Official Star Wars Thread

[Daniel]

Rogue One's release date was December 16, 2016, Solo's was May 25, 2018. A longer break might've helped, but it was over a year!

[droosan]

I think Ben was referring to The Last Jedi .. released on December 15, 2017.

Though, I personally actually kinda enjoyed TLJ more than the other two entries in the 'sequel trilogy'. I also liked Solo well enough.

[Daniel]

Ah, I was thinking in "filler" terms!

[Ben]

Yeah, TLJ to Solo was too quick.

As much as I enjoyed TLJ *while I was watching it*, it was afterwards that I realised how "bad" and weird it was. But I would also agree it’s probably the "best" of the ST's films! (That’s how messed up the Disney SW is!)

However, TLJ *did* leave a sour taste in many mouths, and instead of leaving a year and, as I say above, keeping SW "special" for Christmas, they rushed out Solo, making the filmmakers rush to finish a movie, and too much saturation in too short a time.

And as we know from other franchises, fans themselves will not fuel the box-office and you need that wider crowd to break the magic billion, as it is now (gee, I remember when that number was 100 million!). The majority of the public were just like "but we just had a SW movie and it didn’t make any sense to me", so they weren’t going to bother about Solo. Couple with even the hardcore fans — especially the hardcore fans! — then "boycotting" SW because of TLJ, and Solo never had a chance coming so quickly afterwards.

Disney didn’t have a clear plan for story, didn’t stick to the plan it had for release, and got greedy.

[Farerb]

[Daniel]

Nice. Long overdue!

[Ben]

I cannot believe this doesn’t already exist.


In related, didn’t want to keep swamping the D+ thread news…

My, oh my. Mango just keeps delivering, don’t it?

Rand, just go with Parker's take on this and don’t watch it. It’s so p-p-p-poor. The writing is infantile. The rules don’t exist ("You can’t take off your helmet, you can’t take off your helmet! Okay, you can take off your helmet"), and suddenly a character who is basically a riff on the one true badass bounty hunter in the galaxy is now just one of many who all dress the same? Yeah, I know you mentioned other appearances, but this has just gotten silly. And there’s yet another bunch of them out there?

My jaw is currently dropping in episode six as none other than Jack freakin' Black has just turned up, looking almost like Dean Cundey did a couple of episodes ago in his little magic man in the town square cameo, and all tone Star Wars that was left has flown completely out the window. And now, as I type this, I’m hearing what sounds like…no, it can’t be — it's *impossible*! But, yes, it is. Doc Brown has just entered the SW universe. I wish I could be more excited.

The timeline is all over the place too. They’ve just finished off the Empire, right? But it's rising again!? How is there time for Luke and Han and Leia to grow old, or for Han to speak of it being "true, all of it", like it’s old tales of legends past when it appears to have happened last week? Okay, I’m compressing that down, but it’s obvious where this is going in trying to set up a way for Palpatine to have survived, but all this going off on side directions nice again makes Mango a supporting character in his own show.

And Grogu? Don’t get me started on what they’re doing with Grogu. Any good will earned back from Andor just got squandered again, and then some. Just so, so poor.

[droosan]

No spoilers .. but -- while I agree that the overall storyline for The Mandalorian season 3 was not as gripping as the prior two seasons .. and is well below the high bar recently set by Andor -- IMHO, the series did stick a solid landing in its two-part finale.

It's also a satisfactory 'stopping point' for Din & Grogu's story, at least for the next while, as the focus shifts to what will apparently be an adaptation of the Heir to the Empire storyline in Ahsoka (aka Rebels season 5!)

I do wonder whether the original plan for this season was to follow Din & Bo-Katan on this plot arc, while Grogu remained with Luke Skywalker.

Of course, we'll never know for sure .. but it certainly feels like someone at Disney said "WHAT?!! NO baby Yoda?! Put him back in the show, RIGHT now!" which led to the interlude we got in The Book of Boba Fett.

[Randall]

And to me, placing Grogu right back with Din utterly nullified the first two seasons of Mando. Silliness.

Well, I'll still have to give season 3 a go at some point, but right now I am rewatching Babylon 5 with Parker, and he's enjoying that too much for a Mando break.

[Ben]

Grogu is definitely a problem for them. After all, introducing something like a baby Yoda is a pretty big deal, so they couldn’t *just* deliver him and then write him out. Somehow they would have had to explain things, continue certain threads, etc, but again this just seems to be happening without any clear map laid out.

Most certainly there was an edict from on high to keep Grogu around, but without Luke returning how do you do that? You have him stick around with Mango Din and join his tribe. Wait, what? The only aspect that’s working in any small way is the cloning subplot, which again feels like it should be its own Andor-style spin-off series (and I’m hoping *does* lead to a decent, even half-decent finale). But the rest has just been filler, which for me has been an issue with this show right from the second ever episode.

And I’ve become an alcoholic by taking a shot every time someone says “this is the way” in this season so far. Nothing like jumping on your own unexpected catchphrase and then saying it enough times to really force that home…

[Randall]

Of course, the problem with keeping Grogu with Luke is that he'd have eventually been slaughtered with the rest of the Jedi students by Kylo Ren. Not exactly a happy ending, either.

[Ben]

He’d have presumably been grown enough by then to maybe be padawan. We’re talking some thirty years later, in theory. Or next week n this shows’s terms…

[Randall]

Return of the Jedi is 4 ABY (After Battle of Yavin, i.e. end of Episode IV).
Mando (Season One) is 9 ABY.
Kylo Ren slaughter of Jedi youth is 24 ABY.
The Force Awakens is 34 ABY.

So, if we figure that Mando Season Two ended at about 10 ABY, then we are talking about 14 years between Grogu going with Luke and the Jedi youth killing.

In those 14 years, did any Jedi graduate or otherwise move on?

[Ben]

Maybe. They just haven’t filled in that gap yet.

So basically I was right at my guess of thirty years between Jedi and Awakens, then.

Anyway, having polished off Mango 3 last night, they’ve pretty much given up on trying to solve the Grogu problem and resorted to him just being another character in the mix, by way of…no, no I can’t say it here. But they’ve gone a pretty lazy route as the story moves on and he needs to keep up (rather than writing creatively and finding better ways to handle him). "He’s more machine now, than baby Yoda"…

The timelines still don’t all make sense though. Wow, Luke really aged!

[Daniel]

Montage!