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wordsandrobots · 1 month ago

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Today I am going to say some scathing things about several Star Wars streaming series. Because frankly, having binged them for no reason other than morbid curiosity, I might as well write something about them.

Andor is obviously the good one. In that it is obviously competently-made, compelling to watch, and extremely well-acted. I do have some substantial criticisms: like Rogue One, it doesn't earn a couple of key emotional beats; it is weirdly committed to 'the black guy dies first'; the decision to genocide the French is weighted in ways I can't quite unpick, that mainly revolve around making Ghorman quite so lilly-white in terms of population, something we absolutely do not see anywhere else; the nagging mother/fascist son beat annoyed me; Bix's entire arc was so rote in made me furious; and the torture apologia was especially galling when they later make a point of illustrating how torturers actively screw up intelligence gathering.

However, for what it is, it's a remarkably strong production. I loved everything to do with Mon Mothma navigating the social elite, Luthen's story turning out to ultimately be about Kylea was a great execution of a secondary character slowly taking centre stage, and the ISB was a fantastic little nest of vipers to spend time gawking at. This show had something to say about fascist incompetence, which was always the best part of Rogue One's strand of modern Star Wars. I don't think this elevates Andor himself beyond a stock character, but that's not really necessary for the whole to work.

On the other hand, I struggle to say I liked this. Like Rogue One, I can recognise all its positive qualities yet taken as a whole, it leaves me cold. I think it's the uncanny valley-like effect of this leading into Star Wars. The movie this show now prefigures is, to my mind, hemmed in by 'canon' in a way that feels suffocating, all its innovations swept off the board one after the other so that the original piece it is riffing on can remain unperturbed. And Star Wars simply does not operate in the mode of the paranoid spy thriller that Andor is for much of its run. The sharp shift in tone from introducing K-2SO's into makes it clear just how humourless the rest of the show is and marks the moment when things start collapsing into an exercise in joining-the-dots.

I do think it manages to be more its own thing than Rogue One, leaving sufficient loose ends to imagine a wider point than just re-litigating the first two paragraphs of the Star Wars opening crawl. Yet still - the question of whether there is a point to trying to invent a more complex backstory to films running on Campbell's mono-myth remains standing. It's not that sacrifice and spy-work don't form part of the flavour of the original trilogy (*salutes our fallen Bothans*); rather that the narrative of the trilogy, cumulatively, is about one family's struggle against a cackling goblin channelling Richard Nixon. At the end of the day, no matter how engaging or 'mature' a story Andor seeks to craft, it's still consciously tied to an extremely straightforward and childishly bombastic conception of Rebellion vs Empire.

But hey, at least it didn't hideously other a bunch of middle-eastern-coded rebels, so it's got that going for it.

Obi-Wan Kenobi is a daft idea, done badly, yet still manages to have moments of charm. It looks phenomenally cheap, creating a weird effect whereby it's rather like the original trilogy done with the production values of the prequel trilogy on a fraction of the budget. Introducing more child actors into the Star Wars franchise should be an offence prosecuted under the law (for *their* sake, my gods). And there is no earthly way it was ever going to be a good idea to make an entire show to demonstrate how Obi Wan was Totally Not Fibbing(TM) when he from-a-certain-point-of-viewed his way through the biggest retcon of the entire franchise.

All the same, there are places where this strains towards being interesting. The twist with Reva is nothing groundbreaking but it works. The notion of a Jedi underground railroad has potential. Darth Vader bringing an escaping spaceship crashing to the ground only for the real escape vessel to blast-off from behind it ranks up there with the best 'well now I'm pissed' moments the franchise has ever done. And honestly, the brief scene of Owen and Beru desperately trying to protect a young Luke from danger is almost worth the price of admission on its own, tied though it is to Star Wars' settler-colonial world-view by dint of everything to do with Tatooine (as in, that's not not there in the background of them pretending to Luke it's the Tuskens). Oh, and I will say, the faux-star destroyer-opening of having the shadow of an Imperial shuttle sweep over down-town Mos Eisley was a decent visual concept, amidst everything else that's wrong with the direction.

It remains deeply silly to pretend Obi-Wan is anywhere near old enough to have become Alec Guinness in the nineteen years between Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars. I know living in a desert ages people, but that's clearly not the kind of aged Obi-Wan is in the original trilogy. Of all the dumb decisions made in the making of the prequels, rendering literally everyone as children or young adults is really one of the worst.

Skeleton Crew is probably the show to which I am most well-disposed. It is, to be clear, not necessarily great or even good. We have more child actors, although at least this series is pitched towards a younger audience so that grates somewhat less than it otherwise might (but seriously, I sincerely hope these kids are being protected from fandom crap). Plus they acquit themselves OK over the course of what is mainly a vehicle for Jude Law to tick 'Star Wars character' off his to-do list. He is very much the main draw and the concept of a Force-sensitive pirate is actually pretty fantastic.

Indeed, conceptually, Skeleton Crew is full to bursting. Pirates! Lost treasure planets that are in reality insular American suburbs! Buried spaceships! Owl astronomers! Faulty one-eyed droids with arr-arr accents (SM-33, because that joke was irresistible, I assume)! An underground lair paved over with a spa-and-resort complex! Trash-crabs! It's hitting so many notes of Star Wars exuberance, the only thing holding it back from being a full-blown riot is the plague of dismal colour-grading. (That's another point in Andor's favour, actually, which understands colour-grading is there to enhance and tell a story, not bury it under sludge.)

It's all wrapped around a bog-standard pre-teen adventure story plot but, hey, this is Star Wars. Inventive plotting is not actually one of its greatest strengths and the overall result works. There is probably something to say here about how Jod Na Nawood (silly name, check) is a rather pleasing inversion of the normal good-guy Force stuff where the plot coincidences bend in favour of our heroes. Here, he starts out lurking around in a cell waiting for those same coincidences to get him out of trouble and he henceforth lurches from one bit of good fortune to the next. I don't necessarily feel the show is doing that intentionally, as such, but it sparks the imagination.

Which is perhaps the best compliment I can pay this one. It has an imagination, throwing in space shanties and Old Republic commerce, new sorts of starship design and weird beasts, even just the silly-serious peril of igniting a lightsaber upside-down, all without any thudding callbacks to slow it down. There's no continuity to pay attention to in Skeleton Crew. It's just a rollicking adventure happening off to the side of the main Star Wars events, and that's extremely refreshing.

The Acolyte does something similar in being set 100 years prior to the prequels and running with the premise 'the Jedi deal with a murder mystery'. Of course, it's not a whodunnit so much as it is a whydunnit, with the eventual reveal hinging on the rash, egotistical actions of one particular knight, but that's fine. I'm a Columbo fan, I can work without the culprit being an enigma.

The execution however is . . . mixed. I'll say upfront I don't give a single fig for any wider discussion about whether the Jedi are 'right', philosophically. I consider that argument put to bed in Return of the Jedi where Luke disregards his teachers' feelings and goes with his own, thus proving the positive parts of Jedi training against the entrenched beliefs of those who lived under the old establishment. The prequels reinforce this and if they make another grievous error in cludging real-world monastic practises to turn the Jedi Order into a galaxy-wide system of child abuse, they still hinge on the relatively convincing idea that the philosophy is broadly correct while the institution has become too hidebound to recognise a looming threat from within.

In The Acolyte, Sol's faults are the ultimate root of what goes wrong and had he left well alone, things would probably have been OK (plus or minus a bit of Nightsister ambiguity, broadly favouring things being fine because if there's one thing well-established about those witches, it's that they care for their own; nobody else but definitely their own). That the Order then covers things up, first on a small scale due to the direct fallout and then at a higher level to stave off bad press is just the reality of how big, entrenched institutions work and it dovetails convincingly with events of The Phantom Menace onwards. I've never enjoyed the execution of that idea - making the Jedi flat-out boring was not one of Lucas' best innovations - but I respect the underlying intent.

Where things are perhaps on less solid footing is with the inclusion of One Random Sith who appears to be stirring things up for shits and giggles. Now, is that a refreshing change of pace from grand-scale evil schemes and general empire-building? Absolutely. Does this show convincingly portray the seduction (literal, figurative) to the Dark Side of the show's main character? Ehhhhhh. Not really. I know the general Sith tradition of getting people to buy into what you're selling despite having murdered all their friends not five minutes earlier is part of the brand, but it's on extremely tenuous ground here. Osha has good reason to get angry and bleed a lightsaber crystal by the end, no argument there. It's just that with The Stranger's murder spree being so unnervingly brutal by Star Wars standards (breaking the neck of that one hot jock Jedi stands out as particularly egregious), Osha looks spectacularly dumb to pay heed to a single word out of this guy's mouth.

Still, the action is decent, there's a fair amount of new ideas in the mix, and the cast does a bang-up job portraying this nonsense. Pleasantly diverting for most of its run, I'd say.

And then there's Ahsoka, which is utterly dire and a blot on the careers of everyone involved.

I loved Rebels, OK? There are stretches of The Clone Wars I found quite engaging. The Thrawn Trilogy and Duology stand to this day as among the better attempts at moving Star Wars as a whole forward. But my good gods there is nothing in the eight episodes of this monotonous waste of a budget that justifies it as a one-off comic book let alone a showcase production. It's a series of fifteen-minute cartoon scripts stretched to forty minutes apiece by dint of having nothing happen for whole stretches of screen-time, that depends entirely on the viewer being invested already in flat parodies of characters who mattered in shows aimed at kids ten years ago.

The first three minutes of the actual story, post-prologue, are given over to Ahsoka solving a mid-level escape-room puzzle while the score tries desperately to convince us this is awe-inspiring and mysterious, not the most unutterably boring scene imaginable. It's nothing! None of this show is anything! It's all meaningless Next Story In The Saga crap that only serves to illustrate how played-out Dave Filoni is as a writer. Build-up with no pay-off, bridging a gap nobody asked to be crossed.

I feel actively insulted by this show. I cannot believe this is getting a second season and The Acolyte isn't (oh wait, that's right, a bunch of people with nothing better to do decided they hated The Acolyte on principle and review-bombed it. Urgh). Look - you know what The Heir to the Empire does, when it introduces Thrawn? What Rebels did when it adapted that character into the new Disney canon? They showed why he was such a big deal. They showed him being clever and cunning and a cut above the other Imperial officers. You know what Ahsoka does with him? Has him stand around various CGI backlots being vaguely sinister and smug while issuing the most clangingly obvious orders imaginable. This entire thing relies on you giving a shit about stuff that happened in a cartoon ten years ago, while doing fuck-all to justify why we should care now, today, in a totally different medium.

And sometimes not even that! Apparently there's a whole new bit of backstory with Sabine Wren and Ahsoka to be alluded to, because we can't just have two characters who didn't interact much in Rebels teaming up for the first time and getting to know one another, as a neat mechanism for explaining what their respective deals are, maybe have them bond over losing parts/the whole of their found families, paralleling Ahsoka's ongoing grief for Anakin with Sabine's determination to get Ezra back, as the easiest, off-the-top-of-my-head solution for getting any of this to work, which I absolutely do not endorse because it'd *still* be a mind-numbing series of set-pieces and no damn story.

Rebels worked primarily because it committed to being stand-alone. Yes, there were callbacks to The Clone Wars, of which Ahsoka's role was by far the biggest. But the events on Lothal, the effects on the Empire's exploitation, Ezra's radicalisation as a member of an oppressed society - that was the *point* everything worked towards. It didn't rely on the callbacks as the (pun intended) fulcrum of what the story was saying.

Ahsoka is nothing but callbacks and some bog-standard Star Wars notes. I haven't even grumbled about the Dark Jedi Mercenary Duo because there's not enough character there to critique. They might as well be placeholders. They sure as heck don't meaningly get shown as a master and apprentice pair. Even Maul and Sideous got a more concrete depiction of their relationship! Morgan Elspeth is another total absence of characterisation and I say that having watched Tales of the Empire (my, my morbid curiosity is getting a workout lately). And it is bleakly funny to come from Skeleton Crew, where SM-33 is a thoroughly shonky bit of puppetry and all the more charming for it, to this, where notable one-off eccentric droid Huyang is rendered a total void of personality by virtue of being translated to live action.

That's the take-home here, actually. There was so much of this that I was looking at (when I could be bothered to even look at it rather than letting it play in the background) and thought, you know if this was animated, I bet it could look cool. But it's not. For some sodding reason this was a live-action show with real, professional actors, VFX, fight choreography, all to produce a hollow shell of a 48 year old film franchise.

Welcome back to the worst impulse of the old Star Wars EU. I hope everyone who lamented Disney taking the thoroughly sane decision not to be beholden to anything except what was actually on screen in the films is happy now. They'll throw money at that kind of nonsense these days, don'tcha know?

Geh. I think I might have to boot up Knights of the Old Republic II and remind myself that there are bits of Star Wars spin-off media I actually quite enjoy.

#grumping #about a popular sci fi franchise I am absolutely not tagging here #I'm just...#some of this was clearly just made for fan-wiki editors and that is not a recipe for a good show

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