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biblioflyer · 22 days

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Discovery S5E1 first reactions (spoilers)

Every season, Star Trek's ugly duckling starts finding its footing a little better. I'm actually sad now its at its end.

I was prepared to be grumpy. For the first half hour or so, I was a little bit of a sourpuss. All the classic Discovery sins were on display in full force.

The main character syndrome. Burnham is leading from the front. Again. Didn't we have a whole season character arc about how captaining means sometimes you have to delegate?

Okay, okay, don't at me. The reasons for her to Kirk it up in the thick of things were reasonably well thought out.

I'm really torn between appreciating the whole "Iron Man" sequence in space as a smart, logical extrapolation of the technological development of the series and just being somewhat numb and feeling like the whole thing was rule of cool from start to finish.

They better not skimp out on Raynor's backstory and motives, because thus far every call he's made has been even more devoid of compassion as Captain Shaw, but critically none of his hard man making hard choices directives make sense. He's being set up as an Ahab type character.

Now this isn't the first time we've have a Starfleet Ahab. Ben Maxwell was just such a character. Critically though, he was a renegade that our hero characters were called in to hunt down like a mad dog precisely because, understandable motives or not, he was so far outside the bell curve for acceptable Starfleet standards for rules of engagement, compassion etc. that he was on the verge of provoking a war with the Cardassians.

A war that a lot of revisionist fans, mapping Cardassia and its ultimate alliance with the Dominion to Russia and the invasion of Ukraine, have come around to thinking a preventative war was good and cool, rather than risking an apocalypse. I've talked about this a few times, but the fact that the protomatter, temporal, isolytic, trilithium, biological etc. weapons haven't been deployed in quantity in the wars that have been depicted in Trek means everyone got damn lucky. Strange New Worlds has even seen fit to remind us that even with just conventional weapons, its not hard for casualties to run up into the millions given the scale of the civilizations butting heads.

But that's a rant for another time.

So Raynor being within spitting distance, if not wholly inside of the Section 31 anything for the mission mentality, is irksome. I'm probably not doing my due diligence by complaining without watching episode two yet, but still its a bad look. Its a nasty callback to depictions of casual jerkiness and military caricature from Picard's third season and Discovery's first.

Also I don't care about Burnham and Book’s relationship. I just don't. Nor am I particularly interested in Tilly finding love. They’re all fine and interesting characters without needing to inject relationship drama into the mix. This show has really started to feel like it doesn’t need to rely on cheap sources of melodrama. Finding love isn't the only pathway to character development. I don't watch this franchise for NCC-90210 storylines.

And I'm also a raging hypocrite because if anything happens to Saru and T'Rina, I will be even grumpier! Same with Culber and Stamets.

I may have a soft spot for warm, lived in, tender relationships and minimal patience for stories about relationship drama among the stars.

Also, I do appreciate that at least in the first episode, the Burnham - Book "ship" feels less overwrought. The awkwardness between them reads as a more mature, more nuanced incarnation of the relationship. Even when they inevitably patch things up, I really hope its less showy and melodramatic, and more cozy.

Grumpiness aside, I have to compliment the cast, writers, and crew enormously. This show has matured so impressively in the sense that the cast are able to find the characters in a natural and seamless way. The writers are putting better dialogue in their mouths even if I don't always necessarily want to see the specific storylines playing out.

Its a testament to the idea that art is a thing you practice and the human beings involved in producing this stuff need time and space to get it right. By legacy TV standards, Discovery is only just starting the equivalent of its third season. We used to talk about the two season rule for legacy Trek. The idea that it really only got good, not merely watchable if you have a good tolerance for cheese, but actually good in the third season.

The action sequences, mostly, were really good too. Well composed, clear and easy to follow while having a decent amount of drama and uncertainty to them.

The chase sequence really managed to capture the power and physics of having starships operating inside the atmosphere of a planet and what they can do. Although I'm sure the tech fans will froth at a number of obvious inconsistencies in scaling, at least we actually see some interesting consequences of ships interacting with planets.

Additionally it also accidentally portrays one of the world building problems with the version of the Star Wars universe depicted by the Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith Incredible Cross Sections books. Yes, I'm one of those kinds of fans who has argued both sides of that particular controversy. I've always found Dr. Saxton's attempts to quantify just what is going on and then contrive explanations for how its possible fascinating, but ultimately it presents serious world building problems. Like the idea that one scoundrel with one relatively diminutive ship, like the Falcon or Slave I, could utterly wreck a populated area in seconds causing thousands, if not tens of thousands of casualties if they're having a bad day. Such are the elemental forces and energy levels at the disposal of even common riff raff in Dr. Saxton's depiction of Star Wars.

In Discovery, we see what happens when a couple of scoundrels have their back up against a wall, and it comes within a hair's breadth of tragedy.

BIG SPOILERS

The callback to the Progenitors is also really interesting. I'm curious as to what the MacGuffin will ultimately be, because if you scrutinize the various technologies of the week in Trek, most of the mature space faring peoples already seemed to have the capacity to do what the Progenitors could do: seed a planet with life and then guide that life across billions of years of evolution to a desirable endpoint. The main thing that is missing is the ability to ensure, in the style of Expanse's Protomolecule Builders, that your project can babysit itself without direct intervention for all that time.

Also kudos to Discovery for its cutesy storytelling device of grabbing a background character and turning them into someone of great significance. This is something that can be overdone, see also: Star Wars, especially the Legends continuity; but I have a soft spot for lore nerds.

Also speaking of Lore, I'm a little curious as to whether this is the last we'll hear of Fred. Synth "death" is kind of an ambiguous thing. They were able to harvest usable data from him, but perhaps there's a meaningful difference between the systems responsible for consciousness and memory storage? Perhaps the ocular memory is a sort of buffer in which information is triaged, analyzed, and then either committed to long term memory or deleted.

#Star Trek #spoilers #Star Trek Discovery #Discovery s5 #Discovery s5e1 #michael burnham #Saru #Curtis Saxton #Star Wars Incredible Cross Sections #t'rina #discovery spoilers

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biblioflyer · 2 months

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Bad Dune Takes are the Mind Killer

I'm going to type up some more robust thoughts on Dune part 2, but I've seen some subtle bad ideas circulating that are drawn from shallow readings of either the films or the books or both.

First off, anyone who swallows the Bene Gesserit propaganda about their eugenics program needs to be pushed back on. They are NOT sorting humans from animals. The function of the Gom Jabar test (I will look up the proper spelling later and edit it in), doesn't even really seem to have anything to do with the metaphysics of the setting so much as its testing for self discipline. This is something that is nature AND nurture.

The dirty truth of the matter is that no one is a true Tabula Rasa, we do inherit some tendencies genetically, but barring a serious developmental disorder, those are tendencies. Tendencies can be ameliorated, if not even outright disappear in the noise of lived experience and explicit education.

If Feyd Ruatha can pass the Gom Jabar, you know its not actually testing for merit, its testing for a specific set of traits that the Bene Gesserit find useful.

Those traits are part of the ingredients they are seeking for the Kwisatch Haderach (yes, I know, I'll edit it later) but here's the kicker!

Major book spoilers ahead

While this is probably not exclusively the Bene Gesserit's fault, all of these secret societies, all of this obsession with bloodlines, and perfection is a time bomb. Paul is not a white savior. Paul is a labradoodle. He is an incredible endgame of generations of effort but he's a symptom of a broader problem that he himself vaguely glimpses and his son, Leto II, sees in all its terrible truth: the Bene Gesserit and their ilk are reserving autonomy for themselves, perhaps even at the genetic level, and trying to breed complacency into "the commons." The ones they regard as "animals" unfit for and incapable of self direction. People who are only fit to be ruled.

Sound familiar?

Its feudalistic "divine right of kings" merged with eugenics.

AKA fascism.

Paul and Leto II become despicable tyrants and authorial fiat would seem to indicate they are trapped by a sort of accelerationist framing of the problem. The end result of the millennia of power brokering in the background by all of these secretive societies and open monarchism is a humanity that is doomed. One way or another, it will be snuffed out. Whether by a total war, plague, or collapse of civilization.

This is why I say that the Bene Gesserit endgame is labradoodles. Pretty? Yes. Companionable? Sure. But like many, many, many designer breeds very, very lacking in genetic diversity.

This is what selective breeding gets you. Its why Leto II foresees the need to provoke a "Great Scattering." To ensure humanity exists in so many places, in so many different genetic and cultural forms that it cannot be subjugated by even the most charismatic and supernaturally powerful tyrant - not even by himself - and incapable of being extinguished by any plague or natural disaster. Because consolidation into too narrow and tight of a socio-cultural-political footprint means when (not if) that civilization screws up epically, it brings everyone down with it.

So if Roddenberry believed in the end of history, as expressed by the Federation: a society that is not incapable of error but IS capable of introspection and correction in the wake of error such that it is extremely unlikely to collapse from its own errors and contradictions. Then Herbert seems to be positing that history has no end. It will be one damn thing after another for all time and his implicit solution is that we desperately need diversity: genetic diversity and cultural diversity otherwise a self anointed superior sect of schemers and intriguers will get us all killed in the end by making us docile and homogeneous in order to make us more useful: to them.

Herbert also is suggesting that events like the Fremen Jihad is a likely bit of blowback from such consolidation. That human beings (the very same the Bene Gesserit regard as animals) naturally crave autonomy, dignity, and the essentials of life and if you press these things, the result will be a socio-political nuclear explosion.

I don't know if Herbert was an accelerationist. But it doesn't really matter because this leads me to the second bad take:

The Jihad and the Golden Path are not good, actually. Authorial Fiat dictate that they are necessary because authorial fiat dictates that human civilization in Dune has become so consolidated and bent to the whims of shadowy schemers that any attempt to wrest control away and return it to "normal" people, if indeed that is even possible given the technologies and superhumans running around, will result in such disorder and chaos that it be, functionally, genocide even if it is not genocide in intent.

The Jihad itself is also a consequence of the Great Man relying on people who only see a sliver of the overall project and interpret it through their own prism. That prism being one of anger, resentment, and a desire to see others conform to their worldview in order to ensure they are never again under anyone's boot.

Authorial fiat dictates that by the time Paul is born, there's no way back. No way to unwind all of this mess. The systems and structures are too complex, too interdependent. The Bene Gesserit, the Face Dancers, and everyone else I'm forgetting have too many contingency plans to fall back on. Not even a psychic can pull the Jenga pieces of civilization out delicately enough to restack them without the whole thing coming apart, not if he has to rely on millions of people with an axe to grind against the civilization he's trying to reform, a civilization that spent millennia trying to subjugate the Fremen or drive them into extinction.

But I maintain accelerationism is bad. You're not psychic. I'm not psychic. There's no Kwisatch Haderach lurking in the background to see what comes next. If you burn it all down, there might be a flourishing of dignity and freedom on the other side or it might be extinction because some other "cabal" will just take over and do the same things only meaner and dumber.

So if not accelerationism then what?

Federationism.

Introspection always. Seeking reform and equity before the power structures get too entrenched that gambling on a Great Scattering following in the wake of genocidal messiahs start seems like a good idea.

I'm not dunking on Dune to build a motte and bailey around Star Trek. I love Dune, but people tend to fixate on icky parts and call them good, when the whole point was don't let society get so bad you need to cross your fingers and hope the God Emperor is secretly an enlightened genocidal tyrant who is waiting for you to get restive enough to strike him down as part of some harebrained scheme to generate so much historical trauma it inoculates humanity against tyranny for all time.

Which of course, is a false premise. Herbert may or may not have known this in the mid-20th century, but we live in a world where 5-6 generations later, everything we were supposed to learn from and never repeat about tyranny, fascism, eugenics, and being disinterested in how and why there came to be fighters in difficult to pronounce faraway lands who seem to be rather upset with us, is now a thing that has to be taught and can be disputed and debated.

#dune part two #dune part 2 #dune #dune spoilers #star trek #scifi ethics #golden path #fandom commentary

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biblioflyer · 3 months

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I did not hate S3 but I agree with this sentiment wholeheartedly.

Okay, but maybe it should be?

#boldly go #seek out new plots #star trek #Picard s3 #Star Trek Picard

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biblioflyer · 3 months

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We could have the best of both worlds. The post Dominion War landscape is ripe with opportunities to tell important stories about recovering from trauma, individual and civilizational, and trying to build something new and worthwhile out of blasted husks that used to be ruled with an iron fist while trying to avoid the slippery slope of just using the iron fist to do what’s convenient.

And it would be perfect to finally put the villainous mustache back on S31 by having at least a few stories about putting more effort into rolling them up after Picard S3 revealed the agency’s affinity for mistaking cruelty for pragmatism yet again played a role in nearly obliterating the Federation and traumatizing several hundred thousand to several million junior officers and enlisted crew, to say nothing of the people on Earth.

Doing the 25th century equivalent of Nazi hunting is a perfect job for three characters who never should have finished out S3 having been shoehorned into being bridge crew as well as any number of odds and sods like Worf, Bashir, Garak, and yes: new characters too.

We need more stories about the consequences of war that are about rebuilding rather than pew pew pew and sometimes cry or maybe murk a Klingon ambassador.

#star trek #star trek legacy #star trek deep space nine #worf son of mogh #raffi musiker #seven of nine #jack crusher #elim garak

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biblioflyer · 3 months

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My favorite hot take that made me rethink a lot of things was that while they were poor executors of their principles, the Jedi were right about attachments. It’s fine to love and to care, but if you can’t do what’s right because your needs, your attachments, to friends and loved ones matter more than ending the cackling horror in front of you who gaslit an entire galaxy into an apocalyptic war then it’s the attachments that are the problem. If Anakin had been a normal person then he’d be a moody bad boy with great hair and a head full of trauma and his attachments would be the sole problem of him and his loved ones. Give him incredible power though and his inability to endure threats to his loved ones cause serial massacres and wind up getting a whole bunch of them killed.

The Jedi were right.

If Anakin hadn’t acted on his feelings for Padme or managed to hold them in a healthy way that didn’t distort his priorities, then that final hook Palpatine used to turn him isn’t an option. Playing on Anakin’s insecurities wasn’t enough, it was Palpatine dangling a way to save Padme that pushed Anakin over the edge.

Conversely while I think the way it was presented didn’t so much present Ahsoka as a complicated hero but rather was confusing and tedious, I think Ahsoka the gray represents the other side of the coin: she misunderstood the lesson about attachment and overcompensated for Anakin’s failures. Ahsoka the white is secure in herself and cares warmly for those around her without losing sight of the bigger picture. Much as Obi Wan generally seems to do.

The Star Wars fandom is like a case study of what happens when you overthink media intended for children to the point that you’ve completely altered the message and plot that the creator intended. The whole “the Jedi order is evil and Anakin/Vader is the good guy!” Idea fails to take into account the fact that like.. these movies are meant for kids, they’re meant to be easy to follow and easy to understand with obvious good guys and obvious bad guys. Yknow how we know the Jedi are the good guys? - they’re the main characters, they have funny one liners, they kill the evil bad guys who have red laser swords with their blue and green laser swords, they’re relatable, they’re nice, they’re paternal, so on so forth.

I love critical analysis and I’d never speak a word against it, when we consume media we should always take a step back to consider what ideas they’re selling us, what undertones are portrayed, is this supposed to represent a real life problem? But it’s also equally as important to consider who the audience is and how that might impact the story. And ultimately the audience is children, Star Wars is not meant to be a mystery thriller where the good guys are secretly the bad guys which you can only tell when you pick the story apart 20 which ways. The movies could not more clearly tell us who were meant to support. - is it the angry guys with red swords, ugly old guy who shoot’s lighting out of his fingers and takes over the universe, people who blow up planets, chop off their kids hands and blow up planet’s? Or is it the people who wear warm coloured clothing, talk about wanting peace, who tell funny jokes, have heartfelt moments, with blue and green lightsabers, fight against the space fascists and love each other.

Ultimately, Star Wars isn’t that deep, enjoy it for what it is and I promise you’ll enjoy it 100 times more

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biblioflyer · 3 months

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“We were on a break.” - Spock, probably.

Snark aside, I trust the SNW writers. Which is a first for the streaming era, Lower Decks aside. (I admit to knowing nothing about Prodigy)

There’s a lot of time chronologically between where Spock is now and TOS to muddy the waters . Ultimately I do think they are aiming for the basis of their ambivalence in TOS to be Spock’s insecurity and violent shifting between wholly rejecting his Vulcan heritage and his Human heritage under the assumption that he must choose to be accepted.

There’s just a lot of pain and heartache between now and TMP when he realizes it was a false dilemma all along and walks away from purging his emotions.

#321

"I have a love-hate relationship with T'Pring in SNW. On the one hand, I absolutely love her. Her character is amazing, and every episode she was in, her actress knocked it out of the park. She's tries very hard to be attentive to Spock's needs, both Vulcan and Human, and she is very much not your typical Vulcan.

But on the other, the storyline around her completely shifts the dynamics of what happens in the Pon Farr episode and makes me not like Spock as much because now with SNW, he's a cheater who still seems to expect that T'Pring is just going to be waiting for him.

In TOS, T'Pring's decision is kind of a bitch move sprung on Spock with the implication of being more "Vulcans are lowkey racists" but with SNW context, it's honestly completely fair to tell the guy who cheated on you that actually no I'm not marrying you because I deserve better, sorry our laws require you to fight to the death now, I didn't write them.

I want to love T'Pring so much because she's one of the most complicated female characters on the show but God what the show does to Spock in the process of that development makes me so sad."

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biblioflyer · 5 months

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"...the paradox of what a Star Trek movie should be is often at odds with what a blockbuster movie must deliver."

I mostly strive for OC under this pen name but this article in Inverse on Star Trek Insurrection by Ryan Britt really spoke to me. I've long said that Star Trek at its best is a set of secular parables that show how decent people grapple with complex moral problems and choose what's right over what it is easy or safe.

#star trek #rare media gems #star trek insurrection #ryan britt

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biblioflyer · 5 months

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Temporal Cold/Hot Wars Theorizing

Thinking about how most civilizations that range from moderately above to far beyond the 24th/25th century Federation's tech level have mellowed out and largely seem to not be expansionist for its own sake or prone to zero sum thinking, it leaves us with the problem of the Temporal Cold War. So here's a take, see what you make of it internet land.

Its clear that at some point prior to the Burn, the Vulcans and Romulans have mostly reconciled. Time Travel technology of a sort that was utilized and then abandoned in the later half of the 2Xth centuries was involved to some extent in policing and attempting to subvert the Prime timeline. The Romulan agent who attempted to assassinate Khan in Strange New Worlds is food for thought.

Her motive seems to be Romulan supremacism. Which in some sense is the typical motive of the Federation's anti-pluralist enemies. However, I have to wonder if the Temporal Cold War is 1. not intrinsically a thing that originates with the spread of temporal technology in the 2Xth centuries but rather is something that is happening all over the timeline just about as soon as someone figures out that they can go back in time by looping around a sufficiently large gravity well at warp.

And 2. that a lot of it, and this is more me having fun with the idea here, is motivated in large part by the gradual decline in overt great power competition and supremacist thinking and the implicit "victory" of the Federation. Whether they sign on the dotted line or not, the maturation and increased precision of temporal technology comes along at the same time that particular factions in formerly imperial minded polities, like the Romulans, are watching more and more of their people choose peaceful coexistence and reconciliation.

At that point the only way to avert this "decline" via peaceful assimilation, is to erase the Federation as a viable entity from history. The Sphere Builders for instance try to use the Xindi as a proxy for this.

Sera likely represents another attempt at this for the cause of Romulan ascension, although its equally possible, perhaps even more likely that she comes from an earlier point on the timeline using cruder methods of time travel (like warping around a large gravity well) since she appears to have been stranded in 1992 after failing to find and assassinate Khan and unable to return to her present to ascertain what went wrong.

Of course because the past wasn't what she expected, she may have also feared returning to a present/future in which she wouldn't be recognized by her handlers and unable to prove to their satisfaction who she was, or worse, they would accept her proof and then throw her in an oubliette for intensive study.

Finally, while the Federation and other parties to the armistice that "ended" the Temporal Wars may have destroyed their technology, it seems unlikely that that is actually the real end of it all so much as some outside neutral party is policing the advancement of the timeline such that as desirable as it may be to prevent avoidable catastrophes like the Burn or the destruction of Vulcan in the Kelvin timeline, it must be a tenet of the consensus among time traveling civilizations that nobody gets to go back and tinker Although it is interesting to speculate about when and how different intrusions that aren't repaired such as Narada starting the Kelvin timeline are permitted to spawn branching timelines.

#star trek #fan theories #time travel #this is no time to talk about time we don't have the time

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biblioflyer · 5 months

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So here’s an interesting proposition: what if the admonition is itself not a passive agent? It’s designed to be received in such a way as to throw non-synths off the scent. When it comes into contact with a type of mind that the Synth civilization has put on the naughty list for whatever reason, it damages the host.

The way the Romulan mind is constructed may even have prefigured that the Admonition was going to lash out. It may even be that Admonition is entirely correct: it is an admonition but the intent was “don’t create life and then treat it like an appliance or else!” And the Romulan mind is configured in such a way, whether naturally or because of cultural forces, that your average Romulan freaks out and assumes that Synths will replace and destroy organic life.

I want to get a little meta here because while it flirts with headcanon, if not outright revisionism, I do not assume that there is default, objectively correct narrator in Picard the series. I think it is trying to replicate the prestige drama format where different characters have access to different sets of facts and are interpreting events based on their priors.

Which is a bit within the mode of classic Trek where conflict is actually about a failure of imagination to find a positive sum outcome and a little bit against the spirit of classic Trek in that we may not have finished the story with the complete truth having come out.

I’m also somewhat hostile to the idea of a civilization on that scale that is intended to be a boogieman. Clearly there is room for malign intent beyond the tech level of the Federation: the temporal Cold War happens, but it seems like the default is civilizations reach a point where they’re no longer eying each other as predators and prey.

Jiurati crucially does not receive the Admonition directly, what she experienced may have simply been Commodore Oh’s memories. Someone who wants to create for its own sake, to be loved and to bring people together may even have had a very different experience. Agnes may have received an epiphany that leads her to a breakthrough in her research that accelerates the creation of Synth life.

Positronic life critically is also individual in nature. It builds on organic life but it’s not networked. So the Borg and the eradication of individual experience would be anathema to the Synths. If the Admonition is a wetware virus that spread to the Borg and then into their computers, it would have quickly recognized the Borg as something it could not permit to develop positronic sentience because it would simply enslave that sentience.

Hmm according to Fandom Alpha, he mentioned that The Admonition:

“—was designed for synthetic minds, any organics attempting to access it could be driven to madness, self-harm, and suicide.”

So I wonder what would have happened if the Admonition was passed on to the Borg.

BTW, I still can’t believe that Ramdha’a supposed grief and despair was the reason for the submatrix collapse of the Artifact Cube.

Because the Borg have assimilated so many worlds, a billion minds filled with grief and despair as their lives were taken from them and their loved ones. It doesn’t make sense, it has to be something else.

I believe that Narissa believed it was because of Ramdha. But I personally don’t.

(The whole AI synthetic thing was too close to BSG and the one other game— I’m not on board with that part of the plot.)

But also, Romulans love their secrets too much that 80% of the time the cause of their own downfall.

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biblioflyer · 5 months

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I think this is almost certainly correct. The Uber AI seems specifically oriented towards positronic synth life. It’s likely that in actuality the Borg don’t count because while there are algorithms and such that regulate the hive, the point of the collective is its joining together of wet ware.

The Uber synths likely experienced a major pogrom by organics. Perhaps “digital” life like Moriarty is more limited and tends not to be seen as a true threat to organic life in the same way that Synths who are engineered life from the cells up could be.

It would be interesting to know whether The Doctor could experience The Admonition or if his specific manner of being sapient is also not really what the Synths are looking for.

Fun questions to ponder!

Hmm according to Fandom Alpha, he mentioned that The Admonition:

“—was designed for synthetic minds, any organics attempting to access it could be driven to madness, self-harm, and suicide.”

So I wonder what would have happened if the Admonition was passed on to the Borg.

BTW, I still can’t believe that Ramdha’a supposed grief and despair was the reason for the submatrix collapse of the Artifact Cube.

I believe that Narissa believed it was because of Ramdha. But I personally don’t.

(The whole AI synthetic thing was too close to BSG and the one other game— I’m not on board with that part of the plot.)

But also, Romulans love their secrets too much that 80% of the time the cause of their own downfall.

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biblioflyer · 5 months

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Annie's Triumph and Storytelling Without Words: Ahsoka Theses

If you missed the intro, this is my rumination about Ahsoka. I'm dividing it up in Light Side and Dark Side takes. Here's the intro and a few briefer thoughts. As always I hold my opinions loosely and am intrigued rather than hostile to different interpretations.

Light Side: "Balanced Anakin" calls the class to order.

Dark Side: This show doesn't know how to shoot and story tell with laconic characters.

Light Side: “Balanced” Anakin

Anakin’s “final teachings” were another high point for me. With the benefit of years of experience and personal growth, Hayden Christiansen nails Anakin Skywalker, cosmic entity. His presence is eerie, and I’m not talking about the de-aging. He carries himself with the sort of easy, enlightened calm of Episode IV Obi Wan rather than the tense, antsy teenager he was.

If there was one missed opportunity of the flashbacks, its that they didn’t de-age Christiansen quite enough or he wasn’t quite able to summon the coiled spring energy of that version of Anakin to remind us that this is someone who is barely out of his teens who has been given responsibility for a FOURTEEN year old, IN A WAR.

This too is something that I think Ahsoka might have leaned into: in her mind, he’s Master Skywalker. But he’s also Fly Guy. Someone barely older than her. They practically grew up together. I think this must be some aspect of Ahsoka coming to terms with her training and being part of Anakin’s legacy. The war broke him. In some sense, it broke her, but she still held onto her decency. She didn’t succumb to the Dark Side’s siren song and its promise of power and easy solutions.

Because I feel like Star Wars is better as a Manichean cosmology, I choose to believe that Anakin isn’t “balanced” like Bendu from Clone Wars, but rather he truly redeemed himself. When he transforms into Darth Vader, he is not Darth Vader, he is a representation of everything Ahsoka fears about herself, how she grew up, and why she’s been so hesitant about trying her hand at restarting the Jedi her way.

Their duel is not simply about Ahsoka not drowning in the material world, but about whether she can actually move on from the Clone Wars and Anakin or if her doubts and sorrows will perpetually hold her back and snuff her out.

Dark Side: The characters don’t have a flat affect, the show has a flat affect

Let me be up front: I'm extremely aware this is a VERY unoriginal complaint at this point. Hopefully by digging into where I think the series let its key players down, I can bring some warmth to the whining.

Yes I said that right: let its key players down. I don't think its their fault. I want to be extra clear that I don’t think any of the performers on this series made ill-advised choices with how they played their characters. I believe very strongly that each and especially Dawson, Bordizzo, and Winstead were attempting to deliver nuanced and layered performances that, in some fashion, contrast sharply with the more dynamic (some would say melodramatic) tone of the Prequels, Sequels, and in some cases, the big Marvel shaped elephant in the room.

I wasn’t on set (obviously) so I can only guess at what went wrong but I think there are clues. If you watch some really, really good prestige dramas like Handmaid’s Tale or even other pulpy stuff with an infamously laconic and broody heroine like Captain Marvel (whose film of the same name I am extremely enamored of), you see some extremely skillful use of various devices to invite us into the mindscape of the characters in situations where it would be nonsensical for them to be spoon feeding us exposition.

Some of those devices are tight close-ups of the face and eyes, musical scores that set a mood, and flashbacks.

Flashbacks are something that were used to masterful effect in Ahsoka’s visions in Episode 5, but otherwise anyone who didn’t watch Rebels had no context for anything happening throughout the rest of the show. Even those of us who did watch Rebels had a lengthy time skip that radically altered the circumstances and priorities of the characters, generally without much explanation.

Captain Marvel uses flashbacks split up and injected at pivotal moments in the present day story to provide the insights that her Kree conditioning is not going to permit her to easily trust others with. Of course Captain Marvel is also a story about repressed memory so the storytelling device makes extra sense, but then Ahsoka herself is an unknown to people outside fans of Clone Wars and Rebels, and like the crew of the Ghost, there’s been a substantial time skip that has altered the setting and their lives. It's would have been well worth taking some screen time to show rather than tell us about the experiences the audience doesn’t know about that provide context for those icy exchanges and awkward silences.

As far as music goes, consider the iconic scene where Luke is gazing into the sunset in Episode IV. John Williams’ somber reworking of the Star Wars theme when combined with our knowledge that his aspirations are all coming to naught gives us insight into what Luke is thinking and feeling. Yet I would argue that not only are Ahsoka’s characters blank canvases as far as their lives and motivations, any attempt by their performers to use body language to tell a story about what is happening within is thwarted by subtle and forgettable music.

Or maybe I have crappy speakers! I could simply be unobservant. Your mileage may vary.

Circling back to The Handmaid’s Tale and its love of tight, even claustrophobic close-ups on the eyes of characters who are not speaking, yet somehow managing to communicate volumes; this is one area where Dawson and Winstead’s extremely unfortunate contact lenses don’t help. This is largely irrelevant for Thrawn and Ezra because the former is stoic and inscrutable by nature, and the latter was written to still have retained his dynamic and outgoing nature.

#star wars #captain marvel #the handmaid's tale #brie larson #rosario dawson #carol danvers #star wars ahsoka #ahsoka analysis #ahsoka review #anakin skywalker #natasha liu bordizzo #elizabeth winstead #hera syndulla #sabine wren #storytelling

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biblioflyer · 5 months

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Cruelty is an Unreliable Weapon

The internet has been irritating me of late. This is in some sense, nothing new, but it has been irritating me very specifically in what I view as extremely wrongheaded thinking about the absence of any presence for morality in conflict. You can read between the lines if you so choose to infer what I'm discussing obliquely, but if you'd prefer, assume this is about people who are constantly whining that the Federation isn't tough or militaristic enough, or Galactic Empire apologists.

Settle in, get a beverage, because I got a bit wound up. This will take more than a minute. It clocked in at about 8 pages & 3600 words in Google docs.

Theories of Power and Victory

Two contentions are often made in discussions of war and conflict:

That the capacity to resist equals bargaining power without taking into consideration the manner of resistance i.e. committing atrocities.

The second is that suffering hastens the end of conflict.

Let's examine this. I’m going to primarily lean on case studies from World War 1 because they allow me to speak about modern conflicts via allegory. Allegory by necessity obfuscates the real message the reader is expected to take away from this.

I am at peace with this. If I tell you what to think about the conflict between the United Federation of Dave Filoni Truthers and the Galactic Republic of Rian Johnson Apologists, you will be more inclined to be combative.

If I engage in a bit of obfuscation, then you’ll be more inclined to take these case studies as they are intended. These are thought experiments and frameworks. My hope is you use them to think through modern conflicts where you may be more inclined to fully dehumanize the evildoer or wave off complaints about the behavior of the righteous as “regrettable but necessary.”

Loosening Rules of Engagement: Almost Always a Bad Idea

In World War 1, there was a continual escalation as all sides sought new innovations to break the deadlock. This took the form of both new weapon systems but also new strategies.

Technically commerce raiding is arguably as old as the idea of putting trade goods on a boat, but the usage of submarines definitely represents an escalation and innovation on that idea. In theory we were beyond the days of letters of marque. Assaulting civilian shipping would be considered atrocious and ungentlemanly in normal times.

However, in an era of total national mobilization, it is the very foundations of the nation that are supposedly necessary to be chipped away at in order to try to obtain the defeat of the enemy. In the arguments made under conditions of total war, there may be non-combatants but there are no persons who are truly uninvolved because in a total mobilization, everyone is contributing to the war effort whether with their sweat or their blood.

Even children, especially in the late Victorian era, are net contributors because they take on responsibilities formerly held by adults and, if the struggle is prolonged, will grow into adults who can be drafted or more fully contribute to the industrial effort.

Yet the enemy doesn’t stop thinking of their children as children. The enemy doesn’t stop thinking of their non-combatants as civilians, even as the enemy rationalizes their way into killing the children and non-combatants of their opponents.

So what happens when Germany expands its commerce raiding to include civilian liners suspected of carrying arms ought to be very predictable. The story of the US entry into WW1, if it's told at all - and that’s another bag of badgers - often centers on the sinking of the passenger liner Lusitania.

Arguably the sinking of the Lusitania does hasten the end of the war, but not even remotely in the way that Germany anticipated and definitely not in its favor. It's important to note that the story is not so neat and tidy. The Lusitania is often held up as an inciting event, but the US doesn’t enter the war for another two years when Germany resumes unrestricted submarine warfare.

Rather than say “my bad, you’re right, we shouldn’t have tried to play silly games with sending weapons on passenger liners” the US entered the war in an official capacity. The US entry into the war wasn't decisive right away, it was arguably even more bumbling and horrific as the first year of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but it makes the endgame that much more inevitable for the Central Powers.

Don’t blur the lines between military and civilian.

Germany essentially walked into the trap that Britain baited with international civilians. There are no objectively correct moral actors in this situation but we can certainly dissect the consequences, especially for Germany, of having elected to not take the high road.

When it comes to the US entrance into the war, this story is complicated by the fact that there was a strong contingent of Manifest Destiny true believers who didn’t look at the Western front and feel appalled at how far honor, nationalism, hate, and sunk cost would drive people. Rather instead they saw an opportunity for the US to take her rightful place as a key player in The Great Game.

So it's easy to argue that absent the sinking of the Lusitania, the US would have been dragged in anyway. It was, after all, the biggest creditor of the Entente and were Britain, France and friends to lose, it's quite likely that repaying the Americans would come second to compensating the Central Powers for the inconvenience of having to send millions of people into what amounts to a wood chipper.

However, the sinking of the Lusitania definitely moved up the timeline of the US entry into the war. A thing that could have been delayed, and perhaps even prevented if one or more Black Swans had scrambled US domestic politics. Because the Germans failed to practice a stricter set of rules of engagement, a new player takes the field, the US is able to arm Britain and France more prolifically and openly, and Germany’s goose is pretty well cooked. The only question being how long it was going to take to cook that goose.

While there was certainly malice, pride, and national chauvinism involved in creating conditions in which Germany would be tempted to escalate by striking ships with Americans onboard, there’s no ironclad law of physics or human behavior that dictates the US was going to enter the war.

Had the United States wanted to stay out of the war it could have made a range of different choices, some of which arguably were against the prevailing understanding of its “national interest” and some could be read as rewarding German threats of “terrorism” against civilians, but “bad” options are still options:

Forbid mixed use Entente ships from using US ports.

Forbid American passengers from booking passage on Entente ships carrying weapons.

Warn Americans that their personal security is their responsibility and if they do enter contested waters on a ship that might be considered a legitimate target, they’re on their own.

The British own part of this too: it was their choice to comingle arms shipments and civilian passengers.

It goes without saying that the Germans also weren’t obligated to sink Lusitania.

Of course this choice is complicated by a whole host of contextual factors: British ships had been instructed to try to ram German submarines instead of submitting to boarding and inspection, and some British civilian ships had been armed.

Allowing Lusitania to go along her way peacefully also rewards the British for using human shields.

I don’t find the Germans morally praiseworthy here, but the British deserve heaps of scorn for intentionally putting civilians in danger in order to prioritize winning a war that was anything but existential for it and then daring the Germans to kill civilians to disrupt the British war effort.

What happens if the Germans don’t take the bait? Well, the war definitely goes on and is that much harder for the Germans but they retain a measure of the moral high ground.

Could this win them useful allies in the court of global public opinion?

Or at least keep certain disruptive players like the US out of the war?

The US was the last great power to not take a side as of when Germany and the UK began their nautical shenanigans with tragic consequences. It's doubtful the US could be compelled to enter the war on the side of Germany, hence why Germany could have understood its situation as necessitating unrestricted warfare against not merely the Entente militaries but the Entente people themselves.

However, again there is nothing inevitable here. There are a lot of reasons why the US staying out of the war was unlikely, but it's far from impossible - I don’t believe in historical inevitability, just higher or lower probability.

Because of this lack of inevitability, it is worth restating the moral proposition Britain cast aside:

Don’t comingle military and civilian.

You ignore this advice at your own peril. The consequences are entirely predictable.

The US may very well have not come charging in to bail out the Entente. It could have sat on the sidelines and cut support for the Entente to punish the UK for putting foreign civilians at risk. I think it would have been VERY morally defensible to do so.

There are scenarios, such as insurgency, where the camouflage of being civilian in appearance is necessary if armed struggle is to be at all viable, but again the consequences for “real” civilians are very predictable.

That doesn’t mean the party that winds up killing civilians, intentionally or unintentionally, is morally blameless: it's a choice to loosen rules of engagement or to not exercise even greater care when dealing with ambiguity. There is no mandate to kill civilians through recklessness, indifference, cruelty, or to deny the enemy an advantage.

Everything is a choice.

Immoral choices are rarely unavoidable. Accidents truly happen and are tragic, but caution isn’t a frivolous thing to be cast aside for convenience or galaxy brained theories about psychological warfare as Germany’s fate demonstrates.

Yet, to beat a dead horse, to say that those who blur the lines between combatant and noncombatant have no responsibility for what happens to noncombatants is also deeply disingenuous.

Suffering is an Inconsistent Weapon at Best.

There’s a deeply felt conviction among some that hardness wins wars faster. As near as I can tell the premise usually comes from one of two sentiments.

The first is that the enemy, being a rational actor, is capable of “doing the math.” Once they understand what the aggressor is willing to do to win. How far they’ll go, then every day that surrender is deferred is just more rapes, homes burned, prisoners tortured, more famine, more suffering: pick your poison. Therefore the reasonable and moral thing to do is to just get it over with.

The Romans are probably the most famous example of a people who practiced unmitigated savagery when a city didn’t surrender promptly in order to induce others to not resist in the expectation of gentler treatment. This is a practice that preceded the Romans and I’d argue that it's unlikely that there is any corner of the world where there was no close parallel at some point in time.

While we can’t know for certain until and unless Russian archives are made available at some point in the future, it's tempting to ponder whether or not this mindset has influenced Russian atrocities such as in Bucha. The Romans were also guilty of not always being able to prevent their legions from going berserk even when a city was compliant.

Inflicting cruelty to try to induce surrender is almost definitely one motive behind the targeting of Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, especially electrical equipment during winter time. Which informs us that this mindset does continue into the present day, just expressed in different forms and contexts.

The second assumption is that sufficiently intense or broadly inflicted suffering would shatter the will to resist on a psychological level: creating panic, terror, disorder etc. We see this in its most straightforward form on ancient battlefields when armies rout after an understanding filters through the ranks that things are starting to go pear-shaped.

Whether or not this model can apply to something on the scale of a region or a nation is disputed and the answer probably is more about worldviews than objectivity.

If panic on the scale of a nation is possible, then panic doesn’t always achieve the desired result.

One might argue for instance that Western and especially US Islamophobia drove the US and allies to make a series of unforced errors with a human cost in the millions and still counting as the ripple effects are still rippling even after all this time. Calm and collected people may have been drawing lines on maps and debating the “get in and get out” or “if you break it, you bought it” models of war, but in the background is a subtler, longer term, persistent panic and existential dread induced by 9/11.

Of course it could have just been some mix of racism and imperialism. If that were the case then ascribing fear to the motives of Bush, Cheney, and the alumni of The Project for a New American Century incorrectly offers the villains the opportunity to plea bargain the charges down from War and Failed Occupation in the 1st degree to War and Failed Occupation in the 2nd degree.

For whatever it's worth the excellent podcast series Slow Burn: The Road to the Iraq War persuaded me that the primary, conscious motive was rooted in a broken epistemology about how to combat terrorism, the threat posed by Iraq, American capacities, and further sabotaged by philosophical infighting over to what degree and how to nation build that manifested in real world consequences for how resources were allocated, rules of engagement written, and which personnel got key jobs.

Let's return to World War 1, because it has probably more than just the two illustrations that are relevant here but I’m just going to limit it to two.

However, it's worth revisiting poor but possibly perfidious Lusitania, whose souls aboard needlessly died because the Germans decided to be edgy and declare the waters around the UK to be a free fire zone. Then the UK responded with “I dare you to enforce that” and put arms on civilian liners anyway.

Harshness did not, in fact, have the desired outcome for Germany. It failed to deter Britain from using dual purpose shipping and then following through with their threats ultimately escalated the conflict. Ultimately it's unclear if Britain’s will to continue the fight was impeded in any way and the popular narrative is that it galvanized resistance.

Although information warfare may have played a role too: the British government denied any violation of any of its obligations under pre war treaties or any violation of general decency: i.e. putting civilians at risk without their knowing consent. Messaging and the possible absence of knowing consent on the part of civilians is also worth holding in our heads when weighing the morality of ensuring the homefront is made to feel pain too.

Bringing the War to the Homefront

The British blockade of Germany in World War 1 has two rationales. One is that in total war, as discussed previously the civilian population is playing a very active part in sustaining combat operations. Attritional war is an effort to ensure that your side is not the first to run out of people or stuff. The average person is a lot more aware of this due in no small part to the way the Russian invasion of Ukraine in its second year has calcified into heavily fortified battlelines with much, much less in the way of dramatic maneuvers than in 2022.

The introduction of various destabilizing weapon systems: Javelin, Excalibur rounds, HIMARS, Stormshadow etc. has at each step momentarily unsettled the balance of power but Russia continues to be able to field enough people and material to absorb the losses and then adapt while Ukraine is, unfortunately, reliant on the patronage of allies and what industrial capacity it can scrape together and protect from Russia: no small feat in an era of satellite surveillance, rampant hacking, and cruise missiles.

Notably Ukraine or Russian partisans acting on their own accord or with assistance, have struck at various bits of Russian infrastructure and industrial sites.

This has made some commentators uncomfortable whether because of natural anxiety at seeing the homefront of a nuclear power get hit or a certain amount of hesitancy to label these as legitimate targets. Something Russia is not even a little squeamish about, nor (more controversially) was the US squeamish about during the first Gulf War.

Saddam Hussein notably would continue to be the ruler of Iraq, even under sanctions and bombing campaigns of varying intensity until the US led invasion in 2003.

Which brings us to the second rationale for the British blockade of Germany: punishment with the expectation that it would eventually break the German people. This included food. While this didn’t completely cut off Germany from food imports, the necessity of neutral ships to be inspected and escorted to Germany at minimum had a chilling effect that clawed back 55% of imports of all types and cut the average German down to 1,000 calories a day by 1917.

That’s one large McDonalds meal per person per day and that’s about it. I once had a salad, A SALAD, from Applebees that wound up having over a thousand calories.

Now of course, the success or failure of the blockade is disputed by historians. I have a lot of respect for the profession, but it’s also not hard to imagine that there is some motivated reasoning involved.

When a nation does something that is controversial in its own time, as the blockade was, and winds up killing between 400,000 and 800,000 people through among the cruelest of means: famine, if it turns out that these actions didn’t directly contribute to ending the war sooner, the nation who inflicted this on their fellow human beings is not exactly the hero of the story now are they?

So of course the desire is going to be very strong to gesture at problems with disorder, looting, and the increasing poor health of the military and civilian labor force as having made strong contributions to ensuring the war didn’t last longer and claim even more lives.

On the other hand, average caloric intake fell to a Special Value Meal per day (and probably much worse if you look at essential vitamins and protein) and the Germans kept going for five years. It's possible that absent the blockade, the war lasts even longer but that’s a counterfactual we simply cannot realistically examine because life isn’t an Excel sheet.

Duration also doesn’t necessarily directly map to intensity. If the war is not perceived as an existential struggle because both sides are attempting to collapse one another’s very societies to set conditions for peace on their terms, how does this change the tactics used in the field and the overall strategy?

Because if there is one point I want to hammer home it's that the perception of a war as being existential is intensely radicalizing. People will endure suffering that is unimaginable to people sitting in comfort and safety if they are operating under the belief that if the war isn’t won, the nation and its people will experience even greater suffering than they are experiencing under conditions of war, or even that the nation may cease to exist, its people scattered or massacred.

It's even harder for us to imagine that concepts like the German or British Empires might be worth “going over the top” for, or sitting around never knowing if a poison gas attack is going to be launched in your sleep. Or more nightmarishly: that you might feel so deeply that the fate of your nation is at risk, that it might be worth executing your subordinates for cowardice if they don’t attack enemy fortifications.

Of course there is also the example of modern Ukraine. It is rather clear that the people of Ukraine have taken very seriously the statements of Russian high level people that “Ukrainian” is an invalid identity that must be made to be subsumed into the Russian identity. One does not have to be an ardent nationalist, and I am not, to find this to be more than a little concerning.

It's not hard to imagine that extremely bellicose rhetoric from an opponent, when combined with growing suffering on the homefront and no doubt plenty of propaganda proclaiming the enemy to have an exterminationist agenda, would radicalize even people who are ambivalent to their government.

In 2002, it was widely expected that mounting casualties and a worsening economic outlook due to the war in Ukraine would seal Vladimir Putin’s fate. At the close of 2003, with nearly two years of fighting and one half baked mutiny in the books, Putin remains and is seemingly even more secure in power.

This is a more problematic example because it's hard to conceive of any strategy Ukraine or its allies can undertake that would preserve Ukraine’s autonomy while not generating at least some evidence to support Putin’s “Big Lie” about Russia being a victim pursuing legitimate security interests. Yet, in spite of this, great effort appears to have made to avoid feeding that Big Lie unnecessarily.

As of this writing, Ukraine has not pursued targeting Russian civilians directly either as an explicit policy nor is there much if any evidence it is doing so implicitly. Some in the amateur punditry of the fever swamps of social media have proposed Ukraine pursue payback against Russia for Bucha and other atrocities, but I think history shows this would be deeply, deeply mistaken.

Intellectual honesty compels me to hold up this example: sometimes a nation (Russia) (or just its political elite) can be responsible for the vast majority of the suffering its people have experienced and yet this too can be contextualized to fit a narrative that casts a struggle as existential, centers the chief provocateur as victim, and some critical mass of people will go along with it, rather than reject it and collapse the war effort from within.

Notably, while World War 1 shattered the Russian Empire, the various transitional governments between the end of Czarist rule and the eventual takeover by the Bolsheviks did not exit the war.

Consider all of these case studies, all ye who would dismiss rules of engagement as unworthy of dishonorable foes or inefficient, and would dismiss concerns about excessive cruelty or collective punishment as soft and defeatist.

#War #rules of engagement #ethics #cruelty #the great war #lusitania #Triple Entente #Central Powers #world war 1 #laws of war #atrocities #crimes against humanity #collective punishment #escalation #current events

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biblioflyer · 5 months

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Ahsoka Theses Intro

I'm late to the party as usual but I wanted to let the show digest before I started banging out some thoughts. Some are pedestrian, many meandering. On the whole I liked it but also I felt like there's a lot of nits to pick with how the story unfolded.

As an amusing device, I'm dividing up my praise and complaints into Light Side and Dark Side Takes. As always, this is my two credits, your mileage may vary and I'm also down for having something I missed pointed out that seemed blindingly obvious to someone else.

And no, its not the usual complaints about Mary Sues or "Look how they massacred my boy!" blather that centers Legends as peak storytelling.

Additional entries in this series:

Light Side: "Balanced" Anakin

Dark Side: Efforts were clearly made to develop complex, layered characters through heavy prosthetics and contact lenses but someone dropped the ball on supporting these performances.

Just to prime the pump and for a sampling, here's a few short ones.

Light Side: The Action Choreography.

I have generally been in favor of the return to more tense, tactical swordplay as compared to the flamboyance of the Prequel Trilogy. The jockeying for position and mind games before the first stroke is made really worked for me. I know some people seem to feel like the Prequel Trilogy’s high octane, more acrobatic combat conveyed the idea of superhuman power more, but the older I get, the more I find it more tedious than exciting.

Dark Side: The conflict between Ahsoka and Sabine just didn’t work for me.

At any point. I was frustrated and disengaged with how the series saved the context for the sullen silences and the clipped remarks until the series was mostly over.

It certainly seemed like an attempt to set up an intriguing mystery. Why are Ahsoka and Sabine at odds? Is it Sabine? Is it Ahsoka? Is it Ahsoka’s baggage from the Jedi and Anakin? Is it Sabine’s Midicholorian deficiency?

We don’t get a real clue until Ahsoka’s shadow play with Anakin. Then we finally get the unpacking of some of her fears over being tainted by her experiences as a child soldier and being the padawan of the man who went on to become the second most evil person in the galaxy up to that point.

Huyang’s explanation of the conflict to Ezra, in my opinion, steps all over the much better explanation that it was all Ahsoka and her conflicted feelings over the Jedi, how she was trained, and whether she was herself actually a good person after everything she had to do. Instead the explanation is apparently that Ahsoka is afraid of what Sabine could become with the right training.

Which isn’t necessarily bad as explanations go: Mandalorians aren’t exactly known for being on the same page as the Jedi as to when violence is and isn’t an appropriate tool for a situation. It's just an explanation that is less directly connected to Ahsoka’s journey from gray to light.

I suppose these two explanations aren’t even mutually exclusive. Huyang is observant but not omniscient. Nothing says he has to be taken as if its from an entirely reliable narrator, although he’s presented as pretty darn reliable. Further, it could be both at the same time: Ahsoka fears that she is incapable of training someone who won’t fall to the Dark Side and she also fears that Sabine’s baggage and instincts lead to a natural affinity with the Dark Side and a Dark Side Mandalorian would be bad news indeed.

Light Side: Ahsoka Tano, Child Soldier

The switch from seeing animated Ahsoka to a live action, age appropriate Ahsoka was harrowing. It absolutely, positively did what it needed to do: to represent all of the complicated feelings Ahsoka has about the Jedi Order, Anakin, and the trajectory of her life. It's left unsaid, but it offers an implicit explanation for why she doesn’t stay on as a teacher for Luke’s new Jedi Order nor are there hints that she had any inkling to mentor him.

That Ahsoka would struggle to form a connection with Sabine, another child of war, would make perfect sense. I’m slightly less thrilled about Huyang going so far as to suggest Ahsoka feared Sabine, but it might be proper to say that what Ahsoka fears is that she only knows how to forge people into instruments of destruction and thus any lineage she starts will be at risk for falling to the Dark Side.

Baylon is also an effective mirror to show what Ahsoka could be if she’d traded fear for resentment and let it curdle.

Credit where credit is due, Ariana Greenblatt can play any traumatized alien child she wants. That is a kid who has a natural talent for acting through prosthetics. Watch this kid, because I think she could be the female Doug Jones if she wants that career path.

It just shouldn’t have taken five episodes to reach this kind of breakthrough in unpacking the title character’s motivations.

#star wars #ahsoka #ahsoka series #ahsoka show #ahsoka 2023 #ahsoka tano #star wars ahsoka #sabine wren #light side #dark side #jedi #ariana greenblatt #ahsoka review #ahsoka commentary #ahsoka analysis

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