Author: M. Dean Cooper

The Escape Pod Explains – The Battle of Taanab

Posted on March 13, 2015by

Battle_of_Taanab

One of the frustrating things about running an op-ed blog instead of a news blog is, you occasionally have to set aside what you’re most excited to talk about in favor of the thing that’s most fully developed. In this case, I’m writing these words within hours of the announcement of the first standalone Star Wars film, Rogue One, but it’s way too soon to have anything worthwhile and intelligible to say about what’s basically just a title at this point. If you’d like to see me talk about why this appears to be great news, you can head here to see me make the case for a Red Squadron novel about a year ago, or stay tuned to Tosche Station Radio, where I’ll be a guest next week for just that reason.

Moving on—the other weird thing about this piece is that I couldn’t quite decide whether to bill it as an Expanded Universe Explains or an Escape Pod, for reasons that will become clear shortly. For starters, though, let’s talk about Taanab. Originally referred to, of course, in Return of the Jedi, the “Battle of Taanab” was a conflict that for some reason involved civilian (and scoundrel) Lando Calrissian back before he got mixed up with the Rebellion. When he was awarded the rank of General despite seemingly no military experience, he speculated that Alliance leadership must have heard about his “little maneuver” at Taanab. Read More

Happy Anniversary, Wookieepedia—Time to Start Over

Posted on February 25, 2015by Feature Articles, Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

kudzu

For those of us old and crotchety enough to remember the dawn of Wikipedia, certain guiding principles remain hardwired to the concept, no matter how much the world of open-source encyclopedias has evolved in the intervening years. “Be Bold“, for one—in other words, when in doubt, go ahead and make the edit. A flawed addition is better than no addition. Another is Disambiguation, which is probably less well-known as a principle than it is in practice, in the form of articles like Mercury (element) or Razor (clone trooper). Another concept that brings me back to those early days is Instruction Creep: the bureaucratic process by which rules, procedures, best practices, and so on are slowly codified in response to new circumstances and specific incidents, eventually becoming overwhelming to new users and obscuring the true goals of the organization in question. Wikipedia’s page on Instruction Creep cleverly uses the picture of kudzu vines that begins this article as a metaphor for this process.

Over on Wookieepedia’s version is the following text: “Wookieepedia is not supposed to be bureaucratic. Procedures are popular to suggest but unpopular to follow, due to the effort required to locate, read, learn and abide by them.” Of course, the wook also takes great pains to clarify that it is not Wikipedia, and just because something is policy at one site doesn’t mean it should be taken for granted at the other; nevertheless, the “avoid instruction creep” page remains. It continues: “our contributors are volunteers, and will simply go away if the policies are too confusing or too difficult for them to follow.” Read More

What Star Wars Can Learn From Marvel Television

Posted on February 16, 2015by

carter-cast

For all Marvel’s recent success at the box office with its Cinematic Universe, its small-screen efforts have thus far been a mixed bag. Most people will agree that its first series, Agents of SHIELD (I refuse to put the periods in there), got a lot better once it caught up with the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but there’s no doubt that it struggled at first to define itself, lacking both the personality and—more forgivably given its budget—the grandeur of the Marvel films. Their second series, Agent Carter, has improved by leaps and bounds over SHIELD’s debut even as SHIELD itself in its second season has begun to bring much more life and excitement to its proceedings with an expanded and more-colorful cast freed to the bureaucratic doldrums of the series’ beginning. Later this year, Marvel’s television roster will have doubled with the arrival on Netflix of both Daredevil and AKA Jessica Jones, with three more series to follow further down the line—and all within the same contiguous universe as the films.

For Star Wars fans, Marvel is the ultimate guinea pig for the Age of Disney. What success Marvel has had at the box office Lucasfilm now seeks to reproduce with both a sequel trilogy and no doubt several standalone films, and with more options for small-screen, lower-budget productions than ever before, it stands to reason that they’re watching Marvel’s television operations with great interest. Here are some things I think they should keep in mind. Read More

Only a Sith – On Reboots and Absolutes

Posted on February 4, 2015by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

sw1-ross“Forever? ‘Forever’ is a word for children.”
– Master Kan, Kung Fu

After months of stories set between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, the new Star Wars canon has now moved whole-heartedly into the post-Yavin time period with the Star Wars and Darth Vader ongoing comic series from Marvel and next month’s Luke novel Heir to the Jedi. Advance review copies—or ARCs, as us super-cool blogosphere folks call them—for HttJ have been circulating for a while now, and already one prominent discussion topic has been whether it takes place before or after the events of the already-released Star Wars #1. I’m still working on my own ARC so I couldn’t speak authoritatively on that subject just yet, but I do think there’s something else worth asking right now: how badly do we need to know?

A while back I spoke about the continuity-shaking chaos that was the Legends post-Yavin timeline, and how impossible it was to arrange a logical sequence in which all the known events could take place. I expressed my hopes for the new canon as such:

“The exact chronology isn’t clear yet, but if HttJ takes place, say, six months after ANH, for god’s sake, make that clear in the story. I want to feel those six months in Luke’s character, and if a story in the comics takes place at the same point in time, Luke shouldn’t be there. If he gets so much as a papercut on the fourth day after Yavin, I want to see a band-aid on his finger on the fifth day, no matter how much time separates those two stories in the real world.”

Read More

When Gone Am I – Kanan and Ezra in the OT

Posted on January 30, 2015by , , , , and Not A Committee

kanan-ezra

“When gone am I, the last of the Jedi will you be” – Yoda, 4 ABY

For all the deftness with which Star Wars Rebels has told its story thus far, one criticism that it can’t quite escape is something that many would say plagued the Expanded Universe more and more as it went on: it’s allowing Jedi to survive in the Dark Times. Pretty much by definition, every single Force-user roaming the galaxy doing good deeds in this time period makes Luke and his training in the original trilogy less unique. To some, it goes even further, stunting Luke’s actual importance at best and making Yoda and Obi-Wan look bad at worst.

But Rebels is still four-plus years out from the OT, and over eight years from the quote at the start of this piece. There’s lots of time left for any number of fates to befall Kanan and Ezra—and Ahsoka’s fate at the conclusion of The Clone Wars demonstrates the folly of assuming we know where any young Jedi’s story is going. That said, Yoda’s declaration, and his and Obi-Wan’s clear hopes for Luke as their one real chance of defeating the Emperor, offer almost as wide a range of interpretations as there are real possibilities. Some fans aren’t even that keen on them being alive in the period we’ve already seen them. Some don’t mind them being around as long as they don’t actually join the Rebellion—Luke should be the only Jedi with that distinction, they’ll say. And some are concerned only with Yoda speaking the truth in the most literal sense possible; Kanan and Ezra can be and do whatever they want as long as they’re dead by the time Luke shows up on Dagobah. Read More