thanks for choosing god.

speaking of scams...
Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope.

So I saw "Attack Of The Clones" last night. Wow.. that's a sexy movie. Action, effects, a mature plot.. well, compared to "The Phantom Menace," anyway. I know, I know.. damned with faint praise. Anyway, it was an excellent movie, but it did make it apparent how little talent Lucas has as a writer. See, the official story, apparently, is that he wrote the whole series way back at the beginning, but chose to start with Episode IV, which was the original Star Wars. There are variants of the story.. some versions say that he only sketched the ideas before he wrote the movies. Whatever.. the important thing is that he's supposed to have written the story in advance. So if he did, he's really inattentive to detail. I don't think he did.. I'm thinking that he's making it up as he goes along. At this point, I realise that I'm starting to sound like one of those rabid Star Wars fans who analyses every detail. I'm not.. to be honest, I haven't even seen the movies that many times. I clean up on Star Wars trivia, but that's because the lines from the movies stick in my head. I'm not a rabid Star Wars fan, or a rabid Trekker. I'm a rabid Doctor Who fan, but that's different. :) The thing is, I love a good story, and for a story to be good, it needs to be believable, within its context. That means that yes, Star Wars is set in a distant galaxy, and involves Jedi and Sith and clones and things, but within that framework it needs to be believable. Story continuity is pretty important to believability.

~ The C3P0 situation.
So Anakin goes to the moisture farm operated by his stepfather, and picks up C3P0, who has been working there for roughly ten years. He must have come with Shmi when she was bought by Anakin's stepfather. Owen Lars is his son, so he's known C3P0 for most of his life. After ten years, C3P0 remembers Anakin, and yet when he's bought by Owen Lars in episode IV, neither remembers the other. I can see Owen forgetting, but not C3P0. That doesn't work, and hurts the story.

~ Sibling revelry
Ok, in Jedi, when Leia's told that she's Luke's sister, she says "I know. Somehow, I've always known."
So what's with that kiss in Empire? I'm thinking that he just hadn't decided that Luke and Leia were siblings yet.

~ Space n' Vader
Luke's zipping down the trench on the Death Star. Vader is right behind him. Vader tries to destroy him. End of movie. Next movie, Vader knows that Luke is his son, and is trying very hard to not kill him. So apparently several ship lengths is a within the range of his senses. So why, then, when he met Leia on her corvette in episode IV didn't he get a sense that she might be a relative? He's chasing Luke through space, and he can tell, but when he was torturing Leia, and when he was holding her while she watched Alderaan destroyed, didn't he get any sense that, hang on...

~ Kenobi
Obi-Wan tells Luke: "You will go to the Degobah system. There you will learn from Yoda, the Jedi master who instructed me."
So who's this Qui-Gon Jinn guy, then?

~ Son of a Sith
Kenobi tells Luke : "Your father wanted you to have this, when you were old enough."
If Vader is so obssessive about finding Luke when he first senses him, he clearly didn't know about him before. So, then, how could he have wanted him to have his old Jedi sabre? Particularly as the reason he gave it up would have been to replace it with his red one, so he was already a dark side disciple. Makes no sense. And then, of course, it's been established that you don't get 'old enough' to start being a Jedi, you get 'too old' and no one knows that better than Anakin, who was initially rejected because of his age.

~ "He feared you might follow old Obi-Wan off on some damned fool idealistic crusade like your father did."
The Jedi order is an idealistic crusade? So far, there's been no crusade.

~ "He was the best star pilot in the galaxy."
I can see why Kenobi might say this. Anakin's done a lot of.. um.. commuting at the moment. He flew from Naboo to Tatooine after all. Other than that, though, he's done nothing remarkable. Maybe they'll cover that in the next movie. I hope.

~ "He didn't hold with your father's ideals. Thought he should have stayed here and not gotten involved."
Um.. ok, the only time that Owen even met Anakin was when he arrived at the farm in Episode 2, having left Tatooine ten years before. He didn't talk to him, he has no idea where Anakin is going or what he's doing, and Anakin is already something of a psycho when he meets him.

~ "And he was a good friend."
Well, he's an obnoxious brat of a padawan. At no point has he been a good friend so far. They spend all of their time arguing.

~ R2-D2
Kenobi says "Don't seem to remember ever owning a droid," when presented with R2-D2, not knowing him at all, and yet throughout the most dramatic events of the death of the old republic and the building of the Empire, Kenobi was involved with Amidala and R2-D2. He'd remember, certainly.

~ More memories
So, C3P0 is introduced to the name Obi-Wan Kenobi during "Attack Of The Clones" by R2-D2, though he hasn't actually met him. In Episode IV, he hears the name, again connected with R2-D2, and it holds no significance for him whatever.

~ More C3P0
"What a desolate place this is."
C3P0 says this when he arrives on Tatooine during "A New Hope" but given that he spent his first years there, and given that he worked for about ten years on the very moisture farm that he's sold to not long after uttering this line, you'd think he'd recognise the environment. Unless Lucas hadn't written that bit yet.

~ Look, Ma, No Han
So no one really believes in the force, and no one takes the old Jedi seriously. Both Han and the Imperial general who said those things would have been alive when the Republic was still around, and when the Jedi were still widely respected. In fact, the senate, which relied upon the Jedi as the guardians of peace and justice for over a thousand generations, is still around until about halfway through episode IV. Further, the Jedi aren't killed off until about forty years before Episode IV. That means that there are still people alive who remember them.In fact, the Imperial who says "Don't try to frighten us with your sorceror's ways Lord Vader. Your sad devotion to that ancient religion..." would probably have been around when the Jedi were still a going concern.

~ The Emperor's new voice
In Empire, Vader gets a call from the Emperor. When he answers it, the Emperor is much the same except that he has a big, deep, booming voice and glowing eyes. That doesn't fit, which suggests that the character wasn't yet written.

~ Kenobi and Vader address each other by first names. "I've been waiting for you, Obi-Wan." "You can't win, Darth." So Darth wasn't a title at that point, but a name. No one else is called Darth anything until Episode One.
"A young Jedi by the name of Darth Vader, who was a pupil of mine until he turned to evil, helped the Empire hunt down and destroy the Jedi knights."
The arguments for this are: Darth is a Sith word. Ok, so no one believes in the Force any longer, yet Leia calls him Darth Vader. So that doesn't work. Or Darth means 'lord' but then Imperial officers address Vader as 'Lord Vader' so that doesn't work, either.

~ Betrayed and murdered.
"He betrayed, and murdered your father."
This was hastily explained in Jedi, but not very well. True from a certain point of view, indeed.

~ If Owen Lars is the only living relative of Anakin, and you're trying to hide Anakin's children from him, why the hell would you take one of them to live with that only living relative?

~ "The Jedi are extinct. Their fire has gone out of the universe. You, my friend, are all that's left of their religion." -Tarkin
So the commonly held idea is that Tarkin is second only to the Emperor, and that Vader is second only to Tarkin. That's why, when the Death Star explodes and Tarkin dies, Vader becomes second only to the Emperor. Let's see... is the Emperor likely to put a non-Sith in charge of his forces when he has a perfectly good Sith within easy reach? And would Tarkin not know about the Emperor and the Force? I mean, he's the Emperor's second in command, right? He's going to have seen Vader and the Emperor together.

I am starting to sound like a rabid fanboy, aren't I? I'm not, but I like my stories, and I suppose I just like to disprove things.

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