February is the Rankest Month

Even before the Internet, people liked lists.  Like David Letterman's old Top 10 lists.  The Internet only made lists even more prevalent, mostly because they're easy to write and can create a lot of discussion.  Hence more traffic, hence more ad revenue.

I started doing a couple of entries ranking movies and then I thought, "Why not just do this all month?"  Yeah, why not?  It helps February is the shortest month so I only need to come up with 12 entries.

Anyway, so starting on Monday I'll be ranking stuff.  Mostly movies and TV shows that you might be familiar with.  And some probably not as much.  Feel free to weigh in and tell all your friends to read the rankings and provide their thoughts for all those sweet, sweet page views.  Not that I get any money or anything, but still.

If you're that person who doesn't like reading lists ranking stuff, I guess come back in March.

To kick things off, here's a ranking of Halloween movies I posted on Facebook last October:

11.  Halloween III: So, so utterly stupid that it needs a guy and two robot puppets at the bottom of the screen

10.  Halloween 2018: Boooooooorrrrrinnnnng.

9.  Halloween 2 (Rob Zombie version): Makes you root for Michael Myers to kill all the obnoxious people in the movie.

8.  Halloween 6: The Producer's Cut makes some amount of sense but not even Paul Rudd can salvage the mess

7.  Halloween 5: Generic horror movie with a lame twist at the end

6.  Halloween H20: Booooorrring. And it gave the world Josh Hartnett. Ugh.

5.  Halloween 2 Original: Boooooorrring.

4.  Halloween 1 (Rob Zombie version): Overly long but not as annoying as the sequel.

3.  Halloween 4: The Force Awakens of the franchise as it's basically an update of the first movie

2.  Halloween Resurrection A fun twist on the formula and prescient about reality TV culture

1.  Halloween The OG Halloween movie!  It's a classic. Nuff said.

The Toy Nexus

The last entry I talked about how I watched a lot of Toy Galaxy videos on YouTube over the holidays.  In watching those, I kind of noticed that 1986-1987 was a big turning point for the toy industry, at least for boys.  Girls toys you had some other things like My Little Pony, Jem, or Cabbage Patch Kids, but Barbie was still the queen.

But for boys there were a lot more options and a lot more upheaval.  In the early 80s from 80-85 the big names were Star Wars, He-Man, GI Joe, and Transformers.  Then you had those in the secondary level like Voltron, Robotech, MASK, Thundercats, and GoBots.  And there's always then some other stuff too.

1986-1987 was when things changed.  Star Wars had pretty much wound down with no new movies and the failure of the TV shows Droids and Ewoks.  He-Man was losing ground, especially after the failure of the movie by Cannon Films starring Dolph Lundgren, a movie that really didn't do much to tie to the existing toys since they had laser guns and traveled to our world to hang out with Courtney Cox and Parris from Star Trek Voyager.  Thanks to Harmony Gold's ineptitude, Robotech's "movie" and second series--The Sentinels--never really happened.  GoBots released a movie that did slightly better than Robotech but not as good as Transformers.  And surprisingly there wasn't a huge interest in "Rock Lords," which were literally robots that turned into rocks.  I'm shocked!  While the lion Voltron did well for a couple of years, the vehicle Voltron didn't go over nearly so well.

Transformers:  The Movie came out in 1986 and traumatized a whole generation of children by killing off pretty much all the older characters, including Optimus Prime.  In part because of that, the movie didn't really do much at the box office, even though my brother and I probably saw it two or three times.  Because of that, GI Joe: The Movie went straight to video the next year and awkwardly didn't kill Duke, though you just never saw him again.

Of all those I just mentioned, Transformers and GI Joe were the only ones that made it into the 90s, though they were limping by then.  Transformers (Generation 1) was dead by 1992 and GI Joe by 1994.  By 1987 the luster was coming off.  Transformers had to rely more and more on gimmicks:  Headmasters, Targetmasters, and Powermasters with little guys who became heads, guns, or engines respectively.  Pretenders where you had an organic shell with a robot inside that turned into a vehicle.  Micro-sized Transformers came after the success of Micro Machines.  The last gasp were "Action Masters," or Transformers where the robot didn't transform while they had a vehicle that did.  GI Joe, meanwhile, started as fairly normal military troops and vehicles, but by 1986-1987 they were getting more and more sci-fi.  Eventually it devolved into a lot of lame gimmicks like Ninja Force, Slaughter's Marauders, the anti-drug force, Eco Warriors, and finally the original Space Force.

You have to think the toy companies saw the handwriting on the wall as they came out with a whole bunch of stuff around that period to try to replace the old lines:

• Silverhawks
• Battle Beasts
• Inhumanoids
• MUSCLE
• Space Com
• Bravestarr
• Jayce & the Wheeled Warriors
• Bionic 6
• Air Raiders

Probably a bunch more I don't remember or haven't seen videos about yet.  The common thread is none of those really had the lasting power of those earlier toys.  Most had one or two waves of toys, a TV show with maybe one season of 13-65 episodes, possibly a comic book with 4-12 issues, and some other merch before disappearing.  And other than maybe a Robot Chicken parody, most haven't had any relevance since the 80s.

Why didn't they succeed?  Well for one thing because there were so many of them that they were largely splitting the vote.

But the other big factor was Nintendo.  The Atari 2600 had been around since the late 70s but the video game industry was almost wiped out in the mid-80s thanks to greed and a lot of shoddy products like ET the Video Game.  Then about 1986 the original Nintendo Entertainment System came on the scene right about the time when a lot of those kids playing with Transformers, He-Man, GI Joe, and whatever were becoming teenagers.  It might seem weird now but in the late 80s the NES was revolutionary.  It was a huge step up over the ancient 2600 and cheaper than the computer systems of the time.  I mean back then you couldn't just go online and get a laptop for $200 or a Chromebook for $100.  So yeah it was a big deal.

And for a year or so you has Lazer Tag and Photon games.  Then a kid was murdered by a cop who thought a Lazer Tag gun was real (panicky cops existed long before Tayvon Martin, Black Lives Matter, etc) and that was pretty much the end for those and realistic fake guns in general.  But Nintendo continued to dominate until 1992 or so when the Sega Genesis came out and then the Super Nintendo and so on to today with the PS4 and XBox One and Nintendo Switch.

Groundwork for the future was being laid in this same period as the indie comic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles started taking the world by storm.  Within a few years it would become one of the biggest toy lines of the early 90s.

So yeah that period in 1986-1987 was a defining moment for the toy industry.  Does this have anything to do with writing or anything?  Yeah, sure.  Nothing is forever.  Some series remain popular for a long time but there are always new challengers and seismic changes in what's popular.  If you're too early or too late then you're probably going to fail.  Or if the market is just too crowded then you're probably going to end up like a lot of those toys I mentioned that didn't make a huge impact.  There, see, I tied together.  Suck it, phantom haters.

Toy Packaging

Over the holidays when I was writing I would usually put on a bulldog mascot yule log video like Butler Blue III, his "girlfriend" Addie of the University of the Redlands, or his buddy Jack of Georgetown University--or former Jack as there's a new one this year.

But one night I loaded YouTube and got sucked into watching a lot of videos from Toy Galaxy.  I mean, "The History of Robotech (Parts 1-4)" is something I couldn't really pass up given I did a whole A to Z Challenge on it.  It didn't tell me a lot I didn't know already except that Harmony Gold is even more fucked up than I thought with the sheer number of lawsuits they've had since bringing Robotech over.  One of their last ones was trying to sue Hasbro over a Sky Striker painted like Jetfire and not only was the case thrown out, they were unable to sue about that anymore, which maybe helped with releasing a couple of Jetfire toys since then, though neither is an actual Veritech fighter yet.

Anyway, while watching a bunch of those videos there was something interesting that was referenced in a few of them about the marketing of toys.  The thing is that in Japan you can basically make any kind of transforming robot, put it in a box, sell it, and someone will buy it.  But American audiences are a lot different.  Americans need a story, a mythology, to buy the toys.  So in Japan the toys that became the Transformers, GoBots, etc didn't really have a story or hardly even any names.  GoBots for instance just had designations like MR-01, -02, -03, etc.  When they were brought to the USA they were given names, albeit kind of stupid ones like Leader-1, Cy-Kill, Cop-Ter, Scooter, and Turbo.

The story of the Transformers being from Cybertron and fighting a civil war and even the factions of Autobots and Decepticons was all made up in the USA, mostly by Marvel writer/editor Bob Budiansky.  The stories for the GoBots and Voltron were also pretty much made over here.  Robotech was partially made up in the USA as Carl Macek had to come up with a way to combine three different series into one saga.

The most successful toy lines all had a marketing blitz to go with the toys.  He-Man, Transformers, and GI Joe all had TV shows and comic books to go with the toys and help to sell them.  A lot of cynical people say that those TV shows and comics were just extended commercials, though I like to think they tried their best to have stories and characters too.  Toys that didn't have that or didn't have that until the toys were already out, tended to do a lot worse.

What I can't decide is whether it's a good thing or bad thing that American kids need these stories/marketing.  I mean does it mean that American kids are just too unimaginative to create their own stories for their toys?  Or does it mean that Japanese kids just see toys as playthings while American kids form more of an emotional bond with their toys?  Or maybe it's both?

But the one thing this does highlight that is important if you're selling books too, is that not every country reacts the same way to something.  We've certainly seen that in movies the last decade or so as foreign markets gain importance.  Some movies like Venom or Aquaman do OK in America but do huge business overseas.  Whereas some movies like Black Panther do really well in America but don't perform as well overseas.  For writers then you have the ability to sell all over the world with Amazon, but you might find that some countries respond better than others.  Though the problem for most indie authors is that you don't really have the resources to actually translate the books into a bunch of other languages.

Anyway, there's some food for thought.

A Bad Prequel and Surprisingly Good Prequels

I'm not a big fan of prequels, whether they're books, movies, or comics.  Most of them suck.  But occasionally there are some that aren't terrible.

A couple of years ago, DC introduced new comics and non-illustrated books aimed at young adult readers.  To pander cater to the younger audience, they were written with the superhero characters as teenagers, before they became famous superheroes.

Two illustrated ones I got for free on Amazon Vine.  The first one was Mera: Tidebreaker.  It's about Mera, who in comics is usually Aquaman's girlfriend or wife.  The graphic novel is when she's only like 16 and hasn't yet gone to the surface world.  But eventually she does to search for Arthur Curry to kill him.  But instead she and Arthur wind up falling in love and stopping a war between Atlantis and the surface world.

The second one was Under the Moon: A Catwoman Tale.  In it Selina Kyle leaves home to escape her abusive father and ends up on the streets.  She has to steal to keep alive and eventually falls in with some other kids.  Then they run into some trouble but Selina is able to get out of it with some help from her high school buddy, Bruce Wayne.

One day Amazon had a couple of the non-illustrated YA novels on sale, so I bought the Batman and Wonder Woman ones.  The Batman one is called Nightwalker.  After an 18-year-old Bruce Wayne wrecks a car to stop some bad guys from getting away, he's forced to do community service at Arkham Asylum to scare him straight.  He meets a girl who's part of a gang called the Nightwalkers.  She doesn't talk to him at first, but eventually she talks to him--and only him.  So the cops encourage him to keep going back.  Eventually the girl is broken out of Arkham and the Nightwalkers take the mayor, Lucius Fox, and a bunch of other people hostage with Wayne Enterprises drones they hacked.  Bruce uses some Wayne tech to sneak in and save the day--sort of a precursor to what he'd do as Batman.

The last one I read was Wonder Woman: Warbringer.  Young Diana is trying to prove her worth to the other Amazons when she sees a boat going down in the ocean.  She rescues a girl and by asking an elder on the island, she finds out that the girl is a "warbringer."  She'll inadvertently cause an apocalyptic war to break out unless Diana can get her to some spring in Greece in like 3 days.  This prompts Diana to leave Paradise Island for the first time.  She and the girl inadvertently end up in New York, where Diana gets to see modern culture for the first time.  So of course there's some adjustment for her.  Then her, the girl, the girl's brother, and the brother's friend all set out for Greece, which is complicated because the brother is actually some kind of demigod!  Diana has to take him on and get the girl to the spring in time.  Does she?  Duh, of course.

These were all good mostly because they focused on telling actual stories, not trying too hard to tie to existing comics and movies and whatnot.  For instance, unlike the Gotham TV series, the Batman book doesn't try to wedge in the entire Batman mythos.  Bruce's best friend is Harvey Dent and of course there's Alfred and Lucius Fox, but that's pretty much it until Gordon shows up for a cameo at the end.  The author didn't try to work in the Joker, Riddler, Scarecrow, Ra's al Guhl, Robin, Batgirl, and everyone else.  That's pretty true for the others as well.

Contrast this to a pre-Disney Star Wars novel I read: Darth Plagueis.  Remember in Revenge of the Sith when Palpatine asked Anakin if he knew of the "tragedy" of Darth Plagueis?  This book was supposed to answer that.  But it makes the usual mistake of focusing more on connecting dots than telling a compelling story with interesting characters.  I mean most of it focuses on Palpatine, not Plagueis!

There's really nothing you could consider a "tragedy."  Plagueis is a member of the Banking Clan who's kind of like a Victor von Frankenstein or Mengele in that he experiments on other creatures to try to find the secrets of eternal life.  Why does he want to live forever?  He has no family, no love interests, or really anything except a desire to rule the universe.  But of course Palpatine betrays him and murders him and takes Maul as his apprentice.

The book was really, really, really boring because there was nothing really compelling.  Like the prequel movies for the most part there was too much emphasis on connecting to Star Wars lore and not enough on crafting an interesting story with characters you want to actually spend time with.

So the upshot of all of this is that just because something is a prequel doesn't mean it's exempt from following the principles of good stories.  You still need a story that can stand on its own and some interesting characters.  Otherwise it feels more like reading a history textbook.

Can Diversity Save Superman?

This is the kind of blog post where a few different things all coalesced in my brain to come up with a thought.  Here they are:

1. Scott Mendelson from Forbes tweeting that while the last two Superman movies did OK in the US, they did not do so well overseas.
2. This Geek Twins post about a black Superman
3. My own blog post about domestic vs international film grosses

Putting 2 and 2 and 2 together to get 6, I think the way to make a Superman movie that's an actual hit is to use some diversity in the casting.  Here are a couple of scenarios.

Option 1:  Black Superman

The upside of this (besides morality) is that in 2018 two of the biggest superhero movies featured black heroes:  Black Panther and Into the Spider-Verse (which didn't do as well as live action movies but fared well for an animated, non-Disney/Pixar movie).  And as noted in my blog entry last year, more than 50% of the gross for each of those movies came from the domestic market, compared to about 30% for movies like Avengers 3 and Aquaman.

So while casting someone like Michael B Jordan as the Geek Twins article mentioned might not play overseas, as Mendelson said, audiences overseas weren't gravitating towards white actors anyway.  So fuck 'em.  Cast a black man and hope for a big domestic gross like Black Panther that means you don't have to rely on overseas to turn a profit.  Sure it'll piss off the Fox "News", MAGA hat snowflakes, but fuck them too.

Option 2:  Chinese Superman

Yes there was a Chinese Superman in the comics for a year or so.  The title was called New Super-Man and featured a Chinese guy who had the same powers as Superman thanks to science or whatever.  The point being there is a precedent, so this isn't coming out of left field.  Maybe center field.

The idea here is you cast someone Asian or Asian-American or maybe even just part-Asian and hope that it appeals more to markets like China.  How would it work at home?  Probably not as well as a black Superman, but then have we had an Asian superhero leading a movie?  Not really with Marvel's Shang-Chi and the 10 Rings not coming out for a year or so.  Which means there's not much hard data to work with.

Option 3:  Chinese Lois/Black Lois

If you don't want to go as far as a Chinese Superman, then why not a Chinese Lois Lane?  You could get someone like Awkafina (Crazy Rich Asians) or Li Bingbing (Megalodon) to play the intrepid reporter and I think it would work just as well as Margot Kidder, Amy Adams, or especially Kate Bosworth.

Would that have enough appeal for the Asian markets?  I don't know.

Similarly you could cast a black woman as Lois and hope that helps to boost the domestic gross even if you have another white Superman.  Someone like Lupita Nyong'o (Us) would be pretty awesome as a reporter crusading for social justice.

Would that work?  Don't ask me.

Option 4:  Some of the Above

And of course you can mix some of these things up.  You could have a black Superman with an Asian Lois.  Or an Asian Superman with a black Lois.  Why the fuck not?  It's the 21st fucking Century!  Let's stop being so fucking Puritanical about this shit.

The overall point here is that not only is diversity ethical, but maybe it could be profitable too.  It's a win-win!

Things That Make You Go...Huh?!

If you've followed the blog for a while, you know one of my little hobbies is coming up with fake movie ideas:  sequels, spinoffs, or even whole trilogies!  And yet when people talk about sequels for some of my books, I just go Huh?!

Take this recent review of Transformed for Mother's Day Too:

Otherwise, this book shows promise, and could easy turn into a full-length novel if you really work at it. After that, ponder a series based on that theme

Well, OK, I'm pondering it...I got nothing.  I mean this story is basically Freaky Friday only it's a boy who becomes the mom.  So what's the series?  They stay swapped forever?  We do the same thing with other moms and kids?  Maybe people would read that, but it'd get pretty boring for me.

And I'm sure I could have made this a full novel but these holiday ones I was often on a tight deadline to finish before the actual holiday involved.  I could expand it and change the title so it's not a holiday book, but...I really don't feel like it right now.

I got really confused by this comment on 24 Hour Woman:

Estelle and Nellie made a good team. I wonder what might happen if Nellie ever returns and meets ... Steve?

Steve?  Who the hell is Steve?  At first I thought of Steve Fischer, the main character who becomes a woman in Chance of a Lifetime, but that didn't make sense.  Then it finally hit me:  Estelle...Steve.  Not sure that really works.  Esteban would work better.

In the story a secretary slips her sexist boss a potion that makes him a hot chick and then he gets to see how the other half lives and stuff.  So I guess the idea in this person's mind is that in a sequel they would both swap gender.  I suppose it could work.  The one book I wrote where a woman turns into a guy didn't sell very well, but if there's still a guy turning into a woman it might do better.

It's just that I don't really care enough to do it right now.  Or possibly ever.

I'd like to use the exact comment from this book, but Amazon destroyed the original, which also included the reviews.  But the gist is that this person wanted a sequel.

The story was about a couple in an unhappy marriage.  The man drinks something that turns him into a little girl.  In the end the guy comes to like his new life and his wife finds a new guy who had lost his wife.  So...what's there to do for a sequel?  Obviously they have more life to live, but there's not really a story there.  Everything ended pretty much Happily Ever After, so what's the point?

This review was pretty succinct for The Lipstick Lesbian Elixir:  "this needs a sequel"

This could have a sequel pretty easily.  It's about a butch detective who accidentally gets doused with a drug that slowly causes her to turn into a hot bimbo who likes girls.  I could just have someone else get doused with the chemical, or a whole bunch of people.  Sort of like the Gender Swap Outbreak trilogy.

The reason I wouldn't do a sequel is mostly economic.  The first book didn't really sell, so there's not much point writing a second or third or fourth.  That's basic Hollywood logic.  And common sense:  don't throw good money after bad.

I guess the idea is just because you want a sequel, you can't really expect the author or publisher to agree.  Creative reasons, economic reasons, there's probably a reason they haven't already done it, especially after 3-4 years like some of these reviews.

Star Wars's Doctor Aphra Should Be a Disney+ Show On One Condition

Amazon Prime Reading has had Marvel's Star Wars comics for a while, but it wasn't until November when I was recovering from having teeth pulled that I actually downloaded some for something to read.  I downloaded the four volumes of the first Darth Vader series, two volumes of the second Darth Vader series and the offshoot series, Doctor Aphra.

If you've never heard of Doctor Aphra, it's because she was introduced in the comics, so I'm pretty sure she's never appeared in any movies or TV shows.  Which is something Disney should correct because she would make a great TV series because she's a pretty fun character.

Basically Doctor Chelli Aphra (and the "Doctor" part might not be legit) is like a young female Indiana Jones who has far looser morals.  And her sidekicks are a Wookie who used to be a gladiator, a psychotic C3PO called Triple Zero or 000, and heavily armed R2D2 called B2-1.  Doesn't that sound pretty awesome already?

In the comics she's recruited by Darth Vader when he's in the Emperor's doghouse and starts creating his own little army to regain the Emperor's favor.  Aphra is able to steal the memory chips or whatever of 000 and B2-1 that were locked up because they're crazy killbots.  Along with those killbots, she helps Vader find and activate an old Trade Federation droid army.  Once Vader manages to do whatever to regain the Emperor's favor, Aphra fakes her death so Vader won't kill her.

The character was popular enough to get her own spinoff series that ran for 40 issues.  The first volume is sort of like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in that Aphra's father is also a treasure hunter, though a less adventurous one, who recruits her to find an ancient Jedi temple.  Like Sean Connery in the Indiana Jones movie, he's spent pretty much his entire life looking for the thing, but it's only in the 5 issues of the comic where he actually finds it with Aphra's help.  Of course there's some competition and things go to hell, but in the end Aphra recovers a green crystal that contains the soul of an ancient Jedi.

There were two issues then that were part of a four-issue crossover with the regular Star Wars title published separately as The Screaming Citadel.  Aphra recruits Luke Skywalker to go to some planet where they might be able to activate the crystal.  The queen of the planet takes an interest in Luke when he demonstrates his Force ability.  She basically wants to suck the Force out of him or something like that.  With the help of Leia and an old girlfriend, Aphra manages to rescue Luke and activate the crystal, which is really not like a traditional Jedi.  It's more angry and crazy and genocidal.

The second volume of the comic is Aphra basically hosting an auction on an old space station.  And of course things go to Hell again.  Triple 0 contacts Darth Vader, who comes to the station with a bunch of Imperials to basically kill everyone.  In order to escape, Aphra has to give 000 its freedom, so she's no longer its master.

Overall it was pretty fun.  It'd make a great TV show with her hunting for various artifacts and concocting some scheme only for things to go to hell and her and her crew having to make a narrow escape.  Action, adventure, fun, in the Star Wars universe.  It'd be a winning combination!  Like The Mandalorian you can do it without any of the existing characters (Vader is in the comics but you don't really need him) and fit it wherever you want in the timeline.  The comics are between Episodes IV and V but it'd be easy to move that without changing the concept of the series.

And since the character is essentially Asian, (I mean they're in a galaxy far, far away so technically no one is "Asian") they could get some more representation in the Star Wars universe; it'd kind of make up for what happened to Rose in the new movies.  And she's a lesbian, though that might be too much for Disney, who still haven't had an openly gay main character in pretty much anything.

But the one caveat:  stick to the tone and story from the Vader comics and first two volumes of the solo series.  The third volume through the end they switched writers and the writer they brought in made the character and story no fun at all.  It's basically the difference between Saul Goodman on Breaking Bad and Saul Goodman on Better Call Saul; one is a fun scoundrel and the other is a pathetic sad sack.

What happens in the comics is the new writer has Aphra basically conscripted by 000 to work for him instead of the other way around.  Like in Suicide Squad he implants a bomb in her neck or something so she won't go rogue.  She recruits a crew so they can try to steal 000's full memories from some Imperial facility.  But of course everything goes to hell.  In the 4th volume Aphra is stuck on an Imperial prison that's basically a mish-mash of junked ships.  Periodically they're used as cannon fodder.  But eventually an old girlfriend, a cyborg Imperial officer who's into her, and a shape-shifting alien converge to help her finally escape.  It was a really dull slog to get through it.  Where was the fun of the first two volumes?  It had completely gone.

Really after reading the first two volumes I thought this would be one of those I'd want to pick up the non-Prime ones on sale.  But then after reading the third and fourth volumes I thought, "Nah.  I'm done."  So really, stick to the fun stuff and it'd be a great series.

That's always a problem with series, whether in comics, regular books, or TV when you change writers.  Some are a lot better than others.  In this case I think it was that the first writer, Kieren Gillen, created the character, so he had a lot better handle on it than Si Spurrier, his replacement.  So you'd definitely want Gillen, not Spurrier, to be the consultant for a series.  I'm just saying.

What is the Nature of Evil?

Monday I talked about the final season of Amazon's Man in the High Castle.  One of the interesting things in that season was that it went into the past of John Smith and showed how he turned to the dark side.  It reminded me of a blog Michael Offutt wrote a few months ago talking about some people and calling them evil.

The thing is, I think just writing people off as "evil" is too simplistic.  Sure Hitler, Charles Manson, and so on are evil, but if we just say they're evil and leave it at that, it oversimplifies everything.  And I think it can blind us to seeing more of those people before it's too late because we can say, "Well, they were just bad apples" and not really think about what made them bad in the first place.

In the case of John Smith the show first shows the alternate universe him in "our" world.  In that world he's an insurance salesman and seemingly content husband and father.  At one point he talks to Juliana, the main character from the other world.  He tells her that in the army he got a battlefield promotion to command of a unit and found he was good at it.  When the war ended, he was glad to get out because he was so good at being in command.  In time he thought the ambition might consume him.

Later the show flashes back to 1946.  The Nazis have nuked Washington DC and forced what's left of the US government to surrender.  Smith and his wife have a new baby who's starving and sick.  A comrade in the army shows up with a Nazi armband and food and milk.  He says that Smith and other former officers can join up with the Nazis.  And while Smith doesn't really want to, he has to think of his family.  It'll only be a little while, right?  So he joins up and even allows a Jewish friend to be taken away to a concentration camp rather than risk death for him and his family.

There's that old saying that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.  Or in this case I guess it's the road to Hell is paved with just trying to survive and keep his family alive.  It was sort of what George Lucas was trying to do in the prequels with Anakin Skywalker:  he wanted to keep Padme alive so badly that he wound up going to the dark side.  Since Smith doesn't leave the military that ambition he feared in the other world drives him to do ever more horrible things, until he's ultimately consumed by evil, telling his wife that he doesn't know how to stop and go back to life before the Nazis.

It's a good portrait in how evil doesn't just happen all at once; it gradually creeps up on people, so gradually they probably don't even notice it until it's too late--if then.

The Final Season of Man in the High Castle is Better Than Game of Thrones But Still Flawed

Amazon's The Man in the High Castle is one of those shows I wish I knew some people who watched it so I could talk about it.  As it is, like other shows like House of Cards--when that was on--I talk about it once a year when the new season dropped and no one really gives a shit.  And so we continue that tradition!

The fourth and final season dropped in mid-November and I watched it pretty much right away.  For a quick recap the show is based loosely on the Philip K Dick novel about a world where the Nazis and Japanese won World War II and split the USA between them with the Nazis taking the Eastern half up to the Rockies and the Japanese taking the Western part up to the Rockies, with the mountains serving as the "neutral zone."

Season 1 introduced these films from "the man in the high castle" that showed basically our world, one where the Nazis and Japanese were defeated.

Season 2 introduced the idea of some characters being able to travel between worlds, notably Japanese trade minister Tagomi.  And we also meet the flesh-and-blood "man in the high castle," played by veteran character actor Stephen Root.

Season 3 introduced a Nazi project in the Poconos in Pennsylvania to build a portal connecting the two worlds.  The hitch is that you can only go from one world to another if you don't exist in one of the worlds.  Like in season 3 the main character Juliana's sister was able to come visit her because she died in that world back in season 1.  If you try to go from one to the other while existing in both worlds, you'll be vaporized.

Season 3 ended with Juliana being captured by the Nazis while trying to sabotage the portal.  Going into a trance Tagomi taught her, she's able to leap between worlds without needing a portal, but as she does so the evil Nazi collaborator John Smith (played by Rufus Sewell of the underrated Dark City and other things) shoots her.

So when she leaps into our world she's hurt and winds up in the road where who should find her, but John Smith?  Only in this world John Smith isn't evil and so he takes Juliana to a hospital to get healed.

Meanwhile in the show's main world, Trade Minister Tagomi is assassinated off-screen, which was strange since he was a main character through the first 3 seasons.  So I imagine there must have been real-life issues that prevented him from appearing in this season.  (And apparently he was killed too suddenly to leap like Juliana did.)  The somewhat evil Inspector Kido starts to investigate the murder but his superiors want him to just pin it on some random black guy.

Previous seasons had a few black characters, but this final season really puts a focus on the plight of the African-Americans.  As you'd expect, things were not really great for black people when the Nazis took over 2/3 of the country.  Blacks were herded into camps and those who didn't escape were eventually killed.  Treatment in the Japanese Pacific States was a little better; while they had to live in ghettos at least they were allowed to live.

In the Japanese Pacific States a new resistance group rises in the final season:  The Black Communist Rebels or BCR.  They're supplied with weapons from Red China, who are also at war with the Japanese.  It's basically like in the American Revolution the French supplied the Americans with guns to help destabilize the British Empire.  In this way the Chinese are supplying Americans to destabilize the Japanese Empire.

The founder of the BCR is named Equiano Hampton (played by Martian Manhunter on Supergirl) as sort of a mash-up of Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X.  He's obviously more militant like Malcolm X but he's got the speaking style and charisma of MLK.  While the mostly white resistance in the first 3 seasons had some success, the BCR has far better success, enough that the Crown Princess of Japan wants to meet with them to discuss peace.  But of course it's a trap!  Not by the Crown Princess but by other forces inside the Japanese Empire.  Equiano is killed but the movement lives on thanks to a woman named Bell Mallory, who was originally from Alabama and escaped the camps.

It's Bell who comes up with the masterstroke to blow up oil pipelines from Alaska all the way down to San Diego.  Not the entire pipeline, but at key spots.  Part of the reason the BCR is so successful in this is that nobody thinks the black people capable of any coherent military strategy.  The Japanese high command sees them only as savages and brutes, so it never occurs to them that the BCR might launch a bunch of coordinated strategic strikes.

Facing a shortage of oil and a war on several fronts, the Japanese make the decision to pull out of America.  It's all a little sudden, about as sudden as Donald Trump abandoning the Kurds in Syria, which I guess was because by that point there were only like 3 more episodes left.  Had they had more time they probably could have strung it out a bit more.  It's like Game of Thrones where the battle against the White Walkers and destruction of King's Landing felt rushed after building it up for 8 years.  Though there had been seeds planted in prior years, it still felt rushed to me.

It was nice the show addressed some of the racial issues though.  At one point we see Bell and her boyfriend in "our world" when they go to a Virginia diner and demand to eat at the counter but are turned away.  So while black people weren't being rounded up and put into death camps, things weren't exactly peachy in the other world either.  Later someone brings Bell an old American flag and she refuses to let them fly it because that America didn't really do much better for her and other African-Americans than the Japanese.  And, yeah, really, I can't disagree.  It really made me wish they'd worked the BCR into the series a couple of seasons earlier.

Meanwhile there's a lot of intrigue going on in the Nazi half of the country.  Near the end of Season 3 John Smith's wife took off with their two daughters.  It turns out they went to her brother's house in the Neutral Zone.  They basically live the simple farming life for a year while John Smith has some of his henchmen watch them from a distance.  But eventually he has them brought back to New York.  While his wife and oldest daughter chafe under the Nazi regime, the youngest daughter is so brainwashed that she'd rat the other two out for the good of the cause if her father didn't intervene.

In "our" world Juliana has taken up teaching kids karate, including John Smith's son who died in the other world, and is with some guy and everything seems fine until some Nazi goons try to abduct her.  But the good John Smith comes to her aid and is killed in the process.  Which means the evil John Smith can now use the portal.  He visits our world and talks with his wife and his son--they only have the one kid in that world.  His son is eager to sign up for the war in Vietnam; Smith tries to stop him but the kid is 18 so he has to let him go to join the Marines.  Smith goes back to plot how to get his son back.

At the same time, Juliana uses her Jedi power or whatever to come back.  She hooks up with her resistance buddy Wyatt Price and they start making plans to take down Smith and the portal.  All of it hinges on making contact with Smith's wife Helen and getting her to help them.

Meanwhile Smith is facing pressure from the ailing Fuhrer in Berlin.  Smith helped Himmler take power in Season 2 but after an assassination attempt at the end of Season 3 left Himmler with a bullet wound, Smith has fallen out of favor.  There's a new rival in Berlin who seems ready to take Smith's place as the head Nazi in America.

If anyone were actually reading this I'd worry about a spoiler alert.

But like Cersei in season 7 of Game of Thrones, just when it seems Smith is going to be destroyed, he turns the tables and goes all Michael Corleone in destroying his enemies in one fell swoop.  He smothers Himmler in his office while his goons kill most of the remaining Nazi leadership.  Then he stabs Nazi spymaster J Edgar Hoover, twisting the knife for good measure.  And then makes a pact with the seeming rival that like the Roman Empire long ago they'll basically split it into two with Smith getting North America and the other guy having the rest of the world.  Thus Smith basically becomes the Fuhrer of America.  Not bad for a guy who started at the bottom when the Nazis took over in 1946.

While Smith is like Cersei, at the point of victory he's also like Dany the Mother of Dragons too.  Once he takes over America and the Japanese have fled their territory, he makes plans to annex the Pacific too.  Part of this means setting up more death camps to finish what the Nazis started.  Like when Dany suddenly destroyed King's Landing and turned into a brutal warlord it seems like a sudden shift for him to be creating plans for genocide, though maybe not as much of a shift.

Just to throw another reference in, when his wife finds the plans it's like Vader in the Emperor's throne room as Luke is being tortured.  Or going back to GOT it's like when Jon sees how brutal Dany has become and decides he has to kill her.  In this case Helen doesn't outright kill him, but she gives his train schedule to Juliana so the resistance can destroy the track to derail the train.  Smith isn't killed in the wreck, but like Hitler he kills himself shortly thereafter when Juliana tracks him down.  The Nazis were launching an attack on San Francisco, where Bell and the rest of the BCR are preparing their defenses, but hearing that Smith is dead the guy in charge calls off the attack and takes off his Nazi epaulets.

The end of the series is kind of odd.  The portal starts to come to life as the resistance is going to blow it up.  All of these people start coming through, presumably people who died during the Nazi occupation. It's like a whole weird Field of Dreams thing, except this isn't a baseball game.  Or a theme park.  What the hell are these people going to do?  There are still a lot of Nazis with a lot of guns, tanks, and planes plus a whole war machine in Berlin so it's not really a good time to go sightseeing.

I guess the show didn't have the budget to bring back some of the people who had been killed off in previous seasons like Juliana's old boyfriend Frank, his gay friend played by DJ Qualls, the Nazi double agent Joe, Juliana's sister, or Trade Minister Tagomi.  Seems like a lost opportunity.

The end didn't feel as empty as Game of Thrones but it wasn't exactly Return of the Jedi or Return of the King either.  I think like other shows, The Tick for instance, this was probably a casualty of a change in Amazon's leadership for its TV division.  And like network sci-fi shows like The Orville, it was probably more expensive than something like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.  I don't think it got the awards buzz either, though I'd certainly give Rufus Sewell a nod.  They could easily have stretched this show out longer, but oh well.  It is what it is, I guess.

One interesting thing I don't think they really addressed as much as they could have was the idea of the Nazis raiding other worlds and like the Borg acquiring technology to add to their own.  That explained why they had Cobra attack helicopters in the early 60s or why they had VTOL cargo/passenger planes, something we don't really have even in the 21st Century.  Maybe if the show had gone on longer they could have addressed that more.

A lot of times the show was kind of slow, so I can understand why it might not have had the biggest viewership, but the slow burns would usually lead to some good payoffs.  It was the kind of show where you had to be patient  and usually that patience was rewarded.  Overall it was good, especially if you're a fan of alternate history or multiverses.

Bad Decisions Lead to More Bad Decisions

Following up on Wednesday's post about "Mary Sues" in Star Wars.  If you want to know why Rey ends up a Mary Sue and Luke doesn't, it's because of a few bad decisions by the filmmakers.

First of all was making Luke Skywalker the living MacGuffin of The Force Awakens.  Without Luke around there was no one to train Rey in the Force or even to provide pointers like Ben Kenobi in A New Hope.  So JJ Abrams and company just said she could do all this stuff...because...reasons.  We'll explain it later!

Oh, wait, except thanks to Rian Johnson we didn't!  Also he completely bungled the training.  Luke only gives her a couple of half-assed lessons during the movie.  Whereas in Empire, Luke has weeks or a month or however long of grueling daily training with Yoda.  The only thing they could fall back on was she was just naturally powerful.  Basically like Anakin in Phantom Menace only without mention of midichlorians. Which just comes off as lazy.

Another bad decision:  Luke doesn't see the light in The Last Jedi until after Rey and Chewie have left.  (Because it takes a ghost to convince him not to let his sister and friends be murdered by the First Order.)  Compounding this, dumbass Rian Johnson already showed his X-wing underwater.  So, how can he get across the galaxy and save the day?  Um...he can beam his consciousness across the galaxy!  Yeah, that's it.  Just because we've never seen that in any other movie and just because Luke's spent years not using the Force doesn't mean he can't just suddenly manifest a new power no Jedi has ever used before.  Deus ex machina much?

Then we get to The Rise of Palpatine Skywalker and all the problems there.  Rian Johnson killed off our big bad in Snoke, so, um...the Emperor is still alive!  How?  Um...dark side science!  And Rian Johnson ruled out any actual Skywalkers as Rey's parents, so, um...she's Palpatine's granddaughter!  He had a kid no one ever knew about who then had a kid.  Yeah, sure.  Why not?  OK, but we already put out a trailer and printed up posters and shit calling it The Rise of Skywalker, so, um...she adopts the surname of Skywalker!  Why?  Um...to honor their memory or something.

Though really I think the worst decision was trying to Marvel this shit in the first place by having 3 directors working on it.  And compressing the timeline to 2 years when the first six had at least 3 years separation.  The Marvel thing works fine to have one person working on Ant-Man and one working on Black Panther and one working on Captain Marvel and then one guy (or two really) working on Endgame to tie it all sort of together.  But that doesn't work with a trilogy where each movie is highly dependent on the one before.  That's why, as previously stated, they needed a strong, visionary person in charge of the whole thing, not just some bureaucrat.  The results speak for themselves.  Financially it was a success, but creatively it became a mess.

So the moral of the story is that typically when something goes wrong it's not just because of one thing.  There's a whole chain of failure.  When you're editing especially and something just isn't working out, start looking backwards until you find where the trouble began.  Chances are it's something near the beginning.  Just don't try to half-assed paper over it like a little kid trying to hide a mess.  Maybe big Hollywood directors can get away with that, but you can't.  If you think no one will notice, trust me, someone will give you a bad review saying exactly that.

Luke v Rey: The Mary Sue Debate

Since I talked about Mary Sues on Monday, let's wade into one of those annoying Star Wars debates that's been rehashed a bunch more times with the new movie coming out.  A lot of people argue that Rey in the new trilogy is a Mary Sue.  Then you get people who can't deal with that and say, "Well, what about Luke in the original movies?"

If you actually watch the movies, then Rey is far more of a Mary Sue than Luke.  In The Force Awakens, Rey has spent most of her life on a desert world climbing around wrecks to salvage parts that she'd load on basically a scooter to take back to town.  And yet in the movie she's able to almost instantly not only fly the Millennium Falcon, but fly it THROUGH a downed Star Destroyer and into space.  Someone on Twitter was like, "But she hit the ground a little at first!"  Sure, she struggled for about a minute.  It's basically like if someone who's only ridden a bike gets in a NASCAR car, bumps a wall on the first lap, but then wins the race.  It's pretty much impossible.  The best argument that can be made is that she took stuff out of a lot of ships, so that helped her fly one.  Like if I take apart a lot of cars, I'll know how to drive one, right?  And not just drive but do all sorts of Fast and Furious shit, right?

Now I was willing to write it off if she were a Skywalker because the Skywalkers are great pilots, demonstrated in the previous six movies with Anakin and Luke.  Buuuuut...along came Rian Johnson to say she's not a Skywalker, so there goes that theory.  And Palpatines aren't known as pilots; I mean we never even see the Emperor fly anything.

Also in The Force Awakens, Rey calls Luke's old lightsaber to her hand and fends off Kylo Ren.  This I was less concerned about because she spent her life in the desert with that quarterstaff thing, so she at least had some training with weapons.  I loved the moment when she called the lightsaber initially because I thought, Luke's lightsaber (and Anakin's before him) knows she's a Skywalker!  Buuuut...along came Rian Johnson, so fuck that.

In The Last Jedi, Rey has like two partial lessons with Luke and somehow she can move a whole bunch of rocks and fight a whole bunch of guys with Kylo Ren.  In The Rise of Palpatine Skywalker, Rey can heal a giant snake and Kylo Ren, which is not really something we ever saw before.  She learned that where?  Um...books?

Thanks to an episode of Robot Chicken, I was reminded of Rey's escape from Starkiller Base.  She uses the "Jedi Mind Trick" on a stormtrooper, I think the one played by Daniel Craig, to release her so she can escape.  And she can do this because...she heard Jedi had done that before?  I mean she has no training at all and she can do something that would take Luke until the third movie to do?

And then you might say, "Oh yeah, what about Luke?"  What about him?  Luke didn't even move anything with the Force until Empire in the Wampa's cave.  That was a year or two after he'd met Ben Kenobi and got a lightsaber.  The Wampa was also the first time Luke actually used the lightsaber as a weapon; until then he'd only deflected bolts from a drone.

If you actually go back to A New Hope, all Luke does with the Force is deflect a couple of drone bolts and shoot the torpedoes that blow up the Death Star.  That's it.  Compare that with Rey after one movie.  You might say, "Well what about flying an X-Wing and blowing up the Death Star?"  He'd been flying his T-16 around the desert bullseyeing Womp Rats, so he clearly already knew how to fly.  Though I suppose that's like going from flying a Cessna to an F-16, but he is a Skywalker and they're natural pilots, so there you go.

Before Luke could move a bunch of rocks, he had weeks or a month or however long it was on Dagobah with Yoda.  And working on it a lot more than two half-assed lessons.  Then he goes off for his first fight with a lightsaber...and gets his ass kicked, losing a hand in the process.

In Return of the Jedi, which was a year or so after Empire, Luke has learned the Jedi mind trick, but that's really all he adds to his repertoire.  Mostly other than that he just moves stuff, like calling his lightsaber to his hand and making Threepio float.  And this was all over the course of three movies covering a few years.  So you really can't argue that he was instantly good at stuff.

Then you might say, "What about The Last Jedi?"  Well that's one of the reasons I hate that movie.  The idea that Luke could just beam himself across the galaxy was so inconsistent with really the entire rest of the Star Wars canon to that point.  At least in the movies. In comics and books Luke was more of a Mary Sue because lazy writers would just make him have whatever powers they needed.  In good books, like the original Zahn trilogy, Luke doesn't do anything more than he does in the original movies, except for a hibernation trance.  But that's something not too amazing since Jedi meditate a lot.  The idea of slowing your heartbeat isn't unique to Jedi either.

Anyway, if you compare original trilogy to new trilogy, Rey doesn't really earn all her powers and abilities, while Luke does.  Other than a couple of half-assed lessons, Rey really had no training to make her good at stuff.  Millennials, right?  Gen X heroes had to actually learn their skills.  So there.

Killing Mary Sue Is a Real Bitch

On my phone I spend a lot of time playing this Empire & Puzzles game that's sort of one part a D&D type strategy/questing game and one part Candy Crush in that your attacks are determined by matching crystals on a board.

Anyway, periodically they have these "events" that are usually based on some theme like vampires or Alice in Wonderland.  One was based on King Arthur and as part of that you have to fight Arthur and other characters to get some loot.

The absolute worst character was not Arthur or Lancelot but Guinevere.  She had a whole bunch of special abilities that were really, really a pain in the ass when I was trying to defeat her.  One was that she would heal her whole party.  And not only that but she'd take away your party's "manna" or the power generated to launch your characters's special attacks.  And there was even some other thing too!

If it were just her it would be somewhat manageable, but when combined with a couple of other powerful characters it was really, really annoying.  Because she was so overpowered for these fights I started calling her Mary Sue after that old thing in Star Trek fanfics where there was some character so perfect at everything without any weaknesses.  The label sometimes gets applied to other characters like Rey in Star Wars and so on.  It has a negative connotation as it's not really believable for the audience and it can be kind of annoying because it sucks up conflict and drama.

If you wonder what the big deal is, I think my experience with that game illustrates the problem.  If you have a real Mary Sue she's so perfect and overqualified/overpowered that it makes it a real pain in the ass to kill her or bring her down.  If Guinevere were the hero of the game, it would be really boring to watch her wipe out one team after another with little or no effort.

Now of course if I had Guinevere and she were full leveled up I'd have no problem with her on my team.  It's just trying to kill her that's the real bitch.

The Spoilery But Not Really Grumpy Review of Rise of Skywalker

Happy New Year!

Fixed it for you, Disney!

I probably could have posted this sooner since I saw the movie on Christmas Eve and am writing this technically on Christmas morning, but I decided to wait until after the holidays were over.  Besides, now most of my phantom readers should have seen the movie already.  If they haven't then that's their fault.  I mean, it's been two weeks already!

Since I really, really hated The Last Jedi, I went into this with really, really low expectations.  I'd heard plenty of whining about too much fan service.  I was expecting a lot of retconning--that process mostly in comic books where a writer retroactively changes something that's already happened or provides a new explanation for it.  For instance, after Coast City was destroyed in the Death of Superman story, Hal Jordan goes nuts and becomes the evil Parallax.  Later he sacrifices himself to save the universe in Final Night.  When Geoff Johns brought Hal Jordan back as a Green Lantern, he made up some bullshit about an impurity in the ring or the main battery on Oa or something that caused Hal to go nuts.  So it totally wasn't his fault!  (Actually, I'm surprised they didn't do this with Kylo Ren/Ben Solo.)

And there's definitely some retconning at work.  But in a way I can't blame JJ Abrams since Rian Johnson left the cupboard so bare.  He killed Luke Skywalker--after making him a bitter old pussy.  He killed the big bad in Supreme Leader Snoke.  He destroyed most of the Resistance.  And he shrugged off the mystery of Rey's parents as "they were no one."  It was funny when someone on Twitter whined that they should have used the momentum of The Last Jedi for the next movie...what momentum?  It was as dead in space as capital ships that somehow run out of gas.  So what was the next movie supposed to build off of, those kids hearing stories of Luke Skywalker at the end?  I mean, sure, if the next movie were going to happen in 15 years instead of 2 years, which Johnson knew since they hired him to write Part 2 of the trilogy.  Anyway...

And since Colin Trevorrow left the project, probably after seeing what he was inheriting, Abrams and writer Chris Terrio had to throw something together quick in order to meet the schedule.  Because not meeting the schedule wasn't an option after the failure of Solo, due in large part to firing the original directors who should never have been hired in the first place.  Already down a director, a delay would have had people in a panic.  So, what can you do?

Why not bring back the Emperor?  He's a reliable villain, someone we already know from the first 6 movies.  That's important since a certain dipshit killed off the replacement Emperor and the last movie of the trilogy isn't a great time to try to introduce a whole new villain.

The movie doesn't waste time getting to this, as the opening scroll says a message has been received from the Emperor saying the Sith are going to return and take revenge.  Then we see Kylo Ren using a Sith artifact to find the Emperor's hidden base, meeting Palpatine, and then swearing allegiance to him.  The whole thing made me think later of the Bond movies.  Specifically at the end of the only George Lazenby movie On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Bond marries a woman who's then gunned down.  It ends with him holding her dead body.  But then for the next movie, Diamonds Are Forever, they brought back Sean Connery.  It begins with him punching a bunch of people until he finds and kills Blofeld, thus seemingly bringing that whole thing to an end.  I mean, later Moneypenny even jokes about marrying him, a guy whose wife was just brutally murdered weeks or months ago.  In the same abrupt way we pretty much end the tenure of Supreme Leader Kylo Ren.

And you might ask, how is the Emperor alive?  Um...science?  We see him plugged into machines but how he managed to survive falling down that shaft in the throne room and EXPLODING is never explained.  As far as retconning, there's not even a good half-assed explanation like the Hal Jordan thing.  I guess you can say we didn't see the Emperor explode, but there was a big explosion after he fell that I guess he somehow tough guy walked away from?  Fall back on that old excuse from my grumpy Marvel movie reviews:  shut up, that's why.

Meanwhile Chewie, Poe, and Finn go...somewhere to get a secret message.  It's sort of like the end of Rogue One only no Darth Vader, just TIE fighters.  Then it becomes like the asteroid chase in Empire except Poe keeps pulling the light speed lever to send them hurtling around space, which was something just impossible in the last movie when we decided we had to obey the laws of physics like Neil deGrasse Tyson had been brought on as a consultant.  It's pretty silly, but the one thing I like is that more than Rian Johnson, Abrams seems to GET what Star Wars is:  it's a space opera that's a mish-mash of old serials like Flash Gordon, Westerns, and samurai movies.  It's not supposed to be real and gritty.  So yeah, fuck it, just hop to light speed inside a hangar, through a shield, or wherever the fuck you want.  This isn't fucking 2001:  A Space Odyssey!

Also Meanwhile, Rey is training with Leia's help, something we probably should have done 2 movies ago and countless books and comics ago.  I mean a lot of the books, even the good ones like the original Zahn ones, never do much with Leia's Force ability but she's a Skywalker too.  The one element that Abrams kept from the previous movie is Rey and Kylo being able to communicate over vast distances.  He goes a step farther by allowing Kylo to actually rip off a necklace Rey is wearing at Space Burning Man to bring it to him on his ship.  How is that possible?  Um...the Force works in mysterious ways.  Shut up, that's why!

Not exactly a retcon but Rey, Finn, Poe, Chewie, BB8, and C3PO head to Space Burning Man because at some point Luke went looking for the Sith homeworld where the Emperor is lurking.  I assume this was before the whole thing with the Jedi Temple that turned him into a whiny bitch who was content to let his sister and friends die until a ghost created a bolt of lightning to convince him otherwise.  Still, maybe something like that was more what Abrams had in mind in Luke going off to find the first Jedi Temple, not drinking weird alien slug milk and eating Porgs.

Anyway, the whole reason they go there is to find one of the Sith artifacts Kylo Ren used to find the Emperor.  Because the Sith don't use GPS or Siri.  The First Order spots them, but they're saved momentarily by Lando in his space Winnebago.  Not a flying Winnebago like Spaceballs, but some kind of RV-type vehicle that he was hanging out in because...no idea.  Conveniently some old Jedi hunter's ship is still there and still flies, though it has to have been almost 30 years or something.  Our heroes fall through quick gravel or something into the lair of a big snake, whom Rey heals with the Force so it doesn't eat them like it ate the Jedi hunter.  Force healing is not something that was really in the other movies but probably in some of the lame books or comics.  Still, as far as sudden unexplained Force powers go, it's more reasonable than being able to beam yourself across the galaxy as a specter.  They find some dagger that can tell them where to find the thing they need but while 3PO can read it, his programming forbids him from telling anyone.

After a fairly ridiculous Force battle between Rey and Kylo that involves them playing Force tug-of-war with a ship and Rey shooting Force lightning to blow it up, Rey and company head to some planet to find a guy to extract the information from 3PO.  At this point maybe I should point out that the Emperor's fleet was supposed to launch in 16 hours from the start of the movie.  So all of this to this point has been in less than 16 hours.  Um...maybe there's some time dilation effect or something going on?  Or they have a different definition of hours, like Han's definition of parsecs doesn't jive with the real definition of parsecs.

In part to sell some new toys and in part to help establish that Poe is not gay, so shut up "shippers," they run into an old flame of his who has her own bounty hunter costume thing going on.  She leads them to some tiny alien who gets the information they need, but it wipes 3PO's memory.  Meanwhile, Kylo and his Gwar cover band show up with Chewie on his ship.  So our heroes board the ship to rescue Chewie and the dagger, making 3PO's sacrifice pretty meaningless.  They get captured but are saved by General Hux, who's turned double agent in an attempt to make Kylo look bad.  And maybe since Hux's action figure sold only slightly less worse than Rose's from the last movie, he's killed by General Pride, who it turns out was a former Empire officer still loyal to the Emperor.

Kylo confronts Rey and taunts Rey to remember her parents--let the retconning begin!  She finally unlocks the repressed memories that they sold her on Jakku because slavery on a miserable desert planet was better than being taken to the Emperor.  Instead of "I am your father," it's "You are Palpatine's granddaughter."  So...Palpatine had a kid?  Someone had sex with that guy?  This was before the whole thing in Revenge of the Sith, right?  Or someone had a really messed-up fetish.  Nasty.  And instead of falling off that platform (and losing a hand), Rey just jumps from a hangar deck onto the Falcon.

Now with the dagger thing and info from 3PO, they realize they have to go to a moon near Endor, but not the forest moon from Return of the Jedi.  This moon doesn't have a lot of trees and the ocean is constantly like The Perfect Storm, maybe thanks to having a Death Star fall on it?  Like the Emperor, despite that it clearly EXPLODED, the Death Star is pretty intact.  At least the throne room, where Rey finds the thing they need.  It's funny that she holds the dagger up to the crashed Death Star to find the location pretty much like how Indiana Jones used that staff of Ra or whatever in Raiders of the Lost Ark, so kind of a bonus Lucas reference there.  But somehow Kylo followed them there and then there's an OK lightsaber duel on the remains of the Death Star.

During this, Leia reaches out to her son with the Force, momentarily distracting him, which allows Rey to stab him.  And then Leia dies, mostly because they ran out of footage they could use of her.  It makes about as much sense as Padme dying because she lost the will to live...or whatever.  So like mother like daughter, I guess.

Meanwhile, Finn meets a woman who used to be a Stormtrooper like him.  And she's black!  And female, so suck on that, haters who whined that there couldn't be black Stormtroopers.  He and his new friend (I honestly don't remember her name and am too lazy to look it up) go after Rey but arrive too late to help.

Though Rey uses Force healing to save Kylo, she gets in his ship and flees back to the first Jedi Temple place.  I guess she decided to follow Luke's example of running away like a whiny bitch.  She burns Kylo's ship and then throws Luke's lightsaber away...only for ghost Luke to catch it and say, "That is NOT how you treat a Jedi weapon."  To which I said to myself, "Yeah, Rian Johnson."  That seemed like a straight-up rebuke of the first scene with Luke in that prior movie where he just tossed the lightsaber away.  I'm sure in the media Abrams and Johnson are trying to sell the story that everything is just hunky-dory, but, yeah, I don't think Abrams was very happy that he'd set up that big emotional moment at the end of his movie and then Rian Johnson just took a big dump on it.  Anyway, ghost Luke tells Rey not to let fear make her run from her problems.  And then that Leia made a lightsaber that he hid in a wall.  Leia gave up the lightsaber because she sensed her journey would end with her son dying...makes sense, right?  Not really, but I guess it was a clumsy attempt at irony or something.

Since Rey destroyed Kylo's ship, how is she going to get off the planet?  Turn herself into a ghost?  No, because that'd just be the dumbest fucking thing ever.  How about that X-wing Luke left underwater for like 20 years?  Sure.  And it still flies!  Well, why not?  It was designed to fly through space and atmospheres and stuff, so why can't it sit underwater?  And this is JJ Abrams, who had the Enterprise go underwater, though not for 20 years.

Fortunately, Kylo's ship had the Sith gizmo in it so she can find the place, relaying her coordinates to the Resistance to send their ragtag fleet, more of a flotilla really, to attack the place.  But, wait, on the Space Burning Man planet, Rey destroyed Kylo's TIE that presumably was the one he'd put the Sith gizmo in.  So he has a second TIE that he put it into?  Sure, why not?  Lando and Chewie take the Falcon to go try to get help from the Core Systems like Coruscant.

Meanwhile, Kylo is haunted by the ghost of his father.  Though Han appears solid, not like a Force ghost.  And he convinces his mass-murderer son to fight for what Leia stood for.  Just like that, Ben Solo is back!  I don't know, maybe Rey's Force healing has some kind of mental healing properties?  Sure, why not?

And, again, this is all supposed to be happening in less than 16 hours.  I mean, really?  16 days I could believe, but not 16 hours.

Rey goes into the Sith temple to confront her grandpappy.  He wants her to kill him so his spirit can inhabit her and she can become Empress.  The idea that a Sith has the spirits of all the other dead Siths in him seems like something new--and kinda weird.  Is it some kind of Highlander thing then?  There can only be one!  Meanwhile, Ben Solo shows up there...somehow.  I mean he didn't go with Poe, Finn, and the others and Rey took his ship, so how did he get off that moon?  He just call the First Order for a ship?  I guess.  Or maybe Space Uber.  They show a TIE fighter later so I guess he got one of those...somehow.  Maybe it was Space Enterprise Rent-a-TIE-Fighter:  We'll pick you up!

Meanwhile Poe and Finn lead an attack on "The Last Order," or the Emperor's fleet of old school Star Destroyers that each have Death Star cannons--now in convenient capital ship-size!  There's this massively contrived thing where the ships are underground and need some navigation beacon to get to space.  So the plan is to take out the navigation thing.  Now, look, I know the ships need to be constructed somewhere secret, but building massive starships in planetary gravity is so stupid.  It's one of the reasons I hated Abrams's Star Trek.  I mean sure it's a neat visual for Kirk to ride his motorcycle up to the Enterprise as it's being built, but seriously, something as massive as a starship would be really difficult to build in planetary gravity.  I mean, imagine how many tons those hull plates would be; each one would probably weigh as much if not more than an aircraft carrier in gravity.  It'd be easier in space where you don't have the weight.  So instead of a planet, couldn't they have been in a nebula or something?

(On a side note, the idea of Imperials hiding out in the Outer Rim rebuilding strength reminded me of the original Zahn books.  It would have been a great time to work in a live action Grand Admiral Thrawn.  But no, denied.  Sigh.)

Anyway, Poe leads the fighter attack while Finn and his new girlfriend lead mounted troopers onto General Pride's Star Destroyer that's trying to serve as the beacon for the others.  Oh, and Rose is there too.  Her and Finn's interaction is mostly him telling her to stay places.

The attack isn't going really well--until Lando and Chewie show up with a ragtag armada of freighters and whatever.  Wedge has about a five-second cameo as a gunner on the Falcon.  Not even in an X-wing?  The only pilot other than Luke to survive all 3 movies and he's on a freighter?  Kinda lame.  But I guess the actor didn't really want to be in the new movies; he must have caved as long as he didn't have to be in it very long or do very much.

Rey refuses to kill the Emperor, and is fighting his guards.  Meanwhile Ben is fighting his former Knights of Ren buddies.  Rey sends him a lightsaber he can use to finish them off.  Then they confront the Emperor, but he somehow extracts power from them to heal himself, though not really to make himself look all that much better.  He's still all wrinkled and gross.  There's this whole thing about Rey and Ben being a "dyad" in the Force.  What does that mean?  I guess the best way to think of it is kind of like Voltron or Power Rangers or Transformers combiners where you have 5 smaller things come together to create 1 super robot.  In this case Rey and Ben don't merge physically but their bond in the Force makes them stronger.  Or some goddamned thing like that.

Anyway, somehow the Emperor shoots lightning that fries all the rebel ships fighting.  Um...what?  I guess that Force healing was like steroids too.  And he throws Ben into a big hole as retribution for when Vader threw him down a hole--the one he EXPLODED in, remember?  Except I don't think Ben ever explodes.

But you know the good guys have to prevail.  Rey is able to call upon the power of all the Jedi in the past.  The neat thing is they used the voices of like all the Jedi in previous movies:  Luke, Yoda, Obi-Wan, Anakin, Qui-Gon Jinn, and I think even some from video games and shit.  With their motivational coaching, she's able to grab the lightsabers and then crosses them Wonder Woman style to deflect the Emperor's lightning back at him.  So the Emperor dies, but not because Rey kills him.  He kills himself.  Thus she doesn't go to the dark side.  LOOPHOLE!  She seemingly dies, but Ben shows up to heal her with the Force and after a kiss, he disappears.  Which, really, was about the only end you could expect for him.  He had to die heroically to redeem himself for the thousands, if not millions, of people he brutally murdered--including his father.

And so all over the galaxy people rise up to somehow blow up Star Destroyers.  Sure, why not?  Back at the Resistance base there's a party that includes a creepy scene with Lando and Finn's new girlfriend who may be Lando's daughter.  He asks where she's from and she says she doesn't know and he says, "Well let's find out."  How's he going to do that?  I suppose you could say that it's racist to think her and Lando are related, like I think all the black people are related, but why else are they even bringing it up right then?  And wouldn't it make more sense for Finn and her to go off and look for the families they were taken from?

BTW, I forgot to mention it's very heavily implied that Finn and this new girl are Force sensitive.  On Twitter someone even claims Abrams said that when they're falling through the quick gravel that the thing Finn was going to tell Rey is that he's Force sensitive.  Which is something that might have been explored earlier if not for Rian Johnson.  You know, if they'd had an actual plan for all three movies instead of just rushing into it and hoping for the best?

In the end Rey goes to Tatooine to Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru's moisture farm, which 42 years later is still unoccupied.  I guess when your property had two people vaporized on it, it's not really valuable--if it ever was.  I was really hoping there would be a container of blue milk lying around, but sadly, no.  She goes there to bury Luke and Leia's lightsabers for...reasons.  I sort of get burying Luke's there since he grew up there, but Leia only went to Tatooine to save Han from Jabba so it wasn't her home or anything.  But then Alderaan is in a billion pieces, so I guess she couldn't bury it there.  Rey sees their Force ghosts, but where's Ben's ghost?  He doesn't get a ghost yet?  Come on, Anakin got his right away--twice!

Some old lady shows up and asks for Rey's name and she decides to call herself Rey Skywalker.  Um...why?  She's not a Skywalker.  She's a Palpatine.  Her name should be Rey Palpatine.  I mean sure that's like all those poor people who have Hitler for a last name, but just own it.  The Skywalker thing isn't really earned, but I guess we'd already made up the posters and merchandise so we had to find a way to justify it since from Day 1 it was clear there were no Skywalkers really in the picture with Luke dead, Leia dead IRL, Ben being a murdering psychopath, and Rey being "no one."  But it just feels really half-assed.  It's too bad her and Ben didn't have sex or we could have shown her pregnant at the end so there would actually be a Skywalker--or at least someone with Skywalker blood.  As it is the Skywalker bloodline that began with Anakin thanks to his immaculate conception is now dead since his two children and one grandchild are all dead.  Hooray?

On the plus side, she turned her staff into a lightsaber with a yellow blade.  Have to think it's probably a double bladed saber like Darth Maul's.  That it's yellow and not blue, green, red, or purple is probably supposed to be significant somehow.  And then the closing shot of the two suns to pay homage to that iconic shot from the first movie, which was also done in Episode III.  Hooray?

Going back through it, there are plenty of things that don't necessarily make sense.  I suppose Abrams lucked out in that both of his movies followed movies that weren't very good, so that while his aren't great, at least they weren't THAT bad.  It's like that Seinfeld where hack comic Kenny Bannon gets a lot of laughs just because he comes on after Seinfeld has already warmed everyone up.  Abrams is the Kenny Bannon in this case, though Rian Johnson is definitely not a Jerry Seinfeld.

Anyway, I had a few other observations I made on Facebook after seeing the movie.  I'm tired and lazy and don't feel like retyping them.

I'm not a supporter of Rose by any stretch--I wouldn't buy her action figure for $2--but pretty much writing her out of the movie seems like caving in to the toxic "fans" who hated her solely for her skin color and gender.

In the trailers the Emperor at one point says, "This will be the last word in the story of Skywalker," but the actual line is, "This will be the last word in the story of REBELLION." It's annoying when movie trailers do that stuff.

Apparently if there are no cookie scenes in a movie no one will actually stay to the end. Except me, because this is the last Star Wars movie that will have an actual John Williams score, so I felt like enjoying it to the end. Thanks to the length of the credits I think all the greatest hits are in there from the original trilogy.

Anyway, this makes you wonder what the trilogy would have looked like had Abrams agreed to do all three movies at the start. In the future they need someone if not directing all three movies at least in charge creatively. Ostensibly Kathleen Kennedy was supposed to be in charge but she was apparently too busy counting the piles and piles of money to actually give a shit what was being thrown up on the screen. I mean when your third movie is largely ignoring and/or retconning your second movie, it's kind of a shoddy trilogy. I'm just saying.

As to my last point, I nailed that in an entry last year.  Look, I don't know Kathleen Kennedy, but from this first mess it seems like she doesn't really know anything about the creative end.  They need to have someone actually in charge of the whole mythology.  You know, someone like George Lucas.  Really, Disney fumbling the ball on this really gives me new appreciation for Lucas.  Most of us thought after the prequels Star Wars would be better off without him, but it's really not.  Maybe it's time those of us who hated the prequels cut him some slack.  My brother suggested they put Dave Filoni, who worked on The Clone Wars series and other projects, in charge and that seems like a really good choice to provide some actual creative direction to the property and not just cash grabs like the Disney movies so far.  They can keep Kennedy for the business end if they want but it's clear that she has no fucking vision other than to make money, which is really what I feared as soon as Disney bought the property.  Whenever they make more movies (of course they will) I hope they have their shit together by then.