I’m still flabbergasted that a gigantic, monumental development in the series was announced via Fortnite. That is the pinnacle of clueless, coked-up Hollywood executive, IMO.
I still can't believe that was real. On account of "I don't play Fortnite" and also "why would I think Fortnite would reveal substantial, integral portions of a coming Star Wars movie's plot?".
What is the Fortnite thing? I have never played it.
Epic was making a survival/crafting/base defense/horde mode game for a long, long time that people honestly thought was vaporware at one point. Then one of their business partners started making the first major battle royal game, Playerunknown's Battlegrounds and Epic was like "This rocks, let's rip it off" and put a battle royale mode into Fortnite while keeping the base building stuff and it became insanely popular in the west. Eventually they started doing marketing deals with anyone who'd let them put a character into the game, so now you can find Goku and Batman shooting guns at each other while John Wick and Spider-Man try to blow each other up with rockets, and then they took out the base building stuff so even cynical game industry people are getting into it now.
Undead Scottsman on
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AbsoluteZeroThe new film by Quentin KoopantinoRegistered Userregular
Obviously they never would have done it, but I would have adored seeing force ghost Luke trolling Kylo for a whole movie.
Obviously they never would have done it, but I would have adored seeing force ghost Luke trolling Kylo for a whole movie.
Who would be trolling whom? If a ghost was haunting me and in life he tried to murder me in my sleep, I'd never shut up about it. Every time he started cracking wise, I'd have to remind him exactly how I got into mustache twirling villainy.
Obviously they never would have done it, but I would have adored seeing force ghost Luke trolling Kylo for a whole movie.
Who would be trolling whom? If a ghost was haunting me and in life he tried to murder me in my sleep, I'd never shut up about it. Every time he started cracking wise, I'd have to remind him exactly how I got into mustache twirling villainy.
"Guess I should have just killed you instead of hesitating then. My bad."
Undead Scottsman on
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ShadowenSnores in the morningLoserdomRegistered Userregular
Plus if he snaps at Kylo, he'll never look crazy. But if he can needle Kylo into responding when he's in a room full of First Order High Command and not visible to any of them but Kylo...
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valhalla13013 Dark Shield Perceives the GodsRegistered Userregular
What is the Fortnite thing? I have never played it.
Epic was making a survival/crafting/base defense/horde mode game for a long, long time that people honestly thought was vaporware at one point. Then one of their business partners started making the first major battle royal game, Playerunknown's Battlegrounds and Epic was like "This rocks, let's rip it off" and put a battle royale mode into Fortnite while keeping the base building stuff and it became insanely popular in the west. Eventually they started doing marketing deals with anyone who'd let them put a character into the game, so now you can find Goku and Batman shooting guns at each other while John Wick and Spider-Man try to blow each other up with rockets, and then they took out the base building stuff so even cynical game industry people are getting into it now.
We know what Fortnite is. What does this have to do with revealing something about Star Wars?
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
What is the Fortnite thing? I have never played it.
Epic was making a survival/crafting/base defense/horde mode game for a long, long time that people honestly thought was vaporware at one point. Then one of their business partners started making the first major battle royal game, Playerunknown's Battlegrounds and Epic was like "This rocks, let's rip it off" and put a battle royale mode into Fortnite while keeping the base building stuff and it became insanely popular in the west. Eventually they started doing marketing deals with anyone who'd let them put a character into the game, so now you can find Goku and Batman shooting guns at each other while John Wick and Spider-Man try to blow each other up with rockets, and then they took out the base building stuff so even cynical game industry people are getting into it now.
We know what Fortnite is. What does this have to do with revealing something about Star Wars?
Obviously they never would have done it, but I would have adored seeing force ghost Luke trolling Kylo for a whole movie.
Who would be trolling whom? If a ghost was haunting me and in life he tried to murder me in my sleep, I'd never shut up about it. Every time he started cracking wise, I'd have to remind him exactly how I got into mustache twirling villainy.
"Guess I should have just killed you instead of hesitating then. My bad."
And then Kylo keeps a rando civilian around to force choke whenever Luke shows up. Robot Chicken can do the Force Ghost trolling gag, but that doesn't work so well there's an actual murdering bastard in the mix. Plus, some of the better parts of the ST are when Kylo isn't being super angry and angsty, and is having something like a normal conversation with another character. It'd be better if he was having that conversation with one of the actually living main characters, but Force Ghost Luke would do in a pinch.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
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cj iwakuraThe Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered Userregular
What is the Fortnite thing? I have never played it.
Epic was making a survival/crafting/base defense/horde mode game for a long, long time that people honestly thought was vaporware at one point. Then one of their business partners started making the first major battle royal game, Playerunknown's Battlegrounds and Epic was like "This rocks, let's rip it off" and put a battle royale mode into Fortnite while keeping the base building stuff and it became insanely popular in the west. Eventually they started doing marketing deals with anyone who'd let them put a character into the game, so now you can find Goku and Batman shooting guns at each other while John Wick and Spider-Man try to blow each other up with rockets, and then they took out the base building stuff so even cynical game industry people are getting into it now.
We know what Fortnite is. What does this have to do with revealing something about Star Wars?
Obviously they never would have done it, but I would have adored seeing force ghost Luke trolling Kylo for a whole movie.
If I remember correctly one of the scripts for what became RoS (might have been Trevorrow's?) did actually have Kylo hunting down some Sith artefact or other with Luke's ghost constantly mocking him. That was the script that also had the rebels resistance hijack an Eclipse class super star destroyer. Certainly a ship like that with a gun capable of Rogue One style single reactor ignition shots would make a hell of a lot more sense as a big scary threat compared to Palpatine pulling a million Star Destroyers with full planet annihilating superlasers out of his ass.
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daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
What is the Fortnite thing? I have never played it.
Epic was making a survival/crafting/base defense/horde mode game for a long, long time that people honestly thought was vaporware at one point. Then one of their business partners started making the first major battle royal game, Playerunknown's Battlegrounds and Epic was like "This rocks, let's rip it off" and put a battle royale mode into Fortnite while keeping the base building stuff and it became insanely popular in the west. Eventually they started doing marketing deals with anyone who'd let them put a character into the game, so now you can find Goku and Batman shooting guns at each other while John Wick and Spider-Man try to blow each other up with rockets, and then they took out the base building stuff so even cynical game industry people are getting into it now.
We know what Fortnite is. What does this have to do with revealing something about Star Wars?
It might have been neat if it had, oh, been in a Star Wars game, like Battlefront or Squadrons.
The Palpatine reveal might have been pretty cool if they had the Palps speech instead of the opening crawl, and then panned down to show Kylo coming in on a landing on Sith planet followed by exposition dump/scenery chewing between the two characters. It still wouldn't be good because Palpatine coming back is just stupid, but it'd get rid of the frenetic rapid-fire action scenes with Kylo and put the shocking reveal of the movie's antagonist in the actual movie.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
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cj iwakuraThe Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered Userregular
What is the Fortnite thing? I have never played it.
Epic was making a survival/crafting/base defense/horde mode game for a long, long time that people honestly thought was vaporware at one point. Then one of their business partners started making the first major battle royal game, Playerunknown's Battlegrounds and Epic was like "This rocks, let's rip it off" and put a battle royale mode into Fortnite while keeping the base building stuff and it became insanely popular in the west. Eventually they started doing marketing deals with anyone who'd let them put a character into the game, so now you can find Goku and Batman shooting guns at each other while John Wick and Spider-Man try to blow each other up with rockets, and then they took out the base building stuff so even cynical game industry people are getting into it now.
We know what Fortnite is. What does this have to do with revealing something about Star Wars?
It might have been neat if it had, oh, been in a Star Wars game, like Battlefront or Squadrons.
The Palpatine reveal might have been pretty cool if they had the Palps speech instead of the opening crawl, and then panned down to show Kylo coming in on a landing on Sith planet followed by exposition dump/scenery chewing between the two characters. It still wouldn't be good because Palpatine coming back is just stupid, but it'd get rid of the frenetic rapid-fire action scenes with Kylo and put the shocking reveal of the movie's antagonist in the actual movie.
As much as I love the character, he should stay in the Andor/PT era going forward. They finally had the chance to let Kylo run the show, and wrecked it in all of five minutes.
I did not like the Andor post-credit scene as a first reaction, but giving the show folks the benefit of the doubt, I may have talked myself into liking it:
I hate that it’s the Death Star, because as others have said, it’s like the most obvious Star Wars imagery out there, and the first time the franchise really started eating its old ideas rather than be inventive.
But stepping past that, the thematic work here is kind of great. The piece the prisoners made wasn’t a primary focus of the machine - it wasn’t the super laser itself, it wasn’t even the reflecting panels. It was a connective piece that holds the structure together - useless on its own but absolutely critical to the weapon’s function.
I think that extends the lessons of the prison arc rather brilliantly. The workers made these connectors out of deluded self-interest: if they work and follow the rules, they will survive and not be hurt. The connectors are products of fear and compliance, and their use in the Death Star elevates that idea - the entire fascist structure of the Empire is invisibly dependent on fear and compliance all the way through, from the galactic level down to individual lives.
It’s not the super weapons that hold things together, it’s the false belief that compliance will spare you. As soon as that cracks it all starts to fall apart.
I still don’t like that it makes the confines of Andor’s life a little smaller, but I think I see what the aim was, and it’s sufficiently in keeping with the rest of the show’s intelligence that I don’t mind it.
I did not like the Andor post-credit scene as a first reaction, but giving the show folks the benefit of the doubt, I may have talked myself into liking it:
I hate that it’s the Death Star, because as others have said, it’s like the most obvious Star Wars imagery out there, and the first time the franchise really started eating its old ideas rather than be inventive.
But stepping past that, the thematic work here is kind of great. The piece the prisoners made wasn’t a primary focus of the machine - it wasn’t the super laser itself, it wasn’t even the reflecting panels. It was a connective piece that holds the structure together - useless on its own but absolutely critical to the weapon’s function.
I think that extends the lessons of the prison arc rather brilliantly. The workers made these connectors out of deluded self-interest: if they work and follow the rules, they will survive and not be hurt. The connectors are products of fear and compliance, and their use in the Death Star elevates that idea - the entire fascist structure of the Empire is invisibly dependent on fear and compliance all the way through, from the galactic level down to individual lives.
It’s not the super weapons that hold things together, it’s the false belief that compliance will spare you. As soon as that cracks it all starts to fall apart.
I still don’t like that it makes the confines of Andor’s life a little smaller, but I think I see what the aim was, and it’s sufficiently in keeping with the rest of the show’s intelligence that I don’t mind it.
Thinking about your statement about how this makes Andor's life smaller and it struck me.
The Death Star is huge. Like, the sheer amount of resources and labor required to make it is unfathomable. There must be millions, if not billions of people who, knowingly or unknowingly, contributed to it's creation. There's no other way they could have created.
It may seem ironic that Andor wound up working on parts for the death star, but realistically, how could he have not? Most, if not all, prison labor camps in the empire are probably working on that thing. They'd have to be. Where else are you going to get that much labor that can't ask questions and you can keep 100% silent?
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syndalisGetting ClassyOn the WallRegistered User, Loves Apple Productsregular
I did not like the Andor post-credit scene as a first reaction, but giving the show folks the benefit of the doubt, I may have talked myself into liking it:
I hate that it’s the Death Star, because as others have said, it’s like the most obvious Star Wars imagery out there, and the first time the franchise really started eating its old ideas rather than be inventive.
But stepping past that, the thematic work here is kind of great. The piece the prisoners made wasn’t a primary focus of the machine - it wasn’t the super laser itself, it wasn’t even the reflecting panels. It was a connective piece that holds the structure together - useless on its own but absolutely critical to the weapon’s function.
I think that extends the lessons of the prison arc rather brilliantly. The workers made these connectors out of deluded self-interest: if they work and follow the rules, they will survive and not be hurt. The connectors are products of fear and compliance, and their use in the Death Star elevates that idea - the entire fascist structure of the Empire is invisibly dependent on fear and compliance all the way through, from the galactic level down to individual lives.
It’s not the super weapons that hold things together, it’s the false belief that compliance will spare you. As soon as that cracks it all starts to fall apart.
I still don’t like that it makes the confines of Andor’s life a little smaller, but I think I see what the aim was, and it’s sufficiently in keeping with the rest of the show’s intelligence that I don’t mind it.
Thinking about your statement about how this makes Andor's life smaller and it struck me.
The Death Star is huge. Like, the sheer amount of resources and labor required to make it is unfathomable. There must be millions, if not billions of people who, knowingly or unknowingly, contributed to it's creation. There's no other way they could have created.
It may seem ironic that Andor wound up working on parts for the death star, but realistically, how could he have not? Most, if not all, prison labor camps in the empire are probably working on that thing. They'd have to be. Where else are you going to get that much labor that can't ask questions and you can keep 100% silent?
Even moreso
If you have a massive galaxy-wide labor project and there is a shortage in labor, maybe you just arrest random people standing around for standing, and put them in a labor camp to keep the project moving.
As an evil empire, it makes a lot of sense, and tracks pretty well with real world history too.
SW-4158-3990-6116
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
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cj iwakuraThe Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered Userregular
cj iwakuraThe Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered Userregular
I finished Tales, and liked the last two episodes more than I expected(that finale bit of episode 5 is ice cold), but the Dooku stuff was still definitely the highlight.
What is the Fortnite thing? I have never played it.
Epic was making a survival/crafting/base defense/horde mode game for a long, long time that people honestly thought was vaporware at one point. Then one of their business partners started making the first major battle royal game, Playerunknown's Battlegrounds and Epic was like "This rocks, let's rip it off" and put a battle royale mode into Fortnite while keeping the base building stuff and it became insanely popular in the west. Eventually they started doing marketing deals with anyone who'd let them put a character into the game, so now you can find Goku and Batman shooting guns at each other while John Wick and Spider-Man try to blow each other up with rockets, and then they took out the base building stuff so even cynical game industry people are getting into it now.
We know what Fortnite is. What does this have to do with revealing something about Star Wars?
It might have been neat if it had, oh, been in a Star Wars game, like Battlefront or Squadrons.
The Palpatine reveal might have been pretty cool if they had the Palps speech instead of the opening crawl, and then panned down to show Kylo coming in on a landing on Sith planet followed by exposition dump/scenery chewing between the two characters. It still wouldn't be good because Palpatine coming back is just stupid, but it'd get rid of the frenetic rapid-fire action scenes with Kylo and put the shocking reveal of the movie's antagonist in the actual movie.
As much as I love the character, he should stay in the Andor/PT era going forward. They finally had the chance to let Kylo run the show, and wrecked it in all of five minutes.
God yeah, and McDiarmid smarming it up as Senator/Chancellor or chewing all the scenery as Sidius/Emperor is just the absolute best thing, so saying no to more Palps hurts.
Yeah, ‘The Dead Speak’ at the start of the TRoS text crawl was a reference to that bit in Fortnight.
Wait, for real? This isn’t a joke?
That makes it even dumber, which I didn’t think was possible
It is a thing that actually happened. No joking at all. I watched a YouTube clip and it's just a bunch of Star Destroyers with the Falcon landing and then Palpatine going on a rant about how the Final Order is coming to kick everyone's asses or something. All while a pile of rando avatars bunny hop all over the place. It is probably the single dumbest movie related thing I've ever seen.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
One of the bits in Andor I really appreciate in hindsight is the way the ending of the heist really reinforces the ending of the funeral sequence.
At Aldhani the imperial guy tells us what they've been doing for years in order to break up the native culture, so that less and less participate in their native tradition each time. And we see that imperial derision towards the locals, with their bad smells and their gross skin exchange and etc etc.
In the moment it doesn't really seem to have much to do with the actual heist A plot, but it comes back around big time when we go back to Ferrix. We never really had an inside view of the Aldhani people, but we do for Ferrix, so this time we see that same imperial colonial dynamic working out from the local side instead of the imperial side. The local boss negotiating with the locals over the exact count, when the point is that it's still way less than should be attending an important funeral like that. And the same utter disdain for the local customs - the daughters of Ferrix have been addressed with respect by everyone from Ferrix, but to the imperials they're a local social club, and right up until the end the imperials are just paying zero attention to anything HoloMaarva is saying.
So like when the fighting finally breaks out we know why they're fighting - not just because the empire sucks in general, but in the specific situation of Ferrix because if they don't fight now their traditions like this one will be reduced and reduced every year, until they're in the same position as the Aldhani with only a few folks left. It's a great job of giving you the information you need before you know you need it.
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
I very much liked how the Empire cut the ceremony down in size so they could make it this controllable event where they could watch for Cassian, and then they cut it down even more just to add a little Empire cruelty. Even when it adds no benefit, true-believer Imperials just cannot keep themselves from squeezing juuuuust that little bit more.
I love that just as a cherry on top the Prefect kicks Marva's dog, just in case the audience wasn't paying enough attention, I saw red every time there is a clip of him doing that.
A thing I realized in retrospect about Marva. When Cassian comes to get her and she insists she has to stay and fight with the rebels, you kind of feel sorry for her. Aw, she wants to do something but she's old and sick, yet she's going to play at fighting the Empire. She's going to do something stupid and get herself killed.
And then she strikes the biggest blow of all, without a blaster or lightsaber. And I appreciate that she used her status in the town for good, since the usual depiction of the town "Auntie" is a villain or a busybody.
A thing I realized in retrospect about Marva. When Cassian comes to get her and she insists she has to stay and fight with the rebels, you kind of feel sorry for her. Aw, she wants to do something but she's old and sick, yet she's going to play at fighting the Empire. She's going to do something stupid and get herself killed.
And then she strikes the biggest blow of all, without a blaster or lightsaber. And I appreciate that she used her status in the town for good, since the usual depiction of the town "Auntie" is a villain or a busybody.
I found it compared favorably to the best scene in The Last Jedi. She even kinda looked like a Force ghost in that hologram.
Marva basically pulled a Luke Skywalker but 20ish years earlier and dunked all over the Empire in her death.
Don’t know if we moved past it (who am I kidding, we will never move past it) but my favourite bit in TFA, which most people hated because goofy CG or whatever, was the Rathtar scene, because it felt like the first time I felt like I was actually seeing something new play out in Star Wars, and then the movie never did anything that fun again.
While Marva's speech and the following riot were inspirational in a way I can't help but think that inciting unarmed and unprepared civilians to charge a firing line at no risk to one's self on account of being dead is all that great. It's kind of a dick move even...maybe. I rationalized it by thinking Marva would've assumed the imperials would've banned a large gathering and procession, like they always do, and that the ceremony would've been more private out of the imperials' hearing range presumably. I'm all for partisan insurrection against the Empire but that was mostly a very bloody and costly symbolic gesture.
Or maybe we're not supposed to analyze it in this way and it's just meant to be a cool moment and a convenient meta-narrative distraction without which Cassian couldn't have rescued Byx.
I was thinking the same while watching it, until she lampshaded it. She says something to the effect that is easy for her to say these things now, when they can't hurt her anymore. She said it, they heard it, and if they didn't care that she wasn't there suffering with them, it's probably because she was spitting facts.
Honestly if the local garrison weren't under strict orders re: "this is a trap for one man, you will let them do whatever they want so I can draw him out and so help me if you kill him then I'm going to kill you" then maybe her speech gets shared on the holonet but 99% chance no one ever hears it and she's just recording her thoughts on sheer principle.
Her statement is basically "I died after living a life of suffering, and you can live a life of suffering or you can die fighting the Empire." I don't think she or anyone else there had any illusion that they would "win" Ferrix. But what they did was force the Empire to act in a way that will force the rest of the universe--those who maybe aren't yet experiencing the brutality themselves yet--into action before the hammer comes down on them.
I said it as a joke before but god I would kill to just have the Andor production team and writers keep telling the story up to and including the fall of the empire and he can leave jedi out of it if he wants
I know I'm the only one who wants that and it's impossible, but I still want it
Ehh, the folks at the funeral plainly knew what was brewing. When everyone's marching up dudes are breathing heavy, clenching their fists, generally looking like they're psyching themselves up for a fight. A review I heard compared it to an IRA funeral, which feels about right. The Empire told them a funeral of no more than 40 and there were waaaay more people there than that, the writing was kinda on the wall. Even before Maarva's speech they knew what that might mean. Maarva enflamed the crowd even further but they were already ready to fight.
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
I said it as a joke before but god I would kill to just have the Andor production team and writers keep telling the story up to and including the fall of the empire and he can leave jedi out of it if he wants
I know I'm the only one who wants that and it's impossible, but I still want it
Don't think it's impossible, just keep doing what it's doing - show all the places Luke, Vader, etc WEREN'T. Big war, plenty of galaxy.
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Tynnanseldom correct, never unsureRegistered Userregular
Ehh, the folks at the funeral plainly knew what was brewing. When everyone's marching up dudes are breathing heavy, clenching their fists, generally looking like they're psyching themselves up for a fight. A review I heard compared it to an IRA funeral, which feels about right. The Empire told them a funeral of no more than 40 and there were waaaay more people there than that, the writing was kinda on the wall. Even before Maarva's speech they knew what that might mean. Maarva enflamed the crowd even further but they were already ready to fight.
It mirrored the scenes in One Way Out, just before everything popped off, with everyone vibrating with tense energy.
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I still can't believe that was real. On account of "I don't play Fortnite" and also "why would I think Fortnite would reveal substantial, integral portions of a coming Star Wars movie's plot?".
Epic was making a survival/crafting/base defense/horde mode game for a long, long time that people honestly thought was vaporware at one point. Then one of their business partners started making the first major battle royal game, Playerunknown's Battlegrounds and Epic was like "This rocks, let's rip it off" and put a battle royale mode into Fortnite while keeping the base building stuff and it became insanely popular in the west. Eventually they started doing marketing deals with anyone who'd let them put a character into the game, so now you can find Goku and Batman shooting guns at each other while John Wick and Spider-Man try to blow each other up with rockets, and then they took out the base building stuff so even cynical game industry people are getting into it now.
Who would be trolling whom? If a ghost was haunting me and in life he tried to murder me in my sleep, I'd never shut up about it. Every time he started cracking wise, I'd have to remind him exactly how I got into mustache twirling villainy.
"Guess I should have just killed you instead of hesitating then. My bad."
We know what Fortnite is. What does this have to do with revealing something about Star Wars?
I believe it will be referring to this:
And then Kylo keeps a rando civilian around to force choke whenever Luke shows up. Robot Chicken can do the Force Ghost trolling gag, but that doesn't work so well there's an actual murdering bastard in the mix. Plus, some of the better parts of the ST are when Kylo isn't being super angry and angsty, and is having something like a normal conversation with another character. It'd be better if he was having that conversation with one of the actually living main characters, but Force Ghost Luke would do in a pinch.
It might have been neat if it had, oh, been in a Star Wars game, like Battlefront or Squadrons.
If I remember correctly one of the scripts for what became RoS (might have been Trevorrow's?) did actually have Kylo hunting down some Sith artefact or other with Luke's ghost constantly mocking him. That was the script that also had the rebels resistance hijack an Eclipse class super star destroyer. Certainly a ship like that with a gun capable of Rogue One style single reactor ignition shots would make a hell of a lot more sense as a big scary threat compared to Palpatine pulling a million Star Destroyers with full planet annihilating superlasers out of his ass.
The Palpatine reveal might have been pretty cool if they had the Palps speech instead of the opening crawl, and then panned down to show Kylo coming in on a landing on Sith planet followed by exposition dump/scenery chewing between the two characters. It still wouldn't be good because Palpatine coming back is just stupid, but it'd get rid of the frenetic rapid-fire action scenes with Kylo and put the shocking reveal of the movie's antagonist in the actual movie.
As much as I love the character, he should stay in the Andor/PT era going forward. They finally had the chance to let Kylo run the show, and wrecked it in all of five minutes.
But stepping past that, the thematic work here is kind of great. The piece the prisoners made wasn’t a primary focus of the machine - it wasn’t the super laser itself, it wasn’t even the reflecting panels. It was a connective piece that holds the structure together - useless on its own but absolutely critical to the weapon’s function.
I think that extends the lessons of the prison arc rather brilliantly. The workers made these connectors out of deluded self-interest: if they work and follow the rules, they will survive and not be hurt. The connectors are products of fear and compliance, and their use in the Death Star elevates that idea - the entire fascist structure of the Empire is invisibly dependent on fear and compliance all the way through, from the galactic level down to individual lives.
It’s not the super weapons that hold things together, it’s the false belief that compliance will spare you. As soon as that cracks it all starts to fall apart.
I still don’t like that it makes the confines of Andor’s life a little smaller, but I think I see what the aim was, and it’s sufficiently in keeping with the rest of the show’s intelligence that I don’t mind it.
Thinking about your statement about how this makes Andor's life smaller and it struck me.
It may seem ironic that Andor wound up working on parts for the death star, but realistically, how could he have not? Most, if not all, prison labor camps in the empire are probably working on that thing. They'd have to be. Where else are you going to get that much labor that can't ask questions and you can keep 100% silent?
Even moreso
As an evil empire, it makes a lot of sense, and tracks pretty well with real world history too.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Wait, for real? This isn’t a joke?
That makes it even dumber, which I didn’t think was possible
God yeah, and McDiarmid smarming it up as Senator/Chancellor or chewing all the scenery as Sidius/Emperor is just the absolute best thing, so saying no to more Palps hurts.
It is a thing that actually happened. No joking at all. I watched a YouTube clip and it's just a bunch of Star Destroyers with the Falcon landing and then Palpatine going on a rant about how the Final Order is coming to kick everyone's asses or something. All while a pile of rando avatars bunny hop all over the place. It is probably the single dumbest movie related thing I've ever seen.
At Aldhani the imperial guy tells us what they've been doing for years in order to break up the native culture, so that less and less participate in their native tradition each time. And we see that imperial derision towards the locals, with their bad smells and their gross skin exchange and etc etc.
In the moment it doesn't really seem to have much to do with the actual heist A plot, but it comes back around big time when we go back to Ferrix. We never really had an inside view of the Aldhani people, but we do for Ferrix, so this time we see that same imperial colonial dynamic working out from the local side instead of the imperial side. The local boss negotiating with the locals over the exact count, when the point is that it's still way less than should be attending an important funeral like that. And the same utter disdain for the local customs - the daughters of Ferrix have been addressed with respect by everyone from Ferrix, but to the imperials they're a local social club, and right up until the end the imperials are just paying zero attention to anything HoloMaarva is saying.
So like when the fighting finally breaks out we know why they're fighting - not just because the empire sucks in general, but in the specific situation of Ferrix because if they don't fight now their traditions like this one will be reduced and reduced every year, until they're in the same position as the Aldhani with only a few folks left. It's a great job of giving you the information you need before you know you need it.
And then she strikes the biggest blow of all, without a blaster or lightsaber. And I appreciate that she used her status in the town for good, since the usual depiction of the town "Auntie" is a villain or a busybody.
I found it compared favorably to the best scene in The Last Jedi. She even kinda looked like a Force ghost in that hologram.
Don’t know if we moved past it (who am I kidding, we will never move past it) but my favourite bit in TFA, which most people hated because goofy CG or whatever, was the Rathtar scene, because it felt like the first time I felt like I was actually seeing something new play out in Star Wars, and then the movie never did anything that fun again.
Or maybe we're not supposed to analyze it in this way and it's just meant to be a cool moment and a convenient meta-narrative distraction without which Cassian couldn't have rescued Byx.
I know I'm the only one who wants that and it's impossible, but I still want it
Don't think it's impossible, just keep doing what it's doing - show all the places Luke, Vader, etc WEREN'T. Big war, plenty of galaxy.
It mirrored the scenes in One Way Out, just before everything popped off, with everyone vibrating with tense energy.