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.
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.
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 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.
Another week, another poorly written episode of The Mandalorian. But this time, director Carl Weathers actually made a mediocre script by Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni into something at times genuinely exciting.
The recap reminds us of the kid whose head's been newly imprisoned by the the Mandalorian helmet for no reason. Really, doesn't anyone ever ask, "Why?" This week, the kid's nabbed by a cool alien pterodactyl.
Bo Katan managed to follow it to its nest. She does nothing else, returning to base so everyone can convene, draw up plans, and mount a coordinated effort to rescue the kid, and for some reason no-one seems to think the kid's been killed already. They decide not to use their jetpacks at first for fear of making too much noise and upsetting the monster. "It would kill the child," the Armourer explains as though the kid's being held for ransom.
They make camp upon reaching the nest at nightfall, apparently deciding the nightvision capabilities on their helmets grant them no advantage against the apparently diurnal monster.
And they needn't have rushed because the monster coughs up the kid for his own babies and the kid's just fine.
I know, I know. Beskar armour. But no broken limbs? No saliva? For whatever reason, the monster decided not to feed its babies right away, so the kid was just sleeping in its gullet all night? Was he even in any danger from the babies? Is anyone really in any danger from anything?
The episode ends with the three monster babies being adopted by the tribe. A sure sign this section of the story was written by Dave Filoni whose depictions of animals in Rebels and Tales of the Jedi make me think he was the kind of kid who'd have climbed into the tiger enclosure at the zoo expecting to be able to pet the animals after a perfunctory round of harmless rough and tumble.
Weathers deserves a lot of credit for making the sky battle truly exciting.
Meanwhile, Grogu has a flashback of his rescue and flight from the Jedi Temple with the assistance of none other than Ahmed Best.
Best isn't bad as a badass Jedi and Weathers makes him look good. Certainly better than he looks on the show where Best originated the role of Jedi Master Kelleran Beq two years ago:
The Mandalorian is available on Disney+ and Star Wars: Jedi Temple Challenge is available on YouTube.
I got home late from Osaka last night and didn't feel like watching a movie. In the morning I watched the second episode of Robert Blake's YouTube series. Recorded within the last couple years, the episodes are just him at home going through boxes of old photos. So far he's talked almost exclusively about his roles as a child. Apparently he didn't think too much of Lost Highway at that point in his life, something seemingly confirmed by David Lynch in this interview:
Although, this interview from the time of the film's release shows him being more positive about it--and also somewhat derisive of his body of work previous to it:
I guess people change. Which is a pretty good summary of Lost Highway, actually.
I didn't realise Lost Highway, in 1997, was Blake's last movie. I wonder why. His arrest didn't happen until 2002.
“There was times on that set where I even became almost unprofessional in a sense, where I just started changing lines … I would have to sit down with the writers, and they would be like, ‘Wait, what happened to the scene?’ And I would have to go through and explain why I couldn’t do certain things."
Ortega went on to give specific examples, quoting stereotypical “teenage” dialogue that clashed with Wednesday’s dark, brooding persona.
“Everything that she does, everything that I had to play, did not make sense for her character at all,” Ortega said. “Her being in a love triangle made no sense. There was a line about like, this dress that she has to wear for a school dance and she said, ‘Oh, my God, I love it. Ugh, I can’t believe I said that. I literally hate myself.’ And I had to go, ‘No, there’s no way.’”
Ortega even mentioned choreographing her own dance, the most iconic scene from the show, after discovering that Wednesday was originally meant to inspire a flash-mob, stating: “why would [Wednesday] be okay with that?”
Ortega implied that she had completely reshaped her character to give Wednesday more of an arc, saying, “I grew very, very protective of her, but you can’t lead a story and have no emotional arc because then it’s boring and nobody likes you.”
I don't agree that arcs are essential to creating good characters or stories but, for the most part, it sounds like she was definitely a better writer than the show's credited scribes. The fact that Tim Burton has just cast her in Beetlejuice 2 suggests it wasn't Burton she was clashing with, either, and that Burton had a relatively small creative role for a director on Wednesday. If they do another season, I hope they get better writers. Maybe they should just have Jenna Ortega do the writing.
Speaking of publicised rewrites, I've been amused by this ongoing story about Dave Filoni's supposed involvement in the filming of the Vader hallway scene at the end of Rogue One. Freddie Prinze Jr., star of Filoni's Rebels, recently claimed the Rogue One scene was 100% conceived and executed by Filoni even though Filoni himself claimed in an earlier interview that he'd never filmed any live action before his work on The Mandalorian. Then, finally, Gary Whitta, one of the original writers on Rogue One, said the scene was filmed by the film's original director, Gareth Edwards. It wasn't even part of the reshoots by the second unit director.
Which sounds a lot more plausible to me. I remember when Filoni imitated the sequence in the final episode of Rebels where it made absolutely no sense.
I bet at some point Filoni, or one of Filoni's people, told Freddie Prinze that story about Filoni making the scene for Rogue One, just like Filoni has successfully convinced people he created Ahsoka Tano. The guy's career is taking credit for things at this point. Meanwhile, what has he done since George Lucas sold Star Wars that wasn't running off fumes from Lucas and Jon Favreau? I suspect the upcoming Ahsoka Tano series will be the make or break point. When that show ends up sucking, everyone's going to stop buying into his PR except his most virulent stans. And that'll be yet another headache Disney can't afford.
I'm reminded again how Bob Dolman complained about Disney execs tampering in the writers room on the Willow series. And the stories going around about how the ending to the latest Ant-Man movie was changed to its current lame incarnation. And I'm reminded of the Disney Dark Ages of the 1970s and early 1980s, when a lack of a strong creative vision and too many unimaginative cooks in the kitchen nearly sunk the studio. And here we go again.
Last night I finally finished working my way through Dave Filoni's remarkably anaemic Tales of the Jedi. I guess I should be used to it by now. I realised that Dave Filoni's work without George Lucas' supervision feels sort of like watching a sleepy child playing with action figures. This extends to the animation and pacing.
So many shots begin with characters kind of drifting into frame, everyone from Count Dooku to Ahsoka Tano having exactly the same wooden, stiff-legged stride.
Mind you, most of these episodes were directed by Saul Ruiz, but I've been noticing this in every cgi production Filoni's been involved with since Disney bought Star Wars. Dave Filoni's role on Tales of the Jedi was mainly as a writer, a role he rarely performed when he worked on Clone Wars under George Lucas. With good reason.
Tales of the Jedi features various stories centred on Count Dooku and Ahsoka Tano. Dooku's stories are by far the stronger, one episode featuring both Liam Neeson and Ian McDiarmid in brief guest roles. It's a shame Christopher Lee isn't still alive to share some master and padawan scenes with Neeson. But at least they've dropped the Easter Island statue head design used for Dooku on The Clone Wars.
Unfortunately, Filoni seems reluctant to shake the boat very much. We learn little of Dooku's activities prior to Attack of the Clones that couldn't be inferred. The episodes take a slow, contemplative, Blade Runner-ish tone similar to Anakin's contemplation scene in Revenge of the Sith, but here it seems mainly to cover for the fact that Filoni doesn't have much to say. So even a twelve minute episode feels like it has a lot of padding.
The biggest revelation is the death of Yaddle, voiced here by Bryce Dallas Howard. She somehow tracks Dooku to his secret meeting with Darth Sideous, necessitating a sabre duel between the two. It ends with Dooku crushing her beneath a massive metal door. But then she manages to crawl out from under it without being bloody or mangled or visibly injured in any way. And then she collapses and dies. Like being crushed by a big metal door is a sort of poison. I can understand if maybe they can't show blood and gore. But then why have her crawl out from under the door?
Hey, that rhymes. If you can't have the gore, don't use the door.
As for the Ahsoka episodes, Filoni continues to remake Ahsoka into an aloof spectator in her own life who makes few decisions. Even the episode that takes us back to when she was a new padawan for Anakin is entirely about Anakin's decision on how to train her. Those hoping for the Return of the Tube Top will be disappointed because Filoni seems to be retconning young Ahsoka into old Ahsoka.
She kind of reminds me of some old paintings of children in which the artist didn't know how to draw children so he or she just made them look like serene miniature adults.
I suppose there may be many people who took issue with the fact that Star Wars was often exciting. If that's you, you may enjoy this show.
There was certainly tragedy afoot in last night's new Clone Wars. I wish I could say it was all in the story but, sadly, it was primarily in the writing. Deliberately adopting a slow and grand pace and tone, it may at least be a fitting part 1 of a story to cap the series as a whole but for those looking for a satisfying episode for Ahsoka Tano it was more than disappointing.
I don't believe men can't write women. I don't believe people shouldn't try to write characters who come from different backgrounds and experiences. But Dave Filoni sure can't write women. "Old Friends Not Forgotten", despite featuring Ahsoka at the centre, is all about how the men react to her. First Anakin being adorably flustered at seeing her again then the clones lining up to salute her.
Ahsoka's role in the episode is to graciously acknowledge and observe everything, to gently remind Anakin that there's no time to catch up. The one time she expresses an individual opinion it makes no sense, as though Filoni felt sure there needed to be some kind of conflict but had no idea how to do it. When Anakin and Obi-Wan learn General Grievous has captured Chancellor Palpatine and is attacking Coruscant, leading up to the opening moments of Revenge of the Sith, Ahsoka accuses her comrades of "playing politics" by going off to Coruscant instead of going with her to join Mandalore's resistance against Maul.
This is after she's just indirectly referenced the Martez sisters when talking about how she's learned what the Jedi were meant to be for people. The Martez sisters are on Coruscant, the place being attacked by General Grievous. Her argument doesn't begin to make sense. When Obi-Wan seems surprised at her reaction, it's easy to see why. The room is filled with reasonable, charming men and a beautiful woman whose motives are idiotic or unknowable. Thanks, Filoni.
The tragedy is that Disney has bought the line that Filoni is the one who made Clone Wars great. This is despite the fact that Filoni directed the original Clone Wars movie, the one everyone says sucks but you just need to get past it to get to the good episodes. With Rebels and Resistance he's demonstrated again and again he wasn't the real talent on Clone Wars. I only hope Disney realises this before the live action Ahsoka series goes into production, assuming they've also learned that The Mandalorian needed to be less of a toddler show. It's a good sign Henry Gilroy is at least working on the Cassian Andor series. The Ahsoka series needs to be in the hands of Gilroy or Drew Z. Greenberg or Katie Lucas.
But last night's Clone Wars certainly had its good points. The opening scene with Anakin faking out the droids was funny and the action sequences were good, courtesy of director Saul Ruiz.
Clone Wars is available on Disney+. And for gods' sakes, get a subscription before Disney goes under.
