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.

The Young Someone Chronicles

With Disney about to release the final Indiana Jones film, they've finally managed to get the rest of the film series onto Disney+. I doubt Paramount was willing to let it go so Disney must have paid a fortune and it's likely temporary. But along with the films is something Paramount doesn't seem to care much about, at least not enough to put on their own Paramount+ service, and that's The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. Disney+ really feels like a logical home for it, too, since it's always kind of felt like a Disney Channel series--a watered down, slightly more moralistic version of a popular franchise.

The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, produced sporadically throughout the '90s by George Lucas, who struggled to keep the expensive series alive, is a lot better the better you succeed at getting the Indiana Jones movies out of your mind. As a series about an adventurous lad who happens to run into nearly every prominent historical figure alive in the early 1900s, it's not bad, and sometimes excellent.

A few days ago I watched Love's Sweet Song, which combines the episodes "Ireland, April 1916" and "London, May 1916". The Ireland segment shows Indy in his early '20s, portrayed by Sean Patrick Flannery (who always seems more like a young Mark Hamill than a young Harrison Ford), in Ireland witnessing the Easter Rising. This was shot in 1993, three years before Neil Jordan's Michael Collins. The episode features John Lynch playing the real playwright Sean O'Casey along with a few other prominent figures in Ireland at the time, even a brief cameo from Yeats. Indy is able to discuss similarities in the Irish Revolution to the Mexican Revolution he took part in in the previous episode. And if that's not enough of a whiplash for you, Indy goes from dodging British troops in this story to the gentle romantic episode of "London, May 1916" in which he falls for a young Elizabeth Hurley playing a suffragette.

What a difference a month makes. Don't get me wrong, the episode's really sweet and genuinely effective. Both episodes are good, especially if you can forget about the first when you're watching the second. And all the episodes are better if you can forget Sean Patrick Flannery is supposed to be Indiana Jones. And I think that's the central problem of the series. For a story that's supposed to be partly inspired by 1930s serials, it's almost an anti-serial. Every episode really needs to be taken in isolation, which makes Lucas' decision to re-edit the originally 45 minute episodes into feature length television movies particularly unfortunate. It doesn't help that Flannery is noticeably older in the linking segments, his hair is longer, and his hat looks cheap and stupid.

What, did you get that at Disneyland?

And as good as the London segment is, it feels rushed to fit his great romance with Elizabeth Hurley into the time span allowed. If only this were a story that could continue from episode to episode. It would have been better if Lucas had kept to the original format with an elderly Indy framing the stories as his recollections. You could blame any problems on his faulty memory, then. Even the idea that he used to look like Sean Patrick Flannery could've been put down to his modesty when we all know he actually looked like River Phoenix.

The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles is available on Disney+ in the US.

Twitter Sonnet #1705

Rebounding bottle horns could doink the fight.
And how's the bull to stop a poignant prim?
Decode a flipping pocket crime to light.
And squirrelly shops enjoy the sexy trim.
Perplexing tinsel rafters drop the house.
Devalued shorts display the wealth of borg.
Excessive ears destroy the living mouse.
A lazy hill defends the puppy warg.
Reveals of knifes could cut the scene in half.
Reproofs in idle moods condemn the tongues.
Repenting witches crack the golden calf.
A breathing bounty graced the sailor's lungs.
Abridging stars connects the burning gas.
Redemption false confers a phony pass.

Indy on Tap

My internet has been really bad all weekend so last night I had to watch something off a disk. As it happens, three spools of my old DVRs from when I was pirating things all the time arrived in a box of my books so I watched an episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles I burned to disk nine years ago. It was a 1993 episode directed by Joe Johnston, known for directing The Rocketeer and Captain America: The First Avenger, so he's no stranger to early 20th century American fantasy.

This episode finds Indy (Sean Patrick Flannery) in high school and working as a soda jerk. His girlfriend is Nancy, played by Robyn Lively, just two years after she was on Twin Peaks. Nancy and Indy are a sweet couple and very supportive of each other as they investigate the theft of Thomas Edison's plans for an electric car.

It turns out the plans were stolen by an oil company. I wonder if this idea came from screenwriter Matthew Jacobs or from George Lucas. It seems pretty prophetic now, in any case.

It's odd we never see or hear about Nancy again and, yet, that was also part of the magic of Indiana Jones. There were so many characters and aspects of his life that are peculiarly isolated to individual stories, especially his love interests, much in the mould of James Bond. Which is one of the reasons Kingdom of the Crystal Skull feels like it's so much on the wrong foot.

One of the remarkable things about The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles was how distinct every episode was, with every story introducing new locations, characters, costumes, and props. No wonder it was so cost prohibitive. It occurs to me, too, that the absence of real story arcs runs quite contrary to modern television tastes, not to mention the serials that originally inspired George Lucas. Even though I enjoy watching an episode now and then, they never end stoking a compulsion to immediately see the next one.

We get a dinner scene at Indy's house where we can see his family has black servants. That could never be presented without comment to-day. If it were the BBC or Netflix, the racial demographics of the party guests and servants would probably be measured to precise percentages, realism be damned. You could say that Indiana Jones is a fantasy, but that argument feels particularly odd considering Lucas obviously intended the show to be partly educational, which is why things like Edison's electric car are included (Edison really did try to develop an electric car). But apart from any such considerations, it's nice to see that, in the 90s, filmmakers were still able to present negative aspects of a period without artificially moralising about them.

I never really saw Indiana Jones in Sean Patrick Flannery. This is one of the rare episodes where he actually wears the hat and it always looks terrible on him.

His face was made for a straw boater.