Vladius

That’s really interesting. I actually just read Dark Empire and I’m on Dark Empire 2 right now. I still question that internal logic though because the Emperor was clearly Vader’s master, and the Dark Lord of the Sith wasn’t ever subordinate to anyone else in TOTJ, other than ghosts of former Dark Lords like Marka Ragnos.

A New Hope is more convenient for figuring out which movie you’re talking about, but I still say Star Wars or the original Star Wars out of principle

Anakin Starkiller said:

Let’s be honest, TFA didn’t exactly set up the New Republic as geniuses.

It didn’t set them up at all. They’re barely in the movie.

Clearly not. That’s what is so annoying about all the people who think the “light side” equals “no emotions” and the “dark side” equals “strong emotions.” It doesn’t and has never worked that way, but they think it does because the prequels don’t clarify anything. All the source material before Attack of the Clones suggests Jedi with families and children.

This is the fantasy I always have in my head. I really hate arguing with people about the prequel Jedi, balance in the Force, gray Jedi, Mortis, etc. when none of that crap existed before 1999. Jedi were so much more interesting. They could wear whatever they liked, go wherever they liked, serve causes they wanted to serve, could have families and children. They were much more like feudal knights or samurai. You could easily imagine different factions of Jedi, differing takes on Jedi philosophy and the Force, and non-Sith Jedi villains like C’baoth. There was no Chosen One prophecy, so Luke’s adventures after RotJ were just as eventful and important as anything before.

People who are into the prequel Jedi are easily impressed by what they think is Lucas subtly criticizing problems that he made up. They have no concept that their ideas are stuck in a box when compared with all the possibilities that were getting explored pre-1999. Even KOTOR takes the wild and crazy Tales of the Jedi era and crams prequel Jedi into it.

I do think Palpatine was intended to be a Sith, though. Once the Sith and the concept of Sith Lords existed, I’m fairly certain that Vader and Palpatine were integrated into it.

You’re right that these are severe problems with Rogue One being a prequel, but that hardly seems fair to blame the original movie from 1977 for not taking that into account.

The EU had massive editing and retcons but I would argue they were very good at it. They usually took it as an opportunity to introduce something even more interesting.

I think it would be best to just erase The Old Republic and instead write KOTOR 3, and if there’s characters you really like from TOR, just put them in where they make sense.

Spartacus01 said:

I don’t know if this is an unpopular opinion or not, but I have just finished watching the fifth season of Supernatural, and I personally feel like it should have been the end of the series. I’m not even interested in watching the subsequent seasons, because the season 5 finale is too perfect for me, so I just want to stick with it and pretend nothing else happened after that.

This has always been my opinion and I’m glad someone else came up with exactly the same conclusion. I think a TV movie about getting Sam out of hell would have been just fine too.

The Phantom Menace

timdiggerm said:

The real question is: why does anyone care about having a consistent canon?

It gives a world a feeling of realism and depth when you can look at any one part of it and think of it as part of a larger whole. Information you get from one part can be applied to another part and vice versa. For example when you watch the movies and see Palpatine and Vader doing Sith stuff, you can fully appreciate that they’re part of a 5000 year tradition and a 1000 year plan within that tradition. You can play a video game, watch a movie, read a comic book, and it all “counts.”

When it works it’s really cool. The issue is that when massive duds come up, the people making the whole project have to consider them canon to stay consistent.

leftshoe18 said:

I think that eliminating Attack of the Clones may also benefit a potential prequel trilogy that includes a film edit of Kenobi as the new Episode III. We end up having a big time skip between 1 and 2, followed by a big time skip between 2 and 3.

Yeah you can arrange it lots of different ways. I don’t like the Kenobi show but you could slot in Rogue One, Solo, Andor, etc. after it or various Clone Wars media before it.
I’ve come around to thinking that it is actually better to watch the movies in release order overall, at least for a first time viewer (if there are any left.)

The titling would be okay if the shows were actually about the people in the titles. Obi Wan Kenobi is about Princess Leia and Riva, Book of Boba Fett is about Fennec Shand and The Mandalorian, The Mandalorian is now about Mandalorians plural who are not The Mandalorian, and Ahsoka is about the whole cast of Rebels minus Zeb. Andor is mostly about Andor but it’s also about several other people who barely interact with Andor.

It’s unclear who can use the Force in the original trilogy. It definitely appears like it’s only certain people, because Luke can be a Jedi since his father was (in the original Star Wars.) Then in ROTJ he talks about the Force being strong in his family, which indicates it can be less strong for other people.
Also keep in mind that we do know that the Force requires training and building up over time. Yoda establishes the principle of do or do not and the power of belief, but he also gives Luke training at the same time. He doesn’t just sit him down in the hut and make him try to believe really hard. As of ESB, Luke can just barely move his lightsaber out of the ice or levitate rocks, because he’s had limited training.
You could make the case that sometimes you’re able to go above and beyond with less training when the circumstances are right, like Luke making the shot on the Death Star. But somehow that feels different from Sabine doing a premeditated force lift thing.

NeverarGreat said:

GuardianoftheWhills said:

The show has been so boring due to the subpar writing, acting & directing. None of the characters appear to have any inner life. They seem like characters in a video game just waiting for the prompt to say their lines. Chatbots have more depth.

& once again we have another series where heroes & villains make one stupid decision after another in order to get from one lazy plot point to another. There is no dramatic tension & the stakes don’t feel real.

Thrawn doesn’t feel like a threat to the galaxy because he comes across as an idiot. He has always been, to an extent, a stupid person’s idea of a genius - his ability to outwit an enemy based on psychological flaws revealed by a species’ cultural artefacts was laughably ridiculous - but at least Zahn tried to make him seem efficient & ruthless. In Ahsoka he just comes across as a cartoonish incompetent buffoon.

Filoni has shrunk the galaxy - & even his new galaxy seems to amount to nothing more than a barren & misty moor in northern England.

The art psychoanalysis is ridiculous, but at least it’s different enough to be interesting.

I think the reason Thrawn still feels like such a towering threat is because there’s been no competent villain in any Star Wars movie past the OT. The bar is so low here that even a halfway decent Imperial commander would feel like a terrifying mastermind.

The art psychoanalysis is cool and it’s believable in a setting like Star Wars. There’s lots of people with mental and magic powers, and there are lots of varied alien races. It’s not too different from the real life concept that a culture is heavily shaped by their language, what they do or don’t have words for, and how they express things.

Hal 9000 said:

This show has been a snoozefest.
I genuinely don’t get why Filoni is held in such high regard, as I tend not to like his stuff very much.

It’s one thing to feel a season of a show would’ve been better as a film, but I feel this one would’ve been better as half a film. To have spend close to 8 hours on this story so far, it doesn’t feel worthwhile.

It’s five things:

1. Zoomers and younger millennials grew up watching The Clone Wars
2. He defended the prequels when it was not quite very popular to do so
3. The Clone Wars “fixes the prequels” by filling in some blanks and characterizing Anakin better, so it looks like Filoni is an expert
4. He interconnects all his own stuff so it’s like a facsimile of the EU, you can watch TCW and Rebels and Bad Batch and the Disney+ shows and all the characters are going to cross over
5. He has a reputation as “Lucas’s apprentice” because George Lucas told him some story stuff while making The Clone Wars, so he’s allegedly like the chosen successor

It’s not really about quality, more like recognition.

fmalover said:

If you ask me, I say Kreia would greatly approve of Baylan Skoll. Anyone else agree?

That seemed to be the direction they were leaning into, but they were also really afraid of actually having substantive dialogue between characters, so we don’t know what his plan was. It’s bizarre that the conversation between him and Shin about what he really wants and what they’re doing is seemingly years into their relationship, and many days into their crucial mission.

Everything everyone else said is right. I wasn’t rooting for the show to get better because that would just be wasted, but it’s fun to watch it to pick it apart anyway.
I have no problems with Thrawn’s casting. He does the voice really well, which makes sense. The issue is the writing, of course. They didn’t really have a way to make him tactically genius. His main gimmick seems to be commenting on acceptable losses.
Mercenaries die. Ah, an acceptable loss.
Baylan quits. Ah, an acceptable loss.
Stormtroopers die. Ah, an acceptable loss.
TIE fighters run into the enemy ship for no reason. Ah, an acceptable loss.
Morgan dies. Ah, an acceptable loss.

The Lucas idea that crime bosses fill the power vacuum left by the empire is a really good one. I could take or leave everything else, but that would at least be a unique enemy that isn’t just more of the empire (though some stories with the imperial remnant are cool too,) and it makes a lot of logical sense.
I think some of that bled into The Mandalorian, at least in season 1. It starts with all frontier bounty hunting stuff because this is the aftermath of the empire’s defeat, though fragments of it are still there.

Thanks for the suggestions.
To keep going with my idea, I rewatched unedited Phantom Menace and then started watching unedited ROTS immediately after. There’s some huge whiplash but I really like it. The most jarring things are:

1. TPM’s mostly restrained aesthetic with lots of beige and mostly practical-looking stuff, three planets > ROTS everything brightly colored, complicated CG, many planets
2. child Anakin and young teen Padme > fully adult, lusty married Anakin and Padme who are hiding their marriage for some reason, Padme is a blossoming butterfly compared to how monotone she was as queen
3. There are clones
4. the Trade Federation guys are loose and they’re now part of a much bigger army that includes previously unseen characters Count Dooku and General Grievous
5. The humor is still cornball sometimes but after Jar Jar and the gungans, it feels like a deadly serious adult drama

However, 1 and 2 are just as jarring in AOTC, and Grievous doesn’t appear at all in AOTC either. I think it’s so much better to fill in the blanks yourself.
You can extrapolate how Anakin and Padme got together, and you wonder maybe if they’re just hiding their marriage because it would be scandalous, not necessarily because the Jedi are banned from marriage.
You can assume that Anakin did in fact go back to free his mom at some point but that she later got killed by sand people and he took revenge, because Palpatine alludes to it.
Anakin took C3PO with him and finished him, gave him to Padme.
Anakin and Obi Wan’s relationship is so much more natural without having seen them hate each other for a whole movie. Same with Anakin’s personality in general. He is much more sympathetic and his complaints seem much more legitimate. You can tell that he’s jealous of Obi Wan without him resenting Obi Wan himself, which is some nice subtlety.
The Jedi look a lot less bad, except for Windu, who looks worse since we just saw him try to keep Anakin from getting trained in the first place.
Palpatine being chancellor for a really long time also stands out more.
The Plagueis story reference to midichlorians works better right after midichlorians are explained in TPM. So does all the Chosen One stuff.

I’ll come up with more when I finish watching ROTS but overall I really like it. I think I was right that for a potential fan edit, the parts that would need fleshing out relate to the clone wars situation.

benroberts79 said:

I’m enjoying the show so far and personally enjoying the connection to Rebels, but I keep finding myself asking the question of where do these people go between now and the sequel trilogy?

I think it was mentioned earlier by someone else, but where’s Ashoka and Ezra in those movies. The takeaway from those was that Luke is the only one left and there is no other Jedi’s left and he’s the only hope.

Where as the Ashoka show implies that there is at least 3 other Jedi if you count Sabine. What becomes of them not to show up in the sequel trilogies.

Connecting all of this is what I’m most intrigued by and maybe we come to learn that through either this, The Mandolorian or the BoBF.

What’s very funny is that all of these problems also apply to these same characters being present during the original trilogy.

Peter Pan said:

Honestly, the battle droids and general evilness alone should be enough to connect the Separatists and the Trade Federation. Both organizations are hilariously generic in the sense that we learn practically nothing about their precise motivations. All that is given in the movies is that the Trade Federation doesn’t want to pay taxes because they are greedy, and the Separatists? Well, they are characterized by their dislike for the Republic and the Jedi. Based on the abundance of big companies present at Dooku’s meeting, we can infer that they share the same bland motivation as the Trade Federation, money.

So, I think the distinction between the two can be put in the crawl of ROTS, without losing anything.

Actually, the bigger question is why Dooku is on their team. His supposed motivation to leave the Jedi and the Republic is the corruption of the senate, but the first thing he does after leaving is founding the League of the Uber-corrupt, super-capitalist of the galaxy. It just doesn’t make any sense. I mean, what greater good could justify this absurd action against his actual beliefs?

Yeah, visually it’s a no brainer. All the battle droids, droidekas, and neimodians are there from the start of ROTS. I just mean if I’m putting the episode 2 stuff at the end of TPM. When Palpatine says that he’s making an army to counter the increasing threats of the Separatists, it should be established that the Trade Federation is one of the groups of Separatists he’s talking about. They’re part of a trend. If anything I think it would make sense to put it in the crawl of TPM that the Federation is a Separatist group, and then reference it at least once or twice somewhere else.

For Dooku I won’t get into any detail. He’s just Sidious’s apprentice next in line after Maul. It’s a shame to leave out all the subtlety but as you said it’s not well put together anyway. His identity is tied too much to the AotC bonkers mystery plot and I’m trying to cut out 98% of that movie.

Luke!

One idea I had was to use Dooku and Sidious meeting at the end of AotC:

Phantom Menace ends, either with Qui Gon’s funeral or the giant peace ball. Possibly flip the order of the two somehow.

Dooku and Sidious meet mysteriously on Coruscant. The audience thinks oh crap, who’s this guy. Sidious had another backup apprentice all along and Maul getting killed didn’t end anything. Following right up from “Which was destroyed, the master or the apprentice?” Also Dooku was on some unspecified mission, and Sidious says everything is proceeding as planned, so clearly everything that happened was how he wanted it even though the Trade Federation was beaten. Very ominous.

Next we see Palpatine, obviously Sidious in case the audience didn’t get it before, announcing the creation of an army of the Republic to counter the increasing threats of the Separatists. Maybe include the part with Windu and Yoda up there like they saw this coming.

Shots of the clones on Kamino.

I think this is still missing some connective tissue putting the Trade Federation and Separatists together.

Peter Pan said:

How would you pull that off, and how would the structure benefit from that change?

I haven’t thought about it too much, but maybe show a shortened version of Ahsoka getting the map with no self-destructing droids, she takes it to the New Republic to entrust them with it, then they raid the ship and take it. There’s no footage of them taking it from there so it will have to be implied. I don’t know. But there is footage of Ahsoka having it on Home One I think.