I’m always so confused by what Gabe tends to focus his analysis on. A guy that averages like 14 and 10 went for 20 and 18 in a home playoff game and it’s completely shocking and unprecedented? Huh? Portland, the 3 seed, won it’s opening game against the 6 seed (which fell to the sixth seed by playing terribly over the…

You think killing his own sister is going to restore his honor? Didn’t he lose his honor for killing another madman tyrant who was about to murder countless innocents? It seems odd that one morally justifiable killing would save his honor when he lost it for another, probably more morally justifiable one...

“With so little time left, it honestly shouldn’t be that surprising the show is having to pick and choose those moments when it’s going to try to blow our minds (presumably with the VFX war-extravaganza later in the season).”

Interesting...

Was that prior explanation ever provided in the shows? That’s really interesting, and would negate how I felt about the scene in some ways. The thing I found so contrived about the scene in the show was that nobody had ever bothered to care about Hodor’s backstory- he’s just a lumbering, smiling, naked oaf that…

100% agree. It seems like hollywood has gone the route of saying “anything that isn’t going to be a massive box office tent pole smash isn’t worth making”, so they put all their eggs into just a few baskets every year. So our choices at the theater are either hugely expensive comic book movies or low budget indie…

I think this is great news actually. Tomb Raider was fine- it wasn’t amazing, but it was a decent enough 2 hour distraction. The focus on making every single movie a massive tentpole that won’t be considered a success unless it makes $300 million domestically is terrible. Having movies be released that feel different…

100%. I’ve been saying it since Episode VII came out, but Star Wars literally has a whole GALAXY’S worth of stories to explore. Episode VII could have launched us in literally an infinite number of directions. Hell, even keeping the original cast members in the story for the sake of continuity (not to mention box…

“I can see Luke Skywalker having such an impact that the word “Skywalker” comes to mean something like “Jedi leader.”

These are all really good points. The distinction between why Vader chose The Dark Side and Kylo’s rationale (there isn’t one) is pretty stark. I’m sure TLJ defenders will just say “but in the OT all you knew about Vader’s motivation was that he had been seduced by the dark side, so why do you care about Kylo’s…

I agree about what Star Wars has always been. I wish Rian had actually been as brave as his fans pretend he was and had brought some nuance into the equation, but absent that I’d rather they just dropped the redemption nonsense entirely. Ben Solo became Kylo knowing that Anakin eventually redeemed himself- Ben CHOSE…

Yup. Like I said, I’m totally cool with him being a recluse who has abandoned the Force. But the fact he’s there because his instinctive response to his nephew having dark thoughts in his sleep is to murder him? And then when Kylo knocks him out (super easily by the way...I mean, Luke can Force project himself across…

I wish they had abandoned the need for redemption entirely and embraced the nuanced grey areas of real life morality. Have the conflict be more mature than the good v. evil it’s always been by having Rey and Kylo join forces. Then the other characters can choose whether the goals Rey and Kylo are promoting are…

This strikes me as JJ’s callback to the scene in RotJ with Luke and Han about to be fed to that sand monster thing by Jabba. Because of course JJ has to sprinkle his movies with explicit references to other, better movies.

“Johnson’s story was such a breath of fresh air. It was setting up that you didn’t have to be a Skywalker, that the force (which failed over and over and over) wasn’t limited to a handful of people, and that felt like how the resistance would win. The kids in the final scene - I mean THAT was the whole thing.”

“I’m encouraged by the fact they did not try to dazzle with a hundred split-second cut scenes which a million youtubers would then dissect until the movie opens.”

My biggest problem with the Kylo redemption arc was just how nonsensical it was. Rian had Rey spend a whole movie believing in Kylo’s goodness based on...what exactly? One Skype-Force phone call? And that call was all of 48 hours after Kylo had gotten done torturing her and murdered the man she was clearly looking to…

“People were asking why Leia couldn’t sense him (especially since she felt Han die) so Luke had to have severed his connection to the Force to make that plot point from TFA work.”

100%. People love to pretend that Rian did something drastically different, but at its heart it was another movie about a good force user trying to convince a bad force user to turn good, while the bad force user tries to corrupt the good to join him and rule the galaxy. He shat on some stuff that was canonical about…

I’m thinking that JJ watched Episode 8 and thought “shit, Luke was the LAST Jedi? So what the fuck is Rey? We can’t say she’s a Jedi anymore...hmmmm, what if we say that she honors Luke by calling herself and those that come after her ‘Skywalkers’? Brilliant!!”