Author: M. Dean Cooper

Rest in Peace, Aaron Allston

Posted on February 28, 2014by Feature Articles

AaronAllstonAs you’ve likely heard by now, longtime Star Wars author Aaron Allston passed away suddenly yesterday after collapsing at VisionCon in Branson, Missouri. The news came late last night and threw us all for a bit of a loop, so we’ll be taking an extra day off to collect our thoughts, and we’ll be back with those on Monday.

Our thoughts are with Aaron’s friends and family, including the seemingly limitless number of fans who had the pleasure of getting to know him at a convention or three. Aaron wasn’t just one of our franchise’s best writers, he was one of us.

Yub yub, Aaron. And frothing disease to your enemies.

The Expanded Universe Explains, Vol. VI

Posted on February 18, 2014by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

yoda escape pod concept

13. How did Obi-Wan know where Yoda was?

First, some background.

Dagobah, while not being at all noteworthy in a political sense, is a fairly noteworthy planet as far as the Force is concerned. It was “discovered” and subsequently forgotten multiple times over the years, and one survey team actually found that life there was abnormally ripe for genetic and medicinal research (remeber Luke’s “massive life form readings”?). Likewise, one of the reasons Yoda chose to hide there was because it was so choked with myriad other life forms that his own Force presence would be largely subsumed and harder to detect. Whether the strong Force signature caused the biological potency or vice-versa is pretty much a “chicken v. egg” situation, so it’s easier to just look at Dagobah as the Amazon rain forest of the Star Wars galaxy—teeming not just with life, but with an abnormal variety of life with abornally unique properties.

One thing that tends to bug hardcore Expanded Universe fans is the unusual amount of important events and/or people on Tatooine—a planet that’s very explicitly stated to be the ass end of space, but is constantly revisited due to its iconic status. Dagobah has a similar problem, relatively speaking, but its role as a major waypoint in the Force-User’s Guide to the Galaxy is, as I’ve discussed before, the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card where coincidental arrivals are concerned. As such, there are a couple options for the origin of the dark-side cave, but the most likely candidate these days is a duel between an errant unnamed Dark Jedi Master and the Jedi Knight Minch—who was sort of a wink-wink, nod-nod stand in for a younger Yoda himself—in 700 BBY. The Dark Jedi was killed, leaving a stain on that location around which the cave eventually evolved. The origin of this story was a reference all the way back in Heir to the Empire to Yoda killing a Dark Jedi there; Lucas gospel, however, maintains that Yoda had never been to Dagobah prior to Revenge of the Sith, hence the stand-in. The death of a major dark-sider leaving a mark like that is pretty standard fare; in fact, one of the more creative fan theories going around in the early days of the prequels was that Naboo would somehow become Dagobah, and the cave was the spot where Darth Maul had died.
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Cog Hive Seven and Social Justice in the GFFA

Posted on February 7, 2014by

In last week’s new release Maul: Lockdown, Darth Maul is sent to uncover a reclusive and mysterious arms dealer hiding out in Cog Hive Seven, a space-based prison whose architecture is infinitely rearrangeable. This has two benefits: one, escape is much more complicated when the route out of your cell is constantly changing, and two, it allows Warden Sadiki Blirr to pick any two inmates and smack them together like action figures. The resulting deathmatches are then broadcast to the galaxy for gambling purposes, with Blirr herself collecting a healthy piece of the profits. This system of near-constant combat makes up the spine of Lockdown‘s bloody proceedings, and while the Rubix-Cube-like concept of Cog Hive Seven is a novel approach, the general premise of gladiatorial combat has a long and storied history in the Galaxy Far, Far Away, dating almost all the way to the beginning of the Expanded Universe.

My comrade Lucas Jackson touched on gladiators briefly back in Star Wars and Genre: The Sports Story, and he may well return to the subject one day, so I won’t get too into the details here; what I’m more interested in is what the many instances of coercive life-or-death combat suggest about the Star Wars setting as a whole.
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Star Wars in Five Seconds

Posted on January 24, 2014by , , , , , and Not A Committee

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I know I’ve expressed disdain with what you might call “Buzzfeed-style” articles here before, but let’s be honest—who doesn’t love a good animated gif? A few properly-chosen seconds from your favorite piece of media can be like a little fortune cookie that allows you to reconnect with it for just a moment; in service of a larger point, to illustrate recurring imagery, or just for the fun of it.

I recently asked the staff to share their quintessential Star Wars movie moments; not just cool stuff, but the moments that spoke to them deep down, that encapsulated everything they love about SW in just a few seconds. On a whim, I then set out to track down an appropriate gif of each moment to go along with their responses. That part was a lot harder than I’d expected. Let’s see how I did.
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JJ Abrams, Jesse Plemons, and the Best-Case Scenario

Posted on January 21, 2014by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

By and large, I’m perfectly content to let Episode VII rumors come and go without comment. They can be interesting, and I don’t begrudge anyone choosing to cover them, I just think that there’s rarely much to be gained from spending one’s column inches picking apart developments about which we’re drastically underinformed, and that may or may not even be true to begin with.

But a certain image of the sequel’s development has been coming together over the last couple months that I think could make for an instructive thought experiment—meaning, even if every assumption I’m about to make is incorrect, my point can still stand. So keep in mind that this article isn’t an endorsement of any particular rumors, it’s just that—a thought experiment.
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