#very much establishes him as a proto-Vader

[solustalechoy]

In honor of May the Fourth, I'm going to rant about something that has been sitting in my brain rent-free for years.

Ok, so, Count Dooku, right? Qui-Gon's master, ex-jedi, dastardly villain, love him to bits, played by one of my favorite actors (RIP Sir Christopher Lee).

As he's introduced to the audience, we get the villain first, with hints that he wasn't always so. Turning from the Jedi and siding with the Sith in order to destroy the Republic, he's almost a twisted mirror to Anakin himself. The problem I have here, is that we never see his pre-villain self! Oh, it's mentioned in passing by Mace Windu, a character the audience isn't exactly primed to trust either, given his attitude in episode one. And then it's mentioned again by Dooku himself, which is entirely undermined by the fact that we just saw him moustache-twirling barely a few minutes ago! As it is, all the audience sees is "this is a dastardly villain, played by The Dastardly Villain Actor, clearly nothing he says can be trusted."

Show-don't-tell is basic narrative construction, so I think his impact as a character, particularly as a sort of proto-Vader, would be much greater if Dooku were introduced in Episode 1, rather than Episode 2. With that in mind, I have envisioned four scenes, two of which have a speaking role for Dooku and are thus notably longer than the original movie scenes, the other two being either one or two lines longer, or having no change in dialogue, only a visual tweak.

Scene 1) Coruscant, the Jedi Temple. After the initial briefing to the council, Obi-Wan argues with Qui-Gon about following the code. Dooku enters the conversation jovially, having come to catch up with his old Padawan. He asks in jest to Obi-Wan why Qui-Gon would ever want to be on the council, after all, speaking from experience, it's a thankless job and lacking in intelligent conversation. He mentions hearing about the Naboo mission. Qui-Gon informs him of the Queen's hopes for intervention from the Senate. Dooku seems skeptical of her success. He remarks that if the Republic keeps failing to protect its systems, they will take matters into their own hands.

What does it accomplish? Dooku is a friendly figure, one that stands with Qui-Gon and reinforces his viewpoint. The scene builds onto Qui-Gon's dissent with the council, and establishes that he is not alone in his opinions. His remarks about Naboo act as both short-term and long-term foreshadowing: short-term for Amidala's decision to kick the Trade Federation out herself, and long-term for the conflict with the Separatist movement which forms the bulk of the plot of the next two movies.

Scene 2) The council has announced that they will not accept Anakin for training. Dooku strides in, as we have established he does not respect the council, and calls them out. What do they plan to do with the boy? Turn him out on the streets of Coruscant? Send him back to slavery on Tatooine? Missing one's family and fearing a new environment are not moral failings. Dooku points out that he himself was old enough to remember his mother, old enough to miss her terribly, and yet he still dedicated himself to the Jedi, became a master, even sat on the council. He pointedly asks Yoda "am I such a disappointment to you?" Several councilors exchange glances. Mace dismisses them from the room.

What does it accomplish? Dooku is established as a voice of reason, and as a mirror to Anakin. He now has a firm connection to Anakin, as an authority figure besides Qui-Gon who has advocated for him. Anakin may even remember him as a major reason for him eventually being accepted for training. Perhaps he remembers this when Dooku cuts off his hand ten years later. Perhaps this event runs through his mind as he holds crossed sabers to Dooku's throat on Grievous's flagship. One more betrayal to drive him over the precipice to the Dark Side.

The next two scenes aren't doing nearly as much heavy lifting, but I think they're still important for setting up the next movie.

Scene 3) Obi-Wan is speaking to Yoda after Qui-Gon's death. He is now adamant that Anakin will be trained as per Qui-Gon's last wishes. He remarks that if the Council won't knight him, then he'll appeal to Dooku to train Anakin. Yoda sighs and says that Anakin will be Obi-Wan's apprentice. He then mournfully admits that Dooku has left the Jedi Order.

What does it accomplish? We see that even though Dooku and Yoda clashed, Yoda was still sad to see him leave. We see that Jedi can leave the Order peacefully. We see that Obi-Wan trusted Dooku enough that he was ready to turn to him for help. This will make Obi-Wan's discovery of Dooku at the head of the Separatist movement into much more of an emotional moment, a gut punch to see the man he trusted betray everything he stood for. Obi-Wan's cold rejection of Dooku in prison is more than just stubborn distrust, it's bitterness.

Scene 4) Qui-Gon's funeral on Naboo. Dooku attends, standing side by side with his former comrades. Even if he has turned his back on the order, Qui-Gon was still his Padawan, and he will pay his last respects. Yoda and Mace discuss the sith. The camera does its ominous pan to Palpatine in the foreground, then shifts focus briefly to the background, where Dooku stands nearby.

This scene mainly serves as setup, establishing a connection between Dooku and Palpatine. Both of these men will be important in later films, and the movie wants you to know it. In character, Dooku is not only saying goodbye to Qui-Gon, he's also saying goodbye to his former life as a Jedi. In a way, it is his funeral as well.

All of these scenes combined mean that when the audience goes to watch episode 2, they are already familiar with Dooku. His first appearance on Geonosis is not one of "oh, hey, Christopher Lee, wonder what kind of dastardly schemes his character will cook up." Instead, we have reactions of either "wait, but we like this guy! He was on Anakin and Qui-Gon's side last movie! What happened?!" Or at least, for the savvier audience, a vindicated "I knew he would turn out to be evil, it's Christopher Lee!" Either way, the investment is already there, so when he dies at the beginning of the next movie, it actually carries some fucking weight. For anyone who didn't watch the 2D animated Clone Wars series, Dooku was introduced at the end of the one movie, and died almost immediately in the next movie. He's a one note aristocratic english villain who's only job is to be an evil bastard and die like a punk. Not exactly compelling, is it? Certainly not worthy of the acting chops of Sir Christopher fucking Lee.

[rptv-starwars]

The Empire Strikes Out

Inside the Battle of Hoth

https://www.wired.com/2013/02/battle-of-hoth/

By Spencer Ackerman  |  Date of Publication: 02.12.2013

AT-ATs fire on the rebel base on HOTH.

-

How did the Galactic Empire ever cement its hold on the Star Wars Universe? The war machine built by Emperor Palpatine and run by Darth Vader is a spectacularly bad fighting force, as evidenced by all of the pieces of Death Star littering space. But of all the Empire’s failures, none is a more spectacular military fiasco than the Battle of Hoth at the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back.

From a military perspective, Hoth should have been a total debacle for the Rebel Alliance. Overconfident that they can evade Imperial surveillance, they hole up on unforgiving frigid terrain at the far end of the cosmos. Huddled into the lone Echo Base are all their major players: politically crucial Princess Leia; ace pilot Han Solo; and their game-changer, Luke Skywalker, who isn’t even a Jedi yet.

The defenses the Alliance constructed on Hoth could not be more favorable to Vader if the villain constructed them himself. The single Rebel base (!) is defended by a few artillery pieces on its north slope, protecting its main power generator. An ion cannon is its main anti-aircraft/spacecraft defense. Its outermost perimeter defense is an energy shield that can deflect Imperial laser bombardment. But the shield has two huge flaws: It can’t stop an Imperial landing force from entering the atmosphere, and it can only open in a discrete place for a limited time so the Rebels’ Ion Cannon can protect an evacuation. In essence, the Rebels built a shield that can’t keep an invader out and complicates their own escape.

When Vader enters the Hoth System with the Imperial Fleet, he’s holding a winning hand. What follows next is a reminder of two military truths that apply in our own time and in our own galaxy: Don’t place unaccountable religious fanatics in wartime command, and never underestimate a hegemonic power’s ability to miscalculate against an insurgency.

Vader’s Incoherent Strategy in Outer Space

Vader realizes the opportunity at hand for an end to the Rebellion. Yet his bumbling fleet admiral leaves hyperspace too close to Hoth, losing the element of surprise and allowing the Rebels to activate the shield. Vader rolls with it (after killing Admiral Ozzel): He orders a ground assault on the Rebel base with the sound objective of destroying the generator that powers the shield. Once the shield is down, the Star Destroyers that make up the majority of the Imperial Fleet can launch the bombardment the shields prevent. Vader further orders that no Rebel ship be allowed to leave Hoth alive.

Sounds simple, right? Alas, Vader’s plans are at odds with each other. Vader jumps into the Hoth system with a handful of Star Destroyers; only six are shown on screen. That’s got to enforce a blockade of an entire planet. His major ally is the Rebel energy shield itself, which bottles up a Rebel escape to the Ion Cannon’s line of sight. But Vader doesn’t seem to realize the shield’s ironic value. Once Vader orders the shields destroyed, he lacks the force to prevent a pell-mell Rebel retreat.

A smarter plan would have been to launch TIE fighters against Echo Base — since aircraft and spacecraft can get past that Rebel enemy shield — to lure the Rebels into an evacuation from Hoth through their shield’s chokepoint. Concentrating the Imperial Star Destroyers there would lead the Rebellion into a massacre. At the very least, Vader has to sacrifice the ground-assault team entrusted with bringing down the generator powering the Rebel shield for a laser bombardment from the Star Destroyers.

Vader does none of this.

The Ground Assault

The first phase of the battle is a ground assault launched against the generator. Vader devotes five (or maybe four, since Irvin Kershner’s directing isn’t consistent) Imperial AT-AT Walkers to the task. Vader sees no need to give them air cover, even though he’s tasted the quality of Rebel piloting during the destruction of the Death Star. Two of the Walkers are destroyed, one by Luke Skywalker’s Snowspeeder squadron, and another by Luke himself.

Yet the ground assault is pretty successful — by accident. The weaponry on the AT-AT Walkers doesn’t overwhelm or destroy the few laser-artillery pieces the Rebels have to protect the generator. Only when Rebel General Rieekan orders the full evacuation of Hoth do the Walkers destroy the generator. (That’s an unforced error: The Rebels need to protect that generator at the cost of their lives, lest their evacuation be totally exposed.)

Still, a win is a win. Vader is now clear to destroy the Rebel base, and the escaping Rebel ships, with a punishing Star Destroyer bombardment. Presumably, if the Rebels are abandoning their generator, they’re also abandoning the Ion Cannon that protects the evacuation.

-

(In)Vader

Only Vader can’t bombard the base: He’s in it. For reasons that never get explained — and can’t be justified militarily — Vader joins the Stormtrooper assault on the base. So much for his major weapon against the Rebels, and the primary reason for ordering the Walkers to invade and destroy the generator. Once Vader opts to bring down the shield and lead the invasion, he’s lost the battle.

Worse, Vader is late to the fight. If he wanted to kill some Rebel scum himself, the only ones remaining at the base when Vader arrives are Han, Leia, Chewbacca and C-3PO, who run to the wheezing Millennium Falcon for their own escape. “This bucket of bolts is never gonna get us past that blockade,” Leia frets.

-

What Blockade?

She shouldn’t have worried. Not only is there no laser bombardment from space once the shield is down, there’s no Imperial blockade worth speaking of. By sheer bad luck, Han flies into three of the Star Destroyers, which threaten to overwhelm the Falcon. But he’s just too good of a pilot, evading their pincer movement by taking advantage of the Falcon’s superior maneuverability. He flies into an asteroid belt — which somehow the Imperial Fleet had failed to account for when planning its hasty “blockade” — and the Falcon has defied the odds.

Nor does that “blockade” trap Luke, who flies to Dagobah without a single Imperial ship harassing him. That’s the worst possible news for the Empire: Luke is about to rekindle the Jedi order that poses the biggest danger to the preservation of everything Vader and Emperor Palpatine have built. While I’m not comparing the Rebel Alliance to al-Qaida or the Galactic Empire to the United States, in strategic terms, this is like Osama bin Laden’s escape from the December 2001 battle at Tora Bora, Afghanistan — a disaster masquerading as a tactical success. Indeed, once Vader returns to his Star Destroyer, he gets a message from Palpatine explicitly instructing him to prevent Luke from training as a Jedi. Oops.

-

So Much for Striking Back

What did the Empire gain at Hoth? It had the opportunity to deal the Rebel Alliance a defeat from which the Rebels might not have recovered: the loss of its secret base; the loss of its politically potent symbol in Leia; and most of all the loss of its promising proto-Jedi in Luke. Instead, Luke escapes to join Yoda; Leia escapes with Han to Cloud City (where Vader has to resort to Plan B); and the Rebel Alliance’s transport ships largely escape to join up at a pre-established rendezvous point, as we see at the end of the film.

At the very most, the Empire’s assault on Hoth killed a couple of low-ranking Rebels and destroyed a few transit ships — which we don’t even see on screen. Instead of crushing the Rebels, it scattered them, leaving them to survive for the additional successes they’ll achieve in Return of the Jedi. It’s a classic fiasco of overconfidence and theology masquerading as military judgment — and the exact opposite of the Empire striking back.

-

[Illustrations: Ross Patton, Dennis Crothers ]

[canmom]

that was a clone war, for sure.

a satisfyingly grim follow-through on some of the strongest arcs in the previous run... and though the outlines had already been pretty much locked down by sequels, it did a solid job of filling them in with solid imagery (leaning on the samurai-movie influences quite a lot!) and acting...

also the girl had a sword and leapt about

i think it works best when it’s able to acknowledge that a superpowered warrior caste with absolute authority who more or less unquestioningly pick up and deploy an army of indoctrinated, more or less disposable soldiers is kind of fucked, whether or not there’s an evil wizard behind it all. despite all their efforts to paint themselves as the good guys, the seeds of the Empire were there all along. of course, Lucas or Disney were never quite going to take this angle: the Republic will always be a noble thing, corrupted by the machinations of the bad wizard.

still, some of the best episodes were the ones where the clones are tortured by their disposable status or by receiving obviously cruel and dangerous orders. they pulled a nice trick here by having the clone forced to carry out the execution be the same one who was torturing himself with ‘good soldiers follow orders’ in the Umbara arc, even as his compelled obedience causes the deaths of just about every clone on that ship.

basically, treat the clones as YoRHa is what I’m saying!

anyway, this is a pretty common sentiment, but Filoni really did a lot to salvage the story presented in the prequel films (which had some very nice design touches but, everyone knows how flat they fell even at the time). Anakin now has an actual arc of steadily growing more ruthless as the war burns on, and having him in the Vader outfit awkwardly standing over Ahsoka’s supposed grave and believing she’s dead was a really good way to make his ‘fall’ a lot more impactful than all those ‘younglings’ scenes in the film. Likewise making the clones who carry out ‘order 66′ into people we care about, now suddenly transformed by chips into their heads to take the same military efficiency the show has largely celebrated and turn it on our main characters, was a good trick.

I imagine whatever Lucas had in mind when he first wrote that line from the original Star Wars, about how Obi-Wan fought alongside Luke’s father in ‘the Clone Wars’, it wasn’t really much like this. it was just a vaguely evocative sci-fi word which probably was supposed to call to mind some grandiose metabarons type shit. I do kind of wonder when the particular design style that got established for the clones... of course they’re proto-stormtroopers and so had to look similar, but it feels like they took on some more recent mil-sf trappings in all their dropships and so on?

wherever it came from, it is noticeably distinct from the sharper Imperial uniforms which start appearing towards the end of the show.

what else... this is going to add so much more weight if I get round to rewatching Rebels, and reach the bit where the few surviving clones are hanging out being old gay men on a robot on fuck-end-of-nowhere planet. and Ahsoka’s arc in that. Ahsoka really is the best thing in Star Wars... not a hugely high bar admittedly. I just wish they could have followed through with like, Ventress and Barriss as well. (per the wiki, Ventress got a het death ending in a novel, which seems a tremendous waste!)

in any case...

that’s it. that’s the Star War. sure, it’s not the last piece of Star Wars media that Disney will put out, but the Abrams managed to vitiate it of any thematic weight in its last act, which was a horrendous waste of John Boyega. I think you can kind of salvage it by treating The Last Jedi as the final entry in the series... it’s a hell of a weird sad ending in this treatment, but it’s not as hokey as what they actually followed it with.

but that’s by the by. the big grand tragedy that was attempted by the prequel films and The Clone Wars has received its final brick. the clones are buried... I’m free? (ok, I’m still going to watch The Mandalorian season 2 since Ahsoka’s gonna be in it, but if they fuck it up I’m not gonna care too much. this is a complete enough story).

I feel like it would be an interesting project for someone to trace the development of the ‘expanded universe’ franchise format, and its eventual crossover from a niche nerd thing to the massive engines of capital valorisation that are the MCU. at some point, the entertainment industry has figured out that tying a lot of works of fiction together, to be read as one much greater meta-work, is something we seem to find quite appealing. the individual constituents may not necessarily be that great, but the tension they add to the other works - this explains that, this makes us feel more about this - means that they are all tempting.

obviously I’m not immune to this. before I got into Star Wars (not too deep! not too deep!) I had 40k and D&D and Fallout, and of course I’m right now exhaustively documenting NieR. there’s something very fun about becoming really intimately familiar with the workings of someone’s fictional creation.

still, I have started to try and take at least a bit of distance from pure ‘fan’ engagement... partly because I want to create my own works! so I want to take a more analytical frame and figure out what I can critique and build on.

and partly if I’m honest because of a sense of guilt... if I can affect the stance of a dispassionate critic, I can feel less complicit in the cultural domination of these franchises, less like I’m an unpaid worker at Disney’s marketing department. obviously that’s a huge fucking illusion and I should just enjoy what I enjoy, and let those with more sense judge me as they may. (but please if you do look in, at least pirate that shit for god’s sake. those execs’ bonuses are big enough!)

one thing that is striking is that some of the most popular Star Wars entries are the ones which steer furthest from the ‘heroes save the day’ happy ending. The Empire Strikes Back is probably the fan favourite; in Clone Wars it was the Umbara arc which took the awards; Rogue One is often seen as the best of the Disney set... admittedly, you can’t really extend that to the prequel trilogy, which tried to be the grimdarkest of them all, but fell kind of flat.

I am curious what it will be like to rewatch the prequel films with Clone Wars slotted in; whether they hold up better in light of the arcs in the prequels, or still feel like low points. perhaps they are so derided that they might be enjoyable by virtue of it being impossible to suck that comprehensively!

I have some thoughts on trying to like, figure out a reading of Star Wars as a whole story, trying to imagine approaching it as someone who hasn’t lived in a society saturated in its terminology, but I think that might stand better as its own post.

[takerfoxx]

Gonna knock off some big ones here! The fav(s) of the day are...

BOBA FETT!

Okay guys, let’s get this out straight out of the gate. I grew up as a major Star Wars fan. My dad is an old-school sci-fi nerd and it really rubbed off on me. Classic science fiction was our bread and butter growing up, and the Star Wars movies were no exception. We must’ve watched those suckers a gazillion times.

And the expanded universe? Oh, I was all over that shit! And I mean the old stuff! The Truce at Bakura, the Heir to the Empire trilogy, the Kyp Durron trilogy, both the Han Solo and Lando Calrissian trilogies (there were a lot of trilogies), Darksaber, Planet of Twilight, Shadows of the Empire, The Courtship of Princess Leia, Young Han Solo, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, the Young Jedi Knight series, all of the Tales books, Galaxy of Fear, even less well regarded stuff like The Crystal Star. All that and more filled my bookshelves.

But like many young Star Wars fans, my boy was the guy that got like four lines of dialogue and quickly gets killed off in the first half of the third film.

It’s hard to really articulate what made Boba Fett so appealing. I think it’s part of the air of mystery around him. In Empire, he strides in with a totally badass design, is the guy to track down and capture the heroes, backtalks Darth Vader and gets away with it, and escapes with one of the main characters in tow. I guess that caused people to become intrigued by him and want to see what he would do in the last film. And sure enough, he shows up looking all cool and mysterious, flies into a direct confrontation with both Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, seems to get the upper hand...and is summarily dispatched by a fluke accident.

Lame.

So I guess many who would become Star Wars writers were, like myself, let down by this, and sought to “correct” this by giving ol’ Boba his own mythos, complex history, cast of closely-related characters, and make it so that he escaped the damn worm and would go on to cross paths with the heroes in every obligatory “The one with Boba Fett!” entry in every long-running Star Wars book series ever.

And boy, did I eat it up!

The Bounty Hunter Wars! An entry in both Tales From the Bounty Hunters and Tales From Jabba’s Palace! Endless comics! The aforementioned obligatory Boba Fett books! All of this created a character that became almost revered by the fandom, who cast a shadow over the whole multi-verse. I bought the books, played with the toys, and even wrote a short little Boba Fett story in sixth grade. I mean, this guy was just cool.

Needless to say, I’m not the Star Wars fan I once was. I mean, the only one of these movies since RotJ that I’ve actually liked is also one of the least popular, so that’s a thing. Hell, I was debating putting up a Star Wars entry to begin with. But man, even if I’m not all that into Star Wars anymore, it can’t be denied that for a time it reigned supreme, and Boba Fett was, in my world, the king.

(Though lowkey, it was kind of hilarious watching writers try to reconcile the already established Boba Fett origin with the one created by the prequels after Attack of the Clones dropped)

He’s no good to me dead.

Also...

DARTH REVAN!

So I went from almost not doing a Star Wars entry to doing one with multiple characters. Yeah, go figure.

All right. So, Knights of the Old Republic is probably my last great foray into Star Wars before sort of slipping out of the fandom. It was recommended to me by a work friend, so I popped over to EB Games (remember them?), grabbed up a used copy, popped it into my X-Box, and...

I think I averaged about eight hours a day on those games. Each of them.

It was one of the best gaming experiences I’ve ever had, a wholly new Star Wars story taking place centuries before the films (and yet somehow still having the same technology level) that features none of the classic characters, but still felt very much Star Wars, but also its own thing: a sprawling space adventure as you, the apprentice Jedi, joins up with a ragtag group of companions and travel the galaxy trying to thwart a rogue Sith Lord from finding some long lost superweapon. The worlds you visit! The characters you meet! The quests, the leveling, the force powers, the plot, everything was just so fresh and so cool!

And then you get to the twist, a twist that is now notorious for being one of the best twists in gaming history: finding out that you aren’t just some new Jedi rising up to stop a Sith Lord: you are actually DARTH MOTHERFUCKING REVAN, the Sith Lord that was the master of the current Sith Lord, long thought dead but had actually been captured, mind-wiped and reprogrammed by the Jedi! What do you do with this new information? Well, that’s up to you!

Needless to say, when this was revealed in the game, I started screaming, and screaming loudly. What a twist! What a game-changer!��

Now granted, being the PC of an RPG means that Revan’s personality was decided by the player’s choices, so he didn’t get much of a canon personality of his own, but that still doesn’t change the fact that he’s the centerpoint of one of the coolest pieces of the Star Wars EU that there is, and that’s worth a lot in my opinion.

Also, Bastila was bae, just sayin’. Sort of a proto-Serana, if you ask me.

(note: yes, I know about his role in SWTOR and don’t care for it. No, I haven’t read the novels yet, but I do intend to)

Honor is a fool's prize. Glory is of no use to the dead.

And finally...

GRAND ADMIRAL THRAWN!

The Heir to the Empire is the granddaddy of the OG Expanded Universe. I mean, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye technically came first, but no one remembers that. No, it was all about Timothy Zahn’s epic follow-up to the original Star Wars trilogy, which set the gold standard for the series for years to come and also introduced several of its most iconic characters. Mara Jade? She came from here. Talon Kardde? Also here.

And then you have the trilogy’s centerpiece, Grand Admiral Thrawn.

It’s sort of interesting how iconic Thrawn has become as a Star Wars villain, given how different he is from all of them. I mean, he’s not a Sith. Hell, he’s not force sensitive at all. He’s a military officer, in a series where they tend to be treated as expendable underlings. But through actually using his brain, studying his opponents’ strategies and cultures, making use of the resources available to him, and actually being fair to his subordinates, he’s gone on to almost rival Darth Vader in popularity in some circles. A brilliant tactician who managed to (mostly) overcome the Empire’s prejudice against non-humans through sheer efficiency, he came incredibly close to bringing the New Republic to its knees simply by outplaying them at every turn. His knack for figuring out his opponents’ thought process simply through studying their cultures’ works of art was inspired, and those who tried to outsmart him often came to regret it. What was more, he also was surprisingly honorable, having a strict moral code. He simply believed that the Empire was the best way to run things, and acted accordingly. Though don’t let that fool you into thinking that he wasn’t just as ruthless as anyone else in the Empire. He was just smarter than most about it.

While there was admittedly a lot of crap in the EU that Disney was wise to get rid of, losing characters like Thrawn was a major blow, which was why it was so awesome to see him return in the Rebels tv show. I literally have seen videos of grown men crying with joy just through watching his reveal trailer. And while I don’t have the time or means to watch Rebels for myself, I do want to give it a go sometime in the future, and Thrawn is a big part of that.

But it was so artistically done.