EPISODE 237: STAR WARS FOR YOUR BIRTHDAY

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

In my training as a Jesuit, there was a priest I once lived with who was much beloved by everyone who worked with him. A talented, generous guy, very supportive and encouraging.

But he had this thing -- he would hug too long. That probably doesn’t makes any sense, does it? It didn’t really to me, either. It was just a little thing, and it wasn’t like he was hanging on for minutes or putting his head on your shoulder.

There was just something about the quality of the interaction, the touch. Like you were involved in some sort of unusual energy transfer. It felt...off.

It turns out it was kind of an inside “joke” among the young Jesuits who knew him. Everyone had been through it. “Oh yeah, that guy. The hugs, right?”

It was odd, but it was something that you just dealt with, part of the landscape, not a big deal. You learned to roll our eyes when it happened and move on. He was a really good priest with an idiosyncrasy.

Then about ten years later he had charges pressed against him by a non-Jesuit he had interacted with years before we knew him. The victim had already been an adult at the time of the incidents, but only just. There were definite boundary violations.

And when the story came out, one of the comments from the victim was about how this priest had a strange way of hugging.

It was like a dam opened inside me. All of a sudden I was so angry both with him and with myself for having accepted that behavior as normal. What was wrong with me that I would have ever allowed that? And what were the consequences of my toleration for others? Who else had endured creepy moments like this or worse because neither I nor any of my fellow Jesuits stood up and said, there’s something not quite right here?

With time I began to realize there had been more to it all than just the hugging, too, that there were other moments and patterns that over the years I had come to turn a blind eye to or subconsciously blame on myself.

This guy did a lot of great work as a priest. He was very kind to me. Honestly, I don’t know how much I think he was even aware of the little incremental grooming moves he was making. He never seemed conscious of it all, which is part of the reason why all of us just sort of came to roll our eyes. “That’s just him,” we told one another.

Even as I write this, I think of it as ridiculous, both given how minor those issues were, and the stories that keep coming out about women being harassed and violated by men. I am dumbfounded by what I’ve heard this week, and what we keep hearing again and again. Dumbfounded and devastated.

But no matter how many times I tell myself to get over myself, when I think of that guy I still get so angry.

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I feel like we should all own print calendars right now – ‘member those? And at the end of each day we should make a point of drawing a slash through the box on the calendar as a little statement of defiance. You did not defeat me, reality. I got through it. See you tomorrow.

I’ve spent the week somewhere between gelatinous cube of hysteria, jiggling all over the place, and gelatinous cube in the sun, melting (also all over the place). Since last January I’ve been kind of chasing what I think is kind of a big story for America. It’s had a lot of twists and turns, which hopefully at some point I can talk about, because wow.

But finally in the last month it kind of all came together. I spent the last ten days trying to do the weaving. I think it’s good; I hope it’s good! The people I interviewed for it were definitely amazing, and I really can’t wait for readers to meet them (and frankly be changed by them).

In the meantime my folks visited for the weekend. We had a great time. And I learned something – if you want to make guests happy

A) Make sure there are cookies from the Brown Butter Cookie Company in their room. (They are AMAZING.)

B) That first night, go out for Mexican food. I don’t know what it is, but I don’t think I’ve ever had or seen anyone have a bad time when they’re out for Mexican food. (Is it just me?)

We went to Universal Studios, too. They wanted to do the tour (it was actually a lot better than I remember it), I wanted them to experience Harry Potterland. Which, I don’t know...when I was a kid I once bought my dad a Star Wars novel for his birthday. (It was this one, I think. A great read.)

My mom was very unhappy with that choice. That book was what I wanted. My dad was not into Star Wars AT ALL.

My parents said they really liked Harry Potterland, loved the 3D ride -- and I think they actually did. But we also waited two hours in the sun to get on it. And my folks don’t know anything about Harry Potter – a fact I had conveniently not noticed ahead of time.

So I don’t know... we had a good time, but I do think it was all a little bit Star Wars for your birthday.

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It was a pretty great week for scifi lovers. Blade Runner: 2049, more Star Trek: Discovery (including just the coolest new kind of warp), the first full The Last Jedi trailer and the last Justice League trailer.

The JL trailer is super interesting. Man of Steel and Batman vs. Superman were both demolished by critics and fans for being so dark. And rightly so; Zack Snyder has a fantastic visual sense, but his vision again and again contains massive sequences of nihilistic apocalypse. Watching one of his movies is like watching someone court Death. It's just kind of sick and wrong.

Also, a very weird choice for a comic book universe built around Superman. Superman is kind of comic books' answer to the Doctor from Doctor Who: he's the guy who no matter what happens is able to see that there's more to humanity than our worst behavior, and in always digging deep, never giving up, helping us to realize the same.

And paradoxically what allows him that perspective is the fact that he's not like us, that he's an alien.

Snyder has no place for that kind of hope, so Superman ends up mopey and misanthropic and kind of hateful.

Supposedly Warner Brothers has finally gotten the note that we don't want more apocalypse porn. And you see that in this trailer. It begins with a "What is going on here, am I watching the right trailer?" prelude of Superman and Lois Lane. And then we find out ah, that's all about setting up the problem of the movie -- the world no longer has any hope. So right from the gate that's what this movie is about -- hope.

The song that runs beneath the trailer is a cover of David Bowie's "Heroes". And it's right on the same point. "We can be heroes." And its vibe is pining -- it's like a single candle facing heavy winds, but it just won't go out.

Honestly, I think we're still in for quite a high degree of nightmare. Almost everything in that trailer seems to be taking place in a hellscape of some kind. But even so, it's nice to see the adjustments being made.

(Also, Aquaman shouting “My Man” and seeming to have a good time was just fantastic. I'l be stunned if he's not the breakout character.)

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And then there's Jedi...

I liked it. It was a little more straightforward than other Star Wars trailers, I'd say. But sure. Okay. I'm never going to complain about seeing Kylo, Luke and Rey.

Every trailer is a story, right? And like most movie-stories, a trailer usually has three acts:

• Act I: Establish the main character, their main conflict/want, their journey.

• Act II : Follow them on the ups and downs of the journey, and watch it end in seeming disaster.

• Act III: Big Finish, in which they resolve their conflict/want in either success or failure, usually amidst some sort of crazy awful challenge.

Jedi follows that pattern pretty closely. We start with a kind of preamble teaser, a series of mysterious, unexplained shots -- which is a classic modern Star Wars trailer move – while the Snoke dude (who I continue to misname as Snape, and you know, at some point that’s your fault, Star Wars, not mine) talking about the power he saw in someone. It’s short and sets up the trailer as Kylo’s journey.

But then we go silent and black and cut not to Darth Boy Kylo but Rey lighting up her saber, the sound of it cutting through the silence in a really rich way. (That’s actually maybe my favorite moment of the whole trailer. Something about the saturation of the image and the sound. Strange and cool. More of that, please.)

And we’re off into Johnny Williams doing a “prep for war” vibe while we watch (and hear) our girl Rey train. We get her want – to deal with this thing that’s been inside her all this time (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, she and a lot of people had their minds wiped when she was a kid, she’s totally a Solo), we get her problem: Luke sees Rey’s power, it’s dangerous, and he is not having it. Act I.

Act II, we jump to Kylo talking about putting his past aside (oh, Kylo...), the song still ongoing but bigger now--war is very close. And we get Kylo’s big question of the film: Do I kill my mom or not? Aka Am I all in?

Han’s never mentioned, but for me he’s all over Kylo's issue here. Killing your dad never solves anything. Hence the need to up the ante and kill an American treasure.

DON’T YOU DO IT, STAR WARS. WE’VE BEEN THROUGH ENOUGH.

And while we're talking:

It’s unusual that the trailer would turn to Kylo on his own like this in Act II; it makes him seem like the lead, when Act I already suggested Rey was. It could be this is a “two-hander”, as they call it in Hollywood when a show or film has two leads with equally significant journeys. (Love that term.) But given where the trailer ends, I think it really is still Rey's story first.

Anyway, then we get Act III: crazy battle scenes, full on music, cuts to different characters – starting with Chewie and these plushy penguin things that everyone seems crazy about even though why is that because this is the first we’re even seeing them perform other than in toy stores and do you not remember what the Ewoks did to us, people?

​Can you hear the Porg, Clarice? Can you hear them screaming?

(I actually ran across this old thread about why Ewoks are the best thing about Star Wars. Please read it, and in public spaces, so that I will not be alone in having embarrassed myself.

A favorite from it:

Tell me this doesn't make the ending to Return of the Jedi amazing.)

We get the guy in the X-Wing whose name I can’t remember because he's not a character as much as he is a famous person who got to be in Star Wars; Finn fighting Phasma – how does Finn not rate more screen time than Rogue Pretty?, he was a co-lead in TFA; BB-8.

And we end with Luke warning Rey and Leia looking worried. Those beats feel more like the end of Act II than an Act III – everything’s about to go really bad. And the music is the same, which should warn us, there’s probably some further beat ahead.

And then boy is there.

And just like that we’ve united the Rey and Kylo threads and resolved Rey's quest: she wanted to be able to fully tap her powers (and her memories), and eventually it’s Kylo who she turns to. And now the Snape of it all from the start has changed, too; it wasn’t Kylo he was describing (poor Kylo) but Rey.

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For me, what stood out most in the trailer was how much of it echoes Empire. We’ve got Luke in the Yoda position, complaining that his charge is dangerous, “too much like her brother she is” – God I hope there’s some point where Luke references Yoda in some funny way -- and warning her that some choice she wants to make (wanna bet it’s got something to do with rescuing and/or killing Kylo?) is not going to work, a la Don’t go Cloud City because you’re not ready.

We end on the classic Vader offering his hand – AND SHE TAKES IT. (People are saying that’s a fake out, but you know, I’m kind of in.)

There’s also a moment in the trailer that seems straight outta Hoth (which coincidentally was the name of my first rap album as a kid; my monicker, was DJ Wampa Wamp; it was kickin’.).

Here’s the Hoth Empire moment. Here’s the moment in the new trailer.

Massive doors closing Leia standing there, worried. The ground is even covered in snow.

The concerning thing about this trailer, which Chris Kent pointed out to me: the other characters don’t seem that important. There’s just not much there of them. We know they’re being attacked, hunted – this movie’s version of the asteroid belt chase, maybe? – but nothing there really grabs you and tells you to take notice.

It’s just the first trailer. But that still seems unusual. And it reminds me of something I read about developing The Force Awakens. Originally they wanted Luke in that film. Hamill was just as stunned as everyone else when his script ended up empty. (He actually read the stage directions at the table read (below). I think it was J.J. Abrams that said it brought him to tears.)

But the reason Luke ended up not in the film – and probably a good part of the reason the original screenwriter Michael Arndt got released – was that every time Luke showed up in the early drafts of the script, the entire rest of the movie screeched to a halt. Who cares about the First Order or these new characters? What’s Luke been up to? What kind of stuff can he do now? Does he know how much we’ve been through to get to the point of seeing another movie about him?

It’s so strange – in the original trilogy Luke’s awkward, whiny, a little overdramatic. He’s the kid you get stuck with in science lab who has a lot of feelings to share with you about the frogs. (Leia’s the one who works in student government and asks you to sign a petition. Han’s the cool kid you want to sit with at lunch.)

But come this new trilogy, Luke is THE MAN. Nothing else matters -- in fact in the end they made the whole first movie about that. We gotta find Luke.

God he looks wild. I love it.

Now in The Last Jedi now we finally have him, in fact he seems to be the titular character (if you believe the director). But it seems like the same problem might still apply; I want all the Carrie Fisher moments I can get, and all the John Boyega and Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver moments, too, but can they all take place on that little island, please? Because that’s where Luke is.

A film like this, I’m not sure they really need a second major trailer. But I hope we get one. Because as cool as this was, it’s a little straight ahead.

Although then I saw this and suddenly it all seemed so much better. (Click for embiggening.)

This is not an accident.

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I promised last week that you would get to meet my amazing friend AshleyRose Sullivan, massive Star Trek head and cool person. Also a great artist: here’s a piece she did last year about her complicated relationship with her grandmother.

We talked via email. She entitled her answers, “Damn it, Jim, Here’s My Star Trek Interview,” (which I suspect is actually how a lot of of my interview subjects address me). And it’s a wild ride:

• Star Trek: Discovery: Check.

• Hope vs. grimdark: Check.

• Klingon cuisine: Check.

• Fresh Prince of Bel-Air: Check.

• What it’s like to watch 720 hours of Star Trek: Check.

Enjoy!

Why does Star Trek endure, do you think? What is that seems to keep speaking to the "next generations"? (No need to hate me for that attempt at humor, I already hate myself.)
Star Trek, like any SciFi, speaks to the current time through the lens of some version of a future. It’s always (from Mary Shelley on) been about the present culture, the socio-political issues, and the lives of the people reading/watching it but it approaches these things sideways from an unexpected angle. It sneaks up on you. Star Trek has always been about our time but it’s enough removed from our time that we can enjoy it without getting too beaten down by our own problems to enjoy the adventures of the characters.

Put simply, it’s relevant in unexpected ways.

On top of that, from the get-go Star Trek has always been about hope and high principles. It’s easy, in our world, in these times to become despondent and depressed.

But when you turn on Star Trek, the message that rings clear from whichever part of the future they’re broadcasting from is, “It gets better. Humans get better. Humankind becomes kinder, more generous, more gracious, more understanding, more accepting. It gets better.”

Preach it, sister.

As a kid, growing up in the 90s, I saw a lot of things that a lot of other 80s babies saw. My family struggled with poverty, home insecurity, divorce, illness and domestic violence. And through it all, at the end of the night, there was Star Trek telling me, “It gets better.”

And I’m not the only one. In the four years of my Star Trek project, numerous others have reached out to share how Star Trek helped get them through the most difficult time in their life. When they felt most alone, here was this shining, hopeful future with this crew who, more than shipmates and friends, they were a family. And here they were inviting us to be part of that family. A lot of us needed that.

What would you say were your biggest takeaways rewatching the whole of the Star Trek canon? What did you learn/what most surprised you?
How both easy and hard the venture was. It wasn’t hard at all to sit down and watch tons of Star Trek. I watched about three per day (I rewatched the whole canon, including the Animated Series and every film which added up to something like 720 hours of Trek).

[Editor's Note: WOW.]

While sometimes it was overwhelming, it never felt like a chore. But for every episode I watched, I also read about the behind the scenes stuff, I took notes, I kept track of my thoughts and then I wrote about as much of it as I could. I think the hardest thing was just budgeting my time. It’s easy to do a deep dive into the Trek-verse and realize suddenly that you’ve been reading about Vulcan poetry for three hours.

In 2013, Star Trek completely took over my life. I was living and breathing Star Trek. I was watching it every day while I ate lunch and dreaming about it every night when I went to sleep. By the end, what surprised me the most, was that I no longer felt like a fan. I didn’t have any desire to go to conventions or get a Star Trek tattoo or read recipes for Klingon cuisine. At the end of the year I felt more like a scholar with a new appreciation and admiration for the long body of work that it Star Trek.

For me the Trekverse sun rises and sets on Deep Space Nine. I know that's the Empire Strikes Back of your favorite Star Trek choices (does anyone ever say Phantom Menace is their favorite Star Wars film, I wonder?), but for me it was the first Trek show that proposed a sustained long form story. In fact I think it was one of the first TV shows period I saw do that. And man was that attempt satisfying.

Is there a Battlestar Galactica without DS9, I wonder? A Babylon 5?
DS9 is the most popular choice among critics. And a lot of people love it. But, as far as I’ve seen, among Trek fans, it really varies. Most of the time, it’s whatever series the individual watched as a kid, or whatever Trek helped them out of a hard time. It’s typically an emotionally motivated choice. The Next Generation began when I was really little so Picard was my first Captain and we wouldn’t have the 90s golden years of Trek without it (that includes DS9 and therefore, according to your logic, BSG and Babylon 5) so it’s certainly owed a debt. I love The Original Series (which is owed the greatest debt, obviously.)

I loved the often maligned Enterprise. But, during my epic rewatch, I realized how deeply I identified with Voyager and her crew. Voyager and its characters speak to me in ways that go beyond the nostalgic love I have for TNG. Voyager informed my young adult life and helped make me into the woman I grew up to be.

The new show: Your impressions? I know some Trek fans are worried the show is going to be too dark. You mentioned the same as we were Messengering; can you explain that worry to me? Because for me, it's usually the darker the better.

(Another, weirder way of putting this question: When I was studying to be a priest, I had a teacher who told us the thing you have to know about the Ten Commandments is that rather than a guidebook for how to live your life they're mostly meant to establish the boundaries of what's acceptable. Cross this line and you've gone too far. When it comes to Trek, for you, what are those boundary lines?)
As I said before, Star Trek has always been about hope and high principles--optimism. I think a lot of people confuse “dark” with “deep” making the inaccurate leap of logic that, in order to provoke real emotion, the storyteller must torture the characters in some way.

I find this the easy way. If everything is bleak and dark and hopeless then, yes, it’s very easy to put characters into situations where their emotions are raw and their hearts on display for all to see and relate to.

That’s part of why I don’t prefer stories that are consistently grimdark. (Don’t get me wrong, one of my favorite novels is Bleak House and I just finished a near pathological binge of The 100 which is basically just BSG with teenagers and swords.) I would argue that lighter stories have more power to strike at your deep emotional core because of the contrast. Think of times that sitcoms that get you all weepy and if you can’t think of any go watch Futurama's "Jurassic Bark", Steven Universe's "Rose’s Scabbard", or hell, The Fresh Prince's "Papa’s Got A Brand New Excuse". Those shows with peppy theme songs and funny jokes are felt on a more visceral level because the dramatic turn, the meaningful twist, the heartbreaking revelation is, as in real life, unexpected.

The lighter story that sets you up for a sucker punch of emotion: YES.

Similarly, Star Trek has always come at our emotions sideways. When episodes are mostly light and most problems solved with rigorous thinking and technobabble, when most endings are happy the stories that suddenly take a dark turn tear at your heart all the more. There’s a reason The Inner Light still holds so much power over Star Trek fans. [Editor's Note: In the episode, Picard gets struck by an energy beam and ends up living an entire lifetime while just minutes pass for the crew; if you watched the AshleyRose Ensign video I linked to last week, it was about this same story. And her take was equally beautiful and brutal.]

I loved BSG but eventually I grew numb to the plight of its characters because the tone was so relentlessly bleak. But I will never not cry when Picard wakes up to realize his memory is the only remaining connection to an entire, once great, once just like us, civilization.

I think that what a lot of Star Trek fans reacted to with the initial two episodes of Discovery was this apparently dark tone. Many of us watched Star Trek as kids but couldn’t imagine showing this new show to small children. The third episode, "Context Is For Kings", turns a corner into a more familiar tone, theme and setting. For me that episode said, “Here is the ship. Here is the crew. Here are nods to the series that have come before. Here is a ray of hope--yes, it’s here, even in this bleak time of war.” That was really important for me. I think CBS should’ve aired all three episodes at once as a TV-movie-type event. It would’ve over won more 90s era fans.

As far as boundaries go, I think that, when you’re dealing with Science Fiction, there are none, even in Star Trek. As far as single episodes go, there is no line that you can cross and it’s no longer Star Trek.

What you don’t want to lose is the overall theme of the show, “It gets better.” That’s not to say that it can’t get messy, that we can’t question our deeply held principles, that we can’t do things we’ll regret. This is actually one of the reasons Voyager is my favorite--they don’t have backup. They’re strangers in a strange land and that’s when your principles are really, truly put to the test. But every captain in every Star Trek series had their principles, ideals, or integrity tested. Just off the top of my head: "City on the Edge of Forever", "Chain of Command", "In The Pale Moonlight", "Tuvix" and "Anomaly".

The tone of Discovery, at least so far, is definitely closer to DS9 and the focus is less on the captain than on Michael Burnham and a few other crewmembers. Burnham will have her principles tested (it’s already happened twice in three episodes) but whether she “passes” or “fails” doesn’t really matter as much as what the overall tone of the show conveys. Is this a show that tells us that everything is awful and nothing is good or, instead, that there is always light in the darkness?
I find it super interesting to see you say there's no storyline that can't be done on Star Trek. I'm seeing some of the conflicts on Discovery and while personally I'm loving it (I really really need Anthony Rapp to start shouting a song about Roger and landlords), that level of disagreement and even distrust -- is the Captain a good guy, even? Is Michael being set up, or just another weapon in his collection? -- feels like a big turn for Trek. But you know what, I think this is how I'm making sense of it -- there was always a dark underbelly to the Federation, like any government. And those kinds of black op orgs bring into question the validity of the whole project. But that makes it a super bold choice, too -- you want to see if Trek's overall hope is for real? Let's go to the darkness and see if we can still legitimately find it there.
5) Final question: What do you think science fiction adds to our lives?
Science Fiction takes us just far enough outside our experience to let us see the world in a new way. From that new perspective we can question the ideals, motives, and choices we take for granted. Why do I think this way? Why do I act this way? Why do we all do this? Why can’t we do it this way instead? Who could make this happen? Why not me?

Science Fiction can be fun and light or dark and grim or it can waver all over the place and still be incredibly successful; it can bring great insight or a day’s fun reading by the beach. I’m just glad it exists. For those of us who need it, it has been and will continue to be a literal lifesaver.

Thanks, AshleyRose! And for those who haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend My Year of Star Trek, AshleyRose's blog-journal of her year of watching every episode of every Trek.

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Speaking of Star Trek: I don’t know if I posted this short comic strip already, but either way it's worth a repeat. It’s about an event that happened after World War II. It’s deeply touching, and wildly Star Trek-related. If you like the series at all, you are going to love this so much.

Speaking of Star Wars: Harrison Ford does Halloween costumes. Really. And his choices are incredible.

Speaking of comic book movies: I just started reading this newsletter which this week did a great job of rating all 25 of Marvel Comics' movies and TV shows. Lots of great stuff on the shows, some of the best supporting characters, and also why the comic book company doesn't seem to be capitalizing on the successes of the films.

Lastly, the horrific unfolding Harvey Weinstein Hollywood story has a lot of similarities with the way the Catholic abuse story has unfolded. If you’re interested in what Hollywood could learn from the Catholic Church’s mistakes, here’s five thoughts I put together for America.

Other than Aquaman, my favorite moment from the Justice League trailer is this shot from the base of some kind of Superman memorial:

A good thought for tough times. Lots of heroes out there right now.

You're not defeating us, reality.