Intrigue in the Old Republic

Knights of the Old Republic #0: Crossroads

Author: John Jackson Miller

Artist: Brian Ching

Medium: Comic

Publication Date: March 2006

Timeline Placement: 3,964 BBY

Series: Knights of the Old Republic

Sadly (or not), we won’t be seeing any more of Nomi Sunrider, Sylvar, Master Thon, or the Twi’lek Jedi Tott Doneeta. Even little Vima, who was established in reference books as becoming the greatest Jedi Master of her era and eventually training the Jedi Exile, the player character from Knights of the Old Republic II, will never appear again. Del Rey had plans to publish a Nomi-and-Vima novel called Mandorla, but it was canceled because they can’t ever try anything different, ever, so here we are.

Enter our new protagonist, Zayne Carrick, a Padawan stationed at the Jedi training facility on Taris during the Mandalorian Wars, the next major conflict as we progress through the Old Sith Wars (the Cleansing of the Nine Houses doesn’t count because nobody knows what the hell it is).

Zayne attempts to arrest a Snivvian conman called “the Gryph,” but instead ends up falling off a skyscraper because he is incompetent. He is saved by a passing Jedi Knight on a speeder who has been sent to look for him by Zayne’s teacher, Master Lucien. The Jedi, a dark-haired man called Squint, explains that he and several other Jedi, including their Master, are passing through Taris on their way to join the war, something the Jedi Council does not approve of. Squint offers some vague foreshadowing about darkness and destiny and then departs.

Meanwhile, the five head instructors of the Taris academy, including Lucien, have gathered to grab a group selfie with Squint’s Master before he heads out. One of them, Q’anilia, suddenly has a Force vision of bad things happening in the future and the Jedi Masters resolve to do something about it.

All of this is just unnecessary foreshadowing for the next arc, hurray!

2/5 Death Stars.

Knights of the Old Republic #1–6: Commencement

Author: John Jackson Miller

Artist: Brian Ching

Medium: Comic

Publication Date: March 2006

Timeline Placement: 3,964 BBY

Series: Knights of the Old Republic

Another day, another bungled attempt by Zayne to apprehend Marn “The Gryph” Hierogryph. Zayne gets drenched in sewage and ends up crashing through a window of a restaurant, interrupting the celebratory banquet for his class of Jedi initiates that he forgot he was supposed to be at. Having recently completed the Jedi Trials, Zayne and his friends will soon be informed by their Masters whether or not they have been approved for Knighthood.

Zayne confides in his friend Shad Jelavan that he’s confident he’s the only one who won’t be promoted. Shad helpfully suggests that Zayne failed on purpose so he could stay on Taris and continue nursing his crush on Shad’s sister, Shel, who is awkwardly standing right there.

After the banquet, Zayne is left behind to compensate the restaurant manager for the damage he caused. Master Lucien has also stiffed Zayne with the bill for the entire meal, leaving his hapless apprentice penniless. Suddenly, Zayne spots Marn Hierogryph wandering around outside. He immediately pulls a dine-and-dash on the beleaguered manager.

Now penniful once again, Zayne seizes Gryph with the Force and handcuffs him to his speeder, taking him back to the Jedi academy as a prisoner. Why was this so difficult an arrest for him to pull off before? I guess it was destiny or something. They arrive late to the commencement ceremony and Zayne leaves Gryph handcuffed in the garage while he rushes in to catch the end of his friends’ graduation. Instead, he finds their newly murdered corpses cooling at their Masters’ feet.

“You’re late, young one,” Lucien chides.

The Jedi Masters—Xamar, Raana Tey, Lucien Drey, Q’Anilia, and Feln—pursue Zayne through the academy, back to the garage. Zayne jumps on his speeder and takes off with Gryph, who is so confused he pronounces the word “help” as “HAAALLLLPPP!!!” The Masters follow on their own speeders, but lose their quarry when Zayne and Gryph jump down the garbage chute of a college cafeteria.

After they put on the freshman fifteen, Zayne explains to Gryph what the hell is going on. Gryph wisely decides to ditch the clueless Padawan, but reconsiders when he discovers that the Jedi have framed him as Zayne’s accomplice. Realizing they have to get off the planet, Gryph takes Zayne to meet with a discombobulated inventor named Camper, but when they arrive at the junkyard where he lives, they are attacked by his bodyguard, Jarael.

Camper and Jarael are Arkanians, the same alien species as Master Arca Jeth from Tales of the Jedi, despite the fact that they look nothing like him. This discrepancy will be explained in a future comic, but that story arc is so bad I wonder if John Jackson Miller didn’t write it solely to justify having Jarael look like a sexy albino elf babe while Master Arca looks like death. I mean, no one ever bothers explaining why Gryph looks nothing like a regular Snivvian.

Nope, not seeing it.

Zayne tries to explain that he was set up but the Jedi suddenly arrive with the Constable of Taris. Gryph and Zayne take cover in the Arkanians’ junk-house, which they are surprised to discover is actually a ship, the The Last Resort (why is The part of its name?). The The Last Resort takes off from beneath a pile of garbage and heads for space, where they go into hiding in the system’s asteroid belt.

Zayne, Jarael, and Gryph bicker for a few pages while Camper sits alone muttering to himself because he is crazy. Camper passes out and Jarael tends to him while Gryph goes off to take a nap. Later, Zayne sneaks away to contact his Jedi instructors on Dantooine while no one’s looking, piloting the ship out of the asteroid field to send a clear transmission.

The phone is answered by Master Vandar Tokare, a Yoda-type alien and an NPC from the original KotOR game. Despite his vaunted Jedi insight, Vandar just goose steps along and tells Zayne how disappointed he is in him for murdering his classmates. Zayne argues that he’s such a terrible Jedi he never could have overcome all his friends, and Vandar has to admit that that’s true. Then Jarael hits him with a stick for endangering everyone’s lives on this pointless phone call.

Zayne decides that they have to crack the case themselves so they take the The Last Resort to the last place all the Jedi Masters and Padawans were together before the day of the massacre: the Taris system’s rogue moon. Lucien and his buds dropped off their apprentices there for their final test before being knighted. Wearing spacesuits with opaque helmets, they had to use their Force senses to navigate their way across the moon while avoiding the constant bombardment of debris from the asteroid field. The Taris Masters, meanwhile, drank lemonade and worked on their tans while waiting for them beneath a giant deflector shield. Seriously no one could have figured out that they were a bunch of psychopaths before the mass murder? Really?

Zayne and Jarael go down to the moon and recover the remains of T1-LB, the Jedi’s labor droid who had mysteriously fallen off a cliff during the Padawans’ trial. Zayne uses his physics degree and one semester of detective class to deduce that Elbee didn’t fall, but was in fact telekinetically thrown. As they attempt to salvage him, Lucien shows up with the cops again. This whole story is one long chase scene.

Zayne whispers to Jarael to get close to him, like he has some kind of plan to get them out of this, but I guess he just wanted to cop a feel through her spacesuit or something because they just sit there and then the The Last Resort shows up and saves them by shooting at the cops’ spacecar.

One quick getaway later, Camper has rebuilt Elbee and added a hologram emitter to his head so they can see the droid’s final memories before his death. While the Padawans stumbled around dodging death from space, Xamar, Raana Tey, Q’Anilia, and Feln entered a meditation trance while Lucien awkwardly just stood around because he didn’t properly allocate his skill points to achieve the Jedi Consular class.

The four Jedi experienced a shared vision of their own deaths, with the Sith rising once again and the galaxy in flames. The center of the vision was the person who appeared to be responsible for everything: a masked figure wearing a red spacesuit identical to the ones currently worn by their apprentices. Logically, they decided that the only possible recourse is to murder all of their surrogate children in the off chance one of them becomes the Sith in the mass-produced spacesuit probably owned by trillions across the galaxy. Lucien then noticed Elbee watching them and Force-pushed him off a cliff.

Elbee is so distraught over witnessing his own death that he immediately deletes the recording from his memory, conveniently destroying the evidence that could have cleared Zayne’s name and wrapped up this series a couple dozen issues earlier. The The Last Resort is then captured by bounty hunter Valius Ying and his crew, looking to collect the price on Zayne’s head. Gryph leaves Zayne with him because he’s a scoundrel, but later Zayne mind-tricks the guards and sneaks away in the dead of night, but Jarael shows up and says that he’s screwing them over by hanging around and inviting the wrath of Jedi who can’t tell one spacesuit from another. Zayne decides he can’t continue to endanger his newfound friends and agrees to peacefully return to Taris in Ying’s custody.

Ying brings Zayne before the Jedi Masters, hoping to get his money and be on his way. For some reason Lucien explains their entire evil plan and the circumstances behind it, then murders Ying for having learned too much. Before he can strike down Zayne, however, someone wearing the same red spacesuit and helmet from the Jedi’s vision crashes through the window. The Jedi are thrown into chaos, giving Jarael time to take off her helmet and rocketpack away with Zayne. You would think this incident might teach the Jedi that there are more than five of that same model of spacesuit in the galaxy, but NOPE!

Back aboard the The Last Resort, Jarael explains that they couldn’t bring themselves to leave Zayne behind to try his luck with the psychotic Jedi. No one had ever sacrificed themselves for her before, and she didn’t want him getting a big head over it. Gryph then offers Zayne a job in his criminal empire, which doesn’t exist. Zayne agrees, but only if Gryph stops calling him “intern.” Cue studio audience laughter, freeze frame, producer credits.

Meditations

Let’s not beat around the bush, John Jackson Miller’s Knights of the Old Republic is a pretty good Star Wars comic overall, so there’s only so much here to snark about. Commencement isn’t the greatest story arc, but it’s a decent introduction to the new cast and setting. My biggest problem with it (besides the unfathomly horrific art in issue 5, excepting the intentional stylization of the prophecy sequence) is how structurally repetitive it gets after a while. Every scene seems like it ends with the Jedi and the cops randomly showing up, only for Zayne and his friends to somehow slip through their fingers yet again. The whole book really is, like I’ve said, one long chase scene. And Jeff Goldblum isn’t even in it!

There’s also the issue of the Jedi becoming an unrepentant cabal of murderers based on an extremely vague and unspecific vision of the future. Literally anyone could go to Space Kmart and get that same spacesuit, let’s use a little reasoning here, guys. Admittedly, this is only the first arc of the series; maybe later revelations about the Masters’ history and the true subject of their prophecy will justify their single-minded certainty (spoiler: no).

Travel Foreman’s pencils in issue 5 are just terrible. Everyone looks like some horrible nightmare doppelgänger of themselves. It’s just bizarre how randomly awful everything looks for one sixth of the story. Brian Ching’s art is much better, but I’m not really a fan of his style either. Everyone is always scowling and hunched over with claws for fingers. Unfortunately, he’s the primary artist of the whole series. They should have just gotten Dustin Weaver to illustrate everything.

There’s also a montage at the end of the book showing the state of the broader galaxy after Zayne’s escape from Taris. Several of the Jedi who left to fight in the war, including Squint from issue 0, have been taken prisoner by the Mandalorians. This news report is watched by a cloaked figure sitting in a chair. You would expect this guy’s identity to be revealed at some point in the future, but I’ve read this series before and there are multiple characters who wear cloaks and I still have no idea who this was supposed to be.

Whatever, 4/5 Death Stars.

Jurassic World Might Be Sexist, but Less So Than Almost Everything Else

“She’s a stiff, he’s a life-force – really?”

—Joss Whedon on Jurassic World

“He’s a pushy, smarmy sexist, and she’s an uptight bitch. What’s the problem?”

—Mike Stoklasa on Jurassic World

Is Jurassic World sexist? That’s the question that seems to be on everyone’s cyber-lips, for some reason. I don’t claim to know the answer, but I do claim that some of the arguments flying around to that effect are somewhat specious at best, if not entirely hyperbolic.

People can be offended by whatever they want, of course, and it’s been quite the season for it. We started the summer with Avengers: Age of Ultron, a big dumb action movie decried for the sexism of having its amoral super-assassin talk about her uterus and get captured by the bad guy for five minutes. Then came Mad Max: Fury Road, a big dumb action movie hailed as a triumph of feminism because Charlize Theron did more stuff in it than Mad Max. Now we’ve arrived at Jurassic World (known in foreign markets as Jurassic Park 4: Dumber Than a Box of Rocks), a big dumb action movie whose unabashed sexism includes having its female protagonist wear heels and learn to care about her family.

Why do we expect so much from big dumb action movies, again?

Let’s not forget that the first Jurassic Park is the only real movie in the franchise; all three sequels are just monster flicks populated with stock characters who exist only to carry the plot between scenes of people being eaten. Which is exactly where you expect to find the most nuanced representation of progressive gender politics. I just wanted to see people running from dinosaurs, not get sucked into an Internet vortex of amateur feminist film theory.

A common thread I’ve noticed in several articles is that apparently the Jurassic Park franchise is renowned for its strong female characters. I had never heard this before, and I suspect that it only recently became the case (when people reacted negatively to the lead female character in the latest movie). Multiple reviews, however, talk about how Jurassic World’s Claire Dearing (played by Bryce Dallas Howard) represents a step backward from the previous films’ iconic feminist characters.

Laura Dern’s Ellie Sattler from the original JP was a fine character, sure: strong, confident, reasonable, passionate about her work, and equally passionate about having kids with Dr. Grant. Her big scene in the movie comes when a man with a gun escorts her across the park so she can flip a circuit breaker then run screaming from dinosaurs. No disrespect to Ellie (the honest reactions of the first film’s characters to their situations is one of its many strengths), but let’s take off the feminism-tinted glasses.

Then there was Julianne Moore’s memorable character Jeff Goldblum’s Girlfriend from The Lost World. She inadvertently kick-starts the entire regrettable plot of the movie by going to Dinosaur Island, prompting Jeff Goldblum to fly to her rescue. The first thing she does when he arrives is tell him she doesn’t need a man to save her. The second thing she does is piss off a herd of stegosaurs and need Jeff Goldblum to save her.

Even Téa Leoni’s character from Jurassic Park III is given higher marks than Claire. You’re a better person than I am if you can remember anything about Téa Leoni’s character from Jurassic Park III, besides how she lied to Dr. Grant and tricked him into risking his life to help rescue her son from the dinosaurs. Endangering others to save your stupid kid is a more feminist character trait than coming to realize you can be more than an uptight business professional all the time.

It’s also Jurassic Park III in which we learn that Ellie Sattler, fearless kickass adventuress from the first movie, has settled down and become a stay-at-home mom. At least two reviewers leapt to defend this development, however, pointing out that this was perfectly okay because it was Ellie’s choice. Unlike Claire, whose character development was the result of a gun pointed at her head, or something. Oh no, her sister told her she should have kids someday; now she has to do it.

The most dishonest thing about this is that the third movie’s bungled handling of its returning characters didn’t even need to be taken into account. It was a cash-in sequel with no interest in respecting the character arcs of the first film (just look at poor Dr. Grant, who is still a lonely, childless grump in Jurassic Park III, despite the growth and change he underwent in the original). It’s not the viewer’s job to justify bad writing. But that isn’t allowed to be the case, because these arguments hinge on painting Jurassic World as the black sheep in a franchise of otherwise unimpeachable feminism.

Claire, in contrast to her predecessors, stealth-kills a Dimorphodon to save her boyfriend and uses herself as bait to lure a Tyrannosaurus into battle with the evil hybrid dinosaur to save everyone. Despite apparently being a horrible sexist stereotype, she’s kind of the most badass chick in these movies. Except for Jeff Goldblum’s adorable daughter Kelly, who uses gymnastics to kick a Velociraptor out a window (note: this is the most stupid thing that happens in any of these movies/in any movie).

All of her accomplishments and character development are undercut, however, by her wardrobe. More than one critic, male and female alike, derided Claire’s skirt suit and stiletto heels, specifically calling her out as a “damsel in distress” because of them, which makes me think they don’t know what that term means (one prominent review even included Claire’s bangs as part of that problematic ensemble, which . . . what? I mean, what?). None of them can understand why, when the park she runs breaks down in the middle of a business day and her nephews are lost in the dinosaur onslaught, Claire doesn’t go home and change out of her work clothes into more practical jungle gear.

Honestly, I don’t get it. Aren’t we pretty blatantly reaching for something—anything—to complain about now? I remember reading an article last year criticizing the female protagonists of popular young adult franchises (Divergent, The Hunger Games, etc.) for all having the same body type, but instead of advocating diversity of female empowerment, it just came off as body-shaming petite women. Have we come so far that we’ve somehow looped back around on ourselves and become the thing we hate? I don’t know what else would qualify us to judge this character based on the way she dresses. How disappointingly reductive.

So what if Claire wears heels for the whole movie? She kicks ass in her heels, without calling attention to that fact. She dresses like a professional corporate executive; there’s nothing objectifying or exploitative about her outfit at all. It suits her character and personality—she belongs in a boardroom, not roaming around out in the field. Despite being ill-suited to the action hero role, however, she doesn’t shy away from venturing out into the Mesozoic wilderness to rescue her dimwitted nephews.

But because Chris Pratt, a Navy veteran-turned-dinosaur wrangler hired by the park’s CEO specifically for that talent, is a badass from the start instead of learning how to become one, Claire’s journey is somehow negated. Her heroic actions are just “mirroring” Pratt’s (no examples given), and played for the novelty of a girl kicking ass (no examples given). In reality, she’s just an object of disrespect, a punchline for her male colleagues’ inappropriate humor (no examples given).

I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure the only park employee who offers Claire any insubordination is Chris Pratt, and it’s not because he’s a macho hunk and she’s a fragile little girl with the vapours, but because he’s a douche. “He should have been fired for sexual harassment!” Yeah, but . . . it’s a movie, that’s his character. The “charming rogue” would be an asshole in real life, but we’re still allowed to find him a fun archetype in fiction, right? In The Empire Strikes Back, Han Solo sexually harasses Princess Leia for the whole movie. These are exciting adventure films, not how-to guides for interacting with your female coworkers.

The last line of defense, of course, is hyperbole, also known as “bald-faced lying.” These professional film critics/gender commentators would have you believe that Chris Pratt is “shocked,” “horrified,” and “disgusted” that Claire doesn’t know her nephews’ ages, but I saw the movie too and he just looked momentarily confused, then immediately moved on to something else. The movie did not want us to hate Claire for this, but it seems that plenty of people wanted it to want us to.

How about that ending, though, where Claire willfully decides to throw away her career so she can get married and become a mother, because having children is the answer to literally all of a woman’s problems? Virtually every condemnatory diatribe against this movie that I read included this summary of its conclusion. Except that Claire doesn’t get married or have children, she just gets a boyfriend, and she doesn’t quit her job to become a housewife so much as the company she works for self-destructs when the dinosaurs it created start eating its patrons.

(Childrearing is hardly presented as a panacea in any case. Claire’s sister, Karen, only sends her kids to the island in the first place because she’s in the middle of an embittered divorce with David Wallace over the rights to Suck It®. Many were quick to jump on her suggestion that Claire settle down as the film asserting that marriage and children are key to a woman’s happiness. Except Karen’s marriage is a sham and her life is falling apart. So much for eternal wedded bliss.)

The final lines of the movie actually imply an open, unfettered future. Having shed her self-imposed restrictions, Claire is finally able to look ahead without the need for constant certainty and meticulous planning. “What do we do now?” she asks as the remnants of her old life burn down around her. “Probably stay together. For survival,” Chris Pratt answers, smarmy egotist that he is.

Maybe they’ll stay together and maybe they won’t. The point is that Claire is now capable of seeing all her options, not just the safe ones she can control. As Jurassic World CEO Simon Masrani says earlier in the film, “The key to a happy life is to accept you are never actually in control.” It’s like a theme or something.

So, then, is Jurassic World actually sexist, or just T-rexist? There is one central aspect of the film, buried beneath the circular arguments and unconvincing justifications, that the above clutter was invented to protest. Claire is a successful, career-driven woman, and her arc over the course of the movie involves her becoming receptive to a life beyond that career by forming a relationship with a man and two surrogate children. Through her ordeal she is “softened,” changed in a way that paints her earlier worldview as incorrect, or at least incomplete.

This is, if not sexist, not particularly deep or original either (but consider that this is the third sequel in a 22-year-old franchise about dinosaur clones and you can see how much the studio prioritizes depth and originality); Dr. Grant had almost the same arc back in the first film, after all. If it is sexist, however, it’s so mild and non-malicious I can’t see calling it out as anything harsher than “somewhat problematic.”

But what Hollywood movies aren’t “somewhat problematic”? What is it about Jurassic World specifically that has drawn so much ire? Many articles credited their initial awareness of the movie’s sexism to “well-respected voice” of feminism Joss Whedon’s now-infamous tweet. Good call, guys, but maybe we shouldn’t jump to appeal to the authority of the dude who just wrote a movie where a character talks about how her hysterectomy makes her feel like a monster. (That’s something that happened, right?)

“Like so, so many of you, I bought a ticket to see Jurassic World this past week,” wrote Kelly Lawler of USAToday.com. “I went to recapture that feeling I had when I saw the original as a child. Unfortunately, I walked out of the theater not with the sense of wonder and amazement Jurassic Park gave my 10-year-old self, but instead with a familiar mix of anger and depression.”

Of all the reactions I read, this one saddened me the most, because it was the most honest and most understandable, and also one of the most unfair. We can’t go home again, Kelly. If we watched the original Jurassic Park today for the first time, who among us would still feel that childish sense of wonder and amazement? Who would be bored by the middle-aged cast, the talkiness and debates about morality, the low body count and scant dinosaur screen time, and play Angry Birds on our phones until something loud happened? Who would be underwhelmed by no-longer-special special effects we’ve seen a thousand times before in a thousand other movies, a thousand times as big and fast and loud? Who would live-tweet their outraged scorn for how Ellie Sattler does nothing but talk about wanting babies, get fought over by two men, shriek while being chased by monsters, and break down crying at the end? We can never go home again, never look at something new with fresh eyes, never allow ourselves to be shaped by an experience rather than trying to reshape the experience to fit what we already know. Maybe Jurassic World is perfect; maybe it’s we who are broken.

Then Kelly started talking about how the movie was brainwashing little girls into believing they are morally bad people if they don’t become mothers (“Won’t somebody please think of the children!”) and she lost me.

It’s perfectly natural to lash out when we perceive a threat to something we care about, have fought over and struggled for. Sexism is all around us, its talons sunk deep into the fabric of our everyday lives, so we’ve conditioned ourselves to be on the lookout for it at all times. On the bus, on the subway, at work, at school, on the news, at the club, on the street, in advertisements, online, in the movies. We can’t escape from it, and we’ve gotten used to the idea that we never will. So when we see something, even something ultimately harmless and well-intentioned, that sets off the subtlest of alarm bells in the back of our minds, it’s easy to go off half-cocked with that tweet or Tumblr post or overly self-congratulatory web editorial.

If you felt offended or belittled by Jurassic World, that is of course your right. But let’s allow ourselves at least a little honesty: even if the movie is sexist, most of the ways people have gone about arguing it are crap. This is not a particularly feminist film franchise. There is no reason a strong female character can’t wear heels and a skirt and be more comfortable making an itinerary than going on an adventure. There may be some small irony in lambasting a movie for being written exclusively by four men when it was really written by three men and a woman.

Jurassic World has its problems, as every movie does. Some mild form of antiquated chauvinism may well be one of them, but it’s a problem you can encapsulate in a single sentence. If you find yourself writing a dissertation on how sexism is inextricably baked into this movie’s 65-million-year-old DNA, there’s a good chance you’re doing it wrong.

Movie still wasn’t that great though, better luck next time, Chris Fatt.