Disney's Star Wars shows are bad, but at least they're better than the movies

The season finale of ‘The Book of Boba Fett’ dropped on Wednesday, hot on the heels of a penultimate episode that saw Luke Skywalker, digitally de-aged to his ‘Return of the Jedi’ appearance, hanging out with an adult Ahsoka Tano (Anakin's apprentice from the animated ‘Clone Wars’ series) and ‘The Mandalorian's’ Grogu, aka ‘Baby Yoda’.

This week, Star Wars fans can gorge themselves sick on easter eggs from all of the franchise’s storytelling eras (Naboo N-1 Starfighter! Live-action Cad Bane!) while characters reenact scenes on screen that have already been played out by countless children using plastic toys. “Now Boba Fett is going to ride this rancor! Pew pew!” There's little doubt the episode will pull in millions of Disney+ streaming views, or that Lucasfilm is already talking about future adventures with this ruthless bounty hunter turned good-guy gangster with a heart of gold.

It's a fine time to remember how historically, appallingly, shockingly badly Disney has mishandled Star Wars since the moment it bought the rights from George Lucas in 2012 for $4.06 billion.

Hopes were high back then, certainly. Only seven years had passed since 2005's ‘Revenge of the Sith’, which had ended the somewhat silly prequel trilogy on a positive note, and fans had been sated afterwards by comics, video games, and cartoons. As timelines go, though, that had all been filler, mostly taking place in the interstitial spaces between the films, and the thought of Disney, at the time doing so right by the Marvel Cinematic Universe, continuing the saga of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, and Han Solo on the silver screen was exciting.

Some trepidation existed; the Expanded Universe (renamed ‘Legends’ by Disney), where our heroes had battled villains, raised families, reestablished the Jedi Order, and built a new Republic throughout hundreds of books, comics, and games, would have to be scrapped. Still, when Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford were officially cast in ‘Episode VII: The Force Awakens’, directed by JJ Abrams (who had just rebooted Star Trek with success) and co-written with Lawrence Kasdan (who also helped pen ‘The Empire Strikes Back’, widely regarded as the best in the saga), fans rejoiced.

Then they watched the movie.

From its inception, something had clearly been off. Abrams and Kasdan had written a screenplay that didn't include one single scene with Luke, Leia, and Han reunited; Luke didn't even show up until after Han had become a victim of patricide. In fact, all the character growth from the original Star Wars trilogy had been erased. Han and Chewbacca were doing smuggling runs for shady gangsters; Leia was the leader of a ragtag rebellion against a copy-paste of the Empire; Luke had become Yoda, isolated on a planet and literally forgotten. The film's plot followed a Force-adept orphan on a desert planet, suddenly thrust into a galactic adventure by a beeping droid carrying important information. The villain is a masked, black-clad former Jedi with a red lightsaber. At the end, the heroes destroy a planet-killing laser in a last-minute starfighter attack.

Sound familiar?

The lazy beat-for-beat similarities to ‘A New Hope’ have been meticulously catalogued elsewhere, but where Lucas wrote a pulp space fantasy that respected things like planetary motion and the physics of a vacuum, Abrams gave no consideration to such details, as long as the CGI effects were bright and loud. Perhaps, though, Episode VIII's new director, Rian Johnson, would build upon this familiar foundation to tell a new story that was worthy of the Star Wars name.

In every way, ‘The Last Jedi’ was a disaster.

The plot was boring, revolving around ships that must expend their fuel to travel at a constant speed through the vacuum of space. If that sentence bothers you, perhaps it's because that isn't at all how an object traveling through a vacuum works (a fact that Lucas does recognize, judging from the opening sequence in the very first film – skip to 5:00). The Rebels – sorry, the ‘Resistance’ – can't flee into hyperspace without being followed. To help solve this dilemma, two characters – who meet in the escape pod bay! – get away into hyperspace without being followed. A hundred more examples of narrative nonsense could be noted here, but every instance of screenwriting sloppiness would have been forgivable if Johnson had given Star Wars fans the triumphant return of Luke Skywalker they'd spent more than three decades hoping for and dreaming of.

Instead, the Luke we met was a bitter, defeated old man whose attempt at remaking the Jedi was ended after he tried to murder his nephew over a bad dream, who had retreated from the galaxy and its problems, who spent his days swilling green milk from a four-teated space walrus overlooking a drowned X-Wing.

This wasn't the Luke anyone knew, and we didn't know him for long; after projecting himself as a hologram for no useful reason that he could have possibly known, he simply and bafflingly dies, fading away so abruptly and unexpectedly that this writer thought that somehow a scene had been missed. Our heroes, such as they were, ended the film as a dozen or so defeated and resourceless losers stuffed into the Millennium Falcon.

Abrams tried to course-correct with the ninth and final movie, bringing back Palpatine in a dull, dreary Disney trend of resurrecting dead villains into live-action projects (Darth Maul! Boba Fett!). The less said about this absurdity, the better, but suffice it to say no further adventures of Rey have been announced, nor are there likely to be.

In between, ‘Rogue One’ was a valiant effort to tell a solid Star Wars tale that nevertheless allowed no follow-up to it and provided no compelling reason to see it more than once. (And as competent a film as it was, longtime fans of the universe won't soon forgive Jyn Erso for robbing Kyle Katarn of the credit for stealing the Death Star plans he once deserved.)

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‘Solo’, the second (and last, thus far) standalone entry in the franchise, was the first Star Wars movie to bomb at the box office. As it turns out, nobody was wondering how Han Solo got his last name, nobody bought Alden Ehrenreich as a young Harrison Ford, and nobody really cared about a ‘young Han Solo’ movie, since ‘A New Hope’ was a young Han Solo movie.

Broadly, Disney Star Wars projects can be sorted into two categories: the movies, as producer and Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy's self-insert girl-power fan fiction, and the streaming shows, as the faux-creative visions of genuine Star Wars fans whose imaginative powers consist of smashing existing concepts together like kids playing with action figures.

If “The Force is Female,” that female's name is Kathy. Can it be a coincidence that the three leading ladies in five films are all white brunette women, just like Ms. Kennedy? One can almost hear her instructions to the screenwriters she hires (and, in the cases of Michael Arndt, Josh Trank, Colin Trevorrow, Phil Lord and Chris Miller, and Patty Jenkins, fires). “Imagine if I was an orphan on a desert planet who blew up the Empire's Death Star and became the last Jedi in the galaxy! Imagine if I was Han Solo's first love! Imagine if I stole the plans to the Death Star!” And thus, Rey, Qi'ra, and Jyn Erso were born (One might fairly throw Gina Carano's Cara Dune into the mix as well).

On the other hand, the Disney+ streaming shows serve as officially licensed, big-budget playsets for John Favreau and Dave Filoni, who use actors instead of action figures. Filoni is much lauded for his role in the lore established in ‘Clone Wars’, though he should also be equally condemned for introducing incongruous elements like time-travel and a comic-booky ‘back from the dead’ plot crutch that's been used in three major instances thus far. That said, ‘The Mandalorian’ and ‘The Book of Boba Fett’ are plenty exciting, with loads of nostalgia and recognizable aliens, tech, and locations… exactly as if two grown kids with an unlimited budget and cutting-edge film technology brought the battles they once fought with their toys to life. There isn't anything particularly new or noteworthy in “Yoda… but he's a baby!” or “Boba Fett… riding a rancor!” At least it's inoffensive, though, which is more than can be said of the films.

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Maybe Disney has simply decided to pursue a different demographic of fandom. Ask fans of the George Lucas movies what their favorite ship is, and you might hear answers ranging from the A-Wing to the Z-95 Headhunter; ask a fan of the Disney era the same question, and chances are they'll say it's Reylo. Certainly Lucasfilm's commitment to putting anyone but a white male on screen, unless he's a villain or a legacy character, speaks to a modern ‘woke’ predilection towards leftist identity politics. Then again, Disney also has a distinct aversion to straying outside of the sandbox George built, producing its non-numbered satellite projects around the first Death Star, Han Solo, and Boba Fett, each brimming with nostalgia bait. The upcoming Obi-Wan Kenobi series looks to be more of the same. (Tatooine is a surprisingly ubiquitous setting in Star Wars screen projects, considering it was introduced in 1977 as a backwater planet of little importance; perhaps it's simply cost-effective to film in a desert?) This schizophrenic focus becomes further confused when one considers the fates of all these beloved characters, as well as the backstories Disney insists on filling in.

Luke Skywalker fails to train any new Jedi and abandons his friends and family for decades as the galaxy again falls into oppression, until he dies from… I'm honestly still not sure.

Han Solo leaves his wife and child to become a deadbeat dad roaming the hyperspace lanes with his pal Chewie, until his son skewers him through the chest.

Leia leads a plucky group of perpetually-pursued resistance fighters, until she, too, dies from… again, I'm honestly still not sure.

Lando Calrissian is “pansexual,” attracted to anything, including the activist droid whose consciousness was placed, without consent, into the Millennium Falcon.

Considering these dreary and sordid character beats, longtime fans can be forgiven for feeling anxious, rather than excited, about the upcoming Kenobi series. The prospects of grand adventures set in a time during which Jedi-in-hiding Obi-Wan Kenobi had been understood to be earning his reputation as an old desert hermit called Ben are dubious. A promised reunion with his apprentice Anakin, now Darth Vader, doesn’t make sense in the context of the existing continuity. Most concerning of all is the thought of Disney giving Obi-Wan the sort of ignominious, farcical treatment with which they’ve already assassinated Luke, Han, Lando, Admiral Ackbar, and Boba Fett. (Leia, Chewbacca, C-3PO, and R2-D2 have largely been spared, primarily because they weren’t given anything interesting to do, nor will they be.)

Lucasfilm’s failures go on and on, of course. Boring merchandise that sits on shelves until it kills entire toy stores. Star Wars theme parks with places and characters no Star Wars fan has heard of or cares about. A pattern of announcing projects, only to cancel them. Introducing a “new character” that is literally just a rock. A change in leadership may help, but with Kennedy and her lieutenants firmly ensconced, that doesn’t seem likely, and the shields can’t take much more damage before they shatter and the ship explodes.

So yes, enjoy that momentary thrill of seeing a digital ghost of the Luke Skywalker you remember from ‘Return of the Jedi’. Never forget, though, that no matter what Disney does from here on, that path ends with Luke dying a failure, the Jedi texts destroyed, the Jedi Order gone forever, and the Skywalker bloodline being erased from the galaxy, their legacy stolen by a Palpatine.

These characters, George Lucas, and Star Wars fans around the world deserved so much better.