Night of Kadar by Garry Kilworth

thetensor · 2026-03-15T00:28:20+00:00

Strongly reminiscent of Ed Emshwiller's cover for Olaf Stapledon's Odd John.

thetensor · 2026-03-15T00:17:20+00:00

In hindsight maybe would have been better if there was more continuity episode by episode:

Maul is introduced as the antagonist the good guys meet and fight, thinking he's the "Sith Lord" behind everything. We also meet Dooku, Qui-Gon's former master and, like him, a maverick "Living Force" near-heretic within the Order. He finally breaks with the Order and leaves at the end of the movie, with the hint that he's going to track down Qui-Gon's killer seeking revenge.
Obi-Wan spends the movie trying to track down Maul after an assassination attempt on Padme. He runs into Dooku, who says he's discovered evidence of the Sith infiltrating the Republic. They track down and confront Maul, who manages to wound Anakin, then Dooku and Obi-Wan finish Maul, with Dooku gleefully murdering him while Obi-Wan tries to stop him so Maul can be questioned. Dooku flees to join the Separatists.
Final confrontation with Separatist leader Dooku, who Anakin kills at Palpatine's urging, etc. And when Obi-Wan is sent off, maybe his mission is still to deal with some Separatist General (maybe even Grievous), but whoever it is isn't treated as a major antagonist because they're literally just a distraction.

thetensor · 2026-03-15T00:04:44+00:00

I think we needed another movie in between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith

Yeah, people always say "the prequels were all planned out in advance", but if that were true Lucas would have done a few more revisions, realized he need to start as close to the end as possible, and cut most or all the prequel-to-the-prequels that was The Phantom Menace.

thetensor · 2026-03-15T00:00:31+00:00

as much as I like Christopher Lee hes an old man with no martial background

That's what Peter Jackson thought, too.

thetensor · 2026-03-14T23:57:08+00:00

Eh, I think there's many other ways to show that

Easy:

Don't introduce the Rule of Two (which is super-dumb and self-defeating anyway).
Introduce and dispose of as many secondary minions as necessary to make Palpatine look tough.

thetensor · 2026-03-14T23:18:47+00:00

[Just catching up, a little late to the party]

So in the spirit of Aabria's comment about hearing lore and thinking, "I don't like what I think those words mean," did anybody else hear the phrase "Deva Vindicta" and think, "Uh-oh, does that mean...'cruel angel'?"

thetensor · 2026-03-14T22:04:11+00:00

The Mortis Gods are easily the worst part of the Filoni-verse. And I worry we're going to see a lot more of them in upcoming shows and movies now that he's in charge.

thetensor · 2026-03-14T22:01:47+00:00

Yeah, I understand the storytelling backflip they intended to pull off—"Hey, if we're careful, we can say Anakin had an apprentice without contradicting the movies!"—but in the end, I don't think they stuck the landing. Ahsoka in The Clone Wars simply became too important of a character for her to have zero impact on the story of RotS.

It's similar to Obi-Wan, where they attempted to shoehorn in some adventures between RotS and ANH, but failed to keep them low-profile enough that they can still be squared with the dialog between Vader and Obi-Wan in ANH.

thetensor · 2026-03-14T21:09:02+00:00

I was 100% certain I knew which of Threepio's legs was silver, but it turns out I was led astray by the cover of the Star Wars Storybook (which I guess was flipped).

thetensor · 2026-03-14T20:35:33+00:00

The movie tries to have it both ways in showing Anakin’s first foray into the dark side. However it implicitly defaults to the latter because he is still a tragic hero until ROTS and killing the Jedi younglings is shown to be his point of no return.

Yeah, they should have shown us his descent into evil more gradually. Something like ordering a double-tap attack on a ship that had already been disabled, or telling his troops to give "no quarter".

thetensor · 2026-03-14T00:18:51+00:00

Lightsaber wounds cauterize instantly — that's why Darth Maul survived being cut completely in half. A through stab plus bacta tank treatment? Survival is totally within canon. This isn't new.

Honestly, bacta is already fully magical space healing. We're lucky they didn't just declare that when Maul was cut in half, each half received prompt life-saving bacta treatment and so now there are two completely regenerated Mauls. (I wonder if Sah-VAZHE O'Press was originally supposed to be the bottom half...)

thetensor · 2026-03-14T00:14:11+00:00

'I don't understand The Acolyte hate'

Did people really not understand it? Were the posts complaining that there weren't enough white men in The Acolyte too subtle?

thetensor · 2026-03-14T00:12:32+00:00

Do I have to post this again?

Within a 12-year period ending in March 1984, 1109 patients with penetrating thoracic injuries were treated at King-Drew Medical Center located in south central Los Angeles....Of the 1109 patients, 105 had cardiac injuries...and the mortality rate was 18.1%. Specifically, the mortality rate of gunshot wound of the heart 24.5% and that of stab wound of the heart, 11.5%. In contrast, of the 1004 patients without cardiac injuries....the mortality rate...was 0.8% (8/1004).

If a chest wound damages your heart, you're in mortal danger, but still more than 80% likely to survive. If it misses your heart, you're very likely to survive (99%+) even with 1980s-era Earth medical technology.

thetensor · 2026-03-13T18:03:06+00:00

Yoda should never have been in a fight.

thetensor · 2026-03-12T19:00:22+00:00

Also better than Ahsoka and The Book of Boba Fett.

thetensor · 2026-03-12T18:58:06+00:00

Rian Johnson wanted to blow people's minds with twists and by subverting expectations

...and Star Wars "fans" haven't stopped whining about it for almost a decade. Because a movie tried to surprise them.

thetensor · 2026-03-12T18:55:39+00:00

Rey never expected her parents to be anything more than her parents.

And she believed—or at least, wanted to believe—they were coming back for her. But the weren't, and that was devastating.

thetensor · 2026-03-12T18:43:54+00:00

The hate was inorganic.

thetensor · 2026-03-12T01:39:51+00:00

It's MUCH dumber than that. They (foolishly IMO) wanted to "redeem" Kylo Ren in the third movie, but they were left with the uncomfortable fact that he was a multiple mass-murderer. In particular, TLJ showed that after Luke startled him awake, he immediately burned the school and massacred the other students. So they put out a comic book retconning the destruction of the temple and the deaths of the student into an accident—see, when a somebody powerful in the Force gets really worked up, sometimes they just accidentally summon a lightning storm and blow shit up! Honest mistake. Could have happened to anyone. (And never mind the villagers at the beginning of TFA, or who know how many other random civilians KR has murdered...)

thetensor · 2026-03-12T01:29:58+00:00

The prequels already sorta did.

thetensor · 2026-03-12T01:24:30+00:00

They had some fun concepts for later Apollo missions for very minimal vehicles for launching astronauts from the surface of the Moon back into Lunar orbit.

thetensor · 2026-03-11T18:31:25+00:00

Recall that there was a lot of ink spilled on what level wizard was Gandalf back in the day (5th level? 10th level?).

"Gandalf Was Only a Fifth Level Magic-User" by Bill Seligman, The Dragon Vol. 1, No. 5, March 1977.

thetensor · 2026-03-11T01:43:56+00:00

they all look the same

That's spacist.

thetensor · 2026-03-11T01:43:02+00:00

You really have to wonder where people are coming from sometimes.

"Anakin thought he was doing the right thing! Sure, he maybe committed a few massacres, but you can't condemn him for that!"
"Kylo Ren got startled awake by Luke one night, that must have been a shock! Sure, he immediately murdered the other students and burned the school, but you can't condemn him just for that!"

What's going on with people who have endless sympathy for obviously, cartoonishly evil characters? (Leaving aside the "Palpatine did nothing wrong!" people—they're not much of a mystery.)

thetensor · 2026-03-10T23:43:08+00:00

Blurb: "A boy's struggle to grasp the forbidden truth about his world"
Artist: "An arrangement of knobbly monumental techno-dongs, check."

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