It’s called Star Wars. Not Star Trek, not Star Peace, not Star Friends, not even Star Tales. This gargantuan fictional universe is labeled with a title that guarantees the ability to travel space… and near-constant warfare.
We can debate the relative okay-ness of this focus from a moral standpoint, sure. But in reality, I think that Star Wars is accidentally teaching us the greatest lesson of all: It’s depicting what a universe looks like when you dedicate all of your research and technological advancements to war and destruction, and unwittingly showing us what an incredibly dark place that universe is. Because the Star Wars universe is a fun fictional playground for sure, a great place to build weird and wonderful stories… but it’s not a good place. Not by a longshot.
If there’s one thing that the Star Wars universe is super into, it’s creating bigger, louder, faster ways to kill people. The Jedi’s lightsabers are far more effective than any plain sword—a laser beam blade means that cutting off an opponents limbs or slicing them in half takes practically no pressure or force (teehee) on behalf of the person wielding the weapon. They never get dulled or dirty, and they can also deflect blaster bolts, which can be ricocheted back at the person firing them. Blasters carry power packs that move well beyond extended magazine territory. Many of the more common ships come equipped with weapons, and when they don’t, it’s often incredibly easy to modify them for that purpose. (Part of the reason people were so fond of YT-1300 freighters like the Millennium Falcon was because they were so easy to alter and customize, as Han and Lando would both attest.) And if something handheld or ship-sized won’t do, that’s fine, there are moon-sized ships with lasers that can blow up whole planets! Planets with lasers that can blow up whole star systems! Because we need that, obviously! Death droids and armed starfighters and space bombs are definitely not enough.
Someone might take this opportunity to point out that there’s plenty of other fascinating technology in the Star Wars universe. But this is where the point of the argument comes clearer than ever—because all technology in the galaxy that’s not created to either perpetuate or facilitate battle is garbage.
Allow me to explain.
In the Star Wars Universe, technology designed for war is highly valuable, and usually of higher quality than the ad hoc, poorly devised, and in some cases actively derided tech available for other purposes. Nowhere is this more clear than with everyone’s favorite duo of the series: C-3PO and R2-D2. Threepio is a marvel when you consider all that he can do, but his expertise is geared toward communication and diplomacy as a protocol droid. The fact that Threepio makes it possible to land virtually anywhere in the galaxy and communicate (as he does with the Ewoks when the Rebels get caught on Endor’s moon) should be a cause for constant praise. Instead, Threepio is treated like an annoying hindrance no matter where he tries to make himself useful. But Artoo—along with other various astromechs from the R3s all the way up to the more current BB models—is beloved by everyone. He’s the handiest tin can on this side of the multiverse. Unsurprisingly, astromechs are created largely for the purpose of enacting repairs on various ships and copiloting starfighters. Starfighters. You know. Tiny war ships.
The reason why Artoo and Beebee are so handy is because they were created for the purpose of helping pilots maintain their ships, even while under attack; we see Artoo do this constantly, from his run with Luke on the first Death Star to saving Padmé and her cadre from the Trade Federation blockade when they flee Naboo, clinging to the hull of her ship while it’s in space flight. Their droids brains are capable of intense problem-solving that most other droids don’t ever get the opportunity to experience. Given that, it’s hardly surprising that Lando’s buddy L3-37 started her life out as an R3 unit, later adding components from other droid brains into her own programming along with her own custom code. Droids that do work on the battlefield do have variable intelligence, but that’s down to purpose—the battledroids that the Separatist armies use are likely deliberately dim, making it easy to order them to die.
Then there’s the armor and arms issue, or more specifically the fact that everything distinct about the Star Wars galaxy is often represented by those two categories. The Mandalorian people (who have been featured heavily in The Clone Wars and Rebels series) have an incredible planet and rich culture known the galaxy over. But the real reason why they’re known best? Their iconic beskar armor. Said armor is not only unbelievably durable, it’s also often kitted out with a ridiculous array of weaponry, including wrist lasers, flamethrowers, rockets, jetpacks, grappling lines, blades, and more. The armor is so much a part of Mandalorian identity that when Duchess Satine Kryze turns Mandalore onto a more pacifistic road during the Clone Wars, the backlash she faces from various corners is nearly constant. Eventually, the Duchess is murdered by Darth Maul, and her pacifist message seems to die out with her; we can see by the time of the Rebel Alliance that Mandalore has largely retained its warrior ways, and Mandalorian combat armor is every bit as essential to their way of life as it ever was.
This is true for the majority of the galaxy—peoples and groups are known for their armaments above all things. We know the Mandalorians by their combat armor; the Jedi by their lightsabers; the Sith by their often red lightsabers. The Sand People of Tatooine have the gaderffii (or gaffi stick); the Wookiees have the bowcaster; the Gungans have distinct plasma weapons; even the Naboo, who pride themselves on artful design, use that design sense to create beautiful weapons, from Padmé’s small silver blaster to their sleek, canary yellow starfighters.
On top of all this, technology with seemingly benign programming is often fitted with some form of destructive capacity. In Star Wars: Resistance we find a droid named 4D-M1N, who performs many day-to-day administrative tasks for Captain Doza, and also occasionally acts as a guardian to his daughter, Torra. When there is an unannounced guest in Torra’s room, Fourdee activates into what Torra calls “attack mode”, and it takes a great deal of wheedling and finally a stern order from Torra to get her to power down. Remember, Fourdee is primarily a droid who works as an assistant, but she still had to be outfitted with defense systems and knowledge of how to fend off intruders. She’s part executive aide, part security guard—because in the Star Wars universe, even if it has a very clear noncombat function, if it doesn’t also have lethal capacity, then what is it even for?
Which brings us to the other side of this issue: Most technologies in the Star Wars universe that don’t have some capability of being used in war… well, they kinda just suck.
There are so many areas where it seems like average Star Wars tech should outdo itself given how advanced the military-grade technology is, but in practice it doesn’t appear to make much difference at all. Repair droids who aren’t astromechs—like the pit droid crews used in podracing—have nowhere near the sophistication of their battle-ready cousins. Communication devices like comlinks are often handheld for no good reason. (Armor helmets have built-in comms, it can’t be that hard, y’all.) There’s also the issue of the Death Star’s “stolen data tapes” (tapes, for Life Day’s sake), the plans that are so key to the Rebellion’s success. Which are somehow being kept at a facility where important Imperial schematics and documents are on record in a library tower that must be manually accessed by a claw machine, housed on a tape that looks like it would fit happily into a VCR.
And then there’s the pointed lack of adequate women’s healthcare that arguably causes the rise of the Empire single-handedly—after all, Padmé’s death in childbirth doesn’t seem like it should be a common occurrence in a universe where cybernetic limbs (and cloning!) are readily available. But it’s fine, because there’s a droid babbling nonsense soothing sounds at her while it scoops up her newborn babies and she lies there sobbing. This is something out of a sad historical drama, but it’s happening in a fictional universe full of FTL travel and laser guns. We can cite the period of time when Star Wars was created all we want, but in order to find an “in universe” explanation for these ridiculous affectations, we have to assume that people are actively refusing to create the systems needed to make the galaxy run more smoothly because they have no incentive to do so. The money is in finding ways to blow stuff up and (maybe) surviving being blown up yourself.
Even life-saving software doesn’t seem high on anyone’s lists. On both the Death Star and the Colossus platform in Resistance, people enter areas where trash is disposed—one of them a compactor, the other an incinerator—and find themselves nearly murdered by the apparatuses when they activate. This means that these trash disposers, which have entrance points to permit living beings in and out of them, have no software for the purpose of detecting certain types of life and powering down on detecting that presence. It would seem the most obvious type of software to have in area so casually dangerous…and yet there’s nothing whatsoever. The same goes for the big ol’ door in Jabba’s rancor pit—the idea that Luke Skywalker can just hit the control panel with the rock and a giant metal slab comes right down on the creature’s neck tells you a whole lot about a galaxy where sliding automatic doors are everywhere. This brand of negligence seems intolerable, the sort of oversight that high-powered executives would lose their jobs over, but no one is ever surprised when these things happen.
We know why they’re not surprised. It’s because these things are commonplace. Because you can expect to find hundreds of items to help you kill someone for the price of a couple lunches, but you can’t trust a door not to behead you.
In fiction, we can laugh about these little exploits and call them “adventures,” but in reality the Star Wars universe is a place where the only thought, care, and money available is poured into warfare and death. And it makes the galaxy an unforgiving and perilous place, where many people are struggling to eat, breathe and survive. It may be cool to look at, but it’s not the sort of environment anyone should be striving for—in fact, this lived-in landscape is something that we should be avoiding at all cost. While we may all want our own lightsabers on any given day of the week, Star Wars itself is a cautionary tale.
Emmet Asher-Perrin just wants more droid friends. You can bug him on Twitter, and read more of her work here and elsewhere.
“a galaxy where sliding automatic doors are everywhere.”
Not just sliding doors, but doors that, through a trick of film editing, close incredibly fast. People like to joke about all the railing-less walkways over bottomless pits, but it’s those guillotine-blade doors that worry me. It’s like the people who design structures in this universe are actively trying to murder their users. (Or could it be that droids design the buildings/space stations and this is their passive resistance?)
This is also a universe where (as reading Aftermath: Empire’s End this morning has reminded me) spaceships in battle over planets choose to use repulsors to hover in place rather than simply orbiting, so that when their power is knocked out they immediately fall and crash.
I mean in the old canon, the universe is continuously ravaged by schismatic violence between two religious factions based on ancient disagreement that no one remembers. The last two major escalations in that apparently eternal conflict were: “Slavery is good vs. Slavery is also good, but only in a democracy” and “Power for its own sake vs. Could… you just not?”. It make sense that only military technology survives.
To be honest, we do not know that all the military tech is not also riddled with terrible boneheaded design and construction failures.
In fact, the films suggest that this is very much the case. The original Death Star has an entirely unprotected hole in its surface leading directly to its main reactor. A single shot fired down this hole will destroy the entire structure.
No contemporary combat vehicle has any flaw remotely this stupid. This is like an M1 Abrams tank having a windscreen made of glass.
And then, when, inevitably, this weakness allows the destruction of the station, they incorporate exactly the same weakness into the replacement but make the hole bigger instead of, you know, welding a grate across it.
And this isn’t just a problem with the Death Stars. The X-wing fighter has no radar – if it’s foggy, you have to land blind, and if that means crashing into a swamp, well, that’s tough.
The Star Destroyer has such pathetic main armament that even with several hits it can’t destroy a civilian freighter that is smaller than the stuff that the Star Destroyer chucks away in the garbage. (This, to extend the metaphor, is like the USS MIssouri taking several shots to kill a man in a rubber raft.) It’s so pathetic that it can be within visual range of a fleeing ship for, apparently, days (long enough for members of the ship’s crew to go on pointless interstellar jaunts to casinos) without being able to catch and kill it.
@3 The Death Star II wasn’t finished. Presumably the reactor wouldn’t have been accessible to snubfighters when it was done.
the idea that Luke Skywalker can just hit the control panel with the rock and a giant metal slab comes right down on the creature’s neck tells you a whole lot about a galaxy where sliding automatic doors are everywhere.
I would like to push back on this, because it’s one of the few examples of good safety engineering in the series.
If you’re building a door whose purpose is to confine a large, terrifying predator, you should include things like fail-safe design:
if anything goes wrong with the mechanism, the door should stay closed, or, if open, should close. The last thing you want is a software glitch or power spike causing your door to open when you don’t want it to. (This lesson was ignored, of course, by the designers of Jurassic Park.)
similarly, if the door is closing and something is in the way, the door should continue to close. This is a door whose purpose is to confine a large, terrifying predator. If I am closing it in a hurry, it is because I want that predator to stay confined and not, for example, eat the hapless janitor who has just wandered into the pit. If it works like a lift door in our world and opens again on sensing an obstruction, then the monster will learn this, and the door will no longer be effective. Not to mention that there is a lot of rubbish in that pit (skulls etc) which could impede the closing of a touch-sensitive door. If the door continues to close regardless, then the monster will get out of its way. Or if not then the monster will die, but the alternative is that the janitor dies.
The Death Star II wasn’t finished. Presumably the reactor wouldn’t have been accessible to snubfighters when it was done.
Canonically, it was fully armed and operational. And they didn’t access it through a bit that was still under construction, they went in through a hole in the skin.
This is because Star Wars is for kids (mostly boys) who like to play war. It’s tin soldiers in space. Similar to things like transformers (Cars! which turn into robots!! who fight!!). Or those silly armed dinosaurs. Over the decades and dozens of stories (probably hundreds with the EU included), Star Wars never managed to evolve into a universe that makes sense beyond being a kid’s fantasy. It’s fun though…
I always thought Star Wars was more about the importance of family than of tech, about who you are, where you come from, what your family was. Take a kid with no family, and you get aimless and evil, take a kid with family and give them more family and connections and you’ve got an interesting protagonist. The tech and the droids, and the lasers, are all supplementary to that. They just help frame the importance of family, and the hope which comes with it. The laser swords are important though.
@5 and @6
Poorly working automatic doors exist in our universe too, that is what the massive fine and prosecution by the HSE was about over the filming of TFA. Also, there is a difference between being operational and armed and being finished. A big hole in the skin sounds unfinished to me. Palpatine just prioritised the gun over anything else.
I always assumed Queen Amidala would have been killed in battle or something, but –CHILDBIRTH? Give me a break.
I’m a lifelong, diehard SFF fan who was very young when the Star Wars movies first came out. Even then, barely a teen, I found them entertaining and cool-looking but idiotic. When I revisited A New Hope upon its re-re-release in 1997, twenty years later or so, I found it badly aged (despite the retouched special effects), hopelessly idiotic, and, what’s even worse, boring.
That was my last encounter with a Star Wars film. What little I have seen of the newer ones has not made me want to spend time and money on them.
“a library tower that must be manually accessed by a claw machine, housed on a tape that looks like it would fit happily into a VCR.”
Heh. That’s just an upscaled version of the system that Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure use for “cold” data. It’s on tape, and accessed by an automatic system that pulls the tape from storage and inserts it into the reader. Tape is still the large-capacity backup system of choice.
“Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes rattling down the highway.”
Most technologies in the Star Wars universe that do have some capability of being used in war kinda just suck. Look at the original Death Star, destroyed by a shot to the main reactor. Or the replacement, bigger Death Star, destroyed by a shot to the main reactor. Or the replacement super-duper ultra Death Star, which we know was much better because in the briefing it was displayed as a bigger circle, which, in TFA, was destroyed by shots to the main reactor.
Or the AT-ATs in TESB, designed as armoured attack camels. Would it have killed them to put in a repulsorlift? Or the single bridge on Star Destroyers which can be easily shot off, leaving the entire ship out of control and helpless in ROTJ. And so on….
@3/ajay: “The original Death Star has an entirely unprotected hole in its surface leading directly to its main reactor.”
“Entirely unprotected?” Tell that to the 27 fighter pilots who were shot down trying to reach it.
The galaxy of Star Wars is basically just one giant failed state. Whether ruled by Republic or Empire, the rule of law is largely ignored, bandits and pirates run rampant, slavery is common, and autocrats and warlords thrive. What governments exist are riddled with corruption. It is no wonder that even freighters are heavily armed.
As a backdrop for fictional adventures, it is great. But I wouldn’t want to live there…
Yeah, the claw tape tower was cool. At least the Empire knows not to put the plans on the internet, which is better than a lot of places today.
I want to know if they all use the same bottomless pit contractor, or if they compete for bids.
Makes me wonder what the Mirror Universe Star Wars is like…
@15/Gerry: “Makes me wonder what the Mirror Universe Star Wars is like…”
http://darthsanddroids.net/
In the Church of Star Wars, only the pews matter.
Pew! Pew! Pew-pew!
Padme dead at a medical facility located in an asteroid belt. I’m going with the theory that the droid never had a patient who was giving birth before.
And it might have been closest medical facility available.
The bit that always blew my mind is that civilizations in Star Wars figured out artificial intelligence millennia ago and still suffer through all the struggles that contemporary real-world human civilizations do. Despite hyper-advanced intelligent machines and commonplace access to FTL travel, there’s still the functional equivalent of a galactic third world. How do Tatooine and Jakku suck so much?
I mean, say what you will about AI rights and the morality of building intelligent slave labour, but this is a world that clearly doesn’t care about that, a world where people assemble legions of war droids anytime they want to throw down – what about, I don’t know, anything else? How am I supposed to reconcile universally-distributed intelligent machines with a galaxy that faces all of the social problems we do? How is basically everything not automated? How are there so many crippling resource shortages? Why does anyone feel compelled to fight these endless wars at all? It makes even less sense than f*cking Warhammer.
@18/H8eaven: The most convincing theory I’ve heard is that Palpatine was remotely draining Padme’s life force in order to keep Vader alive. If you assume the juxtaposition of the two scenes is happening in real time, then it’s the only way Palpatine could possibly have known that Padme had died.
#19
Which is why Star Wars is best treated as fantasy and not science fiction. Outwardly, the droids look like real world robots, but for all intents and purposes they’re really funny little beast of burden creatures commenting on the action.
A good rule of thumb: Star Wars is fantasy cake with sci-fi frosting.
Okay, not a good rule. I’m just hungry for cake.
@21/Tyger. Exactly. They tell us right at the start of every movie that it’s a fairy tale — “A long time ago” etc. It was always meant to be space fantasy, a “sword-and-planet” tale like Flash Gordon or John Carter. (It only exists because Dino De Laurentiis said no when George Lucas asked to direct his Flash Gordon movie.)
“No contemporary combat vehicle has any flaw remotely this stupid. This is like an M1 Abrams tank having a windscreen made of glass.”- ajay @3
Not really. The Death Star’s flaw is non-obvious. It is a 2 meter opening on a vessel that can pass for a small moon. It is partially shielded, presumably because full shielding would limit its required function as a thermal exhaust port. The only effective attack to exploit it requires flying along a surface trench in a way that one would never do unless you knew exactly what you were looking for. Even if you do all that, the target needs to be hit with literally supernatural precision to set off the chain reaction.
I can easily see that weakness as being considered an acceptable design compromise because of how unlikely it would be to exploit it. The real problem is Tarkin’s arrogance. He knew the Rebels had access to the Death Star plans and might find something to attack, but he made no contingency plans to find out what the potential weaknesses of the Death Star were and implement effective countermeasures to any attack plan that looked to engage one. He seemed insulted by the idea that he should even have to consider the possibility that his toy could be destroyed. This is all foreshadowed by Vader’s comments in the conference meeting Tarkin called earlier in the movie, so it is a point of the story.
With Death Star II the Emperor gambled on the very incomplete status of the battlestation was enough of a lure to bring the Alliance Fleet out in force to a decisive battle where they could be destroyed in detail by the Imperial Fleet, instead of the Rebels going to ground once Death Star II is fully fitted out. Like Admiral Yamamoto’s similar plan for the Battle of Midway, the opposing force had several things go their way and the plan went pear shaped.
Another fascinatingly insightful view into the Star Wars universe that gets us all thinking and chatting. And you’re right, the Star Wars universe is a great place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there. Maybe a quiet place somewhere on Naboo would be alright, like Padme’s family; that’s about it.
I can easily see that weakness as being considered an acceptable design compromise because of how unlikely it would be to exploit it.
Well, it was exploited to fatal effect on 100% of the Death Stars ever built, so that doesn’t look like a very sensible compromise to make.
(Also, nitpick, but “defeat in detail” means to prevent the enemy concentrating so you can defeat them one small bit at a time – exactly the opposite of what you used it to mean…)
Despite hyper-advanced intelligent machines and commonplace access to FTL travel, there’s still the functional equivalent of a galactic third world. How do Tatooine and Jakku suck so much?
Well, we have commonplace access to fast intercontinental travel, and some fairly sophisticated machines of our own, and yet many places in the world are still really impoverished and dangerous. Probably to do with the local government. Tatooine under a good, accountable, non-corrupt government could be fairly prosperous, but all it’s got are the Hutts. (See also: Venezuela.)
ChristopherLBennett @@@@@ 12
“Entirely unprotected?” Tell that to the 27 fighter pilots who were shot down trying to reach it.
I think ajay’s point was that the port itself was open, without so much as retractable blast door.
If a single proton torpedo making its way to the reactor core causes the whole thing to explode into nothingness — as opposed to, say, just causing a loss of main power — then that probably counts as a design flaw.
Karl Marx IN SPACE @@@@@ 19:
I think the underlying idea is that there are parts of the galaxy that the Republic simply doesn’t control, Tatooine being one of them. Recall that in The Phantom Menace, Watto dismisses Qui-Gon’s money with something like “Republic credits are no good out here. I need something more real.” So Tatooine is certainly outside the Republic’s economic system. Which makes it even more independent, in some respects, than Venezuela, where US dollars and maybe euros would probably be acceptable (even before the current crisis).
Possibly one could argue that by the time of A New Hope, the Empire has been asserting control over previously independent regions, or else it’s just uninterested in local sensibilities. Maybe the Hutts might secretly not like Imperial stormtroopers coming down to Tatooine and wandering around asking questions and killing random farmers, but the Empire doesn’t care.
@26/ajay: “Well, it was exploited to fatal effect on 100% of the Death Stars ever built, so that doesn’t look like a very sensible compromise to make.”
What the hell are you talking about? They didn’t use a thermal exhaust port in ROTJ, they flew right into the big open spaces in the unfinished structure. If you look closely at the opening, it’s surrounded by what appear to be construction scaffolds, so it’s obviously not meant to represent what the finished structure would look like. And it’s obviously a whole lot bigger than 2 meters, so it makes no sense to equate it with the exhaust port from the original.
I think the problem is that people have been making jokes about the exhaust port for four decades and many fans have grown up hearing those jokes and taking them literally, just unthinkingly accepting the premise of the jokes as fact. I think Sabre75 did an excellent job of explaining how staggeringly unlikely it was that anyone could’ve used the exhaust port to destroy the Death Star — and they didn’t even mention all the lives the Rebels had to sacrifice in order to steal the plans and get them to Yavin in the first place so that the flaw could be discovered. The original film did a perfectly adequate job establishing that the weakness in the Death Star was incredibly small and difficult to exploit and that it was a one-in-a-million, Force-assisted lucky break that enabled Luke to succeed where no non-Jedi could have; essentially, it was literally a miracle that it worked. But various wags here and there have thought it was funny to ignore all that and joke about the “huge, obvious” weakness, and those jokes have been percolating around fandom for so long that many fans have lost track of the difference between the jokes and the reality.
@28/PeterErwin: A thermal exhaust vent is basically a chimney. Not a lot of chimneys have blast doors on top. It kind of defeats the purpose. And the vent was surrounded by a trench that was bristling with weapons emplacements. Only two fighters survived to reach it, and the first one missed the shot. Luke would’ve failed too if he hadn’t had both the Force and Han Solo’s unlikely bout of conscience on his side. Like I said, the film quite adequately sold how incredibly unlikely it was. Some fans just want excuses to nitpick. (And even so, Rogue One retconned that Galen Erso put the design flaw in on purpose, so why are people still complaining????????)
Bias: As a franchise, StarWars has had an incredible impact on most of us, from inspirational childhood sagas and life advice ( anger is seductive and destructive ) to resentment for hyper-commercialization or crazed fandom. Hard to analyze objectively given the impact of its 40 year cultural legacy and yet it is an alluring mirror for our politics, tech, and social contexts.
War_as_Nature: While its tempting to decry all the SPAAAAAAACE War stuff as juvenile, it reflects human history and human nature fairly accurately. From current conflicts in Syria or Yemen to economics of military or intel tech, i think the cyclical nature of Star Wars reflects our history fairly well. While there is plenty of good evidence that humankind is ‘playing a bit nicer’ each century, we also get better with our options to destroy ourselves or wreck our planet.
StarWars_is_PostApocalyptic: Consider that earlier StarWars settings had roughly the same technologies, FTL, Droids, computers-with-small-screens/buttons, beeping-Droid-speech (binary). No significant improvements for a 1,000 years? Even our medieval ‘dark ages’ had many tech evolutions. I expect the ‘in-universe’ answers to the lack of major tech/life-style improvements implies a knowledge gap…perhaps the species now just can’t grasp the original tech innovators ( which used to be the ancient and lost Rakatan Empire? if that is still canon? ).
Whether the setting warns us of the dangers of Tech-for-War, Sapience vs Slavery (Droid-Life), or Sharing-Power/Representation-Politics, it seems the core offering of StarWars is morality plays and character uplift…aka “go be a good person”, “beware anger”, “fight injustice”, and “follow your dreams”. Self-Book Advice…wrapped in SPAAAAAAAAAACE!
A thermal exhaust vent is basically a chimney.
You know, a chimney. Like they have on nuclear reactors. (That’s why all submarines have smokestacks.)
@20: Agree that the “Force vampire Palpatine” theory of how Padme really died is the only one that makes the slightest bit of sense. And it’s more strongly implied in the novelization than in the movie, which suggests that it’s more or less canonical, but filmed too ambiguously to have the impact that it should have had.
Besides the absurdity of Padme dying immediately after a medically-assisted childbirth in a society with very high medical tech (because that is the one application that isn’t purely military that doesn’t suck), and @20’s point that Palpatine couldn’t know that Padme was dead before the funeral took place, since she died in a secure location with no sentient witnesses who would be motivated to tell him:
1. Natalie Portman really doesn’t play the scene as “having lost the will to live”, no matter what the med-droid says (remember that Portman would have been filming in greenscreen and may well have been working with a script that hadn’t even added final dialogue for digital characters, so we can’t be certain she even knew the droid’s line at the time of filming). Her facial expressions really say to me “fighting to live but not succeeding”. Which is far more consistent with the character she’s been creating through the films.
2. It’s heavily established in canon and semi-canon that droids exist outside the Force. (Well, I have a strong suspicion that R2-D2 has such a highly evolved selfhood that he does participate in the Force, but that’s currently a fan theory. . .) Therefore, if the real cause of Padme’s death was some Dark Side method of isolating her from the Force against her will, which could absolutely fall under the umbrella of Palpatine’s vague hints at the opera, it would stand to reason that that would read, correctly but uninformatively, on the med-droid’s sensors as “life ebbing away with no biological cause of death”.
3. “Dying of a broken heart” with no biological signs isn’t a thing. Death induced by stress would still be detectable to high-tech medical scanners as a cardiac or immunological problem.
4. The birth isn’t actually traumatic. Presumably what Anakin saw in his dream was a bunch of jump-cuts, likely constructed by Palpatine, between Padme sobbing because of sorrow and/or physical pain due to the perfectly real damage to her throat and windpipe and a screaming newborn. He just assumed that those added up to “traumatic birth experience”, which would make sense in his mental schema (slave women on Tattooine would plausibly give birth unmedicated in a barracks and frequently die), but clearly makes no sense at all in Padme’s. And when we see the birth scene. we’re not watching a woman shriek her way through an unmedicated delivery that is doing the kind of damage that might be fatal. Onscreen it looks a lot more like “woman who most likely has an epidural under the medical-equipment abdomen cover, but is suffering emotional anguish and, perhaps, trying to fight off a threat that is a lot more subtle and less painful than a potentially fatal childbirth”.
That said, all of this is nowhere near as clearly articulated as it needs to be onscreen, such that Padme’s death comes off as lame.
Overall, an insightful article, and one that suggests that the obsession with military tech in Star Wars is a feature, not a bug. To expand a bit on OP’s insightful comment that C-3PO in no way “sucks” technologically, but that he is treated with contempt that makes no sense relative to his practical value:
That’s another place where I’d say “feature, not bug”. We’re getting a very skewed view of technology in Episode IV, particularly because we never see Alderaan. (We never see any high-tech world in peacetime until the prequels.) Logically, since we know it doesn’t produce weapons but Leia shows absolutely no signs of being uncomfortable with high tech, it was a place where nonmilitary applications of technology, such as for art, scholarship, and court life/diplomacy, were still dominant. C-3PO really belongs in that world, and as early as Episode IV there are broad hints in the script that he is way, way out of his element.
Conclusion: C-3PO’s larger narrative purpose, in addition to being funny and relatable, is to hint at what has been lost in terms of peacetime technologies and advanced culture under the Empire. He’s stuck in a civilization that no longer respects his capabilities and therefore treats him with contempt. This reading doesn’t require Lucas to have actually had the prequels totally mapped out in his head; there are notes indicating that, early on (though presumably after casting Anthony Daniels), he was imagining C-3PO as an Alderaanian court droid who has been repurposed. And the whole imagery of “court droid” works beautifully with “fairytale IN SPACE!”
Postscript: All of this makes C-3PO’s cameo in “Ralph Breaks the Internet”, where he IS actually serving as a court droid, that much funnier.
@31 Nuclear reactors are cooled by circulating water, which is rechilled either in large cooling towers, or the heated water is released into a nearby body of water. Nuclear submarines get nice cool sea water to keep things operating well. There are hotter running reactors, that are cooled with nasty stuff that normally isn’t a liquid, but they have proven difficult and dangerous to operate.
What I want to know is, if they are venting hot gasses to cool their power plant, where does the replacement gas come from? Or if that thermal vent is in vacuum, how does it draw heat from the system, when vacuum is an excellent insulator.
@26 ajay – The 1st Death Star was taken out by Tarkin’s hubris and supernatural intervention.
The 2nd Death Star was done in by the Emperor not having a contingency plan for his prime henchmen’s estranged daughter and childhood hobby droid’s ability to form an alliance with the primitive locals who proved surprisingly proficient at guerilla warfare against a technologically superior infantry and armored force and negated his reinforcing the garrison protecting the defense of his most important strategic asset. Also, oddly choosing to conduct a job interview for a new assistant during the decisive fleet to fleet battle with the current holder of the position in the room, thereby having no further influence as the battle evolved.
In both cases the CO on the spot made questionable tactical choices that allowed the enemy to exploit the defensible weaknesses of their largest capital ships. It was avoidable command failure that nixed the Death Stars.
@30/Mahjai: “While its tempting to decry all the SPAAAAAAACE War stuff as juvenile…”
“Juvenile” isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Star Wars was always meant to be juvenile, in the sense that it was meant to be the kind of story that could be enjoyed by children and by adults nostalgic for the cinematic fantasies of their childhoods. I’m always surprised by how many fans want to take it ultra-seriously and act offended at the suggestion that children get to love it too. (But then, I was 8 going on 9 when the first film came out.)
If anything, that was the very quality that made SW so transformative. 1970s SF films tended to be serious, older-skewing, arty, and frequently dystopian or post-apocalyptic — things like Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, Logan’s Run, The Illustrated Man, Rollerball, Silent Running, Fahrenheit 451, and so on. Then Star Wars came along and was unapologetically a light, fun, action-packed adventure that didn’t take itself seriously, a throwback to the more innocent cinematic sci-fi of the ’30s through the ’50s, combining cutting-edge filmmaking technology with the sensibilities of a simpler time. At the time of its release, film critics scoffed at it for its “juvenile” approach, dismissing it as mindless fluff. But it was a huge hit with all ages, so it transformed the entire genre and became the template for the majority of subsequent sci-fi cinema rather than the exception.
@75 Three out of three Death Stars were destroyed by forces millions, if not trillions, of times smaller, weaker and cheaper, all attacking the power source in some manner. That suggests a fairly serious common design flaw. Scaling it down to the affairs of one planet, it is as if you could reliably destroy nuclear power stations by attacking the cooling towers with a firecracker attached to a paper airplane.
Every single Death Star was destroyed by comparatively trivial forces within days or hours of its first use. We saw the planning and analysis that went into the attack on the last one, and it did not last sixty seconds.
Then there was the destruction of the Executor by a handful of fighters in ROTJ, and the destruction of that bombardment ship and Snokes flagship in TLJ, all by comparatively negligible forces.
And have we ever seen a Stormtroopers armour protect him against anything at all?
So the Empires hardware would seem to be seriously deficient.
@33 — Based on everything else we know about space in Star Wars, I assume that the Death Star was exhausting either phlogiston or luminiferous ether out of the exhaust port.
@33 Maybe a huge part of the Death Star’s bulk is taken up with holding tanks for the coolant gas and every couple of months they have to refuel. The Empire is nothing if not wasteful, that has been hammered home in canon enough.
@37 and 38 Both of your theories fit the Star Wars universe very well! :-)
@36/ad: “Three out of three Death Stars were destroyed by forces millions, if not trillions, of times smaller, weaker and cheaper, all attacking the power source in some manner. That suggests a fairly serious common design flaw.”
What it suggests is that these are heroic fantasy stories, and such fantasies demand the triumph of a small force of underdogs against overwhelming odds. It’s the triumph of the individual spirit against the oppressive state, of David against Goliath. The villains have seemingly unbeatable power, but the heroes are persistent and clever enough, and blessed enough by fate, to find and exploit the villains’ one tiny weakness and achieve the impossible.
And the reason they attack the power source every time is because audiences like to see things explode. Although it does make sense in-story — nothing is going to be powerful enough to destroy these ultimate weapons except themselves. And I don’t think you can attribute it to a common design flaw, because each explosion is triggered in a different way. The first (retroactively) was taking advantage of a design flaw Galen Erso put in on purpose to start a chain reaction; the second was due to a direct, brute-force physical attack on the core; and the third was achieved by taking out a regulating system and letting the weapon’s own power run out of control.
“And have we ever seen a Stormtroopers armour protect him against anything at all?”
Yes — audience identification. ;) It keeps them faceless so we don’t feel moral qualms about the heroes killing them in huge numbers.
“And have we ever seen a Stormtroopers armour protect him against anything at all?”
Well, if you consider that Stormtrooper armour was designed originally for Clones it’s whole purpose appears to be, minor protection so a soldier can stick his head through a door without getting it vaporised by a blaster bolt while not actually keeping him alive. The Non-Clone troopers I always saw as being more similar to Soldiers of the First World War with a highly developed sense of only caring for themselves. The First Order seem to be brainwashed and conditioned into an almost suicidal state of devotion in which wearing inadequate armour and running headlong into a gunfire is perfectly acceptable.
@41 — Something I’ve been toying with: When Ben Kenobi tells Luke (when they find the shot-up sandcrawler) that only Imperial Stormtroopers are that precise, maybe he’s thinking back to the Clone Wars and the early days of the Empire when the Stormtroopers were still mostly clones and could still occasionally hit the broad side of a barn?
@42: That works well as a retcon (though it’s totally a retcon, as is basically any interpretation of all of Obi-Wan’s Episode IV lines since Alec Guinness neither knew nor cared about the backstory!)
The explanation of Stormtrooper Aim that I prefer (I believe this was a Tor post originally, but I’m not sure of the author), though it’s also a retcon but at least it’s an intentional retcon, is that the scene in Rogue One where Chirrut walks through blaster fire without getting shot until he throws the switch, but is then immediately shot, implicitly shows that the sentient Force can deflect blaster bolts from a person if that person has a cosmic purpose.
Definitely helps with the truly appalling aim in the “unextended bridge” fight in Episode IV, for example. Also makes the Force a frighteningly unfeeling jerk in regards to individuals!
Our heroes don’t get shot by Storm Troopers on the Death Star because Tarkin wants them to escape, and thereby lead him to the real Rebel base.
Never heard the theory about the Force deflecting bolts until the characters story purpose is complete. Does this mean that the Force is actually the screenwriter of the film, because I’m pretty sure Ki adi Mundi could have used some of that force deflection stuff.
Also, obviously talking up the ability of Stormtroopers is a necessary device to make our characters peril seem more real, of course, we don’t actually want them to kill our characters because that would be silly. See also Obi Wan not blowing up the Death Star Reactor instead of just turning off the tractor beam (and yes, I know, Obi Wan wouldn’t have blown up the Death Star because he’s a Jedi) because then we wouldn’t have this really cool fighter battle that had never been done before.
@45/supermanmoustache: Umm… How exactly do you propose that Obi-Wan could’ve blown up the reactor from a tractor beam control station? The movie explicitly said that the only way to blow up the reactor was literally to detonate a torpedo inside it. Even if there were a built-in way to self-destruct, presumably it would require command-level authorization and the controls for it would be in the most secure area, not just randomly added to some peripheral system.
@46 Because like…The Force.
(Cue Han solo “That’s not how the Force works!” GIF)
OK, if you want me to be serious, I only say how Obi Wan doesn’t blow up the Death Star because I had an argument with someone once who said that Obi Wan should have just wiped out everyone because he was on a sacrifice/suicide mission anyway. The whole point being, I’m saying he shouldn’t because then we wouldn’t have the Battle of Yavin 4.
@43 We know the force, or at least the dark side of it, can halt blaster bolts either in mid air (TFA) or bounce it off someone’s hand (TESB), but with Chirrut I got the impression it wasn’t manipulating the blasters but the aim of those doing the shooting and Chirrut was just relying on the force to guide him into the gaps.
@49/random22: I think it was more that Chirrut just relied on the Force to give him an intuitive knowledge of the safe path to take through the fire. Or maybe he was just trusting in fate and the universe needing him to succeed. The Force is the life energy that binds all living things, so being “one with the Force” means being part of the unified whole of all life in the galaxy. Like the Hindu/Buddhist belief that the separation between self and other is an illusion and we’re all part of a single unified whole. So Chirrut didn’t see himself as a separate entity from the troopers and their blaster bolts; all of it was part of a single living process within the Force. So he had no fear for his own life. If he was destined to make it, then he would make it.
I agree with @49 and @50 on how Chirrut perceives the situation and how his spiritual practice shapes his choices. But the question remains: why was the Force such a jerk that Chirrut was shot moments after throwing the switch?
Either the Force is a really mean tearjerking screenwriter (lol @45), or, darker version, it’s a seriously harsh, utilitarian semi-sentient pantheist entity that manipulates individuals for a much larger plan that many of them won’t benefit from. Possibly even up to and including leaving Ki-Adi-Mundi and many other Jedi completely open to Order 66 and facilitating the rise of the Empire for the purpose of re-ordering the galaxy. . .eventually.
Harsh, Force. Real harsh.
If the Jedi are right, there is no reason for the Force to concern itself with whether or not people die.
It keeps them faceless so we don’t feel moral qualms about the heroes killing them in huge numbers.
I am very fond of the fan theory that this is why Stormtroopers are such terrible shots.
They’re humans, and we know from studies like SLA Marshall “Men Against Fire” that most humans have great instinctive difficulty in pointing a weapon at another human and pulling the trigger. Most soldiers in combat in WW2 did not shoot to kill. They fired unaimed shots, or fired to suppress rather than to kill, or deliberately aimed to miss. It’s well known that firing squad victims were blindfolded not for their own sake but for the sake of the members of the firing squad.
The Stormtroopers are shooting at (generally) other humans with their faces clearly visible; therefore they generally shoot wide*. The heroes, on the other hand, have no such problems; they’re shooting at faceless, inhuman robot-like targets. They have no more problems aiming to kill than you or I would have in shooting at the centre of a paper target. No qualms of conscience make Han Solo’s gun hand waver. He shoots to kill without a second thought.
*Note the exception: poor old R2-D2. Clearly an unarmed non-combatant, he nevertheless is shot and seriously damaged twice. Because he doesn’t have a face.
Note that neither the Jawas nor the Sand People have visible faces, due to, respectively, deep hoods and goggled masks. The Stormtroopers would have no qualms shooting them either. Obiwan is therefore right to expect the dead Jawas to have been shot accurately and precisely.
@51/mutant…: As I said, the Force is the combined essence of all life, not some Abrahamic deity micromanaging the fall of every leaf. Basically, individual choice does enter into it; the Force doesn’t control what people do, it just allows Force-sensitives to be aware of what the life around them is doing (while Force-users can wield it to affect physical matter or other minds — again, people themselves choosing to do it rather than the Force making them do things). There were a gazillion Stormtroopers choosing to fire at Chirrut. As long as he chose to put himself in that line of fire rather than running away, he was pretty much bound to get hit eventually. He knew that, and he chose to go anyway, because his survival wasn’t important to him as long as he lasted long enough to flip the switch. And his trust in the Force presumably allowed him to intuitively know the right path to take to achieve that goal.
@53/ajay: I’m aware of that idea, but my understanding is that it’s mainly the draftees, the ordinary citizens forced to go to war, who were reluctant to shoot to kill. Career soldiers who are extensively trained in the art of killing have fewer qualms about doing it. And Stormtroopers (at least in the First Order) are trained from childhood to be obedient, ruthless killing machines. So I’m not sure the idea really works for them.
my understanding is that it’s mainly the draftees, the ordinary citizens forced to go to war, who were reluctant to shoot to kill. Career soldiers who are extensively trained in the art of killing have fewer qualms about doing it.
Not according to Dave Grossman – it’s because training in WW2 was much less realistic. Deliberate shooting at static bull targets, for example. When they switched to instinctive shooting at silhouette targets, that was much more effective at preparing people to shoot to kill. We can conclude that the Stormtroopers don’t shoot at figure 11 targets in training…
I forget who said it, but if you want a deity (or a Force, I suppose) that is all-knowing, all-powerful, and benevolent, you can only choose two out of three.
@Emily: Well, it is called Star WARS, not Star FRIENDS.
@57/Alan: Again, though, where in Star Wars is the Force ever portrayed as a deity? It’s more of a non-personified cosmic essence of the sort you find in nontheistic Eastern religions, fused with the sci-fi trope of psionic energy. It’s called the Force because it’s a fundamental universal interaction like the electromagnetic or gravitational force, an energy field naturally generated by all living things and binding them together.
ajay @@@@@ 53:
It might be worth mentioning that Marshall’s work has become rather controversial, with a number of military historians and analysts arguing that it’s unlikely he did the sort of systematic data collection and statistical analysis he claimed, and that his results don’t agree with studies done for other militaries (e.g., British and Canadian) during WW2.
There are some links at the top of this Reddit discussion. Also worth reading is this article by the military historian Robert Engen (author of a book on Canadian infantry effectiveness in WW2), who makes two arguments: 1. Even if we accept Marshall’s figures, his interpretation (inherent “resistance to killing”) is questionable, because there are numerous possible explanations for low rates of fire, including deliberate military practice (“fire discipline”); 2. There is good evidence for doubting that Marshall was at all systematic in his questioning or his analysis, or that he interviewed nearly as many soldiers as he claimed; furthermore, his results conflict with other analyses by American, British, and Canadian studies during the war. (One of the most common complaints of officers in after-action reports was about their men firing too early and too often, almost never about them not firing when they should.)
@Alan Brown not true. God is indeed all three of those.
id love to have seen more Legends stuff in this article…there’s a whole lot that could be discussed. Like the theories of what the Death Star could have done against the Yuuzhan Vong if the Empire had still been there. It definitely is interesting having a race with living technology that was all about war without the typical high tech stuff.
Also a lot was better before the imperial days. Things got more run down over time.
Quote: There’s also the issue of the Death Star’s “stolen data tapes” (tapes, for Life Day’s sake), the plans that are so key to the Rebellion’s success. Which are somehow being kept at a facility where important Imperial schematics and documents are on record in a library tower that must be manually accessed by a claw machine, housed on a tape that looks like it would fit happily into a VCR.
Anybody who worked in a TV station in the past couple of decades recognized this as the automated cart machine rendered obsolete by digital storage.
Star Wars has always been about a specific family. Which is why Disney has ruined it. I do not think they understood that.
@55: I’m absolutely not conceiving of the Force as a monotheistic deity. That’s clearly wrong. I’m conceiving it as a pantheist entity (real world analogues would include Atman/Brahman and Stoic Zeus–the latter is a pantheist entity despite the name) exactly as you describe, but one that does also have attributes that can be called “will” or “the Living Force”. So @57’s point still stands: if the Force is a pantheistic entity that also has “will” and can “be disturbed” or “awaken”, then it could have larger purposes, but would be questionably benevolent towards individuals.
@62: I’m actually totally fine with the tapes. Much more secure than digital storage given the level of hacking that exists in-universe. Real world covert operations still sometimes use paper!
@61 I’m pretty sure that there are articles about what a Star Destroyer could do against a Yuuzhan Vong planet moon ship (whatever they were-it’s been about 10 years since I read the NJO so I’m a tad hazy). Organic technology against machine technology is a good idea though, if only someone used it in a book or something.
@62 What? The Death Star using tapes? It’s almost like they didn’t have digital storage in 1977 or something!
Seriously, though this is more a matter of a studio being damned either way, if they change the equipment so it’s digital then it doesn’t fit with the movie this film is supposed to be before, if they change the original movie so the technology is more advanced then people will moan about them destroying the original again.
Way I see it, the only way the Rebellion got the tapes was by sacrificing about 30 troops in a suicide mission, who transmitted the equipment into orbit to a rebel fleet that was easily defeated and nearly destroyed, with the only surviving ships being a couple of X-Wings and the Organa ship that was hunted down. If it was digital they could have just dropped into orbit and had R2 wi-fi the plans (again-doesn’t match up to the original).
@63 I’m pretty sure everyone realises that Disney were/are only interested in Star Wars as a brand. The continuing the Skywalker Saga being a sort of fan service of a kind to the people who really wanted Star Wars to be 9 movies. I always felt that they should have just left the original saga well enough alone and started something new and original but the chances of the whole franchise failing on the first movie does not a sensible business move make when you have a story that people are guaranteed to want to see (if only for the first movie at least).
@64 @64
As I pointed out in @10 above, cloud services still use cart systems. Tapes for cold data, hard drives for warmish data, but plugged in as needed.
@61 – MN: The YV were even worse, as all of their society, despite not using inorganic technology, was geared towards war.
@63 – Wellofworlds: Sure, Disney ruined it, that’s why there are so many fans who are still enjoying it immensely. (And psst, many EU books and comics were not about the Skywalkers.)
@65 – supermanmoustache: Even if the plans were strictly digital, if they’re stored in a closed system, there’s no hacking from orbit.
One of those fast closing doors would have probably kept the first death star from being blown up… just saying.
@64/mutant…: “A disturbance in the Force” doesn’t suggest that the Force is some person who’s feeling upset or bothered by something; it’s more like how throwing a rock into a pond will create a disturbance that propagates through its surface and can be detected elsewhere. “I feel a great disturbance in the Force” means “I am remotely detecting a significant event through the disruption it creates in the medium of the Force.” Again, the whole reason it’s called “the Force” is because that’s what it’s supposed to be — a force of nature.
And The Force Awakens was probably more of a metaphor. You can say that a dormant volcano has awakened; that doesn’t mean it’s actually a sentient being. Plus it’s pretty ambiguous what the title even meant.
As for “the Living Force,” it’s called that because it’s the Force generated by and shared among all living things — it’s an emergent property of the life in the galaxy, not something with its own independent life. It’s as distinct from the Cosmic Force, the more fundamental energy field that the energy generated by living things feeds into. Living minds dissolve into the Cosmic Force when they die, and the modern canon (specifically the Yoda arc at the end of The Clone Wars) is surprisingly blunt about the lack of an afterlife, the inability of the dead to retain independent existence or consciousness within the Cosmic Force unless they have the specific Jedi training to maintain themselves as Force ghosts. Which argues pretty strongly against the idea that the Force has any sentience to it as we define it. If it has a “will,” I doubt it’s one based in conscious thought and decision, more just the natural flow of events and the destiny of the universe.
(Which is pretty dark when you think about it — a franchise defined by war and death coming right out and blatantly saying there’s no hope of life after death.)
As for Disney’s impact on the franchise, I’m far more of a Star Wars fan now than I ever was when Lucas was in charge. I’ve never been a fan of Disney’s corporate rapaciousness and their growing monopoly on entertainment, and I wasn’t really a fan of most of their work growing up, but I must grudgingly admit that the stuff they’ve put out in the past dozen or so years has tended to be surprisingly good. And the current generation of Star Wars creators in both film and television is largely surpassing what came before.
Maybe the point of no afterlife is saying that we have to make sure we make life better for all.
No, Star Wars is at it’s root, George Lucas’ spin on The Rev. Dr. Joseph Campbell’s Book:Hero with a Thousand Faces. Even Lucas and Dr. Campbell got tired of all the second guessing and reading other things into it.
I think that maybe “debate what the Force is” is ceasing to be an interesting question, because the only reliable meta-answer is “It really depends on exactly who is writing any given part of the story including canonical novels”. There’s SO much variation in how the Force is handled.
While I agree with @71 that the influence of the monomyth is absolutely central to at least Star Wars as conceived by George Lucas (and again, I think this is an inherently tough conversation because it’s not clear whether any given person is going with “Word of George”, “Massive Theater Fantasy With Many Authors”, or any of the places in between), I wouldn’t trace Lucas’ understanding of the monomyth just to Campbell. The recent excellent biography of Lucas states clearly that Lucas read Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (a predecessor to Campbell, less eloquent but, IMHO, much more scholarly and better supported by evidence) before reading Hero With a Thousand Faces. So I think Frazer should share significant credit as background inspiration. Lucas also, in that book, reports having an intense religious experience as a teenager that exerted a great formative influence on his art, though he is private on the nature of the experience.
@72/mutant…: Well, I’m just going by how I’ve seen the Force portrayed in the movies, the shows, and the limited number of canon novels/comics I’ve read, and I can’t recall anything that painted it as a sentient deity or that contradicted the original idea that it was the spiritual energy that bound all life together.
The “tapes” you talk about are because the first movie was made in 1977 when VCR tapes wasnew technology. What do you expect them to put them on, the Imperial Cloud Drive? Sometimes I think some people think Star Wars is real.
@73: I think the reason we’re talking past each other is that you’re conceiving of “sentient deity” and “spiritual energy binding all life” as mutually contradictory. Which they are in English–“deity” in particular makes us think of a monotheist being even if we try really hard not to (comparative religion classes often avoid using English words and teach the class a few target-culture words instead for this reason).
So, stepping away from “Lucas’ intent” for a sec just to what I’m trying to say:
It’s not inherently contradictory to both be a pantheist (i.e. someone who believes that the ultimate reality is a spiritual energy in all things, like the Force) and to think that that entity might incorporate fate/a grand cosmic plan/some degree of personhood and will. Those are complicated, debatable questions within real-world pantheist belief systems.
I have absolutely no idea what George Lucas thinks about a complicated question like that, or whether and how it might tie into any personal spirituality he has. But it’s not a hopeless contradiction.
@73: I think the reason we’re talking past each other is that you’re conceiving of “sentient deity” and “spiritual energy binding all life” as mutually contradictory. Which they are in English–“deity” in particular makes us think of a monotheist being even if we try really hard not to (comparative religion classes often avoid using English words and teach the class a few target-culture words instead for this reason).
So, stepping away from “Lucas’ intent” for a sec just to what I’m trying to say:
It’s not inherently contradictory to both be a pantheist (i.e. someone who believes that the ultimate reality is a spiritual energy in all things, like the Force) and to think that that entity might incorporate fate/a grand cosmic plan/some degree of personhood and will. Those are complicated, debatable questions within real-world pantheist belief systems.
I have absolutely no idea what George Lucas thinks about a complicated question like that, or whether and how it might tie into any personal spirituality he has. But it’s not a hopeless contradiction.
@74/lonewriter: “The “tapes” you talk about are because the first movie was made in 1977 when VCR tapes wasnew technology.”
Or rather, because it was made in 1977 when computer data had been routinely stored on magnetic tape for the past quarter-century. Recall that Star Trek in the 1960s had also referred to data tapes. We are talking about the Death Star plans here, not Gormaanda’s cooking holovids.
@76/mutant…: General argument and specific argument are two different things. Yes, of course in general it’s possible to speak of those two as the same thing, but I’m not talking about general theology, I’m talking about the Star Wars franchise and how it portrays the Force. Naturally any given work of speculative fiction is going to invent its own set of rules, so it’s invalid to try to apply a set of rules from somewhere else. The Force is a thing that only exists within Star Wars, so only evidence from Star Wars is relevant to a discussion of its portrayal within Star Wars.
Re: Tapes.
Is it not possible that “tapes” is a generic term for data storage, in much the same way that we still “dial” a phone, although maybe half the people with phones today have ever seen a phone with an actual dial.
Also, someone keeps using the word digital as if it is the opposite of tapes. Even in the 70s, digital data was stored on tapes. Not at the consumer level (unless you count the few PCs in the late 70s that could store to cassettes) but the big iron definitely stored digital data on tapes.
So it may have been tape, but it was almost certainly digital, just not random access, if it was actually tape. And tape may just have been a generic term for digital storage media.
I like the generic term idea the best, because there is nothing you can update “tape” to what won’t eventually be outpaced by time. I guess they could have chosen a more generic term such as “cartridge”.
@78. I also prefer to consider “tape” as a generic term, even though I think CLB’s reasoning is correct. People today record video with their cell phone and refer to it as “filming”.
@29 A thermal exhaust vent is basically a chimney.
But even fireplace chimneys nowadays have spark arrestors to reduce wild fires. Sometimes those are more then a simple cap; I have seen multi-tube, inverted Y-shaped, contraptions that have do not have a line-of-site path back in.
I’ll go through and read the comments later, but this did bring a smile to my face (especially the jab at the lack of women’s healthcare. That said I’ve always been of the mind that Sidious secretly killed her as part of his ressurection of Vader. There’s a Robot Chicken skit that parodies her dying of a ‘broken heart’ with Dr. Ball, who resents being used as a torture droid. I mean, obviously it’s all symbolic and operatic and what not, but it does raise interesting questions…).
But as much as I love Star Wars I’ve often thought I really don’t want to live in its galaxy, given that any crack pot Sith lord or warlord could come and blow up my planet, star system, or what have you with no warning.
I’m not even sure George Lucas would disagree with you, honestly – we’re obviously not supposed to see the Empire (or ostensibly what led up to it) as a good thing, or a good use of resources.
I do want to say, that regarding data tapes – I work in IT for health care systems, which have a massive amount of data. I have, on one occasion, needed to have tapes pulled. It’s still what is used for long, long term storage when journal files (stored on the servers, but which only hold a week or so of data) are archived.
And I wouldn’t really expect Jabba’s palace to comply with OSHA ;)
Regarding the Death Star – remember also that it was specifically engineered as sabotage by Galen Erso (not to mention the things that others have brought up about it not actually being that easy at all). As for the Death Star II, it literally wasn’t finished yet and was intended to be the bait for a trap. Palpatine underestimated the native Ewoks and figured the shield wouldn’t go down.
@32 – I love your breakdown of the Sidious theory :)
Aw man, I missed a discussion about the Force/sentience, etc?
In some ways I don’t find this too dissimilar to the discussions on ‘the problem of pain’ or theodiocy – even though I also disagree with attempts to paint the Force as some kind of personified diety – while I believe in the Abrahamic God, I don’t believe he necessarily micromanages everything either. If the Force DOES have any kind of sentience or will inherent to itself (and I’m not sure if it does. Maybe it can pick up on influences from others though? Or maybe it just tends towards balance/unity or equilibirium, in a natural way. I don’t know.) I think it’s reasonable to think that it would be playing a very, very long/large game and so thus seem unfeeling when considering any particular individual. But I’m also not so sure the Force has any particular sentience or morality -ie, is the will of the Force something inherently ‘good’ (as we know it)? I don’t know.
Then again, there does seem to be a distinctive Dark Side that can be sensed as something unique, can cloud vision, and cause addiction/corruption and amplify qualities like greed, aggression, fear, paranoia, the need to control. And despite what various ‘Grey Jedi’ advocates may say, I don’t think it’s ever advisable to tap into it. But perhaps that’s just some manifestation of negative energy/emotions, etc, and not an inherently evil (which requires sentience, in my opinion) force.
@77We are talking about the Death Star plans here, not Gormaanda’s cooking holovids. – this is my favorite comment in the whole thread. LOL.
@81 – Lisamarie: I love Dr. Ball, MD. “I SAID, GOOD DAY SIR!”.
Spoiler Alert for Wheel of Time!
The bit about the doors makes me think of the “death gates” from Wheel of Time, which are basically inter-dimensional doorways for traveling places…that spin rapidly while opening and closing rapidly…making them insane spinning guillotines of death! Add to that how a character who is trapped uses his ability to easily and rapidly open gateway to open one in front of him and another behind his assailant just as they try to blast him to oblivion with magic…yeah doors are dangerous!!!
If Galen set a trap for the Imperials why didn’t he just wisper to the spy he was working with “Its at the end of the trench in the exhaust port about two metres wide”
Like if he was like what they say, he would also covertly design the reactor to secretly have a bomb inside increasing his odds.
Military dictatorships, whether they call themselves an empire, a socialist republic, a monarchy, or anything else (“government of national unity” and “temporary measure” seem popular), generally don’t give a crap about non-military technology unless it’s viewed as a threat to their power. Since things like industrial safety standards are viewed as a threat to the elites’ convenience, they will simply not exist: the masses are only a threat, and treatment of them like they count implies they have importance beyond their immediate economic value.
The Empire was a military dictatorship; in those, if you’re not in the ruling clique, you’re either obedient and expendable or a traitor to be killed. The poverty of places like Tattoine was a feature, not a bug
@85/Josh Pine: The trap Galen Erso built in wasn’t the exhaust port itself. The trap was a vulnerability in the reactor so that, to quote Galen’s own words, “any pressurized explosion to the reactor module will set off a chain reaction that will destroy the entire station.” Presumably the reason the other designers weren’t worried about the exhaust port (aside from the fact that it was very well-protected by all those gun turrets and trenches and fighters so that the Rebels had to sacrifice dozens of ships and pilots to get even two shots at it) was because under normal circumstances, there’s no way a single torpedo getting through would’ve been enough to destroy the entire reactor.
So Galen essentially did “covertly design the reactor to secretly have a bomb inside.” He made the whole reactor a bomb that would be triggered by a smaller detonation (like how a block of C-4 is set off by a blasting cap).