If They Planned It All Ahead - The Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, Part 1 (Reflection)
Hello, everyone. Welcome. The time has finally come for a rewrite long promised. Admittedly, it’s a rewrite that’s about 5 years behind the curve, but I nevertheless hope that it’s one that will entertain and educate you.
Star Wars was a big part of my childhood - but not because of the movies. I certainly enjoyed the Original Trilogy, and I was in the target age demographic when the Prequel Trilogy films were released, but I was always a child of the Expanded Universe. Star Wars novels were what drew me into the adult Fantasy & Science Fiction section of the bookstore when I was just 10 years old. I saved allowance money over months to buy the Essential Guides and New Essential Guides; I spent the last of my elementary school years reading The New Jedi Order, read Dark Nest in middle school, and then enjoyed Legacy of the Force, Fate of the Jedi, and Republic Commando through high school and university. In terms of games, I spent many hours playing Bounty Hunter, The Clone Wars, and The Old Republic MMORPG. During my sophomore year of university, a bunch of my dormmates and I put together a lightsaber flashmob.
When Disney purchased Lucasfilm, I was optimistic. I thought a greedy corporation would do everything in their power to produce quality products that would protect and grow their investment. Even when Lucas de-canonized the EU and rebranded it as Legends, I was on board with it. Lucasfilm promised us a coherent narrative where every bit of content was meticulously fit together into a grand new canon.
Then … things fell apart.
So many commentators have gone into great detail about when and how the Sequel Trilogy fell apart. Some criticisms I agree with, others I disagree with. What I feel that most people can agree upon is that the Sequel Trilogy should have been planned ahead. Lucasfilm should have fully mapped out the trilogy, with reverence for both the media that they were keeping as the official Canon and for the NEW films as their own coherent story, before a single camera began to roll. Instead, they took things film by film. They then made the ensuing chaos so much worse by trying to sell Episode IX as the conclusion of a nine-film saga, rather than a desperate attempt to jumpstart a trilogy that had a weak start and then died horribly by the end of the second film.
If ever there was a film series where an If They Planned It All Ahead rewrite would have applied, it would be this one. The Harry Potter films had a plan; they merely botched the execution of elements in the Deathly Hallows films that could and should have been set up earlier. Once Upon a Time lacked a plan, but that can be said for most long-running network television series that live year-to-year on the basis on network ratings. The Sequel Trilogy could have had a plan, should have had a plan, and yet launched without one. It was an unnecessary risk that ended about as badly as it could.
The question then is: if Lucasfilm had planned it all ahead, what could they have done instead?
SCHEDULE
This series will overlap with the Goblet of Fire and the Onyx Storm series that I am doing over in Recent Reads. I also need to make time for additional book reviews around it. The full Sequel Trilogy rewrite will therefore be spread across 2025, being broken down into eleven parts:
This part, being Part 1, will detail my overall thoughts on the Sequel Trilogy and its core issues.
Part 2 will give an overview of the changes I’ll be recommending.
Parts 3 through 5 will cover the rewrite for The Force Awakens.
Parts 6 through 8 will cover the rewrite for The Last Jedi.
Parts 9 through 11 will cover the rewrite for The Rise of Skywalker.
As mentioned in the conclusion of the Captain Marvel post, Part 2 is already scheduled, while the remaining parts have only tentative dates. The following schedule will be edited as we progress through the series, with initial estimates replaced with dates and then links as each part is posted.
Part 2: February 14th
Parts 3 through 5: April and May
Parts 6 through 8: July and August
Parts 9 through 11: Late September through October
TERMINOLOGY
Throughout this series, I will be using a series of shorthand and acronyms. This will apply mostly to the film titles but will also cover certain factions and characters. Rather than repeat myself at the start of every post, I want to provide a comprehensive summary up-front. Future posts will link back to this one so that you can easily reference these lists, and if I find myself needed a new term down the line, I will update these lists accordingly.
Films & TV Shows
I will either refer to films by their number with a Roman numeral (A New Hope is Episode IV, The Empire Strikes Back is Episode V, etc.) or with one of the following acronyms.
The Phantom Menace: TPM
Attack of the Clones: AotC
Revenge of the Sith: RotS
A New Hope: ANH
The Empire Strikes Back: ESB
Return of the Jedi: RotJ
The Force Awakens: TFA
The Last Jedi: TLJ
The Rise of Skywalker: TRoS
Original Trilogy films: OT
Prequel Trilogy films: PT
Sequel Trilogy films: ST
For TV shows, I will refer to most shows by their full name. Since there are two shows for the Clone Wars, we’ll use Clone Wars for Genndy Tartakovsky’s series and CW for Filoni’s series.
Continuities
The pre-Disney canon will collectively be referred to as the EU. This obviously applies to all the material that was pushing into Legends, yet I will also be using it to refer to materials that are still canon under Disney yet are interpreted differently through the lens of Legends.
The post-Disney canon will be referred to as Canon. This will cover all materials produced under Disney as well as any pre-Disney materials that are interpreted through this lens.
For an extreme example of what I mean by the EU lens versus the Canon lens, let’s take Order 66.
In the EU, the reason the clones slaughtered the Jedi without hesitation when Order 66 was issued is because Order 66 was one of 150 contingency orders for drastic actions to be taken under dire circumstances. The clones were trained to believe that Order 66 would never be necessary unless the Jedi betrayed the Republic, and they understood that detaining a Jedi Master or most Jedi Knights would be impossible under battlefield conditions. Some clones refused this order, but they were usually clones with strong positive relationships with the Jedi they were expected to execute and had the breathing room to really think how they’d respond to the order, such as how Captain Maze thought he could talk Jedi Master Arligan Zey into surrendering peacefully.
In Canon, the clones were implanted with inhibitor chips that triggered sleeper programming when Order 66 was issued.
While the inhibitor chips were in CW, and thus would predate Disney, they didn’t premiere until Season 6 of that show, which was scrapped mid-production due to the Disney purchase. The inhibitor chips were therefore only really introduced in the Disney era, being brought up again in Season 7, Rebels, and The Bad Batch. I therefore consider the interpretation of Order 66 as a contingency order to be EU and Order 66 as inhibitor chip programming as Canon.
MY FEELINGS ON THE SEQUEL TRILOGY FILMS
To understand this rewrite, I think it’s important to establish the perspective I had going into the ST as well as my feelings about each of the films.
The People I Care About
Vode An
I’ve always been a Mandalorian guy. The Fetts were my favorite characters of the PT and OT. When I really got I to the EU novels, Karen Traviss’s work on Republic Commando and Legacy of the Force quickly became my favorites due to how they dove into Mandalorian culture.
Going into the ST, I was most looking forward to seeing Mandalorians. When they never showed up, I was disappointed, but not enough to ruin my experience. The Mandalorians don't need to be in everything. I feel like they’re a faction that is best reserved for their own stories or else only get involved in the broader stories of the galaxy in small doses. The EU was pretty good about that.
The Mandalorian is a completely different can of worms from the ST, so I’m not going to discussing its problems in this series. Suffice it to say that I only watched the first two seasons and liked what I saw. The writing was weak, and I didn’t care for many of the lore changes and retcons, yet still I feel like those two seasons were respectful to the faction.
New Generation
As a child of the EU, I’m used to seeing the heroes of the OT as mentors, rather than the heroes who drive the plot. Luke, Han, Leia, and even Lando were always a part of the EU stories to some extent or another, but as the story progressed through the era of New Jedi Order, Luke’s students and their allies took centerstage. Characters such as Jacen and Jaina Solo, Ben Skywalker, Tahiri Veila, and Jagged Fel were the characters I looked forward to reading about.
I went into the ST with the hope of falling in love with a new generation of heroes. I was excited to meet Finn, Rey, Poe, and Kylo. The presence of Luke, Han, and Leia was expected, and I was interested to see them interact with the new generation, yet they weren’t the draw. My expectation was that they would be limited to a mentor role and that the story would move on from them.
Heroes Emeritus
A common criticism I hear of the ST is that it mishandled Luke, Han, and Leia. Like was assassinated; Han and Leia’s characters were reset; Han and Leia’s relationship was tossed aside. The audience was denied the chance to see all three heroes reunited.
I agree with the principle of these complaints … but I don’t feel them emotionally.
Because these three weren’t who I looked forward to when experiencing the EU, I didn’t think twice about how Disney handled them, at least in TFA and TLJ. I was open to the possibilities of Jake Skywalker; I was okay with Han’s death; the lack of a reunion didn’t seem important to me. It wasn’t until I’d begun to listen to the arguments of the people who did care that I understood how the ST mangled their stories.
The Force Awakens
On a first viewing, I liked TFA. Yes, it was bland. Yes, it was a blatant ripoff of ANH, leaning heavily into nostalgia rather than earning its on emotion from the audience. Still, it convincingly captured the aesthetics and vibe of the OT, and there were places the trilogy could have gone from where TFA ended. I was optimistic about where things would go next.
Over the years, I have had the flaws of TFA explained to me via various video essays. The film has a lot of problems. The effort to hard reset the story from the end of RotJ to a scenario that copied ANH broke the worldbuilding and damaged the legacy characters from the OT. Issues like Rey’s status as a Mary Sue and the broken characterization of Finn also have their roots in this film.
The Last Jedi
I like TLJ. I liked it when it came out, and I still enjoy it.
… but it breaks the trilogy, the Skywalker Saga, and the entirety of Star Wars. Problems may have started in TFA, but TLJ made the trilogy nigh-impossible to save.
I highly recommend MauLer’s “A Critique of Star Wars: The Last Jedi” to anyone open to long-firm video essays. It’s a series that takes 5 hours to view in full (MauLer is nicknamed “the Long Man” for a reason), yet it is full of good food for thought. I originally watched it with the mindset that I’d laugh off the criticism of TLJ as all being in good fun. However, the arguments MauLer presented brought me around. As much as I still enjoy this film, it isn’t a good one, and it was not the right direction to take the story of Star Wars.
The Rise of Skywalker
This movie is awful.
TLJ put this movie in a fundamentally bad position. TRoS effectively had to start a brand new trilogy from scratch, condensed into a single film. However, even considering the disadvantages this film was working with, it is haphazard and boring. It fails not only as a continuation of the story but as a story on it's on merits. At least TLJ was entertaining. TRoS is mind-numbing at best.
Also, I should note that, while TLJ doomed TRoS, it is also the origin of the only interesting idea TRoS brought to the table. I know the Force Skype thing breaks a lot of lore, yet I thought the Skype duel was an interesting scene. The EU has a similar concept, including many fights that got really crazy due to the participants being in environments with different gravity. I think that an opportunity was missed to truly explore this power’s potential for on-screen spectacle.
At the end of the day, one cool element cannot save an awful movie. TRoS joins Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender as one of two films where I felt dead inside upon leaving the theater.
PLOT
I feel like the things I have to say about the plot of the ST has already been covered in great deal by other commentators or touched upon earlier in this post, so I’ll give a bare-bones version of the issues here.
The ST suffered due to a lack of planning. TFA started a story, TLJ took the story in a wildly different direction that effectively ended it, and TRoS started a new story that tried to overwrite what TLJ did. It just produced an unsatifying mess.
All three movies are a mixture of derivative and metanarrative, albeit in different quantities. They can’t stand on their own, yet they don’t fit with the story established by the PT and OT. You really need to have seen the previous films to understand them, and unless you are here specifically for derivative or metanarrative, you’re probably not going to be satisfied by them. In fact, because the mixture skews from film to film, if you like one film, you’ll probably hate one or both of the others.
Mysteries boxes. So many mystery boxes. If there wasn't a plan in place for all of the mysteries being introduced (or if there was a plan that was going to be tossed aside), then they shouldn't have been introduced. Of the mysteries that did get answered, most felt like they were rushed, only being addressed out of obligation, or being answered in a manner that would appeal the most to people’s fan theories.
All this is to say that the rewrite needs to have a plan for its own story, and it needs to stick to that plan. There must be a coherent vision that flows from what came before while also existing on its own merits.
WORLDBUILDING
I feel like worldbuilding issues of the ST are themselves worthy of a series to address them. This trilogy violates so many fundamental aspects of Star Wars lore, and it does so on a manner that makes it clear that the creative team had no respect for the franchise. In the interest of not burying you in details, I will highlight just a few examples that will be important factors in this rewrite.
The Reset
The ending of RotJ is fundamentally at odds with the opening Disney wanted for TFA. One can’t rehash the Rebels versus the Evil Empire conflict when the Empire is broken and the Rebels are on a swift ascendance to becoming the New Republic. One also can’t tell a story where the Jedi are a half-forgotten myth when Luke Skywalker is rebuilding the Jedi Order and the Sith have been taken out of the picture.
Simply saying that it has been 30 years is not adequate explanation. What happened in the intermediate time period? That’s easily a trilogy of films (or several dozen novels, per the EU) of content that needs to be explored to explain how we got from RotJ to TFA. Hitting the reset button with minimal explanations that make the good guys seem incompetent and/or negligent just undermines the universe. Why should we care about anything that happens in these new films when the precedent is now that everything can be reset on a whim?
It’s important to note that this is a problem that only exists because the ST are sequels. They are beholden to the OT and PT. When this franchise started with ANH, everything was new; the story could get away with vague lore because there was nothing that could contradict what little we were being told. There was no prior canon to be incompatible with. Here, the current version of TFA is not compatible with information that Disney itself has asserted as Canon, despite Disney promising to be better about that when they scrapped the EU.
That’s Not How the Force Works
Balance
Disney tries to have things both ways with Balance in the Force. They want Light and Dark to constantly self-equalize, yet they also want the Light to triumph.
This might have made sense if the EU remained canon. The Light being Balance may have been Lucas’s original intention, but over the decades, so many writers have misunderstood this point that they effectively reshaped the cosmology. As much as I agree with Lucas’s take on things, equality of Light and Dark is a perfectly legitimate definition of Balance within the EU.
Disney wiped that out, though. They reset things so that only Lucas’s original work (plus CW, which he had input on) applied. Outside of Mortis, all evidence points to Light being Balance. Even with Mortis, Light is still Balance - since writing the Kenobi series, I happened upon some deep lore indicating that the Son and Daughter of Mortis represent the Living and Cosmic Force, not Light and Dark, and that the imbalance between them was actually because the Son fell to the Dark Side.
For Disney to then turn around in TLJ and push equality of Light and Dark, and then to double down on it in TRoS, actively clashes with the previous films. Reverting to Light equaling Balance at the very end, without acknowledging the previous position as a mistake, just comes across as weak writing.
Broom Boy
The way that people can just casually access the Force in the Disney era makes the Force feel less important.
To be clear, I am on board with the idea that anyone can use the Force. The Jedi prioritized people with high midichlorian counts because those were the people with the highest aptitude for Force sensitivity, yet I think it fits into the themes of the setting that anyone could sense things through the Force or even use it to affect their environment if they were willing to hone the necessary spiritual discipline.
My issue is that Disney presents the Force more like a superpower that spontaneously manifests in people. A story about a bunch of people spontaneously gaining access to Force abilities could be interesting. In a way, that’s sort of what happened in Fate of the Jedi, though in that case, it was Jedi manifesting Force abilities they couldn’t possibly have learned. It’s just that the story needs to actually be about this phenomena. It shouldn’t just be a party favor tossed out to characters on a whim.
That’s Not How Hyperspace Works
Gravity Wells
Have you ever noticed how, prior to the Disney films, ships did not jump to hyperspace while in atmosphere? That they didn’t drop out of hyperspace in atmosphere? They almost always went up into at least low orbit before they jumped. The lone exception I can name to this was Season 1 Episode 13 of CW, and even that case was a hyperdrive malfunctioning while in the upper atmosphere.
There is a lore explanation for this. Stellar objects cast “mass shadows” into hyperspace. That’s why Han was going on about calculating a hyperspace jump and avoiding stars and supernovae in ANH. A ship that is in hyperspace will be ripped back into real space when it encounters a mass shadow (almost certainly resulting in its destruction by whatever was casting that mass shadow); a ship in real space can’t jump into hyperspace until it is clear of any mass shadows. Disney does sometimes remember that this is a thing. In Rebels, they recycled the Interdictor cruisers from the EU, warships that generate artificial mass shadows to prevent enemy ships from escaping into hyperspace.
So why can Han use hyperspace to jump into the lower atmosphere of Starkiller Base? How can Poe pull off lightspeed skipping? For that matter, in Rebels, how does the crew escape Jedha while still in the lower atmosphere?
By making hyperspace this accessible, Disney undermined multiple scenes from past films.
Why did the Queen and her entourage need to run a blockade in TPM?
Why did Han not jump the Falcon to lightspeed as soon as he lifted he ship out of Docking Bay 94?
Why did the Rebels need to run an Imperial blockade at Hoth?
Why didn’t Han jump the Tydirium directly into the atmosphere of Endor’s forest moon?
Why didn’t the rebel fleet just jump all of their ships past the shield of the second Death Star?
This goes back to the point mentioned above about being beholden to prior canon materials. If Disney’s ST were the first Star Wars content ever, ignoring gravity wells wouldn’t be a problem. Because these films are not the first, ignoring gravity wells opens up plot holes in previous films.
The Holdo Maneuver
The Holdo Manuever was a visually stunning and powerful moment of self-sacrifice.
It is also utter nonsense that breaks space combat in Star Wars.
Prior to TLJ, the possibility of ramming one ship into another via a hyperspace jump was not even suggested. The entire paradigm of space combat assumed this could not happen. TRoS tries to handwave this by claiming what Holdo did was “one in a million”, but the same film then shows the move being repeated, so clearly, it is not one in a million. That’s before we consider that, per Season 2 Episode 9 of CW, it is possible to calculate a hyperspace jump with such precision that a shuttle can pop out of hyperspace in the perfect position to drop a boarding party onto a warship mid-battle. Slamming into a target would be a lot easier.
The simple fact of the matter is, if this strategy were possible, space combat in Star Wars would more closely resemble that of HALO. Hyperspace missiles and suicide drones would dictate battles. I know some people have claimed that mass is an issue and that the Holdo Maneuver could only work with a large ship; however, that’s not a factor. Even ignoring how velocity factors into kinetic energy (and relativistic mass, for that matter, since the ship would not yet be in hyperspace), you don’t need to slice through a ship all the way to destroy it. An impact in a vital area will do the trick. The Executor was destroyed by a tiny interceptor crashing into its bridge at sublight speeds. A faster-moving projectile could do even more damage to an even wider array of target areas.
Also … coupling this with the previous point … why build the Death Star to house a planet-killing laser when it could just fire hyperspace missiles into the surface of a planet?
The long and short of it is, as much as I enjoyed the Holdo Maneuver, it doesn’t work in its present incarnation. If it is going to appear in the rewrite - and I do intend to keep it in the rewrite - it needs to be rewritten to preserve the integrity of the lore.
Sub-spaceships
In TFA, Black Squadron is implied to have been idling to hyperspace outside Starkiller Base. Otherwise, their arrival makes no sense. They are given permission to exit hyperspace when the shields drop, and they immediately do so, appearing over the planet. How, exactly, did they perfectly time their arrival to an event whose time they couldn’t predict? This opens up the question of why the Stars Galaxy doesn’t have an analog for submarine combat by exploiting hyperspace in this manner.
Supplementary Material
Disney has heavily relied on novelizations, comics, and other tie-in materials to explain the holes in the ST’s lore. This was a mistake. For as beloved as the EU was, one didn’t need to consume it to understand the OT. One didn’t even need to consume it to understand the PT. Even CW, which is often hailed for ‘fixing’ the PT, isn’t required viewing to understand the PT.
The way that tie-in content should work is as a reward for those who consume it, not a punishment for those who don’t. Casual viewers should be able to consume a Star Wars film with no background except the other Star Wars films. Preferably, each trilogy should also be able to serve as a self-contained story that doesn’t assume you watched the other trilogies. Even the PT, for all its fanservice, did manage to accomplish this goal.
To given an example of what I mean, let’s look back at CW. I don’t fully agree that the CW fixes the PT films. Those films tell a good story through very, very bad writing, and the CW can’t undo that. However, what the CW does do is provide a deeper understanding of characters from the PT by putting them in a variety of different situations. Among other things, it makes Anakin Skywalker seems a lot more heroic while also hinting at how those same heroic attributes will be twisted when he becomes Vader. When I now watch the OT, I can visualize Vader’s facial expressions behind his mask because I can draw parallels between the scenes he’s in and situations Anakin got into the show; I can hear Matthew Lanter (Anakin’s voice actor from the show) speaking his lines without the distortion from the mask. These aren’t things that I or anyone else needs to enjoy the OT. They are simply a rewarding extra that came from exploring the additional content.
All this is to say that our rewrite needs to be self-contained. This new ST will reference and pay homage to other media, but it will not be reliant upon it. This should be a story that is functional on its own merits and only grows deeper the more media one has consumed.
CHARACTERS
Rey Skywalker Palpatine
Rey is such a mess as a protagonist.
Her defining trait at the start of the series is to wait for the family who abandoned her … then she just gets over it and goes to train as a Jedi instead. The man she briefly latched onto as a surrogate father figure was killed in front her … then, apropos of nothing, she decides a few days later that she wants to redeem the man who killed him. She uses her godlike Force powers without any meaningful training, with no fear of her power … then fears she is falling to the Dark Side … and then just gets over falling to the Dark Side.
All of this is before we get into her being a Mary Sue - and, yes, she absolutely is one. I agree with the comment made by MauLer (in either Part 2 or Part 3 of his Force Awakens review) that this probably wasn’t deliberate. Rey starts TFA as an interesting character with clear limitations that generate tension. Unfortunately, as the story progresses, she is constantly treated as the one with the means to solve problems, until she is too absurdly skilled and powerful to really be threatened by anything. She can use immensely powerful Force abilities without earning them (downloading Kylo’s memories does not count as training, not in a narrative sense). She is a master mechanic, pilot, markswoman, and staff fighter. She has immense insight into people she’s barely met and speaks languages that she doesn’t really have any reason to have learned. She can give into her anger without ever falling to the Dark Side. In all of this, she never makes a meaningful mistake. I was actually excited when TRoS hinted that she’d killed Chewbacca, as at least that would be a mistake she’d need to deal with, but then the film immediately revealed that it was a fakeout death.
Then there is the mystery of her parentage. The audience never truly needed Rey to have a special lineage. We just theorized that she did because it would explain why she is so powerful. Asking questions about her ancestry drew us deeper into the story. Telling us that she was a nobody turned all of this into a narrative dead end and made her power feel like a less natural fit in the world. Reversing that decision and saying she was Palpatine’s granddaughter came across as a weird fanfiction rather than a revelation that balanced the equation.
I wanted Rey to be the hero who led this trilogy. I suppose that was true in a technical sense. However, narratively, she’s just a badly written character who’s hard to get invested in.
Finn
Finn is one of my two favorite characters in the ST, yet he is as wasted as Rey. Nothing meaningful was done with his history as a stormtrooper. His personal journey about running away from fights was okay, but that wrapped up at the end of the TLJ, leaving nothing for him really to do. Baiting that he was Force sensitive didn’t go anywhere, either.
It’s such a shame. I really liked John Boyega’s performance. He made Finn very relatable, an Everyman in the midst of this crazy space opera. I wanted to follow his journey.
Poe Dameron
I really don’t like Poe. He gyrates wildly between absurd piloting skill and narrative punching bag. Whenever a ship he’s in takes a hit, I want to cheer; much like Captain Marvel getting punched in the face by Thanos in Endgame, it was a sign of weakness that finally made him relatable. Then the story would flip and make Poe the fool, the comic relief, the pathetic man who needs to be put in his place for this reason or that. It’s to the point that it feels like he was included purely to fill a check box for a Scoundrel character.
Kylo Ren
I feel like Kylo is the character who emerges from the ST mostly intact. He starts his journey as an angry man trying to emulate his notorious grandfather, murdering his own father to prove himself. He attempts to kill his mother, only to hesitate, still reeling from the emotional toll of killing his father. When offered a chance at redemption, he instead tries to drag the person offering them chance down with him. It takes the death of his mother to lead him to realize that he’s on a path that he doesn’t truly want to walk. He then dies in the attempt to redeem himself.
What we got for Kylo is not great. What I described sounds nice, but it smooths over a lot of things, like how his emotional instability makes him come off as childish rather than genuinely threatening. Still, at least he has something resembling a coherent journey.
Rose Tico
Rose is my second-favorite character in the ST.
No, that’s not a bit. I’m serious.
Much like Finn, Rose is an example of wasted potential, a relatable Everywoman and a charming performance destroyed by a story that didn’t actually have anything for her to do. She spearheaded the waste of time that was Canto Bight, and then she stole Finn’s moment of self-sacrifice. Then Disney, unable to figure out how to correct their mistake, chose to bury her instead.
General Hux
Hux came off as a genuinely intimidating villain in TFA. Yes, he was prone to the same outrage as Kylo, but his rage felt focused, deliberate. He used it to inspire his troopers rather than to lash out at people.
Then TLJ and TRoS turned him into a joke, humiliated him at every turn, and killed him pathetically.
Captain Phasma
Disney made a chrome-plated stormtrooper, plastered her in the marketing, and then threw her in the trash. Twice.
Snoke
Snoke was mostly okay through TLJ. The biggest problem I see with him is that he was a mystery box character. This Force user of unparalleled power should have had an impact on the story before this point, so where was he? I didn’t have any issue with when and how he died, but the fat he died with the mystery up in the air left a hole in the setting.
And then, somehow, Palpatine returned, and he had a laboratory full of Snokes. This was … anticlimactic. I think the idea as Snoke as a puppet through which Palpatine could influence the galaxy isn’t terrible. It’s just that it felt like an answer that was only given to brush Snoke aside in terms of narrative relevance.
Maz Kanata
Much like Phasma, I don’t think the creatives at Disney had any coherent idea as to what they wanted to do with Maz outside of the superficial, in this case being that she is a Yoda ripoff. Maybe the initial plan was to develop her as mystery boxes (such as how she got Luke’s lightsaber) were opened across the trilogy, but then she was sidelined in TLJ, and her appearance in TRoS was so half-baked that I’m 90% certain they just recycled an animatronic for her rather than pay for CGI.
That said, I feel like Maz herself needs minimal changes. It’s just a matter of committing to a role for her. If she’s going to be a character who enters the trilogy and then almost immediately exits it, that’s fine. If she’s going to play a role in every film, that’s also fine. Something in the middle is also fine. We just need to pick how we’re going to use her and be consistent about it.
Vice Admiral Holdo
This was a weird character for me. I guess the goal was to write a stand-in for Leia whilst Leia was in a coma, but with how she is characterized, she really can’t fill her narrative role as well as Leia could. I want to recycle Laura Dern, so the character of Holdo will be jettisoned outright.
Legacy Characters
To avoid rehashing what I said above, I’ll simply say here that I wasn’t personally invested in any of the OT characters returning for the ST, but I do see the point being made when people complain about them. Luke, Han, and Leia should have been treated with more reverence and with respect for their character growth through the OT. Chewbacca should have gotten the Falcon after Han died. Lando … well, Lando should have had a meaningful role in these films. We should have seen these heroes reunited.
I think that bring Palpatine back was a mistake. Yes, it happened in the Dark Empire comics, but that was a whole story devoted to his return. Rushing him as the villain for TRoS, displacing Snoke in the process, just felt desperate.
THEMES
If I were to condense the themes of the ST down into a single idea, I would say that it’s about legacy.
TFA explores the importance of taking up and continuing a legacy.
TLJ explores failure as a legacy, as well as “killing” legacy to build an identity of one’s own.
TRoS explores accepting an unwanted legacy and learning to move forward from it.
As ideas for a sequel series go, this isn’t inherently terrible. It’s just that this plays into the issue of derivation and metanarrative that we covered earlier. It makes the ST unable to stand on its own. These films need to either parasitize or undermine what came before to build up any sense of identity for themselves.
I’ll get into this more next time. For now, I’ll just say that, while the ST should have honored the legacy of the past trilogies, they shouldn’t have been about that legacy. At least, they shouldn’t have been about legacy directly. They should have explored their own ideas that naturally transitioned from the themes of those previous trilogies.
CHANGES TO BE MADE
With that groundwork laid, it’s times to start moving forward.
On February 14th, we will do our overview of the new ST. We’ll start with my thematic vision for this trilogy and the ground rules for this rewrite. We’ll then go over the key worldbuilding elements that we will be introducing whole cloth or else revising from the ST. The section will finish with a discussion of changes that will be made to the characters and the arcs that the new trilogy will take them on. Once that is in place, we will be able to begin the film-by-film story treatments.
It’s going to be a long journey. I’ll hope you’ll join for its entirety. Have a good week, everyone.
