Star Wars: The Last Jedi

I can’t think of a specific set piece that I hated more than Poe’s phone call at the beginning. It embodies everything I dislike about the Star Wars universe. Poe was the breakout star of The Force Awakens. He had been slated to die, but they changed the script to allow him to live because everyone loved him so much, and this scene made me hate Poe.  Also, the writing was just terrible, with Hux channeling Rolf the Nazi boyfriend from the Sound of Music and speaking in “Your father, the king” exposition

Blue Milk: I had actually absorbed Alton Brown’s explanation from several years back that the blue milk from Star Wars was not actually milk.

All milks are colloids, essentially water in which protein spheres and fat globules are held in suspension. The protein and fat scatter visible light in such a way as to appear white. Now, skim milk can look bluish, because without much fat more light bounces off small clusters of protein mol­ecules called casein micelles, which tend to scatter shorter (blue) wavelengths. But even if it were completely fat-free, milk could never look that blue.

And why would farmers have fat-free milk anyway? It makes no sense. You could argue that the milk on Tatooine contains some completely alien protein, but even then you’d have to explain where the heck this blue milk came from. Clearly, this is a desert planet with no signs of herding animals ­capable of being milked by ­humble farmers. Bantha? Ha!

But it could be plausible! Alton speculates that the blue milk could be a vegetable milk, like Tatooine soy — and that Luke Skywalker’s adopted parents were vegans. “This would explain their dour, grumpy demeanor,” he notes, “and as we see later from their remains, they’re already suffering considerable loss of bone mass. I rest my case.”

Kind of gross and unnecessary, but whatever.

A slap across the face is always bad writing unless one character is challenging another to pistols at dawn

It’s weird that the best parts of the movie involve Kylo Ren.

I thought Leia’s floating through space bit was cheesy, but I don’t think I could have handled it if they had killed her off.

Laura Dern’s character should have treated Poe with more courtesy, but she was never wrong. I’ve never been in the army, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work well if everybody runs off to do whatever they feel like.

“We are the spark that will light the fire that will burn the First Order down.” That’s a little awkward and unwieldy,  but I’m willing to forgive it if it turns out to be a reference to "The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower".

Rose was wonderful. The story needed a human character instead of the high mimetic mode archetypes and she was perfect.

There was no tension in the chase scene and I think that was the biggest problem with the movie.  It should have been oppressive and relentless and inevitable. Instead, it was a leisurely jaunt through outer space that permitted a forty-five-minute excursion to Space Monte Carlo.



I yelled out, “It’s the Boy Who Lived!” when Luke failed to kill Kylo Ren.

I thought Yoda was used really well. Best use of the character since Empire.

Poe’s mutiny pissed me off. He’s clearly fucking up constantly throughout the entire movie, but the audience is meant to sympathize with him. Also, it made Leia look dumb for putting the Vice Admiral in a position where she would be promoted to the leadership role.

At this point I felt that the movie was a deeply shitty film with some standout moments, and almost in the span of a scene I went to thinking of it as a flawed masterpiece.

The codebreaker betrays them, Snoke set them up. Most importantly, Laura Dern had a plan and Poe fucked it up with his antics.

I really enjoyed the scene in the throne room. Snoke is kind of a tool, and he looks goofy, but at least he dies after setting up a pretty cool scene.

The salt planet had some striking visuals. Jen liked the salt foxes.

I liked everything about Luke’s appearance there. How Kylo Ren first tries to kill him with the AT-ATs before coming down to for the duel. It didn’t work, but props for trying. It reminded me of one of my favorite passages from Tolkien.

Then Fingolfin beheld (as it seemed to him) the utter ruin of the Noldor, and the defeat beyond redress of all their houses; and filled with wrath and despair he mounted upon Rochallor his great horse and rode forth alone, and none might restrain him. He passed over Dor-nu-Fauglith like a wind amid the dust, and all that beheld his onset fled in amaze, thinking that Oromë himself was come: for a great madness of rage was upon him, so that his eyes shone like the eyes of the Valar.

 Thus he came alone to Angband's gates, and he sounded his horn, and smote once more upon the brazen doors, and challenged Morgoth to come forth to single combat. And Morgoth came. That was the last time in those wars that he passed the doors of his stronghold, and it is said that he took not the challenge willingly; for though his might was greatest of all things in this world, alone of the Valar he knew fear. But he could not now deny the challenge before the face of his captains; for the rocks rang with the shrill music of Fingolfin's horn, and his voice came keen and clear down into the depths of Angband; and Fingolfin named Morgoth craven, and lord of slaves. Therefore Morgoth came, climbing slowly from his subterranean throne, and the rumour of his feet was like thunder underground. And he issued forth clad in black armour; and he stood before the King like a tower, iron-crowned, and his vast shield, sable on blazoned, cast a shadow over him like a stormcloud.

But Fingolfin gleamed beneath it as a star; for his mail was overlaid with silver, and his blue shield was set with crystals; and he drew his sword Ringil, that glittered like ice.

That said, I kind of agree with what Hamill has said in interviews. Luke is not well-served by this script.

I think it’s a very good movie that has some profound flaws running all the way through it, but these flaws might be essential to what does work in the movie.

And Porgs? They’re fine, I guess.  They’re cute and designed to sell plushies, but they didn’t get a whole lot of screen time, so I didn’t find them intrusive.

To the writers of Rogue One

I am including a helpful Venn diagram for your reference. Please note the lack of overlap and considerable distance between the two data sets.

I hope this proves instructive.

Don't do it for me. Do it for the gundarks.

I trust that you will make the right choice.

I hate May the Fourth

Roger Roger: Watching the Phantom Menace with Lily

Lots of people have spent lots of time trying to pin down what's wrong with the Phantom Menace since its release in 1999. I might as well add my voice to the chorus.

As with the other Star Wars movies, we watched this one together. I was uncertain if I should show this to Lily at all. My friend Dave convinced me to go ahead and show it. (His exact words were "Don't be a Star Wars snob.")

I'll admit that I felt some gnawing unease when Dave was visiting in the period between when we had decided to show Lily the movies and when we actually did so, and Dave, unprompted,  shook his head and said "The first two movies were so, so bad."

This is all your fault, Dave!

We were watching last month when when it suddenly struck me that the deal with the queen and her decoys is a good metaphor for everything that's wrong with the movie. The whole decoy deal is a lot of sound and fury that tries to sell you on the idea that there's more going on than there really is, but all it does is needlessly complicate things while adding nothing of value. (For further examples of this trope, see: everything J.J. Abrams has ever done.)

I remember the first time I saw the movie. I was working at the comic store back then, Star Wars mania was at an all time high in the run up to its release. Everybody who came in to the store wanted to talk about it. And the early reports were not positive.  The best anyone seemed to have to say about the movie was some variation of "It's not as bad as everyone is saying." Those of us who worked in the store occasionally got together to do stuff. It was movie night and Bill had already seen the Phantom Menace and his review was....unfavorable. When we were deciding what to see, I was pushing for Menace,  Bill said he couldn't bear to sit through it again, and wound up seeing the Matrix. I recall mocking him for this decision: "Oh, enjoy your stupid 'Matrix' movie that nobody's going to remember by this time next year. I'm off to see Star Wars, bitches!"

In retrospect, Bill's decision may have been the right one.

I was thinking about this when we sat down to watch the movie together. It really couldn't have been as bad as I remembered. Could it?

...

...

...


Holy fucking shit, where to start? The experience of watching this movie compares unfavorably to a two-hour episiotomy.

Not even Lily liked it and she'll sit through some of the most dreadful shit imaginable. Though she did like Anakin.

Lily: Anakin's cute.
Me: *raised eyebrow*
Lily: No! Cute like a baby is cute!

I don't think Jake Lloyd was terrible. He wasn't great, but neither was Daniel Radcliffe in the first Harry Potter (particularly compared to his co-stars) and he certainly wasn't the biggest problem with the movie. 

Jar Jar Binks was the biggest problem with the movie. I realize that I'm not exactly going out on a limb with this declaration.

George Lucas stated that he feels there is a section of the fanbase who get upset with aspects of Star Wars because "[t]he movies are for children but they don't want to admit that... There is a small group of fans that do not like comic sidekicks. They want the films to be tough like The Terminator, and they get very upset and opinionated about anything that has anything to do with being childlike."

I think that misses the point of the criticism. It's not that you included a comedy sidekick. It's that you included a comedy sidekick who wasn't funny.

Not to mention that he, like Watto and the Neomidians, comes uncomfortably close to being a racist caricature. 

Not that Lily noticed that last part. She just thought that he was annoying and not funny. 

Lily was very fidgety at times, and when we asked her to pay attention, she said "I'll pay attention when they're talking about stuff I can understand!" Jar Jar  would be out of place in any movie, but when the rest of the plot is Robert's Rules of Order In Space dealing with minutiae of trade negotiations, "The Senate cedes the floor to the delegate from Naboo. You make a cogent arguement regarding the Trade Federation's regressive tariffs on-zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...," comic relief that a six-year-old finds immature is just not going to fit in.

The pod race goes on entirely too long. When it began, Lily asked if he was going to win. I said "You'll know in 45 minutes," which was barely an exaggeration at all. 

Despite all this, Lily is interested in seeing Attack of the Clones, so I may yet have more Star Wars blogging in the near future.

Just a softy

And some stuff I liked because I don't like ending a review without saying anything nice: The lightsaber fights were great, Ian Mcdiarmid was pretty good,  Liam Neeson seemed to be an entirely different and much better move than the rest of the cast (he had the only scene with Jar Jar that was any good at all, the one where he grabs Jar Jar's tongue and says "Knock that shit off.") Darth Maul had a great design (and my friends met Ray Park at a con once and said he's a very nice guy). 

Lego Easter

The Lego Easter Bunny was here and dropped these guys off

and now they're doing some Easter shopping of their own.

Attack of the Super-Duper Cute Bears!: Watching Return of the Jedi with Lily

Lily was looking forward to this one, because she had heard that it had Jabba the Hutt. I asked her why she was interested in seeing him, and she said it was because she knew he was "blobby" and that she likes "blobby" people, which also explains why we're so close. 

Someone I used to know had an uncharacteristically cogent observation about Return of the Jedi. "George Lucas could have given us anything, and he gave us Ewoks."

I think that really sums it up. It's fairly well-known among Star Wars fans that Ewoks were originally supposed to be Wookiees, and making them babbling arboreal midgets is the very definition of missed opportunity. (Though speaking of Wookiees, "Wookieepedia" is an awesome name for the Star Wars wiki). Only slightly less well known is the fact that the word "Ewok" is never spoken once in the series and yet it's a household word. Jen, hardly the biggest Star Wars fan in the world, knows what they are.

Now, mind the Ewoks are not an inherently bad concept. I mean savage, man-eating pygmies almost invisible in their natural habitat? They could have been terrifying if they were presented in the right way, like furry versions of the Predator. But they weren't and we got a bunch of yub-yubbing Teddy bears. The gulf between how cool they could have been could have been and how lame is they are is so vast that the difference in scale becomes a difference in kind.

Yub Yub

Also, Wicket the Ewok has a middle and last name. It makes me wonder if his mom took his dad's last name when they got married.  What the Fuck, Lucas?! Way to sell the myth of a galaxy far, far away.

As an aside, does anyone else remember the blacked out images on the back of the Jedi action figures? On the back of the packaging for the figures, they used to have a lineup of all the figures available for that set, and the Ewoks were so super sekrit that the images were blacked out. As a kid I assumed it was a printing error, but now I see that it must have been they were trying to keep a lid on what an Ewok was.

Okay, enough about the fucking Ewoks.

I was listening to the Return of the Jedi radio play a couple days before I saw the movie and it's really pretty good. The dialogue is generally improved over the the movie. I'll include a little commentary on the play as it relates to the movie throughout this review.

Radio Play: The radio play begins with Luke narrating the creation of his new lightsaber. I think it was a bit better than the movie opening, with its incongruous Wizard of Oz homage. This page says that someone named Joshua Fardon played Luke Skywalker and he really sounded like Mark Hamill.

I like radio plays. Because everything is done without visuals, the format lead to awesome lines like C3PO "Yes, Jabba the Hutt would be the huge, sluglike individual on the dais" or a cackling Palpatine on the Death Star exulting "Splendid! The son has struck off the father's hand!" The temporarily blind Han works, because he, like the audience, needs someone to explain to him what's happening. It was a pretty interesting cast, with Anthony Daniels reprising his role, Yeardley Smith (Lisa Simpson!) as a random droid in Jabba's palace, Ed Asner as Jabba and John Lithgow as Yoda.

Oh, here's an interesting bit of trivia:&nbspAlso introduced in the storyline is a brief appearance of a dancer named Arica in the palace of Jabba the Hutt... a character whose true identity is that of popular Star Wars Expanded Universe character Mara Jade, established to have been present there in the Timothy Zahn-penned novel trilogy starting with "Heir to the Empire". Yay for continuity porn!

The scene in the movie where Vader goes to oversee construction of the Death Star really works well. It has a zillion stormtroopers in the docking bay and "The Emperor is not as forgiving as I am" really sets up the Emperor as a figure to be feared. It's this scene that makes me think of Vader as the Imperial version of Harvey Keitel's character from Pulp Fiction. He's the guy they send in to clean things up when the situation is messed up beyond repair. And if you're the officer in charge, the last thing you want is this hyperventilating asshole showing up and bossing your troops around and probably strangling a bunch of people. (From the abridged script: Commander: "Greetings Anni. I’m so glad you could come here and kill those of us who fail you.")

I love it that Wikipedia has a List of Star Wars superweapons.

The first two movies were these epic adventures, this just seemed like someone's game session gone awry, the rescue attempt in the beginning in particular. Contrived way to get everyone in the party in the mix? Check! Needlessly complex plan that implodes almost immediately? Check! Chucking the plan and just killing everybody when that happens? Check plus!

Radio Play: I thought the radio version of Jabba's Palace was better than the movie. There was a quick scene with Han and Boba Fett after Han is thawed out with Han taunting Fett that he didn't really do all that much to capture him ("All you did was fetch and carry me") and Fett kind of shrugging it off "Tomorrow I'll collect another bounty and you'll be dead." I really liked that. He seems scarier because it's all business to him.

Leia as the Mighty Boushh is a gimmick that was surprising to an eight-year old Josh, but not something that holds up on subsequent viewings.

Lily liked it, though.

(I know the image is oriented the wrong way. Just tilt either your head or your computer.)

The Rancor looks like it came from the Land of the Lost, and I still feel bad for the Rancor Keeper when it dies. 

Lily was unimpressed with the Sarlaac. "It's just a mouth in the sand."

Radio Play: When Boba Fett falls into the Sarlaac, somebody yells "No one could have survived that!" which is a phrase that always makes me smile, because it's so awesomely corny and it means of course he survived it. The EU tells us that he blasted his way out almost immediately. (It also tells us that some 20 to 30 aliens survive the exploding sail barge, so take that for what it's worth.)

Radio Play: Flying away from Tattooine, Leia says "I'm going to find some clothes that don't require a cabaret permit," and Han is like "Hey, you're not going to throw those away, are you?!" *smile* "We'll see." I thought that was kind of cute.

As the Millenium Falcon was departing, Lily asked "Is the movie over already?" In doing a little research for this piece, I've found that this is not an uncommon question among kids, and it kind of highlights some of the structural problems with the movie. It's really almost three movies, one on Tattooine, one on Endor and the other on and around the Death Star. 

Lily asked "Why is Leia naked?" when we first see her in her metal bikini, and that element just doesn't seem to belong in the same movie as the Ewoks.

The scene on Dagobah

Yoda: Your father he is. Told you, did he?

Luke: Yes.

Yoda: Unexpected this is, and unfortunate.

Luke: Unfortunate that I know the truth?

Yoda: No! Unfortunate, that you rushed to face him! That, incomplete was your training! That, not ready for the burden were you.

I'm going to be as generous as possible here and accept Yoda's claims that to he was going to tell Luke that Vader was his father after his training was done. Doing it when he abruptly quit his training and ran off to confront Vader would have been the wrong time, so it's not so much "I'm sorry that you know" as much as "I'm sorry you had to find out like this."

That's overshadowed by the scene immediately following it, where Obi Wan tries to weasel his way out of the whole thing, "I didn't tell you an outright lie when I was trying to set you up to murder your father, so why are you getting so bent out of shape about this?" He should have just accepted that he was wrong, said he was going to tell Luke when he was ready and left it there. Trying to skate by an extremely dubious technicality is douchery of the highest order.

None of this occurred to Lily, however. Her first thought on hearing that Luke and Leia were siblings was to ask, "Does that mean Luke is a prince?"

What I didn't say: "No, actually the throne of Naboo is an elected position, not a hereditary one. Leia is considered a princess because she was adopted by Breha Organa, Queen of, and Minister of Education to Alderaan, and wife of Bail Organa, Alderaan's representative to the Senate," 

What I did say: "You bet!"

Lily liked seeing Mon Mothma, exclaiming, "A girl. Finally!"

Endor: I can almost imagine Chewbacca's player, when he gets the party snared in the net, saying, "But I was just role-playing my character!" 

"It is against my programming to impersonate a deity," (Radio Play: "Let me open you up and fix that.") This has been the source for countless jokes. Is this really a problem with protocol droids? I'm sure that my friends and I can't be the only one to observe that's an awfully specific prohibition. (It's possible that this falls under the umbrella of some broader behavioral guidelines, but the way it was phrased doesn't suggest that.) I'm sure the EU explains this somewhere.

Luke: Leia, do you remember your mother? Your real mother?

Leia: Just a little bit. She died when I was very young.

Yeah, like when you were seven minutes old. Come on! Yes, I know the prequels weren't yet written, but I wish they would have made at least a token effort to explain this part. 

Lily, unfortunately, loved the Ewoks.

Lily: I think the bear has a crush on her.

Me: It's called an Ewok.

Lily: Awww....the Ewok is cute.

Me: *Twitch*

Lily: It looks like a little Koala!

Later on, when an Ewok was tackling a stormtrooper, she pretended the stormtrooper was saying, "Ah! Get those super-duper cute bears away from me!"

And while I'm bitching about Endor, let's talk about the Tarzan yell. What the fuck was that about? I do have to respect Lucas, who must have been getting crap from fans like me for years and instead of giving the fans what they want, instead doubles down and gives us TWO Tarzan-warbling wookiees in the prequels.

I like Nien Nunb. He's Lando's goofy little alien sidekick. Admiral Ackbar ("It's a trap!") sounds more like Grover than Yoda ever did in the radio play, but the designs for both of them were top notch in the movie. (Speaking of Nien Nunb, I always think of this account of one of our Star Wars games when someone mentions Sullustans. "Well, the rebel base was compromised, so I went to a club and got lots of lap dances, while the Wookies hung out at the bar and killed Sullustans." The ideas our group came up with make Luke's plan for rescuing Han look like the heist from Ocean's 11.) Jen asked "Who's that?" when she saw him, and then cried a little when I said, "Do you you mean his species or his name?"

Speaking of Admiral Ackbar, Lily and I came up with a joke. (Though we came up with this independently, I can't imagine we're the first or only ones to make this particular joke.)

Knock Knock.

Who's there?

Admiral Ackbar.

Admiral Ack-

It's a trap!

Jedi's kind of crappy in a lot of ways, but the assault on the Death Star is really spectacular and off the top of my head, I can't think of a better space battle before or since. The music that accompanies it is my very favorite piece of work in a series distinguished by its excellent music. Wikipedia has a really good 

article on the subject. And there's Wedge as Red Leader! Hi, Wedge!

I kind of recall Lucas saying that arc of the movies was always about the fall and redemption of Anakin Skywalker. Sure, George, and they were always brother and sister. That said, I do think that is the element that works best in this movie. I like the scene where Luke and Vader are riding the elevator (In the special editions, the Girl from Ipanema is playing) up to Palpatine's throne room. 

Mark Hamill is certainly not the best actor in the series, but he has matured over the course of the trilogy, and he sells Luke's quiet conviction that his father can be redeemed. I didn't appreciate it as a kid, but he's on the Death Star as distraction, and he's there to redeem his father. He has no reason to believe either of them are going to live through this.

Radio Play: Palpatine was hamming it up. He was like Raul Julia in Street Fighter. It made Ian McDiarmid's performance in the movie look positively restrained. I could imagine him in the studio, milking the giant cow when he was delivering lines like "So the Jedi SUMMONS his lightsaber and it FLIES to his hand!" I thought he was going to break into song.

The prequels were an even greater missed opportunity than Jedi itself, but there is one element that adds to the appreciation of original trilogy. When Luke is being electrocuted by the Emperor, it parallels the scene when Anakin had to choose between helping Palpatine or helping Mace. He made the wrong choice then and it damned him. He makes the right one now and it redeems him.

Vader is played by Sebastian Shaw, but his power to absorb kinetic energy does him no good here.

Uh oh. I got your X-Men in my Star Wars. Wow, this is getting geeky even by my standards. Time to wrap it up.

I asked Jen what she thought and she said "Luke seems less whiny." It's an okay movie with a couple brilliant parts, but resent it for not delivering on the promises of Empire. Was it good? Sure. It was good. Was it great? No. And I was looking for a clever way to end this post and I couldn't think of one, but that's the perfect metaphor for Jedi. Sure, it ends the series and wraps up most of the loose ends. But it doesn't do so in an interesting or meaningful way. "First it started to fall over, then it fell over."

Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter: Watching the Empire Strikes Back with Lily

We continued our Star Wars viewing with the Empire Strikes Back. As with Star Wars, I hadn't seen it in ages. I had watched it once since Lily was born, but before that, I hadn't seen it since the Special Editions were released in theaters. It was always my favorite, but I found myself wondering if it was as good as I remembered or if that was just rose-colored nostalgia. So we watched it...




...and it was better than I remembered. I think it may be one of the very best science fiction movie ever made.

I don't want to say that this is the best of the series because it was the movie in which George Lucas was the least involved, but rather because he stuck to his strengths. He's credited with the story, and even his detractors admit that he's a great idea man, and here he delegated the screenplay and the directing to those who would do a better job. I don't want to rag on the man, so let me say that he still had perspective when he was producing Empire.  And it's awesome because of it.

Seeing the movie again reminds me of how influential it was on my childhood. On some level, I think of each costume change as a different person. When Han puts on his fur lined coat to look for Luke, in some way I perceive him as a different character entirely. And I know exactly why this is, because they were separate characters in the toy line. Funny how this lingers with me, though.

Speaking of the toys, I was huge into Star Wars, like every other boy in the 1980s. (Maybe girls were too, but I thought they were icky back then) I remember reading about Mnemonic devices around the time of the movie and I saw a toy called Cap 2 and I told my Grammy that the way she could remember was to visualize two bottle caps. I can't remember if I got the toy, but I still remember that mnemonic device twenty years later.

Vader orders Julian Glover to destroy the shield generators on Hoth. Though he was thwarted by the Doctor at the tail end of the 1970s, this time he remembers to bring his AT-AT.

Man, Scaroth really was scattered all over the place.

To digress for a moment, I've always like the AT-AT. (Here's a link to one made out of Legos!) Like so many things in Star Wars, they're striking and instantly recognizable. They're referred to as "Imperial Walkers" in the movie, which I think is a better name, because AT-AT just sounds silly if you say it out loud.

It's not the most practical weapon (AT-AT stands for All Terrain Armored Transport, which is clearly bullshit, because in a race up the stairs, it's coming in third after ED-209 and a Dalek), but my understanding is that they're intended as terror weapons to demoralize opposing armies/civilian populations, and it's no stretch at all to believe that.

NPR put together some radio plays adapting the movies, and I want you to remember that next time somebody talks about cutting NPR's funding.  For some basic details on the plays, go to this link: Star Wars Radio Plays.

I was listening to the radio play for Empire, and it's a lot of fun. Brian Daley did the work on them and I think he did an outstanding job adapting a series renowned for its visuals to a medium where he couldn't depend on those visuals at all.

In Echo base on Hoth, a nameless Lieutenant tries to convince Han not to go out after Luke.

    Han: It's cold out there.

    Lieutenant: (Deadpan) I'm aware of that, sir. I joined with the Rebels because I notice things.

    Han: If Luke dies out there, Chewie's going to get mad. Do you think General Rieekan wants a quarter ton of Wookiee rampaging through his base?

    Lieutenant: (Deadpan) I'm reasonably certain he doesn't, sir.

It's not that funny on its own, but the delivery made me laugh.

The scene with the tauntaun was as gross as I remembered. "And I thought they smelled bad on the outside."

As an aside, the Video Game based on this (Star Wars Trilogy) was awesome and the Hoth levels were the best. My college had a copy in the lounge and always set it to free play during finals week. Also, the old Atari game was a lot of fun, and we got a huge amount of play time out of it back in the day.

I didn't notice this during the game, but the bridge of the Ravager from KOTOR II was clearly modeled on the bridge of Vader's star destroyer. I don't mind, because it's an awesome design.

Yoda worked much better than I had been fearing. I mean he's a Muppet with the voice of Grover, neither of which is a recipe for gravitas. The lighting on Dagobah helped, but I think the thing that really made him work is that he really does sound wise. Too often, what passes for wisdom in the movies are simply Sphinx-like aphorisms "When you doubt your powers, you give power to your doubts", but Yoda really seems ancient and sad.

Unfortunately, Ben and Yoda are part of where the problems begin to creep in. Spinning a bunch of lies in order to get a kid to kill his dad is a pretty shitty thing to do, regardless of your "point of view".

When Luke is taking off for Cloud City and Obi Wan says "That boy is our last hope", and Yoda is illuminated by the light of the engines (love that part) and says, "No. There is another."

Jen asked me if fandom knew at this point that Luke and Leia were siblings. I said that I'm pretty sure that Lucas didn't know it either. He was clearly making up portions as he was going along. Otherwise, the bit where Leia sticks her tongue down her brother's throat would have been handled differently, and Ben would have left a lot more ambiguity in his statements about Vader. I don't think there was any specific person attached to Yoda's line. It's cool and it's deliberately vague, so they could plug in the appropriate character when they figured out who it was going to be.

Jen thought that Han was being a jerk when Leia tells him that she loves him and he replies, "I know," but I still like that line.

There's a weird transition in Cloud City that gets me every time. Luke walks in, a door drops down and cuts him off from R2 and then it immediately cuts to a platform rising up beneath Luke. He walked in, then rose up and it's like there's some intermediate step missing there.

Vader was a beast in this fight. I didn't appreciate until this viewing, but Vader is just slapping the shit out of Luke. It was like watching Mike Tyson go ten rounds with some guy at the gym. I remembered the battles in the original trilogy being kind of lackluster compared the wuxia spectacles of the prequels, but this one was tremendous. Pay special attention next time you watch. Luke has both hands on his lightsaber and he's swinging for the fences and Vader is parrying these ferocious cuts one-handed. He smacks Luke around a couple times just because he can and when he knocks him into the carbon freezing chamber and says, "All too easy," it really seems like it was.

I can't think of a time when I didn't know that Vader was Luke's father, but I probably didn't know it going in the first time. Lily did, unfortunately. She had been at summer camp and one of the other kids there had spoiled it for her. When I mentioned this on Facebook, my friend Dave asked if I were considering legal action.

I'm glad we got to show the trilogy to Lily, but there was no way she could have the same experience I did as a kid.  The gap between movies worked. It allowed the mythology to build. That was part of the reason why the early Dark Tower books worked and the later ones didn't. With the Dark Tower, there was an average of five years between installments for the first four books then bang-bang-bang (I'd say no pun intended, but that's a lie) all three of them come out within months. There was no time for the concepts inside them to build up resonance.

With Star Wars, kids spent three years (and a year is longer for a kid than an adult) debating if Vader was really Luke's father and why they would be going back to Tatooine. I love the internet, but it was different back then. Even if we had waited for a couple weeks or even months between movies, it wouldn't have been the same experience. I mean Lily had a t-shirt with Yoda on it for a good year before she ever saw the movie.

I enjoyed watching the first two movies, but I don't know how I can continue this with Jedi. There's a line from an excited nerd in one Simpsons comic, "This will make the Empire Strikes Back look like Return of the Jedi!" One or two things looked fake to an adult living in 2013, but this was still one of the best movies ever made. And sure, it's not unusual for a series to undergo a little bit of a decline. Return of the King won Best Picture, but I'm inclined to believe that this was awarded for the trilogy as a whole. (I happen to think Two Towers was better but not leaps and bounds better as was Empire over Jedi.) I mean, I guess I'll watch it and I'll try to appreciate the good parts.

Ultimately, I love it because the movie is full of real people doing real things, an element lacking in the prequels. Rogue 2 breaks into a smiles when he hears Han respond to his call, and that's exactly like what a real person would do there. Or when Chewbacca is flipping out on Cloud City and Boba Fett goes to shoot him and Darth Vader, who is standing next to him, just pushes the barrel of his gun down. He seems to be saying, "Relax, it's just a Wookiee." Or Han, butting it and offering his arm to Leia when he sees Lando offering his.

Okay, stay tuned for the recap of Jedi, whenever I get around to it. And may the Force be with you, always.

A long time ago in a galaxy with a six-year-old: Watching Star Wars with Lily

It's hard to find something to say about Star Wars. It's been so influential on my life (one of my earliest memories is seeing it at a drive in with my parents before they split up) and on film making, and, really, my generation as a whole. I can barely get through a conversation without dropping a Star Wars reference. We had previously tried to watch the movie as a family about a year ago, but Lily was just a little too young to appreciate it, so we shelved it after the trash compactor scene and never got back to watching it. We gave it another go last week. 

My friend Dave says the special editions show Lucas beginning to lose his mind, but they're prettier. (Personally I'm holding out for the EXTRA special edition, where Alderaan shoots first.) We didn't watch those. This was the original, Han-shoots-first, no-New-Hope-at-the-beginning-of-the-crawl version of the film. And it kicked ass, thank you very much.

Somebody pointed out that the original is the only Star Wars movie that doesn't take place in the Star Wars universe, and I think that makes a lot of sense. It stands on its own. I think that Empire is a better movie, but it wouldn't have been possible without Star Wars. The Expanded Universe, which is what the vast body of novels and comics and trading card minutia is called, is something of a mess. Take a random alien from the cantina. Odds are, somebody wrote a story about his twenty years of bounty hunting.

My favorite story about the EU is sadly apocryphal, but it's too amusing not to share. When Princess Leia first meets with Grand Moff Tarkin, she sneers at him, "Governor Tarkin, I should have expected to find you holding Vader's leash. I recognized your foul stench when I was brought on board." 

The way the account went is that there was allegedly this story where the author established that Tarkin suffered from "Tarkin's Syndrome", a disease that caused him to exude terrilbe body odor. Again, it's not true, there is no such story, but that's the kind of literal-minded explanations for things that don't need explaining that you find in the EU.

Speaking of Tarkin, Peter Cushing was wonderful. "Jesus, Vader, stop strangling all my dudes!" 

Sir Alec Guinness was awesome too. Seeing him again reminded me that Ewan McGregor did a great job emulating his mannerisms.So many of the quotable lines are his and it's strange to go back, and hear him talking about Mos Eisley being a wretched hive of scum and villainy when the line has been so riffed and referenced almost everywhere.  Lily says Ben is her favorite character after Princess Leia.

Speaking of whom, Carrie Fisher was really pretty excellent too. It's hard to believe that Princess Armadillo from the Planet Badactoria was supposed to be her mom.  Lily has welcomed her into the Princess Pantheon. She's right up there with Wonder Woman as "Princesses who aren't too fancy". 
 
She's not a fan of Chewbacca, however, whom she describes as "The gorilla that looks like it had its face cut off."

My friend Eric is fond of observing that Lucas's directing consists of "Faster! More intense!", but this was back when he was pretty good. He was never Stanley Kubrick, but he was once a competent director of actual human beings.
 
The music! That era was really phenomenal for movie music. I'm a big fan of John Williams. Back when I was doing surveys in college, my last name was too ethnic, so I had to pick a fake name and I went with John Williams.
 
It's really amazing how well nearly everything in the movie has held up. It doesn't look like a product of a specific era, and it looks "lived in" something that Lucas has said was one of his goals. The effects have heft. The movie was made on a shoestring, and I think that working around these limitations is what gives it such enduring appeal.
 
Lily really likes the trash compactor monster. (Feel free to drop by and tell me what its actual name is.) We were playing Akinator the online 20 questions came where a genie tries to guess what you're thinking. Lily tried to stump him with the Dianoga (oh, I already looked up the name. Too slow, nerds!), but he was too smart for us. 

She knew there was more than one movie, but she didn't have any ideas about what they contained. We had the following conversation.

Me: Everyone from Star Wars is coming back for the second movie!

Lily: Yes! Is Luke coming back?

Me: Yes.

Lily: Is the princess coming back?

Me: Yes.

Lily: Is Chewbacca coming back?

Me: Yes.

Lily: Is the mean guy coming back?

Me: Yes.

Lily: Is the guy who got his arm cut off coming back?

Me: You mean Ponda Baba. And no. Nobody gives a shit about him. Also, you are so my daughter.

Bonus! Links to some of my favorite Star Wars sites:

The Nitpicker's Guide to Star Wars: We kid because we love.
 
Star Wars Technical Commentaries: An actual astrophysicist looks at the science of Star Wars and tries to explain away some of the problems. Worth it for this quote:"If a source is uncomfortable or incongruent at face value, it is often possible to add background circumstances to alter its significance and give a more realistic perspective.", which is very similar to my stance and what the author did for the novelization of Revenge of the Sith. It's all good, but of particular awesomeness is the page where he points out the destruction of the second Death Star would have depopulated Endor: Endor Holocaust

50 reasons why Return of the Jedi sucks: It's certainly the weakest of the trilogy, but I have new affection for it in the wake of the prequels.

Abridged Script to the Phantom Menace: There are abridged scripts for all of the movies, but I think this is the funniest.

We've already watched Empire, so keep an eye for the post on Lily's impressions.

The Old Republic from a Certain Point of View: A CoH old-timer reviews SWTOR

City of Heroes was my first and only MMORPG prior to playing Star Wars: The Old Republic and it's still my gold standard for the genre. (Here's My CoH memorial post)

My friends Greg and Dave have been playing SWTOR for a while and I decided to give it a whirl when someone sent me an install disc in the mail as an early Christmas present.

I had to relearn a fair bit. Back when I played CoH, I had a bunch of bonuses because I'd been a paid subscriber forever. So I had travel powers early and enough bonus powers for a full attack chain at level one. Plus I knew the game inside and out. I could start a new character and have him at max level inside of a week. I was soloing Archvillains before it was cool. (Though it was never that hard with an ill/rad. It just took forever. Fucking Nightstar.) I was, in all modesty, really pretty good.

And my friends leveled slower than I did. I'd be closing in on 50 and they'd still be slogging through the teens. I'd shake my head sadly and would offer a silent prayer that they would someday just learn how to play the game.

Anyway, I was remembering this when I saw Dave's toons on SWTOR rocketing through the levels and I was thinking how much it sucks to be on the other end of the equation.

So, how does the Old Republic compare for a CoH grognard?

Grouping with your friends could be a little easier. CoH excelled in that area. I play mostly with Greg and Dave, and we have to go through a lot of contortions to find content that we can all play. By contrast, in City of Heroes, you could disable earning exp, you could artificially lower your level to the level of the mission, or raise your level to that of the mission owner. It was really well-designed in that respect.

The thing that struck me first at the Old Republic is how many time sinks it has. Little ones here and there, but the cumulative effect is enormous.

Four seconds to break down an item for components. Respawn timers when you die. Large Empty areas. (Fucking Tattooine) Waiting for the lift to rise. Traveling from your ship to an orbital platform and then finally to the spaceport on Balmorra, as if being on Balmorra weren't punishment enough. Running Alllllll the way back to the offices in the Senate when you complete a mission in order to get the next in the series.

Seriously, it's really annoying.

In City of Heroes, we used to bitch if it took more than three missions for a contact to give you his phone number so you could call him from the field. Also, our superspeed didn't shut down if we walked into a restaurant.


A trooper flies into a bar...

...and his speeder shuts off.

On top of that, it was trivially easy to teleport your teammates to your location, requiring only the selection of a single power available to every character at level 6, so only one person needed to go to the mission door and could just port the lot in.

Which brings me to my next point. Instances. City of Heroes used them ALL THE TIME. You would walk to the mission door, click on it, and enter your own little world. I recall the dev team lamenting at one point that they might have overdone it with instancing, but I never appreciated how much I liked instances until I started with SWTOR.

Coruscant is usually pretty crowded, because it's the second world for every Republic character. I was on a mission with Greg and Dave to kill 30 gangsters in a particular area, or some such thing. I forget the exact details, but it was something along those lines.

The problem was that there were two other groups on the exact same mission (either that or they were just a bunch of douches and they were killing our mobs just to be annoying. I wouldn't put anything past people on the Internets) The mobs respawned pretty quickly, and the thing that I remember about the whole thing is that they'd just pop into being, performing their milling-around idle animation. I imagined that they were talking about the game last night, or a recent date or their plans for the weekend or whatever. They just looked like they were standing around, shooting the shit, when, as they're turning to tap the ash off their cigarette, a Jedi would suddenly EXPLODE into their group from all the way across the room and FUCK THEIR SHIT UP!! with his laser death swords. The juxtaposition was just surreal.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that I would prefer more instanced areas and not have to compete with other players constantly for mobs and glowies. Why no, random guy, I don't mind if you loot that treasure chest while I'm killing the Elite that's guarding it. Just walk right up to the chest and open it while the robot is spraying me with rockets. You fuck.

From a graphical perspective, despite the Ultra Mode overhaul, City of Heroes was showing its age when it folded (having debuted in 2004) and SWTOR looks really slick next to it. However, the sheer variety of the CoH Costume Creator has never been matched. I made a dude with a pillar of fire for a head. Beat that, SWTOR!

The inability to add a player as a friend account wide is such a shocking omission that I have to conclude it's a deliberate decision and not something they merely overlooked.

If you'll excuse the digression for a moment, a character named Positron was one of the Signature Heroes in City of Heroes, a high level ally who would sometimes show up in missions, and who also served a trainer in one of the zones. He was the character of one of the devs, who had played him in a tabletop game and who occasionally took on the identity for in-game events and posted under that name in the forums.

One day a player wrote a tongue in cheek post titled "DO SOMETHING POSITRON!" where he complained that he had died to an ambush, literally at the feet of Positron the trainer, who didn't lift a finger to help.

Positron the Dev wrote back with the quip "All that crap is grey to me, no XP", which became famous on the boards.

I was thinking of that when I was walking through Coruscant. Mobs aggro on me long after they stopped being worth experience points. City of Heroes did this better. You only had to be three levels higher than a mob for it to ignore you. It's annoying being swarmed by a bunch of goons that don't give you any rewards, but which will slow you down and occasionally knock you off your speeder.

I'd probably never have given SWTOR a chance had CoH not gone under, and I think I do prefer it still. That's not to say I find it superior in every way.

The legacy system in particular is really neat. It's been my experience that a lot of gamers give their characters extensive backstories in video games, and it's pretty nifty to have mechanical support for that.

The spoken dialogue in SWTOR really adds an extra element, and is always solid and occasionally spectacular. They did get some of the best talents in the field, and it shows.

Plots are engaging, if occasionally nonsensical. I may have missed something or it may be revealed later, but one of the missions features a scientist who is secretly a Sith. He developed one of the super weapons that litter the Star Wars universe for the Republic, and he goes through all these machinations like faking his kidnapping to get the plans to the bad guys. That just seems needlessly complicated. Couldn't he just cut out the middleman and deal directly with the bad guys and say "Hey, let me build you a super weapon", rather than fucking around with the Republic in the first place?

Still, that's a picayune complaint. They're fun to play and a fair number of CoH's missions fell apart when viewed critically too.

I like that every class has some mez protection, as blasters were insanely squishy in CoH right up until the very end, and for a long time, mezzes dropped all your toggles and you were as good as dead. At the other end of the spectrum, tankers were almost unmezzable. I would have liked to perhaps have seen some greater differentiation between the classes in SWTOR, and maybe some extra oomph for the front line fighters/tanks, but I think this is probably preferable to CoH.

PvP was added to City of Heroes well after launch. It gained a small, but devoted following, but underwent heavy revision in the interest of game balance with one update and was abandoned by the hardcore PvPers. There was occasional talk of tweaking it again, but mostly it just languished on the back burner. I played a little, but mostly when I went into PvP zones it was for badges or the really solid temp powers that were available there. If I'd see one guy on the /whoall, I'd grumble "What does this asshole want?" before taking off for the nearest exit.

I LOVE PvP in the Old Republic. It's like playing a game of Battlefront! Sometimes you get a shitty team, but hey, then the match is over quickly and you get a new team for the next match.

Though, while we're on the subject of shitty teams, I do seem to be drawing more than my share lately. I'd be on a team with three or four other teammates in the center room on the Ancient Gate map. The other team would focus fire on me, four or five of them, and I'm pretty decent at staying alive on the sage, between breaking LoS, using heals and Force Armor, etc, and I'd last a good twenty or thirty seconds before they overwhelmed me. Thing is, nobody came to help in that time.

It's the slow ganking that gets me. Yeah, if a bunch of dudes jump me and I die before you can intervene, well, sucks to be me. If a bunch of dudes jump me and ping away at me for a half a minute and you're just standing there like Kitty Genovese's neighbors, well, then, dear, I fear, we're facing a problem.

On the other hand, I kept the other team tied up for a couple man-minutes when they could have been working towards objectives, so go me!

And it's fun being on the other side of this dynamic, if you're on a halfway functional team and the other guys are coming at five of you in your entrenched position one at a time, like goons in a kung fu movie.

Overall, I like it a lot. Slowly working my way up with my sage. Having friends to play with makes a lot of difference and I hope to be at level 50 by the time they raise the level cap so we can all do the new stuff together.

Geekfight: Bene Gesserit versus Jedi

For this installment of the geekfights, we'll be looking at the performance of a typical Bene Gesserett versus that of a typical Jedi in a couple different arenas, not just who could beat up whom, as is so often the case.
 
We'll say that the Bene Gesserit in question is someone comparable to Jessica at some point after she became a Reverend Mother.  The Jedi is one of those jobbers who got ganked by a bunch of troopers in the montage in the Revenge of the Sith.
 
Actually, scratch that, because if the pattern for Star Wars holds true, I'm sure they are dozens of expanded universe stories about Ki-Amundi and Aayla Secura where they accomplish ridiculous feats of derring-do.  So, someone with skills and experience comparable to Obi-Wan Kenobi at the end of the first prequel, a Jedi who has completed his training, but does not have an abundance of field experience.
 
Jedi abilities are pretty well known at this point, but I'd like to quantify them here. I discussed this in an earlier post,  so I'm just going to summarize it her: Mind Trick, Telekenisis/Force Push, Force-boosted athletics and acrobatics. Jedi Reflexes are, if I recall correctly, supplemented by short term precognition, so we'll give them that too. No lightsabers for the straight up one-on-one fights, but we'll take a closer look at their skill sets, which didn't figure much into the Dalek fights. Jedi are jacks-of-all trades and have training in a wide variety of areas.
 
Bene Gesserit abilities: Voice (sub-conscious or overt control through spoken language) , Prana-Bindu control (perfect control over every muscle in the body), Internal Body chemistry control (mostly used to confer an immunity to poison, but also can stop the aging process and enter suspended animation or will oneself to die), Other Memory (access to the memories and personality of all female ancestors)  and tremendously refined observational skills.
 
So the first challenge is that of diplomacy. We'll say trying to get the trust of an unknown monarch in an unfamiliar kingdom. This deprives each side of an significant advantage. The Jedi lose their reputation and the Bene Gesserit lose their network of spies, infiltrators and proxies. Still, I think the Bene Gesserit have the edge. They're more ruthless in the application of their skills. Not that Jedi can't be ruthless, but that's the default setting for the Bene Gesserit. It backfires on them occasionally (notably, Paul was rather displeased with the machinations of the order by the end of the first book), but it tends to work as intended. They can get the measure of their target with their observations of minutia and be pushing his buttons when the Jedi are still explaining what a Jedi is.
 
In a straight up, one-on-one fight with each of the participants knowing the capabilities of the other, I would give it to the Jedi if weapons (read: lightsabers) are allowed, and the Bene Gesserit if the fight is unarmed. In the case of an ambush, I would give the edge to the Jedi, as they're less likely to be surprised, due to the nature of their abilities.
 
In small groups, the Jedi improve in direct proportion to their number in a way that the Bene Gesserit do not. That's because, due to the Other Memory, any Bene Gesserit has pretty much the same skill set as any other, and they don't add anything to an effort beyond more bodies, whereas with the Jedi, each individual has the chance to bring a unique skill to their group.
 
The entirety of the one order versus the entirety of another, it's the same story it was with the Daleks. Not enough Jedi. Or, if you prefer, too many Bene Gesserit. If I recall correctly, the Lampadas Horde contained eight million sisters.That's one thing I liked about the Dune series. It had an understanding of just how big a space-faring civilization would be. A criticism a friend leveled against Revenge of the Sith is that the galaxy doesn't seem very big if Palpatine can depart from Coruscant when Anakin is mortally wounded and arrive in the Outer Rim before he would die.
 
The Jedi aren't looking too good in the exchange. Are there any areas where they would come out ahead? The technology of the setting seems vastly superior, particularly in the arena of artificial intelligence. I think the canonical story is that droids in Star Wars aren't truly self-aware, but rather their apparent consciousness is just some kind of Chinese Room illusion. I think that's more an artifact of storytelling than anything else; a way of not having to deal with the ramifications of having millions of sentient beings as slaves.It doesn't make a huge difference either way. C-3PO could certainly pass the Turning Test, for instance.
 
Though that makes me think that the combat droids would be a more interesting opponent for the Bene Gesserit than the Jedi. Their artificial nature renders them immune to Voice (which I figure would be useful once against even a Jedi before they learn to defend against it. It worked against Thufir, and I figure a Mentat has a level of mental discipline comparable to a Jedi), and good luck killing a robot with your bare hands.
 
So while Bene Gesserit > Jedi, I also must conclude Roger-Roger Robot > Bene Gesserit.

Roger, Roger, ladies!

Book Review: Shatterpoint

I occasionally mention my love for audio books. Sometimes I get on a Star Wars kick. For my most recent one, I listened to NPR's audio plays of the trilogy, and then followed them up with the novelizations of the prequels.

Phantom Menace was meh. I never finished that one. I had it on my MP3 player, then I felt like music for the afternoon, couldn't remember what track I was on when I wanted to return to the book, decided it wasn't worth the effort to figure it out, so I just went to the next one.

Attack of the Clones was awful. The movie was pretty crappy, but I was hoping they could clean up some of the silliness from the film.  Specifically, this.  It took ten years for the Kaminoans to grow an army of one million clones. A million might sound like a lot, but it fails to take into account the size of a galactic civilization For some perspective, China, one nation on one planet in the real world, has over seven million people in its army.

Okay, movie rant over. Book rant commencing.  RA Salvatore did the adaptation-

No, let's call things by their proper names. Adaptation implies that the RA looked at the source material then reworked it for its new format. The word I'm going to use is transcription, because he looked at what was happening on the screen and described it in the most quotidian prose imaginable. Ugh. And you'd think he'd manage to avoid making it any worse, since he's not really adding anything. But you'd be wrong. He has some kind of mutant power to find a word that is ostensibly a synonym, but conveys the exact wrong impression. For example, I'd imagine that Yoda has quarters on the Jedi Temple in Corusant. He's a big shot on the Council, he spends a lot of time there, so he almost certainly has a place to stay. I would never in a million years describe it as an apartment, because that makes me think that Yoda comes back to it at the end of a long day of instructing younglings, kicks off his shoes, loosens his belt, pops open a brewski and turns on an episode of Friends. Then he looks at the calendar on the wall and sighs, because it's almost the first of the month and he has to get the rent check to the landlord.

Like Twain said, the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Salvatore also uses "Rocketman" to describe Jango Fett. I mean, Jesus Christ. Can anyone read that and not think of Elton John? Also, he uses diminutive three times in the same paragraph to describe Yoda. And yeah, sure he's small. But surely you own a thesaurus, RA. Why don't you put it to use? And one final gripe. His portrayal of Princess Armadillo. One thing that was actually unintentionally amusing was that he gave her a couple lines like "Those lovable sprites", and since the audio book is read in Jonathan Davies's deep voice, it winds up sounding like that Geico commercial with Peter Graves. The other thing is that he piles on the superlatives every time she's mentioned. She is the smartest, most beautiful human being that ever lived. But when he actually shows her doing something, she comes across as a slightly dim, temperamental teenager.

After all this, I went into the third book with low expectations. However, Revenge of the Sith, as adapted by Mathew Stover is pretty awesome. The first part was largely from the point of view of Count Dooku, which allowed the author to simultaneously gloss over and express disgust at the stupid slapstick antics of the opening sequence. But he also took pains to show the brotherly camaraderie between Obi Wan and Annakin, something you never really saw on the film version. In fact, that lack of camaraderie is what really drives the final nail into the coffin of the series. There is no pathos when Obi Wan has to kill Annakin, because they were never shown to be very close. Instead of two men closer than brothers, they're just these two dudes who work together.

 It is head and shoulders above any Star Wars book I’ve ever read. Previously, I had thought the Timothy Zahn stuff to be the gold standard for the franchise, (to the extent that the stuff introduced in those books (the planet Coruscant, for instance) was later incorporated into canon), but this is even better. It's not just a good Star Wars book or a good sci-fi book. It's a good book, full stop.

The element that I liked the most was that they set up Anakin (and, holy cow, my spell checker recognizes “Anakin”) as “The Hero with No Fear”. The reason that the Jedi Council had given for not accepting Anakin for training was that they sensed too much fear in him. And he was what, a ten-year-old kid, separated from his mom and everything he had ever known? Is that really an unreasonable thing for him to feel? It just made the Jedi Council seem like a bunch of douchebags.

Throughout the book, the author had several sections highlighting individual characters using different techniques, ranging from the first person sympathetic to something I’d never seen out of a Choose Your Own Adventure books, a second person point of view (e.g. “You are Anakin Skywalker. This is how it feels to be the Hero with No Fear…”).

They use that phrase repeatedly throughout the book, to highlight the fact that even though he is a great hero, deep down, he never stopped being afraid. To the universe, he is the fabled hero with no fear, but in the small hours of the day, he's a little boy with a dragon in his heart that whispers to him that everything dies. Eventually, he is eaten alive by that fear and with full knowledge of what he is doing, he embraces the Dark Side because he’s too scared to face it. He accepts his new identity, saying “I am Darth Vader,” and crushes the whispering dragon in his heart. He turns his back on every emotion that made him human, and the chapter concludes with “He had become, finally, what they all called him. The Hero with no Fear.”

Awesome.

It certainly works better than the portrayal in the movie, “I’m going to call you Darth…Vader. Go forth and kill me some younglings.” His fall there was so abrupt that I was imagining the repairman from the one Halloween episode of the Simpsons “Yup, here's your problem. Someone set this thing to ``Evil''

The epilogue is even better. Anakin realizes that there was never any Vader. Vader was just a lie he told himself to make it easier. It was always him. Only Anakin.

It was on the strength of that adaptation that I picked up Shatterpoint, because Stover wrote that too. My biggest complaint was that the audio book was too short. (Only six hours!) I don't like abridged works anyway. Part of Stover's appeal for me is the way he slowly constructs entire worlds. His Wikipedia page claims that one of his influences was Roger Zelazny, and  I certainly see a lot of what I loved about Zelazny in Stover's work.

(I wonder if he could be persuaded to write a piece for Shadows & Reflections. That I'd like to read!)

Shatterpoint was Conrad's Heart of Darkness as a Star Wars novel. I thought I was being pretty clever in picking up on this, but it really couldn't have been more obvious if he had named the ships in the story "Nostromo" and "Sulaco". Aliens shout out!

Moving on, it's a pretty excellent piece, but it was abridged. Audible assured me that "You might be interested to know that publishers do not abridge a book without a great deal of care. In most cases, the abridgement cannot be released without the author's approval of the abridged manuscript. Audible offers unabridged titles whenever we have the opportunity" and like a dummy, I fell for it. But an abridged book just isn't the same. If this is the only format in which it's available, then yeah, I guess I'll take it, but I just don't enjoy it as much.

The story is pretty straightforward. Mace Windu's former padawan Depa Billaba was assigned to a planet where war has waged for generations. The book begins when Mace is presented with evidence of her atrocities and the orders to extract her.

It's a pretty great book. Yeah, it's  Heart of Darkness in spaaaaaacccceeee! but it's more than that, as Stover carefully adapted and updated the themes of the original for what would work in the Star Wars milieu. It wouldn't work without Stover's writing either. He's less poetic than Zelazny in his descriptions, but more precise in a way that I really can't define to my satisfaction. But since both poetry and precision were present in Zelazny's work, I do find his writing enjoyable in the same way, as these differences a matter of degree more than of kind and that is high praise indeed for Stover.

Nor are his concepts lacking. Stover is, I think the best kind of author for a Star Wars books. He comes up with daring ideas that somehow always fit seamlessly in to the Star Wars universe as a whole. They're new, but they belong. He pushes the boundaries of the world and expands them, and leaves the setting richer than he found it.