The State of the Galaxy Address
The state of play in The Last Jedi becomes clearer and Star Wars Rebels crosses over with Indiana Jones in today’s Force Report.
New First Order
Jason Ward over at Making Star Wars claims to have gotten his hands on some spoilers regarding the state of the galaxy at the start of The Last Jedi.
It’s worth noting that Ward seems to have been wrong about the re-release of the original, unaltered Star Wars trilogy, but his intel is usually solid.
Besides, these aren’t really major spoilers so much as things the average viewer could probably figure out for themselves after watching The Force Awakens, so I don’t think they’re going to be wildly off-base.
I’m going to bookend these (incredibly minor) spoilers about the political situation at the start of The Last Jedi with pics of our Supreme Leader Snoke, so if you don’t want to be (slightly) spoiled, just scroll past Snoke’s handsome visage.
For Snoke, the loss of the Starkiller Base was as significant as his wins. His forces are no longer a secret to the galaxy at large. Those who used to laugh at the idea that The First Order were a threat are either dead or no longer laughing. The cold war style stand-off is publicly over after the full on assault on the Republic and the senate. The galaxy no longer views Snoke as someone that is irrelevant on the galactic stage. The galaxy knows he and his cronies are maniacal zealots and they should be feared for better or worse. The galaxy seems to mostly understand that The First Order is eventually coming to conquer their worlds and they have to fall in line or resist. Most understand that war has returned and the perceived era of peace is over.
Snoke understands that everything The First Order used to do in secret is no longer an option and a very overt war is on the horizon. Unfortunately, The Republic has completely collapsed after being attacked in Star Wars: The Force Awakens by Starkiller Base. The galaxy is in complete disarray. The galaxy understands that everyone has to pick a side now.
General Organa no longer stands alone in her determination that The First Order is the greatest threat to freedom and democracy in the galaxy and the only choice they have left is to fight.
I mean, that’s pretty much what you expected, right?
Hopefully this will all be made clear in the film itself. One of the few complaints I have with The Force Awakens is that it doesn’t make much of an effort to explain a political landscape that, at first glance, doesn’t seem to make any sense.
It was largely left up to Claudia Gray’s excellent novel, Bloodline, to explain where the First Order came from and how Princess Leia came to be leading a ragtag Resistance instead of the New Republic.
Bloodline was great, but I’m not a fan of the idea that viewers should need to read a book in order to understand a movie. (I’m looking at you here, Catalyst and Rogue One.)
However, The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson did work with Claudia Gray on aspects of Bloodline, so there’s a good chance he plans to make the political landscape clearer in his film.
To be clear, I'm definitely not asking Lucasfilm to spend an abundance of screen time on senate meetings and trade disputes, but there's a happy medium between The Phantom Menace and The Force Awakens that The Last Jedi should be able to slide into.
Blood Ties
Speaking of Bloodline, a short tie-in story to that novel has just become available to read for free online.
Scorched originally appeared in Star Wars Insider #165. It’s written by Delilah S Dawson, who also wrote the Bazine Natal short story, Star Wars: The Perfect Weapon, that was released in the lead-up to The Force Awakens.
(You know, the one where Bazine Natal found Darth Vader’s helmet for Kylo Ren. Probably. It was all very ambiguous.)
Scorched tells the story of pilot Greer Sonnel as she enters a legendary race. (Greer will later go on to work closely with Leia Organa in Bloodline.)
It really is a short read, but it’s a worthwhile one if you can just never get enough racing in the Star Wars universe, so head over to StarWars.com and give it a squiz.
Grand Admiral Thrawn and the Last Crusade
io9 has put together a list of the Easter eggs in Thrawn’s office, as seen in Through Imperial Eyes, the most recent episode of Star Wars Rebels.
There’s all sorts of interesting stuff in there, including a nice nod to Ralph McQuarrie, but the one that really caught my eye is this relic from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
Yep. Thrawn straight up has the Holy Grail in his office.
Of course, there have been crossovers between George Lucas’ fictional universes before, most famously in the form of hieroglyphs of C-3P0 and R2-D2 in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Club Obi Wan in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
If you look very, very closely at the crowd in the podracing scene in The Phantom Menace, you can even spot Indy finding his seat.
There was even one weird issue of Star Wars Tales (#19) in which Indiana Jones discovered the dead body of Han Solo, who had crash-landed on Earth.
Honestly, the less said about it, the better. As far as Star Wars comics go, this one definitely doesn’t belong in a museum…
Force Material is a podcast exploring the secrets and source material of Star Wars with hosts Rohan Williams and Baz McAlister. Listen and subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, Stitcher, PlayerFM and Castro; stay in touch with us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram; and support the show by browsing our range of shirts, hoodies, kids apparel, mugs and more at TeePublic.
