Month: June 2025

It’s interesting to look at the media we have between Episodes III and IV and see what the Rebellion was up to. For a long time, it seemed to be about hiding and protecting what Jedi still lived after the Order 66 purge. Then you had the various stories of pushback by the likes of the Specter cell or Saw Gerrera’s partisans. And clearly, Luther Rael and Kleya Marki’s organization – aka Axis – was working to build the framework for something larger to fight back against the Empire.

The question was…what was the endgame? How did they think they were going to vanquish the Empire even before the ability to destroy a planet appeared? For all the drilling in the jungles of Yavin, boots on the ground were never going to be enough to hold off the Empire. And it was going to be very difficult to outgun the Imperial Fleet at any point. It forces the question: was the Death Star the Empire’s biggest mistake? Without that – with all those resources turned toward more Star Destroyers, more TIE fighters, more stormtroopers – would it not have become nearly impossible for the Rebellion to ever have enough resources to carve out even a piece of the Outer Rim outside Imperial influence?

Most of the activity in Rebels is about either rallying what Jedi exist, building the Rebel fleet, or sabotaging the Empire at a high level. All of which is viable and good work, but by comparison to, say, the IRA in Northern Ireland – the idea that you can make it so untenable that the Empire will withdraw and give up becomes problematic when you have a single authoritarian Emperor and the resources of a galaxy backing him. So at some level, it feels in retrospect as if the Rebellion’s ultimate goal was just to prevent the Empire’s grip getting any tighter while waiting for some sort of opportunity to come along.

And it’s clear the leadership of the Rebellion was divided on where and how to fight. It certainly felt as if some elements were willing to keep their powder dry in perpetuity, which makes me wonder whether there would have ever been a counterattack in the absence of the Death Star. What’s evident from all of this is that the Emperor himself was the author of his own destruction, both by betting the house on the Death Star (twice) and betting that he could lure the Rebels into one place to be wiped out.

But you have to wonder what the original victory conditions were, and if they acknowledged just how hard it was going to be to return to how things were – or build something new.

One sympathizes.

One of the things that has come out of the Disney+ explosion of Star Wars content has been a new layer of nuance in the good guys. It’s pretty obvious that after the fall of the Empire, the New Republic was fairly feckless – both in terms of hunting down and finishing off the Imperial Remnant and in countering the rise of the First Order. But what we’re seeing in a lot of ways, thanks mainly to Andor but also elsewhere, is that prior to the Clone Wars, the Republic was not exactly in good health – and neither was the Jedi Order.

In fact, the takeaway from The Acolyte is that 100 years prior to the Clone Wars, the Jedi were high on their own supply and convinced of their own right and righteousness, and in the ensuing century the Republic and the Senate were corrupt and strangled by their own bureaucracy. It all suggests that the Old Republic was closer to the Articles of Confederation than anything else, and the Senate much closer to the General Assembly of the UN (or worse, the League of Nations) than an actual galactic government. It’s not hard to see how the Separatists rose up and formed a united faction, because the Republic was ill-equipped to stop them with anything other than a handful of Jedi supporting individual worlds.

But even more than that – in the Mandalorian, Kuil says he was enslaved by the Empire for 300 years. Clem and Marva Andor were looting a Republic vessel on a planet devastated by extractive mining. It really seems as if the Empire just did in public what the Republic was allowing to happen unnoticed. And it makes it a lot easier to understand how people were willing to shrug off the coming of the Empire if it just made the shooting stop. Life in the galaxy can’t get any better anyway, so what does it matter what the powers that be call themselves? And then the Empire era was just a 20-year slow boil, to the point that I suspect the majority of the galaxy didn’t realize how bad things had gotten until Alderaan was vaporized.

And then the Emperor was gone, problem solved, why you bringing up old shit. Little bit on the nose, no?

It’s become apparent that in terms of their acquired intellectual properties, Disney had decided that Star Wars goes in Disneyland and Marvel goes in Disney California Adventure. And now that both have their own “land” it’s possible to compare and contrast now that we’ve had a couple of years for things to settle in.

It’s pretty clear that one of the real stars of Star Wars is the aesthetic. If you never had a single character walking around, if you didn’t ride the two rides, the Aurebesh signs and the X-Wing and A-Wing parked in the woods and the architecture and the ambient music would be an attraction all by itself. There are things to buy: blue milk, lightsabers, robes, droids. It’s an immersive space.

Avengers Campus has to some extent been ill-served both by the Covid delays and by the strike-induced lag in the MCU. But Marvel’s world is sprawling and diverse. There’s not an obvious thing like a lightsaber or an X-wing — Thor has a hammer, Cap has a shield (and wings sometimes), there’s a quinjet on top of a building, but there’s so many different things across thirty movies that it’s impossible to have a unified look or a common point of reference.

And that’s why despite only one ride, Avengers Campus has (and needs) characters. Lots of them. I have a pic of me and the wife with the Wasp holding the shrunken version of A Bug’s Land. I have a pic with America Chavez from a gray morning where no one seemed to recognize that she was an actual superhero and not just a kid at the park (the problem of not having a flashy costume). At different points on Monday I saw Spider-Man, T’Challa, Steve Rogers, Loki and Red Guardian just hanging around.

Star Wars is about creating a world. There are characters that fill that world, some amazingly compelling (Andor might well be the defining piece of Star Wars media at this point). But Marvel’s world is all about the characters, because it’s too big and sprawling for anything else. They still need a proper E-ticket ride at the park, and the real problem is the same as Rise of the Resistance: how do you commit to a single moment and put a billion dollars on it? Especially when Star Tours has a ridiculous number of possible combinations and even Smuggler’s Run is ticketed for new mission types in 2026?

And that’s another thing: Galaxy’s Edge, to me, is proof that Disney always planned for the story of the Resistance and the First Order to go past episode 9. The only way you allow Rian Johnson to deconstruct everything is if you know you’re going to carry on from that point, not immediately go to a finale that undoes half of what you did. Rey, Finn, Poe and Chewie were meant to fight the First Order for a whole new trilogy of their own once the Han/Luke/Leia triumvirate had their sendoff, but that’s not how it went down in the end. No one planned for Carrie to die, or for the Mouse to quail in the face of basement chuds reacting poorly to challenging storytelling.

But Star Wars still provides a fully immersive world, especially now that we’ve demonstrated how much more storytelling is possible there once you pry yourself away from Skywalkers. And it’s made it possible and necessary to reevaluate what we thought we know. Of which more later, certainly. But all I know is that owing to a quirk of hardware breakdown, I was able to walk the length of Black Spire Outpost on a cool gray morning with absolutely no one in sight and only the ambient sounds around, and it was worth the entire price of admission just for those few moments.