Category: Western Culture

I Remember That Episode

 

Set Creativity To Warp Factor 1, Mr. Chewbacca

Mega Star Destroyer

Used to consider myself a little more of a Star Wars guy than a Star Trek guy, but lately I've begun thinking about how depressing the Star Wars cinematic universe really is.

Take any World War 2 movie: no matter how harrowing, it's either explicit or implicit that all the carnage and sacrifice results in 75 years of real-world peace. Even if the characters die, the ultimate payoff to all the conflict is peace.

Now take Return Of The Jedi. Good guys win, galaxy is liberated, everyone lives happily ever after.

Except that they don't live happily ever after. Poor bastard Luke Skywalker spends the next 35 years of his life fighting the remnants of the Empire, until he gets PTSD and crawls into a fetal position in his hermit's cave.

And who can blame him? What's he got to look forward to? Or we, the audience, for that matter? Just movie upon movie of war without end.

And that's why the Star Wars universe is a depressing place. In the Star Wars universe, peace can never be the ultimate payoff. Disney expects yearly returns on a 4.5 billion dollar investment. Can't say that I blame them, but any final "victory" in the latest trilogy is going to seem very hollow when the next band of plucky heroes just have to fight Empire 3.0 in the trilogy which inevitably follows.

More Death Stars, more planetary genocides, more nihilism, ad infinitum.

Sorry Disney, count me out.

UPDATE (Aug 11 / 2017): Just to expand upon one point: in Star Trek, the default state is peace. Of course, in order to have drama, some kind of conflict has to exist. So in any given episode or movie, violence or brinksmanship or diplomacy is used to deal with the conflict.

With the conflict resolved, the Star Trek universe once more reverts to its natural state, peace. (Even if, in the case of the Original Series, that peace sometimes was imperfect and took the form of cold wars with the Klingons or Romulans.)

Conversely, with Star Wars, the default state of nature is war. The audience always knows that war continues between episodes. There's rarely any respite, other than perhaps the occasional happy end-of-trilogy celebration sequence to signify a brief, fragile peace before the resumption of hostilities.

(About the only way to avoid this problem would be to set the next trilogy in the Old Republic or a thousand years into the future in the Third Republic. Which I don't see happening — they'd lose too much on the merchandising of the current characters, etc.)

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She Broke The Glass Ceiling By Being The First Woman To Graduate From The Vulcan Science Academy

Doctorates in spaaace!

This Is CNN

A photo of "a vile lich-like Face of Death, and also, a prop severed Trump head."

CNN's Kathy Griffin: When they go low, we ... aw, fuck it, we decapitate people.

That's Kathy "al-Amriki" Griffin to you, Infidels.

POSTSCRIPT: 

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Two Corinthians, Too

Talk of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg exploring his options for running for high office.

Best of luck to him, but I suspect two billionaire businessman won’t be elected in a row.

[There are no atheists in the foxholes…or on the campaign stump!]

[D.C. is worth a mass.]

 

 

UPDATE: I assume this is satire:

UPDATE (May 26 / 2017):

 

UPDATE (Aug 9 / 2017):