Ventriss feels like a taster of more to come. Her inclusion in Bad Batch felt incongruous, but when viewed alongside this? Definitely feels like there’s a further plan.
Gert wrote: And yet he always gets results. He's a problem for the political structure of the Alliance, but he also serves a purpose as a brick through the window. He exists to show that the fight against the Empire isn't clean.
Pretty much this. He’s a totally unstable, but charismatic leader with a core of devout followers, so you can’t trust him to do anything other than hate the Empire and feth gak up. But sometimes you need a bunch of hardcore nutters to go do something that should be impossible.
I always equated him to guys like America backing Osama Bin Laden during the years when Russia was fighting in Afghanistan. Saw is one of those guys where he is useful for having a group of fanatics who are happy fighting the Empire, but in the back of their heads the Rebel leaders know that after the (hopeful) fall of the Empire, they are probably going to have to deal with him being a huge problem for the new government they try to replace the Empire with, because Saw is so anti-authority.
Gert wrote: And yet he always gets results. He's a problem for the political structure of the Alliance, but he also serves a purpose as a brick through the window. He exists to show that the fight against the Empire isn't clean.
Pretty much this. He’s a totally unstable, but charismatic leader with a core of devout followers, so you can’t trust him to do anything other than hate the Empire and feth gak up. But sometimes you need a bunch of hardcore nutters to go do something that should be impossible.
I always equated him to guys like America backing Osama Bin Laden during the years when Russia was fighting in Afghanistan. Saw is one of those guys where he is useful for having a group of fanatics who are happy fighting the Empire, but in the back of their heads the Rebel leaders know that after the (hopeful) fall of the Empire, they are probably going to have to deal with him being a huge problem for the new government they try to replace the Empire with, because Saw is so anti-authority.
Which is why Rogue One / Andor are so interesting; they eschew the black and white heroes and villains of the main line and really get into the horrible, grimy weeds of what a rebellion against an authoritarian regime actually looks like. The banal evil of Imperial conferences deciding the fate of billions and the bloody thirsty lunatics willing to do anything to overthrow them.
Automatically Appended Next Post: I mean, the fate of Ghorman is decided by a side conversation during the coffee break; you can’t get more corporate than that…
I think calling Saw a bloodthirsty lunatic is a bit strong. He is intensely paranoid, for sure, and extremely reticent to collaborate with others whose ideals he doesn't agree with.
On the paranoia front, is it really paranoia if they actually are out to get you? He did survive right up until the Death Star, after all, so that speaks to the effectiveness of his paranoia as a method of survival against Imperial infiltration and destruction until they literally obliterated an entire section of planet.
He also was able to be reasoned with, even into working alongside those he had political disagreements with. We see this when he agrees to help Anto Kreegyr, a separatist who are Saw's absolute least liked anti-imperial faction, attack Spellhaus before Luthen informs him about the leak of the attack to Imperial intelligence.
I don't think that whole speech he did where he describes every single other Rebel cell as "lost" really fits the description of "willing to work with others".
He puts off helping Kreegyr's lot until the last minute, hinders Phoenix squadron on multiple occasions, hell, even when the Bad Batch were trying to get intel to rescue literally all the Clones, he was like "Yeah, but I can kill some officers with these bombs instead".
Saw being the "first" Rebel buffed up his already large ego and getting addicted to jet fuel clearly ramped up his paranoia and loosened screws that were already loose.
I really, really hope Disney learn from the warm reception of Andor and Skellington Crew.
Both are unmistakably and unabashedly Star Wars, just not quite as we’ve seen it before. They show that, like the MCU, the setting can house a number of sub-genres without losing its own identity.
I dare say it can even hold a Guardians of the Galaxy bit of silliness. Perhaps a Hondo Ohnaka centred series.
As we head toward the foregone conclusion, we can all make predictions.
To see said predictions based on a known outcome come true, and in a genuinely interesting and often intense way? That’s bloody good. And not at all easy.
3rd batch takes a bit to get going but it's just so good and it's still managing to fill in some small parts of the overall back story along the way. I had been skipping the recaps but let episode 9s play and they really tie things together this links to this links to that they really laid the foundations of the story early and it's paying off now.
That last batch of Andor episodes...wow. I'm still processing what I saw (like, Disney Star Wars actually WENT there!?). I look forward to the final arc and seeing how they wrap it up; supposedly it's supposed to lead seamlessly into Rogue One, so it'll be interesting to see exactly how that happens.
... that she gets to choose her next assignment and goes back to chasing Luthen. She's been at it since season one and the last few episodes make it clear the matter isn't settled for Luthen either.
I had thought that Syril might sympathise too much with the Ghormans and turn to the rebellion (which he sort of did), but I’m now wondering whether she’ll flip? Realising that she’s a completely disposable cog in the Imperial machine, which cares nothing for her. That would be a wild turn if they do.
Those three episodes, the plaza sequence in particular, were right up there with the prison episodes in season one and made for some of the most riveting, gut wrenching TV I have seen in a long time. You know what’s going to happen, they’ve been building up to it relentlessly, but to watch it all go down, unflinchingly, almost in slow motion? That was something.
And so coldly. It’s one thing to see a ruthless plan being put together and the pieces manipulated accordingly. But to see it pulled off just as ruthlessly is quite another.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: I really, really hope Disney learn from the warm reception of Andor and Skellington Crew.
Both are unmistakably and unabashedly Star Wars, just not quite as we’ve seen it before. They show that, like the MCU, the setting can house a number of sub-genres without losing its own identity.
Yup, I like this approach of trying different stuff. As much as I like Andor, I wouldn't want all of my Star Wars to be this grim.
So, all caught up again now... I was expecting (I don't know why) episode 9 to be a bit quieter after what happened on Ghorman, just dealing with the political fallout but... crikey, that was intense.
I didn’t like that they kicked off the Plaza with a rooftop sniper. Given they shoot glowing lasers you’d think Someone would have noticed that. Should have been just a dude in the crowd. Honestly I was hoping the locals would have Actually been baited into taking the first shot.
insaniak wrote: So, all caught up again now... I was expecting (I don't know why) episode 9 to be a bit quieter after what happened on Ghorman, just dealing with the political fallout but... crikey, that was intense.
I kinda hope Luthen doesn’t snuff it before the end. He’s a fascinating character, and I’d like to see more
That seems increasingly unlikely. I'm expecting a big bang, somewhere in the next set of episodes.
Something I’ve just realised? As we hurtle toward Rogue One’s occurrences, what we’re seeing here are the very first pebbles that cause the avalanche that causes The Empire to fall.
The Rebellion is starting to get organised (now is the time to watch Rebel S3 E18!) and make bolder strikes. The Empire is beginning to let the mask drop properly. From here, we get to A New Hope, the dissolution of the Senate and the last pretence of democracy, the destruction of Alderaan, the subsequent outrage and thanks to Tarkin’s gross overconfidence, The Empire lose its biggest stick, all of which leads to a much wider and more justified Rebellion. One which doesn’t need to rely on nutters like Saw, as is seen a Just, rather than rabble rousers and malcontents.
But seriously. If you’ve never seen, or haven’t watched Rebels S3 E18 for a long while? Definitely refresh yourself on it
Though was it? Getting groups ready yes, did he need increased suffering in general given the death star will ultimately turn up. Hindsight and all that.
I didn’t like that they kicked off the Plaza with a rooftop sniper. Given they shoot glowing lasers you’d think Someone would have noticed that. Should have been just a dude in the crowd. Honestly I was hoping the locals would have Actually been baited into taking the first shot.
Spoiler:
The way it goes down is anything but elegant, but I suspect that's the point. As in, the Empire's only concern is the completion of the Death Star. They probably have a super secret schedule for it and decide to give Dedra free hand in how she fosters useful radicals, but only until the moment the Death Star construction reaches the point where the mineral is required. Whatever she does until then is going to be useful and if it works out entirely, so much the better. But if she doesn't produce the necessary results, the desired outcome is pushed for no matter the cost.
I see it as a statement on how rigid the Empire is in pursuing its agendas. That wouldn't really work if the clever and sophisticated strategy succeeded unconditionally.
Quick, sloppy execution is also a fairly attractive choice when Imperial propaganda already established a widely believed image of the Ghormans and continues to control galactic media in the aftermath of the massacre. Who's going to believe the odd account of militant extremists that it was a setup and that they are the victims instead of dangerous and violent agitators?
I’ve now very, very nearly collected a complete set of Star Wars figures (modern) so that when I buy my home, I’ll have a display or vignette if you will, of Jabba’s Palace and its denizens.
Main issue right now is his Gambling Droid has only ever been released via the Build A Droid pack-in promotion. Not only are the relevant packs Really Bloody Expensive, but characters I’m not interested in.
The_Real_Chris wrote: Well seen the last of Andor. Different pacing than before and not up to the previous high point.
Personal bugbear was the space around coresant not having ships/star destroyers/ties/etc. in it. Budget perhaps?
It's not technically wartime, and Coruscant is the capital. If there were fleets of Star Destroyers in orbit, it would be alarming.
Isn't empty space over Coruscant simply realistic? Unless you have reason to get close to another ship, you wouldn't be able to see anything because other ships are small and too far away to see, even if there are a ton of them in orbit at any given time.
It goes a bit against the usual way Star Wars fills visible space with interesting things, but that seems fitting for a show that goes a bit against the way Star Wars usually does things.
Maybe it is the 'star wars way', but I would want a bunch of interdictors ensuring no one could drop out of hyperspace in bombardment range, and I would want traffic control around the points where ships typically drop in.
This is all pre-dissolution of the senate “we are secure, the rebels are few and far between” Empire.
Scariff is the first engagement if any real note, where the Rebels turned up with a sizeable and organised fleet.
From there straight into A New Hope, senate is shortly dissolved after the Death Star is confirmed to be in working order (twice).
And it’s the subsequent near immediate loss of the Death Star that really effs things up, and gets a lot of people off the fence and the sidelines - hence the far larger and more impressive fleet seen over Endor. The mask is off, and so are the gloves.
It would be just like Palpi to keep the skies over Coruscant clear for appearances but have a flotilla on standby to jump in the moment somebody gets funny ideas about attacking the planet.
Indeed. Plus who knows how many wings of TIE craft held planetside. The absolute swarm vomited out over Scarif wouldn’t have looked like much by comparison I’d wager.
I would love to know the backstory to Perrin 'always look for the fun' and Sculdrans squeeze heading back from the all night party/bender. Also, post rebellion, does Chandrilla even have divorce?
Geifer wrote: It would be just like Palpi to keep the skies over Coruscant clear for appearances but have a flotilla on standby to jump in the moment somebody gets funny ideas about attacking the planet.
Yep. It looks stronger to have no visible security presence there as it implies there is absolutely no need for it, especially as the battle of coruscant would still be in quite recent memory. "Under the republic, we had a pitched battle above our planet. Under the Empire, the sky is completely clear"
Be aware though its a Kobo.com collection which means they only work with a Kobo account/reader. So you don't get PDF versions or such with this bundle
Geifer wrote: I'm satisfied with how Andor turned out. Both season 2 and as a whole, including Rogue One as the finale.
Next stop: A show like this set between Yavin and Endor, please.
I rewatched Rogue One part way through this season, not realising how directly the end would feed in*. Future rewatches are going to have to be all three in order, as I think they’ll fit together incredibly well. Which is impressive given the time between their filming. I found it interesting on some of the YouTube analyses that a lot of people in the comments seem to be calling this the Andor Trilogy, which I think feels valid.
I had some concerns about the compressed storylines for season two, but it worked out really well. The last two blocks I ended up just watching in a single session, as if they were a film. Now that it’s all out, it would be really neat if Disney did supercuts of the four blocks, because I think that would work. I also think they’ve hit on a neat structure that could be used for other shows.
My first thought was something around gathering the intelligence on Death Star 2, but that would probably feel too samey to Andor and risks being a pale imitation. But something about the development of the rebellion from a rag-tag bunch of individuals into a full military force capable of taking on the Empire could be interesting. In feel, think something like films about the Battle of Britain. First thought could be to use Wedge as the lead character?
*
Spoiler:
Except for the gut-punch of Bix with Andor junior and the sunrise he will never live to see. Man, that wasn’t what I was expecting and was really hard to deal with. I respect it though, it was a really strong emotional end to the story, rather than just the feed in to Rogue One montage, which would have worked, but not had the weight to bring the message home.
If all of Andor had been paced like Andor season 2 is paced, I'd have had no complaints about season 1. Really. All they had to do was stop wasting whole episodes on casts of characters whose names we're never going to remember because they just plain don't matter and *snap* my whole complaint with S1 just disappears.
I know I'm like the only person on the planet who had that complaint, but still. If they'd paced the whole series like this they could have had their 5 seasons and I'd have never whined.
LordofHats wrote: If all of Andor had been paced like Andor season 2 is paced, I'd have had no complaints about season 1. Really. All they had to do was stop wasting whole episodes on casts of characters whose names we're never going to remember because they just plain don't matter and *snap* my whole complaint with S1 just disappears.
I know I'm like the only person on the planet who had that complaint, but still. If they'd paced the whole series like this they could have had their 5 seasons and I'd have never whined.
Well, in that case the pacing would have been awful or they simply would have run out of story. That's why its so quickly paced. Season 1 was the original amount of "story per season" and while great, veers closer to the problems with other D+ shows that stretch a film into a season of television.
Early Rebellion era feels mined out, at least for now. Bad Batch, Rebels, Andor, Rogue One, even Solo to a lesser degree fleshed it out all nice like. Rebels, Andor and Rogue One in particular doing some spectacular heavy lifting.
We know we’re getting further adventures in the New Republic era of course, with the promise Mando, Ahsoka and Skellington Crew will all tie in before the end.
High Republic has stumbled. Much as I enjoyed The Acolyte, it wasn’t an auspicious start. I do wonder how the books and comics are doing for that though.
Then of course we’re told we’re getting some post First Order stuff too. A Reycentric movie, and a Rogue Squadron Movie (I think that’s post First Order, but I might be thinking of that other one that was announced and then canned).
I really, really hope they take the right lessons from Skellington and Andor of course. Don’t just give us more Star Wars. Give us Star Wars with sprinkles and a different sauce.
New planets! New characters! Not a Skywalker or Lightsaber in sight! Not even a Vader or Palpatine cameo! New Ship Designs.
That alone really added to the whole of the thing.
I had a theory that all new Star Wars featured a TIE fighter (usually a new design) and at least one scene with a lightsabre. Andor avoided the laser swords...
Spoiler:
... we just got a force healer, who he wasn't fussed with. I guess it's just a 'hokey religion' to him. Nothing like a good blaster.
LordofHats wrote: If all of Andor had been paced like Andor season 2 is paced, I'd have had no complaints about season 1. Really. All they had to do was stop wasting whole episodes on casts of characters whose names we're never going to remember because they just plain don't matter and *snap* my whole complaint with S1 just disappears.
I know I'm like the only person on the planet who had that complaint, but still. If they'd paced the whole series like this they could have had their 5 seasons and I'd have never whined.
The first three episodes I watched at the weekend - free episodes on the Star Wars Youtube channel - and they didn't do a good job of selling the show, so on this I'm going to have to agree.
The reintroduction of Mara Jade, Talon Karrde and Joruus C'Baoth is long overdue. We definitely want to see evil Obiwan Kenobi, and Mara and Talon are firmly in the cool kids club of smugglers. Lets face it, as kids we either wanted to be Luke Skywalker or Han Solo.
The reintroduction of Mara Jade, Talon Karrde and Joruus C'Baoth is long overdue. We definitely want to see evil Obiwan Kenobi, and Mara and Talon are firmly in the cool kids club of smugglers. Lets face it, as kids we either wanted to be Luke Skywalker or Han Solo.
A surprising number of folks apparently wanted to be the Imperials.
Easy E wrote: A surprising number of folks apparently wanted to be the Imperials.
Folks don't want to associate with the faction where, quite in spite of Stormtrooper marksmanship, every mission is a suicide mission and volunteering is mandatory? I'm shocked*.
Something I do want to see explored is post Endor, pre TFA Not New Republic stuff.
See, Endor essentially saw the Separatists….kinda win, in the long run. Old Republic gone, Empire crumbled. And the New Republic was an optional membership arrangement.
Oh they’d try to persuade you to sign up, sure. But with words and favours.
But what of those that decided it wasn’t for them? Did we see consortiums appear? Smaller scaled allied worlds? How were their relations with the New Republic?
TFA showed that, at least so far as the First Order were concerned, The New Republic fleet was a significant concern, hence blatting it. How much such a seemingly powerful Navy be interpreted by non-member worlds?
There’s a ton of possibility and permutations there.
Having a multi year live action imperial army unit that has to navigate the Empire becoming more and more obvious would be great. Overtime they have to deal with atrocities they have a part in, people die in attacks by rebels/insurgents hardening their views, fanatics become stormtroopers, one or more high profile defections to the rebels. A grunts view of fascism, similar to many German WW2 stories or really any soldiers story from a dirty war.
The_Real_Chris wrote: Having a multi year live action imperial army unit that has to navigate the Empire becoming more and more obvious would be great. Overtime they have to deal with atrocities they have a part in, people die in attacks by rebels/insurgents hardening their views, fanatics become stormtroopers, one or more high profile defections to the rebels. A grunts view of fascism, similar to many German WW2 stories or really any soldiers story from a dirty war.
We got some of that theme done with Bad Batch. Watching the republic clone army transitioning into imperial stormtroopers. Granted it was animated, and not from a 100% internal perspective, as the Bad Batch were outsiders within the system.
I think it could be an interesting show. A little dark, but so was Andor. But the ideas have already been touched on, and it’s not very “Disney” to do it right.
As much as its not very Disney to do it right, its also not very Star Wars. The franchise has really never gone to that level of dark, even in novels. Maybe the occasional comic.
Be careful what you wish for, they might bring back Lizzo and Jack Black back to do some good ol Disney approved twerking while they try to figure out the latest droid fashion for their posh party for next week!
Grimskul wrote: Be careful what you wish for, they might bring back Lizzo and Jack Black back to do some good ol Disney approved twerking while they try to figure out the latest droid fashion for their posh party for next week!
Grimskul wrote: Be careful what you wish for, they might bring back Lizzo and Jack Black back to do some good ol Disney approved twerking while they try to figure out the latest droid fashion for their posh party for next week!
Time to pray to Loki to make this a reality.
Let's add in Jared Leto while we're at it to really make it more likely xD
Grimskul wrote: Be careful what you wish for, they might bring back Lizzo and Jack Black back to do some good ol Disney approved twerking while they try to figure out the latest droid fashion for their posh party for next week!
Time to pray to Loki to make this a reality.
Let's add in Jared Leto while we're at it to really make it more likely xD
What if they added a decent British actor like Jack Whitehall?
I'm sure the UK has some other actors with that much star power, but I can't think of any right now.
With the Multi-verse, they could make it a Disney cross-over where Wang and Madisynn come across the Multiverse to have a show with Jack Black and Lizzo, Jared Leto from Tron: Aries, the live-action Snow White as a neighbor, and Jack Whitehall as...... I don't even know who that is, so whatever......
But what Star Wars needs now is an infusion of new talent. Like screenwriter Craig Sweeny and director Olatunde Osunsanmi. The creative team who gave us Star Trek: Section 31.
Quixote wrote: I don't have Disney+ so I haven't seen any of the newer Star Wars stuff (anything Book of Boba Fett or later).
A buddy of mine says he can send me two series. 1 will be Andor. What should the other series be?
Is he sending you both Andor season 1 & 2? Or just one or the other?
Anyways, for the second series:
*Have you seen Rebels? If so, did you like it? If Yes/Yes, then consider Ashoka - it's essentially just the next season of that,but done in Live action.
*Skeleton Cew - a nice self-contained adventure, not concerned with all the other big SW stuff. Certainly not with the Skywalkers & co. Just an entertaining tale set in the SW universe.
The kids in Skeleton Crew are charming, Jude Law is cool, and it's a neat adventure that never quite become absurd. Like it's always within the limits of what kids on a pirate ship in space in Star Wars might do, if that makes sense. You only have to accept one absurd thing, not several.
Quixote wrote: I don't have Disney+ so I haven't seen any of the newer Star Wars stuff (anything Book of Boba Fett or later).
A buddy of mine says he can send me two series. 1 will be Andor. What should the other series be?
Have you seen The Mandalorian seasons 1 and 2? If so, then I guess Skeleton Crew, although I haven’t seen it. If you’re not interested in that….oof, not a lot of choices. Ahsoka is probably the best of the rest. Or you can mess with him and ask for the Holiday Special.
The kids in Skeleton Crew are charming, Jude Law is cool, and it's a neat adventure that never quite become absurd. Like it's always within the limits of what kids on a pirate ship in space in Star Wars might do, if that makes sense. You only have to accept one absurd thing, not several.
Also, a fair few new ships on screen, and not just updated classics in the vein of the sequels.
Grimskul wrote: Be careful what you wish for, they might bring back Lizzo and Jack Black back to do some good ol Disney approved twerking while they try to figure out the latest droid fashion for their posh party for next week!
Time to pray to Loki to make this a reality.
Let's add in Jared Leto while we're at it to really make it more likely xD
What if they added a decent British actor like Jack Whitehall?
I'm sure the UK has some other actors with that much star power, but I can't think of any right now.
Or Jimmy Carr? He'd make a great Imperial general.
I've seen Seasons 1 & 2 of the Mandalorian... and that's it for Disney+ Star Wars...
Didn't Skeleton Crew and the Acolyte both get canceled? I always heard they weren't all that great.
Skeleton Crew is fantastic.
The Acolyte? It's not.
Skeleton Crew is good, yes. And completely self-contained in its one season. There's nothing to cancel there.
The Acolyte has a few interesting bits and expands the cinematic setting into the High Republic where the earliest time in the setting we've previously seen on screen was Phantom Menace or a few animations or parts thereof set around the time. It is however marred by considerable technical deficienciesm, particularly but not limited to pacing. And since it got canceled we can add an incomplete narrative to the list. It wouldn't be my choice if you're limited on how many shows you get to watch. It's more of a curiosity you might watch if you don't have anything better to do.
Quixote wrote: I don't have Disney+ so I haven't seen any of the newer Star Wars stuff (anything Book of Boba Fett or later).
A buddy of mine says he can send me two series. 1 will be Andor. What should the other series be?
Andor seasons 1 and 2 (pacing is different, 1 is slower in case you need dopamine)
If you have young kids Skeleton crew is a classic Disney kids set up in the vein of their 70s/80/s stuff. While Dakka likes it maybe that's our age, would todays youth appreciate it in the same way? No idea.
Mandelorian was Saturday morning western in space but overstayed itself and has a lot of flaws in it compared to Andor - not least the universal tracking system that seems to be both magic and the death of anyone starting a rebellion (yep, she is over here Darth).
You mean the Ewok movies? The Ewok Adventure and The Battle for Endor? They’re fun if you like older Star Wars. For people who love the prequels and sequels, I think they might be a bit dated. Personally I’d rate them above the prequels and sequels.
Ultimately I tried to finish Acolyte, but I couldn't. I just couldn't. It's such an ass plot (I swear to god the guy playing Qimr knew it too, he just warned us too late) and it's somehow manages to be told in a way that makes it worse.
I'll just put my rant in spoilers so everyone can skip it at their leisure.
Spoiler:
I feel like somewhere, there is a fan cut of the Acolyte that manages to make the entire story no longer than 3 hours at the most, and it would still be a mediocre movie. The plot is so thin. I look back at the 7 episodes I did finish and wonder how on earth they needed 8 episodes to tell the story until I realized the time warp.
The time warp.
I complained about it in the first two episodes, but the time warp doesn't stop there. For a show built like people have super advanced teleportation technology, it's amazing you never see anyone actually using it. They just appear places in ways that don't make any sense. This show exists in a time warp where people appear wherever they need to be for the set piece to happen or the sweeping vista. Why? feth you that's why and feth the budget (no wonder this show was so ungodly expensive, it's so outright wasteful)! Mae's on forest planet now and Osha is on Coruscant, but don't worry, Osha will gather a party of red shirts and get to forest planet and arrive at point B on the map at the same time Mae does even though that makes absolutely no fething sense given Mae's head start (with time for Sol to rehash an argument with green lady he already had to boot). Same way Osha and Sexy Ass, the most unimpressively managed plot twist since Palpatine being evil, manage to get to a ship and go to a whole other planet all in the time it takes Mae and Sol to hobble back to his ship and a few hours will pass for them which is all the time it takes for the green skin girl to gather up a whole other party of probably red shirts and go to forest planet and then no doubt arrive on yet another plent entirely, all in the time it takes about fifteen minutes of dialogue to happen for everyone else.
You know, if this show wasn't so damn sloppy, lazy, and incompetently shot, you could cut a lot of utterly meaningless and not worthwhile content from it, save money, and at least salvaged some semblance of the story in a fraction of the time.
This is what happens when you write something with absolutely no respect for continuity. The plot explodes because you're shooting vistas on location and set pieces you never needed in the first place (and that aren't even that good to begin with). It won't fix that Mae and Osha are the blandest pair of characters in this franchise since the High Republic introduced a whole gaggle of them, but at least you'd cut out the waste and focus more on the only parts of this show that were probably worth anything; Sol and Qimr. I have to give it to Qimr. Qimr probably could have carried a show or movie entirely on his own given the chance but fat chance of that happening now. Sol was good until the plot twist that he genocided an entire tribe of people because he became unfathomably obsessed with a pre-adolescent girl a few minutes after meeting her was just so blindingly stupid I didn't care anymore. My head canon is settled. Sol was a pedophile. The Jedi are evil. Palpatine was right all along.
There are shows that are cancelled before their time, shows I never cared about and don't care were cancelled, and then there's the Acolyte, which I think is just generally a waste of a program for everyone and could have been written off and never aired to save money on taxes and it would have been a better timeline.
Will also chime in and say the The Acolyte was complete ass. Had something that could’ve been somewhat interesting, but it was a complete and total failure.
ZergSmasher wrote: Agree completely. The Acolyte was utter garbage, even worse than the Kenobi show or Book of Boba.
Wait. Kenobi is bad too? That's what I was leaning towards until Skeleton Crew was brought to my attention.
Yeeeep, despite what some of the Disney fanatics might tell you on this forum, Kenobi is mediocre at best and incredibly cartoonish (in a bad way) and borderline canon-breaking at worst. It really wastes Ewan McGregor's return to his role in Obi-Wan and tries to shoe horn in a bunch of random stuff that can't affect the timeline of what happens before a New Hope but basically has Obi Wan interact with a bunch of people he really shouldn't be in contact with (e.g. Leia & Vader). It also doesn't help that the execution for a lot of scenes are incredibly amateur (look up the Leia chase scene for Obi Wan and you'll see a bunch of memed videos of how dumb it is that full grown bounty hunters can't chase down a 8 year old little girl in basically an open area and you can also see the Looney Tunes esque attempt of Obi Wan smuggling Leia in his undercoat). Obi Wan himself, despite being the titular character, gets sidelined for a new character who wastes a bunch of time on a nonsensical revenge plot. A lot of the memes of the Disney era where being stabbed in the chest/abdomen is only apparently only lethal if you're a Qui-Gon got largely started from this show since there's a bunch of terrible fakeout deaths based around that.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
nels1031 wrote: Will also chime in and say the The Acolyte was complete ass. Had something that could’ve been somewhat interesting, but it was a complete and total failure.
Easily the worst of Disney Star Wars.
Only Disney Star Wars could make the concept of a lesbian space coven of witches both incredibly boring and cringey.
But I guess that's due to the power of not one, nor two bad writers, but the power of maaaaaaannnnny.
ZergSmasher wrote: Agree completely. The Acolyte was utter garbage, even worse than the Kenobi show or Book of Boba.
I've maybe softened on Kenobi. It wasn't good, but it wasn't atrocious, and definitely not offensively bad.
Boba is still bad, but at least Boba edges close to 'WTF is this lol' bad. Mostly in the first five episodes.
Also, just as an aside because I rewatched it recently, anyone ever laugh out loud in Attack of the Clones when Mace Windu asks if the Kaminoans are involved in the plot to assassinate Senator Amidala, and Obi-Wan says 'no master there's no motive' and then no one, ever, ever ever ever, points out 'except for the massive clone army they've been making at great expense ostensibly for the republic which is kind of oddly well timed for the current army appropriations bill in the senate which Senator Amidala opposes, which is actually super weird and kind of extremely suspicious now that I think about it.'
I still really really hate how poorly handled the whole 'plot to destroy the Jedi' was because I never don't find more reasons how it just makes the Jedi and everyone else look insanely stupid that they were never suspicious about how the Clone Army came into existence in the first place despite all the warning signs that something wasn't right being blindingly obvious from the get go. Clone Wars just piled on too, with the late confirmation that Dooku commissioned the army but then ABSOLUTELY NO ONE EVER followed up on that wondering if maybe they should be concerned the leader of massive war was also the one who commissioned the army that they've been fighting the war with.
I still really really hate how poorly handled the whole 'plot to destroy the Jedi' was because I never don't find more reasons how it just makes the Jedi and everyone else look insanely stupid that they were never suspicious about how the Clone Army came into existence in the first place despite all the warning signs that something was right being blindingly obvious from the get go.
While the sequels were not 'good' the hate for them just puzzles me when the prequels are RIGHT THERE as evidence that George Lucas really was not the guy to keep this story going.
They set up a cool and interesting universe, but as movies... WTF did I just watch?
As for Boba and Obi, I just tried to remember how they ended and have no idea. And I know I watched both.
I think there was a big monster in Boba? The Young Leia girl in Obi was good, I remember that.
Honestly if I had to rank the worst movies in order;
Spoiler:
Rise of Skywalker, the absolute fething worst Star Was movie. It's so stupidly bad. I guess Abrams 'tried.'
Attack of the Clones, while I know many people rank it more highly than Phantom Menace, Attack of Clones has an utterly nonsensical plot with multiple plot holes and several plot tumors. More than any other film in the franchise imo. Plus it's just cringy for half the film because Lucas' idea of romance is bizare. I much prefer the Seals are Good alternate timeline, where Anakin wows Padme with his juvenile understanding of philosophy and she's clearly only into him because she respects his weird passion.
The Last Jedi, either goes here or over there. IDK man. I get what the director was aiming for, in some ways it's not the worst movie in the franchise and in other ways it's just god awful.
The Phantom Menace, is bad but at least it's an okay movie. I guess. If you squint really hard and ignore the childish stupidity of so many parts of the plot. Decent set pieces at least. The whole plots a mess but there pieces here that on their own are likeable like the pod race, Maul and the music, etc.
The Last Jedi either goes right here, or back there. IDK man. this movie is even more uneven than Phantom Menace with parts I can appreciate and parts that are outright offensively bad. It's a fething mess of a movie.
Revenge of the Sith, the closest of the prequels to being a good move, and IDK maybe it's so okay its average. At least it's somewhat coherent in plot for the most aprt it's just told really badly and botches the parts that should have been the highly of the movie imo. Except for Order 66. That scene is actually okay. It's just everything before and after that that's kind of blarg.
The Force Awakens, about as good as Revenge of the Sith imes, at the least. Good parts. bad parts. Some fun parts. Some cringe parts. Mostly I think this movie suffers from the dumbass plot of Rise of Skywalker making it retroactively worse (gee, sure is conviently coincidental they found Palpatine's grand daughter on some desert plant where no one was looking for her, or anyone who might have been watching over her, just utterly random here she is and there's the Millennium Falcon too which will randomly bump into Han just in time. You know it's kind of weird how this entire movie runs on contrived coincidences. I changed my mind.
Revenge of the Sith is better than the Force Awakens. Move it here.
But honestly, at the end of the day, I still see all of these as mostly bad movies. Star Wars is kind 3 for 9 on main entries because only 3 of them are actually, unquestioningly, legitimately good films. The other 6 are degrees of bad no matter how we cut them.
Rogue One's still great though. Shame Disney's first baller was the only one.
Also, for anyone who has never seen them;
This whole series of videos is quite hilarious. I'm usually dismissve of anything produced with AI, but the dialogue is too clever for AI I think, so the writer just used AI voices but the dialogue and the gags the writer puts into this saga of Anakin's overwrought Jedi Thesis and everyone's frustration with him is quite funny. Mace is the best character for his 'I'm so sick of being the only sane man in this franchise' demeanor. Oh, the brilliance of having Dooku in these videos just come right out and tell everyone what's happening with complete 100% honesty only for no one to believe him is brilliant commentary on the prequels where even a sideways glance at Dooku's direction should have been enough for an intelligent being to figure out 'the plot to destroy the Jedi' if they just used their thinking cap a little bit.
Seals are Good is the best thing that came out of the Prequels.
After Clone Wars I and II of course.
Automatically Appended Next Post: In tribute to my Crimson Firehawk project I watched four whole minutes of Young Jedi Adventures, escaping before my brain ejected out my ear.
I will just say I can see why their stuff is on clearance.
While the sequels were not 'good' the hate for them just puzzles me when the prequels are RIGHT THERE as evidence that George Lucas really was not the guy to keep this story going.
Why are you puzzled over this?
There's the prequels - degrees of not good to bad,
Then there's the sequels - just increasing degrees of not just "Worse than the Prequels", but worse than themselves.
I dislike the prequels. I hate the sequels.
This whole series of videos is quite hilarious. I'm usually dismissve of anything produced with AI, but the dialogue is too clever for AI I think, so the writer just used AI voices but the dialogue and the gags the writer puts into this saga of Anakin's overwrought Jedi Thesis and everyone's frustration with him is quite funny. Mace is the best character for his 'I'm so sick of being the only sane man in this franchise' demeanor. Oh, the brilliance of having Dooku in these videos just come right out and tell everyone what's happening with complete 100% honesty only for no one to believe him is brilliant commentary on the prequels where even a sideways glance at Dooku's direction should have been enough for an intelligent being to figure out 'the plot to destroy the Jedi' if they just used their thinking cap a little bit.
Seals are good definitely has a philosophy degree or has read philosophy. The episode of Anakin and Padme talking about Anakin's view of what makes a good government is basically a stream of philisopher name puns, with their particular philosophical views matching up to their human counterpart.
And there are just so many brilliant foreshadowing lines, like jedi apparently having a reputation for leaping out of windows and a law even being written that any jedi dying as a result of such being automatically classed as suicide.
ZergSmasher wrote: Agree completely. The Acolyte was utter garbage, even worse than the Kenobi show or Book of Boba.
Wait. Kenobi is bad too? That's what I was leaning towards until Skeleton Crew was brought to my attention.
I enjoyed Kenobi. Yes, it's not perfect, but if you're not holding Disney to a higher standard than the prequels or RotJ, it fits right in. It was definitely better than Book of Boba Fett, which was good for the Dances with Tuskens flashbacks but otherwise just boring.
Acolyte likewise is not perfect, but was at least an attempt to show something new, and has some spectacular lightsaber fights, if you're into that sort of thing.
Neither is quite what anyone hoped. Both are clearly film scripts stretched to accommodate a serial story telling, and so have some pretty naff filler.
There is still enjoyable stuff in amongst the padding guff. They’re certainly, at worst, merely average.
If you want a recommendation for objectively crap telly?
Reality TV
Scripted Reality TV (where the concept, subjects or production staff aren’t interesting enough on their own)
Sports
Friends (a single joke! Over 10 years! And it wasn’t a funny joke to begin with!)
And so on and so forth.
Disappointing (and they are) isn’t the same as Crap.
I still really really hate how poorly handled the whole 'plot to destroy the Jedi' was because I never don't find more reasons how it just makes the Jedi and everyone else look insanely stupid that they were never suspicious about how the Clone Army came into existence in the first place despite all the warning signs that something was right being blindingly obvious from the get go.
While the sequels were not 'good' the hate for them just puzzles me when the prequels are RIGHT THERE as evidence that George Lucas really was not the guy to keep this story going.
They set up a cool and interesting universe, but as movies... WTF did I just watch?
As for Boba and Obi, I just tried to remember how they ended and have no idea. And I know I watched both.
I think there was a big monster in Boba? The Young Leia girl in Obi was good, I remember that.
Bobba Fett leaves the big fight to his allies to run home and ride back on his personal mount, a Rancor. He sits on top of it, fully exposed and vulnerable even though he has a jet pack, while fighting giant droids while his Rancor King Kongs its way around the town he is trying to own/run as a criminal emperor while refusing to do any crime.
Look, other Starwars things are bad. SW is honestly like 50/50 on good to bad if not worse. But Book of Bobba Fett is by far the worst thing in starwars. It's SWs Secret Invasion.
Lance845 wrote: He sits on top of it, fully exposed and vulnerable even though he has a jet pack, ...
Not to mention the starship with the whopping big cannons and seismic charges parked right beside the Rancor pen...
I suspect Boba draws the line at dropping seismic charges in the middle of a densely populated city...
But Book of Bobba Fett is by far the worst thing in starwars.
The Holiday Special exists.
And this is important to remember, there is even more of a steaming turd than The Acolyte, Book of Boba, Kenobi, or any other Star Wars media you consider bad. Way back in 1978, they were already making bad spinoffs of Star Wars. It's not a new thing.
Bobba Fett leaves the big fight to his allies to run home and ride back on his personal mount, a Rancor. He sits on top of it, fully exposed and vulnerable even though he has a jet pack, while fighting giant droids while his Rancor King Kongs its way around the town he is trying to own/run as a criminal emperor while refusing to do any crime.
Look, other Starwars things are bad. SW is honestly like 50/50 on good to bad if not worse. But Book of Bobba Fett is by far the worst thing in starwars. It's SWs Secret Invasion.
That's not even the worst part of that fight. You've got a group of allies pinned down by snipers on rooftops and two guys with jetpacks and pistols who solve the problem by.... walking out in the open and tanking fire until they snipe the snipers with pistols. It's such an obvious setup to showcase their unique skillset and they go for the version that removes any sense of danger from the fight at all.
It's actually a highlight of the show. I am by no means a hater. Last Jedi is on my good side of Star Wars or at least I put it under lost potential. Boba though is just an actual mess. I think it might actually be worse than Acolyte, though both are a mess that I can only assume made some degree of sense as a film script at one point.
I think Kenobi by comparison suffers more from the lost potential. What's there is good, but having these actors back together again raises expectations to the point where something that is probably a B- comes across as disappointing. This is also clearly a dragged out film script though they pad it better than Boba and assuming it was part of the same content strategy, I think is technically better than Solo.
You mean the Ewok movies? The Ewok Adventure and The Battle for Endor? They’re fun if you like older Star Wars. For people who love the prequels and sequels, I think they might be a bit dated. Personally I’d rate them above the prequels and sequels.
Yeah, those two. They are on Disney+ too.
I finished Andor and I tended to watch three episodes at a time. That worked really well, as the show seemed to be broken down into groups of three episodes per arc. After the Ghorman arc, I had to take a breather. There were too many times when things hit too close to home in the show. Reminded me a bit of the first two or three episodes of the new Daredevil in that sense.
My biggest take-away, was to go pull out me WEG Star Wars rulebook and start thinking about writing a short RPG campaign.
I'd contend that at this point, The Holiday Special has become classical bad to the point that it's enjoyable to see how bad it is.
In a way the Prequels can be like that now too, especially Prequel memes half of which run on the hammy half-assed doesn't making fething sense dialogue from the movies. Others are based on stupid acting moments, reactions, etc etc. The entire Seals are Good saga is an example of it really, taking bad stupid things from the Prequels and making them funny through reinvention.
I expect it will. As happened with the Prequels, the current crop of Star Wars kids will grow up and find that 'new' Star Wars isn't as good as the Star Wars they remember, and then they'll go back and discover that the Star Wars they remember also isn't actually as good as they remember. And the cycle will begin anew.
Lance845 wrote: But Book of Bobba Fett is by far the worst thing in starwars.
The Holiday Special exists.
I concede this point. The holiday special is worse.
Having seen them both…not really. They’re both bad in hilarious ways, but the Holiday Special has the weird animated segment and coked out Carrie Fisher where Boba has the silliest swoop gang in the galaxy. The Holiday Special is much shorter, though, so it wins.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Prequels benefit from The Clone Wars doing some seriously heavy lifting.
Doesn’t make the films much better, but it’s made the era really interesting,
A lot of Star Wars' appeal is the world building the feeling that YOU could be there and the Prequels really got that right since YOU could not only be a smuggler or a fighter pilot but also a Jedi or a Clone Trooper and best of all the bad guy were all disposable droids.
Star Trek as well. Fantasy life me has little interest in meeting Captains Kirk and Picard, but Fantasy Life me has a lot of interest in being Captain of the Miranda-Class USS Tiananmen NCC-1989.
Hogswarts, Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, all of these are great ideas to dangle for an audience.
I never had any noteworthy problems with the prequels. I really liked that they fleshed out the setting and still rewatch them fairly frequently because that appeal has not waned. Sure, they have a bunch of issues, but not so much that they got in the way of doing what I wanted them to do. And at this point Clone Wars and memes did their part to make the dodgy bits more enjoyable to me.
I would have very much liked for The Acolyte to feel the same, but there I found the craftsmanship so poor that it got too much in the way of the interesting bits. I'm not one to claim the prequel trilogy is a high bar to clear and I enjoyed Book of Boba with the exception of the finale. I'm not hard to please. But The Acolyte and Kenobi had no trouble failing short regardless.
The Phantom Menace wasted a lot of time. It introduced stuff like Midichlorians and Irritating Anakin and Jar Jar Binks which deeply annoyed audiences.
Midichlorians have since been rationalised in other media to be an indicator of force sensitivity, and not the cause thereof.
Attack of the Clones was an improvement, but took a big chunk out the mystique of Boba Fett. It also introduced and then ignored the mystery of Sifo Dyas.
Revenge of the Sith is my favourite of the lot. But because TPM wasted so much time, Anakin’s fall felt forced.
Then the Clone Wars arrived. Despite more than a few duff episodes, it did so much back filling and heavy lifting it elevated the prequels, especially in the later series which delved into how the Jedi Order had been corrupted by the war, turning Peace Keepers into Generals. It also showed Palpatine commandeering ever more power and authority, such as taking over the banking clans.
And so his overall plan, with the crescendo being that scene in Revenge of the Sith felt more organic, and more deserved. Not just some loon declaring himself Emperor “because there is a war on you know”.
My biggest issue with the prequels is the rapid fire rate in which they introduce some interesting bad guys and then dispose of them immediately. The only bad guy to stick around is Duku who looks like an old dentist.
Darth Maul should have been present in all 3 films. Grevous is too good of a character design to get thrown away in a single fight scene where he does almost nothing.
The prequels had the issue that they had no head-room. They had 3 films and no (at the time) idea that TV series and such could come along. So they had 3 films to squish everything into and then it hits A New Hope. So yeah everything feels on speed-up and they can't let any characters get too established unless they are going to appear in A New Hope - everyone else has to die off or vanish fairly fast.
JarJar is perhaps one of the few who survives, but who just vanishes into nothing in the story.
Overread wrote: The prequels had the issue that they had no head-room. They had 3 films and no (at the time) idea that TV series and such could come along. So they had 3 films to squish everything into and then it hits A New Hope. So yeah everything feels on speed-up and they can't let any characters get too established unless they are going to appear in A New Hope - everyone else has to die off or vanish fairly fast.
JarJar is perhaps one of the few who survives, but who just vanishes into nothing in the story.
Then they shouldn't have made up so many new characters so the ones they did use had room to breathe.
I have said this before. Darth Maul should have been the Darth Vader of the prequels.
You have Maul kill Qui Gon in front of Obi Won and then instead of dying, simply escapes while Obi Won is stuck behind his video game energy door.
Obi decides to train Anakin. Yadda yadda. Second movie it's years later and Maul has been a monster in the shadows plaguing the clone wars. But specifically, always getting away. And often, killing people close to Anakin and Obi Won. Yoda's words are reflected here. Maul is a terror weapon. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate is the path to the dark side. Both Anakin and Obi Won are frustrated that they cannot seem to catch this guy and people around them keep dying because of it.
At movie 3 this comes to a head as Obi Wan lets go of his fear and anger while Anakin begins to fear for Padme. It's when Maul comes after her that Anakin lashes out truly in his anger and hate. Obi letting go becomes a better Jedi and Anakin succumbing to his fear/anger/hate slips farther and farther away. It's Anakin that ends up killing Maul and then turns on everyone else for failing to protect all the people that Maul has killed over the years. That the Jedi were too weak to do what was needed. So on and so forth.
Maul was the interesting villain through-line the prequels needed like Vader was. And his role as this horrible demon looking assassin is a great way to show Anakins fall to the dark side. Duku can get fethed.
The end result is you get Obi following the Jedi teachings and becoming greater. Anakin failing to and fulfilling Yoddas worries. And it reflects in 4/5/6 when Obi gets killed like Qui Gon did and then Luke sees his friends under threat in Empire and finally faces Vader in Jedi when his sister is threatened. But unlike his father he pulls back from the darkside and chooses Obi Wons path. Remember that conversation between yoda and ghost Obi? "Was I any different?" It actually happens this way.
Overread wrote: The prequels had the issue that they had no head-room. They had 3 films and no (at the time) idea that TV series and such could come along. So they had 3 films to squish everything into and then it hits A New Hope. So yeah everything feels on speed-up and they can't let any characters get too established unless they are going to appear in A New Hope - everyone else has to die off or vanish fairly fast.
Of course, part of the problem there is that they use an entire movie pretty much entirely to introduce Anakin. His origin as a slave could have been worked into the first 10 minutes of the movie, then skip forward 10 years or so to start of all the political intrigue and the formation of the Separatist Alliance.
I suspect that Lucas had always intended to fill in the gaps between the movies with other content, because otherwise just skipping entirely over the Clone Wars is a really weird choice... but they suffer from the lack of fleshing out as a result, particularly in the treatment of Anakin... (which the Clone Wars series doesn't actually fix... he's still a completely different character at the end of the Clone Wars to the Anakin we see in RotS, which is a problem because the finale of Clone Wars is happening during RotS...)
This is pretty much the exact same thing that happened with the Sequels, though... Disney always intended the Star Wars franchise to encompass movies, TV series, comics and books, and so the sequels included a lot of stuff that was intended to be explained elsewhere. Which is fine for those who follow the entirety of the multimedia catalogue, but leaves a lot of gaps for those who are just watching the movies.
I like Dooku as a character and his scene in Attack of the Clones where he lays out the entire plot to Obi-wan trying to recruit him is my favorite scene (and one of the few I recall) from the pre-quells.
Maul was just a blunt instrument. Dooku was actually interesting as a former Jedi himself, now turned Separatist.
He’s also not a creation of Palpatine. His disillusionment with the Order and the Republic are his own. Palpatine simply harnessed what was already there.
I think there's a few things at play with the prequels. The Phantom Menace was jarring in a lot of ways; some of which it was at fault with and some of which are a result of audience expectations. Star Wars at the point had always been kind of run down and despite repeatedly stating in the films that we were in the boonies, the EU rarely got across the idea that there was true opulence in the core worlds until we saw Naboo, which really ran afoul of audience expectations and felt more like an artifact of early CGI than an intentional choice. That's actually probably been the best element of Disney's TV push, as its really depicted life of the elite as something almost alien to the sands of Tantooine in a way that I think TPM wanted to say, but didn't quite have the time or chops to pull off.
Maul was the interesting villain through-line the prequels needed like Vader was. And his role as this horrible demon looking assassin is a great way to show Anakins fall to the dark side.
I think Maul is likely a character that got compromised as they realized that while an incredible stuntman, Ray Park just wasn't an actor who could deliver lines. Over the years he's had an incredible amount of dialogue cut from every film he's been in and while I bear the man no ill will at all, I think its just one of those calls you have to make while filming that something just isn't going to work.
I suspect that Lucas had always intended to fill in the gaps between the movies with other content, because otherwise just skipping entirely over the Clone Wars is a really weird choice... but they suffer from the lack of fleshing out as a result, particularly in the treatment of Anakin... (which the Clone Wars series doesn't actually fix... he's still a completely different character at the end of the Clone Wars to the Anakin we see in RotS, which is a problem because the finale of Clone Wars is happening during RotS...)
My understanding is the TV show was always part of the plan, but its worth noting that the OT skips over huge chunks of content as well and benefits greatly for it. One of the best elements of those films is their ability to drop you into the middle of an ongoing adventure without setup beyond the title crawl and let you feel instantly reconnected with what's going on. I think the prequels try to pull that off again and I'd argue RotS does, but AotC definitely stumbles by requiring an entirely new Anakin.
Can someone familiar with the Old EU tell me when the Rule of Two first cropped up?
It is of course mentioned in TPM, making it officially canon at that point. But for the period when no films were coming out, it also explains why, Sith wise, there was just Palpatine and Vader, rather than hundreds of the evil buggers.
Pretty sure it’s old Republic fluff, but don’t know if TPM did it first.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Can someone familiar with the Old EU tell me when the Rule of Two first cropped up?
It is of course mentioned in TPM, making it officially canon at that point. But for the period when no films were coming out, it also explains why, Sith wise, there was just Palpatine and Vader, rather than hundreds of the evil buggers.
Pretty sure it’s old Republic fluff, but don’t know if TPM did it first.
It's first mentioned in TPM's "always two" line. It got built out further during the prequel era when they introduced Darth Bane.
I thought it was older than that, but it was more that prior to TPM learning the ways of the Force was always treated as a Master/Apprentice tradition that created a paired dynamic more than their being a hard line limit on Sith that we got with the Rule of Two and certainly a far cry from the institutionalized mandatory training we see from the prequels.
Honestly this makes me a little sad that we never really see Vader hunting Jedi. Both Maul and Dooku die to only a very few Jedi. It would have been really awesome to have had part where we saw Vader going after and beating actual Jedi after his transformation. Showing just how brutal and scary he is to other Jedi compared to others.
I partially agree. Certainly there’s room for such stuff in the still not massively explored time between Prequel and OT for that.
But the newly minted Vader being given relatively menial “but it’s definitely important, I promise” tasks, such as hunting down the Younglings is something I see as deliberate.
His actions in Palpatine’s office are rash, and done in the heat of the moment. He’d fallen far, but there was still room for him to come to his senses and take out Palpatine - and Palpatine knew he was capable, especially if going all Angry Dark Side.
So he’s kept off balance, given vile tasks to drive him ever further into guilt and despair, giving him a much longer road to walk to turn around. And importantly, keep him a tool. Something useful to Palpatine, and to be kept around and subservient, until such time as You’re Dead Or Palpatine Finds Someone Better, as happened to both Maul and Tyranus.
Overread wrote: Honestly this makes me a little sad that we never really see Vader hunting Jedi. Both Maul and Dooku die to only a very few Jedi. It would have been really awesome to have had part where we saw Vader going after and beating actual Jedi after his transformation. Showing just how brutal and scary he is to other Jedi compared to others.
Definitely something that's been covered well elsewhere (Rebels in particular) and something that was supposed to be part of the original prequel designs. Anakin at one point was going to start hunting down Jedi that had gone rogue for example. There's a lot that got crammed into RotS and there's tons of cut content that was filmed. There's a 4 hour rough cut that tries to wrap up all the ideas that mostly got cut to try and focus on Anakin's fall that test audiences felt was too weak.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Can someone familiar with the Old EU tell me when the Rule of Two first cropped up?
It is of course mentioned in TPM, making it officially canon at that point. But for the period when no films were coming out, it also explains why, Sith wise, there was just Palpatine and Vader, rather than hundreds of the evil buggers.
Pretty sure it’s old Republic fluff, but don’t know if TPM did it first.
Didn’t the Old Republic come out after the Prequels? I’m fairly sure the prequels were the source of the rule of two.
However, I also remember a time (the ESB novelization) when Darth Vader was a dark lord of the sith rather than the dark lord of the sith. I remember feeling like it implied there could be more Darth Vader types in the empire who just weren’t part of the Death Star/Skywalker arc so weren’t onscreen, and Star Wars was a much more open setting.
The early novels had Mara Jade and other force sensitive agents of the Emperor, when Sith might have been a regional rank of ethnic title or whatever. I don’t know if they were ever specifically called apprentices, but the Emperor clearly liked to keep his options open.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Can someone familiar with the Old EU tell me when the Rule of Two first cropped up?
It is of course mentioned in TPM, making it officially canon at that point. But for the period when no films were coming out, it also explains why, Sith wise, there was just Palpatine and Vader, rather than hundreds of the evil buggers.
Pretty sure it’s old Republic fluff, but don’t know if TPM did it first.
Didn’t the Old Republic come out after the Prequels? I’m fairly sure the prequels were the source of the rule of two.
However, I also remember a time (the ESB novelization) when Darth Vader was a dark lord of the sith rather than the dark lord of the sith. I remember feeling like it implied there could be more Darth Vader types in the empire who just weren’t part of the Death Star/Skywalker arc so weren’t onscreen, and Star Wars was a much more open setting.
The early novels had Mara Jade and other force sensitive agents of the Emperor, when Sith might have been a regional rank of ethnic title or whatever. I don’t know if they were ever specifically called apprentices, but the Emperor clearly liked to keep his options open.
The original Old Republic stuff was part of the Dark Horse line of comics in the 90s. It's notable for having lightsabers with power cords and really REALLY wanting Star Wars to be Dune even more than ANH. When KotOR was released there were people upset it didn't seem to have anything to do with those comics but definitely more of what people wanted after the prequels.
The Sith wasn't really a defined thing for quite a while. Fans often referred to them as the dark counterpart to Jedi, but it wasn't locked in for quite a while. Famously Zahn's original draft of Heir to the Empire had the race of Thrawn's little assassin alien friends be the Sith. The planet worshipped Vader and would eventually bestow Leia with the title of Lady of the Sith in the book. George Lucas decided he would rather use the name for dark Force users whenever he got around to the prequels and made Zahn change their race to the Noghri. I'm pretty sure some of the other EU books introduced Dark Jedi as Sith Lords before the prequels though.
Notably, the nature of the Force is something that was almost entirely codified by outside elements. Games in particular really played up the dichotomy of Light and Dark where the intention and portrayal was more built around the corrupting influence of power.
So part of the Old Republic as a setting was to set a period of Star Wars history so far back in time, they could do whatever they wanted and not have to worry about continuity. Then Knights of the Old Republic became so popular among the fanbase explaining the transition from The Old Republic to the Prequel era became a whole sub-genre in the old EU.
Can someone familiar with the Old EU tell me when the Rule of Two first cropped up?
Darth Bane, if I recall right it has been a long time, is first mentioned for the very first time in the Phantom Menace novelization but Lucas had already somewhat developed the idea of the character before that. The Rule of Two is mentioned at the end of the film for the first time but the novelization had a little more detail and subsequent EU material further expanded on the idea and Bane as a character. But the idea that there were only two sith lords is older going all the way back to the Zahn novels and dark horse comics that really started the EU as a thing. It just wasn't formally codified as an explicit 'rule' until the Phantom Menace.
A lot of the EU material in the 90s was focused on after the first three movies where the origins and rules of the Sith weren't that important since the most prominent villains were Palpatine, dark Jedi, Palpatine, Imperial officers, or Palpatine. In this early era of EU material the Sith and their origins were not a coherent topic that was being explored. I think writers tended to interpret that Palpatine didn't want to share power too much and that's why it was just him an Vader and whether or not there were other Sith was something that came up now but the ideas were more scattered and not built around any explicit rule or idea of a rule.
One thing to note is that at this stage, the EU was still relatively young. Phantom Menace came out in 1999 while the core novels that would really shape the EU were the Thrawn books and the Dark Empire comics from the early to mid 90s. The EU was a lot looser then, not quite as obsessive about everything making sense as a whole, and writers tended to write around a lot of things instead of trying to define them or tie them together. That changed around the same time as the Prequels as Lucas transformed Star Wars into a multimedia Empire where he operated with a more direct hand in planning and production of projects. Tales of the Jedi, the novelizations, and the New Jedi Order book series all came out in these same time period so all of it was roughly in line with one another and behind the sense the writers were all talking to each other and Lucas so they all had loose understandings of what everyone else was doing.
It didn't start falling apart into a mess until the Clone Wars movie and series in 08 started rewriting significant elements of the EU, and Lucas' rampant ego trips over how everyone liked the EU stuff other people were writing more than his gakky movies, became a point of contention. Up to that point, things roughly tended to be created in blocks where all the creators knew what was going on and even if they didn't directly coordinate what they were doing they could write around one another and make everything fit together.
The early novels had Mara Jade and other force sensitive agents of the Emperor, when Sith might have been a regional rank of ethnic title or whatever. I don’t know if they were ever specifically called apprentices, but the Emperor clearly liked to keep his options open.
Jade and the other Hands of the Emperor were first mentioned in Heir to the Empire back in 1991. The idea of Palpatine having acolytes trained in the force but not specifically trained in the Dark Side is pretty old, but the idea back then I think was looser. The Hands would be the early precursor to the Inquisitors who would appear in the Disney canon filling some of the same roles in the setting but being more like mildly force trained special ops rather than sub-Sith.
It didn't start falling apart into a mess until the Clone Wars movie and series in 08 started rewriting significant elements of the EU, and Lucas' rampant ego trips over how everyone liked the EU stuff other people were writing more than his gakky movies, became a point of contention. Up to that point, things roughly tended to be created in blocks where all the creators knew what was going on and even if they didn't directly coordinate what they were doing they could write around one another and make everything fit together.
I'd argue they fell apart the moment the Vong were introduced, but I'm spiteful like that.
LunarSol wrote: I'd argue they fell apart the moment the Vong were introduced, but I'm spiteful like that.
I feel like I'm the only person who looks back and says 'you what, the Vong weren't so bad. Not great but not so bad.' XD
But mostly I refer to the continuity of it all. It all mostly fit together fairly well until Lucas became more of a dictator about things and started rewriting them. Some of his rewrites, imo, were blatantly spiteful serving no purpose other than to piss into the porridge as his relationship with the fanbase became increasingly toxic for both sides.
LunarSol wrote: I'd argue they fell apart the moment the Vong were introduced, but I'm spiteful like that.
I feel like I'm the only person who looks back and says 'you what, the Vong weren't so bad. Not great but not so bad.' XD
But mostly I refer to the continuity of it all. It all mostly fit together fairly well until Lucas became more of a dictator about things and started rewriting them. Some of his rewrites, imo, were blatantly spiteful serving no purpose other than to piss into the porridge as his relationship with the fanbase became increasingly toxic for both sides.
I was never a fan of Serpentor and the denizens of Cobra-La Vong.
Except for one tiny bit of storyline that I thought was truly inspired. Palpatine had visions of the Vong invasion and knew that everything would be lost, so he built a strong Empire and military tonight the Vong with. The Rebellion screwed with everything and allowed the Vong to run roughshod on the galaxy.
LunarSol wrote: I'd argue they fell apart the moment the Vong were introduced, but I'm spiteful like that.
I feel like I'm the only person who looks back and says 'you what, the Vong weren't so bad. Not great but not so bad.' XD.
No, I actually really enjoyed the Vong arc overall. While some of the individual books were a little ropey, and there was some awfully inconsistent characterisation (particularly with Luke), they were an interesting change from the Imperial Warlord/Superweapon of the Month storytelling that made up most of the EU.
LunarSol wrote: I'd argue they fell apart the moment the Vong were introduced, but I'm spiteful like that.
I feel like I'm the only person who looks back and says 'you what, the Vong weren't so bad. Not great but not so bad.' XD
But mostly I refer to the continuity of it all. It all mostly fit together fairly well until Lucas became more of a dictator about things and started rewriting them. Some of his rewrites, imo, were blatantly spiteful serving no purpose other than to piss into the porridge as his relationship with the fanbase became increasingly toxic for both sides.
I was never a fan of Serpentor and the denizens of Cobra-La Vong.
Except for one tiny bit of storyline that I thought was truly inspired. Palpatine had visions of the Vong invasion and knew that everything would be lost, so he built a strong Empire and military tonight the Vong with. The Rebellion screwed with everything and allowed the Vong to run roughshod on the galaxy.
That’s too 40k for Star Wars. “I was a tyrannical monster for the greater good” is a terrible twist.
Automatically Appended Next Post: I gave up on Star Wars EU before the Vong, came back in for a book or two of the New Jedi Order to see what they were about, and noped right out again. And I still think they’d have worked better for the Sequel trilogy than what we got.
Has the new EU ever explored a droid uprising? Maybe that’s a direction that hasn’t been mined out.
LunarSol wrote: I'd argue they fell apart the moment the Vong were introduced, but I'm spiteful like that.
I feel like I'm the only person who looks back and says 'you what, the Vong weren't so bad. Not great but not so bad.' XD
But mostly I refer to the continuity of it all. It all mostly fit together fairly well until Lucas became more of a dictator about things and started rewriting them. Some of his rewrites, imo, were blatantly spiteful serving no purpose other than to piss into the porridge as his relationship with the fanbase became increasingly toxic for both sides.
I was never a fan of Serpentor and the denizens of Cobra-La Vong.
Except for one tiny bit of storyline that I thought was truly inspired. Palpatine had visions of the Vong invasion and knew that everything would be lost, so he built a strong Empire and military tonight the Vong with. The Rebellion screwed with everything and allowed the Vong to run roughshod on the galaxy.
That’s too 40k for Star Wars. “I was a tyrannical monster for the greater good” is a terrible twist.
Automatically Appended Next Post: I gave up on Star Wars EU before the Vong, came back in for a book or two of the New Jedi Order to see what they were about, and noped right out again. And I still think they’d have worked better for the Sequel trilogy than what we got.
Has the new EU ever explored a droid uprising? Maybe that’s a direction that hasn’t been mined out.
Twice. Tales of the Bounty Hunters has a story about IG-88 in which it is actually 4 bodies with copies of the same mind. While some of the bodies do bounty hunting jobs as a cover they also take over a droid manufacturing planet and implant code to do a droid uprising upon their trigger. (Dash Rendar fights an IG-88 on this planet in the n64 starwars game). The planet ends up manufacturing the primary computer systems for the Deathstar 2 and IG-88 copies himself into the console. It amused itself by shutting doors on Palpatine's face before the rebels blew it up.
HK 47 from KotoR wants to kill all flesh bags. It was implied somewhere that IG-88s code may have been based on HK-47s.
Sustained Mind Wibble Alert. Sustained Mind Wibble Alert
Last few posts have me a bit dewy eyed for the relatively few Old EU Books I read. Specifically, Tales of the Mos Eisley Cantina, Tales of the Bounty Hunters and Tales from Jabba’s Palace.
Short flights of fancy, providing unnecessary background to background, sometimes literal “blink and you’ll miss them” characters. All in the name of world building. They were, mostly, pretty great. Not universally so, but I wouldn’t say any were crap.
And I’ve often wondered….Did That Start With Kenner?
From the off, the 3 3/4” Star Wars range went hard. Not just the goodies and Generic Evil Bad Guy Goons. But creatures from the Cantina, a Droid just about visible in one scene aboard the Deathstar etc.
And back then, they had generic names. Walrusman, Hammerhead, Snaggletooth and so on. They also hailed from a time juuuust before widespread, affordable home media.
That left a bunch of kids obsessed with Star Wars, with their figures, and their imagination.
Is it that hard to conceive that, just perhaps, the stories in “Mos Eisley Cantina” first began as a childhood head canon, possibly honed through an RPG, before becoming canon?
God Bless Kenner, especially as despite it clearly being a license to print money, they forever improved their offerings. Compare the early Cantina Aliens in sculpt and screen accuracy to those from Jabba’s Palace. They didn’t need to go that hard. But they bloody did!
Much of what became "cannon" started with the West End Games line of RPGs and Wargames I still have my WEG Star Wars RPG and played it short adventure just last year. It is a solid system, but the wargame is clearly "of its time".
It’s still a crime that we’re yet to see a Starhawk on screen, outside of vidya games.
Maybe we might start seeing them in Ahsoka S2? I mean, someone’s bound to give Thrawn a kicking, and a brand new ship with (to him) unknown capabilities might be the very dab.
Though I still expect the Nightsisters to betray him. Their arrangement very much seems one of convenience, as neither’s return could’ve happened without the others.
What's a shame is poor Kyle Katarn, Dash Rendar and the Droid Pilot from Hollywood Studios Star Tours.
Katarn's Moldy Crow has been Disney canonized in the Marvel Comics, while Dash's YT-2000 was inserted into Episode IV and the Star Tours transport shows up for the end battle against poor logistics in Rise of Skywalker.
Kyle was definitely one of my absolute favorite characters and I love the Moldy Crow as short lived as it was. Raven's Claw was never a good replacement.
Can't say I feel the same about Dash. IMO he was never more than a poor Solo stand in during the carbonite era.
Corran Horn and Mara Jade are probably the other two standouts missing for me.
Just too angular for me. Also, its windscreens are on the sides and the top, so how do you see where you’re going?
It’s like the K-Wing. I’ll stop short of calling it a Bad Starfighter Design, as even though I don’t like it, no doubt it’ll have its fans. Treading on such toes serves no purpose. But I will argue it doesn’t look like a Star Wars design.
It's definitely the product of its era where they had 7 or 8 total polygons to work with. Similar design to the Star Fox Arwing in that regard and similar to some of the ships designed for the X-Wing/TIE Fighter era of games. It's also a transport primarily so its got a design more in line with things like the Stinger Mantis. It's definitely a little awkward though, with its size and interior never being nailed down to something functional. I just really like its overall look.
I'll agree with you on the K-Wing. I don't hate the overall idea of the thing as like a patrol ship deal, but its wildly overdesigned. There's just so much stuff on it with the extra engines and missiles and stuff in places that don't make sense. If the front was a single interior it would probably work better, but the 4 individual crew compartments is just really weird overall.
Going back to where the characters in the cantina and Jabba's Palace and elsewhere got their names and backgrounds for the "Tales of" books, a lot of them were invented by the Star Wars Customizable Card Game, released by Decipher Inc. in the mid to late '90s. We've got that card game to thank for a lot of little snippets of Star Wars lore.
Easy E wrote: After watching Andor my wife wanted to watch Rogue One and the Original Trilogy.
I had not watched the OT in years, and it was fun revisiting them after not having seen them in about a decade.
My only wish is being about to see the OT without the added scenes of the special editions. I would love to watch the OT theatrical versions again. Alas. I do not own a VCR.
Han simply shot. Poor old Greedo was much too busy doing a dead for there to be a range of numbered shots.
You cannot shoot first if no-one shot after. You simply shot.
That and I hate the Jabba that they showed in the remaster. IT was one of those "he looks nothing what so ever like he should" moments that I'm sure is justified somehow in the lore in the background; but visually on screen looks terrible.
But yeah Greedo being shown to shoot and miss whilst sitting across a table was just BAD. Even a beginner who has never shot a blaster before can shoot at that range and Greedo is a bounty hunter - he knows how to use a gun. He would not miss at that range.
So showing him miss is just bad. Let alone the fact that a whole point of that scene is showing Han shoot first.
Easy E wrote: After watching Andor my wife wanted to watch Rogue One and the Original Trilogy.
I had not watched the OT in years, and it was fun revisiting them after not having seen them in about a decade.
My only wish is being about to see the OT without the added scenes of the special editions. I would love to watch the OT theatrical versions again. Alas. I do not own a VCR.
The theatrical versions were released on DVD almost 20 years ago. They looked like crap, but they were the originals.
Sadly, I left them at my parents place so cousins could watch them, and I suspect they’ve gone walking with Obiwan.
LunarSol wrote: I'm not a purist when it comes to the remasters. There's bits I really like and bits I really don't. I need a version with toggles
I can actually agree with this. Engance the visuals and sound. Add the little bits of extended shots that don't take away or add anything but just workd build. Remove the singing. Remove the early jabba. Remove a lot of the extended edition nonsense. Toggles is where its at.
Overread wrote: That and I hate the Jabba that they showed in the remaster. IT was one of those "he looks nothing what so ever like he should" moments that I'm sure is justified somehow in the lore in the background; but visually on screen looks terrible.
I used to like this scene more. Seeing Ford work his charms is always a delight and when I first saw it, it gave me a better understanding of the pressure that drives him in the rest of the story. Some of that might have been that I was just really bad at reading subtitles, because in hindsight the actual dialogue is incredibly redundant with the conversation with Greedo, which has made me less inclined to defend it. Still, it's not a bad scene, even if I prefer saving Jabba's reveal for Jedi.
Greedo shouldn't shoot. I don't think there's any question there.
I think the one scene added I consider essential is Luke's reunion with Biggs. That adds so much to the film and clearly never should have been cut in the first place.
Overread wrote: That and I hate the Jabba that they showed in the remaster. IT was one of those "he looks nothing what so ever like he should" moments that I'm sure is justified somehow in the lore in the background; but visually on screen looks terrible.
I used to like this scene more. Seeing Ford work his charms is always a delight and when I first saw it, it gave me a better understanding of the pressure that drives him in the rest of the story. Some of that might have been that I was just really bad at reading subtitles, because in hindsight the actual dialogue is incredibly redundant with the conversation with Greedo, which has made me less inclined to defend it. Still, it's not a bad scene, even if I prefer saving Jabba's reveal for Jedi.
Greedo shouldn't shoot. I don't think there's any question there.
I think the one scene added I consider essential is Luke's reunion with Biggs. That adds so much to the film and clearly never should have been cut in the first place.
The definitive version for me on if Han or Greedo shot first is this and you can't convince me otherwise
My main gripe with the special editions is that so much of the added CGI has just not aged at all well. Some of it is perfect, like the expansion of Cloud City in ESB... but the random inserted character stuff, or things like the random CGI Ronto wandering in front of the camera, just look cartoony and out of place.
Overread wrote: That and I hate the Jabba that they showed in the remaster. IT was one of those "he looks nothing what so ever like he should" moments that I'm sure is justified somehow in the lore in the background; but visually on screen looks terrible.
They've fixed this somewhat in newer revisions, with Jabba at least now actually looking like Jabba (same as they fixed Episode 1 Yoda), but the scene really still doesn't work... it's redundant, and Jabba shouldn't be doing his own busywork.
Although I did see a comment a few years back from someone that pointed out it would have worked better if they had replaced the human stand-in with a holo-projector instead of actual Jabba. That would have also solved the problem of Han walking around him without the artificial tail-step.
But yeah Greedo being shown to shoot and miss whilst sitting across a table was just BAD. Even a beginner who has never shot a blaster before can shoot at that range and Greedo is a bounty hunter - he knows how to use a gun. He would not miss at that range.
In the old legends continuity he was at least portrayed as not a very good bounty hunter... But yeah, that scene is my least favourite special edition change, and the subsequent revisions of it (adding Han bending aside) have only managed to make it worse.
insaniak wrote: My main gripe with the special editions is that so much of the added CGI has just not aged at all well. Some of it is perfect, like the expansion of Cloud City in ESB... but the random inserted character stuff, or things like the random CGI Ronto wandering in front of the camera, just look cartoony and out of place.
Overread wrote: That and I hate the Jabba that they showed in the remaster. IT was one of those "he looks nothing what so ever like he should" moments that I'm sure is justified somehow in the lore in the background; but visually on screen looks terrible.
They've fixed this somewhat in newer revisions, with Jabba at least now actually looking like Jabba (same as they fixed Episode 1 Yoda), but the scene really still doesn't work... it's redundant, and Jabba shouldn't be doing his own busywork.
Although I did see a comment a few years back from someone that pointed out it would have worked better if they had replaced the human stand-in with a holo-projector instead of actual Jabba. That would have also solved the problem of Han walking around him without the artificial tail-step.
But yeah Greedo being shown to shoot and miss whilst sitting across a table was just BAD. Even a beginner who has never shot a blaster before can shoot at that range and Greedo is a bounty hunter - he knows how to use a gun. He would not miss at that range.
In the old legends continuity he was at least portrayed as not a very good bounty hunter... But yeah, that scene is my least favourite special edition change, and the subsequent revisions of it (adding Han bending aside) have only managed to make it worse.
I am in the camp that says that talking about Jabba for 2 movies and then finally revealing him in the 3rd was big and a good smart move. Revealing him in the first movie is a mistake no matter how its put together.
Yeah, I mean even in Empire Solo talks about a near miss with a Bounty Hunter of Ord Mantell. This adds a sense of time between Yavin and Hoth. Things happened off-screen and it helps the world feel lived in.
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