Author: M. Dean Cooper

Second Look: Rebels Revisited: Too Far Gone?

Posted on July 5, 2016by

rr-kallusponders

You know Star Wars Rebels had a monumental week when four different members of our show team want to weigh in on it. In the late season two episode “The Honorable Ones”, we see the first hints of decency in Agent Kallus as he and Zeb are forced to work together to survive being stranded on a frozen moon of Geonosis. I rejoiced at the show finally giving its Imperial characters a little nuance, but wondered whether it was too late for us to actually empathize with Kallus after all we’d seen him do. Jay wasn’t so sure that was the goal:

The episode was showing more depth and humanity for Kallus, but not seeking that we empathize with him. We see why Kallus does what he does, and we see how he lives a comfortable lie: thoroughly convinced the Rebels are monstrous and his deeds are justified. We see, too, how he has difficulty justifying them when challenged, as opposed to living in an environment where everyone agrees to the same truths. That’s a valuable perspective.

While Ben and Sarah agreed that the episode was successful as long as one didn’t overestimate what it had set out to accomplish, that was the last time we saw Kallus in season two. It remains to be seen just how his story will continue.

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Second Look: Homer, Virgil, and That Guy on Twitter

Posted on July 4, 2016by

threepio-storytime

For those of you who have just joined us recently, Second Look is a twice-yearly feature where the staff takes a week off and I highlight five pieces from the previous six months that I think deserve, well, a second look. First up is a piece by guest writer David Tayman III—in Homer, Virgil, and That Guy on Twitter, David used his personal theory regarding the origin of Snoke (derived solely from the placement of his scars) as a vehicle to explain why speculating is so fun, and why it can be fun without needing to conform to the story as it ends up being told:

Basically, what we’re doing when we speculate is creating our own fun, what-if timelines. Our own Legends, you might say. People who scoff at the idea of fanfic create it every time they speculate, or entertain a speculation. I like to think the collective brain-trust at Lucasfilm (enough of whose members are keenly aware of fan desires, wishes, expectations, and no-fly-zones) is more clever and willing to think outside the box than I am. But that doesn’t mean others don’t have great ideas, too, with potential to enrich one’s experience of the Legend.

After all, he concludes, Star Wars is a myth, and the best myths expand past the boundaries of any one telling, “official” or not.

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The Expanded Universe Explains, Vol. XIII – Young Han Solo

Posted on June 20, 2016by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

younghan-fight

The Expanded Universe Explains series has had an interesting evolution over the last few years; originally it was a compendium of lots of actual questions posed by my friend Pearlann; once the reboot happened I then moved on to detailing stray movie references that had been told and retold in Legends multiple times (and thus, were especially in need of a reboot). That strategy eventually led me to one of the biggest messes of all—the theft of the Death Star plans.

Perhaps not all that coincidentally, that low-hanging fruit became the seed (ha, fruit pun) of the first Star Wars spinoff film—Rogue One. As such, interest in that particular piece has remained quite steady over the last eighteen months as more and more people become curious about the story. That recently led me to the conclusion that the next spinoff film, its premise also rife in Legends, was a worthwhile topic for an EU Explains, and so here we are.

24. What is Han Solo’s pre-A New Hope backstory?

Well, for starters, there’s a whole bunch of it—two entire novel trilogies, plus any number of scattered bits and pieces. If you really want to get the full young-Han-Solo experience, you’re in luck, as both the Han Solo Adventures, a self-contained trilogy by EU VIP Brian Daley, and the much more recent (and expansive) Han Solo Trilogy by Ann C. Crispin are among the best of the Legends material out there (while managing to be very, very different kinds of stories), and unlike a lot of my recent topics here, they’re pretty damn good at consistency—Crispin’s trilogy covers effectively Han’s entire life pre-ANH, meaning that at one point Han basically takes a leave of absence from his own book and the plot continues without him while the events of Daley’s trilogy are taking place. Read More

The Pitch – New Ongoing Comics

Posted on June 15, 2016by , , , and Not A Committee

vader25A few months ago, we ran a group piece on something I had been thinking about since Marvel started publishing Star Wars comics again—had the medium actually gotten stronger since the original Star Wars series, or would we look back on this era as being just as silly and dated as those early days of Jaxxon and Cody Sunn-Childe? What I noticed then that I hadn’t really considered before was that a good chunk of the regular staff here actually doesn’t read the comics and has little in the way of opinions on them.

Then last week, when I started thinking about what Marvel might come up with to replace the soon-to-conclude Darth Vader series, I decided to bring the question to the staff, and this time I wouldn’t accept “I don’t read comics” as an answer. It’s hard to argue that Marvel haven’t done a great job maximizing Star Wars sales among the existing comics audience, but I was especially curious what they might do to bring in all these superfans I knew who nevertheless barely touched the things. I got some interesting ideas back, to say the least—here they are.

Ben C: As Marvel takes the bold move of ending Gillen’s Darth Vader title, what’s next is a logical question, as is what they should do. The cynical response is to say Marvel will simply re-launch the book with a new creative team in a few months, pocketing the ker-ching generated by it. Here’s the non-cynical response: What if they don’t? What then? Well, over the last two years, Marvel have proved to be competent custodians of the Star Wars license. Due to some very smart creative combinations of writer and artist, with a mix of ongoing and limited series and a restrained use of events, the only question left to ask is what does Marvel have left to prove? Read More

“What is this?” – Interrogating the “Casual” Reactions to Rogue One

Posted on June 13, 2016by and Interviews

When the first teaser trailer for Rogue One was released last April, a whole bunch of people who would identify themselves as Star Wars fans on some level found themselves seeing for the first time evidence of a movie that was unequivocally connected to the franchise, yet had little in the way of familiar characters—no Rey or Finn, no Luke or Leia, no Anakin or Padmé. The only recognizable face in the whole thing was Mon Mothma, but she looked a lot younger than she was in Return of the Jedi—what was this?

https://twitter.com/salsapantz/status/718191455068626945

While I have no interest in teasing or belittling these people for not following the ins and outs of Lucasfilm operations the way a lot of us do, I have to admit I found this oddly fascinating—not just confusion about the story and how it related to the existing movies, but even about whether it was an authorized Lucasfilm production, or some kind of off-brand remake a la Never Say Never Again, the unofficial James Bond movie.

So last month I came up with a short questionnaire and passed it out to several people, with a lot of help from the trusty David Schwarz, that you might call casual fans. The first couple questions revolved around The Force Awakens, with the goal of establishing their current perspectives on the franchise and its “main” story. Once that was done, I then got into their thoughts on the Rogue One trailer and premise in more detail; those responses are reproduced below with my own thoughts and conclusions peppered throughout. Read More