Do Not Think About Timeline of Star Wars

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I am sure that there are some devoted Star Wars fans out there that can conjure some twisty and convoluted explanation for the compressed and strange timeline that flows through the main sequence of the Skywalker saga in Star Wars, but if you sit and think about the years and the characters it really doesn’t quite add up.

20th century studios/Disney

Before I continue let me stress that there is much of the franchise that I am a fan of. I am an old fart and saw the original release in the theaters and when people mention Star Wars, much like with Star Trek, the images that fly to mind are of that original late 70s and early 80s adventure films. All the assorted material in comic books, novels, and television programs, both live action and animated, held little draw for me except for Andor, which I adore and is brilliant, even as it exposes the fault line in the ‘canon’ history of the saga.

The saga of Star Wars from the prequels, through the various programs, and the original trilogy, is the story of the fall of the Galactic Republic, the rise of the Empire, and, the restoration of the Republic by a dedicated rebellion. A story that in the films is principally told through the viewpoint of the Skywalkers, Anakin and his son Luke. When we meet Luke in Star Wars he is nineteen and ready to apply to the ‘Academy’ desperate to leave his life as a farmer and see the wider galaxy.

Nineteen.

Luke was born simultaneously with the Galactic Empire, Emperor Palpatine’s entire reign as the despot of the galaxy is about 24 years from start to his death on the second Death Star. In terms of Empires that’s a very short time, though it beats out Nazi Germany that lasted a mere dozen years, and Fascist Italy that managed to squeeze out 21 years. However a quarter of a century is still a very short period of time, you have only the youngest cohort of adults that know only the Imperial system with a much larger segment of the population that lived in the Republic era.

This was really brought home to me while watching Andor. (And again I adore Andor I think it is a masterpiece of television.) The character Dedra Meeroa, played beautifully by Denise Gough, announces that she has no family. Her parents were criminals and she was raised in an ‘Imperial Kinder Block.’ Ms. Gough was born in 1980. Andor  had its principal photography in 2020 making the actor 40 years old when she first portrayed Meero. Now, even if the character is 5 years younger than the performer that makes her 35 at the start of the series and by the ‘canon’ calendar with this being a mere five years before the destruction of the first Death Star, making the entire Imperial system just 14 years old. This makes Dedra 16 or so when she goes into the Imperial Kinder Block, provided that the systems starts with the Empire and still this is hardly ‘raised in a Kinder Block.’ The numbers simply do not add up.

And you know what — I don’t really care. It is a great bit of character building and backstory that explains the cold hard and dedicated Dedra Meero. I will always take good story over slavish devotion to ‘canon.’  Of course it is always best if you make everything fit neatly, but given the choice, give me great characters and great stories over a perfectly fitted history.

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Starfleet Academy Canceled and My Disorganized Thoughts

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The newest series entry in the Star Trek franchise, Starfleet Academy got its cancelation announced yesterday to cheers from the quarters that despised the program and tears from those who adored it. If you populate or have visited the SF and Trek communities online then it’s no news flash that the series prompted some intense feelings with many going on extended ‘explainer’ videos dissecting the show’s faults, failures, and lack of respect for the ‘good’ Trek that had preceded it. This was a discourse that I did not participate in and avoided consuming whenever possible. Not because I had any particularly strong love or any emotion for the show but because such emotionally driven tirades are tiresome and not worth the energy to even briefly consider them.

 

Star Trek to me has always first and foremost been the original series produced and broadcast in the 60s, a very different time from today in nearly every major way. Next Generation presented a new crew and several seasons where I enjoyed the program but also several seasons where it was tedious, tiresome, and quite preachy. Deep Space Nine had some interesting ideas and characters and I watched a few episodes here and there, but it failed to fully hook me as a viewer. Voyage? God, that was stuff I simply could not swallow with the exception of a couple of episodes I watched out of loyalty to my friend that had written them, I abandoned the series after the third episode. The next series, Enterprise I abandoned after the pilot as it was quite clear to me that the creatives behind that project had a very different vision for how SF and Trek in particular should be written than myself.

Discovery tempted me back with some very interesting casting choices and there was much I found intriguing about its set up – I have never been one overly concerned with ‘canon’ for a series that was never designed to have it — but ultimately I lost interest and the series just slipped out of my viewing habits. Without a deep devoted sense of nostalgia Picard failed to keep me engaged (pun very much intended) and again after a few episodes it slipped away.

Strange New Worlds is a very different story. The first ‘new Trek‘ series that gave me the feeling of that original series, even as they took their own quite large liberties with the supposed canon. Not only did i follow the show and watch every, admittedly too few, episode, I purchased the first two seasons on physical media.

So, with that background established I watched Starfleet Academy with an open but wary mind and heart, hoping for a new Trek that I could be a fan of. Sadly, Starfleet Academy prompted in me the worst reaction any film or television program can generate in the viewer, apathy. There is no worse reaction that indifference.

The series did not repel or offend me, even as it offered up recycled ideas from some of the previous programs that I certainly did not like, but neither did it engage me. None of the characters hooked me with an interest to know them any better, the situation didn’t pull me in, and the cast choices were at best a distraction. I did not avoid episodes but other programming kept displacing it as my sweetie-wife and I decided on which things to watch for our evening’s entertainment. The news of its cancelation brought no disappointment only a sense of acknowledgement. At the time of this writing, we hadn’t finished the first season and last night we made the decision to not finish. It wasn’t out of animosity, the program didn’t provoke enough to generate such a response but simply a recognition that we didn’t care enough to keep at it.

I am sorry for those who did find a connection with this series, it is always a bitter blow when the forces at networks remove from the offerings the thing that spoke to you. To those who are celebrating its demise, really? Is that the best use of your brief and valuable time on the planet, taking joy in even the minor suffering of others? There are better things to do, go do them.

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Movie Review: Project Hail Mary

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Adapted from the novel by Andy Weir, who also wrote The Martian, Project Hail Mary is a

MGM/Amazon Studios

science fiction adventure to save the Earth from a dimming sun which threatens all life on our fragile planet. A fantastic microorganism is populating the sun, causing the dimming, and a molecular biologist, Dr. Ryland Grace, whose published theories align with the newly discovered ‘astrophages,’ is recruited by a global effort to reverse the ‘infection,’ by traveling to Tau Ceti, the only star in the corner of the galaxy not showing signs of dimming. The film opens with Dr. Grace awakening from a medically induced coma used during their transit to Tau Ceti, finding himself the only survivor of the process and with his memory damaged and only recovering as he suffers intrusive flashbacks. The mystery of Tau Ceti’s immunity to the astrophages deepens when Grace encounters a massive alien vessel in orbit about the star.

Like Weir’s novel The Martian, this story is really about the sacrifice, skill, and dedication of highly competent people who have set out to solve a seemingly unsolvable problem. Project Hail Mary functions without the need for a villain or motivated antagonist, with the closest analogy being a medical drama as doctors fight to diagnose, treat, and save a terminal patient, but in this case the patient is all of humanity.

Ryan Gosling plays Dr. Grace managing to convey both the character’s brilliance and his goofy ‘every man’ nature keeping the audience engaged both intellectually and emotionally as Grace navigates a strange, terrifying, and nearly impossible task alone.

Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the team responsible for writing and producing the Spider-Verse films, this film is visually stunning, inventive, and striking in its emotional core. Aided by a sharp script by Drew Goddard, who also adapted The Martian, Gosling carries the film effectively alone. While there are other important performers in this film the ultimate success or failure of the project rested on his shoulders and Gosling’s ability to make you laugh and cry in moments while still conveying unrevealed depths to his character is what makes him a star.

All in all this is a remarkable film and while the two-and-a-half-hour running time might give some pause before buying a ticket, I would recommend seeing this in a proper theatrical setting.

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That Firefly Announcement

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If you have not been in the SF fandom community very long you may not have heard or experienced the devoted base of fans, known as ‘Browncoats’ for the failed television series Firefly.

Created by disgraced talent and Buffy creator Joss Whedon, Firefly a space western inspired by Whedon’s reading of The Killer Angels ran for 11 episodes on the Fox network before being canceled mid-season. Three years later Universal released feature film, Serenity, written and directed by Whedon, who hadn’t yet torched his reputation and career, wrapping up one of the show’s central plot lines while dispatching a couple of the main characters. From there the cast dispersed to their various projects and careers, while fandom possessed enough of an interest and hunger for the series that it lived on primarily in comic book and graphic novel form.

 

Now, more than two decades after the show’s aborted run on television and its middling performance as a feature film its central star Nathan Fillion has announced that the series is being revived as an animated series with all of the surviving cast returning to voice their characters. Ron Glass who portrayed the mysterious Reverend Book passed away in 2016. Whedon reportedly has blessed the project but also is reportedly not involved with this reincarnation of his creation.

I was a fan of the series when it aired way back in 2002. I recognized some of its shortfalls and limitations and thought it leaned a little too heavily into its mashup of the Western genre with the SF elements. Its science was patently preposterous but that I had long accepted as the price for seeing any SF on television at all. I mourned its premature cancellation and attended ComicCon in San Diego to see the panel discussion with the cast prior to the release of Serenity, so while I am not a ‘Browncoat’ I am not hostile to the series. I even own it and the feature film on BluRay, but for me this announcement stirs no excitement.

All art is a product of its time.

The people who made Firefly in 2002 lived in a different world than the one we live in today. Everything that is in the artist’s world, the grand and world changing to the small and scarcely noticed impacts on who they are influencing how they perceive humanity and its place in existence. Making Firefly or Doctor Who or Star Trek today will not recreate those properties as they existed in the early 2000s or in the 1960s. That presumes that the creative team on the animated series, sans Whedon, were the team that crafted the original series, and I haven’t seen any reports that those writers are returning. Which means that the writing will be done by people whose connection to the characters and settings is one driven by nostalgia, creating yet another layer of transformation beyond that imposed by the passing years. The actors have been changed by time as well and that will change how they interpret their characters, it is an inevitability.

Perhaps this animated Firefly will fly high and stun everyone who watches with its insight and engaging stories, but it will not and cannot be the same as that beloved cult series. Time flows onward and you can never truly go home.

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The Post-War World is Passing Away

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And not even the wisest can know what world is being born.

It is a testament to the power of the order that emerged following the Second World War that the term ‘post-war’ is instantly understood with no confusion as to which war is being referred even as that war, its evils, its heroism, and its terrible cost, passes out of living memory. Soon there will be none alive for whom that global struggle is a memory, and it will live only in textbooks, documentaries, and retold narratives. More importantly, the structures erected following the war are now beginning to crumble.

A lot of the destruction of that world order, one that had been laid upon a foundation of law, both national and international, and alliances can be laid at the feet of Donald J. Trump and his backwards, idiotic, and vainglorious mentality. A man who meets the clinical criteria for malignant narcissism coupled with the intelligence of a stunted teenager and the morals of a grifting carnival barker should have never risen to occupy the most important post on Earth. He did not achieve that posting by himself, no there is great culpability to be spread around, some obvious and direct, such as the men with far greater intelligences who saw their duty to the nation and set it aside for their own comfort and prosperity some not so direct, such as the reforms of the 60s that sapped the strength of political parties until they grew so weak as to be unable to fend off attacks from within. Now, with this low IQ, self-dealing, vengeful little man helming our nation’s course into the future, those institutions that have guided and safeguarded the world since the end of the war are falling like rusting relics. Trump alone did not kill off the post-war order, cultural movements around the world contributed to that, but a just, smart, and principled American president may have been able to provide the leadership in these dark times that could have saved and strengthened them, but that ship has sailed and it has sunk.

A New World Order will emerge and not I nor anyone else can know what it will be. We can hope and fight for one that is driven by law and justice and a respect for human life in all the many forms that it can take but that is far from an assured outcome. The time of change has been given to us and it is only us that will shape it into reality. It is a terrible and terrifying responsibility.

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That Old Excited Feeling is Back

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With Outrageous Fortune in the query trenches hoping to catch the right agent’s eye I wanted to turn most of my creative focus to writing my next novel. When Fortune popped up and took over my brain quite unexpectedly I had been working on a large, expansive idea that mashed-up ghost stories with disaster movies and I sought to return to that idea. A prologue and a chapter one were written but the spark wasn’t there, and I couldn’t force it. I stopped work in drafting and thought that my troubles lay with trying to write sans outline but I found myself floundering to produce even that. There is a light, a fire of inspiration, that I need to get a ball rolling on a project but I just couldn’t find it.

This past Friday a stray thought meandered its way into my skull and it set me pondering. The thought was about how you can draw a parallel between unorganized religions that practice the technique of having a sin-eater and with the theology of Christianity where Christ and not a sacrificial goat or person removes sin from a community. The idea prompted research online and began forming into settings, characters and a bit of misdirection.

After a few hours of work over the weekend and yesterday at lunch I have the bones of a new horror novel, with my fires of creation are burning bright. The five-act structure that I love to utilize is coming together with plots running in parallel each with its own set of acts. Theme is not quite there but it’s close and for myself theme usually emerges organically as the story and the characters come together. I do have a working title, Haugland’s Claim and characters that are already beginning to have discussions amongst themselves in my noggin.

It’s good to be excited about a story again.

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Movie Review: The Bride!

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After taking a few days off from serious work and the day job I am back posting on my blog and I will return with a review of a film I had been anxiously awaiting The Bride!

With trailers making the movie appear to be a mashup of 30s gangster flicks and the classic Frankenstein tale the very oddness of it compelled me to see this unique vision in the theater. After pushing back my attendance by a week so I could see Blood on the Moon, where I was warned that the 40s noir western was superior to The Bride! yesterday after a nice lunch my sweetie-wife and I caught an early afternoon screening.

Warner Brothers Studios

There is a triumvirate of positions that greatly affect the look, feel, and tone of a motion picture, The Producer, The Director, and The Writer, and when all three posts are occupied by the same person, as with Maggie Gyllenhaal for The Bride! it comes as close as possible for a major studio release to fulfill the concept of the auteur theory and the final product for good or bad rests on that person.

I wish I could say I loved The Bride! but that is not the case. The film feels terribly unfocused and scattershot, with each sequence interesting and executed with tremendous vision but never coalescing into a coherent whole. I can see what Gyllenhaal was trying to achieve and I can see the thesis of her work, she was shooting for something proudly feminist and while she for the most part avoided pulling out a soapbox from which to lecture her audience the final product, in my opinion, never scaled the summit she set out for herself. The script feels like something that was written by the seat of the author’s pants and never revised afterwards. Major story elements are introduced late, earlier plotlines are wrapped with a sensation that feel forced and pressured as though someone had suddenly discovered that they were running out of pages, and references to other films proved distracting. I think, outside of comedy, it is a very risky proposition to refer to other films in your movie as you rarely come off as anything other than inferior. If I am watching your adaptation of Frankenstein you rarely want me to be thinking of Whale’s version or worse yet Young Frankenstein.

The film had far too little of the 30s gangster and I felt it did not deliver as promised on either the mad scientist or organized crime elements.

The cast is uniformly good and the production design and cinematography are striking, everything that doesn’t work in this film comes from the script and vision behind it and as such if you love or hate this movie the person responsible is Maggie Gyllenhaal.

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A Lazy Tuesday

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Yesterday, Tuesday March 10th, 2026, turned into quite a lazy day for me. After my doctors noted that I had some liver numbers that were out of an acceptable range (which have since returned to more normal values) she asked me to get an ultrasound scan to check the organ. That I scheduled for yesterday at 8:00 am as part of the procedure requires 8 hours of fasting ahead of the test and I know that doing it late in the day would prove challenging.

After skipping a breakfast, I turned up at the Kaiser Zion hospital and without much delay got taken back for my ultrasound. The procedure was fast, painless, and even the gel that they apply to ensure good conductivity of the sound waves was warm and not cold preventing that expected discomfort.

It is my usual habit, when I have a medical procedure of any kind to take the day off, even if like this ultrasound I know it’s going to be fast and without any medication. So, after a quick shopping trip for lunch materials that fit my newly engaged diet, I returned home and played vegetable for the rest of the day.

Today I return to work at my day job but then I have the rest of the week off to attend a cherry blossom festival in Balboa Park tomorrow and enjoy a long weekend after that.

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Film Review: Blood on the Moon (1948)

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After visiting the San Diego Zoo with my sweetie-wife and a very quick lunch of a turkey sandwich to stay within my diet, I hurried to downtown San Diego and the Digital Gym theater for San Diego Film Geeks monthly western for 2026, Blood on the Moon.

RKO Pictures

The western genre is not one that generally calls out to me. Growing up in the 60s the TV was filled with western programming, both original series and films released for broadcast and I guess that the overexposure and my own natural inclination towards more fantastic stories made that part of cinema unappealing to me. There are a few scattered westerns in my library of film, but the genre is decidedly underrepresented there. That said when I saw that this month’s selection is considered a noir and that it was directed by Robert Wise very early in his illustrious career, well that made it just too damned intriguing for me to miss on the big screen. The screening was well attended, and a film historian gave a nice 10 minutes or so talk before the film.

Blood on the Moon, adapted from the novel Gunman’s Chance by Luke Short, stars Robert Mitchum as Jim Garry, a cowboy down on his luck, his herd of cattle having died of disease, answering a call for employment by an old friend Tate Riling (Robert Preston). When Garry arrives he discovers that Tate has brought him into a range war between small farm ranchers organized by Tate against John Lufton, whose large herd usually sells to the Indian Services for the local reservation, but now must be driven from the native territory or be seized by the government leaving the only grazing land for Lufton that claimed by the small ranchers. Things become morally complicated for Garry when he learns that conflict has been engineered from the start by Tate and a corrupt official as a way to force Lufton to sell his herd to Tate at fire-sale prices, ruining Lufton and enriching Tate and the official.

Photographed by Nicholas Musuraca who also shot the fabulous Out of the Past — which also starred Mitchum — this western has the dark moody atmosphere of a film noir, making use of deep shadows to present a frame where far from everything is visible to either the characters or the audience. With morally grey characters, betrayals, and corruption this more than qualifies as a noir in my book and presented in a realistic and gritty manner, the film avoids the grand mythological themes that so often bedevils the western. When the characters fight, they tire and become injured, showing them as ‘real’ people and not idealized versions of American Knights dispensing justice in a lawless land.

I thoroughly enjoyed this movie and it was well worth an afternoon downtown.

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Republicans Reject Responsibility

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The Constitution of the United States of America clearly and deliberately gives the power to declare war to Congress and not to the executive. The modern age and a parade of presidents has eroded the distinction between military action and war. Since the Second World War Congress has acquiesced to the White House more and more latitude in conducting offensive military action but still recognizing their role in the process with legislation such as an Authorization for Use of Military Force.

Trump launched his sudden and extensive bombing campaign against Iran without any form of Congressional approval. This is not one fast mission with a clearly defined goal, this is a prolonged campaign with ill-defined, if defined at all, objectives. Destroying that nation’s nuclear ambitions, that had been ‘obliterated’ nine months prior, preventing a retaliatory strike following an attack by one of our allies, collapsing Iran’s government, have all been both expressed and denied as goals of the bombing war. It is clearly the purview of Congress to debate and either approve or forbid this action. Yet legislation to do precisely that has been killed by the Republican leadership of both houses.  Politicians who have repeatedly and loudly accused nearly every executive action by Democratic presidents of being a step towards serfdom and an illegal usurpation of the Constitution cower from the cult that surrounds this president, breaking their oaths of office and proving to anyone with unbiased eyes that they are from a political party unfit for power.

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