Chen G.

See, see? I told you! Some of this stuff will be great to watch with copious amounts of booze. EDIT: Ahem...

It was definitely a lame attempt to recapture the lightning of the father reveal, and it was that reveal - not the father reveal - which turned the series into a glorified soap opera.

But, if it looks like this before…someone has to turn it to Mordor… That idea scares me.

That’s a tricky one: did the father reveal hurt the series? It’s arguably the thing that made it last: it gave it substance beyond the gee-wiz effects. I would argue the sister reveal was the problematic one.

What about Mordor? before it was Mordor?

Oh please, THAT Vader was basically just Tarkin's muscle. A glorified uber-Stormtrooper.

I think that's a little bit trickier to do given the kind of idiom those scores are written in: Williams wrote something like Rey's theme with the intention that when we should hear it, we should remember Rey and what she's going through over the course of the movies. That's the whole purpose of the leitmotif technique: the make the music and drama inseparable.

Or just because its a painful memory and that's how Guinness plays painful? To me, all these kind of retcon explanations always feel hollow.

Nick, do you have any guess as to where this Tirharad village might be? You'll love the answer, if you can find it!

Not just the prequel trilogy: The Empire Strikes Back doesn't line up with the original terribly well (we've been over this) and Lor knows the sister reveal in Return of the Jedi doesn't jive with either of those two in the least. Star Wars was always like this, and in a sense was always going to be like this.

I know, I know, you could rationalize it all. Just like you can rationalize that Vader is Luke's father in the original film and Ben is lying to him. But you can just feel that's not the case. The rationalization is all after-the-fact. The continuity in Star Wars is extremly haphazard.

I know, I know, its explainable. But it rings hollow.

Its not the impression one gets from the original film. I don't even buy that it was "just" 19 years.

Well, in that film Owen also lived for some time with C3PO and saw R2D2, and he has no memory of either of them in the original film... Star Wars had never been good at continuity. Just like how Obi-Wan was "a name I hadn't heard in a long time" when, if this show's to be believed, he heard it not nine or eight years prior.

It also says that in the screenplay.

I expect all good stories to eschew the cute. Cutesiness is the enemy of drama.

No thanks, I don't need more soap-opera type familial-based drama. I should hope Obi-Wan's offhanded remark on a brother should be just that: offhanded piece of backstory.

At any rate, it does feel as though Vader didn't do remotely enough to try and catch Obi-Wan. I think that point is clear.

I have a rule I've set for myself regarding adaptations: I will not critique an adaptation except by such critiques that I would have made even had I not known a thing about the source material. And so the fact that all these names do stem from Tolkien's appendices means very little to me. I just care that its cutesy, and I don't think these stories benefit from cutesiness except maybe a modicum of it early on. For instance, I wouldn't like to have Hobbits in The War of the Rohirrim, either.

In most media, the main characters don't bite the dust, anyway. There are still ways to build tension.

I think the appeal of the Second Age is the appeal of an ancient history period piece or something: archaic and quite cutthroat. These very-modern English names, with their air of the domestic, don't exactly help. They're cloying. Its like if in the middle of Ridley Scott's Gladiator there was shoved a guy named Bob.

Could be. It could also further up t'north...

See this village? Nevermind the characters for a moment, but just the village: This is Tirharad: Tir-Harad, which is to say its in Harad, the southlands. Except the lush setting would suggest its not in Harad so much as on the outskirts of Harad. What place on the outskirts of Harad do we know that's important to the stories of the Second Age?

Oh, there's more. A lot more! Pharazon's son, Kemen, is in-love with Elendil's daughter, Carine. Durin IV (who's the son of Durin III, don't ask me how) is pissed-off at Elrond for some reason, so they settle it with a rock smashing contest. The Hobbits in question find a man (looking all too much like a certain Grey Wizard) who fell from the sky, Terminator style. There's another tidbit that I'm not sure I can share quite yet.

Its very easy to talk about appearant internal contradictions, but there's something else which is how we feel. And I don't think anyone can, in good faith, say the classic trilogy is homogenous in terms of plot, cinematic style, characterization or anything, really. That is not to say the individual parts thereof are better or worst, but as a trilogy, they don't particularly hold well together except when seen through rose-tinted glasses. I can speak for my own experience when I first watched those films, the transition from the original Star Wars to The Empire Strikes Back gave me whiplash, a little bit like the transition to Prisoner of Azkaban, in the sense that everyone is still there, going by the same names and played by the same actors, but it feels so different, they may as well be films from a different series alltogether. And then are plot elements which, while don't overtly clash, still ring hollow: the father reveal is a huge one. I'm sorry, but I can never ever watch the original Star Wars thinking: "Oh right, that's Anakin Skywalker under that helmet" because it just clearly isn't. Painfully so. Which is to say nothing of the sister reveal. But its true of a lot of smaller stuff.