[I had this lying around on my laptop. I wrote it a while ago, read it now and I still agree with it, so here it is.]
I know the prequels have basically been beaten to death at this point, and that everyone has their own little addition to the large pile of problems with the films, but here’s a fairly basic concept that could have actually made these prequels very interesting:
Have the Jedi be a shadow government.
Here’s a big problem with the prequel Jedi as matters stand. Too many of them are shown to us, so they become homogeneous and therefore boring. At the same time, they appear to be very open about pretty much everything - their powers, their involvement in politics. This kind of jars when you think about how, just twenty years later, people thought the Jedi were just kooky religious nutjobs. I dunno…pretty much anyone who’s been around them would know otherwise.
So take the above alternative. If the Jedi were a very secretive group, shut off from the public and reachable only by the higher echelons of government, it
a) Means you only see a few at a time, which lets you keep them individual and interesting. There’s precedent for this: the Terminators and the Time Lords are prime examples of species who get less interesting the more you see of them. When you have an army of Terminators or Time Lords, they become generic, and therefore less effective. It’s much more interesting to see individual iterations of the basic concept. In the Terminator films, we have very unique characters: the big killer, the deceptively small insidious killer, the reprogrammed savior, the sexbot. In Doctor Who we got the Doctor, the Meddling Monk, the Master, Romana, etc. None feel like stereotypes because they’re unique, not interchangeable with any other individual of their group. The same I think goes for the Jedi. Instead of presenting them as faceless lightsaber-wielders with robes, keep them unique. The OT gave us a deceptively calm old man, a young trainee, a fallen knight, and a trickster-like teacher figure.
b) Lends the Jedi the kind of subdued power that you got from Obi-Wan Kenobi (who, though elderly and quite calm, is clearly a lot more powerful than he seems), since they protect the Republic through influence and indirect action rather than running about en masse waving lightsabers - demonstrating the sort of mental agility and wisdom that comes with the Force and was so under-emphasized in the prequels.
c) Actually can create a scenario where a Jedi conspiracy would sound plausible to the public. In the prequels, that idea always felt ridiculous to me, because anyone who’d interacted with the Jedi - basically, anyone - would know they’re just nice people. But if the Jedi were secretive and insular, this could be used against them - kind of how people in real life extrapolate all sorts of conspiracy theories from the government-imposed gaps in our knowledge ostensibly due to security reasons.
d) And of course fits in nicely with the popular disbelief in the Jedi by a relatively short time into the future.
How cool would that have been - a covert branch of government fighting a phantom menace? You’d have the Jedi try to out-think Palpatine and his plots instead of participating in the big fight scenes; kind of a secret war for control of the Republic. I mean, think about the given Jedi history: secret battles for influence at the top of the food chain culminating in internal purges and greater dictatorship - it makes me think of the NKVD under Stalin. The Jedi might have been suited by such an approach, a sort of quasi-religious secret police.
The main loss from this approach is that it’s more difficult to bring together the non-Jedi elements of the conflict and the Jedi elements, since one would try to distance itself from the other. But you could potentially solve this problem by having the film take place from the point of view of “plainclothes” Jedi, so to speak. In the same way that Obi-Wan traveled in the guise of an old hermit, the Jedi of the prequels could have been indistinguishable from your average guy on the street. This would provide a fairly neat avenue for exploring the character and philosophy of the Jedi while telling a conflict that takes place in the outside world.
Obviously at this point what I’m saying is almost totally incompatible with how the prequels turned out - which may not be a bad thing. But maybe I’m not even talking about Star Wars anymore, maybe I’m just talking about Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in space. (Holy shit…Alec Guinness was in both! Could young Obi-Wan have been the George Smiley of the old Jedi order?)
Anyway. That’s my input on the matter.
I’m “kvural” on NaNoWriMo as well, if you want to buddy me for whatever reason.
I have been quite busy recently for a number of reasons. Let’s list them, shall we?
So, this is my life at the moment.
Ahem, please read news that’s more recent than, like, forever ago.
There will be a full Series 7, though it will start in Autumn 2012.
Seriously, this is like one of the Beeb’s most marketable shows.
…eventually neutralized by the realization that, since this is just some random novel some random person is writing, no one actually cares about “spoilers”.
Steven Moffat (via tinysprout)
I love every word this man says.
(via rosalarian)
Moffat.
(via iamtheblackswanqueen)
Not something I would expect the Moff to talk about, but you have to admit the man’s got a point.
(via therothwoman)
So let’s write female characters who approach sex in a mature way!
Oh, wait.
(Source: mr-owls, via therothwoman)
My current maximum is 3.4 squillion.
It’s coming soon, though.
‘Most of Moffat’s RTD-era scripts felt very passive-aggressive to me, like he was trying to shove RTD’s characters and love interests out of the way and superimpose his own. Maybe it was unintentional, but it makes him seem petty imo, and jealous of the fact that RTD was the one to revive the series.’
…sort of, yeah.
