Star Wars – Page 2 – Spectre Collie

Boba Fett and the Nasal-Induced Vision Quest

I can remember seeing Return of the Jedi for the first time¹, and being so disappointed that they not only introduced another Death Star, but immediately went back to Tatooine. It was deliberately supposed to be a lifeless backwater where nothing happens! That was the whole point!

Obviously, Star Wars went back to that moisture evaporator many, many more times over the years, turning it from the planet farthest away from the bright center of the universe, into the place where just about everything happens. It’s been one of my biggest annoyances in a franchise that includes Dexter Jettster and Caravan of Courage. But after seeing the second episode of The Book of Boba Fett, I’m finding myself thinking, “No, Tatooine is good actually.”

The Mandalorian already often felt like a Lucasfilm-sanctioned fan film, finally making live-action versions of exactly the things that Star Wars-obsessed nerds have been wanting to see for decades. The Book of Boba Fett is that, doubled. When the subtitles identified a character as “Camie,” I had a momentary nerd freakout when I realized that we were seeing Luke Skywalker’s friends at Toshi Station. (Or maybe Anchorhead?) Including characters from deleted scenes and the novelization was a masterfully-executed deep cut — if you’re a nerd of a certain persuasion, you appreciate the reference, but the story doesn’t depend on your getting the reference at all. The moment earlier in the episode, with the Rancor pit, works similarly: another bit of interesting dramatic irony as the audience is wondering what’s changed since we last saw it.

It’s not just “fan service”² because it doesn’t stop the action for the sake of a nerd reference. It’s also not fan service because it’s awesome. The train sequence in this episode is one of the best sequences in any Star Wars thing ever. It was a perfect blend of action and comedy, old west and sci-fi, with all the elements working perfectly with each other. Even if this had been the one notable scene in the episode, it would’ve made this episode a stand-out.

But all the other details were so well-done, too. The sequence with the mayor, menacingly speaking through a calm translator device. The showdown with the Hutt twins, with one of them wiping the sweat off of himself with some kind of rat creature. Boba Fett realizing he was more effective with a practice gaffi stick than with his rifle. The Tuskens immediately trying to scavenge the speeder bikes instead of riding them. The whole speeder bike training sequence. And Boba Fett’s whole vision and the following ceremony. It was all filled with concepts that were more interesting, more clever, and more original than they needed to be.

Two ideas stood out to me: one was how interesting it was to see a more expansive — not “inclusive” — take on Star Wars. The Tuskens are shown here to have a society more inspired by native American, aboriginal, and at the end Maori cultures. In just about every other depiction, they’ve just been the Star Wars equivalent of “The Injuns,” backwards, violent, dangerous savages. It could’ve been handled so much more clumsily, but here they’re given a more interesting depiction that makes them sympathetic without losing any of their weirdness, or denying the fact that life in this type of environment would be really brutal.

Which fits with the second idea: seeing the depiction of crime syndicates and gangs on Tatooine gives an idea of how the Empire could’ve been appealing to people if Star Wars planets were real places. To be clear, I am 100% a believer in the idea that Star Wars is about good guys and bad guys, and it’s actually worse for the stories when they try to make the villains nuanced or relatable. Whenever they’ve had villains trying to justify mass genocide and slavery and all of the other stuff the Empire does, by insisting that there needs to be order, it’s come across as unnecessary at best, or clumsily tone-deaf at worst. But showing it from the perspective of regular people trying to go about their day-to-day lives and having to deal not just with monsters everywhere, but gangs and crime syndicates, you can kind of see why they’d be in favor of a Law and Order platform. Plus, all their stuff is newer and shinier.

I liked the first episode of The Book of Boba Fett, but I didn’t love it. Even if I end up being ambivalent about the rest of the series, I loved the second episode. It alone justifies the existence of the whole series, as far as I’m concerned. I want to see an entire spin-off series about the sweat rats.

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At the Northlake theater, and my dad checked me out of school early to go see it
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Although people are always going to complain about “fan service” whenever they see creators working within franchises they love

Jawas are A-holes

Random thoughts about the first episode of The Book of Boba Fett

I don’t honestly have a lot to say about The Book of Boba Fett yet, since the first episode was mostly just laying the foundation for the series. But it’s a new Star Wars TV series about Boba Fett, so I mean it’s not like I can not force my opinions onto the internet.

I really like both Ming-na Wen and Temura Morrison, so I like seeing them be able to take the lead in a series. Especially an action series highlighting lead actors in their late 50s and early 60s — although I hate even mentioning their ages as if it were some kind of novelty, since they’ve made it more or less irrelevant. Before checking IMDB, I would’ve assumed they were at least a decade younger, and obviously, they can both still, as they say on Tattooine, “get it.”

The first episode seemed to be doing everything it could to restore Boba Fett to his 1980 bad-ass status, since the franchise has been piling indignities onto him ever since Return of the Jedi. He didn’t just jetpack out of the Sarlaac, he punched his way out! Granted, the entire episode was basically him getting his ass kicked, but the key was getting his ass kicked and coming out on top. And with his sense of honor-among-thieves-and-murderers intact.

Although I liked it quite a bit, I couldn’t help but wonder whether the budget for this series was cut relative to The Mandalorian. In that series, I can’t remember a single moment where I was taken out of the story by effects or costumes, even when they were paddling down a lava river. In The Book of Boba Fett, though, I kept noticing that they were on a set, or the costumes looked like costumes and the make-up like make-up, or the CGI was noticeably CGI.

One scene in the city had droids that were clearly Boston Dynamics robots in the foreground, which seemed mid-way between a cop-out and a commitment to practical effects. The Gamorrean Guards looked like they found a couple of guys from the Folsom Street Fair and gave them a light coat of green body paint. Speaking of green body paint, one of the Sexy Twilek Servants from the casino looked like they’d brought him in without doing a camera test to make sure the paint worked.

I was wondering whether it was an aesthetic choice, especially when Boba Fett was fighting a monster that looked like an homage to Ray Harryhausen. Some of the animation looked almost like stop motion. To be clear, I’d absolutely 100% respect it as a commitment to practical effects, I just wish I could be more confident that it was. There was a lot of ambition elsewhere in the episode, with perfect costumes for extras only on-screen for seconds.

In any case: I was surprised to see Jon Favreau so heavily involved in the series, just because I’d thought this was more of an independent spin-off with Robert Rodriguez as show-runner. It’s a good sign even though the projects have so much in common, that this already feels distinct from The Mandalorian, with its own tone and a scope that feels just right for a seven-episode series. It’s not exactly what I expected it’d be, but I’m already on board and looking forward to the rest.

Star Wars and Focusing on the Wrong Thing

Getting closer to a Grand Unified Theory of what makes something “feel like Star Wars”

I like to think of myself as a reasonably well-adjusted adult, but every once in a while I get a flare up that reminds me I’m still an Extremely Online Nerd in my soul. Tonight’s episode: getting irrationally angry about Rogue One out of nowhere.

Okay technically not out of nowhere. I was trying to think of how to handle the issue of plugging cables into the Star Wars-inspired computer I want to build, which seemed like a distinctly un-Star Wars thing to be worried about. Everything in Star Wars just works — or more often, doesn’t work for dramatic purposes — without spending even a nano-second thinking about stuff as mundane as cabling or fuel sources.

Then I remembered that the climax of Rogue One has the team both trying to find a particular file in a file system, while simultaneously trying to get a cable to reach a socket. And I mean come on.

Over the years, I’ve settled into a more mature attitude towards Rogue One after my initial nerd-rage: accepting that it has both the best production design of the entire franchise, and the absolute worst plot and characterization of the entire franchise. (Except for K2SO, which I attribute mainly to Alan Tudyk). I’ve already complained about how the entire movie undermines its own protagonist, but if I’m being honest, the thing that bugs me more is that it doesn’t “feel like Star Wars” to me.

Which is also my main issue with The Last Jedi. That movie’s grown on me a lot, although I’ve still got some issues with how it handles the characters. But the biggest problem I have with it is that so much of it just doesn’t feel like Star Wars. The stuff with Rey and Kylo Ren is mostly fantastic, but the bulk of the plot is a pointless and futile digression onto a space casino, and the Resistance fleet running out of fuel.

The plot of a Star Wars story should never revolve around something as mundane as fuel. A broken hyperdrive? Sure! A lack of fuel? Garbage. Again, that’s Battlestar Galactica, not Star Wars.

A broken hyperdrive doesn’t make sense; the Millennium Falcon shouldn’t have been able to travel between planets without it. The reason it works in The Empire Strikes Back is because to the characters, it’s as mundane an obstacle as any other broken piece of equipment, roughly the equivalent of a flat tire or a broken air conditioner. But to the audience, it’s still fantastic.

JJ Abrams gets this, I think, but takes it too far. The Force Awakens built its climax around a “thermal oscillator,” which is nonsense, but is just enough of a McGuffin to drive the action. If anything, he spent too much time with a bunch of adults standing around a table, talking about nonsense as if it made sense. That’s Star Trek, not Star Wars.

And The Rise of Skywalker, along with all its other issues, takes it way too far in the other direction. It’s not that Emperor clones and thousands of planet-killing Star Destroyers, or even the “Force Dyad” or whatever they called it, need to be explained; they do need to be justified, though. There’s no sense of building up to it. It’s just thrown at you as an immediate threat, trying to raise the stakes without “earning” it.

Comparing all the good and bad Star Wars stories I’ve seen and read over the years, I think that the main thing driving the whole Star Wars aesthetic is that it’s impossibly ancient. Technology that’s thousands of years ahead of our own is already thousands of years old by the time our stories start.

It’s so ubiquitous that characters should rarely even comment on it. That’s my “in-universe” explanation for why none of the computer panels or spaceship controls have labels anywhere; it would be as absurd as putting instructions on door knobs or cabinet handles.¹ It’s also why I think the Imperial aesthetic “reads” as evil and unsettling even when you don’t have Darth Vader walking around in it: it’s all so clean and shiny that it literally feels unnatural.

The reason I think it’s important, instead of just a source of Strong Opinions for Nerds, is that it forces (no pun intended) Star Wars stories to be about characters, along with ideas about spirituality and magic. They are, deliberately, silly fairy stories, but dressed in trappings that make them resonate. The sci-fi elements are there to make the fantasy stories feel contemporary.

Looking back on my reaction to The Rise of Skywalker, I’m surprised that my opinion hasn’t changed all that much. I did go back to the theater to see it a second time, and watching it as “Star Wars I can watch on a big screen” instead of “conclusion of a decades-long series that’s been hugely important to me for as long as I can remember” made it a lot more fun. It’s entertaining in the moment, but falls apart at any attempt to put it into a larger context. And whether it’s good or bad, it doesn’t change the enormous potential of Star Wars as a setting for stories.

Both officially sanctioned by Disney-owned Lucasfilm, and even better, the infinite number of stories not set in the Star Wars universe, but inspired by it. Star Wars is a specific aesthetic, and I’m no closer to being able to define it than “I know it when I see it.” But more valuable than that is the idea of freely picking and choosing from elements of pop culture — sci-fi, westerns, samurai movies, swords and sorcerers, WWII movies — to make stories that are about more than just their setting or their aesthetic.

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I admit I do like the theory that everyone in the Star Wars universe is so dependent on droids that they’ve become illiterate, though.

So Many Bobas, or, Why Frog Lady Is So Important To The Mandalorian

More speculation on how the new Boba Fett series fits into Disney+ Star Wars programming, and how The Mandalorian looks without Baby Yoda

(Image for this post was stolen from The Spruce website)

After the season finale of The Mandalorian, I was speculating that “The Book of Boba Fett” shown in the teaser was going to be the third season of the series, which would unexpectedly take on an anthology format, devoting each season or two to a story about another Mandalorian character. Also, I was enjoying the blissfully un-21st-century feeling of having no idea what was going to come next.

Turns out I was completely wrong in multiple ways. By Monday, they were putting Jon Favreau on Disney-owned morning programs to explain what was going down.¹ The Book of Boba Fett is a new, separate series, led by Robert Rodriguez, coming in December of 2021. After it’s complete, season three of The Mandalorian (which is currently in pre-production) will start.

I’m a little disappointed, because I liked the idea of an anthology series, but it sounds like good news overall:

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I’m not linking to the Good Morning America interview because it annoyed me as a Star Wars pedant. At least Favreau gave them explicit permission to call Grogu “Baby Yoda.”

The Mandalorian: The Book of Din Djarin

The Season 2 finale of The Mandalorian, “The Rescue,” once again reminds me of how I felt watching the original movies

Since it was such an annoyance with this episode in particular: spoiler warning for the season two finale of The Mandalorian.

I can’t accurately describe to anyone what it felt like seeing The Empire Strikes Back for the first time back in 1980. For me, it involved my parents driving us to the only mall theater in the state that was showing the movie on its premier night, then waiting in line for two hours. That was back when two hours felt like an eternity. Everyone in the theater was just losing their minds cheering and gasping and booing at every moment from the opening crawl, in response to every character appearance and dramatic reveal. By the end of the movie, I could already tell as a nine-year-old that it had been a transformative experience.

But the season 2 finale of The Mandalorian was kind of almost similar to that. Partly in the hype building up to it, partly in the feeling that everybody in the country was experiencing a Huge Cultural Event at the same time, but mostly in that feeling of simultaneous satisfaction and uncertainty. It was an excellent conclusion to the season, and I have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen next.

Spoiler Warning: Human Beings Continue to Disappoint

When I first heard that Disney+ was going to release its original series as real series, meaning waiting a week between episodes instead of dumping an entire season online at once, I was very happy to hear it. The Netflix model makes sense for what they’re trying to do — be a repository for hours and hours and hours of programming available whenever you want it — but it turns out that even in the over-stimulated 21st century, there’s a lot to be said for that week of speculation and anticipation between episodes. It feels more like a shared communal experience.

Or at least, it would feel like that, if there weren’t so many selfish a-holes out there.

As much as I’ve been loving The Mandalorian, I’m not watching new episodes at midnight the night before a new episode is released. But I’ve seen people not even waiting an hour to start posting spoilers online.

Now granted, I didn’t see many direct spoilers, probably because I’ve managed to weed out the worst offenders from my social media by now. But there were enough people proud of themselves for talking around the spoilers that by the time I watched the episode at a reasonable time tonight, I already had a rough idea of what was going to happen.¹It reminded me of The Crying Game, when I’d seen so many people so deliberately talking around the spoiler that I could tell what the spoiler was within a few minutes.

Most surprising to me, though, was how many people I saw on Twitter defending their right to post whatever they want. “If you don’t want to be spoiled, you shouldn’t be on Twitter!” was the claim. One particularly asinine person started mocking somebody who was complaining about spoilers, then said that if you’re reading Twitter in the morning you’re clearly not working, so you could just as well be watching the episode. Because taking two minutes to scroll through Twitter at work is exactly the same as taking 45 minutes to watch television during work, I guess.

I started to break my read-only policy to call the guy out for not only being stupid, but also being such a jack-ass that he’d go out of his way to defend carelessly and selfishly ruining the experience for other people, instead of showing the barest minimum amount of consideration by demonstrating the barest minimum amount of impulse control for a couple of hours until everyone got a chance to watch it. But then I realized three things.

One is that the people I was about to yell at were people I didn’t know, and one of them is apparently a contributor to a notoriously asinine Disney “news” site, so I had no idea why I’d been following them in the first place.

Two was that once someone’s selfishness has gotten to that point, calling them out on it isn’t going to have any effect at all. If there’s ever any question, the best course of action is always to block them and move on.

And lastly, no matter how selfish their intention, their advice was “you shouldn’t be on Twitter.” Which is impossible to argue with.

Apart from just bitching about a social media platform I should never have signed back onto, this also has me wondering about building anticipation and buzz and community when distribution gets wider and audiences get more and more fractured. The Mandalorian in particular has been, since its first episode, full of revelations that it’s tried to keep under wraps. Surprisingly, it’s succeeded more often than not. Obviously, people are super-eager to talk about it, or there wouldn’t be so many people eager to spoil it, so they’ve built (and earned) a dedicated audience. I’d be interested to see if there are ways to preserve that communal experience of the old broadcast TV days, that don’t just depend on people not being jerks.

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The biggest spoiler was a coy, roundabout tweet from one of the guest stars of the episode, which more or less revealed that they were going to be a guest star of the episode.

The Mandalorian: Then They Saw His Face

The Mandalorian episode “The Believer” surprisingly felt like I was being rewarded for something I hadn’t earned.

The title image is from a WIRED autocomplete interview with Pedro Pascal and Oscar Isaac.

I expected the worst from the latest episode of The Mandalorian, called “The Believer,” since I expected to see Bill Burr’s character come back, and he’s the worst. But instead of being a disappointment, it felt like they were piling on scene after amazing scene showing me something cool that I hadn’t even known I wanted to see.

About five minutes into the episode, nerds worldwide let out a collective sigh of satisfaction, as we finally saw after 40 years a demonstration of exactly how stuff in the hull of the Slave I stays upright when the ship changes orientation. It still amazes me that this show is actually turning out to be a combination of my most sugar-rush-hyped-up fantasies as a 9-year-old, 20-year-old, and 49-year-old: And and and then, Boba Fett shows up, and they’ve both got jetpacks, and then Ming-Na Wen is in the group too, and they all get in the Slave I and fly to a bunch of new planets, and then there’s a scene like the truck chase in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and they just BOOM destroy a ton of Imperials, and there’s like multiple Mandalorians, and they have these bad-ass fight scenes but also when they take their helmets off, they look like Timothy Olyphant, Temuera Morrison, and Pedro Pascal.

Oh! And then for no reason at all, they had Boba Fett launch a seismic grenade to blow up multiple TIE Fighters at once, which might be the only scene I liked in all of Attack of the Clones. At that point, I was already like No really, I couldn’t take any more fan service, I’ve had so much…. oh well all right then.

I’d also been about to complain about how Star Wars keeps reusing the same biome over and over and over again; how many desert planets are in this galaxy, anyway? The only thing I really liked about Rogue One was the production design, and part of that was putting so many familiar Star Wars elements into a completely unfamiliar South Pacific-esque jungle environment. The last episode seemed to have been set in the same area near Los Angeles that episodes of Buck Rogers and Star Trek took place, and this one seemed even closer to being a real place. I’d love it if the live action series were to get as experimental with exotic environments as The Clone Wars series did.

A perfectly paced, satisfying episode like this one proves how much of what works in The Mandalorian is about restraint. There’s still a host of phenomenally talented concept artists and CG artists (and sound designers, and costume designers, etc. etc.) but here, their work is allowed to stand out, because the stories are more straightforward, the action is more old-fashioned chases and beat-em-ups, and the stakes are more personal. In this episode, I actually had the chance to appreciate the design of the pirates’ speeders, since they weren’t lost in a sea of other things fighting for attention.

It’s no knock on Disney or Lucasfilm to say that it’s highly unlikely that they’ll be able to keep this same level of quality with every one of the new Star Wars properties in the works. But if this one is so eerily able to deliver exactly what I want to see, I imagine that they’re eventually going to have a Star Wars that’s perfectly tailored to everybody.

And yes, the only reason I wrote this post is because I’m so inordinately proud of making the “I’m a Believer”/”saw his face” connection that I felt the need to spell it out explicitly.

The Mandalorian: His Backpack’s Got Jets

My reactions to the last couple episodes of The Mandalorian, “The Jedi” and “The Tragedy”

WAMPAAAA! (Advance to 11:58 for the really good stuff)

I didn’t have much to say about last week’s episode of The Mandalorian, titled “The Jedi,” because I didn’t have the same visceral attachment to the characters that a lot of other Star Wars fans seem to. I never got into The Clone Wars series¹, partly because I was still a little bitter that Genndy Tartakovsky’s brilliant series was so quickly forgotten, but mostly because I was still getting comfortable with the premise of “What if the Star Wars prequels had much more engaging stories and were performed by CGI versions of the Thunderbirds puppets?” when they started lobbing Jar Jar-centric episodes at me. I mean what the hell, Star Wars? I thought we’d reached an understanding.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that I don’t have any attachment to the character of Ahsoka Tano. But some people on Twitter and YouTube were so excited they were already posting breathless takes by 1 AM on Friday. I watched it quickly to try and avoid any spoilers, and… I thought it was quite good.

Spoilers after the break!

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I’m trying again, and I’m currently at the end of the first season.

The Mandalorian Was Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience

Episode 12 of The Mandalorian, “The Siege,” was episodic TV Star Wars, and proved the rest of the series isn’t really that

I keep saying that The Mandalorian is what I always wanted to see as a kid in the early 1980s: an episodic Star Wars television series. This week’s episode 12, “The Siege,” was as close to what I would’ve imagined in 1983 as the series has come so far… and proves that I’ve been wrong about the series this whole time.

This was my least favorite episode of the series so far.¹ It says a lot about how much I love this show that being “least favorite” isn’t really a knock against the episode; I liked it a lot. But it shows that there’s been a lot more going on with this series than has been apparent on the surface. It’s seemed like such simple, straightforward, storytelling that it’s easy to neglect just how sophisticated it is in style, character, visuals, and music.

“The Siege” is like Carl Weathers interviewed me as a 12-year-old in 1983 and made a checklist of everything I’d want to see in a Star Wars TV series:

Jetpacks
Speeder bikes
Those acrylic star map things
Insane jump tricks in an Imperial transport
Assault on an Imperial base
Lava
TIE Fighters where the wings fold up and then they fly off and shoot at the good guys who are racing away
Hallways full of sinister experiments
Macarons

But there’s something almost indefinable missing, the heart and soul of this series, the thing that makes it feel more like “classic” storytelling than “scoped down a bit” storytelling. To jump to a different franchise: it’s what separates Mad Max: Fury Road from what I’d imagined Max Max: Fury Road was going to be like before I saw it. This was an action-heavy and plot-heavy episode that was still extremely entertaining, even if it didn’t resonate with me the way the others have.

In this review on Screen Crush², Ryan Arey makes an interesting point that hadn’t occurred to me: if the characters hadn’t been so suspicious of authority and the New Republic at the end of this episode, Baby Yoda would’ve been safely united with Luke Skywalker, and the series would be over. Depending on how deep Moff Gideon’s conspiracy goes, it might’ve even prevented the sequel trilogy before it could start. So maybe the show needs an 80s TV-style catch phrase: Thanks for nothin’, Greef Karga!

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Not that anyone asked, but my previous least favorite was “The Gunslinger” from Season 1.
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Which is also where I stole the title image from

The Mandalorian: Out of Alignment

Middle-aged nerd REACTS to episode 2 of season 2, “The Passenger!”

This is inevitably going to end up a Chris Farley-style review of episode 2, “The Passenger,” because I honestly don’t have a whole lot of insight beyond “Remember when he knocked out those two guys at once with a third guy’s rifle? That was awesome.”

This episode was, as usual, cool as hell, and exactly how you should do televised Star Wars, and it remains the series that I wanted in my childhood but would never have been possible so we live in the greatest time in history, etc. etc. I’m actually a little worried that I’ll get too used to this level of quality week after week, and I’ll start taking it for granted.

The Mandalorian: Now this is fan servicing!

The Mandalorian season opener “The Marshal” was like time traveling back to 1981

Watching The Mandalorian has always given me a vague sense of deja vu, as if I were watching exactly the Star Wars television series I would’ve wanted to see as a kid. According to the Wikipedias, Jon Favreau is five years older than me and grew up in New York City, but especially with the first episode of season 2, “The Marshal,” he’s somehow managed to translate the hopes of a 10-year-old living in the Atlanta suburbs in 1981 directly to the screen.

To be clear, I wouldn’t have been able to come up with any actual stories, or in fact anything specific apart from lots more of this, please. But The Empire Strikes Back left impressionable kids with near-infinite potential: not only could the movies’ story go in any direction, but there were so many possibilities for new planets and new characters and new stories.

Do or do not; there is #nohomo

More spaceships and laser swords, less snogging.

Whenever Star Wars comes into contact with the internet, dumb things happen. One of the most annoyingly dumb things recently has been the insistence that the new sequel trilogy is a perfect stage for better LGBTQ representation, but Disney overlords have kept it from happening.

The kiss between two women at the end of Rise of Skywalker is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it example of tokenism, they claim, kept short so it could pander to liberals but still be easily cut for less gay-friendly foreign markets. And of course the characters of Finn and Poe were obviously well-suited to be a couple, until skittish Disney execs insisted that they each be paired off with hetero romantic interests.

As a red-blooded American white male gay nerd, I’m calling that a bunch of nonsense.

Of course I’d prefer it if a company as large as Disney would choose to stand its ground. Release the movie with its completely innocuous kiss between two women, and let the market decide. (Retaining the arbitrary and unearned kiss between the trilogy’s hero and villain is a lot more offensive, anyway). But then they’d get accused of cultural insensitivity, so I guess there’s not one easy solution. At least the Huckabee family has to see it and get angry about it, so that makes me happy to think about.

But as for making it a more significant beat in the story, my question would be: why? What do you hope to get out of it? These aren’t stories that do a great job with romance in any case; the most successful one in the entire series is still insufferably corny in places. If it’s just a question of representation — which is absolutely important — then I think showing two secondary characters kiss during a happy moment is a great way to handle it.

When I was growing up watching these movies, I would’ve been happy to see any acknowledgement that other gay people exist, and that they don’t need to be primarily defined by or driven by their sexuality. In a series that doesn’t tend to focus on the personal lives of any of its secondary characters, devoting more time to those characters’ relationship would inevitably feel shoehorned.

The one that I feel a lot more strongly about is the business about Finn and Poe. With that, I can’t be as sympathetic to the call for representation, because I think it’s actually a huge and disappointing step backwards. In modern American entertainment, it’s getting increasingly common to see representation of two men in a romantic relationship. What’s still disappointingly rare, though, is to see two men in a supportive, affectionate relationship that isn’t romantic or sexual.

I’m sure that the people pushing for a Finn & Poe romance (including Oscar Isaac himself) believe they’re pushing for open-mindedness, but I think it just reinforces the kind of toxic masculinity we’re already overwhelmed with. It sets a limit on how much two men can show they care about each other before it turns gay. They hug, they’re concerned about each other, they even share clothes — now let’s see them kiss!

Believe me, nobody wants to see Oscar Isaac kissing another dude more than I do, but I think the better and more valuable representation — which could impact more of the audience than just the people who identify as gay — is to show men being caring and supportive of each other without having to be romantically linked. If for no other reason than it reminds all the guys in the audience who don’t identify as gay or bisexual that being affectionate isn’t a threat to their sexuality or their masculinity.

Now, the obvious issue with The Rise of Skywalker in particular is that they introduced Zorii Bliss as a character whose presence in the movie is at least 75% to give Poe Dameron somebody to mack on. I think they handled it well for the most part, seeing as how she’s portrayed as a bad-ass who’s able to show she cares about someone while still not being just a sexual object. And it gave the movie one of its best moments, when Poe turns on the full smolder, and she shoots him down immediately. But there’s no denying that it’s hella heteronormative.

Since that whole character relationship was already loaded down with the kind of corny, when-do-I-get-that-kiss “romance” that already exists in Star Wars, I say the “best” LGBTQ representation would have been to have Zorii Bliss open the helmet and reveal another man. (Like, say, me. I’ll do it. Just call me). It would’ve felt every bit as shoehorned in, but it would’ve at least been somewhat novel.

But let background characters stay in the background, and let Finn and Poe just be friends. It’s not progress to push for gay characters at the expense of telling men that they can’t be straight and give another guy a hug.