorian/Grogu to the temple on Tython as a way of possibly getting him training from another Jedi. And she probably heard Grogu’s call from Tython, and I think it is understandable she would at least check in on Grogu, even though she refused to train him herself.Again, to me what is bad writing about all this is she just happens to be visiting at the same time Din visits too. And that may just have to be left as bad writing (although some seem to think it might be somewhat pandemic related, which is possible).
In regards to your last point Luke says to Ahsoka something like ‘he came just like you said he would’ so it’s pretty clear to me that she came precisely to keep Din away from Grogu during his training, it wasn’t a coincidence. Whether you LIKE that explanation or not is one thing but it was there.
Yeah, that whole sequence seemed like a heaping pile of coincidences, where both Ahsoka and Din happen to be visiting at the exact same time, which happens to be the exact same time the Academy is being built, which happens to be the exact same time Luke finally has critical conversations with Grogu (what have they been talking about before?).To me it almost felt like it was originally supposed to be spaced out over more time, possibly even more episodes, but then got edited down into this one highly coincidental period.
I kind of suspect its main purpose was to display how much more work Rosario Dawson has put into being able to duplicate the physical performance of the animated Ahsoka, which was definitely much closer than her first appearance.
She also had an important narrative purpose in that she can talk to both Din and Luke in ways they couldn’t talk to each other, all of which is necessary to help explain why Luke gives Grogu the critical choice which ends the episode, and what that choice means for Grogu.So I understand the purpose of her being there in terms of furthering the story. I just think her happening to be there at the exact right time to serve that narrative purpose counts as an unexplained coincidence.
Hey, it worked for the Netflix Marvel series…
“The expanse of Star Wars has always felt more like the volume of a toy box.”Yep and if you don’t like it then stop watching Star Wars. It’s 40 damn years old and it’s been the same the whole time.And holy god if you didn’t expect that from Filoni then you haven’t been paying attention.
The Book of Boba Fett certainly would’ve been more enjoyable to me if he’d spent most of the series tracking down his armour and developing into the character we see in Mando season 2. I liked the show well enough, but it is frustrating to see it just take that toybox approach. Maybe that’s on me for thinking a show about a fan favourite character would take bigger swings and risks.
So BoBF definitely turned into far more of just The Mandalorian Season 2.5 than I was expecting. And that is a bummer because I imagined something different and more innovative.That being said, it did introduce a lot of new stuff for live action viewers. It gave us significant individual Tusken characters, 8D8, the Majordomo and the Mayor, Garsa Fwip, the Twins, the Pykes, the Mods, the other crime families, Krrsantan, Cad Bane . . . . And lots of the recurring stuff (Luke being a major exception) was new to live action viewers as of their appearance in The Mandalorian.So the live action Star Wars universe continued to expand in BoBF. A lot of it was not developed much, of course—for example, we only got a little taste of an expanded Hutt storyline before it was cut short. And I am worried we are done with the Tuskens, which is very disappointing to me (if the Mods are also abandoned, that would be less disappointing to me). But it seems clear we are going to do a lot more with Mandalore, and possibly more with the expanded organized crime universe (whether or not Fett will be a big part of that remains to be seen).
I had some ideas of what BoBF was going to be – but they showed from the first episode that they didn’t have the guts to deliver on that idea. So I was happy to see the Mando diversion halfway through.
So to push back a bit on this analysis:Season 2 of the Mandalorian features as additional important characters Gor Koresh, Peli Motto, Cobb Vanth, the Tuskens, Frog Lady, Bo-Katan, Koska Reeves, Titus Welliver’s unnamed Imperial Captain (he made an impression!), Moff Gideon, Dr. Pershing, Cara Dune, Greef Karga, Lang, Morgan Elsbeth, Ahsoka Tano, Boba Fett, Fennec Shand, Migs Mayfield, and Luke Skywalker (I think I have that roughly in order, give or take).To people only familiar with live action Star Wars, who I would argue likely constitute the vast majority of viewers, only Fett and Skywalker really count as familiar characters (I don’t count the Tuskens). And while not all of those new-to-live-action characters are going to have a future (including Dune, as it turns out, but also some dead bad guys), they are all fleshing out something in the Star Wars Universe that is in some way new for live-action-only viewers.Now to be sure, bringing back Fett and Luke is no small thing, and so if you were hoping for entirely new-to-live-action content, it has not been that.But while I am as confused as anyone by Fett’s arc in what was supposedly his own TV series, that series also basically downgraded Fett back to just a supporting character. Meanwhile, BoBF introduced a bunch of new characters and continued a bunch more previously new-to-live-action characters. And yes, also Luke, but he basically got written back out of the story (for now, I think). So The Mandalorian + Fett have at least mostly been new-to-live-action stuff, and appear set to continue to be mostly new-to-live-action stuff.Now if you include characters from comics or animated shows, then you get a lot more stuff that isn’t completely new. But I guess my point is translating that stuff to live action Star Wars only really counts as leaning on the familiar for (likely) a small percentage of the audience. For most of us, it is for all practical purposes new stuff.
I had absolutely zero interest in Clone Wars or Rebels for years, but then seeing how everyone went nuts over the appearance of the Darksaber at the end of Mandalorian S1 (which for me worked perfectly fine as just “oh cool, a unique-looking lightsaber!”) got me to finally go back and check them out (conveniently just as they were all gathered together on Disney+). And I’m very glad I did.
Interestingly, following that path actually makes The Mandalorian all the more a gateway to expanding a viewer’s personal experience of the Star Wars universe. Which I am sure is part of what Filoni was hoping would happen.
That was me. I hadn’t watched any of the animated shows so I was just like well he has a lightsaber that’s a twist. Then my friend that was over started flipping out that he was in possession of the darksaber. Of course he had to tell me what it all meant!
Perfect summation of my experience. My kids get all ramped up telling me what this or that character means to the wider story, but really, they stand on their own just fine within Mandalorian & BoBF for the viewer not so invested.
Yep. I like to first watch these episodes “cold” and just enjoy them for what they are. Then I will come to places like this so people can explain to me more about what I just saw and why it might be important.And that works for me! I may or may not get around to spending more time with the animated shows (I have only seen some bits watching with my kids). But I kinda don’t need to with all these good folks on the Internet volunteering to be my resource for such information as it becomes relevant to the live action shows.
Basically none of this thesis applies to 95% of people. There was no difference between season 1 and 2 of Mando about recognizability. I had never heard of Ahsoka Tano, or Bo Katan. Boba Fett is more recognizable but he is some guy with zero lines who fell off a hovercraft 40 years ago. And underneath the helmet he’s that kid-clone of the guy from 20 years ago.There’s nothing at all negative I have to feel about the D+ SW universe yet other than Boba clearly is a pandemic show like Falcon and Winter Soldier.
Who cares. Watch TV shows for adults if that’s what you want.
Only people who think they’re superior to others make this comment. Liking media doesn’t make an adult childish.
“Favreau also directed Iron Man 2, itself a sequel to a successful, paradigm-shifting story (Iron Man, which Favreau also helmed) that got bogged down in various plot threads designed to set up future sagas.”No, it didn’t. The only scenes done as setup to future movies were Coulson’s departure, the final scene between Fury and Tony, and the stinger. As much as people really, really want it to be, the donut scene between Fury and Tony was not an Avengers setup scene.
I think we need to remember the Disney+ shows are for a very broad audience. It seems unfair to criticize the Mandalorian for introducing Bo Katan and Ahsoka as “digging into the toybox”, when 90% (yes, I made that number up) of the people watching don’t know the characters. Personally, I’ve heard the names, and I have a vague idea of their place in the expanded universe, but I didn’t watch the cartoons, and I’m certainly not going to wade through 100 hours of programming for their history.They’re good characters, and there are good stories to be told. I 100% agree, however, that we could do without any more uncanny valley Skywalker.
90% seems steep. I don’t think Disney Plus would have put out a new season of Clone Wars had they only 10% of the world’s viewership…
That spin-off Bad Batch is catering to only 5% of people. I made that number up too!
I loved the cartoons and I’m very excited for more live-action Ahsoka. Kinda think you’re missing out with your prejudice here.
I’m probably a good example. I’ve seen all the movies and S1 of Mandalorian, and consider myself a SW fan in general. I have no idea who those characters are.
I’m with you on that. It’s tough to complain that there are no new characters being introduced, when a good chunk of the ‘not new’ characters are from the Clone Wars cartoon that only kids and hardcores watched.They’re basically new characters, expanding the universe, and they lead more people to consume the media where they originated to learn more about their backstories.
What, nobody else wants more of the droid-part modified gang of street tough teens??
Oh well.
It not about how the cameos is bogging down the story, is how well the stories are written.I thought both seasons of The Mandalorian are great for their own reasons with just the right kind of writing and pathos given to the characters, both old and new, to keep the overarching plot running at pleasant pace.The Book of Boba Fett, with all of the neat ideas and potentials, failed to meet expectation because of weird plot decision to focus less on Fett’s current motivations and scattered the plots across too many characters and scenarios, giving the series a very disjointed feelings. It didn’t helps that Din Djarin, Grogu, Luke, Ashoka, Cobb Vanth, Peli Motto, Cad Bane, and other awesome characters have stolen the series in their scenes. And any interesting developments that occurred on this series for Din Djarin and Grogu should have been held for the next season of The Mandalorian.I believe that the show have suffered production problems due to COVID pandemic and couldn’t cobble together the story in way that’s satisfactory. They had lot of interesting ideas that weren’t executed well and should have had additional episode or two to develop Fett further as self-instituted leader of Mos Espa and show more of his motivations. This should be a cautionary tale for how not to develop unsatisfying Star Wars series.Hopefully Obi-Wan Kenobi (should have been titled just “Kenobi”) short series would fares better this coming spring.
Fett deciding to become a gangster after years of chasing fugitives could make perfect sense, but maybe work your way up to that? His backstory is so sparse that I’m not sure why viewers are expected to have any actual affinity for the character.
Agreed.I mean, his flashback with Sand People is really good and well done, but that’s not quite enough development to veer Boba Fett away from being bounty hunter to mafia don. I wanted to see more about why he’s doing that after his tribe got massacred.Oh well. At least we should be grateful for the scene of Fett getting nose-burrowed by drug lizard and went on trippy vision quest!
I think it COULD have made perfect sense, but not the way he apparently wanted to do it.I think that conversation where Fett explains his theory that the bounty hunters would make better bosses because they would know to avoid ruinous violent conflicts was a very Disney moment, and it came across to me and many others as hopelessly naive.And to the show’s credit, it completely failed. The mass violent conflict Fett was trying to avoid happened anyway, many people died, much of the town was destroyed, and on and on. But it is not apparent to me that Fett actually learned that lesson. I mean, Fennec sure did, but did Fett?To resolve this issue in a remotely realistic way, Fett either has to give up the idea of being a “nice” Daimyo, or give up the idea of being a Daimyo at all. But I am not sure the show is prepared to have him make either choice, which may leave his story trapped in a bit of a dead end.
I’m still working on Mandalorian and haven’t seen Fett yet, but we’re talking about the same guy who looked disappointed that Vader wouldn’t let him disintegrate Solo, right? Hardly a passivist.
Yeah, the ruthless bounty hunter of the OT becomes basically a wannabe Robin Hood type—technically a criminal gang leader, but he will work on behalf of the people and try to be as nice as possible about it!And if the show thought of itself as explaining that massive personality shift, it didn’t do a good job.
‘he looked disappointed’?Are you sure this happened outside of your mind? The scene I saw had a Boba Fett who’s face was hidden behind a mask, and immediately replied ‘as you wish’ to Vader’s order with no discernible body language.
The Mandalorian’s “scary bounty hunter we’ve never met before grows a heart, decides to protect a child Lone Wolf and Cub-style” just makes more sense, and is definitely a better fit for Disney, than BoBF’s “scary bounty hunter we’ve seen be unambiguously villainous grows a heart, decides to become a mob boss.”
Yeah, most viewers are going to be actively antagonistic to him given that he sold everyone’s beloved Han Solo to Jabba.
really?concern-trolling a Star War is what passes for tv criticism?BOBA FETT, while not great, was fine. and it had many moments of fun, even camp. and we got to see Grogu hug Mando, and a Rancor impersonate a kaiju.people need to settle down.
To say they’ve oversaturated the market is an understatement. Totally ruined Star Wars for me.
As opposed to George Lucas’ shallow toy box ambitions
The thing about Star Wars is that when Lucas made the original it was a stew of ideas and inspirations of things he loved as a kid.
The only way for it to move forward is to let someone take over and create a new stew in which Star Wars is a key ingredient not the only one.
Lucasfilm need to let Star Wars step out of it’s creators shadow.
Maybe even set it a a time a little less long ago and in a galaxy that’s just far away. So theirs no chance of any of the new characters being directly related to any of the old.
I think there is an argument that Filoni is pretty much doing exactly what you described.As I see it, the debate is really over how much of Filoni’s stew is “new,” and whether Lucas stuff is being used too heavily as an ingredient.And my personal feeling is when you really think about what is being used in The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett, an awful lot of it is either new, or a call back to Filoni’s own prior stuff, not Lucas stuff. Some Lucas stuff of course is still there, but even that is being repurposed in ways that I don’t really think count as Lucas’s creative vision dominating what is happening. With the possible exception of Luke, and even he just got sidelined (I think).Now of course if you set this in an entirely different galaxy with no connection to the original Star Wars galaxy, then it would be even more new. But that would not necessarily be Star Wars at all at that point. Which I would not personally mind.But I also don’t mind Filoni leveraging the Star Wars brand to get the funding for these shows. Because I am a realist about how the financial side of the entertainment business works, and I can accept that leveraging established brands plays a critical role in getting content I want to see actually produced.
I’m going to topline a bigger, longer post about this, but I think Filoni (and to be honest a lot of fans) want to undermine Lucas’ initial thematic vision. I know I do. If you haven’t seen the quotes/interviews, Lucas thinks the Jedi were right to abjure all attachments/love (Lucas equates anything other than universal Agape love to greed) and to recruit and train from childhood. While for a lot of us the prequels are a graphic demonstration that while the Sith were evil, the Jedi were wrong, Lucas absolutely sees it as a black and white issue with the Jedi’s only sin being hubris, not doctrine. Filoni has quotes explicitly disagreeing. I suspect a lot of what we’re getting is that debate on screen, and with Filoni now in charge we know which side will be thematically shown as right in this part of the narrative.
I agree that Faloni is trying to do new and interesting stuff within the Skywalker Saga universe. But I think Lucasfilm are just unwilling to move on from that timeline. They just seem to be looking for cracks that haven’t been covered and trying to jam stories and series into the gaps. At this point doing that is taking away from the originals.
In a couple of years they’ll move onto the time between the Eps 6 and 7-9
I think more than a new universe it’s about the timeline.
For me it would be interesting, even exciting, to jump a couple of 100 years on and start a new saga. If you keep the things that people love about the world, the force, Jedi, droids etc as see how they’ve evolved it would still be Stars Wars.
I agree to date the TV shows have not done much to bust out of the overall timeline set by the movies. But The Acolyte, assuming it makes it all the way, is going to change that by going back way before the prequel era. So hopefully it actually gets made, and hopefully it is a hit. Because that could really open things up timewise.
Hadn’t heard of The Acolyte, must have missed it in the noise about other shows. But that does indeed seem interesting. Leslye Headland is exactly the type of person who could make something different with it.
Fingers crossed!
Indeed my Jedi Brother
That sounds a bit like what they did with ‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’, moving forward much later in time to give us the world of ‘Legend of Korra’, which I really loved. It had all the familiar elements (no pun intended), like bending, hybrid animals, and the spirit world, but it also delivered a more modern setting and a new aesthetic, and different kinds of conflict.
Korra, of course, is a bit controversial, but I for one am extremely happy they did it. And while admittedly a bit uneven, overall I think it is a good example of how you can leverage being in the same universe, and even make use of some of the same characters (at a very different age), without having it feel like those connections are preventing you from telling new stories.
I think Filoni’s doing a mixed job at creating a new stew. Yes, he is telling better stories than ever existed in the prequels, but this new era of live action seems pretty heavily tied to The Clone Wars, and for people like me who don’t want to watch it, they just seem like “why are they focusing so much on this character? Why are they seemingly giving space for audiences to applaud here?” It feels very self-congratulatory.
My contention with the “set it in the universe but divorce it from the OG stuff” argument is that it seems like eventually you hit the Ship of Theseus problem where you’re so fixated on taking out and replacing things from the past because you don’t want to rehash them, that eventually you’ve unwittingly completely replaced so many things that there’s nothing really from the original left. Which ends up begging the question, why not just create something new from the start? Especially when connected to your point about how Star Wars was a melting pot of all the things Lucas loved when he was a kid, and about bringing in someone for whom Star Wars is just one thing they’re inspired by. If you’re gonna do that, why not just get them to create something original inspired by Star Wars and lots of other things?It kind of brings to my mind the old story about someone telling Jack Kirby that they’d worked on a comic book about one of his old characters and had drawn it exactly in ‘the Jack Kirby style’ as a homage, only for Kirby to retort that a true homage to the Jack Kirby style would be to create something entirely new instead of just copying him and retelling his old stories. If you’re gonna get someone to create something new inspired by the Star Wars universe but you want to move away from having it revolve around the actual Star Wars films that got people interested in the first place, why does it have to have Star Wars stamped on it? (I mean, I know the real answer, I’m not wholly naive. As long as Disney own the license can and get billions of people to part with their money almost instinctively by slapping Star Wars onto something, even if they piss and moan about it online afterwards, we’ll get Star Wars content. But still, it seems like the question is worth raising, since this doesn’t seem like an entirely healthy state of affairs culturally speaking, or at least one we should be willing to question.)
Obviously you do know the answer, and personally I am not really that upset by it.The fact is it takes an enormous initial financial investment to do a modern streaming scifi or fantasy show reasonably well. The people making those investments are not doing it for the greater good, they are doing it in the hopes of getting a good return on that investment. Many, in fact, are managing investments funded by others, and they have a legally-enforceable fiduciary duty to manage those investments on behalf of those investors using their best business judgment.OK, so if you are a creative and you want to make a good modern streaming scifi or fantasy show, you need to persuade those money people to give you a whole bunch of money to get it made. And you need to persuade them in terms of return on investment. Of course, you can relate that argument to the anticipated quality of the show, audience appeal, and so on. But ultimately you have to explain to them why investing in this project, and not some other possible project, is a particularly good financial investment.And so OF COURSE it helps if there is some established IP brand you can attach to your proposed show. Successful related movies and TV shows are ideal, but it could potentially also be a successful novel, comic book, game, or so on. But the reason all that is so common is because it is an understandably large part of persuading the money people to give you a lot of that money, specifically enough money to make something good.Now of course we can argue maybe it would be better if the people with the money could just read a script, talk with the creatives attached to the project, and decide whether or not to open up the financial floodgates purely based on their own prediction about whether the resulting product would be successful or not.But when you think about it, is that REALLY better? Do we really think these money people should just be making independent judgments about what might be better or worse scifi/fantasy content?From that perspective, established IP brands are a way of getting the money people to say yes to the creative people without the creative people having to make the money people entirely understand and share their creative vision. In other words, I actually think it is a good thing if a money person thinks something like, “I don’t necessarily get the appeal of this Manda-something show they pitched, but I get that it is Star Wars, and I get that people love that helmet, so OK—let’s cut them a check.”And that may not meet some sort of idealized notion of how art should be funded, but I think among the realistic possibilities it is really not so bad.
Obviously you do know the answerI mean, I literally said I did, to be fair.But when you think about it, is that REALLY better? Do we really think these money people should just be making independent judgments about what might be better or worse scifi/fantasy content?Honestly? To some degree I think so, yes. Because even money people occasionally realise that success isn’t just about chasing the safe dollar and the known quantity and the ‘guaranteed’ success and jealously protecting against any and all possible failure, simply because you can’t actually always do that. Creativity and entrepreneurship are both, indeed, about being willing on occasion to take a risk in pursuit of a greater reward than just playing it as absolutely safe as possible. Risk is scary, and it doesn’t always work, but when it pays off, it can pay off big. And like I say, I’m not wholly naive, I’m not just a starry-eyed idealist, I understand that there’s reasons for all this, and those reasons aren’t wholly without merit. But they’re also, frankly, boring and depressing and increasingly stifling, because they guarantee a timid, over-cautious culture that isn’t willing to take a chance on new ideas and innovations and inspirations and just beats old ideas to death until there’s nothing left in them and they start failing anyway. Playing it safe with known IP isn’t without its own risks, because the arguments you’ve laid out are basically guaranteeing eventual stagnation and loss. Star Wars makes billions now, but the more the card is played the greater the risk of mediocre product being released (which is inevitable because not everything’s gonna come up gold), and the more mediocre product is released the more damaged the brand will get, and the more damaged the brand gets the more people will gradually switch off. Playing it safe doesn’t mean you’ll win forever, it just means you’re pushing failure down the road. Heck, if it was all about always playing it safe and never taking a risk and the creatives always pandering to the most timid and risk-adverse money-manager possible, we wouldn’t have gotten the original Star Wars to begin with. So no, I don’t think it’s especially good if only rehashings of George Lucas’s ideas from 1977 are allowed because everyone’s too scared to try something new.
So all investments in new expensive streaming shows are risky. And yes, investors are therefore necessarily prepared to take SOME risk, but their appetite for risk is not going to be unlimited. Indeed, there are all sorts of different risks they could take with their money by funding different projects. So it still comes back to persuading them why they should risk their money on this particular scifi/fantasy project, rather than something else (which may not be scifi/fantasy at all).The good news is the picture you are painting of constant increasing entropy is based on a false premise about this being an entirely closed system. Because new scfi/fantasy IP in fact CAN be created, and EVENTUALLY can lead to new big-budget shows and movies.However, such new scifi/fantasy IP will often start with less capital-intensive projects, like the aforementioned novels, comic books, games, and such. If that material is a hit in one or more such contexts, then it can be adapted into shows like The Expanse, The Witcher, and so on.But I do think we have to understand it isn’t 1977 any more. Star Wars was made for $11 million. Even adjusting for inflation, that is only around $53 million today. Making competitive modern scifi/fantasy movies or an initial season of a streaming show typically costs some multiple of that.So having streaming shows and feature movies be the entry point for entirely new scifi/fantasy IP may not be entirely impossible, but it is understandable it will be less common as the fixed investment increases. But since you don’t need new scifi/fantasy IP to enter directly in that way, the situation is not nearly as dire as you suggest.And, for that matter—brands are not the same thing as specific creative ideas or visions. Marvel’s “cinematic universe” has successfully incorporated many different ideas and visions despite it all falling under the Marvel brand. Star Wars can be, and sometimes is, treated similarly, as an open-ended brand and not as a closed set of ideas/visions.Again, I personally do not want this to be the ONLY answer, and I don’t think it is the only answer. But at least some new ideas/visions for scifi/fantasy content are likely to be introduced under the Marvel, Star Wars, LOTR, or so on brands.And again, to me that is fine, if that is what it takes to maximize the amount of scifi/fantasy content that gets funded.
This might not bother a large contingent of the faithful who consider dusting off beloved action figures and smashing them together to be a feature of Star Wars, not a bug. When has it not been a feature? The action figures market for Star Wars stuff was huge, from the very beginning. It’s not just off-putting but kind of bizarre how very Comic Book Guy-ish people can be about denying that aspect of playfulness in the franchise, as if there’s something wrong with playing with your action figures. (As opposed to leaving them mint-in-box as some sort of ostensible future investment, I guess.) It’s fine to have some decent plotting and characterization and whatnot, but sometimes you just want them to get their fight on.
I think the people who view it as a bug are people who just don’t like it but because it’s so popular they feel like they’re supposed to like it. It happens with a lot of things in life. Like roller coasters for example. Everyone loves roller coasters and if you don’t then you’re weird!
Isn’t this the opposite of Comic Book Guy, who would be completely worried about canon, etc.? My frustration is the complete lack of imagination tapping into the seemingly unlimited possibilities the SW universe offers.
It’s not just the feature it’s pretty much the point.
The MCU is doing the same thing. Love or hate the beginnings, it at least took risks to develop a shared universe over time.Now it’s all about “who can we pull in with gotcha casting?”
These Disney shows, star wars or marvel, are just becoming such a bore and more of a chore. They are ok in a safe, generic kind of way.
Book of Fett was kind of great. We got Boba Fett riding a Rancor. If you told me that was going to be the endgame of the show than I would have been all excited. These shows are either going to be fantastic or fine. Getting angry at a show is literally the most pointless thing you can do.
Star Trek works better as a TV show. Star Wars works better as movies. This is the way.
I have noticed the more I watch Star Wars stuff – I really, really don’t understand basically anything about how, like, stuff works. I really don’t. They have faster than light travel or whatever and yet they still need to, like, run drugs through a specific planet? Why? Are cellphones not a thing (wouldn’t you just develop one that finds the satellite/tower network for every individual planet, at least?)
I think the less you see of Star Wars, the better. Honestly.
Recent Star Wars movies: The Force Awakens; Rogue One; The Last Jedi; Solo; The Rise of SkywalkerRecent Star Wars TV: Rebels; Resistance, The Mandalorian; The Final Season of The Clone Wars; Bad Batch; Visions; Book of Boba FettIn my view there is some good and not-so-good on both lists, and I also have not personally seen all the TV content. But overall, I am not sure that comparison supports the thesis that “Star Wars works better as movies.”By the way, Star Trek technology also makes no real sense. Very little scifi really holds up to that sort of scrutiny.
Most of those shows are shit except for Mandalorian. And I’m not saying the recent movies are great but I’d take FA, Rogue, Solo, and even TLJ over Boba Fett. Boba Fett was horrid.
And yes, most sci-fi tech doesn’t make a TON of sense…but at least Star Trek has some internal consistency and also shows actual advancement in tech. Star Wars is just all the fuck over the place, and has little to no internal consistency. It’s maddening.
You’ll never convince me transporters/replicators are given any sort of consistent treatment in the Star Trek universe. Instead, “rules” are stated for plot convenience, then broken for plot convenience too.Anyway, Boba Fett was deeply flawed in various ways, but I thought it was systematically better than The Rise of Skywalker, and similar to Solo in being a very mixed bag. And overall, I’d say Boba Fett averaged a bit better than Solo, although largely thanks to The Mandalorian episodes.You also don’t explain your disdain for the animated shows, but just to turn to a fairly neutral source, Rotten Tomatoes, it goes like:Clone Wars Final Season 100%Rebels 98%Visions 96%Resistance 92%Bad Batch 88%The movies are:TFA 93%The Last Jedi 91%Rogue One 84%Solo 70%TROS 52%I don’t personally agree with all those rankings, but I do think it suggests it is easier to make at least a pretty good animated Star Wars TV show, whereas the movies are at much bigger risk of being somewhere in the mediocre to bad range.For the record, The Mandalorian is 93% and BoBF is 70%. Average score across all TV is 89.5%, all movies is 78%.
It is indeed all my personal opinion. I’m just Star Wars’d out and ready for a “less is more” approach.
“Yoda teamed up with Chewbacca, briefly, in Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge Of The Sith, for no serious reason other than it was easy to do and the timeline favored the pairing”Actually that’s not entirely so (according to Lucasfilm savant J. W. Rinzler). Lucas’ lone ambition for first sequel, simply “Star Wars Part 2,” was for it to take place on (Chewbacca’s) the Wookees home planet — look no further than the first unofficial sequel: ‘Star Wars Holiday Special’ (1978). It really wasn’t until Leigh Brackett came onboard (or the ultimate blowback from aforementioned broadcast special), Lucas was no longer so gung-ho Planet Wookee. But, prior to that, Wookees was absolutely the [elevator pitch] synopsis-priority.Albeit, Lucas would only acknowledge Episode III’s Wookee Land as just another idea previously shelved until technology/SFX might catchup.
Boba Fett probably should have just been a series of one shot episodes, of him getting back to being a Bounty Hunter. Can occasionally show him relaxing after a rough go of it, but otherwise, just start the episode with an event happening that requires a bounty hunter, and then they pick up the phone. Then Title card. Then Bob Fett landing or walking up to the client, and they go over the details. Then he goes after the mark. That’s all people really wanted.
Not helping matters is the chaotically mixed reaction to , which showed a rift in the fandom that separates those who yearn for something different from this decades-old saga and those who like the way things are just fine.Many of us just thought TLJ was a bad movie. It has nothing to do with being scared of new stuff. The new stuff can just be bad. You’re welcome to enjoy the movie on your own terms, hell, that makes me happy. Just please stop trying to characterize everyone who didn’t enjoy it as racist, sexist, or … whatever this is.
“Not helping matters is the chaotically mixed reaction to , which showed a rift in the fandom that separates those who yearn for something different from this decades-old saga and those who like the way things are just fine.”I thought the rift was between people who wanted story continuity for the new trilogy and people who couldn’t give half a fuck about screenwriting and love it when JJ Abrams shits non sequiters all over them.
Its not just Boba Fett.Andor, another new series, about stories about a guy we know who dies at the end of Rogue Squadron. I’m not excited about this series, and feel they won’t be creative enough about what he is, but then again I didn’t feel he was that important of a figure in the movie, but the idea of the rag-tag group as a whole.The High Republic series is going to be very hard to write, and people will expect some fan service as well…except it happens SOOO FAR earlier than the movies, even further than KOTOR, people will be lost and unhappy.At least with Kenobi they have material from the movies and cartoons to bridge things, and hopefully add to the stories as it will be familiar.
Oh look! The media has finally caught up to public opinion on the travesty that is Disney Star Wars. Let’s both milk nostalgia for all it’s worth and at the same time actively insult those who are fans of the older material!
I think you’re giving season 1 of the Mandalorian a lot of credit for venturing beyond the “toy box” that it doesn’t deserve. I mean, the breakout star of the show was literally Baby Yoda.
The original trilogy, Mandalorian and Book of Boba Fett are the only good Star Wars things that have been produced. Very simple, bare bones, pulpy, action oriented scifi/ fantasy/ western serials.
I enjoyed The Book of Boba Fett. Those four episodes were pretty enjoyable, I liked seeing his backstory among the Tuskens and how he was figuring out his place on Tatooine. Then we had The Mandalorian season 2.5, weird that it was only two episodes long but I liked it. And then the one-episode team-up special that combined elements of both series was pretty enjoyable too.(taps earpiece) Sorry folks I’m getting word that those were all considered to be the same series? Weird choice but ok!But back on topic, Star Wars is great when it takes risks. The Original Trilogy were three movies with risks. The Prequels were considerably safer, creating backstory for characters we already knew, though obviously we didn’t know all the details. Episodes 7 and 9 were about the safest Star Wars has ever been and so many people resented The Last Jedi for daring to be different. The Clone Wars was enjoyable for what it was, but it was also pretty safe – except for Ahsoka, the new, riskier character that (obviously) became a fan favorite. Rebels dared to use new characters and no Jedi… for about a minute and then it became all about Kanan and Ezra being Jedi again and all the popular Clone Wars characters came back too.The first season of The Mandalorian was a risk – new characters, (slightly) new time period, new factions, etc. That they managed to wait an entire season before funneling in the existing characters is frankly a miracle and that’s all BoBF was. So is Star Wars television always going to be like this? I don’t know. When they take risks, it has a chance, but as soon something gets popular, Disney and Dave Filoni throw everything familiar in for maximum brand saturation.
Star Wars haas always been a load of vapid fan service – remember the young Greedo in Phantom Menace where someone says “You’ll come to a bad end”? A lot of the expanded universe stuff was of that ilk, which a whole load of weak ‘rule-of-cool’ worldbuilding. The prequels doubled down on it (with the needless and continuity screwing inclusion of R2D2 (with magical flying jets)), so can’t exactly complain that the TV shows are following suit
What is most striking is how a cool costume will help you survive – Boba Fett showed that the Sarlacc wasn’t exactly something to be afraid of, Darth Maul had the high ground and still was chopped in half… It doesn’t make any great sense, but does make the marketing easier. Part of the thing about the Mandalorian was in part implying that it might have Boba Fett before the show started
For all the praise Filoni (rightfully) receives, this has been an issue with his storytelling from the jump. Clone Wars started off strong, but ended up having looooong diversions that were either fan service origin stories (Boba Fett at the Imperial Academy seems like a relevant example) or lengthy diversions (the Young Jedis arc which felt like a backdoor pilot for a show no one asked for, or all the times Padmé had to solve a mystery with her friends) and Rebels barely made a full season before they started bringing in Darth Vader, Princess Leia, Obi Wan, and the whole gang from the OT. Hell, even Bad Batch was backdoor piloted on the last season of Clone Wars.
They’re generating IP here, not art. This is the way. I consider myself fortunate that the toybox they’re playing in is the one I grew up in, and sometimes, it’s really good!
Yep, I saw this kind of thing coming as soon as people started clamoring for Filoni to have a bigger role – he’s very good at creating enjoyable stories, but originality and depth aren’t really his strong points and I think he follows Lucas’ ideas too closely in terms of bringing together characters too often (making the universe seem much smaller). I do think Boba suffered from not having him around as much as he only had credits on one episode (I think?) as I’m not sure Favreau is quite as good at all of that is Filoni is but it’s obviously based on the Filoni playbook.
And here I am, enjoying all the things that you don’t enjoy about Filoni’s stuff.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, other than the Jedi Babies and Padmé Amidala, Girl Detective arcs, I’m here for all of it. I was just pointing out that no one should be surprised that Filoni’s gonna Filoni.
I don’t understand that way of thinking; especially not when The Last Jedi – the first Star Wars movie to have 3 Skywalkers in lead roles since 1983 (Luke, Leia, Kylo Ren) – is given as an example of avoiding the past, and when most people celebrate the apparent return of Patrick Stewart as Professor X (a character created in 1963 that he’s been playing since the year 2000) in a Marvel movie.Anybody who’s seen The Book of Boba Fett knows that the problems began well before the first cameos. In fact, the 2 Mando episodes were the first to generate any kind of excitement online, and many people pointed out that the new character Din Djarin was now more interesting to the audience and the showrunners then the classic character Boba Fett. The main character was boring, the new additions (the biker gang) were unpopular… Everything that Mandalorian succeeded at was a failure for TBOBF. The cameos couldn’t change that.And I liked season 2 of Mando. Yes, there were cameos, but they all made sense. If Grogu had to be trained to become a Jedi, we knew that Luke was the one trying to rebuild the order. And making Din Djarin a Mandalorian suggested that he would have to meet Bo-Katan sooner or later. Those appearances did not diminish the heart of the story, which is the surprisingly effective love story between a puppet and masked man. This is what’s important. Not that we’ve seen a few characters before.Expansion doesn’t mean separation. Old characters doesn’t mean repetition. Marvel can make movies we’ve never seen before using characters created in the 60s’. Star Wars can expand its universe while still mentioning that the old one still exist. They just have to make sure they get the basics right.
I’m sick of the Skywalkers, I’m sick of Tatooine, and I’m tired of the entire series revolving around both of them out of nostalgic inertia. We know the Star Wars galaxy is an awesome place for stories and characters, we’ve had great examples of both come out of it for decades. So it’s very disappointing to see the galaxy shrink back so much. JJ Abrams’ precedent with The Force Awakens- do it all over again, but slightly worse- is not sustainable.
I blame the huge tilt towards promoting Disney+ at all costs by the new top guy. Once it became clear that they needed content – lots and lots of content – the show basically got repurposed in part to set up tons of other shows to fill out their content roster.It also doesn’t help that Disney doesn’t really seem to know what they want to do with the franchise, and so they’re just trying everything. The new trilogy seems to have been a disappointment even if it made plenty of money – it didn’t really set up a big sprawling, MCU-style franchise tent to do spin-off movies, and unlike the MCU (but like normal films, including the previous Star Wars movies) it had big drop-offs in box office returns with each succeeding film.
Star Wars isn’t about the nooks and crannies of the Star Wars universe because it’s ultimately not about that, nor is it structured to be about that. Star Wars is about the Force, and the conflict between good and evil represented by the Force. It has never not been about the Force or that, despite a lot of details in the galaxy setting that aren’t about that. The EU did a little expanding on those details with some anthology series and the prequels involving Han and Lando, but for the most part the EU was also about the Force.
Maybe what we’re saying here is we want to explore Star Wars without the Force, and maybe that’s doable for a bit. But I don’t think it’s sustainable because ultimately, as BoBF just showed us, this is actually a pretty generic sci fi setting without the Force. The problem with the first 4 episodes of BoBF was it’s your basic space gangster setting (with a “Dances With Banthas” interlude). And we’ve seen it mostly done better. Firefly is a better space western, Cowboy Bebop is a better space bounty hunter, and multiple Star Trek episodes have done better organized crime stories.
The best argument for Star Wars without (mostly) the Force is Rogue One, which makes an excellent war movie. But having established the Force it’s difficult to plot a future war movie where Force users aren’t involved unless you render them extinct (which isn’t going to happen). However, we can and are getting a new direction even using the same pieces. Lucas infamously thinks that the Prequel era Jedi are right, philosophically. “…holding on is in the same category and the pre-cursor to
greed… The Jedi are trained to let go. They’re trained from birth. They’re not
supposed to form attachments. They can love people – in fact, they should love
everybody. They should love their enemies; they should love the Sith. But they
can’t form attachments. So what all these movies are about is: greed. Greed is
a source of pain and suffering for everybody.”Filoni disagrees. In discussing how he views Duel of the Fates as the lynchpin of the Star Wars narrative, “What’s at stake, really, is how Anakin’s gonna turn out. Because Qui-Gon is different than the rest of the Jedi, and you get that in the movie, and Qui-Gon is fighting because he knows he’s the father that Anakin needs. Because Qui-Gon hasn’t given up on the fact that Jedi are supposed to actually care and love and that that’s not a bad thing.”And now in the shows we’re getting Ahsoka, who explicitly rejects the Code but remains a lightside force user, as a clear throughline character for all the series. We’re getting Luke repeating the “no attachment” dogma he was taught by Yoda and we know where that ultimately will lead him. And we get Grogu choosing the love of his surrogate father over the detachment of the Jedi. Put together with the fact that Leia, the Jedi Master who actually trained the next generation, never rejected love or attachment but instead handled it without anger or fear I think we’re getting an in canon thematic rejection of Lucas’ intended themes. The direction is charting a new direction for Jedi that is neither as self regarding as the Sith nor as dogmatically detached as the Jedi.
Too many shows, not enough focus. Dilution of effort in order to simply create content.
Sorry pal, it seems the direction of SW isn’t for you. Stop complaining, the rest of us are enjoying the shit out of it, as it constantly harkens back to us being a kid, imagining the shit we’re now seeing in the flesh. It’s escapism and pure fun.
People who want Star Wars but NOT Tatooine or Luke Skywalker or lightsabers, etc. are really saying they want a different thing. The amount of Star Wars television/movie media that has nothing to do with any Skywalkers is, right now, limited pretty much to The Bad Batch and Rogue One. Every other series has Anakin or Luke and/or Leia in some combination. And I’m pretty sure every single show goes to Tatooine. Stop asking for chocolate chip ice cream without the crunchy brown things, haters.
Luke only showed up briefly at the end of Season 2 of The Mandalorian, which is not much different from Leia showing up briefly at the end of Rogue One. Meaning like Rogue One, it was mostly not a Skywalker story at all. And of course The Mandalorian was already a hit long before anyone knew Luke would show up.And although the Mandalorian did go to Tatooine, he wasn’t actually based there, and he visited plenty of other “new” planets too.So while I agree that asking for new Star Wars stories to have no connection at all to the Skywalker Saga is probably being unrealistic, I don’t think it is unrealistic to suggest in many cases it could be kept pretty minimal, including any such connections being mostly implied and not shown.
“People who want Star Wars but NOT Tatooine or Luke Skywalker or lightsabers, etc. are really saying they want a different thing”Yup, this exactly. Star Wars has been a tropey small galaxy for decades and yet people still waste time complaining about it.
I actually think that is being unfair to Star Wars history.Even ignoring all the EU content, the prequels certainly showed us a lot that was new. Yes, they also were in part Skywalker movies, but for many people that ended up among the worse parts of the prequels. Not that all the other new parts were winners (e.g., Jar-Jar), but I don’t think it was impossible to imagine at that point how the Star Wars universe COULD be used to very good effect, and to already see how folding in too much Skywalker stuff was an impediment to doing that.Then the animated shows, for many at least, did a better job doing just that. They didn’t entirely ignore the movies or the Skywalkers, but they made the Star Wars universe feel bigger and more open to lots of different stories.So by the time you hit Rogue One or all of the pre-Luke Mandalorian episodes, I don’t think it was somehow a new thing for people to appreciate Star Wars content that only lightly connected to the Skywalker Saga. And now of course we have those precedents too.
“Even ignoring all the EU content”Which you really can’t when you’re discussing this kind of thing.The prequels were literally the start of the Skywalker Saga and were all about Anakin. It wasn’t ‘too much Skywalker stuff’ that made them bad, it was the writing and directing.
Clone Wars(the cartoon) heavily featured Anakin, pulled in plenty of stuff from the OT and prequels and then became heavily referenced in every single thing Filoni has done since, somewhat cutting out the Skywalker part and making it a slightly bigger universe, but almost doubling down on the tropey stuff.By the time you hit Rogue One you’re watching another prequel that this time actually features a cameo by a non Anakin Skywalker, not to mention that the entire movie is pretty much meaningless unless you know what happens in ANH.Not that any of this is bad! I like the way Star Wars is! People just don’t seem to get that this is the way it is though, they’ve certainly been complaining about it for over 20 years now.
Again, I think you are being unfair to the prequels.Phantom Menace had story lines that existed pretty much entirely independent from Anakin, or at least they could have. To many of us, boy Anakin felt shoe-horned into the movie, and it was pretty easy to imagine him being edited out with no harm being done. Padme could have just been a new character. Someone else could have deactivated the droid army. And so on.Same deal really with Attack of the Clones. Again, you can edit Anakin right out, and PARTICULARLY edit out the AWFUL “secret love” story between Anakin and Padme, and still have a complete movie.I would agree, though, Revenge of the Sith is finally too much of a Darth Vader origin story to really survive just editing that out. But certainly a third movie about the rise of the Empire could have been done without it being so Vader-centric.Now to the extent you are saying there could have been a GOOD version of an origin story for Vader—maybe. It didn’t happen, and I am not sure it could really be spread over three movies anyway, but some good version of that story might have been possible in some way.But it is definitely true that the prequels already had many people feeling like shoe-horning a BAD version of Vader’s origin story into those movies was detracting from all the other stuff the prequels were doing relatively well.
So basically if you ignore the parts of the prequels with the Skywalker in them then they wouldn’t be Skywalker Saga movies. I mean, I agree with that in theory but in reality that’s not at all what happened.I guess if you take out the Vader origin story then you have a movie about trade disputes in the Outer Rim and a movie about…damn what was Clone Wars about again if you take out all the Anakin/Padme stuff? All I really remember is that the writing was hacky and the directing was horrible but then again the last time I saw it was probably 10 or more years ago.
At least we’d lose the line about sand…
Right, my point is this debate is nothing new. Since at least the prequels, new Star Wars content has always had one foot on the exploring the bigger universe path, and one foot on the circling back to the Skywalkers path. And all along there have been those of us who liked it better when it was following more of the first path and less of the second.Given that context, it is unfair to say those of us who feel that way now are somehow fighting against the history of Star Wars. Instead, at least in my case, I am asking for more along the lines of the Star Wars content I have liked better, and less along the lines of the Star Wars content I think has sucked. Which I do not think is an unreasonable desire.Of course if you liked it all uncritically, that’s fine for you. But those of us who think it has been mixed are not thereby required to either throw out the baby or happily drink the bathwater. We can argue for being discriminating instead.
I mean sure I guess if you can watch the prequels and ignore the fact that they’re literally all based around the Skywalker story then you’re right…?“Given that context, it is unfair to say those of us who feel that way now are somehow fighting against the history of Star Wars.”No, it’s definitely fair: You’re literally telling me to imagine that the movies are completely different than they actually are in real life.Sorry; I’ve been a Star Wars fan for decades, had all of the EU books up through Vector Prime and have seen pretty much everything done since(though no novels/comics, at least the new High Republic stuff isn’t Skywalkery if you want to check that out) and I just do not see what you’re talking about at all.
Again, you are being inaccurate and unfair when describing movies like Phantom Menace as being “literally all based around the Skywalker story.”Maybe you just can’t see this, but to many of us, it was SOOOOOO obvious how boy Anakin just gets shoehorned into that movie in such an incredibly awkward, unnecessary, and unsatisfying way. So, I am not in fact telling you to imagine a different movie than Phantom Menace. I am telling you it is possible to watch Phantom Menace and see parts of it as better than other parts, and to recognize how many of the bad parts were inessential to the main story of the movie.But again, if you just can’t see that, oh well. And if you think your inability to see that gives you the right to be dismissive of other more discriminating Star Wars viewers, oh well to that too.
No, I’m being very accurate: The transformation of Anakin into Darth Vader is literally the entire point of the prequels. It’s why the OT, prequels and sequels are specifically called:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Star_Wars_films#Skywalker_Saga“So, I am not in fact telling you to imagine a different movie than Phantom Menace.”Yes, you are, that’s specifically what you said to do:
“So the prequels also COULD have been a story about the fall of the Republic and the rise of the Empire, centered on new characters who only at the end lead into Star Wars.”“Phantom Menace had story lines that existed pretty much entirely independent from Anakin, or at least they could have.”You’re talking about what the prequels “COULD” have been, not what they were. This is stuff you’re making up in your imagination, Star Wars without Star Wars, not what was actually shown on screen.
“But again, if you just can’t see that, oh well.”You’re imagining movies that don’t exist and then arguing that you’re more ‘discriminating’ because of it, that’s delusional.
To say, “This part of this movie was better, this part was worse, and the worse part was unnecessary to the better part” is the essence of discrimination.And I am actually baffled you can’t at least understand why many of us see boy Anakin as being shoehorned awkwardly into Phantom Menace. I can understand if you personally liked boy Anakin—that is a matter of taste. But to be literally incapable of understanding (without sharing) the view that the movie would have been better off without him seems incredible to me.Oh well. If this mode of thinking is simply beyond your capabilities, then I can’t help you.For many of those capable of discrimination, though, Star Wars has always been a mixed bag, and it has always been a debate whether there could be more good Star Wars if there was less bad Star Wars. To you this mode of thinking is apparently simply incomprehensible, but you are going to have to live with the fact that debate is going to continue over your confused objections.
“But to be literally incapable of understanding (without sharing) the
view that the movie would have been better off without him seems
incredible to me.”I understand what you mean, but you’re literally saying ‘If TPM didn’t have Anakin it wouldn’t be about Skywalkers, therefore it’s not a Skywalker movie.’, which is true but has absolutely no meaning in this context because I’m talking about the way things are, not what you imagine in your head.“If this mode of thinking is simply beyond your capabilities, then I can’t help you.”Uh huh…“it has always been a debate whether there could be more good Star Wars if there was less bad Star Wars”Nobody debates that, it doesn’t even make sense as a debate. People bitch about Star Wars being a small universe and that’s what I was talking about. You are talking about how the movies would be different if things in them weren’t the way they are, which is true but meaningless. I hope that helps!
“To you this mode of thinking is apparently simply incomprehensible, but
you are going to have to live with the fact that debate is going to
continue over your confused objections.”Wow you’re kind of an asshole, aren’t you? Because you’re making things up I’m confused, eh?
Let me break this down for you: I’m talking about the way things are, you’re talking about how the Skywalker Saga wouldn’t be about Skywalkers if there weren’t Skywalkers in it. And then you insult me over it! Why would you think that’s the right thing to do? Would you say these things to someone in real life and expect them to go over well or somehow bolster your argument?
Oh, and Rogue One is a good illustration of what I am suggesting the prequels COULD have been like (and better for it).Yes, Rogue One basically just makes a movie out of the crawl at the beginning of Star Wars. And yes, it ends with the characters at the start of Star Wars.But, it is not a Skywalker story itself! Those connections are too minimal to make it a story about the Skywalkers. It is a story about Galen and Jyn Erso, the rest of the rag tag Rogue One Force, and the sacrifices they all end up making.So the prequels also COULD have been a story about the fall of the Republic and the rise of the Empire, centered on new characters who only at the end lead into Star Wars.And as I explained in another post, at least the first two movies mostly felt like that anyway, with Anakin being imposed on those movies rather than seeming like a necessary and organic part of them.
Well hell the Clone Wars COULD have been about mad clone masters making their own armies of clones, fighting amongst themselves causing the Republic to become destabilized and allowing the Emperor to take over, like they were presented in the EU. That would have been friggen awesome!
But that’s not what actually happened.And honestly I’m not a huge fan of Rogue One: The editing is really choppy and the story is kind of meh. That’s a personal opinion though.
It doesn’t have to be though. Make a KOTOR type thing. KOTOR was great.Hopefully all these announced shows will supply us with that.
I had no desire to watch BoBF, but now I feel like I have to in order to understand what’s going to happen in S3 of The Mandalorian, which I actually do like. This and the MCU (unfortunately) seem to be going down of path of everything being *so* interconnected that you almost have to do homework on the stuff you like just to be caught up. I get it, that’s their business model, but it’s just unfortunate.
If you want to, you can just watch the last three episodes of BoBF. Which will feel just like watching the next three episodes of The Mandalorian. So problem solved, really.
Fair. I just have to get my D+ sub back (we let it expire).
If you don’t mind all the Internet spoilers, you could probably just watch those episodes right before you start watching The Mandalorian S3.
That might be the way to go. Sadly, I was spoiled on this and No Way Home pretty bad:(
If you’re only in it for Mando content, you can skip the first four episodes. The next three are critical to the Mando story.
Don’t bother
People still just don’t get it. I’m an old school Star Wars fan from the release of the OT when I was a little kid and I want something different and I want them to leave the Skywalker saga behind. TLJ didn’t do that. It was an inferior second rate remix of Empire right down to the little skiffs fighting walkers. Ren betraying his master was a nice twist, but if anyone thought they were going to end the Skywalker saga without Ben being redeemed, they’re nuts. Disney would never have allowed that. It’s an objectively bad movie with missed opportunities, plot holes the size of Tattooine, and such a limited scope it felt more like an episode of a Disney plus show than an actual Star Wars film. The idea that the people that didn’t like TLJ didn’t like it because they’re stuck in the past is incorrect in the extreme. I still think the second season of the Mandalorian was pretty good, but I hated Boba Fett and I’m very worried they’re going to ruin Vader. Also, with Luke and Leia rumored to have roles in Obi Wan, I’m getting the impression we just aren’t going to be able to have Star Wars without some kid in every one and that’s shit. The “Star Wars prequels were bad because they were for kids” bullshit Lucas keeps spitting at us is a joke. The OT was good and it wasn’t a kids series, I don’t consider the sequel trilogy or the shows to be directed at kids, and I don’t feel like kids have to be in every aspect of Star Wars. There’s plenty of room for more adult focused Star Wars content.
New stories within the IP have always been better.
Leaning on nostalgia has always been pretty “meh,” with Star Wars.
Lot less mystery about where a story is going with fan service ventures, or you get a new story that attempts to add more meat to something that was largely popular as a set of bones with a singular direction.
“Yoda teamed up with Chewbacca, briefly, in Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge Of The Sith, for no serious reason other than it was easy to do and the timeline favored the pairing”…Actually that’s not entirely so (according to Lucasfilm savant J. W. Rinzler). Lucas’ lone ambition for first sequel, simply Star Wars Part 2, was for it to take place on (Chewbacca’s) the Wookees home planet — look no further than the first unofficial sequel: ‘Star Wars Holiday Special’ (1978). It really wasn’t until Leigh Brackett came onboard (or the ultimate blowback from aforementioned broadcast special), Lucas was no longer so gung-ho Planet Wookee. But, prior to that, Wookees was absolutely the [elevator pitch] synopsis-priority.Albeit Lucas would later acknowledge Episode III’s Wookee Land as just another preconcept shelved until technology/SFX might catchup.
Firing a terrific person like Gina Carano and thus whacking an intriguing new character (Cara Dune), one of the last known Alderaan survivors no less was an incredibly brain dead, tone deaf move by Lucasfilm. It was also done in a slimy, underhanded way – running smear campaign against her spearheaded by twitter trolls is not exactly a big league maneuver. Unless Disney cleans house at Lucasfilm the franchise is in big trouble.
We are all wondering if the Obi-Wan show will have filler episodes, right?This whole synergy thing Lucasfilm and Marvel are doing is good for business but not that great for real discerning fans.
I found both the Mandalorian and Boba Fett to be relatively boring. Mostly done for fan service than to give an excitingly compelling stories.
Have you been to a Disney Park recently? It’s a fucking disaster. That’s the state of Disney right now. I would argue the only reason Marvel is holding together is because of Kevin Feige.
Notice how Baby Yoda walks? Doesn’t it look like there is an invisible child behind him making him waddle along in that side to side motion? There is a reason for that.
That’s the problem with all these new SW titles. You have to anchor them somehow to the original trilogy (or, sigh, any of the 9 movies). If not, they are less interesting, and they become just another sci-fi series. You absolutely HAVE to include characters we know, else it just isn’t “Star Wars-ey” enough. Paradoxically, it feels like a cheat. I didn’t love the Mandalorian, and even they had to have a Yoda-like character to feel part of the universe, or an IG droid who look identical to the one we see for 5-seconds in Empire, and even Boba himself.I think it is impossible to have a successful standalone series in the universe that has none of the characters we already know.
Although Star Wars has presented itself for decades as a galaxy-spanning adventure, for decades, just about every story we’ve seen could just as easily take place in a small town in Missouri. There’s a handful of key characters, many with familial relationships so all the ills of the galaxy seem to trace back to a single lineage. Characters keep coming back again and again, even after they are “killed”if they’re on the good side. We’re expected to believe entire planets have fallen when all we’ve see of the battles would fit within a couple football fields. Oh, sure, there are space ships zipping around aerodynamically, as if they were airplanes, hopping from one single-ecosystem planet to another, but the stories stay small. The first season of The Mandalorian proved it is possible to at least bring in some originality and a sense of adventure, even if it is pretty hard to portray gigantic events on a movie screen. The second has more fan service, bringing in various familiar faces, but it was still far better than any live action the Star Wars universe has produced in decades.The odd thing is I was thrilled to hear Boba Fett was getting his own series, but after two seasons of watching Pedro Pascal, a fine actor, bringing his character to life, I’m not so excited by the stiff, emotionless Boba Fett brought to the screen by Temuera Morrison. The episodes of Book of Boba Fett where we get to see them side by side didn’t help. Give us more Mandalorian, and I won’t particularly care if Boba Fett rides off into the double sunset.
It’s was refreshing when it was just Mando and Baby Yoda having their week to week adventures, with the lingering mystery of Grogu’s past offering a place for the plot to go in the long run. I wouldn’t even have minded if there was a sporadic cameo from another SW property if it made sense. Instead, it far too quickly devolved into a flood of the characters from the animated series and movies, to the point of absurdity. Once again, it’s suddenly a very tiny galaxy. This propensity to shove as many characters in as possible ended up making for just plain bad, incoherent writing. Nothing comes of it. BoBF is utterly baffling. It is clear that they had no idea what to do with Fett. It was literally, “A Boba Fett series will get viewers, let’s make it happen.” Then when the time came to actually write it, “Shit, I can’t come up with any compelling ideas about Boba soooooo…. Mando? I can get him and Baby Yoda in there. Some more Luke too. Oh, but I have to ignore a lot of what Din learned in season 2 and completely reverse any meaningful decisions any characters’ made. Should be fine.”Not only is Din seemingly not curious about his own understanding of Mando culture, setup by his interactions with Bo, but we find he’s still full death cult follower and the armorer is still alive somehow. He’s been shown as a character to not be quite that dense. That’s a quibble compared to the astounding stupidity of reuniting he and Grogu instantaneously. That’s not just moronic for doing it in what is (ostensibly) a different series. No, it’s moronic because Favreau/Filoni managed to undercut the only compelling emotional through line they had created heading into Mando season 3.
I’m happy that the fans found depth in the Star Wars universe, but I never did.
I feel like people found detail and confused it for depth. There are loads of plot, exposition, planets, technology… but nothing resonant or genuinely meaningful. It’s OK to be fun nonsense, I feel like Star Wars has spent four decades trying to pretend it is more than that. Alec Guinness had it right…
Vader’s line in A New Hope—“When I left you I was but the learner. Now, I am the master”
Even watching Mandalorian season 2 it seemed like a series of back door pilots for other dream shows that the writers always wanted to do but now had the power to get away with making. The problem is I don’t care about the animated shows and don’t have any interest in watching seasons of them just to get the back stories for these characters. I am watching Boba Fett because my daughter loves Star Wars and I will probably watch Obi-Wan and that Rogue 1 spin off show for the same reason. But it is really surprising that Lucasfilm can’t see what made Mandalorian so successful.
there must be insane behind the scenes gossip. this series was such a failure, there had to have been drama
I’m tired of seeing Disney/Marvel push every show together in their extended universe. It’s fine if there’s some crossover, but I just want to see stories that stand on their own.
Who gave any of you a voice? Seriously, you don’t “get” Star Wars. That’s fine. But the constant crying just makes you look like a petty child.
Go watch Marvel.
“which showed a rift in the fandom that separates those who yearn for
something different from this decades-old saga and those who like the
way things are just fine.”Please, you are poisoning the well, you can’t just subvert expectations without anything satisfying in return, it was obvious that the third one would turn out bad because TLJ cut what little FA had set up, but subverting expectations was apparently more important. How about the next Indiana Jones we kill Indiana and the rest of the movie he is a ghost, ah bet you did not expect that? Is not just star wars fans, but movie consumers in general given you could hear so many attending Force Awakens that it was their first star wars, but if people just wanted things that roll around the original trilogy would Knights of the old republic had a sequel an MMO and a remake?
“How will Lucasfilm tie [the Acolyte], which takes place 200 years before
Anakin Skywalker was conjured out of thin air, to the more familiar,
fan-friendly trappings of the original Star Wars trilogy?”Isn’t that obvious? By including Yoda. He already was in the trailer to the upcoming “Star Wars Eclipse” video game, which is set in the same period.
The Last Jedi was a masterpiece, and its rejection by Disney and the idiotic, myopic fanboys is a true tragedy. Not only was the movie itself well-done, but the stories it promised had so much potential for the Star Wars universe. Alas; I’ll never get over it.
Nope. Poorly written nonsense. Just like the other 2.
(I have no idea why I can’t post an original comment, just a follow-up to JJ’s…anyway) “Hunter, Echo, Wrecker, Tech, and Crosshair” ? Did they run out of “vaguely foreign language sounding random syllable names” for their characters and start stealing from GI Joe?
There are days when I wish Doctor Strange would make everyone forget about Star Wars. It is the most over-discussed/over-hyped/over-argued entertainment I’ve experienced in over 50 years.
I still feel with The Last Jedi, Rian Johnson was asking the fans AND Lucasfilm to wonder what’s next? and to truly not know the answer. I think it made fans uncomfortable (it made ME uncomfortable, but only because it wasn’t clear where we were headed, much like at the conclusion of Empire Strikes Back), especially those who had for decades known without a shadow of a doubt what happened next. Luke, the valiant, unimpeachably noble Jedi, would rebuild the order and lead the galaxy to (boring) goodness. Han would remain the affable goofball he’d devolved into during Return of the Jedi, so in love was he, and the and Princess would have Jedi babies and Chewie would be the grouchy but loyal babysitter. I mean, the narrative was written.Then the moment it because clear that Luke would follow the Campbellian hero’s journey to its Beowulfian conclusion, they got pissed. And Lucasfilm got nervous. And now we’re seeing a sort of retcon by way of pre-jaded Luke doing the thing those fans wanted to see in the sequel trilogy.It’s interesting to me that when Dave Filoni has the reins, like he did with Rebels, he can create a narrative arc that draws in those wonderful moments from the “small” universe, like Obi Wan and Maul’s final duel (which is to this day one of the finest moments of visual storytelling in Star Wars), that opens up the larger universe. For all the griping that it was a kids’ show (it was, so that’s not even a valid complaint), it had the same grand scope of other epic properties like Avatar: The Last Airbender (not coincidentally). But that’s a small fry show. It’s not the focal point of the entire studio, or the overlords at Disney, and they want guarantees. They want the band to play the hits, and nothing but the hits. It’s Top 40 radio. You want something weird and risky? Don’t look to the cash cow. Not saying it can’t be a simple pleasure or even be “good,” but be realistic. That said, Star Wars Visions was weird and offbeat and while it didn’t always work, it was always interesting.
The Last Jedi is an abomination.
I’m pretty sure that Lucas was pursuing “shallow toy box ambitions” from the very beginning.
Let’s explore what Jarrod is asking for here. He’s asking for Disney to do this:“Hey, I’ve got an idea for a new live action TV show based on the movies we just spent 5 billion dollars on and made 10 years of animated shows for!”“OK, go on, let’s hear it”“So we’ll make up these new characters, set them far away from everything else we’ve ever seen before, and have them do things that have nothing to do with the plots from the stuff we’ve already made.”“So who are you making this for?”
“I figure there are fans of the show that had no interest in any of the other stuff that came before that might want a show with some of that stuff, but not very much of it.”“And it’ll cross over some with our other shows, so we can get all the fans to watch all the shows?”“No.”“It’ll reference the movies and other shows, though, right? So people that might have missed those will want to go back and watch them?”
“Um, no.”“So you want to make a show for Star Wars fans, who hate everything about Star Wars?”“That’s it!”
The Bad Batch largely stuffed the Crosshair-Hunter character work into the periphery for the majority of the season and outright ignored other dramatically rich plot points, such as Echo’s traumatic transformation …Thanks for this—We just finished watching Bad Batch for the first time and, as much as I like Rebels and TCW, the Martez sisters and Hera were pretty random choices to take up screentime in a show that has other, more interesting stories to tell.
I would rather see the fake Luke Skywalker than Sebastian Stan any day of the week. I don’t really think Sebastian Stan would be my Luke Skywalker, sorry, but it’s true. The thrill everytime I see Luke CGIed is a Jedi mind trick, I know, but I don’t care. What I do care about is plot, subplot, tying up loose ends, character arcs and truths instead of weird out of character arcs and lies, and a Master Assassin who actually gets to shoot someone other than one meager episode in the entire series. All Fennec Shand did was give power point presentations. And sad to say, Boba Fett is no longer the Bounty Hunter of my Youth. Favreau and Rodriguez saw to that. AND if one more person says the Mods were a nod to Lucas (Lucas was a hard rocking hotrodder from Modesto, California, not a suit-wearing, vespa riding, bloke from Brighton Beach who kicked Rocker’s butts, or got their butts kicked by Rockers) I’m going to barf.
This sort of criticism just leaves me cold.I mean, we keep going back to Star Wars because of the nostalgia. If we really want something with a fresh, new take on the space opera or alien sci fi or whatever, shouldn’t we look for … something new? Why do we expect this old thing we love to constantly deliver new experiences?Like, I adore the first couple seasons of the BSG reboot (what a great vehicle for exploring our post-9/11 world) and I love Empire, and I love Jedi. Would setting the BSG reboot stories in the Star Wars universe have made them any *better*? (I mean, they certainly could have set it there, and that would’ve been an all new type of storytelling we haven’t seen in Star Wars — the kind of thing that pieces like this seem to be advocating for.) I’m highly doubtful that using Star Wars as a canvas for that would have improved things any — seems likely that Star Wars would’ve just gotten in the way. (I suppose this argument is muddled by BSG being an old property itself, but I think of the reboot as something brand new, in part because I never watched the old stuff and in part because approximately no one else cared about old BSG either.)Now don’t take any of this to mean that I like the new Star Wars stuff. Each iteration is, for me, an exercise in diminishing returns. I’ve gotten what 10 year old me could dream about — more Star Wars! – and at this point I’m pretty well satiated. But that’s fine by me.
I’m waiting for the show about this dude, and all the wacky space adventures he has with his ice cream maker.
I blame the Fandom Menace.
Disney’s Star Wars is solely about fan service. It is such lazy, sloppy and boring story telling. They keep the SW fans hooked with these titillating appearances of fan favorites. The Book of Boba Fett should serve as a warning to all that attempts to make stories from tertiary characters is a fool’s errand. Boba was better when he was mysterious and looked like a bad ass. Now he’s a schmuck ruined by some seriously bad writing and directing. But everyone excited because R2 delivered Grogu just in time for the worst street battle every (the one with the giant battle droids that couldn’t hit a group of residents strolling down the middle of the street, with combatants firing over and over and over and over at ray shields they cannot penetrate and culminating with a ridiculous homage to kaiju movies with Boba playing bronco buster.) Want to save the SW franchise? Do not have a second season of Boba Fett. Cancel the ridiculous amount of spin-off series planned (The Acolyte? Lando? Ranger of the New Republic? Who gives a shit about them except already ordained SW fans?) Stop it Disney. Just stop. You already Abramsed the Skywalker saga right into the shitter. Stop the marketing blitz disguised as storytelling. It sucks.
I’m just tired of how everything in the universe revolves around Tatooine. It’s a dull rock but the franchise just can’t get away from it.
I wish these episodes weren’t doing “name that asset” every week. Zero creativity.
Good gods, this article is a load of insufferable tripe. Seriously now, do us a favor and stop watching and commenting on Star Wars. You clearly hate it when it doesn’t match your head-canon or conform to awful Expanded Universe non-canon stuff you remember through rose-tinted nostalgia goggles. Just move on. Spare us your vapid, sour ramblings— You and all the whiners who can’t get through any Star Wars content without complaining and nitpicking.
As a lifelong Star Wars fan, I lost interest in the new wave of Disney movies and TV shows somewhere between The Rise of Skywalker and The Mandalorian season 2. It just seems like content for the sake of content – I don’t get the impression that this stuff is being made out of some artistic ambition or creative drive.However, what I’m (perhaps foolishly) excited about is the Obi-Wan Kenobi series. You can keep your Boba Fetts and your Baby Yodas – a show that is a true sequel to the prequels (heh), featuring not just Ewan McGregor but Hayden Christensen as well? I unironically enjoy the prequel trilogy so I’m really genuinely curious to see those actors return, and see how they do playing those characters but with much more competent writing and directing. My understanding is the whole season is directed by Deborah Chow (who also directed the Better Call Saul episode ‘Something Stupid’), and I trust her to make something good.I hope I’m not in these comments again in a few months time saying I’m disappointed – I feel like this is the last bit of curiosity/interest that I have for Disney-era Star Wars and I genuinely hope it brings me back in.Not to disparage anyone who does, but I can’t stand all the MCU films and TV series – not for lack of trying, I’ve sat through about 10 of the films and 1 or 2 of the TV shows. I worry that Disney is basically just “MCU-ifying” Star Wars and pumping out movie after show after movie to try and get the IP to latch on to the public zeitgeist in the same way that the Marvel stuff has. What I always liked about Star Wars was that it was special in its finity – now that we’re faced with live-action Star Wars content stretching out forever it doesn’t feel special anymore.
Disney’s Star Wars is solely about fan service. It is such lazy, sloppy and boring story telling. They keep the SW fans hooked with these titillating appearances of fan favorites. The Book of Boba Fett should serve as a warning to all that attempts to make stories from tertiary characters is a fool’s errand. Boba was better when he was mysterious and looked like a bad ass. Now he’s a schmuck ruined by some seriously bad writing and directing. But everyone excited because R2 delivered Grogu just in time for the worst street battle every (the one with the giant battle droids that couldn’t hit a group of residents strolling down the middle of the street, with combatants firing over and over and over and over at ray shields they cannot penetrate and culminating with a ridiculous homage to kaiju movies with Boba playing bronco buster.) Want to save the SW franchise? Do not have a second season of Boba Fett. Cancel the ridiculous amount of spin-off series planned (The Acolyte? Lando? Ranger of the New Republic? Who gives a shit about them except already ordained SW fans?) Stop it Disney. Just stop. You already Abramsed the Skywalker saga right into the shitter. Stop the marketing blitz disguised as storytelling. It sucks.