Channel72

My ranking is pretty simple:

1. Empire Strikes Back
2. A New Hope
3. Andor
4. Return of the Jedi
5. Bleh… everything else

Sometimes I try to figure out which I find worse: the Prequels or Sequels. They’re both inexplicably bad in completely unique and interesting ways.

I think the Prequels are probably more damaging overall, because they’re more directly connected to the OT as backstory, whereas the Sequels can mostly just be ignored as supplemental material. The Sequels show more obvious signs of “short-term corporate decision-making” in their production, whereas with the Prequels (at least with Phantom Menace) I get the sense that Lucas was genuinely excited about the weird story he wanted to tell.

After I saw AOTC in the theater, I came to accept that ROTS would probably not be very good - but I was still very interested in seeing it when it came out. But after I saw TLJ in the theater, I basically lost interest entirely, and so Rise of Skywalker was the first Star Wars movie that came out in my lifetime that I didn’t go see in the theater.

philraid said:

Definitely. It was supposed to be a “wretched hive of scum and villainy”, which it definitely felt more like that in the original film. You turn around any corner you could get shot or captured by a criminal or the Empire. Adding in more buildings, CGI rats and dinosaurs makes it feel more like a zoo or a theme park.
I also just never understood why they kept going back to this planet in the movies, especially since it was never as interesting as it was the first time around for a lot of reasons listed above. Why did Anakin have to be from the same planet as Luke?

I never liked the idea that Anakin was from the same planet as Luke. But unfortunately it’s implied in A New Hope that Luke’s father lived on Tatooine, when Ben says “[Uncle Owen] thought [Anakin] should have stayed here [i.e. here on Tatooine] and not gotten involved.”

But I think Anakin being originally from Tatooine really only made sense before his character was merged with Darth Vader. Plus, the Prequels ended up ignoring or twisting so much of the backstory mentioned in ANH anyway, so it’s not like George Lucas felt particularly bound by earlier stuff he wrote in the 70s.

The dialogue in some of the Yoda scenes on Dagobah is just really next level. There’s probably no higher quality dialogue in all Star Wars. I mean like 90% of Star Wars dialogue is either just serviceable or corny, relying mostly on the performances to elevate it. But then Yoda drops lines like:

Ready, are you? What know you of ready? For eight hundred years have I trained Jedi. My own counsel will I keep on who is to be trained! Jedi must have the deepest commitment, the most serious mind. … This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away… to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph. Adventure. Heh! Excitement. Heh! A Jedi craves not these things. You are reckless!

That dialogue quality is not just among the best in Star Wars, but it can really compete with the best of Hollywood in general. Obviously, we all know George Lucas didn’t write this.

I have mixed opinions about Part 1. Does anyone else get the sense that this film just feels strangely “empty”? Like, I don’t recall ever seeing like a typical city street on Arrakis, or even any average citizens (except those religious people standing around trying to get a glimpse of their Messiah).

I know in the novel there’s a scene where the Atreides family hosts a dinner party, and all sorts of colorful characters from around Arrakis show up. I think scenes like this were needed to give the movie some personality. As it is, I get the sense that the city on Arrakis is just a couple of rooms in the palace, most of which look like some ultra-modern 5-star boutique hotel in Tokyo. I mean it’s all very visually stunning, it just often feels a bit sterile because the world isn’t fleshed out enough.

Superweapon VII said:

The biggest elephant in the room for me is the presence of AI. If the peoples of the SW Universe can build thinking machines, then battle droids and droid starfighters should be the norm, not an outlier. If they’re concerned about a possible Skynet situation, then remote-controlled drones are a reasonable alternative. There’s no reason the Republic/Empire should default to clone/stormtroopers, and absolutely no reason they or the Rebels should use organic pilots. And just saying droids are inferior to organics doesn’t cut it, not when we’ve seen they’re capable enough in a warzone to get the job done.

As sci-fi, this bothers me. As fantasy, it doesn’t.

Yeah… that’s really difficult to explain. It’s one of those things that is hard to realistically address without killing the whole franchise. The only possible excuse available to explain non-droid armies is cost. You could claim that battle droids are just more expensive to manufacture and require more energy to operate. But Star Wars actually seems to do the opposite, making it seem like battledroids are cheap, mass-produced crap that are inferior to clones. (Although Andor claims human prison labor is somehow cheaper than droid labor.)

As for biological star-fighter pilots, yeah, there’s pretty much no way to explain that realistically. It’s one of those things that just has to be accepted in order for the franchise to work, along with sound in space and hyperspace travel. (It doesn’t help that Star Wars calls attention to this problem by actually showing computer-piloted fighter craft in the Prequels.)

But I think adding in sci-fi elements as much as possible helps to establish boundaries and limitations that can help make stories more interesting. Like for example, there should never be large Napoleonic-style ground armies - it’s so ridiculous and creatively bankrupt. (I always wondered why in Phantom Menace, when the Gungan army assembles out in the open, the ships in orbit don’t just immediately nuke them.) At least in the OT, with the Battle of Hoth, they really put effort into explaining why the Empire has to deploy ground forces. (Although admittedly the design of AT-ATs is hard to explain realistically).

The best thing about the EU is that it at least demonstrated the bare-minimum level of expected competence by advancing the story after ROTJ. The OT characters changed and grew, faced new challenges, and the political landscape of the Galaxy fundamentally changed as a consequence of what happened in the OT.

Of course, that’s really the absolute minimum I would expect for any post-ROTJ continuation of Star Wars. In any sane Universe, I probably wouldn’t actually praise the EU for basic, minimum story-telling competence. But unfortunately, sanity in Star Wars is long gone. We now have a canonical post-ROTJ narrative that basically amounts to a Galactic Control+Z, undoing all narrative progress, resetting the Galaxy back to Empire vs. Rebels, and repeating the OT story-line (poorly) with different characters. There’s no New Republic or new Jedi Order or any of the stuff Star Wars fans had anticipated since 1983… no, none of that stuff. There’s no continuation of the story.

So as silly as the EU can get, we’ve arrived at a point where it actually makes sense to praise the EU for understanding basic storytelling concepts like “cause and effect” and “continuing where we left off”.

The EU is really the only post-1983 incarnation of Star Wars that got the basics more or less correct. The Prequels went off in a stupid direction, and the Sequels were not actually proper sequels but rather a soft-reboot followed by an incoherent mess. Nobody got the bare-minimum basics right except the EU.

Superweapon VII said:

of_Kaiburr_and_Whills said:

The EU leaning too far into pure science fiction is one of my biggest criticisms with it. It’s interesting because the issue usually doesn’t come up in conversations.

As someone who’s come to prefer hard(er) sci-fi to soft sci-fi, the physics of space travel/battle in SW began to rankle me. Then I came upon this thread, which allowed me to view the series from a whole different perspective.

I have the same preference, but arrived at the opposite conclusion. I would prefer if the sci-fi aspect of Star Wars was emphasized a bit more. I don’t want it to be hard sci-fi, of course, but just maybe like 20% more sci-fi. I think the original Star Wars (Episode IV) was like 15-20% more sci-fi than ESB and ROTJ. And I think Zahn’s original Thrawn Trilogy is probably like 15% more sci-fi than Episode IV - which I appreciated.

I can accept that certain physics-violating elements of Star Wars space combat are likely too cemented into our aesthetic expectations about what Star Wars should be at this point, so I don’t expect to see an X-wing rotating about its vertical axis to blow up a TIE fighter approaching from behind any time soon - although that would be cool if it happened.

But I think that “Star Wars is Surrealism” essay is very misguided. Maybe one day I’ll have the time to write up a proper response to it.

Regardless, I definitely think the actual fantasy elements of Star Wars should be kept strictly fantasy/supernatural. So stuff like midichlorians, or really any exploration of “how the Force works” beyond the vague mysticism conveyed by Yoda in ESB, is a really bad move. I also dislike the idea of any technology or physical mechanism that somehow affects, counteracts or manipulates the Force (e.g. ysalamiri, Jedi clones, etc.), because it implies the Force can be controlled and manipulated using predictable physical laws.

Filoni: What Tony [Gilroy] has done [in Andor] and what we did in Rebels,

It takes a lot of suspension of disbelief, or possibly alcohol, to believe these two shows exist in the same Universe.

The “no attachments” thing isn’t explicit in Phantom Menace, but I guess it’s implied during that scene when Yoda lays out the “Sith pipeline”: Fear --> Anger --> Hate --> Suffering

The “fear” phase is definitely related to Anakin being afraid of losing his mom, because Yoda points out he’s afraid of losing her right before saying this.

I’ve seen lots of people say Yoda’s quote about fear is very profound. Personally, I never really understood it very well, because the connection between fear and anger doesn’t seem obvious to me. There’s certain specific types of fear and anger that could definitely be linked (the usual obvious example is xenophobia), but that’s obviously not what Yoda means here. He’s clearly talking about fear of loss.

But even fear of loss doesn’t exactly fit the context. Anakin misses his mom. Missing someone isn’t exactly the same as fear of losing them, which muddles this a bit.

Also… Anakin is 10. Of course he misses his mom.

RicOlie_2 said:

The problem isn’t what Gilroy is doing, it’s that Disney is moving production forward, not pausing it until he comes back.

Sorry maybe I’m just missing something or don’t understand enough about the situation, but where is it being reported that production is moving forward? If Gilroy cannot function as a producer without also performing writing duties, why would this restriction not apply to any potential replacement? Isn’t Lucasfilm (or Disney) required to be a “Guild Signatory” in order to hire WGA members? If so, wouldn’t that mean that if they replaced Gilroy with a different producer, that producer (1) could not be a WGA member and therefore could not write, and (2) would only be able to perform producing duties. Therefore, either (A) the scripts are completed and production can only proceed without modifying the scripts or (B) the scripts are not completed and therefore it would be impossible to move forward with production (or at least the parts of production that weren’t written yet).

Again, I don’t know too much about all this so maybe I’m missing something here. Is the fear that Disney will just replace Gilroy and then just ignore Guild Signatory obligations by lying about any additional writing work performed?

Omni said:

Showrunner Tony Gilroy Ceases Producing Services on ‘Andor’

Tony Gilroy had previously stepped down from all writing duties, but is stepping away from the production entirely now too. The bad news? Production is not shutting down with him. Scripts have already been written but we all know they’re almost living, malleable things that get changed all the time. Greedy bastards, this is probably one of the few legitimate “fuck Disney” angles since the sell. Just shut the fucking production down. Goddammit they’ll ruin this. Hoping for the best, but I’m very, very skeptical now.

This might not be as bad as it seems. My understanding of the article is that Gilroy stopped writing because of the writer’s strike. He then stopped producing as well because another writer tried to shame him for scabbing (not participating in the strike), explaining that “there’s no way a writer/producer can ‘finish’ writing and begin solely producing”.

I don’t know enough about the Hollywood writing process, the industry dynamics of the production process, or the rules or social expectations for WGA strikes, to comment intelligently about any of this, but my understanding is that Gilroy is simply participating in the writer’s strike, not officially stepping down from producing Andor to move on to some other project. It seems the line between writing and producing is fuzzy, creating difficult boundary cases for the strike. But if it’s true the scripts are already completed, it seems there’s a reasonable chance the production process will carry on without straying too far from Gilroy’s intentions or vision.

Marooned Biker Scout said:
Continuing on from that (and because I’m a slow thinker): that serendipity and good fortune ran out for the Prequels.

Having Ben be present at the birth of both the Skywalker children in the later ROTS film just makes him look inept, kind of sexist, or forgetful in the extreme.

Having so many other similar discrepancies, contradictions or jarring issues between the two trilogies really did damage the Prequels for so many fans back then, and in the years since.

I think Ben being present for Leia’s birth (or at least being aware of when it happened) is implied in ROTJ, and explicitly confirmed in dialogue from ROTJ that was cut from the film. In the actual film, Ben says “To protect you both from the Emperor, you were hidden from your father when you were born.” And in dialogue cut from the film, he says “So I took you to live with my brother Owen on Tatooine… and your mother took Leia to live as the daughter of Senator Organa, on Alderaan.” He then goes on to deliver an extended speech describing Leia’s life on Alderaan (all of which is cut from the movie.)

Strangely, it seems Ben never really had much faith in Leia, because in ROTJ, Ben actually says “Then the Emperor has already won. You were our only hope” after Luke says he can’t kill his father. So Ben actually repeats his belief that Luke was their only hope, even AFTER the Leia retcon is in effect. (Although Ben also says the Force is strong with Leia in additional dialogue that was cut.) It seems like Ben’s dialogue is written in a manner that is aware of the contradiction, but makes no attempt to smooth it over.

Of course, the Prequels actually show Ben present at Leia’s birth, which only highlights the issue even further (not to mention the Kenobi series).

Marooned Biker Scout said:

MinchD36 said:

Servii said:

Yoda knows that Leia is in danger and tells Luke to complete his training and sacrifice her if necessary

Here’s the thing, though. Yoda doesn’t actually know if Leia’s in danger. The future is always in motion, and Luke’s vision of her and Han in danger could have easily been nothing more than a hypothetical vision of a possible future.

But yes, they definitely didn’t plan in any concrete way for Leia to be the other. Maybe it was an option they were considering at that point, but George hadn’t decided yet. I heard a rumor once that they were considering having Wedge turn out to be the other, but that always seemed like a stretch.

Leia being Luke sister was definitely a Retcon
it wasnt planned as Vader being Luke real father Luke Real Sister was going to play an important role in the Lucas first version of the Sequels Lucas envisioned Star Wars as a series of 9 or 12 movies.

Absolutely. Poor Nellith. We never got to know her.

You are correct in the OP, it is another retcon that causes issues in Leia becoming “the other” after the fact.

Luke says “they were in pain”, when Yoda explains he is seeing the future and Luke then asks “Will they die?”, Yoda answers with “Difficult to see” and so they were in a very real sense of immediate danger.

The retcon also clumsily fails to account for Yoda saying “there is another” privately to Ben, or Ben saying “that boy is our last hope”, since Ben is supposed to know about Leia.

It’s still pretty amazing how lucky George Lucas got with all these retcons, since there was always existing footage that serendipitously supported the retcon. Like with the Leia as sister retcon, they had the scene at the end of ESB where Luke is hanging underneath Cloud City, and calls out to her with the Force. And with the Vader as father retcon, they had the scene in ANH where Owen says “That’s what I’m afraid of” after Beru says Luke is too much like his father.

This stuff doubtlessly helped Lucas get away with claiming he had it all planned out since 1977. And plain old confirmation bias encourages the audience to ignore instances where the retcon fails, but remember instances where the retcon serendipitously seems to have been the plan all along.

It’s really funny how this idea that the Prequel Jedi were intentionally depicted as flawed, has become a “mainstream” interpretation. I’ve heard this so many times. Anakin’s fall to the Dark Side, along with Vader’s sacrifice in ROTJ, are often used as “proof” that the Prequels repudiate the Jedi and their anti-attachment dogma.

But like… all you need to do is just read literally any interview with Lucas about this subject, and you’ll find he just straight up says (paraphrasing) “Actually the Prequel Jedi were awesome and correct about everything, and Anakin fell to the Dark Side because he didn’t listen to them.”

Like for example, this TIME magazine interview where Lucas says:

“[Anakin] turns into Darth Vader because he gets attached to things,” says Lucas. “He can’t let go of his mother; he can’t let go of his girlfriend. He can’t let go of things. It makes you greedy. And when you’re greedy, you are on the path to the dark side, because you fear you’re going to lose things, that you’re not going to have the power you need.”

Or this interview where he says:

Anakin wants to be a Jedi, but he cannot let go of the people he loves in order to move forward in his life. The Jedi believe that you don’t hold on to things, that you let things pass through you, and that if you can control your greed, you can resolve conflict not only in yourself but in the world around you because you accept the natural course of things. Anakin’s inability to follow this basic guideline is at the core of his turn to the dark side.

Bizarrely, Lucas equates attachment/love to greed, or at least believes these things are heavily connected. I can understand Lucas’ logic behind this sentiment, but this is certainly a very esoteric interpretation of attachment and love.

It’s commonly observed that Lucas’ Prequel-Jedi philosophy is very similar to certain core Buddhist teachings. It’s true that Buddhism teaches that attachment is a major cause of suffering. But when it comes to attachment through romantic love specifically, this is usually interpreted more along the lines of the need to accept a romantic partner as they are and love them selflessly (as opposed to viewing relationships as a means to satisfy your own desires), and the need to avoid codependency (becoming too “needy” such that relationships serve mostly to pacify fears of abandonment).

While superficially similar, the Buddhist concept here is fundamentally different from the Prequel-Jedi philosophy which forbids romantic relationships entirely in order to avoid fear of loss. In particular, Yoda tells Anakin (regarding loved ones who have died), “Mourn them do not. Miss them do not”. Yet Buddhist tradition has pretty elaborate mourning and grievance rituals that last over a month in some cases. So the Prequel-Jedi philosophy about attachment and love is a lot more extreme than what’s found in mainstream forms of Buddhism.

Rey probably won’t get married or have a family. Disney shows very little interest in adding any romance to Star Wars. The Force Awakens came the closest, implying a potential Finn/Rey romance, but that was promptly deleted. TLJ suggested Finn/Rose as an item, but put very little effort into developing that, and Disney clearly was much too scared to actually commit officially to some kind of fucked up Rey/Kylo romance. And Rise of Skywalker was directed by Mel Brooks, as the long-awaited sequel to Spaceballs.

JadedSkywalker said:

I hope Rey does away with the attachment thing and all the prequel Jedi dogma and has a family.

Following that nonsense didn’t work for Luke Skywalker in the Disney timeline. His rejection of it in Legends and starting a New Jedi Order was better.

Did he really explicitly reject it in the EU? I think Luke explicitly rejecting the anti-attachment dogma is more like a retcon, since all those stories about Mara Jade were written before the Prequels, and writers like Timothy Zahn never imagined the Jedi would forbid romantic attachments.

I think the OT pretty strongly implied the Jedi were allowed to marry and have children. I mean, clearly, Anakin had children, and nothing in the OT indicates this was somehow bad or out of the ordinary. Anakin’s fall to the dark side is never connected with romantic relationships or attachments in any way.

It’s really amazing how badly the Prequels mesh with the OT sometimes.

Another notable thing I should have mentioned in the original post, is that this draft includes a scene on “Coruscant”, except it’s called “Ton Muund” instead of Coruscant or even Had Abbadon. It’s described as an enormous city that covers the entire planet. It’s the Imperial capital, and the scene takes place in Darth Vader’s quarters. Instead of the Mordor-esque lava castle, Vader’s quarters are described as efficient, technological and dystopian, like something from 1984.

But then later, there’s a different scene, where Darth Vader is in a castle “of black iron in the midst of a crimson sea” which is closer to the famous castle known from Ralph McQuarrie’s concept art and Rogue One. There are even “gargoyles” (some kind of creatures) that hang around the castle. Presumably this castle is on some other planet, but the location is not mentioned.

Also, General Dodonna is around on Echo Base, unlike in the final draft, where he disappears from the story. But all that exposition about the state of the Rebellion, if included, is probably something that should be summarized in the opening crawl.

Juno Eclipse said:

The love triangle between Han, Leia and Luke is, uh, a little strange and unsettling, to say the least, given what we saw on the actual screen and since.

I’d say the love triangle is still there in the final version - most notably in the scene in the medical bay where Leia kisses Luke to embarrass Han. But in the final version, the love triangle was serendipitously downplayed apart from that one scene. Notably, there’s almost nothing left of Luke’s romantic feelings for Leia.

Apparently R2 and C3PO got involved in some kind of sitcom comedy antics in Echo Base, resulting in Princess Leia’s wardrobe getting drenched with water due to a heating unit malfunction.

It seems like they were trying to figure out a way to hide it from her - but fortunately the Empire arrived and forced everyone to evacuate, which provided a convenient cover story for the droids’ shenanigans.

darklordoftech said:

In his TPM review, Plinkett said, “I don’t care if it’s explained in a book because I can’t read”, yet when Episode VII was announced, some EU fans were hoping that it would begin where the EU timeline ended and argued that if anyone was confused by all the EU characters and Chewie being dead, they should read the EU books, and I was thinking, “but Plinkett can’t read”.

Well, I don’t know how to read either, so I understand Plinkett’s frustration. But I feel like the backstory for Episode 7 is basically equally as removed from where Episode 6 left off as the EU, such that it requires the same amount of backstory explanation as the EU anyway, so there’s really little difference.

I mean, what’s the difference between requiring background info about “Intergalactic bio-tech aliens ransack Galaxy, a moon falls on Chewie, Han & Leia have kids, etc.” vs. “New Empire led by new Palpatine rip-off appears, Han & Leia have evil son, Luke is depressing now, Han is a smuggler again, a ‘Resistance’ exists for some reason, etc.”

I mean the Episode 7 backstory basically requires the same amount of homework anyway in order to make sense of what’s presented in the movie, so it probably would have made little difference if Disney actually just kept the EU and dropped the audience off in the middle of it some time after the Yuzhaan Vong (too lazy to Google correct spelling) f’d up the entire galaxy.

It’s important to note that the main value of the Plinkett reviews was they were essentially a compendium of salient critiques about the Prequels. I don’t think Plinkett actually introduced a single original point of criticism. I don’t say that to disparage the reviews at all - rather, I say it to refute the oft-heard claim that widespread dislike of the Prequels resulted from the viral popularity of the RLM reviews, or that Prequel criticism could be reduced to parroting a list of Plinkett points.

A 1999 movie review of Phantom Menace articulates almost every main Plinkett point about TPM, a decade before Plinkett.

And multiple 2004 posts from this very website bring up the “no main character” criticism.

And anecdotally, most of Plinkett’s Prequel criticisms are things my friends and I talked about privately throughout the 2000s, before the Plinkett reviews. A lot of these criticisms are just obvious - especially the CGI stuff and the overall “feel” of these movies in comparison with the OT.

The main value of these reviews was that (1) they compiled all the most salient criticisms in a single video, (2) the criticisms attacked the fundamental problems with the Prequels, rather than the more common mainstream “Jar Jar is stupid” critiques, (3) they used a unique, comedic framing to express these criticisms, rather than the typical 2000s “rage critic” where the reviewer just screams and rants about how the movie sucks, and (4) they employed some really hilarious editing techniques, like cutting off a rambling point mid-sentence to move on to another segment.

Of course, regarding point (3), it seems a lot of people were put off by the “Buffalo Bill” serial killer voice. I personally found it pretty funny (I thought the comedic device of exaggerating the obsessive sci-fi nerd stereotype by merging it with a deranged, pizza-roll eating serial killer was brilliant at the time). But I’ve seen many people say the reviews were unwatchable due to the voice, which perhaps somewhat limited their audience appeal.

However, as I said, we’ve arrived at a point where these reviews need to be watched with some historical context in mind. Nowadays, Youtube is a career and countless movie reviews with 1-hour or more runtimes exist. But in 2008/2009, the idea that someone would actually make a 1-hour movie review about Star Wars or Star Trek would register as insanely anti-social to many. Only an extremely anti-social obsessive sci-fi nerd - a real-life incarnation of “Comic Book Guy” from the Simpsons - would ever do something as anti-social as that. The reviews therefore leaned into this by employing dark humor, making the narrator a deranged psychopath who watched Star Wars movies with his victims, and casually discussed Star Wars action figures while one of his victims was tied up in the background.

I think like 80-90% of their Prequel criticism is valid.

I remember the most contentious point brought up in the reviews (back like a decade ago when there was a lot of discussion about this) was that the plot (to Phantom Menace mostly) is hard to follow, incoherent, or under-explained.

People that disagreed usually reacted by saying something like “What? I understood the plot when I was 10! Why are you so stupid???” or “Is RLM so stupid they can’t understand the plot of a kids movie??” or whatever. Regardless, I agree with the overall point RLM makes regarding this issue.

I do think the famous “character personality test” is a bit over-rated and requires some cherry-picking to really make it work. It’s pretty easy to describe character traits for Qui-Gon, for example, besides just “stern”.

Muppet Babies referenced Star Wars in every single episode.

And The Muppet Show had a Star Wars themed episode, guest starring Mark Hamill.

If we’re including the 90s, there’s an episode of Friends that brings up adolescent fantasies about Princess Leia in the golden bikini.

Of course, Back To The Future mentions Darth Vader. (A movie, not television show, but whatever)

I found some of them extremely funny - particularly the whole bit going over Anakin’s approach to romance.

It’s often forgotten that the Plinkett reviews were somewhat novel at the time, being among the first “long-form” reviews with an hour or more runtime. They came out at a time when Youtube videos had a length limit (I think maybe 10 minutes max or something), and so they were initially released in 10-minute segments. At the time the Phantom Menace review was released, I remember the length of the review being commented on frequently. Of course, nowadays there are tons of extremely lengthy movie reviews on Youtube.

Also, there is a lot of “lost context” going on with these reviews. The reviews themselves formed something of a meta-joke, playing around with the idea of an obsessive sci-fi nerd that would make such long reviews about a science fiction franchise. The fact that the obsessive sci-fi nerd is also an insane serial killer is for the sake of an absurdist exaggeration of the stereotypical basement nerd. (The meta-joke is probably more evident with the Star Trek reviews than with Star Wars.)

However, this meta-joke is now somewhat obscure, and likely lost on a 2023 audience, because the “obsessive sci-fi nerd” stereotype has mostly disappeared. Formerly nerdy stuff is mostly mainstream now, and being extremely enthusiastic about Star Wars is generally not correlated with “weird obsessive basement-dwelling nerd” anymore. So the whole Silence of the Lambs/serial killer schtick has lost a lot of social context, and probably comes off as inexplicable to many viewers.

Anakin’s father was a random alcoholic homeless man who spent most of his days wandering around Mos Espa aimlessly, scraping by via begging, scamming moisture farmers, and gambling on pod-races, only to usually pass out drunk in an alley behind Watto’s junkyard where all his earnings would be stolen by Jawas.

Shmi Skywalker met him once and took pity on him for some reason. They had a brief fling. He was occasionally charming, if a bit unhygienic. But ultimately Shmi got sick of his antics, and filed a restraining order with Gardulla the Hutt. In order to spare little Anakin the shame of his loser dad, Shmi concocted a ridiculous lie, telling Anakin (and everyone else) he was the unlikely product of parthenogenesis. Anakin’s father was okay with this because (A) it meant he wouldn’t be obligated to pay child support, and (B) he usually had no idea what was going on.

A year before the outbreak of the Clone Wars, Anakin’s father died from acute liver failure at a random outpost a few kilometers southwest of Mos Eisley. He was buried in an unmarked grave, which was later desecrated by Tusken raiders.

Years later, Chancellor Palpatine, knowing Anakin’s father was a random drunk loser, made up some ridiculous story about Darth Plagueis screwing around with the Dark Side to auto-spawn a kid, as part of an elaborate ruse to trick Anakin into spontaneously mass-murdering almost everyone he ever knew. Somehow, it worked - even though creating life is not technically the same as preventing someone from dying.