The Verbose Stoic

So the word has come down that Kathleen Kennedy is stepping down as the head of Lucasfilm, which had been teased a few times before and has generally been met with at least low-key cheering by at least a certain segment of Star Wars fans, and not the segment that Kennedy might claim are cheering her departure.  What I think can’t really be denied is that, for whatever reason, Kennedy’s reign over Lucasfilm hasn’t managed to revive any of the franchises under its bailiwick and has pretty much killed them, with Star Wars being perhaps the biggest example.  Speaking as a Star Wars fan, I went from being someone who was excited about Star Wars, bought most of the EU books and series whenever I could, and looked forward to both the prequels and the sequels to someone who until very recently hadn’t even seen all of the ST and hasn’t watched any of the TV series despite having the streaming service that they are on.  The idea that Star Wars as a franchise wasn’t revived but was instead killed seems pretty accurate to me.

But in his “Drinker’s Chasers” roundtable-type podcast thing, the Critical Drinker gathered a bunch of people together and they talked about how the issues with the ST went beyond the fact that, well, they weren’t very good and featured dueling writers and directors who didn’t want to play in each others’ universes, but that they made a fundamental mistake in sidelining the OT cast.  Drinker commented that he thought that they should have given the OT characters one last adventure, and MauLer commented that when they were saying that the cast needed to pass the torch to the next generation that that wasn’t necessarily the case (he does do by raising that point and succinctly responding “Why?”).  They also talk about the fact that in the ST the three main characters from the OT were never together at all, and that that was done in story as opposed to being a reaction to actor demands — Carrie Fisher passing away and Harrison Ford not really wanting to do more movies — because they killed off Han Solo in “The Force Awakens” long before they reintroduced Luke in the second movie.  This was highlighted by a clip from Mark Hamil in an interview/podcast thing where he revealed that he was still bitter over that.  So we can conclude that for them the big mistake in the ST was sidelining the OT characters in favour of the new ST characters.  In thinking about it, I kinda agree, but not for the same reasons.

Before I delve into that, though, it’s useful to raise another point that is raised in reference to Kennedy, where she comments with George Lucas in the room that Star Wars is easier than something like Harry Potter because there weren’t a lot of books that they had to stick to.  Most of the responses I’ve seen have called her out for ignoring the EU, but when we think about the EU we can note that her statement is actually correct.  The EU was actually tagged as being lower canon than the movies, which meant basically that as long as the movies didn’t contradict them they were fine, but that Lucas wasn’t in any way bound by them.  If he wanted to do something that contradicted things in the EU, then, well, that was just too bad for the EU.  And in the prequels he did exactly that, by retconning what the Clone Wars actually were supposed to have been (the EU tended to treat the Clone Wars as a war against clone soldiers, not a war with clone soldiers on the same side as the Jedi).  So anything that was done in the EU was something that any movie could happily ignore — like they did with “Rogue One” ignoring the multiple takes on getting the Death Star plans that the EU had — and the only thing that covered the time period that the ST was set in was the EU.  Thus, Kennedy was right:  Star Wars was easier to deal with than Harry Potter because the only materials that covered that time period were things that not only could be ignored, but that fans of the EU already accepted could and would be ignored, in contrast to Harry Potter where all the fans wanted to see the stories they had consumed in the books adapted, not written out of existence.

Now, when the announcement came down that the EU was getting shifted to “Legends” and that the new movies would be ignoring it, I was a bit disappointed.  But, of course, it made sense.  I believe that the timeline that the ST was going to hit was right around “New Jedi Order”, which would have been the “Vong War”, which was a completely different sort of thing than classic Star Wars, by design.  While the reaction to “The Last Jedi” might have suggested that at least some fans were ready for something new, trying to revive the franchise with something that different wouldn’t have been a good idea, even if the creative sensibilities of, well, anyone who ever comes into an existing franchise would allow simply copying that idea.  I also thought that shifting the EU to “Legends” was a good idea, because it allowed them to carry on with it in at least some limited fashion if it was still popular and so not burning all their bridges.  So for me the biggest disappointment with that was mostly how it was announced, as instead of simply restating the already existing canon statement — the movies aren’t bound by the EU canon and we don’t really want to do what would be done there — it sounded more like a dismissal of the EU completely, with the implication if not outright statement that none of those characters or stories would play a part in the ST and so in the canon going forward.  Instead of a claim that the characters might not be there, the claim was that none of them would be there at all and all of that was just going to be ignored, and my impression of the tone from Abrams was that it was because he didn’t think they were all that good.  For me, I would have said that they were going to respect that and would be more than happy to think about adding fan-favourite characters if it made sense creatively, but that this was not going to be that universe.  Now, you can argue that Abrams et al didn’t want to add those characters due to issues with royalties and the like, but then they added characters like Thrawn later on, so using those characters obviously wouldn’t have been completely out of bounds.  In my discussion of how I would have done it, I would have used Mara Jade and Wedge Antilles’ daughters (eliminating Poe, but he wasn’t that interesting a character anyway).  But, ultimately, ditching the EU actually made sense even if they did seem more dismissive than I would have liked.

So now we return to the OT characters.  Going in, I did pretty much accept the idea that the ST was ideally going to be a passing of the torch from the OT characters to the new characters in the ST.  While the commenters in the video above wonder if their being a bit old should have forced that, the fact is that it was a concern.  Harrison Ford was getting a bit old for that sort of action movie, and there was no indication that he was interested in doing it anymore.  Carrie Fisher in fact sadly did pass away during the filming of the ST.  The idea that the actors were getting a bit long in the tooth to anchor a new franchise made sense.

As we’ve seen with things like Star Trek, passing the torch in this way is certainly possible.  Despite its stumbling in the first season, “Star Trek:  The Next Generation” did manage that really well, reviving the franchise.  And Star Wars had an advantage here in that the ST was happening while the actors were, in fact, still around and able to pass that torch while being too old and having been out of Star Wars long enough that simply putting them in the movie wouldn’t necessarily have them dominate it.  Due to the fact that the Star Trek:  TOS characters were still making movies at the time that Star Trek:  TNG came out, putting them in that universe would have had them dominate, so the series was set late enough that they wouldn’t be around and we only got a brief cameo from McCoy to pass the torch.  Yes, later, Scotty, Spock and even Kirk came in for a few episodes, but for the most part TNG didn’t get a full “passing of the torch” from TOS … and succeeded anyway.  The ST was going to be able to get a full passing of the torch from the OT characters, which in theory was a huge advantage.

This, then, also ties into the question of whether the story of the OT characters was complete and it was time for the stories of the new characters.  I find that I kinda agree with that, too.  While there were still more things you could do with the characters — the EU, in fact, proves that since that’s pretty much what it did — for the most part their arcs were given satisfying completions, and we could pretty much imagine how things would progress.  Han had managed to land the princess and through that and his generalship was entering into the world of the “respectable”, but we of course imagined that he wouldn’t quite fit in and would be a bit hesitant about it, and would have kept his hands in the “scoundrel” side of things given his comments about Lando leading the fighter attack because he’s the “respectable” one right before it was announced that he was leading the ground mission.  We imagined that Luke, finally a Jedi, would try to revive the Jedi.  And while Leia’s arc wasn’t quite as … pronounced as theirs, we expected that the politician and diplomat turned rebel leader would work to help rebuild the legitimate political order, like she did in the EU.  Their stories were reasonably complete, and for the most part all we wanted to see was them acting that way and using that to guide the new characters in their arcs, and their stories were such that led naturally to that:  Luke mentoring a young Jedi or set of Jedi, Leia mentoring new leaders, and Han mentoring the new “scoundrels” who weren’t in it for their “Rebellion” or their new political order but got sucked into it anyway.

So given the characters, we could easily see Luke mentoring Rey and being a guide for her, given that her arc was a Force Sensitive’s arc.  Leia could have been mentoring Poe, and if that arc had been her pointing out that he needed to lead and so needed to be more of a diplomat than simply a good soldier that could have worked.  And the stormtrooper-turned-Rebel Finn could have been mentored by Han, who knows how it feels to be someone on the outside looking in.  And would it have killed them to use Lando as the contact instead of who they did in the first movie?  He would have had the contacts, would have had an interest in getting Luke’s saber, and it would have been just another passing of the torch, and would have allowed him to be in all three movies so that his showing up in the last movie wouldn’t have seemed so contrived (and proven that he could do it).  So, given the above, no, I didn’t really want to see the OT characters have one last adventure on their own or with them as the primary characters, nor do I think they would have just overwhelmed the new characters.  So I don’t think the ST’s mistake was not focusing on the OT characters and instead trying to pass the torch.  But I still think they made a mistake.  So what was that mistake?

Remember, I just said above that it did seem like the arcs of the characters were completed in a satisfactory way, and so all we wanted was to see them in the roles that those arcs suggested and then help to build up the new characters from those roles.  But if you look at the characters in the ST — starting from TFA, so it’s not just Johnson’s attempts at subverting expectations — all of those arcs were, in fact, wiped out by the ST.  People have joked about Leia being demoted from “Princess” to “General”, but that does overturn her entire arc — such as it was — from the OT, as her political and diplomatic side is eliminated completely and she’s just a Resistance Leader again, a General fighting against a seemingly overwhelming foe.  This actually helped to kill the emotions of the new superweapon attack because given her position I was under the impression that the New Republic had fallen and the First Order as completely ascendant, and so didn’t get that the attack had wiped out the New Republic capital system and main fleet.  So I saw it as akin to Tarkin’s “demonstration”, not a crippling blow to a still-existent New Republic.  If they had even simply said that Leia was visiting the Resistance to rally the troops and talk to them about the political blow she was about to strike against the First Order, then we would have had a better idea of the situation, would have known that the New Republic still existed, and would have had yet one more reason to be devastated about the attack because it would have scuppered that political movement, leaving the Resistance alone which would have played better into TLJ where they are trying to rally politically and mostly failing.

But, sure, Leia’s arc getting wiped out might not be that big a deal since it wasn’t that strong of one anyway, and most people might not have really noticed it except for jokes about her demotion.  But people definitely noted that happening to Luke and Han.  The big objection to TLJ is that character whose arc importantly contained his seeing the good in someone that no one thought had any good in him and being right, and also proving himself dedicated to the ideals of the Jedi suddenly almost kills his own nephew because he sees him as being evil and then runs away to hide in bitterness and for the most part rejects the Jedi teachings completely.  While I didn’t see it as being as big an issue as most people did — it was clear to me that it was a brief moment that he immediately rejected and regretted, and Luke even in “Return of the Jedi” showed that he does, in fact, have a tendency to that kind of impulsiveness — I think it was just the most visible example of this destruction of his arc.  Luke is not the Luke we saw him as at the end of “Return of the Jedi”, the optimistic Jedi proven right in his contention that no one can be completely lost to evil, and not even the impulsive youth of “A New Hope”.  Instead, he’s a bitter old man.  Given what happened, I don’t necessarily see that as being outside the bounds of possibility, but to accept that complete rejection of his arc and what we expected would happen after that we would need a really good explanation, and we didn’t get one.

Han, of course, is the most obvious case.  Han’s entire arc in the OT is about him moving from the complete scoundrel only concerned with himself to someone concerned about the issues of others.  We also see that while he is overly impulsive which gets him in trouble he is competent.  The only big trouble he was in was with Jabba, and that seemed more like bad luck than incompetence and an inability to think things through.  But in the ST, he has completely rejected the Resistance and even Leia.  He has no ideals or nothing he’s even working for.  He’s somehow lost the Falcon which is a ship that the movie also makes clear he still loves.  And he’s taking on very dangerous jobs with no clue how to actually perform them, and thus his entire character is, for the most part, the bumbling character that we saw in a brief moment in “A New Hope”.  He’s not the Han Solo from “Return of the Jedi”.  He’s not even the Han Solo from “A New Hope”.  While his son slaughtering the Jedi might well have caused a radical change in his character, this is just too radical a change from who Han Solo was established to be in the OT.  We would have needed a really good reason for that to happen, and we didn’t get one.

So, to me, the biggest mistake was not trying to pass the torch.  It was, instead, that the OT characters they brought back were not the characters from the OT.  So they didn’t feel like those characters, and so we didn’t accept their passing the torch to the new characters.  And, on top of that, the movies themselves didn’t actually have them do that.  Rey takes the book herself and gets limited teaching from Luke, with maybe a little from Leia.  Han gets Finn into the facility and talks to Rey a bit, but never really mentors them.  Poe gets chided by Leia but doesn’t really get taught anything from her.  The OT characters, then, are not the characters that we wanted to see mentoring the next generation, are not the sort of characters who could mentor them, and didn’t do it anyway.  Thus, you can’t successfully pass the torch from existing characters to new ones if the entire structure of the work is instead working against that.  And that’s the structure the ST ended up with, which is a big reason why it failed.

This the final season of “Once Upon a Time”, and it seems to fit the adage of “The more things change, the more they stay the same”.

This season is basically a soft reboot of the series, picking up from where the last season left off with Henry having gotten older and having a young girl show up at his door like he did for Emma and say the same things he said to her to him.  As it turns out, Emma, Snow, and Charming were all mostly dropped from the season, and they have been moved from Storybrooke to a suburb of Seattle, and are under a new curse.  The premise for this one seems to be based on Cinderella, with an alternate Cinderella coming in — who is a Latino single mother, and so not at all like Cinderella — and turning out to be Henry’s true love … although he doesn’t remember her and thinks that his wife and daughter were killed, and she thinks she was married to someone else and had her daughter with him.  Regina runs the local bar, and the person most likely to have created the curse is the stepmother, who runs a development company and is trying to develop the land against the little girl’s wishes, and she’s “supported” by her daughter who would have been one of the stepsisters.  Hook and Rumpelstiltskin are local detectives.  As things progress, we find out that the stepmother is obsessed with reviving her other daughter at the expense of the one who is following her around, and that ultimately we find out that the first daughter is the one who cast the curse.  As things progress, we find out that the Hook here is an alternate Hook, with an alternate Alice as his daughter, and as usual new threats in a coven of witches and an alternative Rumpelstiltskin come into play.

One thing that really struck me about this season is how badly they did Cinderella, especially in terms of the aesthetics of the character.  I probably wouldn’t have been bothered too much by the shift from even their own previous presentation of her to make her Latino, but the issue is that, well, she’s just not all that attractive.  What would have been the “ugly stepsister” in the original tale is actually quite a bit more attractive than she is.  Heck, the stepmother is more attractive than she is.  On top of that, she appears fairly old, which is distracting given that she’s supposed to be Henry’s first love and the actor playing him — who is not the actor from the previous systems — still looks rather young.  So there seems to be a bit of a discrepancy there.

Now, of course, one could argue that they’ve done similar things like that before that I didn’t mind, like having Regina be more attractive than Snow White.  But in that case they managed to build in a different motive for Regina than jealousy of her looks, and so it worked well, and Snow White being pretty worked well for her Mary-Margaret persona.  Here, Cinderella’s backstory still has her trying to attract the Prince’s attention at the ball — in order to assassinate him — and she clearly isn’t someone who would stand out enough in terms of looks to do that.  If she was still the Prince’s true love — even if she didn’t know it — then that would work as true loves would recognize each other … but she’s Henry’s true love, not the Prince’s, so that entire storyline doesn’t work.  And, again, that she seems significantly older than him, especially in the real world, is a bit jarring.

The show continues its trend of many convoluted plots and villains that are unstoppable until they are defeated with bigger villains coming in to replace them.  The stepmother gives way to the witch who gives way at the very end to the alternate Rumpelstiltskin, but the last few plots are resolved within the span of a few episodes.  Along the way, we have alternate Hook’s relationship with Alice and her relationship with Zelena’s daughter Robin, which is built up as a love relationship which has no impact on the plot.  No, seriously, even when she is seemingly somewhat possessed by the witches’ ritual and Robin appeals to her to stop it Alice doesn’t even bat at eye at shrinking all of them.  Rumpelstiltskin also has a subplot of trying to find a way to die to be with Belle, but that’s not all that interesting either.

The ending of the series is also an attempt at a bit of a bait and switch.  Everyone is back together in the Enchanted Forest, with Emma returning not as a returning hero but as a flustered mother showing up late, as they all participate in a ceremony making Regina their leader, where she is declared to no longer be the Evil Queen, but instead the Good Queen.  Given that this is the last scene and it is focused entirely on her, one might be inclined to think that this was the key to the series:  the redemption of Regina.  But as I was watching it, my thought was that the series wasn’t fooling me.  The show spent far too much time focusing on Emma and not on Regina to make me believe that her arc was the prime arc for the series, especially since she was sidelined even in this season to focus on Henry, who solves the witch problem through the true love he had for his adopted mother.  And they didn’t even give her a true love to give her a truly happy ending, despite that possibility being set up in the previous season.  That, then, makes this scene a poor final scene for the series, as it doesn’t really reflect the main arc and characters for the series, with Emma and Henry sidelined and the focus on supporting characters like Regina, Snow and Charming.

For me, one of the best parts of the season was the stepsister, who was an interesting character and could have moved from the shallow character she started out as to someone who wanted to help the heroes.  The revelation that she was the one behind the curse somewhat hurt that, but she still got a more or less interesting arc.  The little girl had her moments, although she was more annoying than Henry most of the time, and Hook as detective was somewhat interesting and the interactions with Alice — especially when it was discovered that he couldn’t be near her due to a curse — was somewhat interesting as well.  But ultimately, the soft reboot didn’t work, as the characters and town that we had gotten to know are mostly absent from the season, the ones who did make it into the season are given different personalities, and none of the new characters and arcs are all that interesting.  Suffice it to say that if this was what they might have been planning for going forward, it was better to let the series end with this season, as series fatigue would have likely had many fans leaving the series before any of this could have been developed properly.

I’ll have one more post summarizing my views of the entire series.