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[journodale]

Fan Theory: The miniaturization race

Ever since the JJ Abrams Star Trek film came out in 2009, I’ve been thinking a lot about the very different scale of the ship, the decision to use a power generation station and a brewery for different engine rooms, and why the USS Enterprise in that timeline would have been so much bigger than the one in the Prime Universe. Certain fan sites like Ex Astris Scientia went absolutely apoplectic about it, but I started thinking about what could have caused the differences in those timelines.

And then came Discovery, and after it Strange New Worlds, which introduced a whole host of much larger ships than we used to see in both the Original Series and the Star Trek movies, and the expectations that were raised in The Next Generation. To many fans, the progression of Enterprise designs getting progressively larger from the -A, -B, -C, -D, and -E suggested a linear pathway that as starships became more advanced, they got larger. But what if that’s not the case? And certainly, the fact that the USS Kelvin being a very large ship in the Prime Universe (again, to the apoplexy of EAS) suggests that the pathway was not, in fact, linear, and that we should consider what changed in the divergence of the timelines.

My theory: The miniaturization race.

In the prime timeline, the Starfleet Corps of Engineers began a program of trying to miniaturize its technology so that ships became more efficient, and that meant that they didn’t need the enormous powerplants that we saw in the USS Kelvin, and ships could get smaller and more streamlined as a result. There is some suggestion pre-2009 film that this was already happening. In “The Cage,” the USS Enterprise had a crew of 203, whereas by the time Kirk took command, the crew complement was over 400. This suggests that equipment had become less bulky and there was more room for crew aboard. I will note that Deep Space Nine’s “Trials and Tribble-ations” episode had Dax remarking that they “really packed” the ships of Kirk’s era with crew, but again, that may have been possible with smaller equipment.

The USS Kelvin had an enormous powerplant, in part because JJ Abrams used the Long Beach Generating Station as the engineering section, to “give credibility to the engine room of an older Starfleet ship.” If we follow that the NX-01 Enterprise underwent a refit mid-life to include a secondary hull with a larger powerplant (which Picard Season 3 essentially made canon), that begins the notion that as ships got faster, they needed larger power plants to push past Warp 5, until we got to the monstrosity of the USS Kelvin.

The NX-01 Enterprise engine room

The USS Kelvin's engine room

But this is where Starfleet started focusing on making things smaller and more efficient. By the time we get to the first season of Discovery, the USS Kelvin is no longer wildly out of scale, but ships are around its size, but in some cases, getting smaller and more efficient. While there is some debate around the various refits of the Constitution-class, given that the USS Enterprise is larger in Discovery and Strange New Worlds than it was in the original series, there can be some assumption about refit cycles.

The Eaglemoss book on the Illustrated History of the USS Enterprise and USS Enterprise-A suggests that after “The Cage,” the ship underwent a major refit for its next deep-space mission, where the nacelles were reinforced and featured additional hull plating to give them a bulkier outline, necessitating reinforcing the pylons, and that other dimensions were increased in order to install the new equipment. Strange New Worlds indicates that this program seems to have been implemented across not only Constitution-class ships, but also Sombra-class ships (which used many of the same components), but it was also suggested in the Short Treks episode “Q&A” that the larger configuration was original to Pike’s mission, that we retcon the appearance in “The Cage,” and that after Pike’s mission that the refit was to a smaller silhouette, such as the USS New Jersey seen in Picard Season 3. In either case, the upgrade cycles were nevertheless evident in what we saw onscreen.

In the Short Treks episode “Ask Not,” we saw an expansive engine room aboard the USS Enterprise, which had been refit before Strange New Worlds to a much smaller space, with a smaller and more efficient warp core (though in the first episode, “Strange New Worlds,” we did get a glimpse that the core extended a few more decks upward, with fewer open areas and catwalks), which fits the theory of miniaturization. That again got even smaller by the time of TOS, and the lore would have it that the warp core was changed from a vertical to a horizontal one under the floor of the engineering set, but would again be vertical following the refit of The Motion Picture. This is also where the limits of the miniaturization program were reached, and things started to get larger again (but not brewery larger).

The USS Enterprise's engine room from "Ask Not"

The USS Enterprise's engine room in "Strange New Worlds"

The USS Enterprise's engine room in TOS season one

The USS Enterprise's engine room in TOS season three

The refit USS Enterprise's engine room in The Motion Picture

I would also posit that the Klingons were also engaged in the miniaturization race around this time, given that the original D-7 and K’tinga cruisers seen in Discovery and Strange New Worlds also started out much larger than they did in the TOS and The Motion Picture, and we could suppose that the early prototypes of those classes were larger but as the newer tech came into place, they were able to substantially reduce the cross-sections of those ships while still retaining their general configurations, leading to the smaller versions as they went into full production.

So what about the Kelvin-universe and the much larger USS Enterprise from those films? Well, after the Narada emerged and created the separate timeline, Starfleet was spooked at how powerful that ship was and how easily it destroyed the USS Kelvin, and focused their energies on building up their weapons and defences based on the detailed scans they took of the Narada, and not on the miniaturization of technology. That meant that the powerplants of ships stayed large (brewery large), and the ships stayed big and got bigger rather than smaller and more efficient.

The Kelvin timeline USS Enterprise's brewery-style engine room, which allegedly contained multiple warp cores

Lots of catwalks and pipes in the brewery-style engine room

The Kelvin timeline USS Enterprise's second warp core from Into Darkness, filmed at the experimental nuclear fusion reactor at the National Ignition Facility.

The Klingons, who captured the damaged Narada and had it in orbit of Rura Penthe for those twenty-some years would also have been learning the secrets of its technologies (which may or may not have included Borg tech, depending on how much lore you treat as canon). Yes, that also means the USS Vengeance from Into Darkness is ridiculously large, but again, that timeline focused on bigger and more power, and not on efficiency. It's my theory on how the two timelines' technologies diverged so significantly, and I hope that it makes sense.

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My other queer songs of 2024

A few weeks ago, I was asked by Xtra to choose my queer song of 2024, and after an agonizing decision, I arrived at VINCINT featuring Betty Who and “Love Me Tonight,” for the reasons in the Xtra piece.

But in coming up with my list, I also realise that I was spoiled for choice, something that is probably unique at this moment in queer history. And with so much choice, here are my other contenders.

Olly Alexander “Cupid’s Bow”

Alexander was the lead of Years & Years, before the bandmates fell away and it was just him, and when he competed for the UK in Eurovision, he did it under his own name. With a new album on the way, “Cupid’s Bow” was one of the singles leading up to the release. It’s catchy and Alexander has an infectious energy that feels like it gets more intense as his confidence grows with every album.

Bright Light Bright Light “Snap!” 

One of my favourite tracks from his album Enjoy Youth, artist Rod Thomas relied less on guest collaborations on this album than his previous, this harkens back to an eighties electro sound that is relentlessly fun, but the lyrics are also about self-realisation and coming into your own.

Ben Platt “Andrew”

Platt’s latest album, Honeymind, is very much an album about his being very much in love (as opposed to his debut being a definitive heartbreak album), but “Andrew” is also a chronicle of the rite of passage that pretty much every queer kid has gone through, with the crush on someone who will never reciprocate, and the line “It’s just a cruel joke that chemicals play” is life advice that every queer kid has to learn.

Will Youn “Midnight”

Young has been a queer mainstay in the UK for my whole adult life, and we are similar in age which is why this song hit so hard, about being a single gay man of a certain age, and wondering how much of the old single life is worth it. Did I mention that this song hit hard? Glad that someone is talking about it, and can make a catchy tune out of it in any case.

Lauv “Potential”

Lauv was an artist that always struck me as having something of a queer sensibility despite being ostensibly straight, so it was perhaps not a huge shock when he started talking about writing this song and that it was as he started to explore his sexuality, and developed feelings for a male friend, and this was essentially his first real exploration of those feelings. Nothing happened with that friend, but he still put this song out into the world, and it’s sweet and earnest.

Linkin Park “Over Each Other”

Hold up. Linkin Park? Queer? With the release of From Zero, the band chose Emily Armstrong as the new lead vocalist following the death of Chester Bennington several years ago, and Armstrong is a queer woman who is bringing that energy to the band as it progresses and evolves in its new form. And it’s great that they can use videos where she has a female love interest rather than airbrushing over that like so many bands with queer members have in the past. This was actually my runner-up for my queer song of the year, because I also really appreciated that this was a song with an actual narrative progression—that your frustration and anger with the person you’re closest to can blind you to what’s going on, and that you have the ability to change your trajectory, to start listening and empathising rather than just dwelling in that anger, and it’s a message a lot of people need to hear.

[journodale]

The problem with “Queen’s Shadow”

For the past few months, I’ve been meaning to write this particular essay but was motivated to finally put it to pixel, so to speak, by the fact that it was the subject of the most recent iteration of the Star Wars Show Book Club. The book is Queen’s Shadow, by author EK Johnston, and rarely have I been as disappointed in a book as I have with this one.

(Spoilers from here on out).

The book traces the end of Padmé Amidala’s last days as Queen of Naboo, and her taking on the role of Senator for the Chommel sector, but the problems begin here. For a book about a life-long politician, who gets herself enmeshed in political intrigue and who is forced to navigate a strange and somewhat hostile system, it’s a bit shocking to see just how inept the actual politics in the book was handled.

I’m trying to be as fair as I can be to Johnston because I know that anyone who writes a Star Wars book is inundated with hate mail from fans with an agenda, however my issues with this book are both in that the politics were mishandled, but also that for all of the research that Johnston put in the book on the handmaidens, she completely left out all of the rich political material that should have given her the details for the plot. I get that her focus was on the characters, which it should be. But you also can’t completely abandon your plot for the sake of your characters, and in some instances, that is exactly what Johnston ended up doing.

One of the problems throughout the book is that Johnston doesn’t have a good grounding in the basics of how politics works, so everything is treated with a certain amount of handwaving. A big example is what exactly Amidala’s job was as elected queen (which is essentially a president in monarchical trappings, but so many authors in the Star Wars canon seem completely oblivious to this fact, and keep going on about “monarchy, elected or hereditary” which are two completely disparate concepts). It would seem obvious to me that she would be more likely to perform the ceremonial functions of a head of state, which might also include the functions of Commander-in-Chief of the military, and some input into foreign affairs; this would leave the more head of government functions to Sio Bibble as Governor of Naboo (akin of a prime minister it would seem), but none of this division of powers or responsibilities is really laid out, which would a pretty profound impact on how it would shape Amidala’s politics.

The fact that she was appointed to the Senate rather than elected is also not congruent with the established discourse about the democracy of the Republic. It also makes no sense that the current Queen of Naboo decides on the senatorial appointment for the whole of the Chommel sector. There is also little sense to how the Senate operates, nor is there any discussion about the corruption that Senator Palpatine promised to fight when he was elected Supreme Chancellor. Johnston has no clue about how committees operate within an institution like this, which is why it gets handwaved through when Amidala gets onto Organa’s committee which seems to be largely devoid of a topic that they would be conducting the work of a legislature in, be it in scrutinizing legislation or holding the executive to account. If you want political intrigue, you need to know how the system works so that you can actually work it, or have it work against your protagonist. This was especially reflected in the big solution that Amidala brokered at the end of the novel around Bromlarch’s planetary aqueduct system. Her “cooperation agreement” should have been taken care of by the markets, not having senators cut trade deals. If there was work for the Galactic Senate, it would be in dealing with the whatever barriers were preventing trade – hyperspace lane tariffs, for example (which would fit in perfectly with what touched off The Phantom Menace). Amidala’s experience with the Senate in the book isn’t even reflective of some of the most incisive comments in Attack of the Cloneswhere she talks to Anakin Skywalker about politics, and the problems when people don’t agree.

Mina Bonteri’s inclusion in the book is a giant wasted opportunity, because Bonteri should have been the idealist looking to fight corruption within the system that ultimately drove her to the Separatist cause. Instead, we got some ham-fisted two-by-foreshadowing of the upcoming Separatist Crisis by having Amidala essentially overhear Bonteri in communication with Count Dooku, implying that Dooku was her puppet master. That certainly wasn’t the Bonteri portrayed in The Clone Wars series, and it cheapened her to be portrayed in this way.

Likewise, the inclusion of Rush Clovis in this book also completely abased his character to the point that he was downgraded to simply being a creep, which is not how their relationship was described in The Clone Wars. It was made clear that Amidala and Clovis had had an actual relationship – even Master Yoda knew of it. The book reduces this to having Clovis try to kiss Amidala without her consent, and while may fit with some of the contemporary #MeToo messages, ultimately it means that Amidala was infantilized by denying her the opportunity to have had an adult relationship before she reunited with Skywalker six years later. That it just made Clovis out to be skeezy was lazy writing.

My last bugaboo is one that’s common to many a Star Wars novel or short story, which is the hackneyed portrayal of media. While this is nothing unusual, the fact that the reporting on Amidala was focused solely on her wardrobe is frankly insulting to readers. There would have been plenty of legitimate media criticisms of Amidala’s arrival at the Senate given what her last appearance did with the call for a vote of non-confidence (again, a wasted opportunity to explain the procedural mechanism around that, which Amidala would have learned as part of her political arsenal), but in every single story where the author features a reporter, their sole focus is on clothing. How is this even allowed?

Johnston has a sequel-prequel for this book called Queen’s Peril coming out in a few weeks, which focuses on Amidala’s early days as Queen of Naboo, and I’m already dreading it because of the aforementioned lack of attention to detail about just what her job as queen was in this book. Even more alarming is Johnston lobbying to write a book centred around Palpatine, which one presumes would involve so much more fudging the details of a system he was manipulating.  Would that an editor at Lucasfilm Books or someone in the story group start to treat the politics of the universe as a bit more grown-up, because there’s so much good stuff to use in there, and it’s a shame that it’s being ignored in favour of more handwaving.

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Why I’m mad about the Rise of Skywalker

My first reaction to The Rise of Skywalker – once I got past the litany of eyerolls and “oh, come on!” reactions while I was watching it – was just how mad I was about it. It’s not a deep-abiding rage, mind you, and much of my anger is a form of disappointment, but some of it is just about how petty and spiteful aspects of the film seemed to be in response to things that happened in The Last Jedi. (Spoilers, and occasional salty language, about herein).

My biggest and first complaint is that JJ Abrams and his co-writer, Chris Terrio, turned Rey into Ken the Jedi Prince. Ken. The. Fucking. Jedi. Prince. For those of you who are unaware, these stemmed from a series of largely shite (but occasionally charmingly shite) young adult novels in the early 1990s, as the franchise was experiencing its first major revival with the publication of Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn trilogy. Several of those books revolved around the discovery of a Jedi “prince” named Ken, who started to follow Luke Skywalker around until he discovered that he was indeed Palpatine’s grandson (the books had a whole story arc about his father, Palpatine’s son, being a three-eyed mutant), though these storylines and characters conveniently disappeared from the old expanded universe and were never spoken of again. Around the same time, Dark Horse Comics also published Dark Empire, many of the plot points therein were also lifted liberally by Abrams and Terrio – specifically that Palpatine has resurrected himself by use of clone bodies and mysterious dark side powers – the film simply called the planet Exogol rather than Byss, but the broad strokes are the same, including that Palpatine was eventually trying to move his essence into a new body (in this case it was Leia’s unborn third child rather than Rey). These comics touched off a whole litany of spin-offs wherein the nature of the Force and the conflict between the Jedi and Sith descended to increasingly cartoonish depths, and yet here they are, reviving themselves, because of the need to give Rey a bloodline.

In an interview with Terrio in The Hollywood Reporter, Terrio stated that they chose to make Rey a Palpatine because it was the “worst news she could receive,” and then handwaved a bunch of bullshit about “dark side royalty” and how she was choosing her own family over her ancestry. The problem is that this makes no sense, either from a story perspective, or from the broader continuity of the Star Wars universe. Terrio insisted that the original films established that the Force ran along family lines because of Luke Skywalker’s line to Leia in Return of the Jedi about how the Force was strong in their family – discounting that this was Luke’s awkwardly trying to tell a woman who made out with him six months before that she was actually his long-lost twin sister, or the fact that the whole existence of the Jedi Order and their prohibitions against marriage and children precluded there being Force-wielding dynasties out there. Rian Johnson in Last Jedi to make the significant revelation that Rey was the children of junk traders and nobodies was not only “democratizing” the Force – that one didn’t need famous parents to feel the Force – but also to being a hero. Terrio insisted that they weren’t slighting Johnson – and that could be the case. They instead were taking the laziest course to telling the story of the film.

Absolutely nothing in the story demanded that Rey be of Palpatine’s bloodline – if they insisted on bringing back Palpatine (another lazy choice, but more on that later), he could simply have demanded that Kylo Ren find her because she was simply a powerful Force user, whom the Force seemed to manifest in her as a response to the rising darkness (which would seem to have been the whole promise of The Force Awakens’ title). They wouldn’t have needed to invent a son for Palpatine (and then handwave away the fact that he apparently didn’t have Force powers despite their insistence on strong Force lineages, or if he did, how he managed to avoid being groomed as his father’s new apprentice and heir, and how he wasn’t the subject of a war of succession to the throne upon Palpatine’s death), and they would have maintained the notion that the Force belongs to everyone – not the Jedi, not the Sith, and certainly not to famous bloodlines (as Johnson made explicitly clear in Last Jedi). But no – giving Rey a bloodline was about fan service, and the constant need by certain fans that she be related to somebody important (never mind that all of the theories they put forward would not have worked out in terms of ages and timelines).

Another example of Abrams and Terrio totally not thumbing their noses at Johnson was the complete abandonment of the core theme of Last Jedi – that it’s people and relationships that matter, not things. What Abrams and Terrio replaced it with was about turning objects into fetish items – lightsabers in particular. The fact that they insisted on Rey having rebuilt Anakin/Luke’s lightsaber – recreating it exactly rather than turning it into something new – or having Rey build her own lightsaber before the film opened, coupled with the fact that they also introduced Leia’s lightsaber to imbue it with special meaning, as though it was the fact that it was these two lightsabers in particular that imbued Rey with particular symbolic meaning for the final fight was a complete abrogation of Johnson’s message. Lightsabers are not Excalibur – they are not magic swords bestowed upon Jedi by women in lakes. That said, Abrams is pathologically incapable of writing screenplays that don’t have MacGuffins (though the Sith Wayfinders were themselves also MacGuffins, and the dagger another one – even though its appearance and history made absolutely no sense), so this is more of his particularly lazy writing. As an aside, the whole Wayfinder MacGuffin is itself partially lifted from the Jedi Prince series, where the Imperial warlords were looking for the Glove of Darth Vader and found it in pieces of the second Death Star…on a water planet. I’m not even kidding.

The redemption of Kylo Ren didn’t make any sense. Terrio tried to handwave some Joseph Campbell bullshit about how great myths required atonement with the father figure and the great sin of patricide, but Ren’s actual rejection of the dark side was completely nonsensical – particularly because of how they used the device of Leia going into some kind of meditative state that eventually led to her death, as though it was her mystical intervention and self-sacrifice that somehow drove it out of him, as though the dark side was some kind of demonic possession. It also didn’t make sense how Rey decided to heal Ren immediately after she struck him with a lethal blow with her lightsaber – which they played as an act of mercy – and it was Terrio’s contention that it was what allowed Ren to let the light in and see his father again (which was a memory and not a ghost, because how else were they going to get Harrison Ford wedged into the film for fan service). There’s no logic to any of that. Both Force Awakens and Revenge of the Sith showed that going to the dark side was a choice – Ren chose to kill his father because he thought that was what would allow him to bury his past. After a career of mass murder and raping the minds of his interrogation victims, he’s going to suddenly turn it all back because he got stuck by a lightsaber and healed? Really? I’m not buying it. (Incidentally, the fact that Ren’s body dissolved in the end also makes no sense either – Kenobi, Yoda, and Skywalker’s corporeal dissolution had to do with the powers that Qui-Gon Jinn learned to unlock to maintain his presence in the Force after death, which he later showed Yoda how to do in The Clone Wars series and in Revenge of the Sith. I can see Luke having taught Leia the powers, but Ben/Kylo Ren before his training had been completed? I have a hard time with that).

Yet another of Abrams and Terrio’s lazy choices was the need to bring in a Big Bad™ in the form of Palpatine rather than engaging with another of the significant aspects of the Last Jedi’s themes, which was about the banality of evil. The whole point of the casino sequence that fanboys like to deride is that it showed Finn the evil of indifference of those who profit from war, while the underlying theme of the rise of the First Order in the films had to do with people being nostalgic for fascism – sure, a lot of people got trampled underfoot but at least the trains ran on time and we were “safe” with stormtroopers on every corner. It made the film as relevant to the 2010s as George Lucas did with commenting about Nixon and Vietnam in the original trilogy, or his construction of a trilogy of films about political violence and the rise of authoritarian populism with the prequels. Killing Palpatine does nothing about these bigger, underlying societal problems that the Resistance has to confront. Remember in Last Jedi where Poe talks about being the spark that will light the flame that will burn the First Order to the ground? Well, that’s all evaporated with the revelation that hey, it was Palpatine pulling the strings all along. Nothing to confront here, people, let’s just kill the Big Bad™ and go home. Again, it’s cheap, it’s lazy, and it’s fan service.

I have a big problem with the way Abrams and Terrio treated the Finn/Poe relationship, which all of the actors were pushing for. Abrams, in several interviews, dismissed this as the fact that they have a bond that’s “stronger” because they’ve been through the fire together, or some bullshit like that, then assured fans that they would get their LGBT representation because it’s important to show queer fans that they too belong in the Star Wars universe. That “representation” – the fact that a tertiary character from Last Jedi shares a same-sex kiss with another woman (whom the materials accompanying the film identify as her wife) – is brief, in the background, and was easily sliced out of the film for foreign distribution. And yet, Abrams expects plaudits for his “representation,” while also trying to reinforce Finn and Poe’s hetero credentials with the ambiguity of what Finn planned to declare to Rey as they were sinking in the quicksand, and with Poe’s awkward flirting with Zorii Bliss (and we did learn in the subsequent materials that the pair’s previous “emotionally complicated” relationship was when they were teenagers). Abrams later said that a kiss between Finn and Poe would be “heavy handed” – erm, you know, like the fact that he had Rey kiss Ren, the man who chased her, tortured her, tried to rape her mind, killed her friends, and was a mass-murderer. Yeah, he’s a dark, broody soul who just needs the love of a good woman to complete his redemption story (and I’m sure that the Internet is replete with all kinds of fanfic about how her magic vagina cures Ren’s manpain). That’s totally not heavy-handed, heteronormative fan-service in the slightest. There was actual ground that could be made where Finn and Poe were gay male leads in one of the biggest blockbuster franchises on the planet – something that has never been done before. It would have been ground breaking, keeping entirely with the story that had been established, and would have actually been worthy of applause.

The diminution of Rose Tico’s role is also bullshit, and Terrio’s assurances that they filmed more good stuff with her that just wound up on the cutting room floor also doesn’t pass the smell test. Terrio asserted that it was great how she rose from being a lowly mechanic to being one of Leia’s right-hand advisors – which conveniently had very little screen time. There was an opportunity to have her included with the group aboard the Millennium Falcon on its spy mission right at the very beginning of the film, rather than the insertion of the puppet creature Klaud, so as to show that Rose was an integral part of “Leia’s best agents” entrusted with getting the valuable intelligence from their spy in the First Order, but no, that would be a little too obvious. What is left is essential proof that they have caved to the loud and obnoxious fanboys who objected to her presence in “their” films.

There’s a lot of other nitpicking I could do – whether it’s Abram’s inability to grasp how hyperspace works, the fact that the celebration scenes at the end don’t make any sense with the exception of going down the fan service checklist, or the fact that the closing scene contained so much cheese that I’m surprised the Supply Management marketing boards didn’t file a trade complaint and impose 300 percent tariffs on it. The pace of the film was so frenetic that any scene that could have been poignant or moving was lost in the bang-bang-bang editing. Overall, however, I’m just incredibly disappointed in the lazy writing and fan service that pretends it’s being clever.

This was not the film we deserved. This was a film that rewarded the legions of fanboys who complained that films with strong female characters who don’t wind up in bed with a man at the end were a “feminist agenda;” that films that didn’t pander to the very straight white male entitlement to a particular fandom were the works of “social justice warriors” that hate their own fans; that films that don’t recreate the wonder they felt when they were twelve years old – which is an impossibility – are somehow raping their childhoods. The CBC’s Eli Glasner called it “cinematic comfort food,” but it’s more insidious than that – it’s a repudiation of attempts to grow the franchise beyond just a nostalgia cult, as it increasingly morphs itself into (and by cult, there is now a legion of online “truthers” who trade conspiracy theories about how the films have been hijacked by executives with agendas). And because it will rake in billions of dollars, it will assure the people with the purse strings that this is what the market needs more of. My hope for the franchise is moving toward vehicles like The Mandalorian, and the other forthcoming live-action series on Disney+, because the lessons for blockbusters are apparently to be hollow facsimiles of what came before.

[journodale]

On forty years of Star Wars

I don’t actually remember the first time I saw A New Hope. My father says that he took me to see it in the cinema as an infant, and that I lasted as long as the cantina scene before I started howling and had to leave. I was born in 1978, a year after it was released (which means this was likely during one of its repeat screenings), but it was always a ubiquitous presence in my childhood. I remember seeing Return of the Jedi in the cinema, but for the early part of my childhood, A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back were on constant replay courtesy of my parents having taped them off a Superchannel free preview on our Betamax. That, and we had those children’s adaptations of the stories that came with a small record and storybook where Artoo Deetoo would beep, and you know it was time to turn the page.

Star Wars has been a constant in my life. From the action figures of my childhood, to the bookcases of printed material that I collect now, it has filled my free time and imagination. I have had other fandoms – I was big into Star Trek for a while, mostly in the years that Star Wars was fallow, but one of the things that kept the Star Wars fires burning for me was the fact that they allowed their expanded universe to remain fairly cohesive – that the books and comics would (more or less) have continuity with everything else, rather than it all being self-contained, which Star Trek never got into until after the various TV series ended. I get that it was done for practical purposes (you never want to tie the hands of series writers), but I got tired of reading stories that didn’t matter, and when Trek started to go fallow on its own, my love of Star Wars was always there, waiting for me. Likewise with forays into other series like Earth: Final Conflict, Andromeda or Battlestar Galactica, none could hold the lasting candle to my first love.

When the Special Edition films came out in cinemas, I was ecstatic to see the new effects and tweaks that Lucas made to the series. I’ve never been particularly precious about that, unlike some other fans. I loved the prequels – even the Phantom Menace. It should be no surprise that one of the things I loved best about them was the politics. In fact, when they trimmed many of the politics scenes in Attack of the Clones in order to make the print fit into the IMAX projectors of the time, I was disappointed. (In fact, Lucas should have just left out the interminable factory sequence and restored several of the deleted politics scenes because they were so good, and talked about fundamentally important concepts like the difference between populism and democracy). And the fall of the Republic by thunderous applause in Revenge of the Sith was an important political lesson about how populism often leads to autocracy. These are formative lessons for me as a political journalist, and illustrations that I keep returning to time and again for my work. The fact that the whole prequel trilogy was an exploration of political violence fascinates me and keeps me enthralled in spite of the naysayers.

Now in an age of (really good) animated series, a renewed set of books and comics to go along with the series and films, and a creative story group keeping a coherent canon in the background, it’s a fandom that continues to keep me enthralled. It’s a constant in my life that I have never been without, and that I look forward to sharing with my nieces and nephews as they grow up, just as I’ve introduced it to other friends who’ve never seen it (and yes, they exist). It is my first love, and will remain so.

[journodale]

Building a New Republic

One of the things I had been looking forward to in the new Star Wars canon, with the advent of The Force Awakens is how they would treat the formation of the New Republic, and what would become of it. Given that it was handled so poorly in the Legends continuity, where only one author bothered to establish the civics of it – only for each subsequent author to rip it to shreds in order to suit their own ham-fisted way of trying to writing “politics is dumb,” I had some small measure of hope. Sadly, it was for naught. (Spoilers from hereon in).

When The Force Awakens came out, we got a few references to the state of the New Republic and the Senate in the background materials, primarily The Visual Dictionary, where those fleeting glimpses of Hosnian Prime before its destruction were spelled out – Chancellor Lanever Villecham of Tarsunt, whose principle concerns were forging more agreeable trade with the Trans-Hydian Borderlands and not being concerned about the First Order so long as they remained confined within their borders and following the dictates of the Galactic Concordance – the peace treaty signed with the Empire at the end of Lost Stars that ended the Galactic Civil War. There is talk about how the New Republic still has a fleet, but it is a fraction of what it was during the Clone Wars. In terms of the politics of it, General Leia Organa and her Resistance were not sanctioned by the New Republic, and she has her detractors among the Senate who consider her delusion and a number of corrupt politicians have been making personal attacks against her. Corruption in the Senate has long been a background theme of the Star Wars universe, but there is nothing in here to indicate that the system was in dysfunction – only that they had other concerns and were apprehensive about a military conflict with the emerging First Order after decades of peace.

And then came Bloodline, a novel set six years before The Force Awakens and helped to set the stage for the politics of the galaxy, with a couple of seeds of ideas thrown in by Rian Johnson, director of the forthcoming Episode VIII, in particular the scene known as the “Napkin Bombing.” In interviews, author Claudia Grey insisted that she wasn’t trying to mirror contemporary American politics in anyway, but noted that because people found some connections with early, Revolution-era American politics, she concedes that listening to the musical Hamilton may have planted some Federalist Papers ideas in her mind as she wrote. So what we get is a New Republic that has no executive, and for whom the Chancellor – pretty much wholly absent in the book – is more related to the President of the Continental Congress, a powerless figurehead or presiding officer, meaning that the executive functions are apparently handled by individual committees with laborious procedural issues making any and all decision-making slow and cumbersome. The book features many lamentations by Leia that the only time anything got done was when Mon Mothma was able to use sheer charisma to bring the factions together (hinted at in Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath: Life Debt, where Mothma’s cold pragmatism was also a barrier to action as well), but she had long-since retired by this point and the Senate had splintered into two factions – the Centrists, who favoured a stronger central government, some of whose members looked back fondly on the days of order under the Empire, and the Populists, who favoured decentralized power and more autonomy for individual member planets.

In order to keep too many contemporary parallels out of the storyline, Grey mentioned the extreme left and right flanks of each faction (or party, as they were sometimes referred) – among the Centrists, far-right supporters wanted an expanded military and would tend to canards about individual planets not supporting their own defences enough, while the far-left pushed for more governmental control of the minutiae of personal and political interaction. Among the Populists, its far-right would dissolve the Senate so that each world becomes its own separate entity, while its far-left essentially favours direct democracy rather than having senators vote on issues. So there’s that. But it remains irritating that someone who apparently doesn’t understand how political systems work designed one for the sole function of serving the plot device of gridlock and suspicion. That, and Grey (who wrote an otherwise great Leia-centred story) kept making clumsy references throughout, like referring to “ministers” in both factions when there is no executive and none should exist, or the pettiness of references to endless subcommittees and requiring a quorum of consent to allow any senator to address the assembly, or what have you. It made for poor political writing.

And this is probably the point that irritates me the most – that it didn’t have to be this ham-fisted and clumsy, especially given that politics has always played a large and at times nuanced role in the Star Wars universe, particularly in how George Lucas handled Attack of the Clones and The Clone Wars animated series, where you did have some fairly deep political episodes. The whole of the prequel trilogy is about the use of political violence. One of the deleted scenes from Attack of the Clones had some particularly profound messages from Lucas, where Senator Padmé Amidala tells Anakin Skywalker about the difference between popular rule and democracy – a scene that I would love to use as part of civic literacy education every single day if I could. There was some really, really great fodder for good political fiction within this science fantasy universe. There were plenty of openings in the material that the Lucasfilm Story Group laid out in the Visual Dictionary to do some innovative things with the New Republic to give it some depth and actual political shenanigans that didn’t involve a system built on a foundation of sand that was designed to fail. But that’s what we got, and it’s sad because it’s a hugely wasted opportunity.

I am curious to see where Episode VIII will take the politics of the universe, now that the Senate was wiped out along with Hosnian Prime. There is room for Rian Johnson and the Story Group to do some interesting things with the political vacuum, but can we hope that in any future books or source materials that arise from this, that they get someone a bit more competent and knowledgeable about politics to help them out because there is the potential to do so much good, and not just this same tired faux-cynical pap that their Legends Universe writers and now Claudia Grey have promulgated instead.

[journodale]

More dangerous than you realize

Among the many changes that came with the reset of the Star Wars canon were an Empire that was seen by many as a kind of benevolent dictatorship rather than cartoonish, moustache-twirling evil-doers, but another very distinct change that happened was the way in which the Rebel Alliance has been depicted and the way in which the whole Galactic Civil War has played out. (Spoilers from hereon in).

In the old Legends continuity, there was a constant depiction of the rebels as rag-tag, and not really a military force to be reckoned with. After the Battle of Yavin, they are pretty much shown to be constantly on the run, and any victories are by-products of foiling some Imperial plot or another, and have little to do with gaining or keeping any territory over the course of the war. Little of the Empire’s ridiculously expansive war machine actually gets destroyed, and the most we get to see are hints of hit-and-fade operations on supply convoys. Ship battles tend to end in Rebel retreats, and ground battles are almost unheard of. If anything, it makes the victory after the Battle of Endor look accidental, and the course of the civil war to be unknowable in terms of how they could have pulled it off. In other words, there seems little to warrant the Galactic Civil War being considered such and not just a series of guerrilla attacks.

Going back to A New Hope, however, there is every indication that the Rebels were a more effective force that the Empire needed to take seriously. Consider this exchange in the meeting room aboard the Death Star in the film:

Tagge: The Rebel Alliance is too well equipped. They’re more dangerous than you realize.

Motti: Dangerous to your starfleet, Commander, not to this battle station.

Tagge: The rebellion will continue to gain the support of the Imperial Senate…

And here we get an indication that the Rebels were more than just a bunch of rag-tag guerrillas. That this was never really followed up on in either the comics or the books that eventually filled out the saga gives you an indication of how badly the various content creators misjudged the entirety of the Galactic Civil War. The most we got that there was a military threat was in video games where your starfighter flying abilities could be seen as some kind of a threat, but even then, much of those simulators culminated in the recreation of one Death Star run or another, which made the exercise more one about gameplay than storytelling (which is fair, particularly considering the era).

So what has changed since the new canon? In particularly that the rebellion is a much more aggressive one. While this was hinted at in the new Marvel comics, where mention is made of a dozen attacks made against Imperial targets at places like Kuat and Imdaar in the wake of the destruction of the Death Star in order to take advantage of an Empire reeling and off-guard, and some mentions made in Lost Stars about how the Death Star ignited a bigger war than preventing one, what really changed the game in the new canon was the novel Battlefront: Twilight Company.

To dismiss the book as a simple tie-in to the videogames would be a mistake. What it is, rather, is a reshaping of the way the entire rebellion has been depicted. Rather than space battles, we get infantry and ground warfare. We get the backstory that the Rebel Alliance made a push into the Mid Rim with thousands of ships and hundreds of battle groups, and over the course of several months, they captured and held numerous worlds against the Empire until they overextended themselves and were slowly pushed back (the novel opens during the latter stages of the retreat). We get more than just guerrilla warfare and hit-and-fade tactics – we get an actual, full-fledged war in the galaxy that is more than just the Rebel fleet on the run.

What this changes in substance is the canon is the scope and scale of the Civil War, and how for about three years, there was a genuine struggle for power. It wasn’t until the Battle of Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back that the Rebellion is really chastened, after which point their fleet breaks up and goes on the move (depicted in the novel Moving Target and echoed by Mon Mothma’s line in Return of the Jedi that the Empire had spread its forces around the galaxy in a vain effort to engage them). And around six months later, after the Battle of Endor, it means that there is a substantive Rebel military already in place that transitions to the New Republic in order to take the galaxy back from the crumbling Empire.

As we look forward to Rogue One, which will show the growing strength of the Rebel Alliance in their first major victory that resulted in the theft of the Death Star plans, it’s important to look at what reverberated from that, that the rebellion was more than just one retreat after another, and that there were some real stakes in this conflict.

[journodale]

Trepidation about Thrawn

It was announced this weekend at Star Wars Celebration Europe that Grand Admiral Thrawn would be showing up in season three of Rebels, and I will immediately admit that I am nervous. And I swear, I’m not trying to be a pill about it, but there’s a part of me that feels like this is fan service, and that makes me a little bit queasy, especially the fact that they brought in Timothy Zahn to consult on the episodes and write a backstory novel to be released in the spring.

Why nervous? Wasn’t Thrawn one of the best parts about the old Legends universe? Well, yes and no. It was the Thrawn trilogy that launched the Legends universe into being (then known simply as the Expanded Universe), and set off the series of books and comics that were to follow. But looking back in hindsight, there were a lot of problems with the vision of the universe that Zahn presented. Some of those problems had to do with the fact that there was not a lot of material to draw from, especially with regards to the Force and the Jedi, which Zahn made up whole cloth in many cases (only to be largely contradicted by the prequel film trilogy), and we can be thankful that those will be gone from any new Thrawn stories going forward. (Crazy clone Jedi? Nope.) The whole ysalamiri/Force negation bubbles? Gone (and thanks to Dave Filoni for spelling this out during the Celebration panel where this was announced, but pointing out that he gave a visual nod to them with the way that Thrawn was framed with the lizard sculptures during the reveal sequence). The creepy and ridiculous Noghri bodyguards and assassins (which never really quite worked)? Presumably also gone because their origin story with Vader also no longer fit in with the mould of how the Sith operate. Oh, and Filoni has pretty much ruled out Mara Jade coming back either, so that’s another positive. But bringing Thrawn back feels to me like a bit of a retreat from the really new and exciting course that the new canon was charting.

Yes, Thrawn was an innovative villain whose way of looking into the psychology of his adversaries through things like art was something new and unique – but it was also a bit reductive. The Star Wars universe is one that is extremely cosmopolitan, and unlike the universes of other franchises like Star Trek, there are rarely aliens governments that act in opposition to that of our heroes, hence working out a species’ weakness based on their cultural artworks starts to fall apart quite easily. Look at the art world in our own world – can you devise battle strategies based on abstract art? Cubism? Surrealism? Maybe, but it’s hard to reduce entire art movements to looking at the way a species thinks, which is largely what Thrawn’s strength was. This look into art, philosophy and history is apparently what Thrawn will keep up with as part of his role on Rebels, and while I do have a certain amount of faith that Filoni and his writers can do a better job of it than Zahn did, it still makes me nervous.

My other trepidation around Zahn’s return to Thrawn is the fact that as they kept finding excuses to bring him back in the Legends universe in other time periods, Zahn kept finding ways to out-clever himself, going so far as to refer to Thrawn as his Sherlock Holmes, to which he needed to create a Moriarty, who obviously couldn’t be a Rebel and therefore had to be an alien from the Unknown Regions (Nuso Esva), and hence the Zahn-Thrawn stories started to spiral out of control, becoming less about the Star Wars universe than his own private playground about how clever he could be, right up to Thrawn clones and a hidden private empire. The build-up of the Chiss as this incredibly powerful yet insular empire of their own felt largely out of step with the rest of the universe, and this is something that I’m hoping will change with the new canon (but with Zahn back at the help of Thrawn’s backstory, I have reservations. Note that I would have this same reservation if they brought in Karen Traviss to start consulting on the Mandalorians).

It’s very possible that they will do good things with Thrawn in Rebels, that his way of looking at the “bigger picture” of his enemies will be used in a creative way that fits within the more defined universe of the new canon – like I said, I do have faith in Filoni and his team. It could be that I’m being unduly harsh, but in all of the Legends books, the Thrawn ones were not the strongest – most people simply have warm associated memories of them because of its place in really launching the Legends universe in the first place. By putting Thrawn at this particular point in time in the new canon timeline, and as someone who has an established place in the Imperial hierarchy and not someone who is waging his own private war in the Unknown Regions (ostensibly on Palpatine’s behalf but not really) could be a very good thing, and force his character to evolve in other ways. But the fact remains that this borders on fan service, and the likely months of bitching and moaning that will come from the Legends Thrawn fans when he doesn’t live up to their expectations of his backstory will get tiresome. So while I’m willing to be amazed by what they end up doing with Thrawn on screen, I nervous about how it will all turn out.

[journodale]

Return of Marvel Star Wars

Along with the Great Canon Reset of the Star Wars universe came a change in their comic book series. With Disney now in control of the franchise, it made a certain amount of sense for them to partner with Marvel, which is also the Disney umbrella, to pursue the new line of comics that would populate the new Star Wars Canon. Thus far, it has been a good move.

Star Wars comics first started out with Marvel in 1977, months before the film was released, and they continued until the mid-1980s with a few adventures post-Return of the Jedi, but that publishing program eventually wound down, and those comics were largely forgotten when the original Expanded Universe (now Legends) roared to life with both the novel Heir to the Empire, and Dark Horse Comics taking on the comics licence with Dark Empire. Those early Marvel comics were later mashed back into the continuity while aggressively retconning as much of the more...whimsical elements of those original comics as possible. As much as some people loved Dark Empire, I never warmed to it, between its psychedelic colour scheme, bizarre character renderings, and incomprehensible plot lines (resurrected Emperor Palpatine clones! Escalating superweapons that defy logic! Nonsensical depiction of the Sith!), but it did get the ball rolling, and Dark Horse did produce some pretty great comics, like the early Tales of the Jedi series (though not the later ones when Kevin J. Anderson took over the writing), the X-Wing Rogue Squadron line, and their Clone Wars television tie-in line. Their short-lived Invasion comics went a long way to rehabilitating the worst of the New Jedi Order novels, and the Agent of the Empire line was taking a very interesting perspective on the universe. Above all, their special The Star Wars miniseries, depicting the universe of Lucas’ original script, was a particularly noteworthy accomplishment. (Note: Things getting spoilery from here).

But Dark Horse’s line was also getting tired. Near the end, they launched a quasi-reboot series led by Brian Wood, and it, well, sucked. It didn’t really fit into the established continuity, nor did Wood and company attempt to make it do so, which made it frustrating for people like me who very carefully slot everything onto the timeline. (Seriously, if there one could say just one thing about the new canon, it’s that our heroes actually have time to breathe rather than have every single minute of their lives being action-packed for a full year after the first film because there was just so much stuff wedged into it, and they kept forcing more into it). The characterizations were hard to square with everything else (petulant Luke Skywalker! Princess Leia being a fighter ace, sharpshooter, and top diplomat all at the same time!), and the driving storyline for the first number of issues about a leak in the Rebellion fizzled out without a decent explanation, nor was Vader’s chastening by Palpatine handled well, or the fact that the second Death Star was apparently a quarter built within weeks of the first one being destroyed. None of it worked. And when Dark Horse lost the licence and they hastily wrote an ending to the series, I breathed a sigh of relief. But what would Marvel bring instead?

Star Wars and Darth Vader

The flagship line of the new Marvel series, simply titled Star Wars, picks up about two months after A New Hope, and the Rebels are on the offensive, while a series running parallel with numerous overlaps is titled Darth Vader, focusing on our main villain, of course. Both have been well done, but Vader has been particularly so. The main line has thus far shown us Luke Skywalker’s first confrontation with Vader post-A New Hope, and when he got his ass handed to him, his loss of confidence has made for a storyline that humanizes Skywalker in a way that few other stories have managed. It also bears mentioning that the way that C-3PO has been acting heroically at times is a far departure from the way he was depicted throughout the Legends continuity, and lays the foundation for some of his more serious role in The Force Awakens (well, the role that he’s playing according to the background material). The storyline of Han Solo’s “wife” was also fantastic, and the moment that Vader realized that Luke was his son? Incredibly well done.

But it’s the Vader line that shines. In the Dark Horse era, there were various Vader-centric comics produced, most of them under a special imprint where they were collected in hardcover instead of trade paperback, as if to give them special significance. In truth, only the first of those Vader-centric comics, Darth Vader and the Lost Command, held any decent moments, and those were the fact that he was dreaming about an alternate life where he had stopped Palpatine and everyone lived happily ever after, with Padmé becoming Supreme Chancellor, he taking over the Jedi Council, and their son, Jinn, growing up with his own choice about whether or not he wanted to become a Jedi. The rest of those comics were basically Vader going around killing everybody. It offered little in the way of character or content. Those late Dark Horse comics written by Brian Wood have a Vader-centric storyline, which basically amounted to him killing more people to get what he wanted, but he did try to sneak around to do it. This is where the new Darth Vader line is charting new territory, because Vader, in Palpatine’s bad books after the destruction of the Death Star, is forced to scheme. Rather than just going around killing people (which, let’s be clear, still happens), Vader is forced to start going around the system to find out what Palpatine is planning without him, and to try to secure his position. It introduced new allies for Vader, and most importantly, new rivals that make sense, and actual plots where Vader is forced to out-think others rather than just kill them. It’s a fresh new take on the saga’s greatest villain, and it’s not only offered new insights into his motivations, but has given him a depth that virtually no other Star Wars medium has been able to do.

Princess Leia, Kanan, Lando, Shattered Empire

While I’ve largely covered Shattered Empire elsewhere, the other limited series to date have been mostly fantastic. Mostly. Princess Leia opened right with the end of A New Hope and really delved into her grief and attempt to do something for the survivors of Alderaan in the weeks after its destruction, and it was an utterly satisfying series. Leia is far more human than many of her other depictions have been (particularly the last Dark Horse line), and her pilot, fellow Alderaanian Evaan Verlaine, was both a good foil and a great new female character. The series also brought back Nein Nunb in the first of a series of new adventures that he has been involved in the new canon, bringing the character back from near-obscurity. It also got the new canon off to a great start with the post-A New Hope timeline. Kanan has also been a great look back at the time when Rebels main character Kanan Jarrus was a Jedi Padawan in the Clone Wars, his time with his master, Depa Billaba, and filling in some of the gaps with his history. It’s been consistently well done, and I’m sorry that the series is ending after just twelve issues, because I wanted as much of those last few months of the Clone Wars as possible.

Where Marvel has really made its only real misstep was with Lando. Another limited series, this one depicts a heist Lando and his cyborg pal Lobot get involved with, and as you can imagine, things go wrong. This one hit a few wrong notes for me, with the artwork (recalling some of the horrors of Dark Empire for me), and the way in which they depicted Sith corruption in the artifacts they inadvertently stole as part of their heist. It was a bit of a throwback to the worst of the Legends days, and it made the way in which the heist went wrong cheap and disappointing. The only highlight of the series was the way in which it depicted Lobot losing his humanity, and his final message to Lando when it happened. The rest of it, however, was poorly done, and it makes me nervous for the forthcoming Poe Dameron miniseries, because the same writer is behind it.

Overall, I’ve been thrilled with the way that Marvel has brought Star Wars comics back to life, and I look forward to how both the two flagship lines, and future miniseries, push the new canon forward.

[journodale]

Overselling the breadcrumbs on the Journey to the Force Awakens

In September, the Star Wars publishing programme released a major glut of new books under the banner of "Journey to the Force Awakens." They were intended to start laying hints and groundwork for the upcoming film, and would have small connections to what went on. As with so many projects of this scale, your mileage may vary, but there were some really great books that were released as part of it, and a couple of not-so-good books as well. (Minor spoilers to follow).

There were a number of things that these different books needed to do beyond laying the groundwork for The Force Awakens — they also had to lay down a number of planks for the new canon going forward, and paving over the haphazard chaos of the old Legends continuity with something a little more coherent going forward. Some of these steps were already being taken, particularly for the period of time immediately after A New Hope in the timeline, where the novel Heir to the Jedi and a couple of the new Marvel comics were placing a few markers on the ground, but a few of these filled in more of the picture, which was great. As well, the novel Aftermath and the Shattered Empire comics, which were part of the "Journey" line-up were excellent works in and of themselves, but they really did lay the groundwork for where the new film would go (both of which I discussed here). So how would the rest of the projects fare?

 The retellings

As part of the release were retellings of the three original films, each done in a different form. None of these really had anything to do with the Journey line other than being released at the same time, but did give us some new canon material. The retelling for A New Hope, subtitled The Princess, the Scoundrel and the Farm Boy, contained by far the most new material of the three, and was divided into three sections, each told largely from the first-person perspective of the title characters in each section — Princess Leia, Han Solo, and Luke Skywalker respectively. The author, Alexandra Bracken, drew a lot of material both from the old Brian Daley-scripted radio drama and some of the deleted scenes from the film, and best of all, contained a lot of new Leia-related material, giving her a much more active role than what we saw in the film. All of which was great, and why it made the Empire Strikes Back retelling, So You Want To Be a Jedi?, so abysmal. If there was one book I would tell you not to read, it would be this one. Aside from much of the narrative to be a second-person retelling from Skywalker's perspective, it was juvenile (it reduced the film’s romance to “mushy stuff”) and poorly written, with "Jedi lessons" interspersed, mostly being some elementary meditation exercises. Given that there was so much room for new material in this story — the weeks it took the Millennium Falcon to reach Bespin on back-up hyperdrive, the time Skywalker spent training with Yoda, the ability to bring in the tonnes of Yoda backstory in from the prequels and the Clone Wars into the picture — all wasted in favour of a couple of lame parables. Skywalker as well had backslid in terms of character development, which was even more frustrating to read, considering how much had been developed in Heir to the Jedi and The Weapon of a Jedi book that was part of the “Journey” line. It was infuriating to read. The final retelling for Return of the Jedi, subtitled Beware the Power of the Dark Side! was a good retelling, which was hugely in-depth, footnoted a number of items to add more history and description, and which added some key new scenes, we're all great, but most importantly, it gave us some interior monologue from Vader as he is being confronted by his son, but more importantly, Padmé's son. That was a key piece of the puzzle that we were finally able to see.

The young adult novels

Most of these were great, and while I've largely covered Lost Stars in another post, it too gave us a bit of a different perspective on some of the original film trilogy and filled in a few gaps there as well, such as how Ciena Ree was assigned the task of retrieving Vader after the destruction of the first Death Star, and that insider perspective on the Empire that I discussed before. The other three books, each one an adventure of the three main character, was each given a framing story placed around the time of The Force Awakens — the Solo story features his aged self in a bar retelling the tale of the book, which took place shortly after A New Hope; the Skywalker story had Threepio recounting the tale to Resistance pilot Jessica Pava (who was one of the pilots in the film), took place after the Heir to the Jedi novel, but before the new Marvel comics, while the Leia Organa tale was framed as her recounting her memoirs as General Organa and leader of the Resistance, but that tale was one which preceded Return of the Jedi, and filled in some of the canon around that time period (now that Shadows of the Empire has now been officially discounted). These books were all where most of the "hints" were supposed to be found, but rather than actual hints, we mostly got a few background characters — pretty much all without speaking roles — from The Force Awakens sprinkled through. It wasn't until I got the Force Awakens Visual Dictionary after seeing the film that those connections even became evident. Main characters from those books were all extras in the film, and we wouldn't have known otherwise without that additional reference material. In other words, as great as those books were as stories, they were vastly oversold as hints. Rather, it was an attempt to seed some elements of the continuity back further through the timeline, whether it was a planet scouted in Lost Stars that became the Resistance base, or Skywalker finding the Temple of Eedit on Devaron being an impetus for him to find other lost Jedi Temples as alluded to in the film.

Overall, the Journey publishing line was an ambitious project, and had more hits than misses (seriously, So You Want to be a Jedi? should be cast into the Pit of Carkoon and digested over a thousand years in agony), but it wasn't a fount of hints, clues, or even foreshadowing. I appreciate the effort to help make the expanding canon cohesive and organic, but when a more concrete hint about what would be a plot point in The Force Awakens came from one of the Rebels “Servants of the Empire” novels than anything in the Journey line, perhaps the marketing people should calm down a little.

[journodale]

A few thoughts on “The Force Awakens”

I’ve finally watched The Force Awakens a couple of days after it opened, and I have thoughts about it. Plenty of thoughts. As a lifelong Star Wars fan, one who first saw A New Hope in my infancy (apparently I was fine until the cantina scene, at which point I lost it and my parents had to take me out of the cinema), and with memories of watching Return of the Jedi in cinema in my childhood, and who always had the films available on Beta, and then VHS, I have been steeped in the films my whole life. I have every single book and comic that the franchise produced. The chance at seeing new films again was an exciting opportunity to bring more to this universe that George Lucas created, which I know and love so much. And now that I’ve seen it, I find myself conflicted. (Spoilers from hereon in, so consider yourselves warned.)

I went into the film with a great deal of optimism. There was not only talk about bringing back this film saga, but doing it in a way that would give us a bit of old with the new, that respected the material, and I hoped would be part of the unifying storyline overall. After all, between seven films and two television series, there was so much to draw on to bring us a new adventures in this fully realized universe.

As much as people bitched and moaned about the prequels, I never did. Maybe that’s because I wasn’t expecting them to recreate my childhood sense of wonder that the first film did for so many, which is something I always felt baffled by the expectation of. Yes, they have a few quirks, and yes, the dialogue is wooden, but there is immense value to them. The prequels gave us something new – it added tremendous depth to the universe, threw a myriad of shades of grey into the stark black-and-white of the original trilogy, and made us question some of what we held dear, be it about the nature of the Jedi, the way in which Obi-Wan Kenobi taught Anakin Skywalker before he fell to the dark side and became Darth Vader, or even about the nature of who Vader was as a person, twisted and evil though he was. From the prequels was spawned The Clone Wars, where a film and six seasons expanded the universe even more than what could be conceived of in the Expanded Universe of books, comics and games, and even when they drew inspiration from those ideas, they improved on each and every one of them and made them better. And now, with Rebels, we’re getting that new depth to the years leading up to A New Hope.

Abrams, however, has tossed most of this aside. As the “non-spoiler” reviews started to come in, one rankled me the most, from one of the notorious prequel-hating fanboys that I know, who declared the film great because there were no references to the prequels at all. And immediately I went, “Oh, fuck. This is going to be fan service, isn’t it?” And lo and behold, I was not wrong. Instead of giving us something new, Abrams gave us what was basically an updated version of A New Hope, from the conflict between the First Order and the Resistance, Starkiller Base as a new Death Star, Leader Snoke as an updated, scarred Palpatine-figure, desert planets, lost droids containing secret plans, Maz Kanata’s castle as the Mos Eisley Cantina, the destruction of Hosnian Prime as the destruction of Alderaan, the death of a major character, the Resistance Base inside an old stone fortress just like Yavin 4 – so many elements just brazenly given a new coat of paint.

CBC’s film reviewer, Eli Glasner, referred to it as a remix or Star Wars Greatest Hits. He hit the nail on the head with this:

If this newest iteration is guilty of anything, it's that it hews too closely to the Star Wars blueprints. From the iconic opening crawl, there is a distinct sense of déjà vu. The Rebel forces have been replaced by the Resistance, the Empire by the First Order. A droid holds a secret map, while a new black-hooded bad guy with a vocoder voice readies another massive weapon. 

When he didn’t hew to the original, Abrams’ visuals put too much of his own stamp on the film in other places. As what he did with Star Trek, he threw out virtually every familiar alien species seen on camera, and not until near the end, with the cameos by Admiral Ackbar and Nein Numb do we get some familiar species, and even then, it’s done as fan service. (Seriously – you’re telling me that not one ubiquitous Rodian or Twi’lek could be found?) Lucas could bring Ackbar back for several episodes of the Clone Wars and bring something new to the character. Abrams did not, merely using him as a wink to fans. Some of the ways in which his sets on the Imperial Star Destroyers, or the way their guns were portrayed, it was very much the way in which he updated the Enterprise sets and guns on the ships in that universe. There were some other parallels with Abrams’ treatment of Star Trek, with big-jawed tentacled creatures chasing people, for example. In fact, the only signature Abrams gag that I didn’t see was the floating red ball, but I’m sure it’s an Easter Egg in there somewhere. As an aside, many of the fans made a big deal of Abrams proclaiming that he would be using mostly practical effects, never mind that those same practical effects dominated the prequels, not that anyone cared to notice as they complained about the CGI.

This isn’t to say that there weren’t aspects of this film that I enjoyed, which was largely to do with the characters. I really liked Rey, and Poe, and Finn. (No, seriously – Poe is my new Star Wars crush). Rey and Finn gave us a bit of the sense of wonder that we saw from Luke Skywalker in A New Hope, but that sense was tempered by each of their previous experiences. But as much as I enjoyed their contributions to the film, it doesn’t shake my overall sense of disappointment in what was presented to us.

With Abrams turning over the reigns for Episodes VIII and IX, I certainly hope that his successors can pick up and do more, do better, than what we saw here. I’m hoping that Rogue One and the new young Han Solo films will return us to a place of bringing us new things to learn about the universe, but in the meantime, we still have Rebels turning out new stories that aren’t just retreads of what we saw before. But my final verdict is that Abrams over-promised, and under-delivered in kicking off a new era of Star Wars films.

[journodale]

Inside the “benevolent dictatorship”: The Empire in the new Star Wars canon

The renewed Star Wars canon has presented us with a different vision of the Empire than the one we became accustomed to in the old Legends continuity. There, we grew up on a vast force of petty tyrants whose brutality and evil was naked, as was a system built around open displays of racism and sexism. In the run-up to The Force Awakens, the reset canon has turned all of what we knew of the Empire on its head, to the point that it is considered by many of the inhabitants of the galaxy far, far away as something akin to a benign dictatorship, bringing stability and order to a galaxy that was devastated by the horrors of the Clone Wars. (Spoilers abound from hereon in, so consider yourselves warned).

The development of the Empire of the Legends continuity traces back to the first tie-in novel, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, where Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia Organa are forced to crash on Mimban, site of an illegal Imperial mining operation. We got a sense then of a government full of venal bureaucrats, willing to break its own laws and rules, and abusing the local natives with little regard. As the organization of the Empire became more codified with the West End Games roleplaying games, which in turn fed into the military that Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn trilogy made real for a generation of readers, there was little regard for what it all meant for the ordinary citizens of the galaxy. There were short stories, roleplaying scenarios and comic books about Imperial forces occupying planets, declaring martial law, enforcing conscriptions, and coming in with a heavy hand and an iron fist. It’s no wonder that there would be a rebellion that blossomed, but it makes one wonder why it took nearly twenty years for it to take hold if that were the case. Some of the later roleplaying supplements introduced a bit of subtlety, most notably the HoloNet News segments of the old Star Wars Adventure Journals, which gave us a bit of propaganda – that first the Empire tried to claim that the Rebels themselves destroyed Alderaan by stockpiling experimental superweapons of their own on the planet when they accidentally went off, or that Grand Moff Tarkin and other senior military staff died in a shuttle accident weeks later. Little of it did much to convince anyone that the Empire was little more than an occupying force, rather than one that was embraced with open arms as we eventually saw in Revenge of the Sith.

When the new canon started to emerge after the reset button was pushed at Lucasfilm, the first novel we saw was A New Dawn, a kind of prequel to the forthcoming Rebels animated series where we met Kanan Jarrus and Hera Syndulla, but also Rae Sloane and Count Denetrius Vidian, a terrifying cybernetic “efficiency expert” who used murder and violence to achieve his ends while everyone in the galaxy at large praised his management expertise and lined up to buy his books, and he translated that wealth into power and influence, eventually earning himself a spot in Emperor Palpatine’s cabinet. We also met an employee of a surveillance company that was shocked to learn that the benign monitoring she felt she had been engaged in for years – crime solving, looking for missing persons, even marketing – was being employed for mass surveillance for the Empire, leading to arrests of those being accused of dissident activity. There was shock that the Empire was behaving in ways that were tyrannical.

The most important books that showcase what the Empire looked like on the ground to most civilians was from the Rebels tie-in series “Servants of the Empire,” and Lost Stars, one of the showcase novels of the “Journey to the Force Awakens” line-up. The “Servants” line follows two youths as they navigate life under the Empire – Zare Leonis as he enters the Imperial Academy, increasingly disillusioned as he searches for what happened to his missing sister – and Merei Spanjaf, his hacker girlfriend. Both have parents who work for the Empire in some capacity, both have their illusions stripped away as they see the Empire for what it is, while encountering people who still believe in it. Part of what makes this an effective look inside are the ways in which propaganda is being used against students, an example that drives it home for readers being when Leonis learns about a case study that tried to blame the Trade Federation for mass starvation out of greed, though that never was the case, as Leonis’ parents had been involved in it, the truth being about a biotechnology patent dispute held up in the corrupt courts of the late Republic era. We see more glimpses of this propaganda in Lost Stars, to varying degrees of success (though there was one particular ham-fisted Jedi reference in there that didn’t fit with the point they were trying to make).

All of those books, however, show some of the seductive facets of the Empire. They arrive on backwoods planets in the Outer Rim promising progress, jobs, trade, economic development and ultimately prosperity. Over time, however, the Empire erodes their goodwill with poor practices, strip-mining, and over-pollution because they simply chose not to spend the credits on best practices. Corruption happens, but the idealists in the Empire do pursue it when possible, never quite understanding that the rot within the Empire goes to the top. Nevertheless, those idealistic characters show just how plausibly the Empire was able to sell its message, and the alternatives of corruption and chaos from the days of the Clone Wars are memories that still haunt the population. It also makes it easier to sell the Rebel Alliance as a bunch of terrorists and malcontents who are often related to the Separatists and sometimes called as much.

The Death Star and the destruction of Alderaan posed a particular challenge to Lost Stars, and how that was spun by the Empire. This time, there was no in-universe propaganda like we saw in the original Legends chronology, but rather characters trying to justify what they witnessed when genocide was committed. People who witnessed it surmised that the Rebellion was a bigger problem than the official broadcasts had stated and that the Emperor had to destroy Alderaan to prevent a bigger war, so that nobody would dare challenge the Empire. Remember that the Rebels had just won their first major engagement against the Empire (during which the Death Star plans were intercepted – and I cannot wait for Rogue One to see how this happens), and top Imperial commanders aboard the Death Star were concerned that the Rebels were dangerous to the Imperial Starfleet. So those who witnessed Alderaan’s demise rationalized it by saying that only a demonstration on the scale of Alderaan would make the Rebels see reason, and that it was saving more lives than it took by preventing an all-out war like the galaxy had seen during the Clone Wars. But the Rebels’ destruction of the Death Star – or the DS-1 platform, as the Empire referred to it in their own official broadcasts – saw the deaths of over a million Imperials, and touched off an all-out war (a war which is more intense in the new canon, but I’ll touch on that in a future post). Again, there remains that plausibility within the Imperial mindset that they are on the side of good.

The old depictions of a racist Empire are also toned down considerably in the new canon, with the “Human High Culture” of the Legends continuity virtually extinguished. In the canon Empire, Palpatine’s Grand Vizier is Mas Amedda, a familiar face from the prequels. While there are still non-human races enslaved by the Empire, it is often done in the context of punishment for an uprising – the Wookiees, or the Bodach’I in Lost Stars, for whom the Empire made it sound that the planet’s resistance to Imperial regulations and open defiance was restored with trade sanctions, when in fact it meant slavery. In the “Servants” books, those petty bureaucrats who engaged in racist behaviours – keeping non-humans off of the school grav-ball team under preposterous sounding reasons, for example – are dismissed as people abusing their authority rather than an endemic problem within the Empire itself. We see more women in the ranks in the books (thought this has not yet translated on screen in Rebels), making the Empire less of a male bastion like it had become under the Legends continuity.

In one article I read about The Force Awakens (and you’ll have to forgive me that I can’t remember which one), it said that people in the First Order remember the Empire as a kind of benevolent dictatorship. If anyone wanted to know how or why, the groundwork has been laid very effectively in the new canon, making me all the more curious about what the new film will hold.

[journodale]

The crumbling Empire in the new Star Wars canon

With The Force Awakens less than a month away now, I’ve been making my way through the post-Return of the Jedi stories that have taken place as part of the new canon, and there could not be a wider schism from the original Legends continuity, but it’s one for the better. It’s also laying clues and markers for the new film, starting to shape the galaxy we’re about to revisit in cinemas. (Spoilers abound from this point, so consider yourselves warned).

There are five main stories that form the core of what the post-Return months look like – the short story “Levers of Power” (collected in the Rise of the Empire bind-up), the Shattered Empire limited comic series, the Uprising mobile game, and the novels Aftermath and Lost Stars. We’ve only been given glimpses of what the first year post-Battle of Endor looks like, but out of those, a coherent picture is being drawn. (Yes, there have been a trilogy of “Blade Squadron” short stories in there as well, but they’re less consequential to the picture being painted).

In the original Legends continuity, our conception of post-Endor history starts five years afterward with the Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn trilogy, which re-launched the Star Wars universe after the franchise has been largely dormant for nearly a decade. It painted a picture of a New Republic that has been battling the remains of the Empire for five years, and in subsequent years, those years were fleshed out largely with the X-Wing books and comics, along with a handful of other books and short stories. The theme was consistent, however, of a fragile New Republic that couldn’t even get itself organized enough to summon a Senate for another couple of years after the Thrawn crisis, and of an Empire that still retained an improbably large number of ships and resources, even as it splintered into various factions. Amidst all of this was the curious detour of a tale that takes place days after Return, called Truce at Bakura, where a new alien threat at a remote planet forces the Rebels and Imperial forces on that planet to unite long enough to drive them away.

The new canon, however, diverges entirely from this piecemeal history. Starting with “Levers of Power” – detailing the actions of Admiral Rae Sloane during the Battle of Endor – and the opening issue of Shattered Empire, these immediately start the new tone and tenor what happens. While “Levers” shows Sloane being calm and economical in her deployment of forces during Endor, right up to ordering with withdrawal of surviving Imperial ships once the Death Star II explodes, it feeds into Sloane’s key role in Aftermath. Shattered Empire establishes that the Emperor left orders to burn several worlds upon his death, starting with his homeworld of Naboo, while the Rebels push back against it over the course of a few months. The key characters in this tale are A-Wing pilot Shara Bey and her husband, Kes Dameron, one of the Rebel pathfinders that were part of Han Solo’s Endor strike team. If the name Dameron rings a bell, it’s because they are the parents of Poe Dameron, one of the characters in The Force Awakens.

In the game Uprising, the Anoat sector (home to the planets Hoth and Bespin from Empire Strikes Back) is under lockdown by the Imperial governor, who is suppressing news of Palpatine’s death. While one the one hand, it removes itself from what’s going on in the outside galaxy by virtue of the Iron Blockade, it sets up an interesting post-Endor dynamic of propaganda and information control, and the lengths to which some members of the Empire go in order to try and keep their hold on power.

The real masterpiece in all of this is Aftermath. Set a few months after Endor, a group of surviving Imperial heavyweights meets on Akiva at Sloane’s behest to try and chart a course for the future of the Empire as they are in rapid decline, while a Rebel pilot coming home to find her son ends up disrupting that summit, along with some help from Wedge Antilles along the way. While the Imperial dynamics are fascinating in and of themselves, what sets this book apart are the various interludes that are happening around the galaxy, wherein we see the New Republic is already established and is in the process of summoning a Senate, while its new Chancellor, Mon Mothma, lays out her vision of the New Republic, which is vastly different from what played out in the Legends continuity. Mothma says that the war needs to end soon, and that it must be a temporary chaos between periods of peace, and that once the war does end, the New Republic will largely demilitarize and the remaining ten percent of forces would be a peacekeeping force, while training member planets to have their own militaries, with an eye to avoiding another galactic war as what began with the Clone Wars and the creation of the Grand Army of the Republic.

Lost Stars gives a few more clues for the year after Endor, with more factionalism in the Empire, new emperors being declared constantly while Grand Vizier Mas Amedda tries to keep a coherent government going, culminating in the last major Imperial battle over Jakku (again, a marker for The Force Unleashed), and closes with a peace treaty in the offing. In other words, the Galactic Civil War is coming to an end within a year after Endor, not de facto ten years, and officially fifteen years after Endor (before new wars erupted with the Yuuzhan Vong, and a new civil war within the post-New Republic government) of the Legends continuity.

It’s not hard to understand why the Legends continuity evolved the way it did – the series is called Star Wars, after all, and there was an expectation that there would be this fight between good and evil throughout. That meant constant wars going on, and there being some sense of familiarity with the Empire as the main villain throughout the first phase of this continuity, until the prequels started to roll out. Unfortunately, what it ended up also doing is making it difficult to see what kind of civilian life could look like in this scenario of near-total war that kept going for decades – not that the bigger picture appeared to be of much concern to most authors. It was also burdened by its conception of the Empire at the time, both being nigh-invincible and iron-fisted, both of which have been softened in the new canon. What I suspect this is going to lead to is toward a situation in The Force Awakens where it appears that the demilitarized New Republic wouldn’t have the forces to stand up to the First Order, hence the formation of the Resistance to battle them without going toward total galactic war. But again, that’s just supposition.

What is also very particularly noteworthy about these post-Endor novels is both that the heroes of the original film trilogy have much reduced roles, and of the new characters we’re seeing a lot of strong female characters that largely didn’t exist in the Legends universe with the exception of Mara Jade (whose role was so often marginalised in most of the stories she appeared in). Shara Bey, Norra Wexley, Jas Emari and Rae Sloane are all formidable women who are playing major roles, and in the cases of both Bey and Wexley, their motherhood status was also a major plot point, which again played out vastly differently from how we saw it in the Legends continuity. There, Leia Organa’s motherhood was often treated as an inconvenience, where her children were largely fobbed off onto her former bodyguard Winter “for their protection from the dark side,” or to show that she was having difficulty balancing her role in the New Republic leadership with her family. Bey and Wexley were both women who sent their children to live with family while they fought in the Rebellion, and there is a more palpable sense of guilt and in Wexley’s case, her son’s resentment when she came to collect him made for a much more human dynamic that created some of the tensions in the novel. If anything, these are reflections of the maturation of the Star Wars universe, and the increased quality of the writers that they are tapping to tell these tales.

While the post-Endor timeframe gets fleshed out over the next couple of years as two more Aftermath sequels are planned, plus at least one other New Republic novel is due next year, we’ll see the state of the galaxy with The Force Awakens’ release, but that does give us a better roadmap for that timeframe. I look forward to what stories we’ll see in the interim, with the crumbling of the Empire, and the formation of the First Order out of it.

[journodale]

Reflections on the new Star Wars canon

As I dig into Aftermath (at far too slow of a pace, but there’s an election on and I have a lot on my plate), I wanted to take a couple of moments to reflect on the new Star Wars canon in advance of reading the new “Journey to the Force Unleashed” titles that were released this month. After reading the old Expanded Universe (now Legends continuity) since its inception (well, I’m a bit behind on the post New Jedi Order titles), there are a few observations I had and wanted to share.

First and foremost, the quality of the writing in these titles is a step up from the vast majority of what we saw in Legends. And with the advent of the Lucasfilm Story Group, there is a much greater feel of cohesion rather than the constant tension in Legends of trying to come up with something new while trying to both reference the volumes of material that came before it, or trying to retcon some of the missteps made by previous authors – never mind the fact that there were constant attempts to wedge in new materials post-A New Hope when the calendar for that time period is so packed. Ditto with post-Revenge of the Sith. Between books, short stories and comic titles/graphic novels, Darth Vader’s every move is scheduled a year out. I kid you not.

Much of this first phase of the new canon ties into the new animated series, Rebels, and sets the stage between Revenge of the Sith and the series, showcasing the emergence of the Empire. Most of the Rebels titles are geared for the young adult audience, but don’t let that dissuade you – the tie-in series “Servants of the Empire” is some of the best Star Wars writing that I have come across. What is so remarkable about them is the way that they set up everyday life under the Empire – propaganda, petty bureaucrats wielding their authority, corruption creeping in, but the abiding belief in the system by the population at large who were weary after the rampant corruption of the old Republic, and the devastation of the Clone Wars. The series offers the perspective of someone growing up in this system, and it makes for a very different perspective from what we are used to, and it fleshes out the universe from the stark heroes and villains that we are accustomed to.

Much of the exploration of this time period also sets up a very different feel about the Empire itself. While it was not explored much in the Legends continuity, there is certainly a sense that the Empire is far more fragile than it was presented in Legends. There are no superweapons or overwhelming fleets of Star Destroyers that can be summoned at a moment’s notice – instead, resources are stretched, fleets spread out, and when crises hit, Darth Vader is harder pressed to contain the situation. Mind you, it also sets up the theme that is building in Rebels, that while there is insurrection and dissention, the fact that it is not coordinated means that small victories tend to be pyrrhic, and ultimately prove futile (until the birth of the Rebel Alliance). The stage for the Galactic Civil War of the original three films is being set in a more deliberate way.

Something else that I have noticed in these new depictions of the universe is that the Empire is a much more human place – not in terms of species, but rather in terms of the people who inhabit it. There are sympathetic characters in the hierarchy, rather than a series of endlessly cartoonish thugs and dictators. The “Servants of the Empire” series depicts it best, with sympathetic officers in the Imperial Academy who see abuses and try to stamp them out, or who have an honest belief that they are trying to make the galaxy a better place. Rae Sloane, a Star Destroyer captain who debuted in A New Dawn, but has carried through other short stories and now takes a starring role in Aftermath, is another good example of someone trying to do the right thing from within the Imperial machine, even though there are people higher up the food chain who are terrible human beings. It provides a much more textured perspective than what we are used to seeing, and nuances the Galactic Civil War in a way we never really saw in the original Legends series. And I think this is important to see, that there are shades of grey and that not everything is black and white (a legacy of the prequel films, which coloured the stark moralism of the universe of the original trilogy).

There are other notable parts of this new continuity, from the comics and Dark Disciple, which carry on the Clone Wars storylines toward their conclusion in Revenge of the Sith. With a few more story arcs that were planned but never produced, I hope that the good people at Lucasfilm finish them off in one form or another so that we can see what happened in the final months of the Clone Wars, from the Outer Rim Sieges to the demise of several members of the Jedi Council in advance of the film. There was also a post A New Hope novel, Heir to the Jedi, which takes up Luke Skywalker’s nascent understanding of the Force from a first-person perspective, something we have never seen before. The closest we got was I, Jedi, which depicted a similar journey through the eyes of Corran Horn, but it’s not quite the same thing.

The only part of this new canon that I have not yet been able to explore are the new Marvel comic series, aside from preview pages on ComiXology, or quick flips through them at my local comic shop. (I collect them in trade paperbacks, which don’t start shipping until next month). What I have seen, however, has impressed me. Having recently read the quasi-reboot Star Wars ongoing series that Dark Horse launched shortly before they lost the licence, I can say that I wasn’t impressed with the direction they went in, or with the way they were depicting the characters or situation. None of it read very well to me, so I’m glad that these new comics seem to be taking them in a much better direction.

In all, I have to say that this newly reset canon has impressed me to date. I was interested and looking forward to what a clean slate would provide. So far the Lucasfilm Story Group and the authors it has assembled have proven that this was the right choice. Now I get to look forward to the next steps, as the march toward the new films progresses ever more quickly.

[journodale]

Why the Star Wars canon reset is a good thing

It was not unexpected that there would be howls of outrage from the fandom of Star Wars when it was announced that Lucasfilm would be pressing the big reset button on what it considered canon after a great many years of considering the Expanded Universe of novels, comics, and role playing games to be part of it. With the advent of Episode VII, the new Rebels animated series, and a planned new standalone film every year, it was decided that henceforth, they would be starting from scratch, with only the two film trilogies and the entirety of The Clone Wars series as canon, and that now going forward, new novels and games would be part of it.

In fact, I’m actually really glad that they’ve decided to hit the reset button. I would further venture to say that it’s probably the best move that they could have made.

Don’t get me wrong – there are some things that I have really loved and enjoyed in the Expanded Universe. There is a rich depth of history and lore that has blossomed, especially in the past few years as a concerted effort was made to start pulling disparate threads together and to come up with a unified whole. The work on some of the recent source books like The Essential Atlas, The Essential Guide to Warfare and most especially The Jedi Path have been awe-inspiring for someone who writes military science fiction in my own unique universe.

But there has also been a whole lot of utter shite in the Expanded Universe canon. There’s no sugar coating it either – some of the books (and a few of the comics) have been so utterly terrible that there’s no redeeming them. Things like the escalation of super-weapons, nonsensical villains and an inability to comprehend the scope of the galaxy abounded unchecked, and made reading them a real struggle. Even some of the better works, like the Thrawn Trilogy which really restarted the whole Expanded Universe in the post-movie years once the old Marvel comics had ended, have some pretty large holes in them, such as the ysalamiri – Force-repellent creatures that go against everything we understand about the very nature of the Force, even though that hadn’t been fleshed out when those novels came out. Not to mention, the fact that the main characters continued to retread lines of dialogue out of the films was unbelievable and made it all seemed hackneyed rather than trying to capture a sense of familiarity.

The arrival of the prequel trilogy really started to flesh out the universe and most especially the understanding of the Jedi, and the Expanded Universe novels struggled to incorporate the new material. Retcons abounded, but managed to more or less contain the problems in continuity. It wasn’t until The Clone Wars that the real cracks started to show in the Expanded Universe canon, despite Lucasfilm even having someone on staff full-time to act as the keeper of that continuity.

Part of the problem was that there was simply too much, and it hamstrung the writers of the show from being able to tell their stories in an effective manner, and George Lucas himself would declare that what was in the show took precedence. Part of the problem was also in the calendar – not only did The Clone Wars have a hard time fitting in with the previous Clone Wars materials that were filling the gap in the years between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, but elsewhere in the Expanded Universe, authors got sloppy, and their own continuity department wasn’t able to effectively read a calendar, so that every time a new post-A New Hope story or comic appeared, there simply wasn’t room in the calendar to place them. And yet, they kept producing them.

Now, imagine being a writer for not only The Clone Wars, but now Rebels and the standalone films. Trying to navigate that much material is an impossible task – especially if some of that material that you have to navigate is quite awful. But as the writers of The Clone Wars carried on, a much better picture of the universe emerged, and one that was superior to the Expanded Universe materials in pretty much every way. Many of those stories were informed by the Expanded Universe, but didn’t hew too closely to the material in order to have some freedom, and we got new versions of characters like Aalya Secura and Quinlan Vos, who had appeared in the comics. We got a new vision of Ryloth, the Twi’lek homeworld, that wasn’t so stultifying as the original Expanded Universe concept. We got a new vision of Dathomir that was fresh and exciting, and with that came a new history for Asajj Ventress that proved more sympathetic and allowed the character to grow and gave her a different (still unwritten) ending than she did in the comics. And emerging out of this, in particular around the storyline of Darth Maul’s return, was the particular dichotomy between Sith and Jedi metaphyics with their views on life after death. This crystallized in the Yoda storyline in the final half-season of The Clone Wars, and it is a far cry from the ridiculous overly powerful Sith ghosts that haunt their way throughout the whole of the Expanded Universe canon.

Of particular interest to me was the fact that we got politics that were more realistic and that could better capture the tension between optimism and cynicism that not only exists in the real world, but that adds a richness to the world. The Expanded Universe was full of cartoonishly corrupt politics, and only one novel trilogy – the Black Fleet Crisis trilogy by Michael P. Kube-McDowell – actually managed to get some semblance of actual politics into them and to get it right. Subsequent novels destroyed the work he put into it in order to keep up with the juvenile cynicism – that almost all politicians are corrupt – as the backdrop to a series of increasingly unrealistic political plots that were astoundingly brain-dead in their execution. Why this is of particular significance is because the prequel trilogy was all about political violence. Even as those films were being released and those themes were emerging, the Expanded Universe continued its parade of clichés to the point that the political scenes in those novels are unreadable.

It is with this in mind that I look forward to what the new canon will have to offer. The coordination from the newly created Lucasfilm Story Group will help to keep things better ordered (and we can hope that they actually keep a calendar this time), and the retcons to a minimum going forward. That this new canon will be informed by the Expanded Universe but not dictated by it will provide a wealth of materials for the new writers to draw from without being bound by some of the worst aspects the Expanded Universe.

As a giant Star Wars nerd, I’m looking forward to rediscovering the history and rich expansion of this universe again through fresh eyes, and to see what the Story Group has in mind going forward with filling in the thirty years post-Return of the Jedi, to see the birth of the Rebellion in a new way in Rebels, and to rediscover the history of some characters like Boba Fett in the new standalone film that will be dedicated to him (again, an example of where the Expanded Universe went cartoonishly bad in trying to perpetuate a character that was both mysterious and yet overly powerful).

There is a new journey ahead in that universe, and I eagerly await what Lucasfilm has to offer, with the films, the new novels, and the new comics under Marvel. It’s going to be fun.

[journodale]

A lament for House duty

It's not uncommon to hear complaints about the state of debate in the Commons these days, but looking into the Commons during government orders does fill one with a bit of despair. Years of allowing the standing orders to slide and be undermined are turning debates in the House to irrelevance.

It's more than just this video going around the internet showing MP Jonathan Genest-Jourdain apparently dozing off in the chamber after checking his hair. It was also evident in spades when I was in the chamber this evening waiting for the slightly delayed debate on C-304.

MPs would get up, recite their prepared speeches (with the exception of Joe Comartin during the C-304 debate, as he actually gave his speech off the cuff), and as soon as they finished speaking, they gathered their things and left the Chamber. Every single one of them. How exactly you can debate when you’re simply exchanging prepared speeches in isolation and then not listening to the replies or opposing arguments?

To add insult to injury, the parliamentary secretary to the government house leader, Tom Lukiwski, suggested at procedure and House affairs today that perhaps we stop showing wide shots of the chamber during times when it’s not really full, because it looks bad. Mind you, we used to show wide shots and reaction shots, way back when they first started televising QP, but eventually we did away with that, keeping cameras trained solely on the MP currently speaking, so as to create this artificial impression of what actually happens in the chamber. And people wonder why I make a point of actually attending QP every day in the House?

The thing is, it’s not really difficult to make debates in the House meaningful. If the Speaker bothered to enforce the prohibition against prepared speeches, that would be a great start, because it would force MPs to pay attention to the debates and not simply act as room meat trying to make quorum, while they fall asleep in the background after they forgot their iPads to play solitaire on. And another easy – really easy! – fix would be for the Speaker to abolish the lists of speakers given to him by the House leaders and whips. Make the MPs compete to speak. (Bonus – when applied during QP, this would also become a disciplinary tool, where unruly MPs wouldn't be recognized to speak). Force MPs to actually want to engage with the debate, to listen to the points being offered before them so that they can rebut, and debate points.

But of course, that would mean that the leaders' offices might not have the same level of control over what MPs say and do in the House. And it might mean that MPs would actually have to pay attention and think for themselves on their feet. But it might also mean that we’d get MPs active and engaged and eager to show up to the House rather than simply be assigned as room meat. And then maybe we wouldn’t have to worry about how empty the House looks on a wide shot. Which, incidentally, we not only need more of, but we also need to return to the era of reaction shots and more camera angles, which might also encourage more MPs to show up and actually pay attention so that they won’t be embarrassed when they fall asleep acting in their capacity as room meat.

First posted February 14, 2011.

[journodale]

Van Loan's "gridlock" hypocrisy

A mere couple of hours into the debate on the bill to create the government’s new pooled registered pension plans, Government House Leader Peter Van Loan dropped the hammer once again – time allocation. Because there is apparently no bill before Parliament that the government doesn’t deem to be such a crucial piece of business that they don’t want to hurry it through.

Making it worse is Van Loan then heading for the television cameras lamenting that the opposition spent x number of hours debating this bill, and they’re not really debating but delaying, and it’s just terrible they’re doing that. Worse than that, Van Loan then points to our neighbours to the south and says, “Look at the legislative gridlock they have going on. We don’t need that here in Canada. We need to take decisive action, and that’s what we’re doing.” And then, pleased with himself, he vanishes.

And then there’s the gridlock excuse – which is really kind of sickening. For Van Loan to equate debate in Canada with American gridlock takes the cake. First of all, their system was built for gridlock. For them, it’s a design feature so that no one body can get too much power. Our system, where the executive is drawn from the legislature, pretty much avoids that, and given that Harper has a majority in the Commons and the Senate – there is no actual gridlock. It doesn’t exist – not unless he’s got either a backbench rebellion or his senators decide to exercise a bit more independence than they usually do (seeing as most of them still believe they can be whipped, which is false). None of those things are happening right now.

But here’s the ironic part – with the government’s Senate “reform” bill they’re trying to push through, they will create gridlock in our system, with no mechanism with which to clear it. “Elected” senators, empowered with “democratic legitimacy,” will flex their muscles, and because they have broader electorates than MPs do, they’ll throw their weight around, and then we’ll really see legislation get caught up in a logjam (which the executive will then try to take advantage of). And yet this is what they are eagerly hurtling toward. So the next time Van Loan says anything at all about the Senate “reform” bill not going through, then he should be called out – very loudly – as a hypocrite.

Process matters. Democracy is process – they’re inextricably linked. For this government to try to thwart process and curtail debate because it might invite dissent (which is the hallmark of “radicals,” apparently) smacks of anti-democratic tendencies that deserve to be called out. If we want to be a free and democratic society, that means enduring a few more speeches and a few more rounds of questions and answers in the House or in committee. Otherwise, we might as well just anoint Harper as Emperor, hand him his Sith robe and be done with it.

First posted January 31, 2012.