Voices from the Star Wars Screensaver

People generally don't seem pleased with the last episode of Acolyte. Not that many people watched it, the ratings being a new low for the steadily declining franchise. But I watched it, so I guess I'll talk about it. The gist of my impression is that, as swings of the lightsabre go, this was a whiff.

I was kind of hoping I'd find out if I was right that Mae was a Force projection of Osha's. Instead, the extent of the revelation was Sol saying the two are in fact the same person. What does that mean? Are they clones? Why did they look different as children? Can they read each other's thoughts? He says they're one person, but if that doesn't actually reflect anything that happened in the story, then it's just hot air. It's an idea but one that was never given legs.

A lot of reviews are focusing on the sloppiness of the plotting. Vernestra makes Sol the fall guy for all the murders. Presumably that includes Inara despite all the witnesses on hand to say otherwise. Mae's killer instinct had just kind of faded away a few episodes back so now, whatever, I guess she's into the rule of law over vengeance killing. Maybe it's because she and Osha are the same person, so if one is mild, the other is wild? Ah, the see-saw of duality.

I think the sloppiness of the writing is due less to incompetence than to a genuine lack of concern for plot mechanics. College literature courses nowadays are more focused on applying particular analytic theories to texts than they are on the mechanics of the story so I'm quite ready to believe the writers of Acolyte simply did not care if anything made sense except on the most abstract thematic level. It was the same with Echo. The characters have powers and they do things and if you ask how and what then, well, you're a nerd. Get out of the clubhouse. The point is that institutional authority is corrupted by hubris. The writers see their job as beginning and ending with the idea and actually conveying the reasons behind it likely seems a gratuitous exercise. So Sol doesn't say he killed Mae and Osha's mother because she looked like she was turning into a big death bird in the process of disintegrating Mae. That would be impertinent. Why did Bazil tear up the wiring in Sol's ship? Why did Osha decide to train with Qimir? Why anything? People are always just doing stuff, okay?

I will say it's very sweet how much Leslye Headland is clearly in love with her wife, Rebecca Henderson, who plays Vernestra. Most people watching wondered why the show was leaning so much into her character. The green paint and the bald head don't flatter her and make her look more like a Star Trek alien than a Star Wars alien. She has kind of a snooty governess quality. I could see her playing the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass, though she wouldn't be my first choice. As a character, she never managed to do anything particularly interesting because, without any logic to the events unfolding, there's no particular weight or significance to anything she or anyone else does. But she was front and centre, she was given the quirky lightsabre whip, she got to talk to Yoda at the end. We should all be so lucky to have such an enamoured spouse as Headland is for Henderson. Headland, I guarantee you, would be physically incapable of understanding why anyone would find Henderson uninteresting.

I've cancelled my Disney+ account. I'm just not getting value for money and it is a pain in the ass for me to transfer money from Japan to my U.S. account. I'll probably come back for Andor season 2 next year but for now I'm just sticking with The Criterion Channel.

Tales of Dave Filoni

This is how Dave Filoni bakes a cake.

Dave stands up and walks to the kitchen. His arms swing at his sides at a slow, steady pace. His legs seem to swing below his floating torso as though they don't make contact with the ground. He takes a popular recipe book off the shelf, opens it, and smiles. "I'm going to make a cake," he says.

In a mixing bowl, he deposits a cup of flour and smiles. "I've added the flour. Oh! Now I will add some water." He proceeds to add the water. He stirs mechanically with a placid smile on his face. He pours the mixture into a mould and places it in the oven. "Time to start baking!" he says, turning the knobs though his eyes don't seem to focus on them. Twelve hours later, he opens the oven to find a charred mess. "No!" he says, leaning forward slightly, "I can't let this cake die!" The scene fades out.

Hours later, Dave is seated at a clean, nondescript table with two human friends, each with short, nondescript haircuts and wearing nondescript jumpsuits. There's an empty plate before each person with a few crumbs. "That was a delicious cake!" says one. "How did you save it?" says the other.

Dave smiles his placid smile. "With a little help from an old ally. But that's a tale for another time."

Roll credits.

So, yeah, Tales of the Empire is typical Filoni. The new six episode series, consisting of very short, ten to seventeen minute episodes, presents first the unremarkable tale of the unremarkable Morgan, whom we met first on The Mandalorian. We see how she survived the attack on Dathomir by General Grevious, one of the best story arcs from Clone Wars (written by Katie Lucas with some help from her father, one assumes). So it's a suitably plump vein for the Disney leech to suckle and supplies us with a few wisps of excitement. The second three episodes mine an even better vein, finally continuing the story of Barriss Offee, a former Jedi who turned traitor and was arrested on Clone Wars before Disney bought Star Wars.

There's some genuinely interesting moments as we see some bitter inner conflict manifest in Barriss. Unfortunately, Disney's edict that all bad people be dumb as rocks seems to be in effect in this series (how Andor was spared that, I don't know). When the Fourth Sister, the Inquisitor a turned Barriss is apprenticed to, starts grumpily killing people all the time, even when it directly works against her own interest, Barriss' choices don't seem to be between Light and Dark but between common sense and intense stupidity. Oh, well.

Tales of the Empire is on Disney+. Happy Star Wars Day.

Star Wars for You and Me and Everyone

Yesterday I showed Star Wars to the English club at the Japanese junior high school where I work. I mean Episode IV: A New Hope, and that was the first thing I had to explain to them, "This is the first movie, I know it says 'Episode IV'. It's from 1977, Episode I came out in 1999." Attending the club yesterday were three second year girls, one second year boy and one first year boy (ages ranging from 13 to 14). None of them had ever seen Star Wars before. Previously, I've shown them Ghostbusters and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, both of which they seemed to enjoy. So I was surprised to find they seemed to be struggling to maintain interest in Star Wars.

Well, one of the girls seemed to be captivated. She told me later her favourite character was Obi-Wan Kenobi. The rest liked R2D2. Everyone seemed more engaged once the characters got to the Death Star and there was bickering between Han, Luke, and Leia. And they all seemed riveted by the finale. It's fascinating just watching the movie with people who'd never seen it. I can't even remember my first time seeing Star Wars and it's very difficult even to imagine the experience of watching C3PO and R2D2 wandering the desert and not knowing what was going to happen next. But now it occurs to me that people who've recently been saying that Star Wars has to stick to certain formulaic elements are dead wrong. The defining element of the first film is that one scene after another throws unexpected elements at the viewer. The very fact that the first movie is the fourth episode, that it drops you into the middle of the story without really holding your hand and explaining anything, speaks to the franchise's broad storytelling possibilities.

Thinking about why the kids liked Ghostbusters and Roger Rabbit better, I came up with a few theories. Ghostbusters and Roger Rabbit are both comedies, so maybe they're easier for kids to latch onto quickly. Also it occurs to me that they'd never seen anything like those two movies before. Neither one is widely seen in Japan and none of the new Ghostbusters movies are really like that first one. Meanwhile, Star Wars has had a lot of exposure in Japan. So while A New Hope may have been unique in 1977, it's now something the kids would already recognise as a certain type of story from its countless imitators in American and Japanese media. Teaching in Japan, I've had a number of teachers and coordinators here try to sell the idea that Japanese students need more preparation and explanation for everything but I've also seen a few people offer rebuttals to this idea, asserting that one of the problems with English education here is that teachers tend to over explain. There's so much emphasis put on sentimentality and nostalgia in the culture that I suspect the compulsion to explain and prepare is partly a means by which adults can feel a certain ownership of the students' new experiences. Also, it masks some incompetence. The reality is, I believe, that Japanese kids can enjoy surprises just as much as kids in any other country.

Another thing I was thinking of watching Star Wars again was a video I saw a few months ago on YouTube called "How 'How Star Wars was Saved in the Edit' was Saved in the Edit", a delightfully blistering reply to another video essay called "How Star Wars was Saved in the Edit". The original video, posted six years ago, offers various weak arguments and phony perspective to argue that Star Wars was in reality the accomplishment of George Lucas' ex-wife and editor Marcia Lucas. There's been a lot of talk of Disney shills lately. I don't know if these people were actually paid by Disney or if they're just a weird group of corporate simps but they do speak with the lame, phony tones of a Disneyland tour guide. Anyway, the original video has over three million views while the rebuttal, from two years ago, has only 217k. I urge you to watch the rebuttal.

So when I was watching Star Wars again, I was specifically thinking of "How Star Wars was Saved in the Edit"'s argument that the whole idea of the Death Star attacking Yavin IV was something that Marcia Lucas came with and cobbled together with creative editing. The rebuttal video points to the footage of Tarkin referring to "our moment of triumph" which seems to throw cold water on the idea. But I would have to ask further questions, like, before the supposed edit, what was the point of a tracking device on the Millennium Falcon, which was clearly referred to in unedited dialogue? Anyway, please watch the video above.

X Sonnet #1798

Exchanging looks, the elves would sort the bows.
A present mind repeats the morning's past.
A rare and golden gift's a nose that glows.
And here, some fame would hold a monster fast.
Wasabi bears retained the key to home.
Remembered palms were swaying over graves.
Attackers drove the years ahead of Rome.
The face of love submerged beneath the waves.
A child's break became a woman's dream.
Across the sand, a golden servant steps.
Combining fruits unites the scurvy team.
The flattened skirt has lost its vaunted pep.
For trading stars, the gods were put to bed.
The darker space has faded up to red.

A Sucking Tunnel

I was amused and even a little surprised by the heights of stupidity achieved by last night's finale of Ahsoka. The cream of the jest would be if Disney now follows through with giving Dave Filoni an actual Star Wars movie to write and/or direct. I mean, it could work. With maybe the cast of Mystery Science Theater 3000 riffing on the thing (preferably Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Trace Beaulieu).

I did kind of like the scene where Ezra built his new lightsaber. Even though I never liked Kanan, it was a cool conversation between David Tennant as the droid and Eman Esfandi as Ezra. But it was all downhill for the rest of the episode.

Ahsoka's ship is for some reason hovering slowly over the snail people and on top of Ahsoka's ship is Ahsoka herself meditating and Sabine hanging out. We get a few more pieces of the maddening, time killing dialogue Filoni likes to give his female characters. SABINE: "So you know" AHSOKA: "I do." We finally learn the bone of contention between Ahsoka and Sabine was that Ahsoka feared Sabine would seek vengeance for the Empire's attack on Mandalore. The character motivation we should have had from the beginning. But I doubt Filoni had thought of it until the last episode since the beef between the two was originally implied to be a clash of personalities.

Is it wise to be sitting on top of the ship when they know TIE Fighters can swoop in at any time? I suppose they figure they can get back inside fast enough for the shields to go up or for Huyang to execute evasive manoeuvres . . .

Oh, yeah, no-one moves fast on this show.

Well, Diana Lee Inosanto was kind of quick in her duel with Rosario Dawson. I was reminded of how George Sanders, who considered himself a terrible sword fighter, said Tyrone Power could make him look quick when Power played the hero to Sanders' villain in The Black Swan. Only here the roles are reversed as it's our heroine who lumbers about with her lightsabers like an average schlub who just got out of bed. With Ahsoka's makeup and prosthetics, it should've been easy to use a body double who could actually fight. My guess is Disney was just too cheap. Yet they throw money at Dave Filoni.

Not too much money since they evidently didn't have a Star Destroyer bridge set. So Thrawn had to do all his strategising in the witch's tower and when he finally leaves in the climax he does so aboard the trans-galactic ring ship. I don't see why they don't just keep a Star Destroyer bridge set on standby. Why not just reuse the one used on Andor? Might as well ask why Sabine doesn't have her jetpack.

The answer, of course, is so we could have the scene of her and Ezra Force jumping into the Star Destroyer hanger. Ezra makes it and takes down two stormtroopers so he can stand up with his back to the hanger and yell at Sabine, apparently unconcerned about the possibility of any number of Imperials getting the drop on him. Even though a zombie stormtrooper had gotten the drop on him just minutes earlier.

Filoni piles layers of weak logic from here on in. Ezra overhears the dead stormtrooper's comm, a communication about reinforcements coming to the location. Why would they be sending reinforcements to the location if they didn't know Ezra was there? How would they know Ezra was there if they can't see him next to unconscious stormtrooper they're trying to talk to? Given it's a whole huge hanger that should be loaded with personnel, despite the fact that Ezra refuses even to glance around, someone should see him.

This whole sequence of idiocy ends with Ezra landing an Imperial shuttle in a New Republic cruiser's hanger. He exits the ship wearing a full suit of stormtrooper armour, including the helmet, while everyone trains weapons on him. Maybe his comms were knocked out and the New Republic ship just let him come aboard on faith (we know they're that dumb) so they didn't know who was aboard. He still could've removed his helmet before exiting the ship. God, it's so stupid I'm going to need a helmet for banging my head against the wall just thinking about it.

So it seems like the rumours about the show being a setup for a Heir to the Empire film or series might be true. All I can say is they better let Timothy Zahn do the writing. He's at least better than Filoni though why the hell they would bank on even Zahn is a mystery considering his trilogy of books really only achieved the success they did because it was the first real Star Wars content in a long time after Return of the Jedi. The plot hinges on the ysalamiri and just look at all the Star Wars content that featured the ysalamiri after that. Yeah, basically none.

Anyway, that's another kettle of fish.

Ahsoka is available on Disney+. Though I'm wondering if they won't try to make everyone forget this one like they did the Willow series.

A Soaker Tan'O

Last night's Ahsoka was almost competent and there were a few moments I think were actually good. The editing was a bit better, managing to cover up for some of the weak fight choreography. Some of the special effects were astonishingly bad, though, and the writing wasn't great. It is a little better now, though, because . . .

Dave Filoni now has male characters to drive all the action. He's a little better at writing men and the episode, which turned on the actions of Thrawn, Ezra, Baylon, and a surprise appearance from C3PO, actually has everyone speaking at a natural pace.

We also had another brief appearance from Anakin, the man who remains at the centre of Ahsoka's universe.

I never liked Ezra on Rebels but actor Eman Esfandi is pretty charming. Even though he and Sabine still lack appropriate emotional reactions to circumstances, I thought it was kind of cute when his hair was singed and he said, "Close!"

But the episode began with Hera at a hearing, threatened with court martial.

Are they kidding with this set? It looks like a cut scene from a '90s PC game.

C3PO walked in with a message from Senator Leia Organa to save Hera's bacon. Sadly, this mostly just highlighted the absence of Carrie Fisher. The gratuitous anti-droid comment from the senator framed the conversation again for Disney's ongoing, annoying "droids' rights" subplot. They don't understand, or they don't care, we're supposed to laugh at C3PO, not with him. The result is a scene that earns the word "cringe".

I do like Lars Mikkelson as Thrawn and with his delivery alone he almost makes it seem like leaving Sabine alive was all part of a clever plan. Almost.

Ahoska is available on Disney+.

A Sucker to Know

Last night's Ahsoka was the best of the series so far. It was terrible but it had some nice design work and the writing was dumb in a slightly different way than in previous episodes. It reminded me of something stupid I noticed all the way back on an episode of Star Wars: Rebels.

I wrote in my 2017 review for an episode of Rebels called "Trials of the Darksaber";

Here Sabine casually caresses the Ghost's resident droid, Chopper, who shivers with apparent pleasure in response.

So . . . that was surprising. What was that? Oh, how I want Sabine and Chopper to be lovers. What a lovely can of worms that would be. Of course, I know that's not what's going on here but, egad, how happy I am to construe it that way. What's actually going on here, I'd say, is a further attempt to establish Sabine as a bona fide Disney princess.

In "Ghosts of Geonosis" she had her Tinker Bell moment, now she's having her Snow White/Cinderella/Aurora moment. The way those princesses seemed to have a perfectly innocent physical rapport with deer, mice, owls, and dwarfs, Sabine has it with Chopper. And now that we know she is a daughter in a major Mandalorian house with the potential to become leader of all Mandalorians thanks to inheritance, she's literally a princess.

Now think about Sabine's relationship with the horse/wolf mount that Thrawn's people just kindly handed over to her. It automatically seems to love her and seems to be making up for Sabine's persistent naivete. Just like the forest animals in Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Tangled, and so on. They really want Sabine to be a Disney princess.

They may have leaned in way to hard on the naivete angle. She just seems intensely stupid most of the time. After, by pure dumb luck, the Empire gives her a mount to explore a totally alien planet, she gets angry with it and argues with it after it gets spooked by her fight with the bandits. She doesn't thank her lucky stars that she doesn't have to go on foot across a wasteland with no food and water. She decides to argue with the animal instead. It has to beg for the pleasure of carrying her ass across the hellscape. I'm inclined to think there's some, perhaps unconscious, misogyny in this writing.

By more pure, dumb luck, she runs into some cute snail people who just so happen to be taking care of Ezra. They offer her food the moment she gets to their camp which she refuses and, okay, maybe their food would kill her but when was the last time she ate? Also, I couldn't help hearing Indiana Jones in my head; "You're insulting them and embarrassing me."

And there was Ezra, hale and hearty on snail people food. Their reunion was another moment that compelled me to marvel at how void Dave Filoni is of imagination. Their casual hellos had the vibe of Luke Cage running into Danny Rand. Scratch that, Luke Cage and Danny Rand were more excited to see each other. And they lived in the same city. Sabine just travelled to another galaxy, potentially sacrificing her own to do so. Ezra hasn't seen a friendly human in more than a decade but he's casual about it, too. Compare that to Han's reunion with Lando in Empire. Luke's reunion with Biggs in A New Hope. People used to have emotions in the Star Wars universe. Hell, a passionate kiss wouldn't have been out of order. Dave Filoni consistently tees himself up and whiffs.

We only see Ahsoka herself briefly at the beginning where she and Huyang seem to be treating the intergalactic ride in a space whale like a car wash. They're bored! They're killing time with stories.

Meanwhile, the bad guys arrive on the planet of moorland. Baylon and his apprentice, Shin, have a conversation that's so badly written, it's like it came from a first draft in a community college creative writing class. Baylon explains to Shin that this is a place of madness and dreams and the subject of folklore in the familiar Star Wars galaxy. Thanks for the infodump because we're certainly not going to see any of this. Despite this legendary background to the place, Baylon and Morgan had seemed bored and barely interested, of course, when they first arrived at the planet.

Lars Mikkelsen brings some welcome subtlety to his performance as Thrawn. In fact, since he's so nice to Sabine, and the New Republic council all seemed like slobbering assholes, I started to wonder if Thrawn taking over wouldn't be such a bad thing.

And yes, we got Ezra last night, too, and he's looking biblical, just like his namesake. I still wonder why Filoni chose names from the bible for Kanan and Ezra.

Star Wars: Ahsoka is available on Disney+.

Star Wars: Loitering

Last night's episode of Ahsoka was supposed to be a big event. Written and directed by Dave Filoni, it also played in select cinemas in the US. It was 52 minutes long (around 42 minutes if you subtract credits). So I guess if you caught an 11am show you could still get lunch at a reasonable time. And since there's not much to distract you in the episode, you'll have plenty of time to consider what restaurant or fast food joint you want to go to.

It really is astounding that someone could get into the position where he could make an expensive, effects laden entry in a major action adventure franchise while having absolutely no instinct for crafting tension or excitement or emotional depth.

I kind of liked the moment where Jacen can hear the lightsabres in the waves. Maybe it was just because they squeezed out one drop of John Williams music for it. Though they were still unwilling to spring for "Anakin's Theme" or "The Imperial March". But the moment is followed by Hera giving instructions like they need to hurry and Filoni gives us this shot:

Just, you know. Standing around, chatting. It's a water cooler moment. How 'bout that little Force using kid? I thought he was blue-screened into the whole series, who knew he'd actually make a contribution?

And there's Ahsoka's flashback to the Clone Wars where, loitering amongst a bunch of troopers, she and Anakin hear sounds of battle nearby. What does the body language of the troopers tell us?

"You hear about those new T16s? I hear they're quite a--what was that? Oh, it was nothing."

When a whole Rebel fleet turns up for some reason to round up six AWOL X-Wings and General Syndulla, the lead X-Wing pilot has a casual chat with the commanding officer. He's supposed to be stalling for time while Ahsoka's making a desperate attempt to communicate with the space whales. Is there a hint of nervousness in his voice? Are there beads of sweat on Ahsoka's brow as she tries to focus? Nope. Everything's serene, everything's casual. Break out the Grateful Dead records.

I think Filoni sees himself as spiritual but even on that score, what is he ultimately saying in Anakin's "Choose life or death" lesson for Ahsoka? She throws her lightsabre away at the end just like Luke did, making it clear that this is just a meandering imitation of Luke's arc in the original trilogy. It's a shame because Hayden Christensen was primed and ready for a comeback.

His reflexes and showmanship with a lightsabre are still top notch and Rosario Dawson looks even slower and clumsier next to him. Maybe Filoni did put something of himself into the character after all.

Overall, this series reminds me of some of the students in my high school art class who would be very proud of themselves for drawing a really nice looking arm or leg but then be too timid to actually finish the picture, worried they'll screw up what they so impressed themselves with. But that "impressive" thing itself was really just a first, rudimentary lesson. Ahsoka always feels like it's telling us, "Nothing much might be happening now, but just you wait!"

Ahsoka is available on Disney+.

A Slow Ka

Last night's Ahsoka had some good qualities but, on the whole, it was another insubstantial episode. The action scenes were a little better though the show's lacking in good fight choreography. I was watching the last episodes of the second season of Iron Fist on Monday and when a show is outshone by Iron Fist you know there's a problem.

The late Ray Stevenson was good as Baylan and he did his best with Filoni's bone-headed dialogue, some of which was unintentionally funny last night. When he told Ahsoka that Anakin used to talk about her and she replied, "He never mentioned you," I thought, "But you don't know his name yet." Maybe Filoni hopes you'll forget such details in the vast space between lines.

SABINE: "Don't worry about me."

AHSOKA: "I'm not."

SABINE: "Good."

AHSOKA: "Should I be?"

SABINE: "What?"

AHSOKA: "Worried."

Oy vey. Filoni could write a book, How to Fill Five Minutes with Three Seconds of Dialogue. I said, "Worried," at the screen twice before Ahsoka said it. It reminded me of the sloth DMV scene from Zootopia.

By the way, worried is used as an adjective here and worry as a verb. The dialogue should have been, "Should I?" "What?" "Worry." Then Sabine could've said, "I just said don't!" and we could have kept the meaningless merry-go-round going for another ten minutes.

Ray Stevenson was good but, boy, Sabine giving the map to him was really dumb. Why did she assume he wouldn't kill her? Why didn't he kill her? What code of honour does he have? I saw people were joking about how Ahsoka criticised Grogu for feeling attachment to Din but seems to have turned a blind eye to Sabine's fanatical devotion to Ezra. A sure sign that a guy can't write female characters is that they spend all their time obsessing with male characters and it appears to be their sole motivation.

The episode ended with Ahsoka in the World Between Worlds where she found an eerily smooth skinned Anakin. You're out of luck if you haven't seen Rebels or Clone Wars. It would've been a lot cooler when Hayden Christensen called her "Snips" if people talked at the same natural pace on this show they did on Clone Wars.

I'm not a fan of the World Between Worlds introduced on Rebels. It's basically a way for characters to cheat death, another way to lower the stakes, and for the show to wallow in nostalgia. But I guess that's the name of the game here.

Ahsoka is available on Disney+.

The Ambling Ahsoka, Further Down the Trail

Ahsoka episode three was a brief flight covering little ground. There were some things I liked, though, and a couple things I thought, in addition to being bad, were kind of curious.

Top of that list would be Hera's son, Jacen. Last week, one of the things people complained about in the first two episodes was the absence of Hera's son, last seen at the end of Star Wars: Rebels. I didn't complain about it because I honestly forgot all about him and didn't care very much when I was reminded.

But it's so odd the way he was shoehorned into the third episode I kind of think Dave Filoni had forgotten about him, too. First we hear Mon Mothma ask Hera about Jacen--which makes it seem even stranger that Ahsoka and Sabine never inquired about him as presumably they're closer to Hera than Mon Mothma. And then we get an actual scene with the kid.

It feels so perfunctory, so much like an afterthought. I was tempted to think it was shot over the past week after all the reviews pointed out Jacen's absence but surely that's not possible with the actor's strike going on. But I bet it was added some time late in the production.

This was also the first time we saw Genevieve O'Reilly playing Mon Mothma in a show set after the original trilogy. I'd have thought they'd have made more effort to make her look like Caroline Blakiston. They could have at least changed her hair. She actually looked more like Blakiston in Rogue One. But I guess I don't mind O'Reilly taking over the role. She was excellent on Andor though perhaps her presence serves as another reminder of how much better the writing was on that show.

The New Republic politicians mostly appeared to sneer at Hera for wanting to follow a trail of evidence leading to Imperial Remnant activity. She provokes their disdain because the trail is loosely related to a friend of hers who went missing. Boy, that was lame. I was reminded that in the old Expanded Universe books, the New Republic was also portrayed as immobilised by bureaucratic disagreements and a belief that the Imperial remnants no longer presented a serious threat. I remember finding that tedious and silly then, too, though at least it turned out a spy was at the bottom of it.

Lately, I've been thinking about this interview with George Lucas and Dave Filoni (it starts at around 9:20):

One of the striking things about it is that, even though it's heavily edited, George Lucas has nothing nice to say about Filoni and a couple of Filoni's remarks are critical of Lucas, like where he implies Lucas was being foolish for making episodes of The Clone Wars about banking. It's a little ironic since some of the best parts of Mon Mothma's subplot on Andor involved banking. Filoni says kids wouldn't be interested in it, and that may be true, but kids aren't the only audience for Star Wars. Even setting aside the fact that people who were kids in the '70s, '80s, and '90s are adults now, a lot of the people lined up for Star Wars in 1977 were teens and adults. So I reject this idea that Star Wars is just for kids.

Another interesting part of the interview is the story about how Filoni frequently had to explain to Lucas what he was trying to do and Lucas frequently had to tell him that his, Filoni's, ideas were not translating onto the screen. That sounds like it would be good advice about now when it comes to the relationship between Ahsoka and Sabine.

We still have no idea what the big fight was that drove these two apart. There's not even a hint of the kind of tension you'd expect in the aftermath of such a rupture. They're just blandly polite to each other.

I did kind of like the training scene (though the show's weak fight choreography was again in evidence). Mainly it was for David Tennant as Huyang.

You could say he's kind of playing a deluxe C3PO. Few people argue Anthony Daniels is an especially good actor (Alec Guinness certainly wasn't impressed) though he works in a broad role like C3PO and oddly kind of makes the case that Star Wars droids aren't sentient. However, David Tennant is, I believe, one of the greatest actors of his generation (watch his Hamlet if you haven't already). Some of the nuance he puts on his lines on Ahsoka make them almost delicious. And, as usual, Filoni seems to loosen up when he's writing male characters.

The score on Ahsoka is good and I like the planet with the red trees. Is it supposed to be Dathomir? If only Filoni could write Ahsoka and Sabine. A lot of people are criticising all of the unnatural pauses. I think Filoni may be trying to emulate Spaghetti Westerns, particularly Once Upon a Time in the West.

For one thing, Once Upon a Time in the West isn't universally beloved (though I love it). It's not even usually considered Sergio Leone's best (though it's generally in the top three). But I would say Once Upon a Time in the West is more effective because the motives behind the sparse dialogue are clearer and the stakes are obvious enough that real tension hangs in the pauses.

It also should be noted that Once Upon a Time in the West isn't a kids' movie. I certainly wouldn't expect a three year old to sit still for long lingering shots of Jack Elam's face. So another part of Filoni's problem may be that he's not even clear on what he's trying to do.

Ahsoka is available on Disney+.

X Sonnet #1733

Essential buttons pay for houses cheap.
The demon mirror cries to see itself.
Through woods of wire hair the kittens creep.
A pastry box contains a captive elf.
Her eyes bananas called for sporty splits.
Explaining cows has led to foreign zoos.
It's not for eyes the summer cooler spits.
But time is short for paying fruitless dues.
As danger mornings mount the nights extend.
A floppy fist rewards the wimpy man.
As lousy lines were gathered blanks descend.
A vapid kid regressed to rusty pan.
Another zebra ball has knocked the night.
She lifeless flipped through space in lifeless flight.

Ah . . . Sou ka?

Well, here we are. Fifteen years after first appearing as a supporting character in the Clone Wars cgi movie, Ahsoka Tano is now starring in her own live action series, Ahsoka. After watching the two premiere episodes, I saw that Andor, not Ahsoka, was trending on Twitter with people either observing how much better Andor was or people complaining about people saying Andor was better. So, yeah, Ahsoka seems to have hit the ground stumbling.

A lot of reviews say it's slow and that it's almost incomprehensible if you haven't watched Star Wars: Rebels. I'd say, yes, both are true. Though I will say that one of the main problems with Obi-Wan Kenobi was that it lacked the sense of awe and majesty you get in classic Star Wars movies. So in that sense, I appreciated Dave Filoni's slow and almost ceremonial pace at times. But the guy just can't write. I used to say he couldn't write female characters and his male characters are a little more nuanced but I think, at the end of the day, he's just all around a bad writer and the slow pace makes it all the more excruciating to experience.

I don't mean he's a bad writer in the George Lucas way, like Lucas imitating the stiff style of Flash Gordon dialogue. Filoni has no emotional connexion to the characters so it feels mostly like he's treading water, waiting for something to come to him and nothing does.

The first scene is kind of cool if intensely stupid. A New Republic ship comes across a strange vessel asking to board and issuing an outdated Jedi code. Instead of even opening a channel to get a visual or even aural impression of the strangers, the captain says he'll "call their bluff" and invites them aboard. Of course, they come aboard and use red lightsabres to slaughter everyone.

Cut to Ahsoka herself, now unlocking a puzzle in an ancient temple of some kind. This is another in a series of attempts to bring an Indiana Jones-ish vibe to the Star Wars universe and I'm going to quote from my review of a Bad Batch episode that attempted something similar with similarly unimpressive results:

The target of her tomb raiding in the episode, the "Heart of the Mountain", doesn't have a lot of lustre, literally and figuratively. We know it's something from before the time of the Republic, we know it's on a planet in an uncharted system. But why is it legendary? We find out it serves a function, but what do people believe it does? A legendary artefact ought to have legendary powers. The idol in Raiders of the Lost Ark was clearly a religious symbol, representative of a god. The sort of Incan trappings of the Idol and temple carry associations for the audience, mixing the known and the unknown.

Part of the reason artefacts have a mystique in tomb raiding stories is because there's a mysterious culture around them. Whether it's the cities in H Rider Haggard or the cults and books around Cthulhu in Lovecraft, there's a sense of unknown culture. In Star Wars, which Lucas created as a playground where you could "other" aliens who didn't even exist, you should be able to have screaming weirdos trying to thwart Ahsoka, some evidence of some deeply strange or hostile society around the artefact, several steps removed from, but still implicitly connected to, the object. Without it, the sense of mystery around the object is absent and it just feels, as some reviewers have said, like a video game.

For some reason, Ahsoka's compelled to work with Sabine Wren to decipher the map she obtains. Why, in the whole New Republic, Sabine Wren is uniquely qualified to decipher the thing is never made clear. Nor is it revealed why Ahsoka and Sabine split up. Sabine had had a go at being Ahsoka's padawan but we're told, but never shown, they had some terrible clash of personalities that compelled Sabine to give up padawaning and searching for Ezra. Seems like a pretty important character development point to just omit, doesn't it? I guess it's stashed somewhere with the reason Nick Fury and Captain Marvel stopped looking for a new homeworld for the Skrulls.

We catch up with Sabine on her speeder, now played by the gorgeous Natasha Liu Bordizzo. Even the chaste Dave Filoni can't resist tracking a shot up her thigh. She's speeding away from a ceremony where she's set to be honoured, her absence somehow only discovered at the very moment the master of ceremonies announces her name. So two starfighters are scrambled apparently to arrest her?

This is what you do when someone doesn't show up to a ceremony in her honour? During the ceremony?

We also catch up with Hera, my favourite character from Rebels entirely because of Vanessa Marshall's performance. Now she's played by the ridiculously miscast Mary Elizabeth Winstead. But this is only the latest in a series of badass roles (Kate, Birds of Prey) Winstead has insisted on playing despite being totally wrong for them. She's reunited with Rosario Dawson, her costar from Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof, a movie where Dawson and Winstead were both perfectly cast. Dawson as a plainspoken, charismatic chatterbox and Winstead as the pretty, naive airhead. She's run so far away from that, it reminds me of how Edward Norton tried to play only suave romantic leads after being perfectly cast as the dweeb in Fight Club. People have suggested Winstead got the job because Ewan McGregor is her husband.

And, yeah . . . Rosario Dawson is wasted here. She would've been great as the young Ahsoka Tano, energetic, clumsy, and charismatic. But Dave Filoni has taken one of the most creative performers of dialogue alive to-day and cast her as a statue. Incidentally, this extends to her fight choreography, which is lumbering and limp.

But at least none of her fights end like the duel Sabine has with dark Force user Shin Hati (Ivanna Sakhno). When I saw Sabine getting stabbed through the gut, I laughed out loud. It seemed impossible that they would do this again after a widespread critique that too many people were surviving lightsabre skewerings. It's gone from critique to meme, even. It's truly astounding that even Disney would be this stubbornly idiotic. But. Here it is. You could argue Shin stabbed her slightly to one side of Sabine's gut, potentially only destroying her intestines, but that only begs the question, "Why didn't she finish her off?" No-one even seems surprised Sabine survived. My revenge headcanon says she has trouble with bowel movements from now on.

Do I have any positive comments? Sabine looked great, at least before she cut her hair. Why did she have to cut her hair to wear a Mandalorian helmet? We saw this kid on The Mandalorian, right?

I get why Disney is hyping Dave Filoni. They want a credible successor and Filoni has a rabid gang of fans. Filoni certainly likes to hype himself, and he'll bend the truth to do it, like when he tried to take credit for Darth Vader's hallway fight in Rogue One, which people actually involved with the film quickly denied. An Ahsoka series could have been great if he'd gotten some of the writers actually responsible for Ahsoka's development on Clone Wars, like Paul Dini, Henry Gilroy or, hell, why not Katie Lucas? George Lucas created Ahsoka because he was thinking about his relationship with his daughters and it turned out Katie actually wrote some pretty good episodes of Clone Wars, including the memorable Dathomir arcs.

Well. Maybe it gets better next week. Ahsoka is available on Disney+.

A Place in the Galaxy

I chose to observe Star Wars Day this year by watching Star Wars--that is, A New Hope, the 1977 movie that started it all. I'd been meaning to since watching Andor and since I'd seen many comments from people flatly asserting that Star Wars has no artistic merit and limited entertainment value. Since then, I've been thinking of the reasons why audiences might be losing touch with the franchise.

What are some of the reasons it's hard for people to-day to understand the impact of the first film? One thing that strikes me about it is how much it hinges on Luke finding his way. Luke really is a solidly conceived and executed character. We see his restlessness, his teenage petulance, his longing for escape and something bigger he doesn't quite understand when looking at those twin suns.

It's hard to overstate the importance of John Williams' score which continually broadens the scope of everything we see.

Luke doesn't just want to leave Tatooine, he wants to fight. He wants to join the Imperial Academy like Biggs and it's implied he'll use that as a jumping point to join the Rebel Alliance. Andor makes it clear the kind of daily impact the Empire has on an ordinary citizen but Luke's desire to fight is more fundamental than saving the galaxy or even in acheiving personal validation. He's reckless enough to check out the Sand People after he's already recovered R2D2. He has his big rifle and it seems he's looking for an excuse to fight.

When his aunt and uncle are killed, he's solemn and awed. He doesn't seem to feel much grief, not like he does when Obi-Wan dies.

Obi-Wan and Han Solo present two models for Luke for how he might fit in with society, how he might satisfy his needs while maintaining positive connexions with other people. Obi-Wan dazzles Luke with stories of "crusades" and honourable warfare he embarked upon with Luke's absent father, the original missing male role model. Alec Guinness' performance conveys a profound inner peace Luke knows nothing about but Obi-Wan presents him with a path of wisdom and discipline to achieve it. Meanwhile, Han shows how a man sometimes needs to put his pragmatism ahead of a sense of honour or duty. Ultimately, it's of course Obi-Wan who exerts more influence.

I suppose these things might not connect with younger audiences to-day. The MCU movies tend to be about people who are already grown. But even young Peter Parker is too squeaky clean to have the kind of urges Luke has (Peter Parker in the comics, or the Sam Raimi films, is another story). I suppose it's possible this generation doesn't like stories about a protagonist having a dark side, or stories where such impulses are natural and must be managed and taught to find satisfaction in acceptable ways.

A New Hope is primarily told from Luke's point of view and this is what makes the cantina scene so effective. He'd clearly never seen so many aliens in one place before--not just in terms of species but in terms of people not from his world. The initial audience for Star Wars would have been as bewildered as Luke. Luke has some experience dealing with people. A human from another planet might be mysterious indeed but Luke would have some ready understanding of facial expressions and mannerisms. The cantina drops a sea of new and inscrutable expressions and customs. There are faces he can't read, associations he can't rely on (one guy literally looks like the Devil). Even the humans have peculiar hairstyles and wear strange things.

He calls the Millennium Falcon a piece of junk. How true is that really, though? What is Luke's frame of reference? Probably the equivalent of magazines and catalogues which showcase products in their ideal forms. Han does have a valuable lesson for Luke about what it's like to actually live in the galaxy.

I found myself thinking of Kimetsu no Yaiba, the mega-hit anime franchise. It starts out a lot like Star Wars. The protagonist, Tanjiro, is a teenager who comes home to find his family slaughtered and his sister transformed into a demon. He meets an old master who trains him and he's obliged to go to a world that's culturally alien to him. The substantial difference between Tanjiro and Luke is that Tanjiro is not established with any previous desire to leave home. He was quite content in his domestic lifestyle and now his primary motive is to cure his sister so that they might some day return to a semblance of happy, normal life. It's his sister, Nezuko, who has the violent impulses that must be managed and they're implicitly abominations, causing Tanjiro to feel shame and horror.

Domesticity and creature comforts may be the true religion of Japan but maybe prioritising them is no longer so uniquely Japanese. Maybe people all over the world are more passive than they used to be and the desire to fight and conquer is no longer felt. Or at least, maybe it's no longer consciously acknowledged.

The Mando that Goes Up Must Come Down

The third season of The Mandalorian concluded true to this year's established form--with weak writing and some nice action sequences. This time, I have a stronger feeling that the problems may not have been entirely Jon Favreau's fault, despite the fact that he has sole writing credit. There are a few instances of very obviously looped dialogue I think may well have been added by meddlers at Disney.

The previous episode ended with Din getting cut off from the other Mandalorians as well as Grogu on the secret Imperial base. This episode begins with one of the Mandalorians flying straight up into the sky. Over the comm, Bo-Katan fills him in about what we've seen and instructs him to get reinforcements from the fleet in orbit. Meanwhile, I'm wondering, why was this guy flying straight up into the sky in the first place?

I suspect an early version of this opening scene featured no dialogue at all. We saw some Mandalorians moving through corridors and another one flying towards the fleet. Explanations wouldn't have been necessary if we can remember things established in previous episodes--comms can't get through Mandalore's atmosphere and the folks planetside are in hot water. When this guy gets to the bridge of the capital ship and asks for aid, all would have made sense. Someone at Disney saw this and thought everything had to be spelled out for the two-year-olds in the audience. Since the Mandalorians are all wearing helmets, it's easy dub over dialogue so they had Bo-Katan give her instructions while the guy was in flight. But ironically, this makes things much more confusing because we're left asking--why the hell was this guy flying straight up at the sky to begin with?

This is almost immediately followed by a scene where Gideon is watching Din and Grogu rendered as dots on a schematic and he remarks from off-camera, "The Mandalorian has escaped." I laughed out loud at that one. Wouldn't the nearby Dark Trooper feel compelled to ask, "Uh, which one, Sir?" Gideon could've replied, "Who do you think? The star of this show!" That was probably the thinking of whoever dubbed that line in. I bet they were thinking, "The kids at home know him best as the Mandalorian." Again, trying to make things absurdly clear has rendered them ridiculous and confusing.

There are some other things I don't think can be blamed on looped dialogue, like Bo-Katan suddenly swooping in to fight Moff Gideon. I was really digging the grand jet pack melee and how dizzying it was. How Bo-Katan alone spotted what was going on down below I don't know. A shot establishing a connexion between the two locations would have been nice. Many of the problems could be attributable to director Rick Famuyiwa who directed three of the episodes this season despite being one of the weakest directors from previous seasons.

I did enjoy most of the fight, it was well choreographed. Though Gideon destroying the Dark Sabre after demanding that Bo-Katan relinquish it struck another blow to the clarity of Gideon's motives. Also, after establishing how cool the Dark Sabre is and how cool Bo-Katan is with it, destroying it now feels pretty lame. Maybe it'll be repaired.

Grogu was cute in the episode but once again his story made little sense. I thought Din had already adopted him so I don't know why he needed to again here. Grogu's inability to talk doesn't seem like it should be an issue if they could give him a device that speaks "Yes" and "No" when he presses corresponding buttons. I thought he would have his first words by the end of this season. So much for that. It seems Grogu may be the Maggie Simpson of the Star Wars universe, though even Maggie had that episode where Elizabeth Taylor voiced her. Who could they bring in for Grogu? I nominate Faye Dunaway.

The Mandalorian is available on Disney+.