I like how the ST we got downplayed the PT (the PT being one okay movie (TPM) and two shit ones (AOTC/ROTS). The PT’s version of the force is too sci-fi for me and the proposed ST seems to double-down on that. I don’t see any Joseph Campbell in “the microbial world.”
Quotes from Joseph Campbell:
“Between mythology and biology there is a very close association. I think of mythology as a function of biology; it’s a production of the human imagination, which is moved by the energies of the organs of the body operating against each other. These are the same in human beings all over the world and this is the basis for the archetypology of myth. So, I’ve thought of myself as a kind of marginal scientist studying the phenomenology of the human body, you might say.”
"I would say that all of our sciences are the material that has to be mythologized. A mythology gives the spiritual import – what one might call rather the psychological, inward import, of the world of nature round about, as understood today. There’s no real conflict between science and religion. Religion is the recognition of the deeper dimensions that the science reveals to us. What is in conflict is the science of 2000 B.C., which is what you have in the Bible, and the science of the twentieth century A.D. You have to disengage the messages of the Bible from its science. "
“What I’m trying to say is that the structuring of a mythology is conditioned by the science at that time. There’s no use constructing a mythology based on an archaic science. I wouldn’t know what to do with an atom, but I do recognize that when we had a Ptolemaic cosmology there was a whole interpretation of the relationship of the earth to the different planes of the universe that was mythologized. What happened to that was it was given an ethical and moral value, the stages of a ladder of the heavens represented the stages of the psyche.”
None of this has anything to do with Midichlorians
Heck, I’d have loved a straight retcon of Midichlorians as a symptom of larger issues within the Jedi Order. Saying they were a bullshit idea the Order adopted in their decline as a means of selection for child abduction.
This fits in well with one of the themes of ANH of materialism vs spiritualism. It might be an interesting idea if the Jedi’s belief in midichlorians were a signifier of them leaning more toward materialism. If you lean into this enough you could make the case that the Jedi are only Jedi in name. Sure they run around the galaxy with laser swords, and they think they understand the Force (midichlorians), but they don’t have a connection to the spiritual.
The whole point of Midi-Chlorians is their connection to the Force. It’s a symbiotic relationship and very spiritual. The Midi-Chlorians and Force aren’t the same thing. It’s one of the biggest misconceptions.
“There’s this world of creatures that operate differently than we do. I call them the Whills. And the Whills are the ones who actually control the universe. They feed off the Force and the conduct is the midi-chlorians. The midi-chlorians are the ones that communicate with the Whills. The Whills, in a general sense, they are the Force.”
“The Whills are a microscopic, single-celled lifeform like amoeba, fungi, and bacteria. There’s something like 100.000 times more Whills than there are Midi-Chlorians, and there’s about 10.000 times more Midi-Chlorians than there are human cells. The only microscopic entities that can go into the human cells are the Midi-Chlorians. They are born in the cells. The Midi-Chlorians provide the energy for human cells to split and create life. The Whills are single-celled animals that feed on the Force. The more of the Force there is, the better off they are. So they have a very intense symbiotic relationship with the Midi-Chlorians and the Midi-Chlorians effectively work for the Whills."