Category: Not A Committee

Almost exactly eighteen months ago, Lucasfilm announced the reboot of the Star Wars Expanded Universe—or Legendsification, if you will. It happened on a Friday, and it was such a seismic moment for your humble nerds at Eleven-ThirtyEight that I wanted to document the days that followed as accurately as possible. The next Monday, we published Das Reboot – The First 48 Hours, a group piece that, unlike our average Not a Committee, I presented entirely in chronological order, timestamps and all—so readers could feel the sequence of emotions unfold in “real time”.

With Tuesdays being an off day, I thought it’d be fun to cover the first 24 hours after the new trailer the same way—but while the trailer technically went public at about 10pm Monday night, interest was so high that the Jedi Council Forums were down on and off for a couple hours (and then again Tuesday afternoon)! I eventually got a DM off to the gang, though, and below is what followed.

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12:14 AM – Mike: So, JFC, LOL, and TBH, that was a trailer. I’m not even going to try to be especially coherent right now, but there’s just so much to freak out about here: new character voices! A mountain range with a familiar-looking trench in it! Finn’s “oh shit” face when he sees Kylo’s lightsaber! Han and Leia being all tender and stuff! How are you guys feeling? Read More

Buried in the Force Friday blitz at the beginning of this month was the first The Force Awakens-related update to StarWars.com’s Databank section. Naturally, very little new information actually came out of the new entries; many didn’t include pictures, and some of the character entries were nothing but the same one-sentence bios from the back of their action figure cards.

One big new piece of info did show up, though—or rather, if you follow the spoiler reporting, a confirmation of one of the oldest rumors: there’s a superweapon on the table.

I actually stopped reading spoilers a long time ago, but even I had heard bits and pieces to this effect; and sure enough, the exceedingly minimal entry for the First Order’s Starkiller Base nevertheless deigns to include the apparent in-universe reasoning for its name:

“An ice planet converted into a stronghold of the First Order and armed with a fiercely destructive new weapon capable of destroying entire star systems.”

While certain reporting (and certain memes) has tended to paint the First Order as an upstart group of ne’er-do-wells rather than a serious galactic power, the ability to destroy an entire star system? Well, that changes the equation. Superweapons have a mixed reputation among Star Wars fans, though; the Expanded Universe is known for adding a whole bunch of ’em to the lineup (including the Sun Crusher, which did exactly what the Starkiller is alleged to do and was totally invulnerable besides), and even many movie purists will tell you that concluding the original trilogy with a second Death Star wasn’t exactly George’s Lucas’s most creative idea. So I put the question to the staff: is this a mistake? A ham-fisted attempt to replicate the feel of the OT? Or are superweapons a crucial part of Star Wars’s magic formula? Read More

David: Oh hello, Mistah Filoni. Good morning. Nice, uh, hat you got there. Thanks for this chance, by the way! I’m pitching a light-hearted and completely not meta episode that I’m calling for now “It Rhymes, Like Poetry”. Good, huh?

So, picture this… Cold open! The Ghost crew are escaping a massive cloud of TIE fighters and the ship is in pretty bad shape. Zeb is complaining about doing yet another dangerous job for Vizago instead of sticking it to the Empire, and when things look dire Hera jumps to lightspeed!

Our heroes get to the world of Pantora, where they deliver their load to some funny looking dealer, but they have to wait at least one day until the Ghost is repaired. The kids (Sabine, Ezra and Zeb) decide to head to the city. Pantora is nothing like it was in that animatic from Clone Wars. It’s become very industrial and it’s full of merchandise vending machines, and people trying to sell you things everywhere and… well, it’s all very crazy and, uhm, satirical, for the grown ups in the audience, you know. Read More

One of the best selling points of the canon reboot has been the opportunity to revisit troublesome details in the worldbuilding of the Galaxy Far Far Away that were either ill-conceived to begin with, or became overcomplicated as the years went on and new stories piled up. One detail that was confusing from the get-go is exactly how fast hyperspace is. For one thing, the film characters call it “light speed”, when it’s clearly got to be way, way faster than that—in fact, the films also tend to suggest each transit takes no more than a few hours; no one brings a change of clothes before departing Tatooine for Alderaan, and Luke doesn’t seem very stiff or grubby when he exits his X-wing on Dagobah.

So maybe you can’t blame the Expanded Universe for never really ironing out these inconsistencies; they didn’t have much to go on. When I raised this topic to the others, David Schwarz pointed out that West End Games’ original table for the transit times depicted in the original trilogy (below) actually contained a typo that suggested all these trips took a matter of days, not hours—which might have been more sensible, but certainly doesn’t seem to be the films’ intent, and isn’t that more important?

Meanwhile, one of my own favorite examples dates all the way back to Heir to the Empire—the Star Destroyer Chimaera, with a hyperdrive faster than even the Falcon‘s, takes five days to travel from Myrkr to Wayland. Look for those two planets on the Essential Atlas‘ galactic map and you’ll find them practically right on top of each other at the coordinates N-7. So if it takes five days to go that tiny distance (and it’s not a freak detail; multi-day hyperspace journeys factor into the Thrawn trilogy alone on multiple occasions), how the hell did Luke survive a trip from Hoth (K-18) to Dagobah (M-19) without his body eating straight through that flight suit? Read More