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That was never a problem with ESB! The Falcon's hyperdrive was faulty, they had to sublight between Hoth and Bespin, it took them implied weeks (I believe explicit weeks in the novelization) of dodging the Empire to get there! TLJ blows up using that excuse in it's first hour with it's dialogue!
I'm probably missing the bit, but dammit you got me with this!
Dilithium power extraction creates a lot of excess low density gas that immediately goes into space. The sound you hear is the thrust pushing the air past you.
Why’s the Death Star even need a trash compactor
If a lightsaber can burn through metal why doesn’t it melt the casing
How do Jedi recharge their lightsabers what do they run on
What’s Yoda’s actual age? He says he’s 600 in Empire and then 900 in Jedi that’s a big difference
Why are Jedi so bad at communication
No Ben, a lie through omission is still a lie
Who ran the QC for the AT-AT tripping is a big weak point
Why do I smell burning toast
sighs I really don't have anything better to do this afternoon do I
-Doylist writing, you need something your heroes can escape since the big firefight seems like a bad idea. Watsonian - Contractors building the deathstar decided compacting the garbage made it easier to feed into the recycling components of the system we never see.
-A saber isn't truly generated until it passes through it's emitter, and is sheathed to prevent the plasma from flying everywhere, including back at the casing.
-Lightsabers have special power cells to start the ignition of the blade. They're like keyfob batteries, last years at a time, but a smart Jedi will keep a spare or 2 on hand just in case.
-Yoda is 900 years old. He's been training Jedi for 600 years.
-Because they were raised in a cult that taught them to repress emotions instead of work through them like sane people.
-Yes, Ben was wrong for this, that's why he initially failed to stop Anakin.
-Davin Felth, the "Look sir, Droids!" sandtrooper. He was QA'ing the AT-AT, and actually figured out a work around for the tripping problem during a test. Unfortunately, he pointed it out and the contractor was a friend of Tarkin's, so he got busted down to line trooper and sent out on backwater patrols while the problem was swept under the rug.
And also a while back, I, uh, had a thought for why a fascist dictatorship would put a waste disposal chute next to the prison block on their ultra-secret genocide engine.
Was it even a dump chute? I think they just wanted the prisoners to smell the garbage 24/7.
Oh
Oh
In truth I recall Leia shooting a hole in the prison wall to get in there. But still, maybe it was just a security grate or something. And once you have a thought like that it does not leave you.
Like not “this ruins my disbelief” but more “what the fuck series of events happened that put the worst fucking space squid in that fetid shit”
someone had to have bought that fucking thing on board
Eh, probably just hitched a ride with some food or something, like most pests do.
The bigger question is where did it go when it wasn't in the crusher. There's probably a ticket in the security office work list to investigate how personnel are disappearing from the bathrooms and showers INSIDE a gigantic space station, always in convenient proximity to a loose grating.
It should basically be a space horror story except it's hard for one mysterious alien beast to compete with a moon-sized space station filled with thin polished catwalks without railings hanging over bottomless chasms of death.
You ever see those videos of how just how tight of a space an octopus can squeeze through?
…
WHY DID I SAY THAT OH GOD THAT JUST MAKES THEM WORSE AAAAAH
[ Memories Unlocked: Shadows of the Empire 64 Visual Trauma ]
Jedi were 10,000 approx during the Republic Era, probably in the low hundreds in the Imperial years maybe? Even a 90% kill rate for order 66 gives you only 9,000 dead, so that’d be 1000 Jedi running around the entire galaxy (which, as small as Star Wars feels, is still a galaxy)
Sith is just Vader and Palpatine, with Maul rejecting the Sith over everything it cost him and how it did nothing but betray him at every turn, but still being one who embraced the dark side outside of a specific order or sect.
I actually think someone working at Lucasfilm said recently as many as 100 Jedi survived Order 66, and people were like "ugh, that's so fucking many, way to kill the whole point of the OT." According to Wookieepedia, including unnamed characters not shown to have died, and Inquisitors are former Jedi, there are 50 survivors depicted so far in media, so we're halfway there!
And sure, yes, going from like two people to fifty times that many does make Obi-Wan and Yoda and Luke seem less special.
But!
a. It just means they survived Order 66, not that they even survive to the era of the OT. Several such characters (such as that one dude in Obi-Wan) have already been shown to have died.
2. It's a fucking galaxy; 10000 was already a ridiculously low number for Jedi.
iii. Imagine 99% of everyone who lives in your town just getting fucking murdered. That would count as a pretty fucking clean sweep, no?
I think the feeling now is less the actual number and more the density of the survivors. Like in any given settlement, there's 3-5 Jedi around.
This is more of a shitpost and I'm sure the actual answer is actually reasonable... but I'm also curious just how many Jedi are in and around Tatooine at any given time? Or the highest number total at once?
Can a person without enough intrinsic Jedi juice get results if they're dedicated to their training and achieve the right sort of insight or enlightenment despite lacking the leg up on understanding that comes with having a deluxe helping of midi-chlorians whispering to you? The Jedi Service Corps for Jedi younglings that don't make it to Padawan and then Knight is still canon, apparently, but did they get filtered by Force aptitude alone?
I think the most interesting route would be 'anyone could hypothetically be a Jedi, even if it's be hard to get over the initial hump for some'.
All lifeforms, even non-sapient ones, in the Star Wars universe have midi-chlorians in them and a connection to the Force. Progressing from 'too weak to be noticed' to 'hunches' to 'feel the Force' to 'use the Force'.
So they don't have to try hard if they want to make it a little fuzzier than 'you have winners and you have losers, determined at birth by the contents of their veins'.
From a story structure perspective, the Inquisitors also add something Star Wars was in desperate need of: minibosses.
Like a big problem with trying to do episodic/longform adventures in Star Wars is that there is no amount of Stormtroopers that will read as a valid threat to any Force sensitive to an audience anymore after thirty years of getting clowned on by everything, but also you *can't* afford to dilute your Big Dogs, ie Vader and Palpatine, by having them actually face off against heroes at the start of things. And you have kind of nothing inbetween.
Inquisitors solve this problem. They're Dark Force Users, so they're allowed to be threats, but also they're explicitly just attack dogs that are not allowed to actually learn much about about the Force (because if you learn too much and have an epiphany and stuff you get Vader'd). Basically Star Wars really needed something like the Inquisitors.
Sure, the spinning saber is silly, but it's also very Empire(tm) silly - it's impractical but it LOOKS scary, which is just kind of the whole Empire ethos in a nutshell.
Inquisitors were just a way to wiggle around Lucas making the dumbass Rule of Two for the Sith, a turd of an idea that has never done anything good for the setting. It's an incredibly stupid philosophical idea and basically means the Sith ideas are permanently on the verge of total destruction, no matter how much of the galaxy the Sith control. All it takes is one potential Sith to fuck up, kill their master, flip back to the Light Side, and then the Sith are basically gone. Yeah, yeah, the Sith disobey and have their side-apprentices and whatnot, but that still cuts you down to like six Sith-ish people at any given time as opposed to the Sith having a whole Academy and army of their own to oppose the Jedi. It would've been far better off if this whole time there was a selection of Sith being wielded against the Jedi, with the idea being it forces Vader to stay on his toes and keeps him distracted from plotting against the Emperor. And while the Sith infight for the sake of power, they're still supposed to have a goal in that order comes from strength and they want to have everything ordered. No way can Palpatine keep the whole galaxy under the thumb of the Sith with himself and one meager apprentice, he'd need Sith heading up at least every major force in every system.
And what's the upside for the Inquisitors? They definitely don't get trained up like Sith so there's no real chance at having a ton of personal power. They just kinda... hang around, pecking at each other to get to the top of their shit-heap. Even if they reach Bestest Inquisitor, they're still a very far cry from any full Sith and they'll never get promoted to actual Sith apprentice, so there's no point.
Kanan and Hera have this exact conversation when he's training Sabine how to use the Darksaber.
So, at least per Filoni's view, anyone can access the Force, so long as you can center yourself (edit: and not even just anyone, literally Sabine specifically). Maybe not rip ships from the sky, but you can connect with it, let it guide you.
Then in the second episode I laughed way too hard when a character called it the “far galaxy”. She glared pretty hard because that level of dad-joke is usually her purview.
It’s good that Lucas never got to explain the whole thing with the Whills because it just makes it even more bizarre and at odds with the spiritual nature of the Force.
The crass version of the Whills is you do nothing, share no connection. No, it’s that deep inside your ancient space-mitochondria are goddamn fucking Whos living in mitochondrial Whovilles, and they’re the ones with the actual connection to the force and the more space-mitochondria, and thus the more Whos you have living throughout your body, well, the more attuned you are to and strong in the Force.
“Wait, then so nothing I do, no spiritual training, no form of enlightenment, no openness and connecting with others will connect me to the Force more intimately, the literal life force of everything in the universe”
Nope! Fuck you Horton! Not enough Whos!
Could work with how Chirrut is portrayed in rogue one.
Still think making another character a "jedi" is not a good idea
Which is the OT (and TLJ) version of the Force.
It's an energy field created by all living things. While certain people may have a natural ability to tap into it better than others ("The Force is strong in this one"), it should be something all living things can use.
The mistakes that were made were Lucas thinking this natural variation in Force talent had to be explained at all (midichlorians) and JJ utterly not understanding what the previous 6 movies said about it, and boiling it down to super special bloodlines.
Based on that experience, I think the show's ... okay? That's about it.
As for the plot, it's a little too Proper Noun-y for me at this point. All ancient temples and secret orders and mysterious artifacts. The premise sort of works; a bunch of old friends who already did their heroism and now went their separate ways, now forced to come back together for (possibly) one last job? You can hang a series on worse concepts. Everyone having changed, old wounds opening up all the time, people having new priorities as they went from Rebels to The Establishment (except those that refused to do so?) Now, the question is if the show can live up to it.
The quality of Star Wars media has been pretty much uniform in its mediocrity and popcorn sensibilities. In particular, it is literally aimed at children (with Resistance being the epitome of that spectrum). Even the few outliers we can think of, such as Rogue One, were reportedly bent towards that direction during the production process (see also: the MCU). Andor is probably the only thing I know of offhand which was specifically not treated as something that children would be able to watch and enjoy.
And before you say, "Just because it's for children doesn't mean it has to be bad!" I would point out that a lot of the things we think are "bad" as adults are necessary for children to understand and consume. As an extreme example, nobody here is gonna be watching Blue's Clues and think, "Wow, that dialogue is deep, and check out that cinematography!"