Star Wars prequels bad, but Ewan McGregor good? We’re so confused! Not nearly as confused as poor Obi-Wan as he tries to figure out what to do with himself on Tatooine. This show manages to achieve the impressive feat of being good despite also being a midquel, but how? That’s what we’re talking about today: why we liked the show, what didn’t work quite so well, and why they absolutely shouldn’t make another season. Unless it’s an excuse to get Padme back with some decent dialogue.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Suzanne. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. [opening song]
Wes: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast. I’m your host, Wes. And with me today is…
Oren: Oren.
Wes: And…
Chris: Chris. We are looking for more audio editing volunteers, no experiences necessary. We’ll train you how to do it. So if you’re interested in making us sound better, just go to mythcreants.com/volunteer.
Wes: A long time ago in a podcast far, far away, we sat down to record what we thought of the Obi-Wan Kenobi show. And now you’re all gonna have to listen to it. So spoilers abound. Let’s do this.
Oren: [Hums Star Wars Theme]
Wes: Yeah, insert song here, but we’re not gonna pay for it.
Oren: I’m not gonna use the actual music so we don’t get sued, but you know yeah.
Wes: Careful, careful.
Oren: Fair use.
Wes: I guess first things first. I like the show and they should not do another season of it.
Chris: Yeah. That’s the most important thing. If you take away anything from this, tell them not to make a sequel, a season. That would just be the worst.
Wes: Just want to get that right out.
Oren: Yeah, same. But wait, hang on guys. Alternatively, we could make Obi-Wan Season Two that is literally just like the Reva Show, doing Reva stuff. And then every once in a while we cut back to Ewan McGregor and he is taking a nap or something.
Chris: He’s at his meat factory.
Wes: Meat factory!
Oren: Yes. Working at the meat mines.
Chris: We could have slow TV style where we just watch him on the assembly line, packing meat.
Oren: Slow? Oh gosh, slow TV. Now, for some reason, he moved away from the meat market. He was living in a cave, now he lives in a house. I was very unclear what part of his character journey that was supposed to represent.
Chris: I would watch him petting his space camel.
Oren: Yeah.
Wes: Aw. Yeah.
Chris: Or whatever it is. Space tapir. That thing was cute. I’d watch him just like, “here you go. Here’s some nice water. Here’s some food.”
Wes: Have you noticed that they seem determined to always, whatever Star Wars show is next, they’re always gonna have something happen on Tatooine. And they’re always going to show you something that they haven’t shown you before. It’s like they keep adding stuff. Book of Boba Fett had those weird drinkable cactus pods and then Obi-Wan Kenobi has the giant meat creature. And it’s so big that they’re–it’s a meat mine. People are mining meat from a giant creature that is fresh? I don’t know. They didn’t ask any questions.
Chris: If we ignore the chances of a creature that big living in such a desert environment, which we have to because of Star Wars, then I think that’s pretty cool. It’s like a whale that dies and falls to the ocean bottom. There’s a whole ecosystem that comes out of this dead whale, except for humans doing it.
Oren: The air is real dry on Tatooine. So it’ll keep for a while. It might even just become jerky. If you leave it out there long enough.
Chris: [Laughing] Mine the jerky.
Oren: Yeah. Welcome to the jerky mines. I don’t like that.
Chris: It’s weird because people are pretty tired of Tatooine on all these desert planets, but nonetheless, they always stick with Tatooine all the time. There’s probably some budget reasons behind that. I almost start to wonder if there’s also a fear that if they leave Tatooine behind, people won’t think it’s Star Wars anymore or something.
Wes: Yeah. That is a legit concern. I think.
Oren: All I know is I don’t like Tatooine. It’s same-y and boring and it gets everywhere in Star Wars. I’m very bored of it. But you know what I’m not bored of? Watching broken down Obi-Wan have to work his really terrible job at the meat mines.
Wes: Yep. More of that, please.
Oren: For some reason, watching that was very fascinating.
Chris: So the miracle of the show is the fact that it’s a midquel that takes place in a narrow space and it stars a character that is in both the prequel films and A New Hope. So they have such a narrow window with so much established cannon on either side to work around and considering those constraints, they did a fantastic job. It’s not perfect, but I don’t think it ever could have been.
Oren: Yeah, better than I thought. Okay. When I first heard about the premise for this show, I was very dismissive. I did not think it was gonna work and it worked better than I expected. It brings up some weird dissonance. I definitely didn’t get the impression that Leia knew Obi-Wan this well, but it’s not technically impossible.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: Sure.
Chris: I think that was a great idea with having young Leia instead of young Luke, because she calls Obi-Wan for his help: “You’re my only hope.” But we don’t actually see them together. So on one hand you think she would’ve mentioned it if he was part of a really important experience in her youth, but on the other hand, it’s a lot easier to believe that this could have happened between the two of them.
Oren: See, and now I assume what happens is that in that scene in A New Hope when Luke is all sad because the old man he knew for two days is dead. Leia is comforting him and then Leia tells him, oh man, he meant a lot to me, too. Let me tell you about this really involved adventure we had when I was ten. And then Luke is like, you know, you’ve actually lost a lot more today than I have. Both Obi-Wan and your planet, I guess I was being kind of a jerk.
[Laughter]Oren: So that’s how I’m assuming that scene goes now. This is a fun deleted scene we can find somewhere.
Chris: Don’t worry, they’ll just make CG versions of the characters and add it in.
Oren: Oh my gosh, get into that rabbit hole. Anyway.
[Laughter]Oren: So the thing that made this show work to me is this weird combination of we’re kind of nostalgic for the prequels now, because it’s been long enough that we’ve sort of emotionally forgotten how bad they were. Whereas the new movies are still fresh and hurting and we’re all still very disappointed by Palpatine returned somehow. And so we can’t look at that. That’s why all Star Wars shows are like frozen in time because they don’t wanna approach the sequel time period for good reason, because that would just be a nightmare.
So now we’re looking backwards and it’s like, man, it was a while since the Return of the Sith was terrible. So that’s kind of nostalgic. And also this show is giving us emotional closure that we should have gotten from Return of the Sith but didn’t because, again, it was terrible. Also it’s Revenge of the Sith, not Return of the Sith, but I think, you know what movie I was talking about.
Chris: It’s interesting because it makes the continuity between the prequels and A New Hope actually better by giving it a little bit more breathing room so that Obi-Wan can have his emotional fallout from what happened with Anakin and also all the Jedi being murdered and deal with that before we see him in A New Hope. So it feels more likely that he would be that centered and that distant from everything in A New Hope, because he’s kind of dealt with it in this midquel.
Oren: It’s also just kind of cathartic for Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen to get some material to work with that’s actually good. Look at that. We get a brief little glimpse of what the prequels would’ve been like if they were better and we can rewrite them in our brains to have always been that way. Now I’m just sad Natalie Portman wasn’t in it to get to be Padme, but good somehow. Considering large sections of it are a tribute to Padme with Obi-Wan telling Leia how great Padme was, I think that’s as close as we are gonna get.
Chris: I also thought they did a really good job with the villains. Obviously wanted to have Vader in there, but you can’t have too much Vader because we need to maintain his threat level. Vader’s like the last threatening villain that Star Wars has. You gotta protect that. And they did surprisingly well, and of course they needed a lower level villain to take the pressure off of Vader. So Vader didn’t have to appear so often. So that’s why we had Reva, who I think we should talk about.
Wes: Who was great.
Chris: Yeah, Reva works great. But Obi-Wan only beats Vader once. And of course, then he just leaves him alive for some reason. But, you know, again, this can’t be perfect. It’s a midquel.
Oren: Again. Would it have killed you to have some Imperial troop transports fly in and make Obi-Wan run away or something? Would that have been too much?
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: But still we see Vader kick a lot of ass. So overall it’s a pretty good job.
Wes: It’s nice, too, especially when Vader touches down on that planet in the third episode, I think, because we’re seeing him kind of through Obi-Wan who is having fresh horror of: wait Anakin’s alive, and he’s that? And the “that” he’s looking at is walking down a street Force Choking and throwing people, willy nilly. The lens for that shot is great. And he only gets scarier from there where he just eventually rips a spaceship out of low orbit with the Force. Apparently he can do that.
Oren: He also maintains the tradition of doing cool stuff with his levitation and then forgetting he has levitation. That tradition goes all the way back to The Empire Strikes Back. So, you know, we gotta maintain that.
Wes: That’s right.
Oren: But I was also impressed by the fact that Vader is portrayed as both being super evil and blood thirsty, but also really insecure.
Wes: Very, yeah.
Oren: You know, just really feels like there’s unfinished business and that he doesn’t measure up because his old teacher is still alive and that is more depth than you expect for Darth Vader.
Chris: Okay. That’s more depth than we’ve ever gotten from Darth Vader.
Wes: Out of anything that’s ever been published.
Oren: In that it is a little bit of depth.
[Laughter]Chris: More depth than: “there’s good in him somewhere. I sense.” Okay, we’ll just have it take your word for it, Luke, cuz we’re not seeing that anywhere.
Oren: If you say so, Luke, my boy.
[Laughter] I also really love the banality of evil. With the stormtroopers, because like Star Wars has this problem with stormtroopers, and not just Star Wars, a lot of media has this problem of how to portray the soldiers of an evil empire. Will either be like, oh, they’re just robots. And, well, that doesn’t make sense. Or it’ll be like, don’t you feel bad about killing them because they were people, too, and you’re just as bad as they were cuz you killed some of them. And this movie struck the perfect balance of showing us how the stormtroopers they chat and joke and have little in-references with each other. But if they found out who Obi-Wan was they would without hesitation kill him and Leia. And it was just so menacing and perfect. I love that whole sequence. And Mr. hello, my name is friendly alien collaborator. I backed the white as it were, and that guy he’s so [shutters] he’s awful, but I love it.Wes: It’s true. They realize that, okay, we have our evil empire and most of them wear helmets, so they’re not very expressive. So we need to maybe do something more. Huh? What if they banter? I think that’s a good point. It’s the same thing with Vader. He just seems to be seething with his rage and anger at Obi-Wan. Even through a mask. They just do a good job with the body language, I think. It’s all just better scripted. It comes across a lot more emotional than it ever has before.
Oren: Was also a big fan of the Owen and Beru portrayal in this show. I mean, partly just because of the Owen roast memes. Those are hilarious. But those two being actual characters, as opposed to some throwaway skeletons. Was not what I was expecting. And I was apparently there for it. I apparently loved it a lot.
Chris: I did have a little trouble with Leia. I wanted to like her. It’s probably just that the actress looks younger than her age and she acts older than her age. Although her lines make her seem a lot older. And so it gave me this impression of a six year old that talks like a 30 year old. Which again is too bad because the actress is actually older than she looks. I guess we’ve seen a lot of those child characters who just act like adults to try to, Hey, look how cool this kid is. And it does get a little old after a while.
Oren: You could tell they were kind of struggling to be like, how do we have this kid act in a way so that you will know this is kid Leia. And it’s like, I don’t know. I’m not really sure how to have her act in a way that would bring across that she’s kid Leia. It wasn’t like she was terrible. It was just not the greatest.
Chris: I did like some of the scenes where she was a captive in trying to put on a brave face, but it was almost in a, like, I’m obviously scared and trying to put on a brave face sort of way where you can see that vulnerable side, that she’s still a little girl, but also see that she’s doing her best in a tough situation. I feel like that’s more compelling than the over the top, I know everything and I’m so superior act where she acts really old, almost treats Obi-Wan like he’s a kid sometimes.
Oren: They pair that with this weird thing of her running away from him because she notices that he has a bounty on his head. That doesn’t make any sense if you think about it rationally. Now, you could excuse it with the argument that while she’s a child, and she wasn’t thinking about it rationally.
Chris: But she wasn’t acting like a child.
Oren: Right. In many other scenes, she does not act like a child. So a little dissonance.
Chris: Yeah. I’m also just getting a little tired of this trope that we make princesses cool if they reject everything associated with being a princess to go run wild. It’s got a very “not like other girls” vibe to it that is just increasingly rubbing me the wrong way. But even if nobody says “not like other girls,” even if there isn’t any other princess who likes princess things that we are going to be shown in a really negative light, it still has that sort of flavor to it.
Oren: And it feels weird cuz if they were like, young Leia liked to run around in the woods. All right, well, that’s not a trait I associate with Leia, but children sometimes do different things than their adult versions do. So that’s fine with me. But instead they had to show this like, oh, you thought that this princess was Leia, but actually she ditched princess class to go run in the woods. And it’s like, um, okay.
Chris: She can just go running in the woods. And it’s just getting a little repetitive. I think it’s just fine to have some princesses that are a little rebellious, but now it’s just so common. It’s like every princess has to be kind of tough and rebellious all the time. It’s starting to devalue the idea of, for instance, Leia is a diplomat and that’s important, too. Having social skills is important, not just running off into the woods.
Oren: Well, she can apparently run so fast that she makes the adults chasing her intentionally smack into trees.
Wes: That’s right.
[Laughter]Oren: There were a lot of little things where I was just like, mmh, I wish they’d storyboarded that better. And like, mmh, I wish they’d plotted that a little better and a few big things, but the little ones kind of built up over time. First we have the weird chase scene where three adults somehow can’t catch this small child. And then we have the weird moment where Reva somehow teleports to the end of a tunnel network so that she can be there when Leia shows up.
Chris: It’s like, how did she get there?
Oren: How did she get there so fast? And then the part we were talking about earlier where Vader forgets he can use telekinesis so that the droid can just carry Obi-Wan off. There’s a lot of those little moments. It’s like, I wish you thought that one through a little bit more.
Chris: Let’s talk about Reva.
Oren: Yeah, Reva’s great. I’m a big fan.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: Yeah, I know. I think as the lower level sympathetic villain, she does a real good job.
Wes: What do you guys think about, so we have the introduction she’s the third sister, one of these, for all intents and purposes, Sith Lords, but the first episode also shows the younglings trying to escape. So when it’s revealed that she is a youngling who survived, they want that to stick in your head, I guess, but they don’t draw a direct connection from it at the beginning.
Chris: I was confused.
Wes: Yes. And I think that’s the issue.
Chris: Am I supposed to believe that because one of those younglings was black…
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: …That that has to be the same person as this black woman?
Wes: Yes. Thank you for saying that.
Oren: I was a little confused cuz I thought that they were all gonna be the former Jedi younglings but it was just her, apparently. I thought they were showing us the backstory of the inquisitors, but no, apparently it was only her who was a former youngling and her introduction was a little confusing because they were like, somehow she’s from some kind of marginalized background in Star Wars, but they never really say what it is. And it was kind of weird that she’s third sister, which implies that she’s a higher rank than sisters four through 10. So that’s a little odd, right? I would’ve had her be like 10th sister if the idea is that she’s supposed to be the lowest rank of them.
Wes: Yeah, I guess I just kind of wish maybe we had known that she was a youngling who survived right at the get go. I don’t think that would’ve really taken much away. Instead of learning much later that she survived, we could have learned her agenda later when we did, I think that would be fine, but knowing that she was a former Padawan that presumably went to the dark side, I think there’s nothing wrong with that. Instead of the confusion that Chris noted is more damaging, I think.
Chris: Mm-hmm, yeah. I think they were really into the idea of slowly revealing her to be not as evil as she seemed.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: And that’s why they did that because only later do we realize that she’s actually serving Vader for the purpose of getting revenge on him. And that comes after we learn that she was a Jedi youngling. So I’m wondering if they… you know, Vader takes a little while to show up. Maybe it was partly because they wanted her to seem more evil and more threatening in the beginning. I’m not sure that she, I guess if we think that she might kill Vader, that does start to open up the questions about whether she’ll really go through some of the evil things that says she will in the beginning. But conversely, when she’s sympathetic, we also need to ignore what she might have done over the many years that she’s been among the Sith.
Wes: What are you talking about, Chris? There’s no way she murdered a bunch of children.
Oren: It’s fine. Keep that implication quiet.
Chris: Just don’t look at it too close, okay? Don’t look at it.
Oren: But that joke aside, I actually find Reva’s dark side turn much more convincing than most dark side turns we see in Star Wars in any format: in the movies, in the shows, or even in the books that I’ve read. Because most of the time it’s like, oh man, you killed a guy out of anger. Now you’re on team evil. And it’s like, I guess that’s how that works.
Chris: That’s a big problem of the Return of The Jedi. Where it’s like, oh Luke, if you strike me down, you’ll just join me somehow. Don’t ask how. It will just happen.
Oren: It’s like, if you kill Vader, you’ll join Palpatine. How does that work? Why does killing Vader put Luke in Palpatine on the same team? That’s not really how political affiliations work. In this case, what we have is she joins the inquisitors with this idea that she will work her way up to having the opportunity to get revenge on Vader, but in doing so she basically has to do inquisitor stuff and basically just becomes an inquisitor. I found that very compelling. That’ll mess with your brain.
Chris: Yeah. I love this dynamic where she thinks that she’s a spy, but actually she’s just one of them. That’s really good.
Oren: I thought that was great. As disappointing as it is that her big plan to take out Vader was a sucker punch, which she could have basically done at any time, I did like the actual lightsaber fight between her and Vader.
Wes: That was really well done.
Oren: Yeah. That was a great fight. I was a big fan. I also am glad she lived, but I wish they had found a more convincing way for her to live than walking off being impaled.
Wes: Yes.
Chris: Come on. We need impaling people with a lightsaber to matter in the future. Can you not make that a walk off type injury, please?
Wes: Well, it’s like you said with why didn’t they just have some ships force Obi-Wan away before he could land a killing blow on Vader? It’s like they should have done that better. I mean, they had two people in this series, the actual grand inquisitor and Reva, survive getting gutted by lightsabers.
Oren: Though, hilariously, this is becoming a weird pattern for Disney+ Star Wars shows. Reva is actually now the third character who has survived what should have been a fatal gut wound. The first one was Fennec from Mandalorian. That, they explained it as, oh, well we replaced her stomach with droid parts and it’s like, okay, I guess if there was someone with a surgery unit, like right there. Sure. I could maybe buy that. And of course later we find out that Boba Fett had time for a leisurely bantha ride into town first. Whatever, there’s at least technically an explanation there. And then the first inquisitor survives and it’s like, uh, I guess maybe he got taken to an Imperial medical facility right away. They don’t say anything, but maybe? And then Reva survives and it’s like, what?
Chris: Come on.
Oren: Okay, come on. And I’m not saying I wanted her to die, right? That is not the alternative I’m looking for. I want a better constructed way for her to live.
Wes: Especially if their goal was just to humiliate her and return her to the gutter. That’s kind of was what the grand inquisitor said when he showed back up in that moment. Well then why would you stab her with a weapon that instantly fries her insides? Can’t you just break her legs and arms, or I don’t know, something less.
Oren: Yeah. I have a hard time believing they would leave her alive, but if they were going to, if that was the idea, then impaling her was definitely the wrong move.
Wes: Should we then talk about why she goes after Luke? Cause that’s the one part that I was most, just like, huh? with Reva.
Oren: Okay. So the way that she finds out about Luke was pretty contrived.
Wes: Yes, very.
Oren: Bail Organa just happens to call Obi-Wan and tell him all the sensitive information when he thinks Obi-Wan might be compromised. That part, I find very contrived, again.
Chris: It’s like, Hey, I think somebody broke into your house. Here, let me leave a sensitive message on your answering machine.
Oren: And then Obi-Wan apparently didn’t delete that immediately. Uh, sure. So that part, I found pretty contrived. But the actual murder of Luke, I am actually gonna put myself on the side of pro that story decision. And the reason why is that? Like I said, I can imagine that Reva is very twisted up inside because she’s trying to justify to herself that everything she’s doing is actually for the greater good cause she’s gonna assassinate Vader. And then she gets her big chance and she blows it. And she knows she’s never gonna get another one. So at that point, the idea of killing Vader’s son, I could see how she would think that was actual revenge, right? It’s like of kind of gets weird if you remember that in Star Wars, everyone dark side is on dark side team and everyone light side is on light side team. But if you just imagine that Vader might care about his son, just because he is his son. Then to me, it makes sense that killing Luke would be a way to hurt Vader in Reva’s eyes.
We: Okay. I accept that. Sure.
Oren: So that’s how I saw it. And to me it made sense. The way that she found out was silly.
Chris: But I do think that was a good way to kind of bring her full circle. And get her to realize that she cannot continue as she has.
Oren: Plus then we got to have the cool scene of Owen being like, Beru, there’s a Sith coming!, and Beru is like, shame! and then just loads of blaster. It’s like, all right, yeah, Beru, my new favorite!
Chris: I also did like the explanation of, okay, maybe it would be a much better idea if instead of trying to fight a Sith, we just ran and her explanation being like, well, no, cuz then we would put our host in danger. So we decided it was better not to do that. Okay, that’s actually a pretty decent explanation for why you wouldn’t run.
Oren: It was funny to me, one of the many silly controversies about Reva, because of course people are racist, was like, well, how did she know that Vader was Ankin. That’s impossible. Continuity error. And I’m like, man, I don’t know. Maybe she thought about it for five seconds. I keep forgetting that’s supposed to be a secret from anybody. I can kind of buy that Luke wouldn’t know, cuz he’s raised in Podunk backwater and he has no real knowledge of history or what’s happening in the Empire. But anyone who knows the history of the Clone Wars could probably guess that Darth Vader is Anakin because you know, oh man, Anakin Skywalker turns to help Palpatine and then disappears. And then two days later, Darth Vader shows up and we’re not allowed to see his face.
Chris: Right. Especially since she personally witnessed Anakin being a Sith and murdering people.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: Well, he was clearly among the Sith, so where did he go? Oh, look. And she would in fact know that the Sith get new names.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: So it just wouldn’t be hard. It just wouldn’t be hard.
Wes: No, no.
Oren: I laughed a bit at the reference when they have Obi-Wan say goodbye, Darth, because it’s like a reference to A New Hope back when we thought that that was actually just his name. His name was Darth Vader, because at that point, Lucas hadn’t decided that Darth was some kind of Sith title. So Obi-Wan just says you’re a master of evil, Darth. And it’s in later continuity, you would never say that it would be like, you know, calling him prince or something. But they were just like, okay, well we’ll call back to that. You know, back before all of the lore was created.
Wes: I like that. That’s good.
Oren: Yeah, it was great.
Wes: So how about the hilarious moment of at the very end, Obi-Wan sees Qui-Gon Jinn and Liam Neeson shows up and says, I’ve been here this whole time. What the heck have you been doing?
Oren: Mostly being like, oof, maybe I shouldn’t have said to train Anakin.
Wes: Yeah. Right.
Oren: Regretting his choices.
Wes: I am so sorry.
Chris: I have to say that arc with the fact that Obi-Wan could not contact his master felt a little tacked on with everything else going on. I guess we could say that, okay, Obi-Wan wasn’t able to do the ghost communication thing because he was emotionally caught up in all the trauma that happened. Then when he moved past it, he could. I was expecting that to get a little more development than it did.
Wes: Yeah.
Oren: It definitely felt like a contractually obligated thing where they were like, well, remember how at the end of Return Of The Jedi, Yoda said that Qui-Gon Jinn invented force ghosts. So like, we kind of have to do that, right? Cause they said it was so I guess that’s in there, too.
Chris: I guess considering how Obi-Wan is supposed to be kind of rusty and he let himself go a little bit. He’s really cut up. If he just had this wise ghost mentor hang around giving him sage advice that would’ve felt a little bit like it didn’t go with the arc that they were planning for him.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: So it makes sense to delay that.
Oren: It’s like, Hey, Obi-Wan, do you wanna maybe do some lightsaber practice so that you don’t get completely rolled if Darth Vader shows up? Nah, I’m gonna go to my job at the meat mines.
Wes: That’s right. This meat’s not gonna cut itself.
Oren: I also say that at this point they should just bring Mace Windu back. They’ve brought everyone else back. Samuel Jackson wants Mace Windu to be brought back. He’s all excited about using a lightsaber left handed. I say, just do it, man. You’re bringing back everyone, might as well bring back Mace Windu.
Chris: Yeah. Purple lightsaber.
Oren: We gotta get the purple lightsaber back though. I will riot if Mace Windu shows up with a normal colored lightsaber.
Okay. Well with that, I think we’re gonna have to call this recording in a galaxy far, far away to a close, you know, cause a long, long time has passed since we started.
Chris: If the Mythcreant podcast is worth a dollar to you, please support us on Patreon. You can go to patreon.com/mythcreants or mythcreants.com/support.
Oren: Don’t try to pay us with Republic credits. Those are apparently no good on Tatooine for some reason.
Anyway, before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Finally, we have Danita Rambo. She lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you next week.
[closing theme]Chris: This has been the Mythcreant podcast. Opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Colton.
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With that show, it’s just getting harder to make a good Star Wars story now. There’s some point where it’s just not worth the risk, and I’m beginning to believe Disney’s just about reached it.
I think the main problem is that all stories try to stay close to the canon, around the time of the full nine-movie saga (not judging the quality of the movies here, that would be a much longer post). They could go past the end of “Rise of Skywalker” into the future where nothing is set in stone yet. They could go back in time several centuries or even a millennium or two (so even Yoda is out of it) as the defunct EU did with “Knights of the Old Republic” (games and comics). In both cases, it is highly unlikely you would be hemmed in by what happens in the movies and the other media wrought around them.
But Disney wants to have their cake and eat it, too, and that means they want fan service. Fan service is only possible when you stay close to what the fans know and use characters the fans are familiar with. A series set 100 years from the end of “Rise of Skywalker” could mention famous characters from the movies, but would not feature them. A series set 1000 years in the past (so before Yoda’s birth) would not mention anyone we know, but could build up on changes within the Jedi Order or set up the last time the Sith had major power in the galaxy (or a thousand other things, of course).
“Fan service is only possible when you stay close to what the fans know and use characters the fans are familiar with.”
I think the issue is the word “characters”. Disney is focused on the Skywalker family, NOT the galaxy–there seems to be a belief that only that one family matters.
The older EU did it better. The best books in the original EU were the Rogue and Wraith Squadron series, which only occasionally bump into the main characters and hardly ever in a significant way. Wedge, Tycho, and Akbar are the only three I can think of that routinely show up that are in both the movies and the books, and Tycho was never named in the movies. As for Jedi, two characters have potential, and one does train as a Jedi, but it’s treated more as a way to become more useful in a dogfight.
From my perspective, what ties it into the universe is the ships. The stories revolve around the adventures of a pair of X-Wing squadrons, which means we get to see X-wings, A-wings, B-wings, a few Y-wings, TIE fighters, TIE interceptors, Imperial class Star Destroyers, a few Super-class Star Destroyers….all those things that make the setting feel like a Star Wars setting.
There were hundreds of thousands of beings at Endor. There are nearly infinite story possibilities in the Star Wars universe. Disney could tell literally any story they want, so long as they follow two rules:
1) Don’t violate the established cannon too much. Some variance is normal; no two people tell the story of the same event the same way. If you avoid making changes that make the movies impossible, you’re fine. For example: In “A New Hope” the audience focuses on the fight against the Death Star. If I’m a commander about to have my base blown to hydrogen atoms, I’m also going to get as much hardware and–more importantly–intel offworld as possible. This gives you a number of characters to play with. Show them fleeing a gas giant as the Death Star comes into view right before they jump to light speed, and you’ve established provenance.
2) Include a lot of ships that we’re used to. You can make up new ships, of course–“Starfighters of Adumar” did so, in a way that made perfect sense–but give us enough normal Star Wars hardware to know where we are. In a very real sense the setting of Star Wars IS the ships. The galaxy is huge, so you can have whatever on-world or off-world setting you want as long as we go back to a familiar ship occasionally.
I think though, most of the fans will expect to see familiar character when a story is set in the time frame. You can, of course, leave them out completely and focus on unknown people. Yet, that might annoy the fans. In a setting which is set at a different time, this expectation isn’t going to happen, making it easier to get the fans behind the story and the new people in it.
I also don’t think it’s so much Disney wanting to make this a Skywalker story (although I still think the ‘nobody’ answer to Rey’s parents was the better ones), but that after six movies focused on the Skywalker family most people expected for the rest to revolve around them as well. George Lucas already made it a Skywalker story by focusing on the family again in the prequels.
Yes, the defunct EU also had quite some stories where the movie main characters didn’t feature, but the most commonly known ones nevertheless featured them or at least some of them.
I think viewers are more willing to accept shared universes. Look at Star Trek–people accept that different people, ships, even different technology exist in the various TV series. Or look at Diskworld–no one’s upset that Vimes only appears briefly in a “Tiffany Aching” book.
In the Star Wars universe you have, as we’ve discussed, the books. You also have “The Mandalorian”, which only very briefly encountered any of the main characters from the original series. “Star Wars Rebels” does the same thing. “Rogue One” is the only movie outside the original trilogy that I consider any good, and while it ties into the original trilogy it tells its own unique story, with its own unique characters. There are also the games, most of which create novel characters and settings, with only occasional run-ins with the main characters from the original series.
All in all, I think the idea that people will get annoyed if they don’t see a Skywalker simply isn’t true. I think it’s the opposite–the Skywalker family has been mined out, story-wise, and it’s time to move on to more productive veins.
As an added bonus for Disney, new stories means exploring new species, new technology, and new ships–which means, new merchandise.
I think the real issue is risk-aversion. By continually re-hashing the Skywalker saga they believe they can safely promise return on investment. Making a new series is a risk. The established characters automatically draw people in and cover a myriad of sins. If you make an original story, it’s got to actually be good. You don’t have the crutch of someone else’s characters; your work has to stand on its own.
I think it will be easier to make a clear cut and a new start if you move back or forth in time far enough so the audience will not expect to see any familiar characters. “The Mandalorian” draws both on the Bobba Fett fandom (I know Mando isn’t Bobba, but the armour is iconic) and the Yoda fandom (again, I know Grogu aka Baby Yoda is not Yoda as a baby).
It’s not about a shared universe as much as it is about putting known characters in just for fan service. That will clearly not happen in times in which the characters aren’t around. Long before any of the know characters are born or long after they will most likely have died will put a stop to that and help establish new characters who do not rely on being recognized at least to a degree (see Mando and Grogu).
They should make a movie about the construction of the Death Star. This is so they can film Eddie Izzard’s Death Star canteen routine. Sure it will be ridiculously costly but with CGI less costly than other Hollywood epics gone wrong. Besides who wouldn’t want to see what life was like as an ordinary citizen and working grunt of the Empire? What could be more thrilling than wielding in SPAAAAACE?
I kind of like the “You didn’t destroy Anakin. I did” line. And he kind of proves it, because Anakin would have said something about the high ground when he had Obi-Wan in the hole.
In what of the fascinating what ifs of movie history, George Lucas originally wanted Toshio Mifune to play Obi-Wan Kenobi. The samurai actor as a space samurai, and yes that is what the Jedi essentially are.
At the risk of potential spoilers, how well are the female characters written?
Well, we talk about the two main ones (Reva and Leia) in the episode. the others are fine if not exceptional.