by Luke LoPresto

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, a film series went completely insane–or so you’d think from the Internet, where, to some, Star Wars: The Last Jedi is a daring sequel in an overcautious era, taking a blockbuster series into uncharted territory. To others, it’s a disorganized mess that betrays the childhoods of everyone involved. In an era where, as Chesterton warned, campaigns to abolish right and wrong have nearly abolished right and left, politics have come to dominate the debate over The Last Jedi. (Because we all know how much people loved the politics in the prequel trilogy.)

After two viewings, I want to explain why I love this movie and why you shouldn’t be put off by the ideologically “progressive” interpretations of The Last Jedi emanating from Hollywood and Manhattan.

Attack of the Thinkpieces

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have some trepidation walking into the movie theater, worried that the movie from left-leaning Hollywood would consist of Disney spitting on my values as a cradle Catholic and a conservative. It was small reassurance to know that Disney loves money far too much to risk no longer getting it from white men like me.

So I was pleasantly surprised to see the movie was not a heavy-handed left-wing propaganda piece. General Hux never says “Make the Galaxy Great Again” or anything like that. But this didn’t stop all the usual suspects from posting commentaries on how the film was a condemnation of the usual feminist buzzwords like “toxic masculinity” and the most “feminist” and “diverse” Star Wars movie ever made (which is at least plausible; logic dictates one of them must be). Predictably, right-wingers have risen to the bait and condemned the movie for selling out to SJWs, unintentionally validating the thinkpiece-writers’ projections and letting them win the argument.

That’s not the narrative I read into the movie at all. I instead saw a broader parallel to the friction between the Millenial generation and Boomers or Gen X, represented by the younger and older contingents of the film’s cast, respectively.

A New Take

Poe, in particular, is so focused on destroying a First Order dreadnaught in the opening battle that he gets an entire Resistance bomber squadron killed, for which Leia demotes him. Then Leia is incapacitated and Laura Dern’s vice admiral Holdo takes over. Despite the Resistance fleet being tracked through hyperspace – bringing up the very real possibility of a mole in the heroes’ midst – by the First Order, who is now slowly picking off the fleeing heroes, Holdo refuses to explain her apparent non-plan to the recently demoted Poe, who apparently has never heard of operational security or “need-to-know,” except he uses the latter term later, so I guess he’s just an idiot.

Now the “I don’t like just sitting here doing nothing” trope is nothing new, but consider how the word “resistance” has gained whole new connotations in the two years between the releases of The Force Awakens and this film. The pyrrhic victory against the dreadnought, and later the disastrous consequences of Poe’s unsanctioned mission for Finn and Rose (specifically, the fleeing Resistance lifeboats being exposed and shot at, necessitating Holdo’s epic sacrifice), almost seem like an admonition of the modern “bash the fash” mentality. Rose’s lines about “saving what we love” instead of just “destroying what we hate” may sound uncomfortably close to the “Love Trumps Hate” slogan, but it’s not a bad lesson, not by any means. We should fight to defend the things worth fighting for, not just to crush our so-called enemies.

Meanwhile, on Luke Skywalker’s island, Rey begs the original trilogy’s hero to return to action, beat up the bad guys, and save the day. Luke, however, tempered by thirty years of experience and wisdom, is reluctant to act, knowing how the wrong move can have disastrous consequences. He’s not entirely right, but he’s not entirely wrong, either.

Rey, much like the audience, is convinced things will play out much like they did thirty years before, with herself in Luke’s role of young hero and Kylo Ren in Vader’s role of conflicted villain poised to return to the light. In the end she is…less right than she thinks. After Rey, so-called Mary Sue, gets Force-ragdolled around the room by Snoke, Kylo betrays his master, but it’s not out of the goodness of his heart; he’s just sick of taking orders. So all Rey has accomplished is replaced one dictator with a slightly less stable dictator. Whether this is good or bad for the galaxy at large remains to be seen.

Rey drawing hasty comparisons between the myths she grew up with and her current situation reminded me of those who compare “Trump’s America” to Nazi Germany. In both cases, we see people jumping to conclusions and reacting accordingly, with less-than-ideal consequences. Luke, having experienced a lot more of history himself, doesn’t fall for this trap (RIP Admiral Ackbar) and warns: “This is NOT going to go the way you think!”

The Phantom Controversy

I could go on. Kylo Ren’s declaration that he and Rey should “let the past die” and “kill it if you have to” echos the progressive sentiment of sweeping away any references to less politically-correct, less “enlightened” eras of history, the sort of mentality that leads to the removal of statues of anybody who ever said anything racist. And near the film’s conclusion, just when you think the last traces of the old Jedi have been burned to ashes, it turns out Rey salvaged the ancient Jedi sacred books. “Page-turners they were not,” but that doesn’t mean she can’t learn from them.

Did I also mention Poe’s rather hasty jump to the conclusion that Vice Admiral Holdo is a full-on traitor just because he can’t personally figure out her plan and/or doesn’t agree with it? Trump-Russia collusion scandals, anybody? Not only is Poe wrong, his subsequent mutiny is cut short so quickly it’s downright embarrassing. I’m sure people who break the chain of command usually think they’re doing the right thing, but the chain is there for a reason, guys, and breaking it can cost lives.

All of that sounds very different from the thinkpieces you’ll see elsewhere, right? Almost like I watched an entirely different movie. Did I discover the film’s creators’ true intentions? Well I can’t prove that I’m right…but you can’t exactly prove that I’m wrong, either.

Why did I come to such different conclusions? Probably because I love Star Wars enough to give it the benefit of the doubt, or because I want to hold out hope that not everybody in Hollywood is a full-blown social justice warrior.

Or – and hear me out on this one – maybe it’s because I focused on “who” the protagonists are: an isolated young adult desperately seeking her purpose in life, a recent defector of conscience who is still too scared for his own life to commit fully to the cause, a dedicated soldier who isn’t ready to watch his comrades die seemingly for nothing, a naive orphan grieving her sister’s death, a subordinate leader thrust to the top of the chain of command and now responsible for the lives of hundreds, an aging veteran at the end of his life who believes that his life’s work and purpose have all come to naught.

Those clickbait websites, on the other hand, are too focused on “what” the protagonists are: a white woman, a black man, a Hispanic man, an Asian woman, an older white woman with pink hair for some reason, an older white man.

The proper reaction to the ethnicity of the cast is “meh.” Far too many commentators, on both sides, have rejected color-blindness… which has helped make them blind to everything else going on in The Last Jedi.

The Franchise Awakens

A lot of people have rejected The Last Jedi because they don’t like the direction it takes the series, or because they think it betrays the earlier films, or because its subplots are subpar. I recognize there are plenty of valid criticisms for this movie, but I don’t think it is bad. I think it is challenging. It challenges the viewer’s preconceived notions about the Force, about Luke Skywalker, and about the very nature of storytelling itself. When was the last time a franchise blockbuster movie did that? In the age of comparatively interchangeable and disposable superhero films with minimal consequences, characters who are cornerstones of modern culture are being evolved in The Last Jedi, and our assumptions are being shattered, our preconceived notions disabused.

I know not everyone is as passionate about Star Wars as I, so I won’t begrudge anybody the right to hate this movie. But I will step in and argue with anybody who claims this movie is bad. As far as I can tell, nothing in this movie is indefensible. It’s well-executed, thought-provoking, and highly entertaining. You can dislike something and still acknowledge that it is good. I don’t particularly enjoy reading Shakespeare but I won’t claim it’s garbage.

But… if you were disappointed in the film, if you wanted to love it and found it wanting, I hope I’ve helped you find something to love about it. Find something you like about it and try to keep it in your mind. Find something you hate about it and try to explain it away in your mind. This isn’t real-world politics. It’s a movie. It’s a galaxy far, far away. A little bit of positive bias won’t hurt. Or at the very least, learn to respect it for what it is and for what it’s trying to do. It’s good practice for all of us in dealing with our fellow man. And when it comes to art and its influence on our thinking, inspiring us to engage with new and challenging points of view, whether we decide to agree with them or not, is definitely a goal worthy of a Jedi Master.

I don’t talk much on De Civ about my personal life, but I am an enormous Trekkie and always have been. I once memorized a song listing all the episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, more or less in order, and the most damning thing of all is that I routinely find it genuinely useful to have this song memorized.

I even used to run a Star Trek roleplaying game online.  A dozen or so players from around the world came up with Star Trek characters they could pretend to be aboard my “starship” and we all wrote Star Trek adventures with each other, using short chapters called “posts.” I played the captain, a bitter Bolian war hero, and I was ultimately responsible for coming up with good plots for the other characters to play through. The game ran for several years, and we had a lot of fun.

This is called “simming.” There’s a whole subculture around it. People who like the Original Series simm ships from Kirk and Spock’s time, people who want to “continue” Star Trek make simms that share the time period and feel of Voyager and Next Generation, and so on. People who want to make Star Trek “dark and gritty” make restricted “R-rated” simms which are inspired by Star Trek but with cussing, dark and pessimistic storylines, character death, and a lot more sex. There are even a few who like the J.J. Abrams movies enough to make simms based in the “Abramsverse.” Simms often organize into federations of dozens of different simms called fleets, which allows them to share stories across a large shared multiverse.

Of course, because of Sturgeon’s Law, most simms are terrible, repetitive, joyless, and unstable. But some aren’t. (Mine, for instance!) Even a few of the R-rated games were surprisingly decent.

There was one R-rated game in my fleet called, I think, Deep Space 17. It was captained by a chipper 16-year-old girl named Penny whose character (in one of the Mary Sue flourishes for which simms are justly famous) was also a 16-year-old girl named Penny, the youngest captain in Starfleet, an absolute prodigy. When she decided to make her game more “mature,” I think she had some genetic virus infect her that turned her into a 21-year-old, and then she added an R-rating to her game and the characters started angsting a lot more. Her game had a lot of people shouting at each other and having sex and making Difficult Choices because Every Episode Needs To Be Dark, but, for a simm, she had good writers, and she became a good writer herself. It was different enough from everything else in my fleet that I honestly enjoyed reading their adventures.

Fast-forward to today. I’m no longer a simmer, but I am faithfully watching every episode of the new Star Trek: Discovery (currently paywalled for American viewers at CBS All Access). It’s unlike any Star Trek that has ever been televised before. And yet, every week, I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that I’ve seen this all before. None of the shocking twists have made me even bat an eye. Several of them have made me roll my eyes. But so much of Discovery is new and different, where could that feeling be coming from? And why do I feel so disappointed in a show that is so bold and fresh and new–all things I’ve long believed a new Star Trek needed to be?

It finally clicked with me when this happened in episode 5, “Choose Your Pain”:

That’s it, isn’t it?

The first episode that has nothing to do with the rest of the series.

The unexpected protagonist, Michael Burnham, who is terrible yet somehow wins every argument.

The “edgy” Klingons.

The garish design.

The “edgy” cussing, including the F-bomb.

The choice to immediately start a war without earning it and thinking it would somehow have the same power as DS9 even if it’s the most cliche war in history.

The blunt, soulless namedropping of characters and events from other Star Trek shows in lieu of actual continuity.

The casual use of Section 31-influenced plot points because a “shadowy amoral intelligence service” is cool and “edgy” and dark.

The twenty-eight separately credited producers.

Even the same-sex relationship.

It all makes sense now.

Star Trek Discovery is somebody’s R-rated simm, ported on to the big screen with a $120 million budget and a stunningly good cast. (It really is a great cast. Sonequa Martin-Green in particular is so far above the material she’s being given so far it hurts.)

Here’s how I imagine it played out:

The Discovery simm started out as an Abramsverse game run by Captain Georgiou’s player. (I’m assuming that was either Nicholas Meyer or Bryan Fuller.) It was going to be a bright story of exploration, rated PG (the baseline for simms), and it was set in the Abrams timeline simply to avoid continuity headaches.

But, after the first few posts of the game (i.e. about 16 minutes into “The Vulcan Hello”), Georgiou’s player flaked out. In a simm, when the captain disappears (which happens a lot), the first officer takes over the game, regardless of the first officer’s in-character or out-of-character qualifications. That’s just how it is. Chain-of-command. And Georgiou’s first officer was a character named Michael Burnham (played by Akiva Goldsmith?).

Burnham had been planning to get severely injured in her confrontation with the Klingons, then spend the next several adventures working on her character’s long and painful recovery, focusing on her* character. This is hurt/comfort fic, but nobody minded. After all, Burnham was already very clearly a Mary Sue. Between her being an adoptive family member of Sarek and Spock (despite never being mentioned before), mischaracterizing Sarek by writing a Sarek who wasn’t furious with her for joining Starfleet, having a bizarre name that makes her “special,” being the only human graduate of the Vulcan Science Academy, becoming a high-ranking officer without attending Starfleet Academy, and so on and so forth, Michael Burnham scores a 76 on the Ultimate Mary Sue Litmus Test. (Any score over 30 is considered “high risk of being a Mary Sue”). Sues are allowed to write hurt/comfort.

And, you know, having a Mary Sue aboard your simm isn’t the worst thing in the world. Simms can get dull if nobody has any fresh ideas, and Sues are idea machines. Kids who write Mary Sues turn into adults who write actual good stories. So Michael Burnham is exactly the kind of character you’d expect from a really talented 15-year-old.

But, when Georgiou vanished, Burnham became responsible for the entire ship and story. She had to drop the hurt/comfort story, leap up out of her Sickbay biobed half-dead, and head to the bridge.

To her credit, Burnham stalled, hoping that Georgiou would return and put the game back on track. This is why absolutely nothing happens in the middle part of “The Vulcan Hello.” But sometimes people just disappear from games with no explanation, and you have to move on. So, eventually, Burnham moved on. She staged a mutiny against Georgiou and then wrote a battle aboard the Klingon ship that got Georgiou killed.

Now the simm had no in-game captain, which is a genuine subversion of simming conventions. Like I said, Sues are awesome at coming up with fresh ideas, and moving the focus away from some arbitrary captain was a great one. Unfortunately, Burnham was so taken with the “mutiny” twist that she failed to write adequate justification for it into the story, and her mutiny came across as wildly unjustifiable. Still pretty good for a 15-year-old writer.

Burnham’s player now fully asserted herself as C.O. of the game–and she had very different ideas about how it should go. She saw Battlestar Galactica just last year, and thinks it is the bee’s knees because she hasn’t seen Season 4 yet. “What Star Trek is missing,” she announced in an OOC (“out-of-character”) post, “is a strong focus on endless interpersonal conflict between unlikable characters who never learn anything.” Which isn’t actually the lesson of BSG, but is the lesson most simmers took away from it.

So Burnham’s player changed the rating to R and announced that the game is now set in the regular Star Trek universe (the “Prime Timeline”). That’s not because she dislikes the Abramsverse, but simply because she wants to show the “real darkness” in the Star Trek universe, and can’t do that as well in the Abrams timeline. Also, she really likes name-dropping events from canon, as seen in her Sarek-heavy backstory, and the Prime Timeline is better for that. Nevertheless, Burnham kept all the hideous Abramsverse aesthetics, because she doesn’t actually care about continuity. Continuity isn’t “edgy,” but those hideous Abramsverse starships and doors and computer panels and lens flares sure as heck are.

Most of the players left when the game got an R-rating, so Burnham blew up the Shenzhou to kill off all their characters. Dr. Nambue, Ensign Danby, Lt. Januzzi, we hardly knew thee or thine ridiculous names. (They all used the same random name generator from the simm’s application form.) However, there were two big exceptions: Saru’s player is one of those guys who just wants to invent a species to play and then spend the rest of the game exploring that species, so he’s pretty much down for anything. He stuck with the simm, and so Saru survived the Battle at the Binary Stars.

So did Voq.

Yes, Voq is a player character. Originally, in Georgiou’s plan, the game was going to begin with a tense confrontation with the Klingons. However, based on dialogue in “Errand of Mercy”, there would be no Federation-Klingon war. The confrontation would be resolved by the end of the first simm “episode,” with Voq helping defuse the crisis. Voq would then join the Shenzhou crew permanently. (Georgiou didn’t really want to do Klingons at all, but Voq really really likes Klingons, so she agreed.) Voq had already started weaving out an elaborate Klingon political storyline, so he stuck with it when Burnham decided not to defuse the crisis after all. They agreed to kill off the NPC villain, T’Kuvma, that Georgiou had created, and leave Voq in charge of the Klingon plot.

However, Burnham is currently paying no attention to Voq’s plotline and has mostly just told him not to mess anything up. He’s not half-bad for an RPG writer, but he’s spinning his wheels a bit because he doesn’t know what direction he’s supposed to go (and he suffers from the delusion, common among simmers, that Klingon politics are FASCINATING). He managed to recruit his real-life girlfriend a couple weeks ago to play his in-game girlfriend L’Rell, explaining L’Rell’s oddly fanatic in-game loyalty to Voq.

However, Voq had so little to do last week that they had his player run a new character called Ash Tyler, a Starfleet prisoner aboard a Klingon ship rescued by Lorca in a storyline that went nowhere. (Ash was also L’Rell’s girlfriend, because L’Rell’s player insisted.) However, I have my suspicions about whether there’s more to that story than meets the eye: since simm storylines are always driven by the player characters, it was very weird to have an entire subplot between Voq’s alternate character; Burnham’s friend Dwight, the captain of another simm who stopped by to play dark-and-gritty Harry Mudd for a week; and an NPC like Captain Lorca.

Yep, Lorca is an NPC (or non-player character). While Burnham’s player is in charge of the game, the Burnham character, in-game, has been stripped of rank, and can’t be in charge of anyone. Lorca is her solution to this problem: an NPC under her control who can hand out orders to everyone else (mostly Burnham), while also handing out cryptic hints about Dark Gritty Starfleet Stuff and serving as a dramatic foil to Burnham. That’s why Lorca only ever has scenes with Burnham (and not, say, Lt. Friggin’ Saru, the friggin’ XO). Stamets sometimes uses Lorca in his posts, mostly so they can shout at each other, but Burnham frankly wishes Stamets would stop.

Speaking of Stamets, both Stamets and Tilly are new players who joined Discovery soon after Burnham took over.

Stamets has characters on four other simms (which is the legal limit in his fleet), so he knows what he’s doing. He really enjoys simming, because it lets him explore drama. Unfortunately, he thinks drama consists mainly of angst and whining. This is his first time in an R-rated simm. He finds it refreshing! He’s not liking Stamets very much, since he’s turning out to be too idealistic for this kind of a game, so he’s thinking about signing up again with a new character… or doing something horrible to Stamets to make him more compatible with the R rating. OOC, Stamets’ player is an older teen who is (like roughly 40% of all simmers) very recently out of the closet, so his character is (of course) in what the player imagines an adult gay relationship is like. But he’s so new to the concept he just ends up writing more “edgy” bickering with his beloved, the NPC Dr. Culber. He’s a good player; he just needs a little more seasoning — and for Burnham to let him out of the box she’s keeping him in.

Tilly stumbled into the game. It’s her player’s first time simming, and Burnham (who is not a half-bad simming leader, for a simming leader) took her under her wing. So, even as a cadet, Tilly gets to be the game-master’s in-game roommate. Burnham’s player is a little frustrated, though, because Tilly (who is a HUGE Voyager fan) still hasn’t figured out the whole R-rating thing yet. Burnham’s player keeps writing joint posts with Tilly’s player and trying to drop hints that Tilly needs to develop an edgier side (by staring at her and frowning a lot in-character whenever Tilly seems happy). But it just isn’t clicking with Tilly, who keeps trying to write everything like a Voyager episode.

Last week, Burnham sent Tilly a private message on the forum where the simm is played telling Tilly in no uncertain terms that she needs to let out her “darker side,” that this is a game where she could even say the F-word and nobody would bat an eye! Tilly’s player took the advice to heart. Even though she couldn’t really figure out why she’d ever want to say the F-word in-character, she tried to be a good player and dropped it into a post. Only the post wasn’t dark, and didn’t develop Tilly’s edgier side. It was about exciting science! Stamets liked it and went along with it, because he is completely blown away by saying the F-word in a Star Trek simm, but Burnham’s player just put her head in her hands and sighed. She’s learning the first rule of roleplaying: no matter how good your plans are as the game-master, your players are going to go off in their own direction and ruin them without realizing this. If she can learn to roll with this and let her players play the game they want, her game could get good–even great.

For now, for a simm run by teenagers, Discovery is a strong, entertaining game that’s trapped in a “dark and edgy” box. If you just accept it for what it is–somebody’s R-rated simm–rather than expecting it to reincarnate the spirit of Star Trek for a glorious new era of television, it’s definitely possible to enjoy it. I’m going to keep watching. Plenty of Star Trek series have needed to grow up after weak first seasons; the only difference with Discovery is that it’s a gawky teen who wears all black and thinks it’s already an adult. It’ll eventually find the fun, and, if we’re lucky, it may even find the spirit of Star Trek. Until then, it’s pretty good for a simm. Star Trek Discovery airs Sunday nights (including tonight, in about 16 hours!) at 7:30 PM Central on CBS All Access.

Meanwhile, if you do want the spirit of Star Trek, Fox’s The Orville is somehow achieving that, despite a catastrophically awful premiere and weak second episode. They haven’t aired any episodes that made me say, “Oh, that’s right up there with ‘The Inner Light,'” but I’ve definitely seen worse episodes than their latest outing, “Krill,” and the humor is finally starting to click. The Orville airs Thursdays on Fox at 8 PM Central after Gotham.

*In simms, it is conventional to refer to players as their characters, even when the player and character have different genders. So I refer to Burnham’s player as a “she” even though the player could just as easily be a 15-year-old boy.

Type of Show: Though it aired on a (cable) network, Mr. Robot is another in the new genre of “binge-watch” shows, in which every episode must be watched in sequence to make any sense, the most exciting story beats happen at the end (rather than the beginning and middle) in order to keep you watching for another hour, and everything from storylines to individual shots are padded to make the show fill an entire season. (see also: The Man in the High Castle)

What It’s About: A Fight Club for the Information Age, full of fury at capitalist society (which it portrays in drab caricature), Mr. Robot has its dysfunctional protagonists channel their energy into hacking and virtual terrorism rather than punching and physical terrorism… but otherwise it pretty much follows the Fight Club aesthetic, from the vague idea that it is the oppression of society that make us miserable (rather than our own defects) to its deep-seated misanthropy (which is odd, given its anarchism), to its many long, self-indulgent, but very entertaining speeches about the State of Society today. Mr. Robot also has its protagonist break the fourth wall in regular narrations, which seems to be a hat-tip to House of Cards, a show with a similarly grim outlook on life.

Where People Watch: USA Network, Amazon Prime (subscription only), The Pirate Bay (illegally)

What James Watched: The first three episodes of the first season, portions of the fourth, and the entire season finale (episode ten).

Best Part: Hacking is virtual breaking-and-entering, so all great hacking movies are, at heart, dolled-up heist movies. Mr. Robot is the story of the greatest “heist” of all time, and, when the show is focused on that, it shines. Lead actor Rami Malek, playing protagonist Elliot Alderman, carries the rest of the show on his back, and does a marvelous job with it.

Worst Part: Mr. Robot does not spend a lot of time focusing on the heists. And, because of its deliberate choice to present a caricature of the modern world, most of the characters that inhabit that world are shallow and uninteresting (though their one-dimensionality is covered up by making them flashy and stylized). Unfortunately, this includes protagonist Elliot, whose name I had to repeatedly look up in the course of writing this review — though Mr. Malek’s good offices at least keep Elliot watchable.

Representative Excerpt:

KRISTA: And what is it about society that disappoints you so much?

ELLIOT: Oh, I don’t know. Is it that we collectively thought Steve Jobs was a great man even when we knew he made billions off the backs of children? Or maybe it’s that it feels like all our heroes are counterfeit. The world itself’s just one big hoax. Spamming each other with our burning commentary bullshit masquerading as insight. Our social media faking as intimacy. Or is it that we voted for this? Not with our rigged elections. But with our things, our property, our money. I’m not saying anything new, we all know we do this, not because Hunger Games books make us happy, but because we want to be sedated. Because it’s painful not to pretend because we’re cowards… f**k society.

Theme Music:

(You learn a lot about any show from its theme music.)

Should I Watch?: 

No.

Mr. Robot is a good movie stretched out over the course of too many episodes. Everything important and interesting it has to say, it says in its pilot. Watch that, then stop.

Type of Show: In the 21st Century, there are two kinds of shows: dark (think Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies) and bright (think Guardians of the Galaxy).  Some straddle the middle, or vacillate between the two.  Utopia is unlike all of them: its plot and characters are pitch-black, darker than anything I’ve seen recently.  But its tone — everything from its color palate to its music to its dialogue — is brighter than anything since Pushing Daisies.  It’s a drama, but often feels like something else.

What It’s About: A powerful conspiracy is determined to get its hands on a manuscript: the second volume of Utopia, a cult-classic comic book.  They’ll kill anyone even tangentially connected to it.  This is bad news for a small group of online Utopia fans, who have managed to get their hands on the manuscript… and they now have to flee for their lives.

Where People Watch: BBC4, DVD, The Pirate Bay (illegally)

What James Watched: The entire first season — six episodes.  There was a second season, also six episode, which aired in 2014.  This short run, though unthinkable in mainstream American television, is perfectly normal for a British show.

Best Part: Watching four completely innocent people from completely different walks of life fall deeper and deeper into a rabbit hole of conspiracies (and conspiracies-within-conspiracies) is fun in any universe, but Utopia‘s bright approach upends the entire conspiracy genre.  I know that’s like saying “the best part of the show is the show,” but that’s kinda true here.

Worst Part: Utopia is incredibly violent, and shockingly graphic about nearly all of it. It gets one or two points back for refusing to show children being graphically murdered… but promptly loses them anyway because it’s perfectly willing to kill children just off-screen, and does so more than twice. If you simply aren’t up for a lot of violence (and a bit of sex), nobody will judge you for skipping Utopia.

Representative Excerpt:

DUGDALE: How did you… get involved in all this?

DONALDSON: Remember SARS? I worked for the Martarla Foundation who discovered it. One of their top scientists, rising star, six figure salary, used their private jet. Ever been on a private jet? It’s nice. I was in Hong Kong when SARS hit. They kept it locked down, but I thought, ‘Fuck that, I’m special’. So I went in, had a look, found out it didn’t exist.

DUGDALE: What? SARS didn’t exist?

DONALDSON: No. Whole thing was just a series of unconnected respiratory problems. Took me under an hour to discover there was no cause or link. So, I filed my report and within a week, I was discredited, research destroyed… fired. I tried speaking out, but everyone thought I’d just gone a bit David Icke.

DUGDALE: But people died. SARS was–

DONALDSON: Started in November 2002, it lasted precisely seven months, by summer 2003 it no longer existed; the ‘pandemic’ affected just eight thousand, four hundred and twenty-two people and killed nine hundred and sixteen. Do you know how many people die each year from random respiratory problems? SARS did not exist. Next question. Why did they do it? Answer? I don’t fucking know. All I know is that in the next few weeks I was embroiled in a sex scandal. Professor Pervert, addicted to coke and prostitutes.

DUGDALE: So, d-did they just set you up?

DONALDSON: Yeah! Well… No, I do like cocaine and prostitutes, but they didn’t have to tell everyone.

Theme Music:

(You learn a lot about any show from its theme music.)

Should I Watch?: 

YES.

Another review put it like this: “Utopia is like Lost without all the irritating parts of Lost.” That’s barely even kind of true, but it’s still the most accurate one-sentence summary of Utopia I’ve found, so I’m reprinting it anyway.  I enjoyed Utopia a great deal, and it told a story that has only occasionally been told before in an entirely fresh way.  And, although I wouldn’t go so far as to say Utopia has clear heroes, it does definitely have people you can cheer for — and who are still worth cheering for by the time the first season ends.

At first blush, it doesn’t seem like there’s any good reason to listen to NPR’s 1981-1996 radio adaptations of Star Wars. Take away all the groundbreaking visual effects, iconic actors, and revolutionary design, and it sounds like all you have left is the dialogue — not exactly Star Wars‘ strongest point. But with Brian Daley’s writing and John Williams’s legendary soundtrack backing it up, you actually get something well worth listening to! Here’s ten reasons why you should pick up NPR’s Star Wars radio plays:

10. The Lost Biggs Scenes

These deleted scenes are some of the most well-known, giving the audience a look at Luke Skywalker’s life on Tatooine before a pair of robots came into his life. They also establish Luke’s friendship with fellow pilot Biggs Darklighter, who is defecting from the Empire and will later fight in the assault on the Death Star. In the movie, Biggs gets about two lines of dialogue and an out-of-place moment when Luke mourns Biggs’ death, like they were BFFs. Well, that’s because they were.

However, this sequence, which takes up the first episode of the radio drama, does suggest quite a backstory. Biggs mentions that he’s still first mate on an Imperial starship, having not yet joined the rebellion. The plot of the entire movie probably takes place over no more than a few days, yet in that time Biggs managed to jump ship, find his way to the rebellion, and become a member of Red Squadron in barely more time than Luke did! Not impossible, but still seems improbable…

9. “Low is your ceiling…”

Luke delivers this line upon bumping his head inside Yoda’s hut, unconsciously mirroring Yoda’s famous speech pattern. Nothing really significant about it; I just think it’s funny.

8. Arica

In Jabba the Hutt’s palace, an added scene brings C-3PO into contact with a dancer named Arica. To casual fans, this is little more than filler that provides a less-awkward means for characters to narrate events. To die-hard Expanded Universe fans, however, this is the closest one of their favorite non-film characters will get to the movies, for “Arica” is merely an alias for…Mara Jade.

First introduced in Timothy Zahn’s 1991 novel Heir To The Empire, Mara Jade was once a Force-wielding assassin, answerable directly to the Emperor. There it was revealed that she went undercover at Jabba’s palace on a (failed) mission to assassinate Luke Skywalker. Luke would eventually help her move past her dark past, eventually (highlight for spoilers!) marrying her.

The great thing about this scene is Mara’s friendly demeanor. Most depictions of her past indicate that she’s not evil, merely misguided, working for an evil master. Her polite banter with C-3PO, of all people, one of the most chronically abused characters in the franchise, helps to humanize her. She’s an assassin, but she’s just one step away from redemption. And really, redemption is what Star Wars is all about.

7. Stranded on Hoth

In The Empire Strikes Back, Luke loses consciousness / slips into delirium when Han Solo finds him in the frozen wastes on Hoth. It’s implied he stays that way until he wakes up in a bacta tank and a diaper back in Echo Base. The radio drama adds a tense conversation inside the temporary shelter (so presumably Luke isn’t still in that tauntaun carcass) between Han and a lucid Luke as they discuss their odds of survival. It serves little purpose other than to provide some characterization, but remember that after Echo Base, these two friends won’t speak again until Jabba’s Palace, halfway into the next movie, so the opportunity to develop this interpersonal relationship is welcome.

6. The Battle of Derra IV

Before the proper plot of Empire Strikes Back gets underway, the radio series first depicts a space battle at Derra IV, wherein an entire Rebel convoy and its escort squadron is wiped out by and Imperial ambush. Now the Rebels have taken heavy losses in the movies, at Yavin, Hoth and Endor, but they still managed to either get the job done or at least escape relatively intact. Here, there’s none of that. It’s a total defeat for the Rebels and sets the tone for the darkest entry in the trilogy. An effective scene I would’ve loved to see onscreen (seriously, how hard would it have been to create 2 minutes of new space battle footage for the Blu-Ray?)

5. Perry King as Han Solo

Now put that gun down for a moment and hear me out.

There is no doubt that Harrison Ford has been, and always shall be, Han Solo. But the voice actor for the character, Perry King, brings a different take to the character. He talks much more like the scoundrel Han Solo is supposed to be: a sleazy faux-“smooth-talk” voice akin to that of a used-car salesman. I won’t try to assert that it’s better than Harrison Ford’s performance, rather that it’s simply a… differing interpretation that’s worth listening to. Definitely sounds like a guy who would shoot first.

4. Say No to “NOOOOOOOO!”

The changes Lucas has made to the six movies over the years have been met with largely negative feedback. Greedo shooting first, giant dinosaurs in Mos Eisley, different music in Jabba’s palace, replacing Sebastian Shaw with Hayden Christensen, the list goes on. Though that last might be explained by the fact that Disney doesn’t own the film rights to the X-Men. (At least that’s what I gather from a quick Google search.)

The 2011 Blu-Ray releases take Vader’s big NO from Revenge of the Sith, one of the most mocked moments in that movie, and dub it over his turning against the Emperor in Return of the Jedi. It was at this point that fans became convinced Lucas was just trying to mess with them.

Because it is a radio drama, the NPR version has to include some kind of dialogue at this moment, or the listener won’t know that the Emperor has been picked up and tossed down a shaft.  Their version, however, is much more interesting than Lucas’s revision:

Palpatine: Put me down!
Vader: I will put you down. Down the reactor shaft! Down to your death!
Palpatine: I am your master!
Vader: Darth Vader’s master, BUT NOT ANAKIN SKYWALKER’S!

Hammy? Yes. But, dang, it’s still epic. Brock Peters chews the scenery so hard as Vader (in a radio show, no less!) that he could probably have destroyed the Death Star himself if he’d kept it up.

Despite the fact that both characters are voiced by different actors, Lucas should’ve dubbed this exchange into the Blu-Ray. Because when your dialog is clunky, sometimes the best solution is to just roll with it and ham it up.

3. The Trials of Princess Leia

Remember how the destruction of Alderaan hung over Leia like a dark cloud for the rest of the trilogy? No? That’s because she brings it up exactly once after the fact in the whole series (actually, she didn’t bring it up, a Rebel general did). Having your whole world, your whole life up to this point, literally burned to ashes is going to change a person. Especially after enduring torture at the hands of Space Nazis. Yet Leia seems altogether unaffected by any of this in the films.

Brian Daley’s writing and Ann Sachs’s portrayal of the character in the radio drama work wonders to fix this, with a rather uncomfortable sequence depicting Leia’s interrogation by Vader, including a bit where he uses mind control drugs to attempt to trick her into thinking he is her father (remember this was broadcast before Return of the Jedi showed us that Darth Vader actually is her father). And her anguished cries at Alderaan’s destruction work far better than in the movie, which is more concerned with Obi-Wan’s trauma at the event than Leia’s!

2. The Case for Rebellion

The penultimate episode of the A New Hope adaptation, titled “The Case for Rebellion”, features a lengthy argument in which Luke tries to convince Han not to abandon the Rebellion, while Han tries to convince Luke to do the opposite. It’s an interesting look into the characters’ opposing personalities, and gives Han’s surprise rescue of Luke at the climax of the Death Star assualt more of an impact.

Prior to this the episode also features a scene where Solo demands payment from a Rebel general for delivering the princess. When the general protests that they don’t have any currency, Han demands to be paid from their stockpiles of precious metals, in other words, he’s gouging vital resources from the Alliance’s supplies. Again, this scene gives more payoff to Han’s character development, and Perry King’s portrayal really helps make Han unlikeable in this episode. Which is, of course, the entire point.

1. Operation Skyhook

It may be surprising to discover, on listening to the adaptation of A New Hope, that the opening scene of Star Wars, where Leia’s consular ship is pursued by Darth Vader’s Star Destroyer, does not happen until the middle of the third episode of the radio series. The entire first episode is devoted to the “lost Biggs scenes”, while the second and half of the third are focused on how Leia came into possession of the Death Star plans. These scenes add a lot because not only do we get to see Leia acting as a solo protagonist, we actually get to “see” Alderaan.

The theft of the Death Star plans has long fascinated the Star Wars fandom, but this was the first depiction. Undoubtedly at least part of this will be overridden by the upcoming Rogue One film, but I hold out hope that this depiction will in some way be homaged in the new movie.

You can find NPR’s complete Star Wars trilogy on Amazon, currently a bargain at $60 for the set.  Luke LoPresto blogs at Mirum Planetarum.

Type of Show: It is unfair to call The Man in the High Castle a heavily-serialized drama. Like many other shows written for the “binge-watching” audience (House of Cards &c.), it is way more serialized than that.  As a series of episodes, it is unintelligible; it can only be understood as a full, season-long story.

What It’s About: In 1947, the Nazi Reich and Japanese Empire conquered America.  Now, in 1963, Juliana Crane and Joe Blake are helping the Resistance smuggle films that depict an impossible world where the Allies won.

Where People Watch: Amazon Prime (subscription only), The Pirate Bay (illegally)

What James Watched: The entire 10-episode first season, which is all that has been released so far.

Best Part: Mad Men won a bunch of awards for its powerful, faithful evocation of the 1960s. The Man in the High Castle goes much further: it powerfully, faithfully evokes a 1960s that never happened: a 1960s America that has been quietly perverted by anti-Semitic propaganda and seppuku.  The world it creates feel real in every detail, from production design to tiny quirks of dialogue, and that world-building is entrancing. Obergruppenführer John Smith (really? that’s the name of a main character?) is singled out in most reviews as a standout, and I must agree: every regime will has its collaborators, and some of them will be true believers. Smith is fascinating.

Worst Part: The Man in the High Castle is, even at this early date, obviously joining Lost’s tradition of asking questions that it has no intention of answering.  The refusal to commit to and advance the broad story drains the show — and apparently its writers — of any sense of urgency.  The story is ten hours long, but has less character development and change in all that time than your average 90-minute B-movie. What’s there is good, but it is soooo slow in coming and involves soooo many long silent shots of people frowning that you start wishing you were watching Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies, which were somehow less overextended than The Man in the High Castle.

Should I Watch?: 

NO.

The Man in the High Castle could work very well, if its first and (probable) second season were smashed together into a tightly-paced six-episode miniseries.  Watch the pilot episode for its gorgeous production values and world-building (the pilot is free on Amazon even to non-subscribers, so, bonus).  The rest of the series just isn’t worth the time it asks for, so bail out and go watch the original Red Dawn, which has far less verisimilitude but a hell of a lot more entertainment value.

Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy were able to write subversive novels only by writing novels that looked, on the surface, as though they were actually being “subversive” in the particular way that the literary establishment favors. That is, they appeared to be unabashedly calling for nihilism and the the downfall of Western civilization—which, since this was and remains the precise agenda of the literary establishment, hardly seems subversive, in retrospect.  They could not hide their Catholic motivations; they could only disguise them as something else.  Percy could not have written Dr. Tom More as, say, a hard-boiled detective and gotten away with it.

Casablanca would never work as a novel.  You would know too much about Rick’s insides to be surprised in the final scene.

Yes, I admit, I am already very partial to any movie about radio.  I am heavily invested in radio, because I have been laboriously leading production on my own radio drama, Starship Excelsior, since 2007.  (Indeed, work on Excelsior‘s next episode is the main reason my posts on De Civitate have slowed down during the past few weeks.)  I’ve grown to love the medium, and so should you, and Welcome Back, Mr. McDonald is certain to help get you listening to modern online radio drama.  It even managed to make me see the value in foley art, which I had long since discarded as a crude vestige of a less technologically advanced era.  I now see that the rise of the BBC Sound Effects Library and its brethren have made our jobs easier… but also a little less human, and more than a little less distinct.

But I’m not just recommending this movie because I’m a radiophile.  It is a genuinely lovely little movie, like Noises Off! but with more heart.  I know this isn’t a very thorough review, but go get it.  You’ll thank me.

At this point, I would normally include a trailer, but none appears to exist.  Indeed, all online footage of it appears to be from the Korean market.  Here, instead, is a one-minute random clip from the movie, with Korean subtitles:

(Incidentally, I don’t mean to slam American movies: I want to see The Artist, loved The King’s Speech, and will happily maintain until the day I die that Wallace & Grommit should have won Best Picture in 2005.  But American audiences would likely not accept Welcome Back, Mr. McDonald en masse, which was my point.  If I wanted to be mean to the Academy, I’d have mentioned Babel.)