Ohhhhh wrong episode, my bad.
When Mae is in the escape ship, she flies through the 2 layers of the rocks making up the planetary rings and says something like "Sol won’t be able to follow us here. " Sol does so anyway, and his larger ship is being pummeled by rocks, so Bazil disables the ship so they don’t get killed by Sol’s recklessness. That’s how I took it anyway, though yes, a line of dialogue would have made it a lot clearer.
…No…
He disabled the ship while Sol was chasing Mae in the runabout through the asteroid belt.
…–ETA- ah, Munch got it.
I think that we can discuss Bazil and what he did or didn’t do speaks a lot of how clear that role was. I got that he could smell out Osha or Mae but why not go directly to Sol with a translator? How would disabling the ship while they were flying through the rings make them safe compared to forcing them out of the ring? How was Sol even fooled for a second that wasn’t Osha? He trained Osha! Wouldn’t he know her aura/force presence to know it was Mae?
All we ever see is Sol emotional, which is opposite of what Jedi are supposed to be. The expedition of the past was three emotional Jedi and Master Indara. One of the few things the show did was make her character the most Jedi of those four, which I liked.
As I think about that, the Jedi we see on Coruscant are also emotional as they all want the cover up. I sympathized with the senator who wanted the Jedi to have oversight. Equally, though, the republic is so old that there is a lot of corruption or incompetence in how it functions.
As for myself, I’m over the flashback. It should be used sparingly, not as SOP. It’s used as a cheap attempt to get quick interest instead of building characters.
A series about how the republic is falling to corruption and taking the Jedi with them, or the Jedi are as well, would have been interesting. Sending Jedi on missions that they do the best they can but with incomplete information could have also started to show them losing Jedi. Of course, the fact that six Jedi (at least one Knight, one Master, and Jecki, not sure if she is still a padawan or not), failed against one dark Jedi user doesn’t speak highly of Jedi.
Thanks for the discussion!
I may be mistaken, but didn’t the flashback scene in Episode 7 establish that Osha and Mae were essentially identical in the Force – a single consciousness split into two bodies?
Just consider all the child soldiers the Jedi were bringing with them during the Clone Wars. The line from the series reminded me of the Ferrengi in Star Trek: The Next Generation castigating Picard for bringing a ship filled with families on dangerous missions.
And, boy, they went hard with Jecki’s death. Homeboy stabbed her three times! Almost as if to say, “Try surviving that.”
Well it’s official, no season 2. It was not a great show but some of the worst people are going to be emboldened by the news so I wish it had lasted 5 seasons if only for that reason.
That’s a shame, I just hope the powers-that-be take the right lessons from this:
Lesson The First: Most people either don’t care about the fucking Jedi or can’t stand them anymore. Especially when your sad attempts at creating tension make them look completely fucking incompetent at being both force users and warriors for peace and justice.
Lesson The Second: You need an actual story with actual understandable/relatable motivation for your characters*. Andor has that in spades, Ahsoka, after a rough start, seems to be finding its footing.
Lesson The Third: Write a good story FIRST, then set a reasonable budget for the story you want to tell. They spent a reported 180 MILLION DOLLARS on this dreck. They did the first season of Mando for around $80m. Obi-wan was $90m, and Andor was $135m and while Obi-Wan was the weakest of the three, all were better stories, told well, for less money.
* And when you write an interesting character with the potential for character growth that is also acting as the conscience of the show - DON’T FUCKING KILL THEM OFF FOR NOTHING. Jecki’s meaningless death in the pursuit of Sol’s idiotic ‘mission’ really pissed me off. She was the second most interesting character in the show with Qimir an easy first (and a great new villain - shame we’ll never see him again). None of the main protagonists were even a little interesting and some of them bordered on farcical.
There could have been a good show here, the High Republic is fertile ground for stories that don’t involve the damn Skywalkers. They managed to spend all that money and not find any of them.
My feeling exactly.
I’d be interested in some of the threads being picked up elsewhere.
I think the lesson here is actually deliver on the premise you sold us on.
The problem is that some of us totally disagree with your first two points. (I think everyone can agree about spending less.) I like that Jedi have varying motivations, personalities, and styles. Getting away from the always light until dark. And I didn’t have any problem relating to the characters.
What I’d like them to do is have a lot more limited series, covering multiple genres and characters. The two seasons of Jedi Visions is a great example of when they loosen creative control.
The series didn’t spark any joy for me as I found myself without any care for the characters or the plot. I get that the Republic, and the Jedi themselves, fall because they got too big for their own britches, but can we at least show them being a force for good even for a little while?
This is really curious to me. People like Jedi that lose 6 on 1 battles against what is effectively a kid/young adult? Or very senior Jedi that either get sucker-killed by a child or commit suicide for guilt over something they didn’t actually even do (as seen in the flashback)? The Jedi are a joke and it’s truly a surprise to me that they took that long to collapse if what we saw in The Acolyte is the cream of the Jedi crop.
I would be very interested in your take on a coherent explanation for Sol’s motivation in this series. Because whatever it is, I didn’t see it and even if it’s there, he was completely incompetent at bringing it to fruition.
And what @Odesio said. We’ve actually never seen the Jedi as an effective force for good except for a bit in the first (chronological) trilogy - and even then they’re regularly out-maneuvered. These are the people who jealously guard access to the Force because only they can be trusted with it?
I agree with your last point. We already saw floundering, flawed Jedi in the Prequels. I want to see them at their zenith. The Knights of the Old Republic game is the closest we have ever gotten to that.
Why couldn’t we have a “cops on the beat” type story but with Jedi?
It’s good to have variety. While the Skywalkers’ stories are interesting, I want to see more. Jedi aren’t perfect and good stories poke at their failures.
The same thing with Sol. His intuition led him astray and he never corrected it. I’d think this is a common failure mode for Force users who rely on their feelings. I find this very relatable.
Yes, that would be wonderful.
So, Troops but with Jedi?
I would love to see a series (or even a film) set in that general era (either the KotOR era, or the era of the Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO, which was set about 300 years later). A strong Republic, a strong Jedi Order, fighting against an actual Sith Empire.
So…
Star Wars: Discovery?
Yes, exactly. Or even something smaller. Where they are solving a murder or a small crisis on some planet. People keep saying, “The Jedi are always so perfect, it’s boring” but we never actually saw that. We saw them when they were basically extinct and when they completely shit the bed and all died (and on a War footing if you include The Clone Wars). The only time we actually see them be Jedi is the first five minutes of The Phantom Menace.
And that was the best five minutes! When you see how the Trade Federation reacts to the news of the Jedi arriving, and then Qui-Gon melts a fucking door to go talk to them, you really get a sense of how big a deal these two guys really are.
Then it goes down hill.
They had super speed! everyone completely forgets about that.