ALL ENCOMPASSING STAR WARS THREAD

[JLSigman]

Someone on Mastodon said it best, this felt like episode 7 of 10, not 7 of 8. Either the last episode is going to be a movie in and of itself, or they leave a fuckton of dangling threads.

[Eivion]

There have been talks for a while now that Ahsoka may not be one and done series like originally assumed. I'm guessing we get at least one more season to set up whatever is happening in the movie.

I feel like a war between Imperial Remnants and the New Republic would have been addressed in the sequel trilogy so it feels like even if a skirmish or two happens we almost certainly get no actual war, especially with the First Order building in the background.

I'm thinking we get something of a rug pull with Thrawn coming back only to head immediately to the Chiss Ascendancy. They also a clearly hinting to something force wise having the Nightsister Great Mothers on the run. Baylan is presumably going to run into it before the series ends. 

You have to keep in mind Zahn has written Thrawn books in the new continuity, and Filoni has already hinted we should be figuring out why none of these important figures were there for the latest big war of the galaxy.

[keith_h]

I like the time dilation theory I saw somewhere, that when they arrive back in the main galaxy it'll be post sequel trilogy due to light speed relativity.

But I guess then I don't know how that would factor into the Mando team up movie...

[NikoBaltimore]

On 9/20/2023 at 8:36 PM, roofiethebutcher said:

I guess seeing Clone Wars and Rebels is needed because this is all very boring to me.  Don't care about most of these characters.  The best one, Baylan, unfortunately, won't be back. 

I only wanted to highlight this part because I personally never saw Clone Wars or Rebels.  It just never was something on my radar no matter how much I'd hear about it.  But this show has done the opposite in that I not only care about the characters but at the least would like to get a synopsis of both shows.  But I agree it's a shame Baylan isn't coming back because RIP Ray.  But holy bats he crushes it in damn near every scene he's in.

[Craig H]

My god, the New Republic just looks more and more really fucking frustratingly stupid. Why was that one stupid fuck who did all the talking even a Senator? They really are the most head in the sand government ever. I wanted to reach through my TV and smack all of them upside the head. Even Mon Mothma. MON! YOU WERE THERE, FOR, LIKE, EVERYTHING. You were there for the ascendancy of Palpatine, you were witness to Order 66, you remained an Imperial Senator until Palpatine dissolved it, you helped fund the Rebel Alliance, you were witness to the rise of Luke Skywalker, you know the force is real, you know there are Imperial loyalists serving in the government you're a chancellor for, you can't possibly believe Imperialists or a more powerful brand of them (COUGHFIRSTORDERCOUGH) won't rise up again, and yet...HERE YOU ARE! Surrounded by assclowns! Letting it all happen! I feel like Philip Seymour Hofman in Charlie Wilson's War.

Like, based on everything written that takes place pre-TFA, I get that the New Republic was pretty fucking dumb, but this is getting to be a little ridiculous now. Based on how dumb and naive they are, they shouldn't have even been able to form a government on one planet, let alone an entire system. 

The rest of the episode was pretty great, but yeah, it's hard to swallow that this was the penultimate episode even if they possibly do a movie or another season. There is just so much to wrap up or touch on with one episode left to go and knowing Disney's past, the final episode will probably only be 50 minutes.

I hope they pull it off though because I've really enjoyed this season or series or whatever you want to call it.

[Raziel]

I mean, that's been my chief complaint about Star Wars in total since the Disney buyout.  Aside from Rogue One, everything that's occurred in Disney Star Wars requires every single character to basically be either a Spaceball or a Spengo for any of it to actually work.  

[Craig H]

6 minutes ago, Raziel said:

I mean, that's been my chief complaint about Star Wars in total since the Disney buyout.  Aside from Rogue One, everything that's occurred in Disney Star Wars requires every single character to basically be either a Spaceball or a Spengo for any of it to actually work.  

I think this week's episode basically brought me to where you're at where now I'm just very frustrated at how unbelievably dumb the New Republic is. It was sort of amusing to see it in action during S3 of the Mandalorian, but that senate hearing for Hera was just maddening. And I can't really blame Filoni for it or anything because he's just playing the hand he's been dealt, but there are better ways to get to "Leia was right and all them rich New Republic government folks got what they had coming to them in TFA" than going the route of, like you said, making the government look like Spaceballs every time they're on screen.

[Log]

13 hours ago, NikoBaltimore said:

I only wanted to highlight this part because I personally never saw Clone Wars or Rebels.  It just never was something on my radar no matter how much I'd hear about it.  But this show has done the opposite in that I not only care about the characters but at the least would like to get a synopsis of both shows.  But I agree it's a shame Baylan isn't coming back because RIP Ray.  But holy bats he crushes it in damn near every scene he's in.

As someone who's pretty checked-out on SW right now, I would recommend Rebels for sure, and probably cherry-picking the best stuff from Clone Wars.

Rebels was a fun show that carved out it's own corner of the SW universe, which is nice. One of my major issues with the current crop of Filoni stuff is it's just too "hey, it's that character from the cartoon, but live!" for my liking without any real substance to the story. Rebels mostly avoids that by having it's own cast of fresh characters.

There was a recent season of Clone Wars, sort of an epilogue, a couple years ago that I remember digging.

[Eivion]

I find the comments on the New Republic weird considering how incompetent nearly every government on Earth has shown to be regularly throughout history into even now. Its never really a case of one person being able to change things, and when it comes close to that those people are typically a monstrous dictator. You also have keep in mind the New Republic government really isn't that different from the Imperial Senate or Old Republic. It actually is very much of the same rich assholes trying not to rock the boat likely more for their own personal interests/protection than the people of the galaxy or even their own homeworlds. There is little Mon Mothma can actually do to fix things. 

As for Hera's trial, she is talking about stuff that even most Jedi consider fairytales. And while Elsbeth was clearly up to something there wasn't much Hera had to back up on that being Thrawn's return or a concentrated effort of Imperial Remnants. Even Gideon's incident on Mandalore still looks like a lone warlord trying to build his personal forces. Its dangerous, but not enough to warrant a mass military effort. You have to keep in mind the New Republic is spending most of their resources on recovery. They don't want another big fight, and there probably are those who are hopeful most issues will resolve themselves without New Republic involvement like what happened with Gideon.

20 hours ago, NikoBaltimore said:

I only wanted to highlight this part because I personally never saw Clone Wars or Rebels.  It just never was something on my radar no matter how much I'd hear about it.  But this show has done the opposite in that I not only care about the characters but at the least would like to get a synopsis of both shows.  But I agree it's a shame Baylan isn't coming back because RIP Ray.  But holy bats he crushes it in damn near every scene he's in.

Clone Wars as a whole is good, but its also a war anthology and mileage can vary from arc to arc despite an overall connected story. The last 4 seasons or so are the best, but you still have an arc or two in each that can probably be skipped due to being boring or poorly executed. Robots and politics were usually the weak points. Jar Jar episodes as well though there is at least one great Gungans vs. Grievous scene/episode worth checking out. I would suggest giving the series a shot.

Rebels takes a bit to get going, but it does pull more from the adventurous side of Star Wars and forms a pretty solid narrative as it goes on. It and Andor are very much the building of the Rebellion and the start of the actual war with the Empire. Its good and worth watching most of.

Both series are very much what have set up a lot of the current shows' plots.

Edited September 28, 2023 by Eivion

[Technico Support]

Star Wars' recent storylines of the Empire rebuilding and the First Order rising due to selfishness/incompetence/laziness/complacency of regular people, and how the New Republic isn't all it's cracked up to be, is fascinating.  It's definitely not something I'd expect out of a property built on "one man with a laser sword" hero power fantasy.  I was annoyed by The Force Awakens because it tore down the victory won in the original trilogy, resetting it back to Empire vs Rebels.  And I know they made the movie that way because remaking Episode 4 as cheap fanservice was easy.  But these recent seasons of Mandalorian and Ahsoka fleshing out that backstory retroactively is a really interesting turn.  Seeing this thematic change from the original three movies, built around, dare I say, simplistic childish fantasy (example: we were supposed to buy that the Emperor dying suddenly fixed everything), to this new thing where people on the side of good don't even side with our heroes, is pretty wild.  There's probably something to be written about themes maturing as an audience supposedly grows up, but, at the same time, a lot of people hated The Last Jedi, which did away with a lot of the simple fantasy stuff (the Jedi are fallable, your heroes aren't always right, fighting isn't always the right approach, one man with a laser sword can't win this), so I don't know if any of this is right or not, in the end.

Edited October 2, 2023 by Technico Support

[Matt D]

Just flashing back to my initial comments about The Force Awakens (from here:

Quote

. This movie really wasn't for me. It was for the 13 year old I was lucky enough to introduce to Star Wars over the years and who was sitting with me, who wouldn't shut up about the physics of the planet killer, and couldn't remember Poe's name but thought he was great, who could probably relate to Ren on some level.

The biggest thing the movie did wasn't killing Han. It was destroying the New Republic, just like that. It was, in one fell swoop, and after so many smaller swoops, invalidating the victory of Jedi. The story continued so there was no happy endings. We knew that. But it jettisoned everything, the idea of a new republic, of a new jedi order, of Han and  Leia together. It set everything back so that nothing in the trilogy we all grew up with ultimately ended up mattering. Just a string of failures by our heroes. And it had to do that so that this story could live on its own and not be entirely beholden to what came before, so that the stakes would actually matter. On some weird level this feels like a failure of George Lucas. He didn't carry the torch and because of that, years and years passed and this was really the only way to move forward. I'm not saying it felt like a betrayal, but it did feel like it invalidated what came before. I really do think it was necessary because it made this story its own and it made it something that a new generation can latch on to as their own and not just their parents.

 

[Technico Support]

Thinking more about Star Wars, I feel like the writing and reactions to the movies differed according to its target demo, my generation, growing up.

• Original trilogy: Lucas wrote what was essentially a children's series.  A good vs evil fairy tale in which a poor farm boy is actually the chosen one, who defeats the evil plaguing the universe.  I am firmly in Gen X, so we were all children then and loved this.  We mythologized it, making it something bigger in our heads.  It was sacred.
• Prequel trilogy: Lucas makes another children's series.  But my generation was in our mid/late 20s by then.  We think we're GROWN UPS~!  We want "grown up" fare.  But we're dumb.  We're overgrown children, desperate to put away childish things and show how adult we are, for whom "grown up" means dark or edgy.  So we hate this shit.  We don't want "yippee!"  or pod races or Jar Jar or Count Dookoo or Elan Sleazebaggio or whatever.
• Sequel trilogy: Now we're older, in our 40s or pushing 50.  We probably have kids of our own.  We want to reclaim that feeling we had as kids.  We don't want grim or dark anymore.  We want nostalgia.  So TFA is a remake of New Hope and we love it.  TLJ brings uncomfortable, adult themes and we no longer want that, so the majority of us hate it.  RoS is just a mess. 

We went from wanting kids' movies, to not wanting them, to wanting them again, as we aged.

 

There's also something to be said for TLJ in that I like the points it raises and the "adultness" of its themes.  I enjoyed how it told a different kind of Star Wars story and exposed the "childishness" of the originals.  BUT was that the right thing to do?  You can't say "one man with a laser sword can't beat the Empire" when they did just that in the original trilogy!  In the end, the new trilogy was such a  massive missed opportunity because there was no overarching vision behind it.  There was nobody to ask "what's our point with these three?  What story are we telling?"  So it's two different films and then one Frankensteined mess of dangling story threads and fanservice trying to pull it all together.

Edited October 2, 2023 by Technico Support

[JLSigman]

On 9/27/2023 at 12:17 PM, JLSigman said:

Someone on Mastodon said it best, this felt like episode 7 of 10, not 7 of 8. Either the last episode is going to be a movie in and of itself, or they leave a fuckton of dangling threads.

According to folks, the last episode is 42 minutes. So, dangling threads.

[Craig H]

Is that 42 minutes of characters on screen, or does that 42 minutes include the usual 9 minutes of credits and foreign credits.

D+, you’ve been around long enough, please make it so that when we just get to the credits that the episode is considered done and when we go to watch next week it goes to the new episode and not resume the credits from the previous episode.

[Technico Support]

Could be worse.  On Apple TV+, if I navigate to a show instead of using the stupid "up next" interface, it never remembers where I left off.  So if I forget, say, where I am in season 3 of "For All Mankind," I just need to pick an ep and try to remember if I've seen it or not.  Every other app seemingly has more intuitive ways of telling what I've seen.

[Eivion]

14 hours ago, Technico Support said:

a lot of people hated The Last Jedi, which did away with a lot of the simple fantasy stuff (the Jedi are fallable, your heroes aren't always right, fighting isn't always the right approach, one man with a laser sword can't win this)

To be fair these were things Lucas was already saying back with Clone Wars. Unfortunately you have many who didn't watch or somehow missed this.

Also one man with  laser sword didn't win it per say even in the original trilogy. It was  a group effort in ANH and ROTJ.

[Technico Support]

4 hours ago, Eivion said:

Also one man with  laser sword didn't win it per say even in the original trilogy. It was  a group effort in ANH and ROTJ.

Well sure, literally it was a team of people.  But Luke joining and doing Luke things was what won it for them.  He was the Jordan to their Bulls.  They're not being the Empire without him.

[Craig H]

14 hours ago, Technico Support said:

Could be worse.  On Apple TV+, if I navigate to a show instead of using the stupid "up next" interface, it never remembers where I left off.  So if I forget, say, where I am in season 3 of "For All Mankind," I just need to pick an ep and try to remember if I've seen it or not.  Every other app seemingly has more intuitive ways of telling what I've seen.

Apple+ also has a...cumbersome UI. 

[J.H.]

So my prediction for the end of Ahsoka was a little bit from Columb A and a little bit from Column B. 

There is just far too much unresolved but every listing I've seen is "Series Finale" so this is getting resolved in the Filoni movie (hopefully oresented in Filoni-Scope)

James

 

[TheVileOne]

If that's the rule of the force, then there is no excuse why Chirrut Imwe couldn't somehow find the Force to pull the lever in Rogue One. 

[Eivion]

Dug the finale a good deal.

Spoiler

I was happy to see Sabine come into her own by the end. Morgan going full Nightsister was neat to see alongside their very different blade and fight style. It was interesting to see Thrawn actually shook a bit when he realized he had to send her to her death and heard of her death. Ezra being the only one to make it home to of the Jedi was unexpected. Was neat seeing full blown Trooper zombies.

With the way things ending I was surprised to see them essentially set up two different paths. Guessing we get another season while the other stuff is eventually tied up in Filoni's film. Or maybe its the other way around?

Forgot to mention Baylan's final scene was interesting. 

Spoiler

Kept wondering why those statues felt familiar. Turns out those were the Mortis gods from back in Clone Wars. Specifically the Father and Son with Daughter's statue likely destroyed due to her death back then. Looks like the theory of Abeloth people have been pushing may end up being right. Actually would explain why Ahsoka needs to stay as what little of the Daughter is left is inside of her.

 

Edited October 4, 2023 by Eivion

[JLSigman]

Thumb firmly in the middle.

This is definitely a Filoni Production (TM), with story beats dropped and picked up randomly. Ray Stevenson's death makes this habit of Filoni's all the more irritating, since we either recast the role or drop it entirely. Not sure which would be worse, IMO.

[RandomAct]

Well that Ahsoka finale was certainly a TV show that aired.

[Craig H]

I am underwhelmed.

[Craig H]

I guess to expand on that, everything felt very flat and sort of smelled like, “we have to end things here because we ran out of runway and budget.”

I want to see this get wrapped up and I saw some people mention that you could have taken half of this season and combine it with however you’re going to end it to be the first movie of the sequel trilogy instead of TFA. I don’t know if I agree with that or not, but it’s an interesting idea.

There’s just so much left dangling. I mean, there’s a ton left dangling so here’s hoping they’ll get to finish this up.