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Out there theory?

Proper proper “pants on head, and the pants are made from tinfoil, and I’m sitting on a hat stand” theory?

Baylon is after a door to the World Between Worlds. He spoke of the cycle, and wanting to end it. And I think stopping it before it began.

If Disney wanted? This could create a divergent timeline. Baylon goes back. Somehow mediates between the extremes of Jedi and Sith philosophy, thus balancing things and ending that cycle.


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Also?

Sooner or later, we need a Choppervision episode.

One episode. Entirely from Chopper’s point of view.

And if you don’t like that? Well you can just go and watch Jersey Shore.

(No don’t do that I don’t want you to go insane and have your eyes melt and your brain dribble out your nose)

Disney isn't going to retcon the sequels. They're currently riding high on prequel nostalgia, so apparently you CAN polish a turd with enough time and effort. Current hires have been to get back Daisy Ridley to do Rey's Jedi academy after all.

Personally I find more and more people demanding every project completely reshape the foundation of the universe is just setting themselves up for disappointment. Next week I'm going to read some angry rant about how someone thinks Ahsoka sucks because it didn't turn out that Ezra was possessed by some all powerful Dark Side Force god that Thrawn sacrifices himself to save the universe from.

Which is why the pants perched atop my bonce are made from finest tinfoil on that one

And to be honest? The Clone Wars has been redeeming the prequel era since 2008 dude. 2008. I didn’t even need to pretend to be Not Old back then! 2008 man, LIVE IN THE NOW!

I do however entirely and uncomedically agree with your second point though.

I mean.... it took a bit for Clone Wars to really hit its stride, but we're still at the point where the Prequel era has had more years of great content than bad. It just doesn't make those make me want to sit through those films again.

A key element that made the prequels redeemable is that people didn't necessarily hate the story being told, they hated the execution. TCW was successful because it expanded that story while also being well executed, and contextualized a lot of the execution issues that had put people off.

When it comes to the sequels however, the execution isn't really the issue - it's mostly the story that people hate, and that's a steeper mountain to climb.

Yet I for one unironically enjoy the sequels.

Are they perfect? Objectively no.

Are they decent? Subjectively yes.

Are they a bit ropey? Subjectively yes.

Are they disappointing? Kinda. I mean I totally get why others don’t enjoy them and fair enough.

Are they abominations? (Sorry to Chaos, this isn’t specifically aimed at your good self ) Maybe try watching some actually bloody awful films, those with no redeeming qualities at all, and thus expand your media literacy and get back to me.’

Star Wars, at its very, very worst? It’s just not plumbed certain depths of incompetence. No, not even the Ewok movies which remain a not-so-guilty pleasure of mine,

Go and watch objectively crap films. Which ironically can be subjective.

But I’m thinking Manos Hand of Fate, and Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things.

So for me? I don’t care if didn’t enjoy the latest Star Wars offering. I do care if you have something constructive to say in the way of criticism. And if you do? I may well respond with a counter point, but hopefully I won’t be a dick about that.

What I do object to are folks over egging their pudding of criticism and confusing the somewhat disappointing but still actually really well made with Utter Utter Crap Where They Couldn’t Even Steady The Shot And Keep It In Focus crap.

And given I’ve mentioned media literacy? I’m no graduate in anything. I’m now 43 years old* and despite my career path the highest qualifications are C grade GCSE’s from 1996. So I’ll freely admit I’m utterly unqualified.

But what I do do is watch and learn from those who are genuinely qualified.

Do something or ideally better? And get a grip of what Gakky Media actually is, and separate it from the merely disappointing.

*No, I don’t know when or how that happened. Getting old sucks,

chaos0xomega wrote:
A key element that made the prequels redeemable is that people didn't necessarily hate the story being told, they hated the execution. TCW was successful because it expanded that story while also being well executed, and contextualized a lot of the execution issues that had put people off.

When it comes to the sequels however, the execution isn't really the issue - it's mostly the story that people hate, and that's a steeper mountain to climb.

and it helps that for all it's flaws people generally agree that the third act, ROTS, stuck the landing. The prequals ALSO brought in new concepts, new ways of looking at Star wars etc.

The sequals not only failed to stick their landing, but by and large also didn't give us anything new, Rise of Skywalker read like a mid 90s EU story in the worst way possiable.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:


Are they abominations? (Sorry to Chaos, this isn’t specifically aimed at your good self ) Maybe try watching some actually bloody awful films, those with no redeeming qualities at all, and thus expand your media literacy and get back to me.’

Pffft. You like Rocky Horror, your judgement on this is questionable at best.

But seriously (and unironically), one of my favorite movies, if you want to talk about bad, is The Apple - a movie so famously bad that the director tried to kill himself after the premier. I know bad cinema, and I'm comfortable saying that the sequels are gak. They all work fine as standalone films - well acted, well paced, okayish plotlines in isolation from one another and the broader franchise, gorgeous visuals, good special effects, etc. but thats the thing - they aren't standalone films. They exist within the context of a broader franchise and need to work in the context of the films that came before, as well as with the other elements of the trilogy. They don't, and thats why they are bad. Because they are disjointed from one another as well as the long-standing and well-established throughlines that have undergirded the series for 40 years. Its like if the Fifth Element was released as a Star Wars film - love the movie, lots of people do, but if you put a Star Wars label on it then people will have expectations of it. Expectations that the film cannot and would not meet, and as a result the reaction to it would be negative.

 ThePaintingOwl wrote:

The_Real_Chris wrote:
What a damming indictment of Disney though that so few can imagine Thrawn actually winning in any significant way. Would they be able to have him come back and unite Imperial fractions into a credible threat. On one hand Hollywood can mirror yank concerns (and they are ambivalent about authoritarian regimes currently), on the other they really want to flog stuff to said regimes.

How is it an indictment of Disney that the series exists in a larger story? Knowing that Thrawn has to lose has nothing to do with any weaknesses of their writers or whatever you're trying to say about real-world political stuff, it's simply the fact that Ahsoka exists in a known timeline where only a short time remains before the sequel trilogy begins. There isn't enough time for Thrawn to win on any significant scale, he has to be quickly defeated so the Republic can stay in its state of peaceful ignorance and the First Order can begin to do its thing. It's like watching a WWII movie and complaining that the Germans are clearly being set up for defeat and nobody believes they will win.

Which IS the fault of them continually producing stories in this ever narrowing era of the universe. As good a show as Andor was and Ahsoka is turning out to be, something like Thrawn is basically wasted here. It's cool seeing why he is such a good threat. It sucks there is no room for him to actually be one.

For Eff’s Sake Don’t Delve Into The Old EU then.

 Lance845 wrote:

 ThePaintingOwl wrote:

The_Real_Chris wrote:
What a damming indictment of Disney though that so few can imagine Thrawn actually winning in any significant way. Would they be able to have him come back and unite Imperial fractions into a credible threat. On one hand Hollywood can mirror yank concerns (and they are ambivalent about authoritarian regimes currently), on the other they really want to flog stuff to said regimes.

How is it an indictment of Disney that the series exists in a larger story? Knowing that Thrawn has to lose has nothing to do with any weaknesses of their writers or whatever you're trying to say about real-world political stuff, it's simply the fact that Ahsoka exists in a known timeline where only a short time remains before the sequel trilogy begins. There isn't enough time for Thrawn to win on any significant scale, he has to be quickly defeated so the Republic can stay in its state of peaceful ignorance and the First Order can begin to do its thing. It's like watching a WWII movie and complaining that the Germans are clearly being set up for defeat and nobody believes they will win.

Which IS the fault of them continually producing stories in this ever narrowing era of the universe. As good a show as Andor was and Ahsoka is turning out to be, something like Thrawn is basically wasted here. It's cool seeing why he is such a good threat. It sucks there is no room for him to actually be one.

Which is a problem of the sequel trilogy as well. The background narrative that underpins the sequel trilogy heavily limits the stories you can tell over the intervening time period from RotJ to TFA. The sequel trilogy (in my view) made the setting very boring, stagnant, and small, rather than leaving it as a wide open realm of possibility. The prequel trilogy didn't really have that issue, even though we knew what the "destination" was, there was a wide open canvas filled with meaningful storytelling opportunities that had big stakes. Even though Ahsoka was never mentioned in the OT or within the PT itself, they still found a way to introduce her as a major fan-favorite character with deep plot relevance within the broader storyline in a way that works within the context of the broader franchise. Even though we know how the Prequel Trilogy ends and how the Original Trilogy starts, we really don't have much of a clue as to what exactly happened in the timespan in between and the storytelling that has arisen out of that knowledge gap has been surprising and deep. By contrast, we have a decently good understanding of the events that occurred in the gap between the Original Trilogy and the Sequel Trilogy because it is unreasonably well fleshed out even in the relative absence of media released detailing that time period, and as a result of that information we have a generally solid sense that not much of major consequence that we aren't already aware of can really happen in that gap, as it would push the constraints on the existing narrative in the absence of some big retcons.

In fact, its arguably not even the sequel trilogies fault as a lot of the narrative details and plot hooks (like the Galactic Civil War ending shortly after the Battle of Endor, the imperial remnant fleeing to the unknown regions en masse rather than going through an extended warlord era ala the old EU, and the Republic unilaterally disarming itself and living out the interbellum period in uneasy peace) aren't really even mentioned in the movies at all, those all come from supplementary materials released in support of the films, but were necessary as a means of explaining "how we got here" so that those movies would make sense in the context of the rest of the franchise - which IS a fault of the films, starting with The Force Awakens. Its not a reasonable or natural continuation of the plotline as we expected it to be. Our heroes won at the end of ROTJ, so why are they so unsatisfyingly on the back foot fighting the same enemy again like they were when we last left them? That requires a lot of narrative filler to explain and fill in the details so that it makes some modicum of sense, but a consequence of that is that it restricts your storytelling opportunities in a big way.

Had TFA gone in an even slightly different direction, you would not have needed all that background material, because the opening of TFA would have seemed like a natural continuation of how you might have expected the intervening 30 years to go, and that would have left open a huge world of possibility for what you can do in the "in between", because that narrative filler would no longer be a necessity.


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 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
For Eff’s Sake Don’t Delve Into The Old EU then.

The old EU is fantastic. Ok, it has lots of problems, issues, and stinkers. I'm okay with pretending that the Yuuzhan Vong war and everything that happened afterwards never happened - the words "Galactic Federation of Free Alliances" and "Galactic Federation Triumvirate" will forever haunt my dreams. As a piece of general storytelling advice - names that are a moutful to say like those are are trying too damned hard. If thats the direction your narrative is going, go in a different direction. If you've run out of good names for your factions, then you've leaned too hard into the concept of government instability to drive your narrative forward, and you need to dial it way back and explore other narrative directions rather than having a new character become a sith lord and overthrow the established galactic government every 5 years. The Old Republic stood for a thousand generations, you can let one of the subsequent successor states exist for longer than 30 years.

Anyway, yeah - I dig the EU. There was lots of individually bad aspects to the stroytelling, but bigger picture it all flowed together really well and made sense (...and then the Vong came....).

yeah the Galacitc federation of blah blah, was them trying to be clever, "lol, the thing is called the GFFA... get it,. galaxy far far away lol!"

lol, I never realized that. Its kinda cute, but not as a central aspect of your storytelling.

That was the penultimate episode? It feels like the story has only just got going.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
That was the penultimate episode? It feels like the story has only just got going.

Of the season.


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 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Maybe try watching some actually bloody awful films, those with no redeeming qualities at all, and thus expand your media literacy and get back to me.

Why? Why does it really matter whether a bad movie is terrible or really terrible? Once quality drops below a certain point it's all meaningless arguing for the sake of arguing, we don't need to come up with a perfect ordering of the 50 worst movies ever made. And the sequel movies are definitely below that point for most people. The plot is a mess, there's no internal consistency, nothing makes any sense unless you buy a bunch of tie-in products that give you the missing story pieces, the pacing is unbelievably bad, and somehow despite all the relentless jumping from CGI spectacle to CGI spectacle they commit the worst sin of a mindless action movie: they're boring.


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 Lance845 wrote:
Which IS the fault of them continually producing stories in this ever narrowing era of the universe. As good a show as Andor was and Ahsoka is turning out to be, something like Thrawn is basically wasted here. It's cool seeing why he is such a good threat. It sucks there is no room for him to actually be one.

I agree in principle but realistically there was zero chance Disney was going to do it. Or, ideally, declare the sequels non-canon and reboot the entire mess with room to properly follow the OT. The needs of the business dictate content between the OT and the sequels and it's not a strike against the writers that they're working with timeline constraints that were established before they started.

chaos0xomega wrote:

This is scientifically wrong. Your blood is 90% water molecules, water boils at room temperature at high altitudes, as it will in vacuum.

Theres no such thing as your bodies internal pressure. Your body is not a pressure vessel. It does not self-pressurize - otherwise you would quite literally explode when exposed to vacuum. Your body pressure is the environmental pressure. If you're tossed into a vacuum, then your "body pressure" gradually drops to zero and every water molecule in your body starts boiling as the boiling point decreases with the decrease in pressure. The idea that your blood won't is predicated on the idea that your cardiovascular system is a closed system and thus "pressurized" by the pump that is your heart, but one of the known effects of vacuum exposure on the human body is tissue rupture (again ebullism (not embolism - embolism is a side-effect of ebullism in this case) and internal bleeding) resulting from the boil-off of body moisture, as well as air escaping the lungs and your intestines. Your closed circulatory system won't stay closed for long (especially if you try holding your breath, which in reality will likely cause more tissue damage and take you out faster than if you didn't). Nobody said anything about the bends, ebullism is a vaguely similar but altogether different (and very real) phenomenon that does occur when the human body is exposed to low pressures at very high altitudes.

The argument of going from 1 to 0 is less damaging than going from high pressure to 1 because the number of atmospheres of change in pressure is smaller is not a good one. That assumes the pressure effects on the human body can be modeled linearly - they aren't. A submarine designed to withstand several atmospheres of pressure would not make a good spaceship, nor vice versa.

90% water is not 100% water. That additional 10% makes a big difference.

And yes, your body is a pressure vessel(anything that is air or liquid tight is capable of holding pressure). Otherwise your liquids would just leak out even in atmosphere. Yes, you will experience swelling. But your blood will not boil in your veins like you seem under the impression that it will. It would boil if you were actively bleeding(which is possible if you were injured from debris) but only as it left your body, though bleeding would be very very bad as the pressure difference would cause it to happen very fast.

Having read a little about Ebullism, it is again something that happens over hours and hours of exposure. It would not be an immediate thing.

So all of the issues you point out are correct, but over many minutes to hours of exposure. Not in the short term like 3-5 minutes which is what we are discussing.

What you seem to have missed wrt cosmic radiation is that when exposed to direct sunlight in space, the temperature of the exposed object very rapidly heats to 248degF. That will cook you (and that will *definitely* make your blood boil) unless you happen to be wearing a full body light color/reflective suit.

 ThePaintingOwl wrote:
Of the season.

Season. Series. The last television show of all time. Doesn't matter. Painfully slow and badly paced is painfully slow and badly paced no matter how you cut it.

(Well, unless you cut these 8 episodes into 4, and then made another 4 equally paced episodes... that would have helped).

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 ThePaintingOwl wrote:
Of the season.

Season. Series. The last television show of all time. Doesn't matter. Painfully slow and badly paced is painfully slow and badly paced no matter how you cut it.

(Well, unless you cut these 8 episodes into 4, and then made another 4 equally paced episodes... that would have helped).

You can say you don't like the pacing of the show but it very much matters whether it's the penultimate episode of the season or of the series. If it was the final episode of the series it absolutely would be a very bad situation, with no realistic hope of wrapping up a satisfying ending to everything within the limits of a 30-60 minute episode. But as the final episode of the season it has much less ambitious goals and plenty of time to get there. It has to close the chapter but it is absolutely expected that there will be unresolved elements going into next season.

BrianDavion wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:
A key element that made the prequels redeemable is that people didn't necessarily hate the story being told, they hated the execution. TCW was successful because it expanded that story while also being well executed, and contextualized a lot of the execution issues that had put people off.

When it comes to the sequels however, the execution isn't really the issue - it's mostly the story that people hate, and that's a steeper mountain to climb.

and it helps that for all it's flaws people generally agree that the third act, ROTS, stuck the landing. The prequals ALSO brought in new concepts, new ways of looking at Star wars etc.

The sequals not only failed to stick their landing, but by and large also didn't give us anything new, Rise of Skywalker read like a mid 90s EU story in the worst way possiable.

I actually quite enjoyed The Last Jedi, because it tried to do some new, interesting things (the relationship between Rey and Kylo is intriguing and delivered in a neat way), but then Rise spent 20-minutes retconning most of it out of existence, which meant that film lost me before it failed to do most of the rest of the things it was trying to do.

chaos0xomega wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:


Are they abominations? (Sorry to Chaos, this isn’t specifically aimed at your good self ) Maybe try watching some actually bloody awful films, those with no redeeming qualities at all, and thus expand your media literacy and get back to me.’

Pffft. You like Rocky Horror, your judgement on this is questionable at best.

But seriously (and unironically), one of my favorite movies, if you want to talk about bad, is i]The Apple[/i] - a movie so famously bad that the director tried to kill himself after the premier. I know bad cinema, and I'm comfortable saying that the sequels are gak. They all work fine as standalone films - well acted, well paced, okayish plotlines in isolation from one another and the broader franchise, gorgeous visuals, good special effects, etc. but thats the thing - they aren't standalone films. They exist within the context of a broader franchise and need to work in the context of the films that came before, as well as with the other elements of the trilogy. They don't, and thats why they are bad. Because they are disjointed from one another as well as the long-standing and well-established throughlines that have undegirded the series for 40 years. Its like if the Fifth Element was released as a Star Wars film - love the movie, lots of people do, but if you put a Star Wars label on it then people will have expectations of it. Expectations that the film cannot and would not meet, and as a result the reaction to it would be negative.

This. This is the biggest crime of the sequel trilogy; it’s the third time that you’ve done this, AND you releasing films into the post-MCU mediascape, and you don’t even bother to have a half hour meeting about what the overarching themes and plot arc for your tent pole films are going to be?! A thousand facepalm emojis isn’t enough to convey the utter incompetence on display there.

Likewise, I respect The Last Jedi for trying. It would have been a great middle film of a different trilogy, or even a great middle film of the trilogy it was made for, if someone other than JJ Abrams had responsibility for its sequel (or if JJ Abrams had any integrity whatsoever and followed through on the conclusion that TLJ had set up. Shame Colin Trevorrow got pulled off the project, as his treatment for what would have been The Rise of Skywalker would have fit neatly after TLJ and capped both movies in a satisfying manner.

I am a huge fan of the original trilogy but not a big fan of the prequels. That said there were some great bits in them and I do not dislike them as much as many do. However, the last three movies were abysmal in my opinion. I struggle to find anything positive to remark about them. Even the Book of Boba Fett, which was overall terrible had some good stuff in it, like the Tuskens, but the final three Skywalker movies…. I really dislike them. The more I think about it the more irked I get.

The conclusion of an epic saga muddled by studio politics and poor writing.

chaos0xomega wrote:


But seriously (and unironically), one of my favorite movies, if you want to talk about bad, is The Apple - a movie so famously bad that the director tried to kill himself after the premier.

Love The Apple. More people should watch it..... maybe... I think?

I just want them to move forward. I don't even want to see Rey build something. I want to see 500-1000 years into the future when what Rey built has already come and changed and become something else and she is a legendary figure.

Get away from all this crap to tell us something new.

 ThePaintingOwl wrote:
There isn't enough time for Thrawn to win on any significant scale, he has to be quickly defeated so the Republic can stay in its state of peaceful ignorance and the First Order can begin to do its thing. It's like watching a WWII movie and complaining that the Germans are clearly being set up for defeat and nobody believes they will win.

I would be quite happy with 2-3 years of steadily growing power and lighting successes, uniting the Imperial remnants, taking the equivalent of western Europe and part of Russia before being taken out in the kind of small scale Jedi decapitation event the SW universe loves so much.

Having now watched the latest episode...

Bonus points for saying break off attack as the fighters can't cope, flushing them out, then sending them back in once it was safer.

Very disappointed in the stormtroopers though. It wouldn't have taken much to have a few disposable local allies be with the main characters for what are supposed to be veteran long serving troops to competently cut through, before being beaten off by the Jedi. As it was they went out as easily as any other mook stormtroopers (still trying to think of any time since they first time we saw them storming the corvette where they are actually shown as competent - even in rogue one where they got a better shake they still weren't all that). Again would have cost little and would have started to give the heroes a credible protagonist which in virtually every star wars media they now painfully lack.

Technically they were assumed to be competent in Empire Strikes Back, though you don't really see it.

Rogue One was eeeh. You had the Death Troopers who worked well, until some dude turned the cheats on, otherwise it's kinda fifty-fifty, as long as no protagonists are involved, anyway.

 Bobthehero wrote:
Technically they were assumed to be competent in Empire Strikes Back, though you don't really see it.

Rogue One was eeeh. You had the Death Troopers who worked well, until some dude turned the cheats on, otherwise it's kinda fifty-fifty, as long as no protagonists are involved, anyway.

Rogue one they went down like SS in a 50's/60's war film. Died in droves but took out plenty of allies in the process. For the films conventions that is fair enough I guess.
In empire? I assumed that was the fleet and armoured cav guys doing the heavy lifting... Then again they didn't let fleet and ground coordinate so no Ties backing up the walkers which was incompetent, inter services rivalry at its worse or the Rebs had Russian levels of air defence pointing skyward.

But still it is mind blowing for me that any vaguely competent writer doesn't understand you need something for heroes to triumph over. Unless they all grew up playing computer games on easy with headshot hacks on. I just really don't get it.

For blasting out the outer defenses of Echo base, maybe, but clearing out the inside was probably done by all the grunts, and a bit of Vader.

As for air support, at least it's present in Rogue Squadron - Rebel Strike, if delayed, mostly aimed at the transport, but it is lacking, I am chalking that one up to Lucas' lack of understanding of military strategy, but it is lacking nonetheless.

And I fully agree with your last sentence, the season finale of Mando season 1 actually turned me off the series altogether.

 Bobthehero wrote:
For blasting out the outer defenses of Echo base, maybe, but clearing out the inside was probably done by all the grunts, and a bit of Vader.

As for air support, at least it's present in Rogue Squadron - Rebel Strike, if delayed, mostly aimed at the transport, but it is lacking, I am chalking that one up to Lucas' lack of understanding of military strategy, but it is lacking nonetheless.

And I fully agree with your last sentence, the season finale of Mando season 1 actually turned me off the series altogether.

I blame Jon Favreau. Not that I have anything to back it up, mind. Not that I have anything against the guy in general. But I just can't imagine that the lead producer coming in after handling superheroes for a decade mixes well with the way Stormtroopers have traditionally been treated. You even have the superhero setup right there. All heroes with unbeatable plot armor on the good guy side surrounded by a boss enemy and his army of mooks on the other side. It went as predictably as one would expect.

I mean, they still managed to lower the stakes in Book of Boba, and that's saying something. But Mando proper really is a pretty sad show in that regard.

Add me to the list of people who don't see why you would want bad guys that take no effort to beat. It only makes the good guys look worse, and who wants that?

It's just a problem whenever you have a story with lethal conflicts and a Saturday morning rivalry conflict. The villains can't actually do the scary things they're capable of and the heroes mostly mop up jobbers before an inconclusive battle with the major villain.

I did think the last episode did a good job of making the Nighttroopers both jobbers but also JUST dangerous enough to turn the tide as long as Shin could back them up. They pretty efficiently established a pecking order and even that the villains are overall stronger than the heroes with Baylan in their ranks.

They’re also fighting against Jedi, and a Mandalorian. Two more or less functionally extinct cultures.

The Jedi in particular. When they can fling you around with a thought or gesture, know where you’re going to shoot before your shoot? Yeah you’re gonna look like a bunch of idiots. All the more so given how incredibly rare Jedi are, and so not exactly something you can properly train for.

Sabine is wearing Beskar, a material highly resistant to your weapon. Oh and she’s got one of those fancy laser swords as well.