Watching "Revenge of the Sith" now and I'm fucking cackling at Palpatine's expression as Anakin and Obi-Wan crash Grievous's ship from space onto Coruscant. Palpatine is sitting in the backseat and looking like he's genuinely afraid for his fucking life here. He looks like he's having a crisis. He looks like he's rethinking all of his evil schemes as they fall from orbit. That looks like a "holy shit, I might actually die here with these two Jedi clowns" expression.
There are so many moments in this sequence where Darth Sidious could have died in a freak accident due to random shrapnel or something. I love that shit. I love complicated tragedies being averted by comedies of errors or just stupid errors. The rise of the Empire could have been thwarted by Palpatine tripping over his robes at the wrong moment because he thought himself too clever for an exploding spaceship.
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I don't think I'll ever be over the way that the thesis statement of OWK is represented, more than anything else, even more than Reva's plotline honestly, in Haja.
Like.
Genuinely? The one "twist" I wasn't emotionally prepared for was that Haja was legit, and he really was trying to help, and there really was a massive grassroots shadow-network underground railroad evacuating Jedi survivors and Force-sensitive kids across the galaxy, and he really was part of it.
Because the thing with his whole setup--the magnet tricks, the motion-controlled windows, the cold-reading, the crowd-working kid identifying obvious offworld marks, the "audience plant" stormtrooper playing along over the comm? Yeah, they're cheap tricks, but it's a SOPHISTICATED setup.
This guy is a straight-up conman. He really is every bit the sleazy grifter he appears to be.
That matters. That's important. Haja is not an angel. He's a mid-level fake psychic, callously cashing in on the Jedi's legacy to do, like, bullshit fortune-telling. It's--it's the way you can see this guy's whole backstory in a few minutes of screentime. Because we DO see him identify a Force-sensitive kid....and the escape he offers them is genuine.
So: Haja. And the story we can see in him at a glance.
He's a scam artist! He's dressing in knockoff porn-vid robes, waving his hands, and babbling half-remembered vague tropes before murmuring generic platitudes and sending rubes on their way. The Jedi are dead, right? It's not like they're around to be offended. He's not even really lying, right? He gets people what they want! The Jedi stuff just lets him upcharge! He's just skimming a little, a man's gotta make a living.
And then, one day, someone came to him who'd used all their hope just getting there. Someone with a Force-sensitive child, and the Empire on their heels, stumbled terrified into his little den of cheap tricks, because they'd heard a whisper of a rumor that there was still a Jedi alive on Daiyu.
And in that moment, Haja learned that he was a better person than he'd ever realized.
They must have staked everything on reaching him, and then they found him, and what they found was...Haja. Just some guy in a cheap costume. Just some guy, and not a particularly great one. How much is the bounty on a Force-sensitive youngling? Enough to retire on. Enough to set you up for life. And Haja is just some guy, who had just been slapped in the face with the reality of what he was capable of doing in the next five minutes.
There are moments when you learn who you really are, and sometimes you surprise yourself.
After all that time "acting like a Jedi," when given the opportunity--he chose to act like a Jedi.
Ultimately, the thesis statement of OWK is: There is a galaxy full of Hajas. And that's hope enough to keep going for.
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The funniest thing about this scene is that there is zero pre-communication about doing this bit, Obi-Wan just 100% flings himself into pretending that Qui-Gon is a notorious sadistic killer, like this horrible gremlin is faking LOOKING SICK at just the THOUGHT of what Qui-Gon might do if someone crossed him and Qui-Gon is playing right along, THESE TWO ARE THE WORST I LOVE THEM.
(Star Wars: The Living Force | John Jackson Miller)
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