Your Eyes Can Deceive You. Don't Trust Them.

Thursday night, I had no choice but to bifurcate my chronological rewatch of Star Wars, because for the first time in seven years, a new Star Wars film in hit theaters, and I didn't want to break a 27-year streak of being there on opening night.

I enjoyed it ... all right. Good clean fun, lots of action, adorable animatronics, easter eggs galore, humor, a great soundtrack, yadda, yadda, yadda. Very lightweight in the story department, I thought, shaking my head at some obvious mis-steps undermining key sequences in the film.

Over the next day or so, I saw people mostly gushing over what to me had only been a diverting piece of cinema and (coming as it did at the end of a seven-year SW film drought) no big deal. I liked it, sure. But I didn't love it. Wasn't tremendously drawn to watch it again and again in the theater as I have every SW film since -- well, since 1977.

And then:

Someone smacked me in the face with what an idiot I had been.

How? By pointing out that Rotta the Hutt is Stinky from The Clone Wars animated theatrical release.

Had I turned my brain off, just because the film was so removed in sequence from the stories I spent the prior week immersed in? I watched the 2008 movie literally four days earlier. The Mandalorian and Grogu even shows a slightly older Stinky early on in the movie.

Yet I somehow failed to process that Jabba the Hutt's kidnapped son in that 18-year-old cartoon and Jabba the Hutt's kidnapped son in this brand-new live-action film are, duh, one and the same.

Thankfully, a Threads post brought this home to me and rebooted my Star Wars cognition, by saying how much the poster would love to see Rotta and Ahsoka Tano reunite in the future.

Pieces fell one-by-one into place in my head ... and they wouldn't stop falling.

Rotta the Hutt grew up to be the person he grew up to be, in part, because of the way Ahsoka treated him during one of the most traumatic experiences of his life.

Grogu, too, had his life saved in infancy by the determination and dedication of a Jedi, Kelleran Beq, in one of my favorite sequences of the entire Mandalorian series.

That hermit who helps Grogu in the swamp isn't just an extraneous piece of plot armor to explain how Grogu is able to save Mando from the poison that's killing him. Instead, this is a deliberate example of someone taking the time to help a child in need -- just like Ahsoka and Kelleran, except that no one had to give him the assignment. He just did it.

Continuing on through my Threads feed, I came across other people making other, seemingly unremarkable comments about the film. And with each one, I realized that when I sat in that auditorium and watched The Mandalorian and Grogu, I'd been watching it as a standalone film and authored story that just happened to be set in the Star Wars universe, rather than watching it as a work grounded in the massively greater story that is Star Wars as a whole. 

I had been alert to the possibility that it might just be a long episode of The Mandalorian TV series, and when a portion of the plot reached what appeared to be almost full resolution, I thought, "Oh, this is where an episode break would have been."

I watched the sequence of Grogu in the swamp on Nal Hutta as a nice segment in his character arc, and found myself annoyed that the filmmakers hadn't allowed Grogu to succeed on his own, but leaned instead on this convenient hermit as a device, infantilizing The Child instead of letting him grow as fully as he might.

In short, my writer's knowledge of storytelling craft got in the way of what the story intended to tell me all along: that as we grow up, everyone around us has the chance to make a difference in our lives. Some choose to be Ahsoka Tano. Some choose to be Owen and Beru. Some choose to be Bail Organa. And some choose to be Din Djarin or the swamp hermit. There was a larger tapestry hung up on that screen for me to see, but I let my penchant for the constraints of writing conventions overwhelm the root purpose of all art -- to offer up meaning for those open to it.

I'm now really excited to see the film again before it leaves the theaters. Maybe I can do a better job letting myself see, instead of judging surfaces and assuming what's below is simple artifice.

Difficult to see ...

As of today, I'm really glad I looked up where to slot the various "Tales of ..." episodes in my chronological rewatch of everything Star Wars. The three that fit between The Acolyte and The Phantom Menace were fine, but the ones in the gap between TPM and Attack of the Clones really felt like they enriched the larger storyline.

Actually seeing Dooku erase Kamino from the Jedi archives and then leave the order created a sense of an arc from the pre-TPM episodes through to AOTC. And having Ahsoka's birth and revelation of her Force powers put into chronological context did even more to emphasize the passage of time between Episodes I and II.

I Will Not Condone a Course of Action ...

I've been annoyed for almost 30 years at the seeming non-sequitur of Queen Amidala telling her advisors that she won't condone action that would lead to war, considering that nobody described such an action in the discussion that leads up to her avowal. The governor says an invasion is imminent, and her security chief says that the security forces will be no match for the Trade Federation's troops, but neither makes any recommendation of what should be done about that. They're basically telling her that the Trade Federation is about to start a war, and that if that happens, the Naboo will lose, and her response is that she refuses to start a war. It's always provoked a big "Huh?" from me.

But as I watched the scene yesterday, I did what I always advise people to do, and instead of thinking she has no reason to say what she says, I asked myself, "Why would she say that?" And the answer is pretty obvious, actually: the Naboo have excellent starfighters, and they're unaware of how well-defended the Trade Federation ships are. We see both of those facts play out later in the film.

So what was really being said in those lines was this: 

Sio Bibble: The Trade Federation is about to land troops on the planet to attack us.

Captain Panaka: If they do that, we'll be wiped out. 

Queen Amidala: I hear what you're saying, but I am not going to be the one to attack first.

He Is a Political Idealist, Not a Murderer / Truly Wonderful, the Mind of a Child Is

According to the best (i.e., basically the first) timeline I could find, three short "Tales of ..." episodes fit into the gap between The Acolyte and The Phantom Menace, so I watched those tonight: two "Tales of the Jedi" episodes featuring Count Dooku and one "Tales of the Underworld" episode about the street-rat childhood of a character I presume ends up being Cad Bane. (Or maybe not, as a Cad-Bane-esque gangster manipulates the kid into becoming part of his operation.)

The Dooku stories follow him through two vignettes that instill or compound his alienation from the politics of the Senate, as both feature corrupt senators who enrich themselves off the suffering of their people and call on the Jedi for help.

The proto-Cad-Bane episode was one I hadn't seen before, as I've never gotten around to watching "Tales of the Underworld." The two urchins recruited into the gangster's schemes seem to live a pretty happy-go-lucky existence scrounging through trash and stealing fruit from a hapless droid. Like the Dooku episodes, it's clearly intended for a younger audience than some of the more substantial animated shows. There's very little suffering visible in the homeless kids' existence; they dig around in garbage for food, but don't actually complain much about being hungry or uncomfortable sleeping outdoors, and manage to consistently entertain themselves, running around and giggling through large portions of the story. Presumably things will get a little harder for the character I assume is Cad Bane, since he ends up alone with the gangsters after his friend gets nabbed by the police. The timeline, makes it appear the story continues with an episode set between TPM and AOTC, and another between AOTC and ROTS. We'll see if it develops any more depth.

Your Eyes Can Deceive you. Don't Trust Them.

I finished up my rewatch of The Acolyte this morning, and my view of the show has changed significantly since it first aired. Previously, I thought it got off to a rough start and then got unevenly better over time. Though it had a lot of great stuff in it, I thought that overall it didn't rise much higher than "pretty good."

But with the advantage of a second viewing, and especially with my realization of how much better the story would flow with episode three put in correct chronological order, the entire thing seemed far more consistent and well constructed. The first time through, I kept hoping for Sol to be the hero that he wanted to be despite his guilt over mis-handling things on Brendok. I put a lot of blame on Indara for the debacle with the coven, and hoped Sol would redeem his fellows from the mistakes of that mission. Seen in full context, though (spoilers ahead), his centrality to the disaster and his subsequent self-delusion pretty squarely make him the villain of the entire story, and only at the end when he tells Osha, "It's all right," as she's Force-choking him to death, does he truly do the right thing.

Some other realizations along the way:

Torbin even more than Sol refused to face his own culpability. He spent ten years in silent meditation, and yet when Mae finally gets through to him, he still says, "We thought we were doing the right thing." Of all of them, his selfish behavior is what brings calamity down on the mission and the coven, but he hasn't the courage to say, "I" when accepting Mae's absolution, and he hasn't the courage to admit that he really didn't think he was doing the right thing -- he just thought he was going to get to go home.

And despite seeing two different versions of the coven's demise, and revisiting their home 16 years later, we never actually see anyone onscreen check to make sure they're all dead.

I doubt there's any real chance of another season, or even an eventual sequel to tie things up, and in light of how good the series came across this time, I think that's a genuine shame.

He's Here.

Two more episodes into The Acolyte, it's more and more obvious how impaired the story flow was by not putting episode 3 at the start of the series. Not only would it have better informed the following two episodes, but the action would have flowed uninterrupted from episode 2, with Mae and Qimir ending that episode having escaped the Jedi, into episode 3, where they arrive on the next planet to hunt down wookiee Jedi Master Kelnacca. Similarly Sol and Osha transition from the mission to find Mae on Olega to attempting to head her off before she gets to Kelnacca. It would have been a steady ramping up of the pace from the investigation and surveillance on civilized Olega to the expedition into dangerous jungle on Khofar. But with the interruption of the flashback episode, that sense of progression is reined back, and the viewer has to climb out of the past to get back into the mounting action, instead of being pulled directly along with it.

We'd also get to see the transformation of Qimir into the Stranger just a single episode after his introduction, again letting us feel a quick-paced development instead of a start-and-stop one.

I can't help but feel that with episode 3 up front, I would have been far more intrigued, and the show would not have needed episodes 4 and 5 to overcome my skepticism, but instead would have notched itself up in my estimation from good to exceptional with all the powerful action and revelations in these two chapters.

And of course, Manny Jacinto's performance in both episodes is terrific, and it would have been great to see it directly build on episode 2.

Maybe someday they'll find a way to revisit these characters and let him bring the character to full fruition.

The Power of One. The Power of Two ...

So. Last time I kind of dumped on episodes 1 and 2 of The Acolyte. This morning, I got on the treadmill and watched episode 3, and ... 

Good grief, whose idea was it to put this episode out of sequence? It provides all the emotional context we need to immediately engage with the characters, it's honest with us right up front that the Jedi are in the wrong about a lot of things, it provides all the stakes that previously felt missing about the opening scenes that the show started off with, and it's SO much better-written than the other two episodes.

[Spoilers Below]

If I'd started my rewatch with this episode, I would totally have been able to maintain my naive viewer pretense, because we start outside of the Republic, outside of the Jedi order, with mostly sympathetic characters who just want to do their own thing and an interesting conflict because for one of those characters, her own thing is not aligned with everyone else's. The Jedi show up as interlopers who arrogantly intrude on someone else's property and interrupt a private ceremony, making demands they don't actually have the authority to insist on.

Whereas on my original viewing of the show, I was suspicious of everyone's motives for episodes 1 and 2, and then suspicious of the coven in episode 3 because the two well-established parts of the story so far were how much Sol cared for Osha, and how Osha had clearly made a life for herself after leaving the order, if I'd started with E3 in the first place, it would have been easy to see the appropriateness of the coven's concerns and the wrongness of the Jedi's actions, while also believing in Sol's good intentions.

Instead of having the fire alluded to and the deaths of Osha's family laid out with expository dialogue, in chronological sequence, we get to see the tragedy unfold with a full understanding of what's going on ... and then we're left with some uncertainty over whether the witches were actually all killed, or if maybe they were playing possum using the Force in order to protect themselves from the Jedi returning and shield Osha from a lifetime of uncertainty or regret over whether she'd made the right choice. So we still get a major mystery to ponder as the series unfolds, but we also have all the setup we need to become deeply invested in the characters, and we're left without the false drama of "Wait, is this woman waking up on the spaceship the same woman who just killed that Jedi?" followed by the disorienting revelation that Osha "had" a twin, which is the blindingly obvious explanation for who actually committed the murder.

Anyway, now I'm kicking myself for starting off this chronological rewatch of the whole franchise by stupidly failing to use chronology in approaching the very first series of the effort.

Yord. Put Your Clothes On.

Threads was teeming today with Star Wars fans posting hot takes and Episode rankings and throwing gauntlets over which hated movie was actually genius and which truly deserved the notoriety of worst Star Wars movie ever. I left some replies here and there, some of them actually bringing interesting or at least appreciative responses, but I felt slightly left out because I haven't obsessively watched anything Star Wars in several years.

So I sat down and added up how much Star Wars there is and how long it would take me to go through all of it chronologically, just because I think that would be an interesting exercise -- especially if I can put myself in a mindset of, What if I really was seeing all of this for the first time?

Chronological order, of course, means I had to start with The Acolyte ... which might have been a mistake. I don't say that because it's no good, but because I don't have the familiarity with it needed to pretend I'm unfamiliar with it. That is, having seen it when it came out, and rewatched some of the episodes, my memory of it remains clear enough to notice things I did or didn't notice before. That seemed to put my brain in a comparative mode, evaluating this viewing against my previous experience and stymying my efforts to roleplay a novice viewer.

So how did it go?

Well, for one thing, I just couldn't stand to watch it in color. I tried, for a couple of minutes, but the garishness of the color palette and what I consider the low-budget look of the costuming just overwhelmed me. I discovered the first time through (around episode 3) that putting my computer in grayscale mode made the cinematic composition work much better and look more artistic than watching in color, and knowing that just made it intolerable to keep subjecting myself to the show as shot.

It felt like my eyes breathed a sigh of relief when I set the display to black and white and restarted the show. But I think it also made it even harder to indulge in my pretense of finding things novel.

As for the two episodes I watched tonight ... (spoilers ahead)

I didn't remember wrong that the project starts off really rough. Lee Jung-jae is pretty good as Master Sol, and Manny Jacinto is terrific in every scene. But their characters are both playing roles at this point in the story, causing their dialogue to go oblique at key moments and preventing us from immediately getting a good feel for their true personalities and motives.

And unfortunately, almost every character has some similar block making them less accessible than they ideally ought to be. Mae remains masked through almost the entire opening sequence, putting on airs of being a merciless assassin. Osha then has to overcome the barrier of the audience wrestling whether she and Mae are the same person, or if there's some sort of twin thing going on. Yord gives off a stiff, awkward vibe, but how does one measure the degree to which that vibe reflects the unusual situation of arriving to arrest his former colleague, versus how much is simply him being a stiff, awkward person?

As a result, it's very hard to get attached to anyone, even though almost all the characters have likable aspects to them.

I did manage to feel like my uninitiated viewer's perspective made for a more straightforward judgment of the Jedi order during this High Republic period. They're entrenched in their formalism, mired in politics, and constantly express underlying trust issues that hang between them. It's interesting to observe -- but again keeps one at arm's length from whole-hearted enthusiasm for the story. and I actively dislike Vanestra, the head of the Jedi Council, who embodies the entire order by way of her authority.

A personal issue of mine also distances me from the story at this point: I want to watch stories about people who are both competent and good, and these characters are, so far, occluded in both of those categories. By the midpoint of episode 2, Yord is the only one who defies that, as he's pretty obviously straightforward, dutiful, stuffy, and unimaginative even while coming across as a pleasant enough fellow underneath his cloak of formality.

There's more than enough to keep one going -- mysteries as to what's going on with almost all of the characters wafts of engaging personalities from most as well. But so far those attractions merely tease the possibility of a satisfying storyline rather than delivering one.

I know the show gets considerably better. We'll see whether I can follow through on the immense project of a full rewatch ...