NFBisms

I think if there’s one, individual Clone Wars arc worth watching, it’s The Wrong Jedi arc (season 5 finale arc). Written by a real crime TV writer - Charles Murray - it’s genuinely just good TV and has the chops to pull off its ambitions. When Ventress talks about turning Ahsoka in to “the bondsman”, I popped. It’s good stuff - just solid procedural genre fiction.

And so much of what the show nails is distilled into these four episodes. If you hadn’t watched previous seasons, it catches you up to the character dynamics at the top, and pays them off (for once) in a single taut plotline. Every other episode tables the character development for ROTS, and this is the only one to offer a new dimension to it.

I think what a lot of people (and myself) like about Clone Wars Anakin in general is how he matches personality-wise to “The Good Friend” Ben describes in A New Hope. He’s given moments of charm and swashbuckling as a pilot and warrior that feel more believable to that end; more than the deeply troubled young man Hayden mostly portrayed. Luke aspires to this image of his father. The shades of darkness Anakin’s character gets to show, then work as compelling “foreshadowing”. It’s mirroring the OT arc in earnest, which I think is what a lot of people wanted out of the prequels in the first place. That’s the “fix”. It’s not a deconstruction of Vader’s mythos, it’s Luke gone bad.

But yeah, 2/3 of TCW isn’t actually good, and only the aforementioned four episodes are truly great. I will always have a lot of fondness for its insanity, but it’s not a show worth recommending broadly anymore. It used to be the container for a lot of Star Wars’ potential, but all of that has since been met or squashed by the various things released post-acquisition.

Yeah, I think on streaming it’s not burned-in, using the software’s default subtitles for the benefit of anyone watching on a phone.

Speaking of the influence of Japanese / samurai cinema on Star Wars, something mildly interesting is how the creators of the FX show Shogun have cited Star Wars as a resource. It’s fun how a modern samurai show has wrapped back around to taking influence from Star Wars. A big one is the font used to translate the Japanese:

Source

To the point that I’m pretty sure The Mandalorian uses the same one.

They’ve also cited Obi-Wan’s ANH look as the influence for Toranaga’s look (as a send up to Toshiro Mifune being Lucas’ first choice for Obi-Wan), and took inspiration from Lando’s betrayal at Cloud City for [SPOILER BELOW]

Saeki’s betrayal in episode 7.

RE: “Good talent”, I’ve been thinking about how transparently the process of finding creatives has been to this point.

• Russian Doll becomes a hit, Headland has a show announced the following year.
• Benioff and Weiss were offered a Star Wars before Game of Thrones ended. (doesn’t go anywhere)
• Jon Watts gets Skeleton Crew as he concludes his tenure with the MCU Spider-Mans

NOT that I want Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo of Shogun to be saddled to Star Wars, but I think there’s no way their names haven’t been floated now re: potential helmers of something in the future. Shogun got great reception for FX/Disney - they’re clearly fans of Star Wars - and I think there’s a path forward there if after Andor, LFL wants to continue pursuing a prestige TV audience. Still, I am interested in the second season of Shogun (even if they’ve run through the source material) and would prefer they stick with what they’re doing.

(Counterpart is another really great show Marks did. I think Andor fans would really like it, it’s also a kinda sci-fi spy thriller.)

I just think “good talent” is hard to quantify, let alone for execs that only follow the money and recent successes. Obviously you can have someone with Tony Gilroy’s prestige and cache as a sure bet (not to mention that writer’s room and all its weight), but would other esteemed industry veterans really want to do it? That in itself was already such an odd serendipity.

What if The Plan™ is bad? Then you’re just recreating the same shit again when the course inevitably needs to be “corrected”. Well easy, they just have to Be Good™, right? The irony of “commitment” being the only quantifiable thing in this pitch is that people were soo happy The Acolyte was never given the opportunity to find its legs.

Either way, with Chapek’s ousting, they’ve already decided to slow down! We are years behind in terms of decision making. There is only one Star Wars show coming out next year, and after that, the only somewhat sure thing we have is Filoni right now building towards an Heir to The Empire movie.

So they literally came to the same conclusion, and I know everyone’s still going to hate it. The problem with making this out to be a no-brainer “just find talent” thing is that the suits agree with you! But what does that mean, really? It means The Mandalorian and The Clone Wars was financially successful and uncontroversial, “proven” in this franchise.

anyway Andor >> literally all of Star Wars, the Michael Clayton director doing Star Wars is the kind of thing I’m going to miss in this bleak future

I’m not anti-Christian, truly, I’m really not trying to be boxed in to these perspectives. There is room to do all of the stuff you all are talking about thematically and still have dialectical discussions about its world. Like you just said about Han and Andor.

The Jedi can be right - they are! But pedagogy is not a question of content.

Also The Wire comparison was me doing an apples to oranges thing. I’m saying I like that kind of thing. It’s not worse than mythology to me. It has its own audience, the prequels in whatever small way have things that work better in that lens.

like, I’m not rejecting the story of Star Wars guys, but there’s emergent stuff in the cracks worth pointing out

I pretty much agree with you. I don’t want to be boxed in with the perspective you’re actually responding to.

my pov

The “dark side” as a blatantly degradative drug is just kind of a boring read IMO. If The Force is supposed to be “everything” then the nuances of the human experience should be given room to work inside the framework. Agency and choice is a far more compelling engine to drive a story than mythological convention. It’s part of what makes ROTJ work for me; it wasn’t “too late.” It denies this idea weight.

Whether or not it accidentally stumbles into it, the prequels do enough to portray that rigid understanding of the Force as flawed pedagogy too - more than truth about nature. For all the convoluted vagueness about the galactic polity and what it’s meant to analogize, the denial of anything innocuous possibly leading to “the dark” (for a child) works too well in a decade not far removed from satanic panic and at the height of Catholic church scandal. I know not everyone agrees, but I do think that stuff is interesting. The Wire is a good show, and better than Lord of the Rings. (/int. absurd)

The prequels get so close to finding a good synthesis, but ultimately fail by retreating into Anakin’s wacky yellow-eyes corruption in ROTS’ third act. It just doesn’t leave much genuine room for feelings of remorse or guilt in The Force, and make Anakin/Vader feel less real.

“He’s more machine now than man, twisted and evil” from Ben is kind of where I’m getting the OT’s thematic vilification of prosthetics. It’s both about the inflicted trauma and the corruption of nature via technology. I don’t think it’s out and out ableist in the same way - because it does make Vader more scary in the OT - but I guess an unfortunate unintended message is that disabled people are unnatural or evil. Which isn’t better lol

most positive depiction of cybernetics in the franchise

Vladius said:

NFBisms said:

I absolutely believe it’s worth exploring why something does or doesn’t work, don’t get me wrong. That’s kind of my whole obsession, yk? I don’t post walls of text working through my thoughts on something on a forum because I fundamentally misunderstand that. I apologize for being a bit glib, but my frustrations are actually that I don’t think people are being good enough at it. /respectfully

Are you a SomethingAwful goon by chance?

I didn’t even know what this meant lol. I’m just an originaltrilogy guy, mostly hang out on our Discord server, actually.

Honestly though, I do want to apologize for how condescending I’m being. I think because I’ve had a lot of these conversations throughout different threads or on the server, I get tired of re-litigating and catching things up to where a different one (on the same topic) is. But forums just move slower and more sparsely and ultimately it is two different communities, regardless of overlap.

That’s really no one’s fault and honestly unfair of me.

There are certainly discussions that I’m not interested in having, yeah

I absolutely believe it’s worth exploring why something does or doesn’t work, don’t get me wrong. That’s kind of my whole obsession, yk? I don’t post walls of text working through my thoughts on something on a forum because I fundamentally misunderstand that. I apologize for being a bit glib, but my frustrations are actually that I don’t think people are being good enough at it. /respectfully

DZ-330 said:

You’re right, terms like “good,” “well-paced” and “competent” are subjective.

But that doesn’t mean they can’t be evaluated.

“Well-paced” usually refers to a story that keeps the audience engaged without dragging or rushing, and “competent” writing means the plot and characters are coherent and compelling. These aren’t arbitrary standards; they’re widely recognized in storytelling. And when Disney’s content doesn’t meet these standards, it can affect viewership and revenue. So, while subjective, these qualities still have real-world implications for the business.

ok define dragging, rushing, coherent, compelling, etc

I realize this is annoying but I truly think whatever thesis you can make from this kind of thing falls apart under any kind of scrutiny. I’m not saying things can’t be evaluated or that I even disagree about the Acolyte, but trying to speak on some kind of objective corporate tip, from your own purely personal engagement with the content’s quality is arbitrary. Your opinion is not invalid, you’re just not going to discover an insight worth saying out loud.

“Make good things, not bad things!”

Mocata said:

Disney never had a spine to start with and it doesn’t care about these current day ethical quandaries and diversity inclusions. People like to argue over it but it’s not true. This is a soul-less corporation that was about to tell some guy his wife dying in their park recently was her fault because she signed a D+ user agreement. They just want money, and they thought these projects were a way to make it. When the viewers and subs take a hit then we see shows getting cancelled (or removed). That’s all there is to it; numbers in a share holder meeting and money spent versus money earned.

☝️

I just don’t think we can use these subjective words so definitively and then make up arbitrary diagnoses from that. It’s dialectics 101 guys

BedeHistory731 said:

NFBisms said:

Spineless, craven decision IMO.

Absolutely. It’s just giving the not-so-nice side of the fandom more ammo to blame the show’s issues on culture war BS instead of it just being an overpriced yet poorly-written piece.

Also, I’m pretty sure it means the High Republic stuff is on the way out in favor of more Skywalker-era stuff.

I don’t even really care about that (we can ignore them), and honestly it’s a decision that does make sense. I think this show, in a healthier, better managed property, doesn’t even get made as it is in the first place.

But they did make the show. The ol’ cynical, views and money business shit guiding the boat doesn’t become less of a bummer just because I didn’t think the show was great. Shows’ first seasons are exactly where they used to find their feet. Imagine if Breaking Bad didn’t get the chance it had. The Clone Wars. Irregardless of the potential, it always sucks to see that studios won’t trust their creators outside the equation of money. They need to invest in ideas, back creative when it counts, stand by them, help them. Let a rough first season develop into something good. Build an audience

And you’re right, The Acolyte is the first big thing in the Disney acquisition that ventured outside of the common conceits and eras, where do you think they’ll retreat back into? this isn’t just about headland’s show

here’s to another decade of buckethead and green baby, gimme that filoni slop

Spineless, craven decision IMO.

Vladius said:
However the structural stuff of the Jedi, as far as masters with multiple apprentices, decentralization, Jedi with lovers, families, and children, a lack of a standard uniform, etc. are all consistent with how the Jedi were portrayed in everything else (mainly post-ROTJ material because that was what we had) up until the prequels came out. After that, KOTOR retconned the 4000 BBY time period as way more pared down and similar to the movies in terms of portrayal and visual design.

Right, all I’m saying is that some of the the current direction has been reconciling, at the very least making room for, TOTJ-like Jedi as historical.

Jedi Survivor’s whole High Republic subplot has a lot of the same elements, for example. Dagan Gera and Santari Khri’s outfits are not standardized, they have autonomy to explore, build, and recruit throughout the galaxy for their own project (Tanalorr) that is largely unencumbered by oversight. The High Republic Jedi are also generally much less strict on attachments, to the point that romance and basically-marriages are common.

I think a lot of it gets hamstrung by its proximity to, and the desire to “explain”, the prequels (see: The Acolyte) - but The High Republic gets as close to the old understanding of the Jedi as it can before being obligated to fit into and set up the prequels’ state of play.

Ultimately doesn’t mean anything, but the fundamentalism of the prequel Jedi has been retconned into a particular period.

I’m not saying you CAN’T reduce it to just one time period of history, I’m saying you SHOULDN’T because it’s very limiting in terms of stories you can tell. I know you know this already, but it’s an out of universe change which is why we emphasize pre-1999 (real life) not pre-4000 BBY or pre-1000 BBY or something.

Sure. I don’t disagree. Obviously I’ve expressed liking what emerges from the prequels, but I think it does have its limits. At the very least, a bunch of things to write around. I’ve hit diminishing returns on it after Acolyte, for sure.

I don’t know what you’re talking about with the bureaucrat thing.

Granted, it’s like right up to the 1999 line (late '98), but - Redemption. Nomi’s administrative obligations [as a Republic representative] to the conclave rebuilding the Order basically pre-creates Andor’s whole Mon and Leida Mothma bit between her and Vima, (which pushes Vima to seek out Ulic). Nomi, Tott, and Sylvar get into political squabbling about whether Ulic should be tried for his war crimes. They have diplomatic roles on Ryloth and Cathar.

It feels closer to the roles of the prequel Jedi (more than the Dudes Rock™ of the Qel-Droma boys in the preceding titles), even if it’s all predicated on Jedi having children or being widowers.

Maybe beside the point of this thread, but all of the Tales of the Jedi stuff is still implied to be true of the Jedi at one point in the galaxy’s history.

Hell, Master Odan-Urr from those comics is basically who writes the modern Jedi Code in new canon, (his discovered annotations, at least). The mural in Palpatine’s office (ROTS) depicts The Great Hyperspace War. Even pre-1999, the TOTJ comics themselves begin to hint at the direction of things when Nomi, Sylvar, and Tott basically become bureaucrats after The Sith War.

I don’t keep up with High Republic stuff really, but of the stuff I have (Jedi Survivor, The Acolyte, and Dooku: Jedi Lost), a big friction in those is going from a looser Jedi mandate to the inevitable tie to the Senate and a heavier handed High Council. Even in the prequels themselves (and granted, this is gleaned from Jedi Lost context), Dooku at the start of AOTC is still [unofficially] considered one of their number despite having endeavors counter to the Jedi’s code and official political affiliations.

Granted, it’s a lot of writers making stuff work or having their own interpretations, but a lot of the “dogmatic” read on the prequel Jedi has to date been contextualized as not as strict as it may seem to a tortured-for-other-reasons Anakin Skywalker. Yoda is forgiving Jedi for having children or gambling problems constantly. What are the consequences, really, of breaking the rules? The code is just a guide, an ideal aspiration.

Vladius said:

NFBisms said:

Something I’ve been thinking about (and this is perhaps American centric) in regards to the current approach is how much better all of this would have played in a different time. As we further burn through the backlog of Chapek’s tenure over-investing in D+ (yes, there’s context) - it’s clear all of these new shows have been targeting different audiences, and that the streaming landscape where every studio is their own distributor has done zero favors to that end. Handicapped it, even.

Back in the day, all of this would be optioned out / syndicated to different networks!

Mandalorian-verse to primetime (ABC/Fox/etc)
Bad Batch + animateds (maybe even Ahsoka) to Cartoon Network
Andor to whichever premium cable channel
The Acolyte to Freeform, The CW or MTV
Skeleton Crew to ABC Family
Obi-Wan as Direct-to-Video miniseries/movie
etc, etc.

It used to be such an important part of a media’s identity, where it played, who it was for. It was “easier” for many to skip The Clone Wars because being on Cartoon Network implied certain things about its prescribed audience. The Star Wars movies were being marathoned elsewhere after all, on TNT or the USA Network.

The shows wouldn’t be better (maybe they would, w/ network guidelines) but as “consumers”, our choices would inherently be better informed.

What the Disney+ of it all does is put all the shows on the same expectation for a broad subscriber base - the same audiences - even if that’s not what they’re trying to do. Even to unsubscribed spectators looking from afar, in other countries even, it all becomes a series working through the “latest installments”, not a franchise with diversified demographic objectives. We have to figure out this stuff by waiting for a thing to come out, a waste of everyone’s time.

To say less of the “Disney” branding itself being inescapable and inflexible. It has completely painted the way y’all have engaged with the work of like five different creative teams. My frustration with that aside, I can’t even really blame those fans for it. Streaming and the growing monopolies in media have just been doubling down into being their own distributors, becoming “brand families”, etc. - the ways of figuring out profit/strategy for this stuff is stuck between antiquity and new media.

At the same time, this stuff wouldn’t even exist without streaming economics being fucked up. Luckily, hopefully, like I alluded to before, it really is a case of us reacting to a backlog. Shows take a while to produce, we’re just catching up to what’s probably been figured out over a year ago. That isn’t optimism about corporate good sense mind you, it’s just that literally, we’ve been seeing the illusion of the streaming model tangibly break down all across the industry the past few years. I think if we’re talking about what’s coming next, some of what has been expressed in this thread is coming. The slow downs, the return to films, etc. Whether or not that era will be any good is another question.

I see what you’re saying and there probably would be less backlash, but I think the shows probably would be a lot better as well. There would be greater independence and the networks would focus more on trying to get ratings and repeat viewers every week, rather than a sort of abstract thing where they make the equivalent of TV movies to increase the relative prestige and value of a subscription. The networks themselves would all front the costs of the shows and do more with less, rather than Disney’s own shows all competing with each other for budget and sometimes pointlessly ballooning into millions and millions of dollars.

I do agree with this, I was just contending with the shows as they currently exist but realistically there would be more of a collaboration between the network and studio in this scenario.

I think a “good” example of what we’re talking about is Marvel TV pre-2020. I think that whole thing is in a similarly diluted, played-out spot as Star Wars nowadays - but before Disney+ really took off, they had just as many different properties, if not more. The different ecosystems they nurtured kept the brand(s) healthy, fans didn’t feel like they had to watch everything until it doubled down into making Disney+ Events™️ every season. Now those fans don’t care in much the same way Star Wars fans don’t.

But at one point this had been their presence on TV:

ABC
Agents of SHIELD
Inhumans
Agent Carter

Freeform
Cloak and Dagger

Hulu
Runaways
Helstrom

Netflix
Daredevil
Luke Cage
Jessica Jones
Iron Fist
Defenders

And that is just stuff that was [ostensibly] for their healthy MCU. There were still their cartoons and other “non-canon” shows (Legion on FX). Eventually it all becomes that franchise’s version of Legends when they focus in on D+, but at the time it didn’t dilute the energy for Infinity War or Endgame. When I talk about Star Wars following that example, I’ll be clear that I’d rather there just be less of it overall, but when dealing with the hand they have - they should have leaned further in this direction.

Making everything a Disney+ event is doing them no favors. “Disney+” in general is just rough branding.

deleted, apologies

But also - Jon Favreau could just be a hack. (affectionate)

I believe that just as easily, he’s always been of a piece with the Russos, Shawn Levy, and JJ Abrams - business is a part of their art. Grogu was always his baby - his marketing savvy - he doesn’t need the studio to tell him to retreat back into it.

And that doesn’t mean execs didn’t, but at what point in the blanket diagnoses does Gilroy’s blank check from saving R1 reconcile with what should be Favreau’s for delivering Mandalorian?

In any case, I think most of the problems in everything else are truly just Star Wars as a property being disadvantaged for being high concept and spectacle-driven, demanding more time and budget for prep, VFX, and production design than the average TV show. That is what goes beyond the “typical” - and again, these are not typical times. All of that under the pressures facing every part of the industry is going to blowback seemingly worse, especially relative to the standard we were used to for it in Old Media.

Going back to BOBF onwards as delineator, that is precisely where the shift I discuss in my previous post begins. At the point production there starts, Mando has been a success, and Chapek is well into his term, having put into motion his D+ pump. Obi-Wan, Andor, Ahsoka, and Acolyte are materializing around this moment in time. If anything, it’s the opposite of interference - lack of support or blind faith - that proves to be a weakness and/or strength of these productions. Iger sucks, but Chapek notoriously didn’t care what he was greenlighting. It’s all a part of the context we should be looking at.

Well, I don’t think it’s that simple, either.

I think if we’re talking about the quality of the streaming shows - the oversaturation of them, the budgetary constraints - we can point to the top-down direction (from Disney) to pump out shows for their streaming service. Creative direction in the micro is a different conversation (but not entirely unrelated), and I think broad pop culture punditry just hasn’t been good about parsing out what’s relevant to what they want to talk about when. People have been conflating a bunch of things to one catch-all pattern of their choice, whether it’s an imagined incompetence, a perceived political agenda, or disagreement with an assumed creative direction.

It leads to wonderful insights like “they should just focus on making Good™ things!”

But there is information that can lead these conversations in a more productive place. I think we should be able to look at how the Andor we know gets made, for example (THR) :

The subtext here is that the “streaming economics” were Bob Chapek’s (and the entire industry’s, really) irresponsible, inflated spending on a streaming gold rush, greenlighting as much as realistically possible in this period. That timing is really what ensures Tony Gilroy’s involvement in Andor. With that extra cash being thrown around, LFL is able to secure him and the money that makes his manifesto possible - the big budget, the 12 episode seasons, etc. Otherwise, Andor remains in development hell, maybe one of the earlier versions with another creative team is made instead.

That bad business practice is literally what made a great show, this stuff isn’t as algorithmic as it’s made out to be. The Acolyte and Filoni/Fav’s pet projects like Ahsoka and BOBF are borne from the same context. They just didn’t leverage in a similar way. Or were less successful. Maybe they were in some way, and it didn’t pay off! This is all aside from each team’s own creative strengths and weaknesses too.

These are different teams handling circumstances and pressures that, yes, Disney puts them all under. How each one worked inside of that creates their own dialectical discussions worth having. Was there too much supervision or not enough? There isn’t a shadow council really mandating what they should be doing, it’s still just people developing their own pitches through financial stress tests, maybe some arbitrary corporate preferences - a hunger games of ideas vs ideas until they are produced.

But the problem when there is one, is always Disney, on some level. It does reflect back on them, what they are doing, the initial choices that puts things in motion, how they did or didn’t help. There’s no point in defending them IMO. That doesn’t mean it’s a monolithic animus with its own agenda or ideas. And that animus certainly isn’t one Kathleen Kennedy.

In truth, even when it’s bad, Star Wars isn’t special. Every one of the million little reasons it’s stumbled in the past few years has manifested in ways throughout the entire industry. We can only hope we’re almost through the worst of it, on a delay.

Something I’ve been thinking about (and this is perhaps American centric) in regards to the current approach is how much better all of this would have played in a different time. As we further burn through the backlog of Chapek’s tenure over-investing in D+ (yes, there’s context) - it’s clear all of these new shows have been targeting different audiences, and that the streaming landscape where every studio is their own distributor has done zero favors to that end. Handicapped it, even.

Back in the day, all of this would be optioned out / syndicated to different networks!

Mandalorian-verse to primetime (ABC/Fox/etc)
Bad Batch + animateds (maybe even Ahsoka) to Cartoon Network
Andor to whichever premium cable channel
The Acolyte to Freeform, The CW or MTV
Skeleton Crew to ABC Family
Obi-Wan as Direct-to-Video miniseries/movie
etc, etc.

It used to be such an important part of a media’s identity, where it played, who it was for. It was “easier” for many to skip The Clone Wars because being on Cartoon Network implied certain things about its prescribed audience. The Star Wars movies were being marathoned elsewhere after all, on TNT or the USA Network.

The shows wouldn’t be better (maybe they would, w/ network guidelines) but as “consumers”, our choices would inherently be better informed.

What the Disney+ of it all does is put all the shows on the same expectation for a broad subscriber base - the same audiences - even if that’s not what they’re trying to do. Even to unsubscribed spectators looking from afar, in other countries even, it all becomes a series working through the “latest installments”, not a franchise with diversified demographic objectives. We have to figure out this stuff by waiting for a thing to come out, a waste of everyone’s time.

To say less of the “Disney” branding itself being inescapable and inflexible. It has completely painted the way y’all have engaged with the work of like five different creative teams. My frustration with that aside, I can’t even really blame those fans for it. Streaming and the growing monopolies in media have just been doubling down into being their own distributors, becoming “brand families”, etc. - the ways of figuring out profit/strategy for this stuff is stuck between antiquity and new media.

At the same time, this stuff wouldn’t even exist without streaming economics being fucked up. Luckily, hopefully, like I alluded to before, it really is a case of us reacting to a backlog. Shows take a while to produce, we’re just catching up to what’s probably been figured out over a year ago. That isn’t optimism about corporate good sense mind you, it’s just that literally, we’ve been seeing the illusion of the streaming model tangibly break down all across the industry the past few years. I think if we’re talking about what’s coming next, some of what has been expressed in this thread is coming. The slow downs, the return to films, etc. Whether or not that era will be any good is another question.

Channel72 said:

NFBisms said:

On the contrary (and I know this won’t move the needle for you), something I actually kind of appreciated here was the effort this went to show the Jedi not as space cops. I think that angle gets overplayed a bit; it’s easy to villainize them in that lens, but that’s hardly the point. This has a more productive distillation of the subtext.

Ehh… I don’t know. I haven’t watched the whole show yet, but I remember in Episode 2 they literally have the Jedi in a helicopter-like ship hovering in the sky at night with blinding floodlights beaming down, screaming things like “This is the Jedi! You are under arrest!” over a megaphone. I really could not tell the difference at that point between the Jedi and the LAPD.

The Jedi in this show did more “cop-like” things than they ever did in the Prequels, like arresting people, interrogating suspects, etc. While we often joke that the Prequels basically turned the Jedi into glorified space cops, I don’t think the Prequel Jedi ever actually arrested anyone, except when Mace tried unsuccessfully to arrest Palpatine. The closest they come to cop-like behavior in the Prequels, I think, is when Anakin starts yelling at that shape-shifting assassin outside a nightclub in Attack of the Clones. But for the most part, the Prequel Jedi were portrayed as diplomats, negotiators and advisors in The Phantom Menace, and then as bodyguards, soldiers and Generals in the other two films. In Attack of the Clones Obi-Wan took on the role of a detective when investigating the assassination attempt on Amidala, but he comes across more like a Private Investigator or FBI agent than a police officer.

I now want to see a parody show where the Jedi have to cruise around the Galaxy and show up to random people’s houses to settle civil or domestic disturbances. In the first Episode, Jedi Master Plo Koon and his new Padawan respond to a 10-16 at the intersection of Dune Street and Kerner Plaza in South Central Mos Eisley, and talk down a meth-crazed Jawa who became violent after a Twi’lek that lives upstairs complained about loud cantina-band music blasting all night.

I guess to rephrase, I think the show tries to emphasize Jedi As Cops are not The Problem™, but merely a symptom of the Order’s larger failings - an inevitable consequence of the pressures put on them, but not how they are supposed to be/structured to be. The string of murders pushes our characters into an investigative role, yes, but pointedly in this era, under the council and Senate’s noses. Sol and co. are basically rogue. And it’s especially something that they are not equipped to handle [yet]. Every Jedi we meet in this show is book-ish more than warrior.

Not to mention they fail wholly at finding leads, making arrests, or like, not all dying.

I think Headland is being too “clever” for her own good in trying to create the predictable associations early, only to “subvert” them later. The fumbled Rashomon thing for example is seeing the events on Brendok in different perspectives, and the only real difference / new information I can gather from episode 3 and 7’s depictions is the emphasis that the Jedi didn’t come to the planet to enforce law. That every way they fucked up wasn’t because the Jedi are inherently cops, but because Torbin and Sol were being a bit much. What the Jedi really want to do is meditate on the Force and scan for midichlorians in plants and stuff.

(And to tangent off of that, the whole Rashomon thing they try to do here is incorrectly implemented. The whole point of that device being used in the original movie is about the unknowability of the events that transpired! Everyone having their own truths, no one being right or wrong. It’s not about incomplete or hidden information like it is here! But I digress.)

If I had to be earnest, I think Andor is the best Star Wars media probably ever produced? It’s perfect. So I will always be grateful for that.

But I think weirdly enough, Andor more than anything is what has allowed me to feel at peace with Star Wars? Like, I can put it to bed now. When I joke about ending it all, it’s coming from a real place of love and satisfaction. Not trying to be cynical.

The middling/bad nature of the prequels - and to a lesser extent, the sequels - has always left Star Wars an unresolved question in my mind. There’s potential here, I’d always imagined it, and I’ve always been looking for it - in books, in comics, in cartoons, the shows. I developed so much understanding of the universe along the way, to speculate about it like it was real, find interesting conceits to explore. I’ve never been fully satisfied with any one thing, and it only got harder as I got older, as I branched out and became a fan of other things.

But I always saved a place in my heart for Star Wars. So when the perfect cross section of where I am now as a film fan, and all this “language” I’ve honed over the years as a nerd came out - it was, idk, meaningful to me. I could “grow up” now, move on. Gilroy took every nerdy way I’ve thought about the Star Wars galaxy and put it into something I could genuinely enjoy as an adult. So removed from the canon being built on the other side of the franchise, so singular in its refraction of the OT story I already loved. And it was a Gilroy project through and through! As a big Michael Clayton-head, I couldn’t be more pleased.

I only came to this realization after not really feeling the subsequent releases (Mando, Ahsoka, Acolyte), but also not really feeling any kind of desire to “fix” them like I would. I wasn’t even disappointed. They just weren’t for me.

So Andor really changed the franchise for me, from an investment in its world and timeline, to a complete series of films I adore, a TV show that I love. I’ve gotten what I’ve always wanted from this whole thing and those movies aren’t going anywhere. And I think ultimately, even if it’s not Andor for you, that’s the end of the line for everyone at some point.