It's been a while since I've pointed a finger at George Lucas, moved it down to get him in your eyeline, and said, "J'accuse". Okay, maybe it was only September. Whatever.
Then, my issue was the lack of anything resembling a media presence a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, implying people do not think, act or behave like people actually do in the real world, lacking even a basic sense of curiosity or desire to be informed. QED the occupants of this galaxy may look human (when they do), but these are really characters we shouldn't expect to be able to relate to.
This posting's charge is one of a lack of proportionality. If you think that's a bit niche and technical, you may wish to substitute laziness or stupidity, but that's up to you. Your choice: I'd like to make that clear to Mr Lucas' lawyers. My charge is lack of proportionality.
What I mean by that is that things that should be quite big, aren't. Unless being big would be one of the first things on its Tinder profile. Like the Death Star. That's big. Very big.
Take Mos Eisley Spaceport. As Ben Kenobi says, "You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.” I suppose Lucas imagines it a space version of Benjamin Hornigold-era Nassau. But there was a reason why the Bahamas became the semi-independent Republic of Pirates, a chain of cause and effect, political, social and military, stretching between the Caribbean, England and Spain underpinning what and why that was. In Hollywood terms, it had a back story.
But, there's no basis for Mos Eisley to be that, so, instead, it's a truck stop, Newport Pagnell services at best. But, even then, it's not an intermediate point between somewhere and somewhere else, there's no city, no industry for it to support, so why is even there, full of merchants and privateers with at least 94 docking bays? Okay, you do get bonkers buildings built, seemingly without thought or justification, but they tend to be religious. Build a church and they will come, whereas a spaceport... build it and it would be destined to be more like Viaduct Petrobas in Brazil.
Even accepting it is what it is and is where it is, it seems to have one (gay? come on, it's a bit gay) bar and a lot of (drunk? stoned?) inhabitants just wandering around aimlessly. This is the town where Jabba has put a price on Han Solo's head "so large that every bounty hunter in the galaxy will be looking for you”. That's dialogue for when your quarry has disappeared into the void, not moved from the public bar to the saloon bar. Turns out Greedo, Han, and Jabba are all within a laser-blast of each other. It does all smack of kids in the playground unthinkingly shouting out what they heard on telly last night.
I could go on - and I have done previously. A planet is searched for a rebel base as quickly as the Millennium Falcon is searched for stowaways. Or, continuing the tradition, in Solo, Han finds it incredibly easy to have an audience with the warlord who runs the planet, like my living around the corner from Rishi Sunak, Stella Street-style.
Did I mention the playground? I'm beginning to think that's hugely important. Like Stella Street, the underpinning logic of Star Wars falls between the surreal mess of dream logic and the restrictive 'that couldn't happen' of the real world. Call it playground logic - there's cause and effect, but only in the here and now, what you can see or touch. Mos Eisley a den of thieves? Fine, Luke and his friends are in danger! How did Mos Eisley come to be a den of thieves? Doesn't matter, and the kids in the playground would just roll their eyes if you pressed the matter and shut you off with a 'who cares?'. Because it doesn't matter.
I used to think George Lucas was reliving the serials of his youth, like Flash Gordon. He was born in 1944, the perfect age to be sitting cross-legged in front of the big wheezy thick glass screen watching both the 1930s cinema series syndicated for TV, though possibly a little old for the then newly-minted TV series. But I don't think Star Wars is him reliving that; otherwise he would have given us Flash Gordon the film. It's him reliving the next day in the playground, running around, two fingers out-stretched, making laser-blaster noises, shouting out their favourite bits, vicariously being Flash, killing the bad guys and rescuing the dame, and not giving a flying toss about backstory - which, embarrassingly, he had to do with chapters 1 to 3.
Looked at through that lens explains a hell of a lot.
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2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth
2084. The world remains at war.
In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.
The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.
Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.
Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.
24 0s & a 2
Twenty-four slipstream stories. Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.
