Chen G.

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.

The trilogy contradicts itself internally, too. I think its best not to lump Star Wars films into trilogies and look at them individually: that we look at them is trilogies at all is because that's how George Lucas would want us to, because he wants to create a facade of having concieved of them as trilogies.

Oh sorry, you might like her more by her pet name... "Nori" There, the writers made it better, right? Right?! Somebody say "Right" !

Was thinking that. I'm honestly astonished: they had enough time since both the Vanity Fair pieces and the teaser to try and present something that wasn't so self-consciously "high fantasy". But they didn't.

Oh I agree. Everything about that storyline (and that's also the storyline that encompasses the man who falls from the sky, because why not) comes across so cloying. The rest of this - minus the outlandishness of the Troll - I'm fine with.

That looks like...Sir Lenny Henry in a bad Bach wig! Their names are just as terrible, too, by the way: Elanor Brandyfoot, Poppy Proudfellow and Sadoc Burrow.

Oh I agree. And Fellowship was quick to point out its unconfirmed.

Umm...so...

I don't mind the idea of the show: I thought the first episode was quite good. But there are just so many entries in the Disney Star Wars canon set in the timeframe between Episode III and the original Star Wars - Rogue One, Solo and now this - the "stitching" together that we're seeing is becoming just a bit much.

The answers to questions like that is “so that we’d have a movie.”