The Mandalorian Wars Begin!

Knights of the Old Republic #7–8, 10: Flashpoint

Author: John Jackson Miller

Artist: Dustin Weaver

Medium: Comic

Publication Date: July – November 2006

Timeline Placement: 3,964 – 3,963 BBY

Series: Knights of the Old Republic

The crew of the The Last Resort (seriously, why didn’t they just name it Last Resort? Everyone’s going to put “the” in front of it anyway) set down on the planet Vanquo, posing as refugees from the Mandalorian invasion. Using Zayne’s lightsaber, Jarael disguises herself as a Jedi and cons the occupants of a mining outpost into thinking the Mandalorian fleet is attacking the planet. They run for their lives, leaving their food stores to be plundered by Zayne and his friends. Zayne, Gryph, Camper, and Elbee begin loading supplies onto the ship while Jarael plays with Zayne’s saber (bow chicka wow wow). They are suddenly interrupted when the Mandalorians decide to invade the planet for real.

And just like that, the Mandalorian Wars have begun!

Today we celebrate our Independence Day!

Separated from the group, Jarael is immediately captured by the invading horde, while Zayne and the others hightail it back to the ship. They are pursued by a detachment of Mandalorians commanded by Rohlan Dyre, who beats them to the The Last Resort and takes off in it without them or the rest of his men. Just, like, for a ride I guess. With Zayne, Gryph, and Camper clinging to Elbee, the taciturn droid grabs hold of the ship’s loading ramp and everyone manages to get inside before the ramp closes.

Camper promptly beats up the Mandalorian carjacker with Jarael’s lightning-stick and sets course for Mandalorian space, following the tracer signal from Jarael’s bracelet. Gryph suggests that the Mandalorians might just really like expensive jewelry. Rohlan explains that, since his people think Jarael is a Jedi, they are taking her to their scientific research station for studying captured Jedi on the planet Flashpoint, a world so close to its star that its day is only an hour long and no life can survive outside a small shielded zone.

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Their jump to Mandalorian space is observed by Captain Saul Karath of the Republic warship Courageous. A secondary villain from the first KotOR game, Karath is still a loyal Republic soldier at this time, and upon identifying Zayne’s ship as belonging to the killer of the Jedi students on Taris, he decides Zayne must have been a Mandalorian agent all along and vows to hunt him down and bring him to justice. Doesn’t he have anything better to do, what with the invasion and all?

Zayne asks if Rohlan is some kind of deserter, but Camper tells him that such a concept doesn’t even exist for Mandalorians. Rohlan tells them that he was the only one of his people to question their leader’s tactics in this war and his motivation for starting it. He has repeatedly run off to search for answers, only to be caught and sent back to the front to die in glorious battle. Failing to convince Zayne and Camper to give Jarael up for dead, he resolves to help them infiltrate Flashpoint in the hope of finding answers there.

Meanwhile, we’re introduced to the “big bad” in this period of galactic history, the supreme commander of the Mandalorian forces and architect behind the burgeoning conflict, Mandalore the Ultimate. Despite wearing the mask of the Mandalore we previously met in The Sith War, this character was established in an RPG sourcebook as not being the same Mandalorian who took up the mask at the end of that story. I’m not sure why.

Don’t act like you’re not impressed.

Mandalore is chilling with his bro Cassus Fett, talking strategy and shooting the shit. He’s like “Oh hey btw, did you send our bud Rohlan on another suicide mission yet?” and Cassus is like “Yeah but he ran away again lol.” To which Mandalore the Ultimate replies, “For his sake, he’d better hope he’s dead!” Which doesn’t make much sense, but he’s drunk so whatever.

On Flashpoint, Jarael is dragged into the Waiting Room of Doom, where all the captured Jedi just sit around completely unfettered until they’re brought in to be experimented on by the sadistic Mandalorian scientist Dr. Mengele Demagol. There are like a dozen Jedi and only a handful of guards, so I guess they all just forgot how to use the Force or something.

Soon after Jarael gets smacked in the face with a blaster rifle and thrown into the room, Squint, the Jedi who saved Zayne’s life on Taris at the beginning of the series, is dragged out of Demagol’s laboratory and deposited on the floor near her. Almost all his hair has fallen out from Demagol’s experiments, which is important. Jarael tries to explain to him how she’s not supposed to be there, but Demagol comes in and selects her for his next experiment. Sensing that Jarael is not a Jedi, Squint volunteers himself to go back under the knife in her place. Despite talking about how long he’s waited for fresh Jedi to study, Demagol agrees to have Squint taken back to his lab for some reason, even though he just finished with him thirty seconds ago.

The The Last Resort arrives on Flashpoint, with Rohlan convincing the Mandalorians to let him land by pretending that Zayne is a Jedi Knight he captured while Gryph and Camper hide in Han Solo’s secret smuggling compartment. Rohlan marches Zayne into the station just as Squint is dragged back out.

Jarael cradles the bleeding Jedi in her arms and they have some kind of moment I guess, then Demagol starts creepily running his hands through her hair and notices her pointed elf ears, not a baseline trait of her species. He excitedly orders that she be taken to his laboratory at once, but Rohlan comes in with Zayne and says “No do this guy first” and Demagol inexplicably goes “Yeah okay.”

Almost paradise.

Once the three of them are alone in Demagol’s lab, Rohlan clonks the mad scientist over the head with a femur that was just lying on the floor for some reason. Bone is apparently harder than Mandalorian armor, because Demagol instantly goes down. Zayne puts on his armor and helmet and they stash him in the closet, then walk out of the lab loudly discussing how it’s too bad that Zayne died so quickly. Jarael knocks the disguised Zayne to the floor and begins strangling him, but stops when she hears Zayne telepathically say her name, which means that she has the Force now I guess.

Rohlan and Zayne go outside just as the station’s guards receive a hologram transmission from Gryph, posing as an admiral aboard the Republic cruiser Glomkettle (his mother’s name). Since Flashpoint was once a Republic research station, he claims that when its former inhabitants were driven out by the Mandalorians, they left behind a series of booby-traps that he is now going to activate. Zayne uses telekinesis to surreptitiously plant mining charges around the compound, which Gryph then detonates from aboard the The Last Resort.

Fearing that Flashpoint’s shield is going to fail, leaving them to be cooked by the sun’s heat and radiation, the Mandalorians abandon the planet. Zayne runs back into the station on the pretext of saving his research and Rohlan goes after him, bidding the retreating warriors to tell Mandalore that he died nobly for their cause.

With the Mandalorians gone, Zayne outfits all the Jedi with spacesuits from the The Last Resort so they can breathe outside of the station. Rohlan drags an unconscious Demagol over to the Jedi so they can take him back to Coruscant as a prisoner, explaining that he had to knock him out again while putting his armor and mask back on him.

Zayne thanks Rohlan for all his help but tells him he should go with the Jedi. They’re going to blow up Flashpoint Station, so Mandalore will think he’s dead and he can get those answers he was looking for from Demagol. Rohlan stares across the courtyard at Jarael for a moment, then admits that Zayne’s right and boards the Jedi’s ship.

Zayne and Squint take a moment to catch up. Zayne tells him how the war has now broken out for real, and Squint invites him to come with them and be a part of his Master’s plan to defeat the Mandalorians. Zayne says no thanks.

Squint goes over to say goodbye to Jarael, because every guy in this story is obsessed with her. He tells her that Squint isn’t even his real name, and next time they meet she should call him Alek. Then he thanks her for giving him this sweet red spacesuit with an opaque red helmet, which coincidentally is what the figure in Zayne’s Masters’ prophecy of doom was wearing. Hmm, now who do we know from this era who’s a bald Jedi involved with the return of the Sith who dresses in red and whose name sounds something like “Alek”?

Could it be this guy?

Anyway, then Zayne, Jarael, Gryph, Camper, and Elbee get on the The Last Resort and Squint and the other Jedi get on their ship and they go their separate ways, but at the last second Rohlan jumps off the Jedi ship and sneaks back aboard the The Last Resort without anyone noticing, THE END.

Meditations

Flashpoint is one of the high points of this series. Maybe even the the high point, I won’t be sure until I’ve read all of it. It’s pretty good, though. It’s amazing what a difference Dustin Weaver’s art makes; it’s a perfect match for the tone and content of this series and I’m not looking forward to settling for less in the next arc.

For a long time the Mandalorian Wars were not that fleshed-out. Unlike most major galactic conflicts, which were created to serve as a setting for telling stories, the Mandalorian Wars were introduced as back story to a different war. Mostly we just heard about them from characters who were there, so it’s gratifying to see these events actually taking place on the page. Even though those who’ve already played Knights of the Old Republic know how all this is going to end, it’s still cool to see how the galaxy moves to that point.

Unlike Commencement, which started to drag after a while of essentially the same thing happening over and over while Zayne tried incompetently to clear his name, Flashpoint, being a mere three issues long, boasts much more condensed and therefore exciting storytelling. It produces a major shift for the galaxy as a whole with the advent of the true Mandalorian Wars while also providing a trajectory shift for Zayne’s story by introducing him and his crew of misfits into this macro conflict.

At the same time it deftly weaves in the introductions of important new characters like Demagol, Rohlan Dyre, Mandalore the Ultimate, and Saul Karath, as well as reintroducing Squint and setting him down his own path, while his mysterious Master’s machinations continue in the background. A pretty solid little comic, all in all.

4.5/5 Death Stars.

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.

2 Classic Christmas Specials (You Probably Don’t Remember)

Raggedy Ann and Andy in: The Great Santa Claus Caper
Release Date: November 30, 1978
Distributor: CBS

Does anyone alive today even remember Raggedy Ann and Andy? Anyone who wasn’t haunted by them, I mean. A brother-and-sister pair of rag dolls, they started out as characters in a series of illustrated children’s books before becoming a successful line of toys and, occasionally, stars in the odd animated holiday special. Released in 1978, The Great Santa Claus Caper tells the story of how Raggedy Ann and Andy, along with their stuffed dog Raggedy Arthur, saved Christmas from Alexander Graham Wolf, the antagonist from Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Little Pigs, and The Wolf of Wall Street.

As chief inefficiency expert at the Gloopstik Corporation, a division of Acme Conglomerates, Inc., Wolf combats inefficiency wherever he finds it, and his next target is Santa Claus’s workshop. Unfortunately for him, as he monologues his evil scheme to the audience, he happens to drive past Santa’s reindeer Comet, who somehow overhears his entire plot as he speeds past. Instead of giving Santa a heads-up, Comet decides to go find someone else to save Christmas, someone light enough for her to carry on her back but who won’t die a horrible death of exposure at the North Pole. “Of course, how stupid of me!” she exclaims. “Raggedy Ann and Andy!” 

The logical choices.

Raggedy Ann awakes to find this looking in her window:

 

Comet explains the situation and they begin the long trip back north. “I didn’t know reindeers could fly!” says Raggedy Ann. “I didn’t know rag dolls could talk,” Comet shoots back.

Cut to Santa’s workshop, where the elves make toys by pulling a lever on a conveyor belt, dropping hundreds of mass-produced dolls, yo-yos, teddy bears, soccer balls, bicycles, and, for some reason, fully decorated Christmas trees into giant bins. 

Wolf arrives and his car unfolds into a fanciful contraption. A large robot claw drops Santa’s toys one at a time into a funnel on top of the device. When they come out the other side, they are coated in transparent gelatinous cubes or cones.

Comet and the Raggedys arrive at Santa’s workshop, which is at the bottom of a giant chasm for some reason. Comet remains on the surface to keep watch for no reason, while the rag dolls venture down to the North Pole. 

The Big Bad Wolf apparently knows of the dolls through their reputation and proudly shows off his machine, the Great Gloopsticizer. Wolf reveals that Gloopstik prevents Christmas presents from ever wearing out of breaking; he’s actually doing a great good. However, Raggedy Ann and Andy soon realize that toys are no good if you can’t touch them or play with them. Wolf admits that this is all a money-making scam; he holds all patents on Gloopstik, so with all of the toys Gloopsticized, the world’s children will have to buy their Christmas presents from him. 

Raggedy Arthur attacks the wolf but is dropped into the machine and encased in Gloopstik. Wolf thoughtfully leaves his head exposed so he can breathe, because of course rag dolls need to breathe. Raggedy Andy is able to turn the tables on the villain by dropping him into his own contraption. The Great Gloopsticizer apparently thinks the Big Bad Wolf is a Christmas tree because it spits him out in a cone of Gloopstik covered in ornaments and tinsel, with a star on his head.

Raggedy Ann and Andy tell Arthur that they love him even though he’s encased in a tomb of Jell-O for all of eternity, and much to their surprise they find that love is the only force powerful enough to destroy Gloopstik. Bursting into tears with the realization that no one loves him enough to free him from his self-made prison, the Big Bad Wolf poses that age-old moral quandary: “How can you be good when you’re stuck in Gloopstik?”

The dolls break the fourth wall by appealing to the audience à la Peter Pan, and by shouting at their TVs, viewers at home are able to destroy the Gloopstik with the power of love. All of the toys and the newly reformed Big Good Wolf are released, and Wolf presses the self-destruct button on his machine so Santa will never know what happened.

As he walks home from the North Pole on foot, Alexander Graham Wolf remarks to the Raggedys that he thinks he will enjoy being good much more than he enjoyed being bad, but no one can say for sure unless they’ve tried both.

I suppose that’s the best moral we can ask for.


The Wish That Changed Christmas
Release Date: December 20, 1991
Distributor: CBS

So I guess there used to be this occasional TV series called McDonald’s Family Theater, in which McDonald’s sponsored a half-hour program whose content was completely unrelated to their brand. This special Christmas episode opens with Ronald McDonald trimming his tree, when two McDonaldland characters known as “Fry Kids” walk in. The feature presentation then begins with no transition.

The Wish That Changed Christmas follows a little girl named Ivy, who lives at Miss Shepherd’s Home for Orphans. As the only inmate who hasn’t been taken in by a foster family for the holidays, she is shipped off by train to the Appleton Infants’ Home. However, as the train passes Mill Valley, the narrator, who is a character in the story describing the action as it takes place, decides to move the plot along by distracting Officer Jones, causing him to trip over a cord to the town Christmas tree. As a result, several lights on the tree go out, so instead of reading “Merry Christmas Welcome to Mill Valley” it now reads “Merry Christmas to Ivy.” 

Ivy sees this new spelling from the train. Being intensely stupid, she assumes the sign was put there by her grandma, who we were already told by Miss Shepherd doesn’t exist. After wandering around asking random strangers if they are her grandmother, Ivy realizes that she’s missed the train and is now stranded in a strange town on Christmas Eve.

Elsewhere in town, Mr. Blossom entrusts Peter, his preteen employee, with locking up his toy shop after he goes home. Neither of them know, however, that the toys all come to life when no one is around (naturally). The only toys of note are a Christmas doll named Holly and a sadistic owl named Abracadabra.

Meanwhile, Ronald comments on how amazing it is to get lost in a good book, only to discover that the Fry Kids have somehow entered the book he’s been reading to them and really have gotten lost inside it.

 

Will Ivy ever find her fictitious grandmother? Will Holly ever file a restraining order against the Tootsie Pop owl? What does the McDonald’s Corporation have to do with any of this? Only a miracle of Christmas can tell.

 

The Long, Tortured History of Calling Sith Lords "Darth"

We’re now entering the part of the Old Republic timeline where the Star Wars prequels begin to exert a clear influence on the setting. Say goodbye to Tales of the Jedi’s retro aesthetic and hello to bad guys with red lightsabers, Jedi Padawans, stubbornly ineffectual bureaucracies, and Sith Lords named Darth Negativeconnotation.

At one point in Knights of the Old Republic: Commencement (2006), Zayne Carrick, our new hero, sarcastically calls female lead Jarael “Darth Sunshine,” a one-off throwaway joke that ruined continuity forever.

Again.

“It’s morphin’ time!”

Darth, of course, used to be just an evil-sounding name that Luke Skywalker’s father took for himself when he turned to the dark side. While writing The Phantom Menace, George Lucas decided to make it some kind of religious tradition wherein every Sith Lord takes the name.

The EU, as we know, had already featured a plethora of Sith who weren’t named Darth, because even Kevin J. Anderson wasn’t that derivative. This was fine, however, as most of those Sith hailed from ancient times, and the Darth tradition seemed to originate with Darth Bane, the creator of the Sith “Rule of Two” seen in the movies. For all we knew at the time, “Darth Bane,” introduced in the Episode I novelization (1999), might have just been the dude’s birth name and all the Sith of his order, from Sidious to Maul to Tyranus to Vader, renamed themselves in his honor.

That convenient explanation wasn’t long for the canon, however. Wizards of the Coast’s Living Force Campaign Guide (2001) introduced Darth Rivan, a Sith Lord who predated Bane and, more importantly, had chlorophyll for blood. Then the two Knights of the Old Republic games (2003 and 2004) added Darths Revan, Malak, Bandon, Traya, Nihilus, and Sion, bumping the Darth title back thousands of years even further.

However, since all those characters could trace their supervillain origin stories to the Trayus Academy, an ancient Sith training center on the dark-side world of Malachor V, one could reasonably assume a connection between the academy and the Darth name. Maybe at some point there was a dude called Darth Trayus, and Revan and Malak, the villains of the first KotOR, took his name after getting their undergraduate degrees in evil. After KotOR III got canceled, there was no reason not to headcanon that idea.

That is, until John Jackson Miller ruined it by populating the interim period between Tales of the Jedi and Knights of the Old Republic with Darth Sunshine, Darth Hayze, and Darth Luzion, none of which were really the names of any actual characters.

“Heritage of the Sith,” an article in Star Wars Insider #88 (2006), traced the Darth name, like so much else in Star Wars, back to the Rakata, an ancient dark-side race of aliens who ruled the galaxy before the time of the Old Republic. It revealed that “Darth” likely comes from the words Daritha, which is Rakatan for “emperor,” and darr tah, meaning both “immortal” and “conquest through death.”

The Rakata connection would seem to link back to Revan and Malak, as they rediscovered the Rakata’s Star Forge and the remnants of their Infinite Empire after falling to the dark side during the Mandalorian Wars. This was even made explicit in Jedi vs. Sith: The Essential Guide to the Force (2007), which identified Revan and Malak as history’s earliest known Darths (it also said that “Darth” was often considered a contraction of Dark Lord of the Sith, because that’s a common method of abbreviation now, why not). The KotOR comics’ casual references to Darth names preclude this, however, so for the Rakata explanation to work it must refer to something in the even more distant past.

Fortunately, “Evil Never Dies: The Sith Dynasties,” an online reference article published as a supplement to Insider #88, established that the Rakata had tried to conquer the Sith species some 27,000 years before the time of the movies. The invention of this confrontation proved to be quite the continuity godsend, as Revan’s uniqueness was soon eroded the same as Bane’s and Vader’s had been. Star Wars: Republic #63 (2004) introduced Darth Andeddu as a long-dead Dark Lord entombed on Korriban, while “Behind the Threat: The Sith (Part 5): Antiheroes” (2008) named Darth Vitus as the gatekeeper of a holocron that was already ancient by the KotOR era.

The EU’s Old Republic and Legacy eras continued to dilute the Darth title by introducing unimpressive and ridiculously named new characters ad nauseum, but for the next few years Sith lore remained mostly unchanged. We still had no idea who the first Darth was, but given the ceaselessly shifting retcons we’d already endured, it was starting to matter less and less. Of course, as with all things, the worst was yet to come.

From the earliest drafts of The Star Wars, where Darth Vader was some random evil general and not anyone’s father, to the comical Darth Andrew from BioWare’s MMO The Old Republic, “Darth,” although occasionally referred to as a title in some sources, had always been functionally a first name (Obi-Wan even uses it as such in the original Star Wars). Discontent to leave well enough alone, however, Paul R. Urquhart, co-author of Star Wars: The Essential Guide to Warfare (2012), prefixed it to Naga Sadow’s name in the book’s section on the Great Hyperspace War.

The addition of “Darth Naga Sadow” to the (now defunct) canon did nothing but further confuse what exactly the Darth name is and further ruin the specialness and mystique that were once attached to it. No small feat, given how polluted the EU had already become with terrible Darth names (see also: Darth Enraj, Darth Vowrawn, Darth Ruyn, Darth Karnage).

Now anyone could be a Darth; you didn’t even have to rename yourself to show the depth of your devotion to evil. You could probably just pay a small fee and get ordained online.

Fucking Star Wars.

“lol wtf am I doing”

[Continuity Note: It bears mentioning that, although Darth Rivan was created first, his name’s similarity to Darth Revan’s was eventually explained in the best possible retcon, at the mere expense of undermining Rivan’s character in every way. Rivan, it turns out, was the galaxy’s biggest Revan fanboy, so much so that when he became a Sith he attempted to rename himself after his hero. Unfortunately, the ancient manuscript he was consulting contained a typo that misidentified Darth Revan as Darth Rivan. The Dark Lord of the Sith’s whole identity was based on a misprint. This was an actual thing that happened in Star Wars canon.

[Rivan then used an ancient Force artifact so ineptly that it somehow transported him hundreds of years into the future, where he was immediately murdered by some rando. It was a quiet Christmas back on the plant-people farm that year.]

My Kung Fu Anime Lesbian Daughter

Me: Finally finished your teen girl anime.

Me: 7/10 show but I give it an 11 because two girls held hands in the last second.

Paul: "Better concept than execution" sums it up.

Paul: Also great fight scenes.

Me: Having read the top comments on your article idk if I should even write a rebuttal now since it seems like everyone already shares my opinion.

Me: Not to dump on your lesbian anime daughter because she still had a better show than the one with the heavy black outlines and stylized character designs where everyone has sharp edges.

Me: Aka ALL OF THEM.

Paul: So avatar > anime?

Me:  Avatar > Korra > Yu-Gi-Oh season 1 > Death Note > Pokemon Indigo League > the rest of Yu-Gi-Oh > the ending of Death Note > Digimon > Samurai Shamu

Me: I think that's all the animes.

Me: Oh wait this one 

 

Me: Which is on a VHS tape in my parents' attic.

Paul: Denver le dernier dinosaur is better.

Me: That's not anime though.

Me: Also Barn Beagle and I tried watching it in college and it was terrible.

Paul: There is currently a social media campaign to recognize best freinds.

Paul: Thanks, Farcblog.

Paul: Well of course.

Paul: You watched it with Barn Beagle.

Paul: Beagles have never been able to appreciate anime.

Me: DENVER THE LAST DINOSAUR

Me: HE'S MY FRIEND AND A WHOLE LOT MORE

Paul: Yeah Korra is basically my kung-fu anime lesbian alter ego/daughter

Paul: so I can't help it.

Paul: Hey hey but what about that Toph, amirite?

Me: Season highlight.

Me: I did not dislike the show, it was good, but Avytar was better.

Me: Still wish they would do shows for the next earth and fire Avytars.

Me: While the setting continues to decay in post-industrial blight.

Me: Then in the last one they're in space.

Paul: Hahahaha

Paul: That would be great.

Paul: Avatar: The Legend of Rocky: Pennsylvania

Paul: Avatar: The Tale of Flamo: The Moon

The Legend of Sexism

Me: Goddamn, why does Korra suck so much?

Me: She gets her ass kicked so often it's like watching a Joss Whedon show.

Paul: But I love jizz whiner.

Me: whine abt dat jizzzzzzzz

7 Things I Learned from Watching 7 ‘Fast & Furious’ Movies in 7 Days

A week ago, I had never seen a single Fast and Furious movie, and I was content that things stay that way. After months of being told by suggested article titles in various sidebar links “This franchise isn’t really as bad as you’d think!,” however, my curiosity was finally piqued. What followed was a seven-day odyssey into a world of ten-stacks and drifting, pink slips and NOS, bromance and blatantly pornographic shots of cars. When I emerged at last on the other side, forever changed by what I had seen, I was certain of nothing, save for the unshakeable veracity of these absolute Truths.

Works cited:
 

• The Fast and the Furious (2001) – Paul Walker teams up with Vin Diesel to take down his criminal gang from the inside but his head is turned by Vin’s sister’s talent for sandwich-making.
  
• The Turbo-Charged Prelude for 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003) – Paul Walker teams up with a music video director to go on a cross-country road trip.
• 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003) – Paul Walker teams up with Tyrese Gibson to rescue Eva Mendes from a drug dealer by driving a car onto a boat.
• The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006) – Nobody from the first two movies teams up with an unlikable teenage expatriate living in Tokyo.
• Los Bandoleros (2009) – Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez vacation in the Dominican Republic on the studio’s dime.
• Fast & Furious (2009) – The first movie happens again.
• Fast Five (2011) – The gang is hunted by both special agent John “The Dwayne” Rockson and a crime lord whose MacGuffin they have accidentally stolen.
• Furious 6 (2013) – Vin Diesel brings his crew out of retirement to contend with an amnesia plot.
• Furious Seven (2015) – Jason Statham is out for revenge but proves even more inept at it than Emily Thorne.

1. Ignore the people who tell you to watch the movies in chronological order.

Google “fast and furious timeline” and you’ll find no shortage of helpful advice indicating that the fourth, fifth, and sixth films are in fact prequels to film number three, Tokyo Drift. That’s fine information to keep in mind, but as with the Star Wars prequels, if you opt for chronological order over release order you’re just screwing yourself over.

Ignore everyone who says that Tokyo Drift takes place between Fast & Furious 6 and Furious Seven. They’re wrong; it takes place concurrently with the end of part six and the beginning of part seven. The final minutes of Furious 6 actually spoil a key scene from the end of Tokyo Drift by reusing footage from that film. Not to mention that films four, five, and six all contain nods back to film three (“I thought you wanted to get to Tokyo?” someone asks Han Seoul-Oh, the best character from Tokyo Drift, to which he replies, “We’ll get there eventually”).

Just stick to the order the films came out; you’ll spend less time wondering why everyone in Japan was apparently still using flip phones in 2014.

 

2. Despite a consistent release schedule, it took almost 10 years for this franchise to get off the ground.

Even if you haven’t seen any of the Fast and Furious movies, as I hadn’t, you still have a basic idea of what to expect from them: Paul Walker, Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese, and Ludacris on a high-octane adventure, often involving some sort of heist. That’s what the previews for the past several films have shown us, anyway. But that only takes us back to Fast & Furious (the fourth film) in 2009. The first movie came out in 2001. What the hell were they doing for eight years?

Spinning their wheels, really, but now we can look back on this span of the franchise’s history and charitably call it “worldbuilding.” When Paul Walker, Vin Diesel, and the rest of the Super Friends reunited in 2009’s Fast & Furious to jumpstart the franchise as we know it today, a whole pool of supporting characters from which future films could draw had already been introduced. The Fast and Furious series is like the Marvel movies if they were made by someone with a little more restraint.

3. Most truckers would rather commit cold-blooded murder than take an insurance hit.

Look, bros, I know you’re pissed about constantly getting your cargo ripped off by Vin Diesel and his gang, but castle doctrine will only get you so far. Clearly these guys weren’t expecting you to be packing heat; you’ve already made two of them total their cars at 80 miles per hour, and now you’ve got the last dude dangling from the outside of your cab while his arm gets lacerated by wire. I think continuing to fire point-blank shotgun rounds at him is, at this point, a pretty clear-cut case of MURDER.

This is the situation that Paul Walker finds when he returns to save the day. Handing the wheel of his car over to his girlfriend, he climbs out the window as they race down the highway alongside the semi and attempts to disentangle his friend. And the trucker keeps shooting at them! Paul Walker is still a cop at this point, so the trucker would have been extra screwed if he’d been a better shot, but for all he knows he’s trying to blow away some good Samaritan attempting to rescue the guy hanging from the outside of his truck.

The same thing happens again in the opening heist sequence of Fast & Furious. Vin Diesel & Co. are in the process of hijacking a fuel tanker in the Dominican Republic. Suddenly the driver catches sight of Michelle Rodriguez walking along the roof of one of his tankers. I honestly don’t know what my first reaction would be in that situation, but I’m fairly confident it wouldn’t be to immediately speed up and start jerking the car around in an attempt to throw her to her death.

I can see trying to outrun them or fighting back in self-defense, but come on, guys, this isn’t even your own stuff you’re willing to kill over. Were you hired to transport some corporation’s product from one location to another or to protect it with your life? It hardly seems worth it, bros.

4. Vin Diesel can convert any by-the-book cop into an anarchic rogue just by talking to them.

He does it to Paul Walker (twice!), The Rock, and that fluminense lady cop whose name I don’t remember. The Fast and the Furious, as mentioned above, follows Paul Walker as he goes from being an undercover cop investigating truck robberies to an outlaw himself after falling under the sway of Vin Diesel’s magnetic personality.

Fast & Furious (aka the fourth one) almost feels like a reboot of sorts: Paul Walker is once again a cop, Vin Diesel and his crew are once again robbing trucks, everything is back where it started. We watch as Paul and Vin become friends all over again, Paul rekindles his romance with Vin’s sister, and in the end Paul Walker once more turns his back on his badge to save his friend.

The films teach us to expect Paul Walker’s alignment flip-flopping, however. He’s a former car thief and juvenile delinquent, he grew up on the streets and used to run with people like Vin Diesel’s crew. The Rock, on the other hand is introduced as a paragon of legality. He’s Inspector Javert, he’s Lieutenant Gerard. He doesn’t care about the good intentions that led you to break the law; if you broke it, your ass is his.

That is, unless his entire team is killed by drug traffickers and you help him satisfy his blood vendetta. Then he’ll draw down on a lawfully acting army captain when he refuses to set free a dangerous mercenary to save Paul Walker’s kidnapped wife. It’s cool that his character actually has an arc and all, but you’d think he would have at least gotten fired over that one.

Then there’s that fluminense lady cop who tried to arrest Vin Diesel then teamed up with him because she wanted to bone him. I mean who doesn’t though?

5. All the hottest skanks hang out at the drag racing circuit.

You wouldn’t think it, but apparently it’s true. No matter where or what time it is, any drag race will be spectated almost exclusively by impractically clad women (those who aren’t are sweaty bros in muscle shirts). Chief among its artistic achievements is how the Fast and Furious franchise broke new ground by aesthetically blending the illegal street-racing scene with an L.A. nightclub and/or red-light district.

If you look up the word “gratuitous” in the dictionary, you’ll find all the nude scenes from Game of Thrones. If they didn’t have that, though, they’d have a collage of all the ass shots in the Fast and Furious franchise. Even in the United Arab Emirates, where women are routinely stoned to death or flogged for being raped, you can’t have a rockin’ party without dancers in thong bikinis and gold body paint.

 

Sharia law has no power over Vin Diesel and Paul Walker driving one of the world’s fastest cars off one of the world’s tallest buildings . . . into another of the world’s tallest buildings. #america

It’s not really offensive in the way that Michael Bay draping Megan Fox over a motorcycle is, but for the most part it isn’t that sexy either. At a certain point the level of pandering just becomes comical and you say to yourself, “Oh, I’m watching a movie for 13-year-old boys.” Then you hang your head in shame for not figuring that out back when Vin Diesel drove a car really fast underneath an exploding fuel tanker.

6. Paul Walker wasn’t really that bad an actor.

Before his tragic death, I had never heard much talk about Paul Walker except as a punchline about bad acting. Having now seen the franchise that made him a household name, it’s hard to deny that his Hollywood career probably owed more to his being absurdly handsome than to his acting talent. That said, his performance was never a chore to sit through or a distraction that pulled me out of the movie. He always just seemed like a regular dude having a good time.

I mean, with a movie franchise that also stars Vin Diesel, Ludacris, Michelle Rodriguez, and The Rock, you’re not going to the theater expecting to see some Day-Lewis-style method acting. The performances are an afterthought in these movies; besides the action and car porn, the appeal is the interplay of the personalities on-screen.

In that regard, Walker is perfectly adequate as the relatable everyman whose point of view anchors the franchise and makes a believable part of this family of lighthearted, non-emotive outcasts. Let’s be honest, these movies are just dumb fun and everyone involved in making them knows it. Paul Walker just always seems like he’s having a blast doing ridiculous things in dumb movies with his friends. What more can you ask for a part like that?

I watched all seven of these stupid things over the course of a week and still found myself having a real emotional reaction to his sendoff at the end of Furious Seven. I neither knew nor cared anything about him seven days ago, but these goofy movies somehow made me care.

 

7. The Rock perpetually secretes baby oil from his pores.

Seriously, he is so goddamn shiny.

Like a statue of David carved out of Vaseline.

So, for the second time, [the Pharisees]
summoned the man who had been blind and said:
“Speak the truth before God.
We know this fellow is a sinner.”
“Whether or not he is a sinner, I do not know,”
the man replied.
“All I know is this:
once I was blind and now I can see.”
 

John IX, 24-26
the New English Bible

This Is This

Me: A MAN CHOOSES, A GAMER OBEYS

Paul: A MAN CHOOSES

Paul: A GAMER GATES

Me: Finally started Korra season 4 today.

Me: Forgot what happened at the end of last season that made her turn into Robert De Niro from The Deer Hunter.

Paul: She was scared by a bald.

Suddenly, the EU Gets Really Good

Tales of the Jedi: Redemption 

Author: Kevin J. Anderson

Artist: Chris Gossett

Medium: Comic

Publication Date: July – November 1998

Timeline Placement: 3,986 BBY

Series: Tales of the Jedi

Ten years have passed since the Sith War, and still Ulic Qel-Droma can find no rest or respite from his demons. He’s hired a pilot named Hoggon to fly him from planet to planet, looking for a place where he can escape from his memories and live out the rest of his days in solitude. Hoggon takes him to the moon Yavin 4, its jungle ecosystem now recovered from Exar Kun’s fiery end. “You can get a real sense of history here,” Hoggon explains. “It gives me shivers to be here . . . I can almost feel the echoes . . .” Ulic stands amid the crumbling ruins and sees them as they were: Massassi firing from atop unbroken walls, Republic soldiers rushing past, smoke rising from the burning temples, bodies littering the streets. The ghost of his brother, left arm missing below the elbow, staring back at him.

“No . . . this won’t do,” says Ulic, wringing his hands. “This won’t do at all.”

On Exis Station, Nomi Sunrider has called a Great Jedi Convocation, the first gathering of all the galaxy’s Jedi since the end of the Sith War. Nomi’s daughter, Vima, now probably around thirteen or fourteen years old, greets the Triceratops Jedi Master Thon and the felinoid Cathar Jedi Sylvar as they arrive on the repurposed mining station. Vima is eager to show her old master around, but the Jedi are called away as Nomi brings the gathering to order and begins laying out her plans to restore the Republic to its antebellum glory.

Feeling left out, Vima Sunrider looks at the two holographic images on her mother’s desk: “My father Andur . . . killed when I was just a baby. And Ulic, my mother’s second great love . . . I think she resents him more for leaving us than for what he did during the war.” She asks her mother if they can work on her Jedi training now, but Nomi is too harried and overwrought from all she still has to do for the convocation. Vima packs a bag and runs away from home, determined to find someone who can teach her to be a Jedi . . .

I’m going to try to keep this a little vaguer than usual because this one’s really special. They should have called it Kevin J. Anderson: Redemption.

I won’t lie and say that Anderson suddenly became a genuinely talented writer. The script is easily the weakest part of this book, with some characters’ dialogue coming off as unwieldy or unnatural. But it’s also markedly better than the four KJA stories we’ve read so far, and the approximately 500 we’ve yet to get through. His typical juvenile, overly enthusiastic tone is completely absent, as are the unnecessarily descriptive textboxes that have littered this entire series. Instead of being told what the characters are thinking and feeling, the art is finally allowed to convey it wordlessly.

KJA’s writing style couldn’t have picked a better time to spontaneously mature, either, as Redemption is easily the most beautifully illustrated comic ever produced for the Star Wars brand. Christian Gossett’s art has always been the highlight of Tales of the Jedi (except in The Golden Age of the Sith #0, for some reason), but the art, writing, and coloring in this volume are so different and so much improved that it’s hard to believe it’s part of the same series.

Even the framing bears mentioning, like a cool, auteur-directed movie. When Ulic and Vima first see one another, it’s through a broken pane of glass. Ulic’s image looms large and jagged, reflecting both the way Vima sees him and his own spiritual state, while the crack running through Vima’s youthful features conveys the broken lens of memory through which Ulic views her and mistakes her for her mother (“I didn’t come all this way just to be reminded of your mother’s face,” he snarls).

When Ulic is buried in an avalanche and wishes he would die, all we see of him is an extreme close-up of his eye inside a torn and irregular panel, representing his broken point of view. Similar little touches and attention to detail permeate the comic.

Among them is the thematic pervasiveness of the title. Redemption is a common theme in the EU, with many characters following in the footsteps left by Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi, but few other stories match the deftness with which it is portrayed in this book. Tales of the Jedi: Redemption is not just another simple black-and-white tale of a Jedi fallen to the dark side working his way back toward the light. It’s about something more human and less metaphysical D&D alignment than that.

The redemption sought and offered here is not overly concerned with making amends for accumulating an overabundance of dark side points; it’s redemption for a wasted life, for refusing to let go of an old pain, for blaming others so you don’t have to blame yourself. The dark side of the Force is not nearly so scary as the darkness we all carry within our own hearts. The title is about Nomi and Sylvar as much as it is about Ulic, and the common thread that leads them all down the path to redemption is a little girl who wants to be a Jedi.

The characters in this book sparkle with a life heretofore absent from the series. Sylvar was an unmemorably flat and uninteresting side character in the previous two volumes, but here she practically leaps off the page, wounded and dangerous and thankfully completely redesigned so instead of just being a creepy a lion in a bikini she’s actually pretty badass.

Vima says it all about Nomi in the line I quoted earlier: “I think she resents him more for leaving us than for what he did during the war.” Absolutely she does. It’s not very heroic, and probably not very politically correct, but it is very human. It doesn’t excuse what she did to Ulic at the end of The Sith War, but it’s good to see KJA eventually acknowledge Nomi’s actions for what they were, and see how that resentment has festered inside her for a decade, shaping her as a Jedi and as a mother.

Ulic himself, the only real protagonist we’ve followed for any length of time since Xesh, is finally a compelling character as well. Free of the burden of being a well-intentioned idiot for the sake of the plot, Ulic is allowed to just be Ulic, and we to see him for all that that entails. Stripped of the Force, his friends, all his hope, and his Damoclean destiny, Ulic reads like an entirely different character.

Just from the way he’s drawn, the cant of his head and cast of his eyes, you can feel the weight of the albatross around his neck. When he tells Vima, “I no longer enjoy my memories . . . I have wandered too far, seen too much . . . I have the blood of enough children on my hands,” it doesn’t ring at all false or melodramatic. Unlike the cocksure, hotheaded, angst-ridden, and ultimately hollow young man as whom he came across in the rest of the series, this is a characterization with some real weight to it.

There’s a beautiful moment near the end of the book where Nomi goes looking for Vima and ends up coming face to face with Ulic for the first time in 10 years. They’re drawn in profile, facing one another with mostly blank expressions, but between them are two panels with close-ups of their eyes, and they contain all the sadness in the world. Without a single word, this look tells us everything we need to know about how these characters feel, all the lost time and wasted chances they see in one another in this moment.

Wait, am I still talking about a Star Wars comic?

The fact that Redemption is so much incongruously better than all the preceding volumes of its series is just one of the things that make me think readers would be better served by not even bothering with the other Tales of the Jedi comics and just skipping right to this one. Dark Lords of the Sith and The Sith War aren’t bad but tonally they don’t match their follow-up at all; the rest of the series, I feel, might actually weigh this volume down.

Tales of the Jedi in a single image.

All the relevant information about these characters’ back stories and relationships is contained in the book’s opening crawl or conveyed through exposition. It’s set 10 years after the previous comics, making Redemption more of a coda to the main series than a direct continuation of an ongoing plot. It’s a pretty self-contained, standalone story, and I recommend it be experienced that way.

Regarding the passage of time, 10 years is a long time, but it’s not that long. Ulic and Nomi should probably still be in their early-to-mid-thirties, depending on how old they were supposed to be when we met them. The way that they’re drawn, however, they look at least 40, and Ulic could easily be in his fifties. Yeah, hard living and all that, but that was the excuse fans had to tell themselves when George Lucas compressed the gap between the original trilogy and the prequels, de-aging Old Ben Kenobi into a spry 57-year-old.

Details about the Great Sith War also don’t match up with what we saw previously. In The Sith War, no one from the Jedi or the Republic ever set foot on Yavin 4; they just stayed on their ships and cast Wall of Light from orbit. In Redemption, however, Ulic remembers ground combat taking place, with Republic soldiers fighting Massassi among the Sith temples. This scene also seems to imply that Ulic’s fatal duel with his brother took place on Yavin 4, when it actually happened on Ossus. Later lore would take its cue from this version, depicting a final battle between the Republic and Sith forces before Exar Kun killed himself.

A minor detail, but Ulic’s lightsaber blade is now yellow, when in Ulic Qel-Droma and the Beast Wars of Onderon and The Freedon Nadd Uprising it was green, before becoming blue in Dark Lords of the Sith and The Sith War. The yellow blade is way cooler, though, so the hell with it.

More curious is the pendant that Ulic wears around his neck throughout Redemption. He frequently looks at it when deep in thought or lost in his memories, and freaks out when he almost loses it at one point. Weirdly, it’s drawn inconsistently, switching between a ring and a medallion between panels, sometimes even subsequent panels, but whatever it’s supposed to be, its importance to Ulic is clear.

Yet despite this, Ulic never speaks of it directly and we never learn its significance. It could have been something of Nomi’s, of Cay’s, of Master Arca’s, or perhaps a token of someone or something else entirely. Something of his mother’s, perhaps, or his early life before he became a Jedi? Something he picked up during his decade of soul-searching?

Its origin and meaning are known only to Ulic, and that’s actually a pretty cool withholding of unnecessary information; all that matters is that we know how Ulic feels about it. If you’ve just read the entire series, however, it feels a little strange that this thing is depicted as being so important despite coming out of nowhere.

Then there’s the matter of Ulic and Nomi’s romantic relationship. I get the feeling that Tom Veitch and/or KJA wanted it to be this epic, tragic love story, with two young lovers torn apart by a galactic war and the misguided decisions that caused it. What really happened though is that they kissed like once and then Ulic got into drugs and Nomi started PMSing really bad and set Ulic’s Force on fire.

Here, though, there is a real sense of something lost between them, a history whose squandering feels like it should matter. Forgetting about the strict guidelines of canon and continuity for a moment, Redemption feels like it would work best if set in a universe similar to Tales of the Jedi, but one in which those events didn’t happen exactly as depicted in the comics. There always was a good story embedded in there, it was just obscured by lackluster writing and weak structure.

If you ignore the rest of the series, you lose the good along with the bad, but it leaves the backstory up to your own imagination, and that may make for a stronger story than slavish adherence to the comics. In 1977, Star Wars dropped us into the plot in medias res, and fans spent the following two decades theorizing about the Clone Wars and the rise of the Empire and Anakin Skywalker’s fall to the dark side. Then when we actually saw those things we couldn’t help but be let down. It’s true that Redemption was the end of Tales of the Jedi, not the beginning, but I think the same principles may apply. A good story always leaves you wanting more rather than knowing too much.

5/5 lightsabers. Legit art.