Ahsoka

Yeah… you know what would have been great? If they’d have thought of that and done a story so far bit right before the first episode.

I’m a lazy man. A lazy, lazy man.

so lazy you don't even bother to cook your shark..

The girl who is a Mandalorian-Jedi seems like she probably has a big backstory and complex relationship with Ahsoka and Mary Elizabeth Winstead that appears to be relevant and important. Same with the lost friend who apparently died on some incredible epic mission that no one has bothered to explain.

That two Sith are looking for a video game plot with one of those witches from Fallen Order is whatever but at least tell us who the main characters are and why we should care about them.

Fully caught up now. Slightly concerned that the third episode had a taste of the Obi Wan “almost this entire episode could’ve been a ten minute sequence in a film” vibe to it.

But

Ultimately, I’m enjoying the show overall. I know I’ve mainly posted negative stuff about it but it bounces along ok and I’ve played enough Star Wars games for this plot to feel like a comfortable worn in pair of pants.

One last negative - basically every character who I assume was originally designed for the cartoon looks like an upper tier cosplayer dressed as a cartoon character more than a natural part of the relatively muted onscreen world. Purple hair, bright yellow trousers etc

I think I’ve said it before but I think they could address a lot of the problems that Star Wars and the MCU have on Disney+ by making more anthology or one-shot special shows so stories are compacted rather than stretch out for hours longer than the plot can support across whole series.

Although I guess when each of them is costing the price of a full feature film they want/need to milk every minute of screen time they can out of their investment.

More or less all of them are things they make because they have to rather than they want to. Like The Mando S1, arguably the best one of the lot. You could tell they gave a shit about it just from the credit sequence.

It’s telling that the Obi Wan series actually was a film script they dragged out and added very little. Feels like that’s the approach for most.

It also benefitted from being pretty disconnected from the main franchise. Sure it had a few cameos from people like 88, but it felt like it was all happening in some remote place with new people and new stories.
(though then it turned out it was just around the corner from Tatooine, so it was a bit weird that no-one seemed to have heard of the Empire or Jedi or anything much).

All the other shows are tied into the existing cannon with Luke, etc.. which gives them very little space to maneuver, and not much opportunity to tell an interesting story. Ahsoka is pretty boxed in with what we know happens before and after.

Weren't they planning an Old Republic type show? One of the things that really let KotOR be successful was that they set it so far before the movies that they basically had total freedom to tell whatever stories they wanted.

The problem, obviously, is that they have to be low stakes enough to not tread on the plot of the movies and high stakes enough for us to care because they are mostly trapped in that horrible no-mans land between the OT and the ST.

Yeah. Basically, everything we see, all those little world building bits, all the deprogramming stuff, all the absorbing the empire into the republic scenes are for nothing as they get exploded with a big firework an hour into the episode 7.

Yeah it's really fucked these shows. As they're stuck in a timeline where they just decommission a working fleet and intelligence service. While doing the logical nonsense of the prequels. The Republic raises taxes and tariffs, hence the arguing in Phantom Menace, while providing absolutely no services. Like even the basic security ones most states are expected to achieve.

Yeah but post Cold War one of two things were true, you were under the US nuclear umbrella and part of NATO, or you just had your own nukes like the UK (which did both). But yeah in Star Wars there's clearly smuggling rings and such with entire fleets of warships, so you'd think you'd maintain enough defence spending for that. Then when the Remnant starts out with a handful of Star Destroyers you just go nip that in the bud before they manage to turn an entire fucking planet into a cannon.

It's not just the military though. The Republic clearly has no Federal institutions, like education, health, pensions. It only ever has a massive fucking bureaucracy but nothing obvious it ever uses it on.

This was a problem with Phantom Menace as well though. If the Republic wasn't spending it on anything then it's not like tariffs could have actually been that high.

The annoying thing is that we all suffered through the sequel trilogy to move on past the skywalker era so maybe have a stab at that.