The Great Bird herself, the mighty starship Enterprise.
Made of gingerbread and stuff.
This is the handiwork of a place called the Blackmarket Bakery. And it is awesome.
Where no cookie has gone before!
A Big-ass STAR WARS quiz thing!
Jason did a Star Wars quiz thing, and you can bet I’m gonna do it too! Let’s jump right in!
1. Which film is your favorite of the Original Trilogy?
The one that started it all, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. I know, most people consider The Empire Strikes Back to be the greatest of the Star Wars films, but for me, it’s the first one that always has that special something, the one that took us into that amazing universe for the first time. All the conflicts are laid out in the first forty minutes or so. The swashbuckling fun, which gives way to that amazing Battle of Yavin…as much as I love ever single Star Wars movie, A New Hope is the one at the end of which I always find myself smiling with a sigh of contentment and the thought that if I could once, just once, tell a story that makes someone feel the same way at the end…I’ll be a happy man.
2. If you enjoy the prequels, which one is your favorite?
I’m on record as loving the Prequels. The one I enjoy watching most? Attack of the Clones. I love its changes in mood, its structure as a mystery story, and that incredible battle at the end, when the battlefield is shrouded in dust and smoke and the whole field is a hellscape of blasterfire blazing through it all. I love that movie, the weakness of the Anakin-and-Padme lovestory notwithstanding.
3. How old were you when Episode 1 came out?
I was 27.
4. Which of the movies have you seen in the theater?
Every single damn one! A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, I saw at the Westgate Theater in Beaverton, OR, which is long-since demolished (but whose long run of showing the first movie is something of legend. By the time Return of the Jedi opened, we had moved to Western New York, so I saw that one at the Cinemas III at the Olean Center Mall in Olean, NY. I would later see all of the Prequels, all three of them, at the Regal Cinemas in Orchard Park.
Where will I see Episode VII? We’ll see!
5. Did you go to any of them on opening night?
It’s interesting. A New Hope was out for several months before we saw it, but I was five, so I had no idea. I’m not sure how long The Empire Strikes Back was out before I saw it, but it was a couple of weeks, at least. Jedi, I saw in its third day of release. We saw TPM on opening day, after seeing a stage production of The Phantom of the Opera the night before, so we’ve always called that “Phantom Weekend”. AotC and RotS? Both of those, I attended midnight showings. Both were unforgettable.
6. Who is your favorite character from the Original Trilogy?
Who else? Han Solo.
7. Who is your favorite character from the prequels, if you have one?
Who else? Obi Wan Kenobi.
I also like Anakin and Padme a lot more than most do, apparently. And Mace Windu. And Queen Jamilla.
And I don’t hate Jar Jar.
8. Have you read any of the books or comics?
I was reading the Marvel series way back while the original films were coming out. I should do a longer blog post on those someday, but some of those stories still hold up pretty well, especially the ones they did between ANH and TESB, when nobody knew anything. The Marvel writers did things like have Han pay off Jabba, only to learn when they got the TESB script that they had to reinstate the price on Han’s head, and so on. Fun stories, from the days when Star Wars was more swashbuckling space opera adventure than the Campbellian fantasy it would turn out to be.
As for novels, I read one of Brian Daley’s Han Solo books back then, and then some of the “Expanded Universe” novels, when that started up. I quickly fell behind and then stopped entirely when they got to the point of releasing three or four novels a year. It just got to be too much. But I’ll never forget walking into Walden Books, seeing a new Star Wars book sitting there by some guy named Zahn, and thinking, “Wow, Star Wars is a going concern again?”
9. Favorite book or series? Favorite SW author?
Timothy Zahn, I think.
10. Favorite comic?
As mentioned above, the Marvel series, most likely. I haven’t read that many of the comics since then, and as I write this, Dark Horse Comics’s long history of Star Wars comics is coming to a close, which is a shame. All those comics will still exist, of course.
11. Favorite character from the Expanded Universe (EU)?
Mara Jade.
12. Favorite villain from the EU?
The standard answer here is probably Admiral Thrawn, but you know who I really liked? Captain Pellaeon. I liked how he wasn’t really evil, so much as a guy who just couldn’t find a reason to do anything other than just keep working at his job, even when it was unlikely that his job even existed anymore.
13. If you had your own ship from the Star Wars Universe (SWU), what would it be? It could be a mash-up/ugly.
The Millennium Falcon. Is there another possible answer?
14. Would you rather be Sith or Jedi?
Sith are evil and Jedi are stilted and a bit dull. Can I be a Corellian instead?
15. Would you rather be a Rebel or a member of the Imperial Navy? What would your role be?
I’d like to be a Rebel mechanic, one of the guys who fills and fixes the ships. That would be cool.
16. If you could be any species from the SWU which would you be?
If I have to be non-human, probably a Twi’lek. You can wear those tentacle things like a scarf.
17. If you could date any species from the SWU which would you pick?
A Twi’lek, obviously!
18. If you could date/marry any character from the SWU who would you pick?
Yeesh, this is getting a little fan-service-like, innit? If I didn’t think that Domina Tagge would kill me, then…maybe Domina Tagge.
19. If you were going to bone just one Star Wars character and you never had to see them again, who would you pick?
Oh, come on.
20. If you could BE one SW character, EU or not, who would you be?
You know who I like? Dex, the giant fat alien who runs the diner on Coruscant and has information. That would be cool.
21. What would your SWU name be?
Darth D. McDartherson III. (Sorry, this quiz is getting a bit silly.)
22. What color would your lightsaber be, what kind would it be (double-bladed, single blade), would you dual-wield, and what kind of grip would it have?
How about yellow? Nobody did anything with yellow.
As for grip…just a standard straight grip, I guess. Or the curved one like Darth Tyrannus’s.
I wonder why they only had lightsabers? Why not light-daggers or light-lances? A teeny Jedi-army knife with a three-inch lightblade might be cool!
23. Do you own SW merchandise?
Yup.
24. How much, to date, do you think you’ve spent on SW merchandise?
Books and a few toys and some art…maybe a couple hundred bucks. Not all that much, since it’s been spread over thirty years or so.
25. What is your favorite SW possession?
My die-cast Millennium Falcons, most likely. Or my copy of The Art of Star Wars, which dates back to the late 80s. JW Rinzler’s three Making Of… books are indispensible.
26. Do you have a favorite SW artist? If so, who?
Ralph McQuarrie, obviously. Honorable mentions to Drew Struzan and the Brothers Hildebrandt for their poster art.
27. Are there items you do not own but covet? What are they?
It might be memory playing tricks on me, but I remember seeing in 1980 or so a die-cast Millennium Falcon in a toy store that was about four or five inches in diameter. (The ones I own now are two inches.) I’d love to have one.
28. Are there items that are not made but that you wish were made? What are they?
No idea, really. I’m not much into collecting that kind of thing, really – I’m mostly happy with what I have.
29. Did Han shoot first?
Yes, but in all honesty, I don’t really care all that much. I object to Lucas changing this because it destroyed one of the movie’s biggest laughs. I reject, completely and utterly, any notion that this somehow changes Han Solo’s character in any way.
30. Did Boba Fett, in your opinion, ever leave the Sarlacc or did he die there?
Maybe once, but I’d hate to think he was some kind of superhuman who kept surviving anything and everything ever thrown at him.
31. Are there things about the movies you wish you could change? If so, name three.
Erm…see my Fixing the Prequels series: The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith. As far as the original movies go, maybe change Boba Fett’s demise a bit to give Han some intentional action that does him in, as opposed to an accident. Other than that, not really. Maybe cut out a little of the “funny” stuff with the Ewoks.
32. Which era would you want to live in?
There doesn’t seem to be huge difference between the eras in the films (and why would there be, they’re only separated by about twenty years), so sometime in there would be fine. Preferably on one of the outer worlds where the Empire hasn’t quite got ‘round to totally taking over yet.
33. What SW games have you played?
None, since the arcade games. I’m a terrible gamer.
34. Do you play/own Star Wars Miniatures?
No.
35. Favorite SW costume for men?
Han’s get-up in TESB. He had a jacket on in that movie, not the vest.
36. Favorite SW costume for women?
Honestly, while everyone else is ogling Princess Leia in the gold bikini, the dress the Ewoks made for her always stunned me. Still does, actually.
37. Have you ever dressed up as a SW character? Who/When/Why?
No. Cosplay isn’t really my thing. I could do it, but I just don’t have the time to invest in it.
38. Do you ever have SW sex fantasies? If so, have you ever acted them out?
Like I’d tell you.
39. Do you Ship any SW characters who aren’t together? Who/why?
No.
40. Have you ever written SW fan fiction? Can we read it?
Funny you should ask, because in a way, you CAN read it!
41. Have you been to a Celebration or plan on going to one?
Haven’t, but would love to. They’re never anywhere near Buffalo, though.
42. Have you ever been to Star Wars Weekends at Walt Disney World?
No, but I would, if the stars aligned!
43. Do you wish they had Star Wars Weekends at Disneyland?
No. (Simply because California’s on the other end of the country from me. I have no problem with them having them, I just don’t care.)
44. Best section you’ve experienced on Star Tours?
I don’t recall it much, other than the ominous feeling when you’re falling toward the Death Star.
45. What initially brought you to the SW fandom?
I saw the original when I was six years old. I was done-for from that moment on. Everything since then for me, creatively, has been colored by Star Wars. I see the world through Star Wars-colored glasses!
46. Do you consider yourself a SW Fanboy or Fangirl?
“Fanboy” tends to be a term of derision, so no. I prefer “geek”.
47 Have you seen Fanboys? Favorite character and/or quote?
Nope.
48. Do you wish they would make 7, 8, and 9 or do you think they should be done with it?
Obviously this quiz originated before the Disney sale and the announcement of Episodes VII, VIII, and IX. I’m fine with it, but at the same time, it feels like an add-on to me. I’ll see it, you bet, but I could have lived perfectly happily with Star Wars being done.
(Interestingly, it’s always worth going back to George Lucas’s actual thoughts on Episodes VII, VIII, and IX from back in the late 70s. The “He always said it would be nine movies!” trope isn’t quite accurate.)
49. If they ever made 7, 8, and 9, do you think it should continue the Skywalker Legacy or use entirely new characters? Or something different?
As long as there are Star Wars stories being filmed under that include “Episode [number]” in the title, they should be about some generation of Skywalkers. Other tie-in movies? Fine. But I want Skywalkers. They’re totally central.
50. Do you watch The Clone Wars?
I’ve watched several episodes and been impressed with them. I need to watch more, obviously.
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“Shiny in the Black”: A FIREFLY Christmas! (part four and conclusion)
(Concluding my repost of this Very Special, but not in the Blossom way, Episode of Firefly.)
part two
part one
“Those aren’t toys,” Kaylee said. “Those are agricultural supplies for a new colony. Did you change the job while you were out?”
“Seal it back up,” Mal said. “That stuff is perishable, and by breaking the seal, we’ve started the decay process.”
The crew stood around, staring at the crate that was supposed to contain toys for the children of the orphanage on Haven but really contained farming seed and fertilizer that had supposedly been destined for Whitefall. Jayne and Book lifted the facing of the crate back into place and restored the seals. When they were done, Jayne stepped back and looked at Mal.
“Well, Mal, guess we got ourselves another hiccup.”
“Yeah, looks that way.” Mal muttered another curse in Chinese and then he kicked the crate for good measure.
“That won’t hurt the crate,” River said.
“It will hurt your foot if you do that again, though,” Simon said.
“So, what now?” Jayne said. “That’s it then, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” Mal said. “I’m thinkin’.”
Zoe cleared her throat. “Captain, you know Jonas better than any of us. How likely is he to hold this against us?”
“Worried about us having another enemy?”
“I’m running out of space on the piece of paper where I keep their names written down, sir.”
“Yeah. Preacher, how did this happen?”
“I have no idea, Captain,” said Book. “I double-checked the numbers. We had the right slot number in the warehouse. The only way this happens is if the warehouse workers put the crates in the wrong slots themselves.”
And with that, a silence settled over the crew as they realized what had happened.
“Well, this is new,” said Jayne. “Never stolen the wrong goods before.”
“Yeah, this is definitely a wrinkle we haven’t tried before,” said Mal. “All right, I’m open to suggestions.”
“Suggestions for what?” It was Wash, who had just come down from the bridge. “Everyone’s looking awfully glum here.”
“We stole the wrong goods, honey,” Zoe said.
“Now there‘s something we haven’t done before!” Wash said. “Now what?”
“See?” Mal said. “Took him all of two sentences to get up to speed on this.”
“What do we do?” Kaylee asked. “Captain?”
“Maybe the children want to play as farmers,” River offered. “They can grow their own vegetables and work the soil.”
“River,” Book said, “the orphanage is in the middle of a city that’s a hundred miles in diameter. There’s no soil except what’s in the decorative flower pots.”
“That sounds depressing,” River said. “Children need space.”
“Well, we can’t solve every problem at once,” Zoe said. “Captain, Jonas is gonna know that he can’t open the crate without breaching the shelf-life of the goods that he thinks are in there.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Mal said. “If that’s the case, then Jonas has no idea that he’s got a crate full of toys on his ship. Which means that he’s on his way to Whitefall. He won’t know anything is wrong until Patience does. Of course, knowing Patience, she’ll have already tried to shoot him.”
“So that’s it then,” said Jayne. “We ain’t gotta do a gorram thing. Let them shoot each other and then we can sell this stuff to whoever takes over for Patience. Make back our coin, and then some.”
Mal considered this. After a moment, Shepherd Book stepped forward.
“Captain, I know that your ship is not a democracy, but I must voice my opposition to what Jayne has suggested.”
“Yeah, I thought you might,” Mal said. “Wash, go get us on a course for Whitefall. Get us there fast. We want to get there before the shooting starts.”
“You got it,” Wash said as he headed back up the stairs. “A pilot’s job is never done! Until he lands, then he’s done until the next job….”
“Zoe,” Mal said, “I’m gonna need your help figurin’ out how to approach this one. We’ve got to make a switch without both Jonas and Patience deciding that I’m cheating them.”
“Sounds like a challenge,” Zoe said.
“Why I’m givin’ it to you.”
“Wait a minute!” Jayne said. “We’re gonna try to get the toys back? Anybody else think that’s crazy?”
Simon shrugged. “I think it’s kind of shiny,” he said. Kaylee grinned at him.
“Doc, I’m gonna do somethin’ hurtful to you someday soon,” Jayne said. “Mal, how can you even consider this?”
Mal looked at Shepherd Book. “I took a job,” he said. “And even though the job’s starting to bring some trouble, truth is, that’s what jobs do. And there ain’t a job in the ‘Verse that I’m like to walk away from once I take it.”
Jayne shook his head. “I can’t ruttin’ believe this.”
“Hey, look at the bright side,” Mal said. “We’re goin’ to Whitefall to try and do business with Patience.”
“Probably be some shooting,” Zoe added.
Jayne laughed harshly. “Day’s gonna come when you’re not gonna be able to buy me off by lettin’ me shoot some folk,” he said.
Mal considered that. “Well, that’s gonna be an interesting day. Come on, Zoe. We need to brainstorm.”
It took them the better part of a day to get to Whitefall, which was a pretty miserable and dusty rock way out on the fringes. Malcolm Reynolds didn’t much like this world; it was run by a crusty woman named Patience who didn’t tend to practice any, and who had a nasty habit of trying to shoot him. She’d succeeded once, but the last time, Mal had got the better of her. He’d done the job, and despite some unkind words as regarding his character, he’d gotten paid. But this one was going to be tricky, no doubt about that.
“OK, Mal, we’re here,” Wash said as Whitefall loomed before the ship. “Now what?”
“Well, Patience is a woman of habit,” Mal said. “So I’m thinkin’ she’ll want to meet with Jonas in that same spot she chose to meet us in last time we were here. Good spot for an ambush. So we’ll go there and hope we’re in time to avoid some fisticuffs and general tomfoolery.”
Zoe looked at Mal. “‘Tomfoolery’, sir?”
“What? You know I like to dust off archaic words now and then.”
“Part of what makes you charming, sir.”
“Thanks for sayin’. Now, if I’m Patience, I’m puttin’ two snipers in the hills around that meeting spot, after we took care of the one she ahd there last time. And Jonas is gonna have his own sniper up there somewhere too. So Jayne and the Shepherd will take care of the snipers for us, and then we walk in and make everybody happy.”
“Aren’t we doin’ an awful lot of counting on the Shepherd to shoot people on this job?” Zoe asked.
“Probably, but that book of his is nonspecific as regards kneecaps and elbows, if I remember right. Wash, same landing spot as before.”
“Sure thing, Mal,” Wash said. “And I’ve got Jonas’s ship on the scanner now. They’re landing as we speak, two hilltops over. Looks like we got here in time.”
“It’s a Christmas miracle, Captain,” Zoe said.
Mal rolled his eyes. “Now don’t you start,” he said. “Let’s go get ready. Wash, put her down.”
“Sure thing, Captain,” Wash said.
Mal and Zoe walked down to the hold, where Jayne and Shepherd Book were waiting.
“Captain,” Book began, “I feel I should apologize for having gotten you into this business.”
“Did it with my eyes open,” Mal said. “But if you’re volunteering for a month of mess duty, I don’t think I’ll hear any objections from the rest of the crew.” He glanced around at Kaylee, Simon, River, and Inara, who all just stood there placidly. “And a month it is! All right, Zoe and me have come up with what we think is a nicely nuanced plan.”
Jayne grunted. “Book and I take out the snipers and cover you while you and Zoe try to talk some sense into Patience and Jonas?”
“Yeah, that’s about it.”
“We gotta start comin’ up with plans that don’t have quite as much ‘if’ in ’em,” Jayne grumbled.
“Every time I ask you for input, your first words are ‘I shoot them’.”
“Yeah. Not a lot of ‘if’ when the other guy’s got bullets in him.”
“OK. Get that crate ready. And Kaylee, keep the engines warm. We may need to make a fast break for it.”
“Be easier if you’d let me replace that drive inducer that I keep warning you about,” Kaylee said.
“New year’s comin’,” said Mal.
The scene that confronted Mal and Zoe when they peered over the edge of the knoll above Patience’s rendezvous spot was about what Mal expected: Patience sat atop her horse, while her men had Jonas at gunpoint, and Jonas’s men had Patience’s men at gunpoint. Everybody had everybody else at gunpoint.
“Whole lot of gunpoint,” Mal muttered.
“Not too late to find a desk job, Captain,” Zoe replied.
“More of us than there are of you, Jonas,” Patience said. “And I’ve got a sniper aimin’ at you right now. You’re not walkin’ away.”
“I got a man took out your sniper,” Jonas replied. “I’m not stupid, Patience. And my men are better shots than yours. Now how about you toss me the coin and we’ll be on our way?”
“All I see here is a big crate,” Patience said. “You might as well open her up and let us see the goods.”
“Suits me fine,” said Jonas. “Randy? Open it.”
Keeping his hands visible at all times, Randy popped open the crate and swung it open. “Uh, Captain?” he said.
“This some kind of joke, Jonas?” Patience asked. “That don’t look like seed and fertilizer to me.”
“What?” Jonas turned to Randy. “What is she gorram talking about?”
“This crate, sir,” Randy said. “It’s full of…toys.”
“Toys?”
“Toys, sir.”
“Toys?!“
“This some kind of joke, Jonas?” Patience sounded annoyed. “So you’re gonna dump fake goods on me after you have my money?”
Jonas looked uncomfortable.
“Do we go down now?” Zoe asked.
“Shhhh,” Mal said. “Things haven’t gone south enough yet.”
“Patience,” Jonas said. “Uhhhh….”
“I’d like to hear an explanation,” Patience said. “Before I shoot you myself.” She pulled out her pistol.
“Malcolm Reynolds cheated me!” Jonas said.
“Reynolds?” Patience’s eyebrows went up. “What’s he got to do with this?”
“Funny you should ask!” Mal called out as he rose up and sauntered over the knoll, his pistol in his hand but not aimed at anything. Zoe came behind him, her shotgun in her hand as well.
“Reynolds!” shouted both Patience and Jonas at the same time. Both also pointed their pistols at him, at the same time.
“Well there we go,” Mal said. “Two criminals suddenly united in purpose. Warms the heart, eh, Zoe?”
“Sure does, sir.”
“Mal, I’ll shoot you where you stand,” Patience said.
“And I’ll shoot you again before you hit the ground,” Jonas said.
“Sure,” Mal said. “But then you wouldn’t hear the explanation and my counter-proposal.”
“Explanation?” Jonas roared. “You switched the crates and took the good stuff! What were you going to do, let me get shot and then sell Patience the real goods?”
Mal thought. “Huh. Zoe, that might have worked.”
“Surprised you didn’t think of it, sir.”
“I gotta be goin’ soft in my old age.”
“Happens to the best of us, sir.”
“Jonas, we didn’t switch a gorram thing. The warehouse workers screwed up. Those crates were in the wrong spots. We took what we thought was our crate, but it was really yours. And you got ours, thinkin’ it was really yours. Kind of an irony, ain’t it?”
Patience rolled her eyes. “Right now I’m wondering which of you is the less competent one,” she said.
“Well, that would be him,” Mal said. “No offense, Jonas, but at least we discovered the problem and we’re here to make it right. Now here’s our proposal. We take our crate and go on our way. You get your crate, which we stashed about a mile away from here. Then you two finish your business and everybody goes away happy. Or we go away happy and you shoot each other. Whatever you prefer.”
“Or I just take all the goods and keep my coin,” Patience said. “Mal, you’re still not very bright. Neither are you, Jonas. You may have taken out one of my snipers, but I put two up there.”
“Yeah, Patience,” Mal said. “As to that, we took out Jonas’s sniper who took out your sniper. And then we took out your other sniper. So now the only two snipers up there are mine. And they’re good, believe me. Aren’t they, Zoe?”
“The best, sir.”
“Yup. So, Jonas, we’ll take this crate now. Yours is a mile that way.” He pointed. “No reason for anybody to get shot.”
“You takin’ my hauler too, Mal?”
Mal shrugged. “I suppose we can leave it behind once we get our goods back on my ship. As a good-will gesture and all.”
“Or we can come with you and make sure we get it back,” Jonas said.
Mal shrugged. “Or that,” he conceded. “We just want our goods.”
“A bunch of toys?” Jonas shook his head. “What are you up to, Reynolds?”
“I’m doin’ a job,” Mal said. “Why does everybody keep asking me that?” He turned to Patience. “Give him the coin, Patience, and go get your box and keep running your little world. Nobody needs to get shot here. It’s Christmas.”
Patience blinked. “It’s what?”
“Never mind. Just get out of here.”
Patience sighed. “Every time you show up on this world I end up losing money,” Patience said as she tossed a sack of coin to Jonas. “That crate ain’t there and I’m puttin’ a bounty on you, Mal.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve got a track record here, Patience,” Mal said. “I get you the goods and then I get paid. The way a transaction’s supposed to be. You’re the one likes shootin’ people and tryin’ to get out of paying, so I’d just as soon you rode off with your men and stopped disparaging me.”
Patience laughed. “Fine, Mal, have it your way. But if you don’t mind some advice, you need to stop expecting transactions to run the way they’re supposed to. That’s why you’re still flying around in a rustbucket.” She gestured to her men, who stood down, and then they rode off.
“She only says that because she can’t fly in a ship for ten minutes without puking,” Zoe said.
“Yeah, well, let’s get this stuff back to Serenity. We’ve still got a job to do. Jonas, if you would?”
Jonas sighed. “You heard him, men. Let’s go. Least we can with him saving our bacon on this one.”
Jonas’s men grumbled but obeyed. Mal spoke into the mouthpiece on the wire he wore under his coat. “Jayne? Preacher? You can come down now. We’re all good here.”
“How’d you know where to find us, anyway?” Jonas asked.
“Dealt with Patience before,” Mal replied. “Let’s move.”
“Did you really leave her goods a mile away?”
“Yup.”
Jonas shook his head. “You could’ve kept them, sold them someplace else. Made double profit.”
“Thought of that,” Mal said. “But I need to be able to do business. No need to make an enemy out of Patience until I have to.”
They moved the crate of toys back to Serenity, whereupon Jonas ordered his men to start back to their own ship. Mal ordered his crew to get the ship ready for departure, and then he went outside with Jonas.
“Well, Mal,” Jonas said, “it was a pleasure, as always. Now, if that’s all–“
“Not quite,” Mal said. “I’ll be taking the coin that Patience gave you.”
Jonas blinked. “What?”
“You heard me,” Mal said. “You took coin from me that wasn’t yours to take. And despite that, I still came here and saved your gorram hide. Way I see it, you owe me. Let’s square up right now. Get it over with.”
Jonas stared at him. Mal sighed.
“Jonas, you really want to see what a good draw I am? And what a good shot?”
Jonas sighed and pulled the bag of coin from his jacket pocket and flipped it to Mal. “Every time I wonder how it is you stay in business, you pull something like this out of your hat.”
“Not much of a secret,” Mal said. “I don’t set my sights too high. I just keep flyin’.”
“Yeah. Well, do me a favor and don’t tell anyone you took my coin from me.”
“As far as I’m concerned, it was a payment offered in good will.”
Jonas nodded. “Yeah, call it that. But stay away from me for a while, would you?” He lit a cigar and went to join his men. Mal turned and went aboard the ship.
“OK, Wash, let’s fly. We need to be in Haven’s air within twelve hours.”
“We can just make it,” Wash replied over the loudspeaker.
Serenity lifted off.
Eleven and one half hours later, they were flying toward Haven. Mal came up to the bridge, where Wash was looking at a scanner.
“So?” Mal asked. “What’s the new problem?”
Wash blinked. “I didn’t call you!”
“I know, but we’re due for the next problem with this job. What is it?”
Wash pointed to the scanner. “Alliance ship in orbit. They haven’t scanned us yet, and maybe they won’t, but if they do–“
“They might board us,” Mal said. “Then again, they might not. They’re in stationary orbit?”
“Uh-huh,” Wash said. “Right above the part of town where our Shepherd’s orphanage is.”
Mal muttered several curses in Chinese.
“That’s what I said,” Wash replied.
“All right. Let me think.” Mal thought. And then he pressed the intercom button. “Would everybody please report to the hold? You too, Inara. I need everybody.”
The plan was this: Mal, Zoe, and Wash would stay aboard Serenity, in stationary orbit on the other side of the planet. They would load all of the toys onto Inara’s shuttle – individually, because the shuttle wasn’t big enough for something the size of that crate – and then Inara would fly down to the orphanage in the middle of the night, when Shepherd Book assured them no one would notice something like a shuttle landing on the roof. Then, Jayne, Book, Simon, Kaylee, and River would take each toy individually to a child.
It wasn’t one of Mal’s most thought-out plans, but it was the best he could come up with on fairly short notice. Mal thought it was a decent enough plan, until Zoe said “Nice plan, sir,” which was what she usually said when she thought his plans were scenarios for utter disaster. But that was the plan, and so it was that on the night before Christmas, when all through the orphanage not a child was stirring, a shuttlecraft flown by a registered Companion came down to land on the roof.
“All right, we’re here,” Jayne said as he grabbed an armful of toys. “Let’s get this ruttin’ job over with.”
“Said with the true spirit of the day,” Shepherd Book said. “All right, everyone follow me. And keep quiet. The whole place is asleep.”
“They always knew when I was sleeping,” River said. “They knew when I was awake.”
“She’s gonna be all right, isn’t she?” Jayne asked.
“Sure,” Simon said. “Isn’t she always?”
Jayne shook his head as Shepherd Book led them across the roof and into the orphanage via the roof access door, which Book lockpicked open in seconds.
“Real great security here,” Jayne remarked.
“It’s an orphanage,” Book said. “One where everybody knows there’s nothing worth stealing.”
They went downstairs, where they found themselves in a very large room, with bunk beds running down each side, and a child sleeping in each bed.
“All right, there are four more rooms like this,” Book whispered. “Every child gets a toy.”
“Right,” Jayne said, and he ran off and started randomly sticking a toy on each bed.
“Jayne!” Kaylee protested. “You can’t do it like that! You can’t give a boy a doll!”
“Why not?” Jayne asked. “They don’t like it they can trade.”
“Just do it right,” Kaylee said.
“What kind of toys did he play with?” Simon muttered.
In this way they went through the room, distributing a toy to each child. Somehow, miraculously, they got through all of the rooms without waking a single child, giving a toy to each one, one toy to each of three hundred children.
Except the last bed, which, when Jayne approached it, he discovered was empty. No child here, just rumpled sheets. Kid probably got up to go to the bathroom, or get a drink of water. “Huh,” Jayne thought. He looked at the toy in his hand – a teddy bear – and decided that he rather liked it. He’d always wanted one when he was a kid, and never got one. And this one was real nice, with a bow around its neck and everything. So there was a toy left over. So what? Kid shoulda been there in bed. Kid’s loss. He turned and headed back for the ship.
Meanwhile, River was taking her time over each gift, gently laying it on each bed, and whispering a rhyme over each child. What made it take even longer was that she was inventing each rhyme off the top of her head. Simon wondered if he should intercede, but since she was speaking in verse about things that weren’t somehow grimly dark or eerily foreboding, he thought it was best to just let her go.
Also meanwhile, Kaylee found herself wondering if it was really fair to try to pigeonhole these kids into girl toys and boy toys. After all, her toys had been wrenches and hammers and drivers and blast drills and parts from a hundred different ship engines, and look how she’d turned out! Nothin’ to be ashamed of. It was a fine life, even if once in a while she wanted something a little more than engine parts and dirty overalls.
Also meanwhile, Inara saw that the orphanage’s one lone security guard had had his curiosity piqued by some strange noises, and he came shuffling up the stairs to find a shuttle sitting on his roof. He was about to blow an alarm whistle when she came down and silenced him with a look and a flash of leg. It always worked, especially with young men like this. Barely old enough to grow a beard. Staring at her as though he’d just seen an angel. Sad world, Haven, she thought. No wonder Companions almost never come here.
“Is there a girl you like?” she asked him.
He managed to nod.
She removed a ruby brooch from her robe and handed it to him. He gulped.
“Give this to her,” she said. “And say nothing of me tonight.”
He managed to nod, again. A major accomplishment, that. And so she sent him on his way, knowing that this would be their little secret, forever. Inara could keep secrets, and what would he say? Would he talk of the beautiful woman in the spaceship on his roof? No. Of course not. She smiled.
Finally meanwhile, Shepherd Book went all the way to the lowest level of the orphanage, where the oldest kids were. These kids were in the worst shape, the ones most likely to end up in something a bit worst than Mal’s line of work, the ones most likely to end up on the wrong end of someone’s gun or floating dead through the Black. He had little hope that a toy, just one toy, would be enough to budge more than maybe one or two of them off the trajectory their lives had them on, but lots of miracles had started from smaller stuff than a single toy. He laid each one on a bed, and tried not to linger too much over the one particular bed, the one over there on the left. On his way back up to the roof, he paused at the door to the headmaster’s apartment. He wondered if he might say hello, under other circumstances. Or if he might rather go in there with a gun instead of a bible. He lingered there only a moment and then returned to the roof.
“Are we all here?”
“We’re just waiting on Jayne,” said Simon.
“Where is he?!”
At that moment, Jayne was muttering, “Where’s the gorram stairs around here?” He’d gotten lost. It was a bigger orphanage than he’d though, and now he had no idea how to get back up to the roof. But he had to get up there, fast; the night was getting old and people would be getting up soon. He rushed around, all over the place, looking behind every door, until he found the stairs up. “‘Bout time,” he said. And then he stopped, because there was an eight-year-old girl looking at him.
“Uhhh…hi there,” he said. “You should be in bed, youngster.”
“I couldn’t sleep,” said the girl. “I have bad dreams. I wanted a drink of water.”
“Well, you got your drink, so back to bed.”
“You’re not from here,” the girl said. “Are you here to steal things?”
“No,” Jayne said. “Not this time, anyway. Maybe tomorrow, haven’t figured out the next job yet. Don’t know. Gotta keep moving.” But he didn’t move. That girl just stood there, looking at him. All big-eyed, with her tangled hair and bedrobe that wasn’t filthy but had seen better days anyway…. “I think your eyes are stuck,” he said. “I gotta go.”
“Bye,” she said. And she stood there watching as he went halfway up the stairs, where he stopped.
“Aww, gorram it,” he said as he turned back and came back down. “This is for you.” He handed her the teddy bear. “Hold onto it tight when you sleep. Might help with them dreams. I got a preacher friend who says this is Christmas, so…have a ruttin’ happy Christmas.” And then he went up the stairs, practically running up them, to get away from the girl with the big eyes.
“That all the toys?” he asked when he got on board the shuttle.
“There were about twenty or so left over,” said Simon. “I left those in a playroom.”
“We’re all ready, right?” Inara called back.
“We’re all here!” Book said. “Close her up and let’s go home.”
Inara guided the little shuttle back into the air, and up into the sky toward the planet’s other side, where Serenity lay in orbit.
“What took you so long, Jayne?” Kaylee asked.
“Got lost,” Jayne said. “And…there was a little girl. Don’t worry, I gave her a toy.”
River pointed at his shirt, his red shirt. “A man with a beard wearing red came in the night to give her a present,” she said. “Just like the old stories!”
Jayne stared at her. “What is she ruttin’ talkin’ about?”
“Nothing,” said Book.
When they arrived on Serenity, Mal was there, waiting.
“Nice work,” he said.
“Thank you, Captain,” said Shepherd Book. “I appreciate it.”
“I did a job,” Mal said. “Soon as that tree gets dry and starts dropping those sharp needles all over my mess–“
“I’ll have it down, sir.”
Mal nodded and headed for his bunk. “Nice work, everyone,” he called out. “Zoe, wake me when we get to Persephone.”
A few weeks later they’d done another job, and they all had a little extra money. Not a lot, but some. So they all decided to exchange gifts. Mal wasn’t sure whose idea it was, or if it even was anyone’s idea, but it seemed to happen anyway.
Zoe gave her dear husband Wash that stegosaurus figurine he’d wanted. Wash gave his beloved wife Zoe a brand new leather vest.
Shepherd Book gave Simon an old copy of a very old anatomy book, a ‘classic text’ on the subject, from Old Earth. Simon gave River a rose made out of glass, with gold leaf on the petals; she commented on the fact that it had thorns. River gave the Shepherd a new Bible, which she promised him she would leave ‘uncorrected’.
Kaylee gave Jayne a new carrying case for Vera, his favorite gun; Jayne gave Inara a robe that she knew she would look stunning in but would never ever ever wear in front of Jayne. And Inara gave Kaylee a new engine stabilizer and one of her own robes.
And Mal? He got what he always wanted. He got to keep flying.
Merry Ruttin’ Christmas
and a Happy Gorram New Year!!!
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Fixing the Prequels: Finale
The Fixing the Prequels series was never, as I’ve noted many times throughout, a project for me to complain about the much-hated films. My goal was always to acknowledge the Prequel Trilogy’s very real problems by suggesting ways they could have been overcome whilst preserving the main story, while also arguing that the films are often much, much better than their reputations have developed. I intended this series to end a long time ago, and my hope was that as time went by, the Prequels would gain a bit in the main estimation of pop culture. I never expected them to become beloved, but I hoped that their many good qualities would look better from a distance, and the angry and often obnoxious rhetoric about them whenever they were brought up would become less toxic.
This, sadly, has not happened.
The tone regarding the Prequel Trilogy has remained as belligerently hostile as ever, with seemingly every discussion of Star Wars that comes up either devolving into, or at least involving a substantial detour, into “Why the Prequels were awful” and “Why George Lucas is the worst thing ever” and all the other boring memes, like “Lucas needed someone to tell him ‘No’” and the always-dreary appeals that all the best thinking about the Prequels was ever done by the noxious Red Letter Media guy. Even the sale of Star Wars to Disney, with the subsequent rejuvenation of the franchise with a new trilogy of films plus a number of spin-off movies, ended up with a lot of cheering that “Hooray! Finally we get Star Wars that has nothing to do with George Lucas!” and “I wonder if they’ll completely ignore the Prequels!” and so on.
To this day, while I understand a lot of the criticism these three films have received, I’ve never understood the outright hatred of them. Their mere existence serves to dredge up a fairly ugly side of fandom every time they arise in conversation. I just end up shrugging and saying “Oh well”, all at the same time avoiding a lot of Star Wars discussion, because I just tire of saying the same things, over and over again.
Anyway, I have some final thoughts on things regarding the Prequels and Star Wars in general, so I thought I’d gather them in one place as an epilogue to this series in general.
Midichlorians
Might as well start here. I touched on the midichlorians in several places throughout the series (here and here, mainly), and my view on them has generally not changed at all. I see the midichlorians as an error on George Lucas’s part, but not from a philosophical standpoint but rather from a storytelling standpoint. I’ve never bought into the notion that by introducing midichlorians as some kind of “mechanism” for the Force, Lucas undermined the mysticism of the original trilogy. The problem is that there just doesn’t seem to have been any story reason to introduce them. The midichlorians add absolutely nothing to the narrative. They’re just kind of “there”, gumming up the works. There’s a very vague implication in Revenge of the Sith, when Palpatine tells Anakin that Darth Plagueis was able to influence the midichlorians to “create life”, that somehow he is responsible for Anakin’s “virgin birth”, but that’s all we have to go on. It’s my understanding that one of the “Expanded Universe” novels actually did something with that concept, but I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter now anyway, as the whole “Expanded Universe” has been swept beneath the rug. The very base suggestion seem to be that the Force somehow noticed that it was out of “balance”, and that it therefore influenced the midichlorians to bring forth a specially powerful being to restore that balance. This, though, also is never really dealt with or stated outright, so the midichlorians remain what they always were: a vexing idea that seemed to have no real reason to be there in the first place.
The “Balance” of the Force
This, too, was a vexing concept that was never really discussed. The prophecy was that someone would bring “balance” to the Force, and it was pretty much assumed by everyone that Anakin was the “Chosen One”. Oddly, though, it was never really discussed at all just how the Force was out of “balance” in the first place. The Jedi seemed to assume that “balance” would mean the destruction of the Sith, but…we’re talking balance here, right? Equal measures of yin and yang, not all the way one way or the other. I suspect that what Lucas had in mind here was that a thousand years of the Jedi maintaining peace and justice in the Old Republic led to a calcified, entrenched group of Jedi who were pretty much so set in their ways as to never budge. This is hinted at a number of times in the Prequels, what with the Jedi’s surprise that the Sith could have returned without being noticed and other similar markers along the way. Not until Revenge of the Sith does Yoda note that they might have misread the prophecy all along.
The general implication is that Anakin must play his role, turning to the Dark Side and destroying the Jedi so that they might rise again, stronger and wiser. Metaphorically, Anakin is like the forest fire that clears the forest of dead brush that is choking off new growth, and that “balance” is not restored until Anakin personally destroys Emperor Palpatine, at the cost of his own life. With their deaths, Governor Tarkin’s words from A New Hope come true, as the last remnants of that earlier time are, at last, “swept away”.
All this plays into my notion that Lucas probably should have played more strongly with the angle that the Jedi were not in their prime at the time of their fall, but were actually succumbing to ruin and rot without ever realizing it. For years I’ve thought that the Jedi were roughly analogous to the Knights Templar, who also retreated so far into their own arrogant self-assurance that they too did not realize that their end was at hand almost until the moment the attacks came and they were tied to the stakes and the firewood at their feet lit.
No “signature” ship
Now here’s a criticism of the Prequel Trilogy that does not come up as often as some others, but it’s one that actually does have real resonance with me: there is no single ship that appears throughout the Prequels, no one ship to signify the Prequel era and tie the films together.
In space opera, ships are important. In fact, ships become characters themselves. In Star Trek, each iteration of the Enterprise has been a beloved part of each show or movie. Firefly fans, like myself, can’t imagine the show without Serenity. And in the Original Star Wars trilogy, the Millennium Falcon is as iconic as it gets. When Luke and company defeat Jabba the Hutt in Return of the Jedi, the real moment of triumph is not when Jabba’s sail barge explodes, but rather when we cut to space right after, and the Millennium Falcon soars to space again.
The Prequel Trilogy has no single ship to tie everything together and serve as a backdrop for the adventures within, and that’s a problem that I just couldn’t solve in this series, given my intent on keeping the main story of the Prequels intact. The closest we get is that a chrome-hulled Naboo cruiser appears in each film, but it’s a different ship each time. There isn’t one ship to serve as the backdrop for all the adventures; there’s no single ship that is the scene of victories and heartbreaks. Ships matter in space opera, and while there are a lot of neat ships in the Prequel Trilogy, none of them becomes a home to the story. A great ship is a character in itself, and the absence of one definitely hurt the Prequel Trilogy’s sense of inhabitability. There was never a really strong sense of returning to a familiar place, as there often was in the Original Trilogy when we saw the Falcon, or even Luke’s X-wing or the bridge of a Star Destroyer.
Palpatine’s “Long game”
This is, to me, an underrated aspect of the Prequel Trilogy. I remember after The Phantom Menace, people complaining about the fact that Palpatine/Sidious is exerting all that energy to get a treaty signed to make Naboo subservient to the Trade Federation, and pretty much the exact opposite happens – and yet, Palpatine still wins. Why did he care, then?
I suspect that he actually didn’t care. Not really. Whether the treaty got signed or not never really mattered; what he was doing was sowing discontent in the very fabric of the Republic. He was creating tension that he could then use to his advantage, giving rise to a notion of the Republic as increasingly faulty and unable to function. Whether or not Naboo fell in line or somehow managed to get off the hook was never of major concern, which suggests that Palpatine was actually a genius at adapting his plans and spotting opportunities while everyone else was merely reacting to day-to-day events. Consider: Palpatine was scheming the creation of the Clone Army a full ten years before a need for such a thing was even recognized. That’s a pretty big thing.
This, in turn, suggests that Palpatine’s eventual fall was due to his eventual failure to keep adapting to circumstances. As Luke Skywalker would eventually say, “Your overconfidence is your weakness,” and this turns out to be exactly right. The Palpatine of the Prequel Trilogy would never let a bunch of sentient teddy bears destroy his precious defense shield! The Palpatine of the Prequel Trilogy was never overconfident.
The nature of the Sith
The films never really make much clear about who the Sith are or what they were doing. The implication is that they are basically the Dark Side equivalent of Jedi, but some history would have been called for at some point. What was the “revenge” they were seeking? What were they trying to accomplish? The films didn’t really address any of this at all, which I always found slightly vexing. Some of this was eventually explored in Expanded Universe stuff, but again, the Expanded Universe has been wiped clean, so…I guess we still don’t know. (Maybe they could take the step of only erasing Expanded Universe stuff past Return of the Jedi, but even then, it’s still disappointing.)
Whither Star Wars?
Where does Star Wars go from here? I expect that Disney is going to try making it into a mega-franchise not unlike the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which will be interesting. Star Wars is going to end up looking very different each time out, I suspect. Will it be too much? Probably not for me, but I do kind-of worry about losing something along the way: the sense that Star Wars was about a single story. I’d hate to see Peter Jackson start making all manner of “Middle Earth” movies, about anything and everything he can think of, once The Hobbit is done. But even so, it’s a big Galaxy, with lots of stories to be told. Maybe one day The Empire Strikes Back will be joined, at long last, by another Star Wars film none of whose action takes place on Tatooine!
I’ll be there, whenever there’s a new Star Wars film to be seen. Will I have the same connection to Star Wars as it continues to unfold? I don’t know. I’ll see the movies, but there’s a very real sense in which my Star Wars ended when Revenge of the Sith came out. What comes now will be fun to watch (I hope), but it really feels like what’s coming is the next generation’s Star Wars, not mine. I hope they play nicely with the old toys. And if they find grand space opera to their liking, I’ve got one for them!
With that, I think I can safely, and finally, call Fixing the Prequels complete. This has been fun, and at long last, I can end with this:
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“Shiny in the Black”: A FIREFLY Christmas! (part three)
Continuing my repost of this Very Special (but Not Blossomesque) Episode of Firefly.
“Weapons on the ground!” the voice shouted. “Now!”
“Do it,” Mal said. He shot a look at Jayne, whose expression of disgust tended to be indistinguishable from his expression of being about to lose his temper. Slowly, Mal, Zoe and Jayne all laid their guns on the floor.
“Put that package on the floor too, preacher,” said the voice.
Book put the crate down.
“All right, face the crates.”
They complied.
“Put your hands on your head.”
They complied.
“Stand on your left feet and recite the first stanza the Alliance anthem!”
Mal glanced at Zoe. “Uh, what?”
Now the voice burst out in laughter. “All right, turn ’em off,” he said. The floodlights all shut off, and the light returned to the dim of the warehouse overhead lamps. Mal turned toward the source of the voice to see a stocky man dressed in old army fatigues approaching. The man was bald except for long, stringy hairs that hung from the back of his head; he had a thick mustache and three days’ growth of beard. He gave Mal a gap-toothed grin as he put his hands on his hips.
“Ahh, Mal, what am I gonna do with you?”
Mal and the others glanced around at the ‘lawmen’, and saw that they weren’t lawmen at all. They were a motley bunch of thieves. Not unlike themselves.
“Jonas,” Mal said. “Fancy meeting you here. I never figured you to be on Ariel. Kind of a rich world for your tastes, isn’t it?”
“Gotta go where the money is, my boy,” the man named Jonas said as he lit a cigar and took a few puffs. “‘Sides, ain’t planning on being here long. I’m guessing you weren’t either.”
“Not really,” Mal agreed. “Can we put our hands down? I don’t tend to find this posture conducive to friendly chat.”
“Ain’t so sure we’re being friendly,” Jonas said. “But sure, let your hands down. Don’t make a move toward those weapons, though.”
“Of course not,” said Mal. “After all, we’re just bein’ friendly.”
“I suppose we are,” Jonas replied as Mal and his people lowered their hands. “So, Mal, what are you doing here?”
“Same as you,” Mal said. “Doin’ a job.”
“And what would be the nature of that job?”
“Well, we’re purchasing the contents of this crate right here and going with them to a…client on Haven. Easy enough.”
“Sounds easy. Haven’s a piss-poor world…wait, did you say you were purchasing the goods?”
Mal shrugged. “Yeah, we’re doin’ it the honest way this time. Wanted to see what that was like.”
“Really. Honest. Dumpin’ a box of coin here and taking the box? That’s a new version of honest. Sounds to me like you’ve found a way of stealin’ that ends up costin’ you money.”
“Yeah,” Mal said, shooting a look at Shepherd Book, “I guess we didn’t really work all the kinks out.”
“Well, Mal, I can’t let you have this box. See, we need it, too. I’m doing a job, myself, and there’s a cantankerous old woman out on Whitefall that could use some of what’s in that box.”
“Whitefall?” Mal laughed. “You’re planning on doing business with Patience?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Oh, no reason,” Mal said. “Just make sure you plan for her to try to shoot you.”
“Nah,” Jonas said. “Patience and me go way back. I was the one who told her that she should shoot you if she got the chance.”
“Well that was nice of you,” Mal said. “She got the chance. Twice. I’m still here, still flyin’. Counts for somethin’.”
“Yeah, I guess it does. But I can’t let you take this box, coin or no. You see, Mal–“
“Hey, Captain!” It was one of Jonas’s men. Jonas rolled his eyes.
“What is it, Randy? I’m trying to be threatening here, and you’re interrupting.”
“I know, Cap, but this ain’t the box we’re here for.”
“What?”
“Look!” The wiry man named Randy held out a PDA for Jonas to look at. “See, that’s the number of the box we want. It’s the next one over. That one.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. That one’s got the farming seed and fertilizer in it. See, the one we want is in slot number 29-94-77. This slot is number 29-94-75.”
“Oh,” said Jonas.
“Well, this changes things a bit, doesn’t it?” Mal said.
“I think it does, Captain,” said Zoe.
“You see, Jonas, there’s no need to make this deal confrontational. Instead of goin’ that way, we can go another. We’re not even here for the same crate. We’ll take what we want, you’ll take what you want, and everybody’s happy.”
“Seriously, Mal? You’re after this crate? What’s in it?”
“I don’t think that really matters,” said Mal. “Haven’s not a big farming world, so you can bet I’m not looking for farming seed and fertilizer. Let’s just take what we all want and be done with it.”
Jonas kept his gun aimed at Mal as he considered things. Then he nodded at the Shepherd.
“Sure, Mal, we can do that. But I want the coin, too.”
Mal shrugged. “Give it to him, Preacher,” he said.
“Really?” asked Book.
“Yeah, really,” Mal said. “Plan was to leave the coin here anyway. But if you’re gonna take the coin, least you could do is have your boys load our crate onto our hauler for us.”
“I suppose I could do that,” Jonas said. His men grumbled, but he hissed them quiet. “A friendly gesture, right?”
“Yeah,” Mal said. “If we promise not to shoot you, can we pick up our guns now?”
“Sure,” Jonas said. “But we’ll still be coverin’ you until this is done.”
“I figured,” Mal replied as he picked up his pistol. The others followed suit.
“How’d you get in here, anyway?” Jonas asked.
“Door was open.”
“Well, I suppose you can thank me for that,” Jonas replied. “Paid the guards to leave it open and make themselves scarce. All right, boys, you heard the man. Let’s get these boxes loaded! Remember, this one here goes with them, that one down there goes with us. With the Shepherd’s coin.”
Book handed the box of coin to one of Jonas’s men, four of whom turned to the work of loading both crates while Jonas and Randy kept their pistols aimed at Mal and his people.
“Somethin’ here ain’t right,” Jayne said. “We’re gonna get screwed on this deal.”
“Well, Jayne, the screwing was built into the deal, so at least we’re not surprised by it.” Mal shook his head. “This is a weird damn job, though.”
“Nah,” Jayne replied. “There’s still some way this is gonna go south. You watch. Always happens to us.”
Mal rolled his eyes. “Not all our jobs end in disaster,” he said.
“Name one,” Jayne said.
“Well, there was–“
“You ended up drunk and with a con-woman pretending to be your wife.”
“Yeah, but it was good up to then.”
After about ten minutes, they were all outside and both crates were loaded onto their respective haulers.
“Well, Mal,” said Jonas, “I’d prefer if you’d drive off first. And try to stay out of my way in the future.”
“Pleasure doin’ business as always, Jonas,” Mal said. “But I wouldn’t mind pointin’ out that just because we were in the same place, doesn’t mean I was in your way.”
“Even so. I don’t want to get your luck on me, Reynolds. You have a history of taking on work that doesn’t leave you much of a profit. One day you’re gonna realize that ‘Just keep flying’ isn’t a great strategy for life.”
“Thanks for the wisdom, Jonas. Got some for you, too.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“Patience is gonna try to shoot you.”
Jonas grinned. “Let her try.” He gestured with his pistol, sending Mal and his people off.
“I’m tellin’ you, this is gonna be a bad deal for everybody,” Jayne said as they neared Serenity.
“Calm down, Jayne. Your opinion is noted.”
Mal drove the hauler back onto the ship’s cargo hold, and Kaylee closed the hatch behind them. Simon and River were there waiting; Wash was on the bridge, and he called down on the intercom.
“Captain?” Wash said. “I’m ready to lift.”
“What are you waiting for!” Mal responded. The ship shifted beneath their feet as the engines roared and Serenity lifted off. Book and Jayne were offloading the crate from the hauler and securing it.
“You see, everybody?” Mal said as he took off his overcoat and tossed it at the foot of the stairs. “Nice, simple job. No big worries, no big fuss. We’re out some coin, sure, but we’ve got a big crate full of nice, shiny toys that will make all the children in an orphanage on Haven happy.”
“Everything went all right?” said Simon. “No hiccups?”
“One little hiccup,” Mal said. “But it didn’t amount to much.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure of that, Captain,” said Shepherd Book.
“What?”
“Hey Mal,” Jayne said. “We got a problem.”
Mal glanced at Zoe. They walked aft, to where Book and Jayne were both staring at the crate, which Book had opened. Zoe took one look and let out a string of expletives in Chinese. Mal did the same, only with a string of completely different expletives in Chinese.
The crate was full of farm seed and fertilizer. They had the wrong crate.
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Where STARDANCER came from!
This post is cross-posted from ForgottenStars.net, and slightly spoilery for the book.
So, where exactly did I get the idea for Stardancer? Easy answer. I got it from a lot of places.
(This is long, but I hope it’s at least a little interesting!)
Like many a writer, my first efforts at fiction writing were fanfiction — Star Wars fanfiction, specifically. I suppose that’s not terribly surprising, huh? Fanfic has been the starting point for many a writer, and Star Wars was one of the biggies.
Now, when I was writing Star Wars fanfic, I wasn’t writing original stories in that universe. Instead I took the basic thrust of the Original Trilogy’s story and rewrote it, with “new” characters and some plot twists along the way. I changed Luke Skywalker from a farmboy to a competitive pilot. My Han Solo character acted the part of a cynical space-rogue, but that was just a front for his own revolutionary activities. Princess Leia? Well, she was the voluptuous space pirate who ended up being a part of the good guys. And instead of rebels versus a Galactic Empire, I had the galaxy basically divided into two “countries”, a democratic republic and a harsh Empire. These two entities had been at war for decades, and now it was coming to a violent head.
I kept some other stuff, of course. I had an Emperor and his Vader figure, although I played up the angle in the Original Trilogy of Darth Vader wanting to kill the Emperor and take over. The thrust of my Episode One (which coincided with Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope) was the necessity of destroying my Empire’s new superweapon; in my Episode II, the freshly defeated Empire — well, it struck back. And so on.
I finished my own version of the Star Wars trilogy, in the first year or two after I graduated college. Then, I started working on the first draft ever of my Arthurian novel, The Promised King (and let me tell you, that draft was an embarrassing mess). I thought I was done with Star Wars fanfic, but I found myself sucked back in, around the time The Phantom Menace came out. Now I was wanting to continue on — but not, as George Lucas was doing, by going backwards; I wanted to write what would have been a putative Star Wars Episode VII.
I did start that project, but I never finished it, choosing instead to eventually leave fanfic behind for good, as I started working on that Arthurian novel a lot and writing short fiction for attempted publication. Problem was, my space opera story for my own Episode IV was sticking in my head. The central idea was the discovery of a planet that has been literally sequestered from the rest of the Galaxy for centuries, a planet that was once a part of a vast Empire that has been gone for so long it’s almost completely forgotten — but its descendants are still lurking out there somewhere. I liked that idea, and filed it away in the back of my head. I knew I’d get back to that strange planet, whose inhabitants were forbidden to travel to the stars, but I knew it wasn’t going to be my re-worked Luke, Han, and Leia who went there.
So who would?
I had no idea.
I wasn’t worried about it. I wasn’t even consciously thinking about this, much. When I get ideas, I almost never jump on them as soon as they pop into my head. I let them marinate a bit. Or percolate. Or simmer for years and years and years — and I’m not kidding about that. This whole thought process, beginning with this little lost planet? That’s from 1999 or 2000. A long way back.
Meanwhile, at some point in 2001, I got a movie on a VHS tape that I had heard was very good, an animated film from Japan that would be suitable for The Daughter, was was only 2 at the time. The film? Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro.
If you’ve seen that film, you know that it’s about two young sisters, one of whom is roughly 13 or 14 and the other of whom is around 6 or 7. They move with their father to a small village, out near a hospital where their mother has had an extended stay, and here they have adventures, some of which are supernatural and involve the giant furry beast who lives in the nearby enormous tree. (Yes, it sounds heavier and more depressing here than it really is — the film is utterly delightful and magical and you should see it if you haven’t.)
I didn’t watch My Neighbor Totoro and immediately conclude that I should have two sisters go to my little lost planet. But that notion came along not very long after I saw the movie, and it’s clear to me that this is where that part of the puzzle came from. Now, I did make my two Princesses older than the ones in the film, but I liked the idea of the dynamic between two sisters. Brother-and-sister has been done a lot, but sister-and-sister, not quite so much.
From there, it sat in my mind. For years. I wrote a couple of pages, over ten years ago, just to see what it might feel like. I considered serializing the story online, in blog form, writing one chapter at a time. I kicked around a lot of options, through the last half of the 2000s, always kicking this idea of these two Princesses (because obviously they were Princesses!) and the odd planet they found, but never quite getting ’round to writing it.
I’m not sure what I was waiting for, but finally, sometime in 2011, I decided that it was time to stop waiting for the story to be “ready”. There is never a “ready”, when it comes to stories. I believed in this idea, more than any other I had (and I have quite a few), and I wanted to write it, more than any other. The question was, What was I waiting for?
And thus, it was off to the races.
Three years later, here we are!
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Fixing the Prequels: Revenge of the Sith (part eleven)
Previously:
And now we come to it: the final scenes of Revenge of the Sith.
Most of what I would change here would be to touch up the emotional undercurrent of everything that’s going on, and to address a few issues that have given some people (but not me) pause over the years. Largely, though, I tend to be of the view that the entire second half of this film is extremely good across the board, and close to pitch-perfect in spots.
When we left off, Obi Wan had just confronted Padme with the truth of what’s happening to Anakin. Here Padme decides to try to intercede before things fall apart too badly, and she gets in her ship and flies off to Mustafar. She has a stowaway on board, though: Obi Wan.
The scene that unfolds on the Mustafar landing platform is, to my mind, one of the most underrated scenes in the entire Prequel Trilogy. I suppose that by this point in the film, people’s minds are long made-up about this entire exercise, so it might not even matter how good a scene George Lucas turns in at this point. But anyway, for what it’s worth, I love just about everything about this scene: the hellish red pall over everything, the smoke and ash in the air, Natalie Portman’s capturing of Padme’s desperate attempt to talk Anakin away from his path of hatred, Hayden Christensen’s efforts to make it all sound so reasonable and then his whip-like shift to rage when it fails, and Ewan McGregor’s grounding of Obi Wan, trying to reassert a kind of parental control over Anakin even though he knows it’s going to fail.
There’s also an interesting call-back to The Phantom Menace. Remember in that film, during the duel at the end, the bit with the cascading force-fields that separated the combatants? Qui Gon Jinn knelt and meditated, while Darth Maul paced back and forth like a caged animal. Here, when Anakin feels Obi Wan’s pressure, he begins doing the same thing. Anyhow, I would only make a few very minor changes to any of this:
PADME: Oh, Anakin!
ANAKIN: It’s all right, you’re safe now. What are you doing out here?
PADME: I was so worried about you. Obi-Wan told me terrible things.
ANAKIN: What things?
PADME: He said you have turned to the dark side . . . that you killed younglings.
ANAKIN: Obi-Wan is trying to turn you against me.
PADME: He cares about us.
ANAKIN: Us??!
PADME: He knows . . . He wants to help you.
ANAKIN: Is Obi-Wan going to protect you? He can’t … he can’t help you. He’s not strong enough.
PADME: Anakin, all I want is your love.
ANAKIN: Love won’t save you, Padme. Only my new powers can do that.
PADME: At what cost? You are a good person. Don’t do this.
ANAKIN: I won’t lose you the way I lost my mother! I’ve become more powerful than any Jedi has ever dreamed of and I’ve done it for you. To protect you.
PADME: Come away with me. Help me raise our child. Leave everything else behind while we still can. [An addition here] You wanted to teach our child to use the Force!
She holds up his original lightsaber, his Jedi weapon. ANAKIN ignores it.
ANAKIN: Don’t you see, we don’t have to run away anymore. I have brought peace to the Republic. I am more powerful than the Chancellor. I can overthrow him, and together you and I can rule the galaxy. Make things the way we want them to be.
[Now, this is fascinating right here. Anakin appeals to Padme in a very bizarre way: “Join me and we shall rule the galaxy as husband and wife.” That he thinks this can possibly work at all is a testament to how screw-up Anakin is. There is no way that Padme would ever choose to become a dictatress. The other interesting thing here is that in twenty-whatever years, Anakin will make the same offer to his son: “Join me, and together we can rule the galaxy as father and son.” It fails then, too. For all the parallels between Anakin’s path and Luke’s, it’s telling that at the key moments, Luke is clearly also his mother’s son.]
PADME: I don’t believe what I’m hearing . . . Obi-Wan was right. You’ve changed.
ANAKIN: I don’t want to hear any more about Obi-Wan. The Jedi turned against me. Don’t you turn against me.
PADME: I don’t know you anymore. Anakin, you’re breaking my heart. I’ll never stop loving you, but you are going down a path I can’t follow.
[Padme’s line here, “You’re breaking my heart”, sometimes comes in for ridicule. I suppose I can kinda-sorta see where that’s coming from, but my general impression here is that Lucas is delving full-bore into his folkloric approach to storytelling. In fairy tales and stories based on them, such as Wagnerian operas, people are always dying of broken hearts.]
ANAKIN: Because of Obi-Wan?
PADME: Because of what you’ve done . . . what you plan to do. Stop, stop now. Come back! I love you.
ANAKIN: (seeing Obi-Wan) Liar!
PADME turns around and. sees OBI-WAN standing in the doorway of the Naboo Cruiser.
PADME: No!
ANAKIN: You’re with him. You’ve betrayed me! You brought him here to kill me!
PADME: NO! Anakin. I swear … I …
ANAKIN reaches out, and PADME grabs her throat as she starts to choke.
OBI-WAN: Let her go, Anakin.
ANAKIN: What have you and she been up to?
OBI-WAN: Let her go!
ANAKIN releases his grip on the unconscious PADME and she crumples to the ground. The lightsaber in her hand, his old one, rolls beneath the ship. OBI WAN notes this, and then returns his gaze to ANAKIN.
[Here I would have played up her choking, made it appear a lot more violent, a lot more visceral, than it appeared in the finished film. Maybe, instead of letting her crumple to the ground, Anakin could even throw her against the ship’s hull. More physical injury here might blunt the “She dies of a broken heart?!” criticisms.]
ANAKIN: You turned her against me.
OBI-WAN: You have done that yourself.
ANAKIN: You will not take her from me.
ANAKIN throws off his cloak.
OBI-WAN: Your anger and your lust for power have already done that.
OBI-WAN flings off his cloak.
OBI-WAN: (continuing) You have allowed this Dark Lord to twist your mind until now . . . until now you have become the very thing you swore to destroy.
They circle each other until OBI-WAN is near PADME. He places his hand on her.
ANAKIN: Don’t lecture me, Obi-Wan. I see through the lies of the Jedi. I do not fear the dark side as you do. I have brought peace, justice, freedom, and security to my new Empire.
OBI-WAN: Your new Empire?
ANAKIN: Don’t make me kill you.
OBI-WAN: Anakin, my allegiance is to the Republic … to democracy.
[Here is where I would add something.]
ANAKIN: Your allegiance will destroy you.
OBI-WAN: Anakin, this isn’t how it has to be! Come back with me! It’s not too late for you. Help me destroy Palpatine and make things right!
ANAKIN: You don’t understand–
OBI-WAN: Anakin, I’ve raised you, taught you! This isn’t who you are, this can’t be who you are! Come with me! It’s the only way.
ANAKIN turns to face him, and there is real pain, real conflict on his face. But then he looks at the slumped form of PADME and hardens again.
ANAKIN: You don’t know the power of the Dark Side…the true nature of the Force. Palpatine is my master now.
OBI-WAN’s face falls. He knows what is about to happen.
OBI-WAN: My allegiance is to the Republic, Anakin.
ANAKIN: If you’re not with me, you’re my enemy.
OBI-WAN: Only a Sith Lord deals in absolutes. I will do what I must.
(ignites his lightsaber)
ANAKIN: You will try.
And with that, the last battle begins. The duel between Obi Wan and Anakin really must be watched multiple times to see all its subtleties, the bits of strategy involved, and the way the setting itself plays into the duel. As they fight through the mining installation, they have to contend with the radiating heat, chunks of lava flying every place, and eventually, they wind up on the rivers of lava themselves. All of this is very intense, and it’s quite simply the most emotionally involving action sequence in the entire Prequel Trilogy. There is literally nothing I don’t love about this fight – well, maybe “love” is the wrong word, I “admire” it – from the intense look of business on Anakin’s face as he tries to kill Obi Wan when he has him pinned to the table, to the way Obi Wan barely keeps his balance as he crosses a thin length of pipe, to the way their fight disrupts the installation’s functioning in the first place.
What surprised me, though, when the film came out was that George Lucas intercuts the Obi Wan versus Anakin fight with a battle between Yoda and Palpatine. When I first saw this, it felt slightly wrong to me, but I got used to it over successive viewings. Obi Wan’s duel with Anakin is the Main Event of the Prequel Trilogy, so why intercut it with something else? Well, in terms of storytelling, I don’t think that Lucas had a choice. Palpatine is the main villain, after all, the big one, and Yoda is known to be one of the greatest of all Jedi. The notion that they would not confront one another simply doesn’t stand up, so confront one another they must. Lucas wisely doesn’t provide nearly as much footage of their battle as he does of Obi Wan’s, but he knows that there is simply no way that Yoda can vanish from the scene in the Old Republic era without at least attempting to deal with things.
And frankly, I wouldn’t change much of anything there, either. It’s interesting to me that the battle starts in a nondescript-looking room, a boring office, which then turns out to be a chamber underneath the great Republic Senate itself, as their battle takes to the central rostrum as it begins to rise up into the larger chamber. When Palpatine begins using the Force to hurl Senate debate pods at Yoda, the symbolism is hard to miss: he is quite literally destroying the mechanism of the Republic’s government.
The main change here that I would make is that I would make clear, in the end, that Palpatine has defeated Yoda. Yoda holds his own for most of the fight, and then when he flees, it needs to feel like he has been truly defeated, that he simply was not strong enough to win this fight. I would have Palpatine take control, landing blow after blow after blow, even as he gleefully cackles his way through the fight. That is one touch I love, the sheer glee that Palpatine shows as he finally unmasks himself in front of Yoda, his hatred of whom he has been burying for years.
Here’s what I think should have happened at the end of Yoda’s battle with Palpatine: Not only does he lose, but he loses very badly. Maybe he even takes a lightsaber blow…but when he flees, there is no question that he has to flee. Only by scurrying through a Star Wars equivalent of a Jeffries Tube can he survive. He has to look worn out, devastated.
And I would not have him rescued by Bail Organa. I would have Yoda flee Coruscant alone somehow. He could flee somehow to the Jedi Temple, dark and abandoned and smoldering, and wander alone through its halls, before finding a ship and flying away from Coruscant himself. Why? Because the Yoda at the end of Revenge of the Sith doesn’t quite match up to the Yoda we meet in The Empire Strikes Back. That Yoda doesn’t hold out much hope for things. He doesn’t think that Luke is going to be worth anything, he seems to have pretty much given up and has to be talked into training Luke by Obi Wan’s ghost. So in my view, Revenge of the Sith must end with Yoda almost broken. So he would fly away from Coruscant unseen by anyone at all, his destination unknown.
Back to Obi Wan and Anakin. Lucas wisely keeps this fight going, and going, and going. This fight isn’t shown in short bursts, like the Luke-versus-Vader battles of the Original Trilogy, or like Qui Gon and Obi Wan versus Darth Maul. There is nothing exhilarating about this fight, nothing exciting in the sense of an exciting action sequence. Instead, this fight will end everything and set the stage for everything to come in the Original Trilogy. It’s a deeply sad battle, as every single attack, every blow, every moment just cements the fact that these two men, friends for years, will be enemies for the rest of their lives. The two fight with differing styles: Obi Wan is trying to figure out the landscape, how to use it to his advantage, how to keep the fight going until he can spot a serious advantage. Anakin, on the other hand, is relentless. In this moment he just keeps coming and coming and coming, never questioning the need to fight, never backing away. There are moments when Anakin seems on the verge of defeat, only to manage another gigantic Force-leap, another acrobatic moment of evading doom. Thus we come to their final exchanges before the end:
OBI WAN: I have failed you, Anakin. I have failed you.
ANAKIN: I should have known the Jedi were planning to take over!
OBI WAN: Anakin, Chancellor Palpatine is evil!
ANAKIN: From my point of view, the Jedi are evil!
OBI WAN: Then you are lost!
Simple, brutal dialogue there. Words shouted in anger over flumes of molten rock as these two onetime friends prepare to find out which one is going to kill the other. I’d change the dialogue a bit, though:
OBI WAN: I have failed you, Anakin. I have failed you.
[Before I continue, I really like this line and the sad way that Ewan McGregor delivers it. You can hear his sadness, but even more, his resignation that it’s over. Anakin is gone, his friend is now a Sith, and only one course remains. Here is when all thought of redeeming Anakin dies, and when Obi Wan realizes that in some way, he has played a role in allowing all of this to come to pass.]
ANAKIN: I should have known the Jedi were plotting against the Republic!
OBI WAN: Anakin, look around you! The Jedi are all dead, and the Republic fell because of Palpatine!
ANAKIN: He did what he had to do to save everyone. And I will serve my master.
OBI WAN: Then you are lost!
Anakin’s inability to recognize that the thing he swore to protect has now been destroyed, with a great deal of help from himself, just might be the key tragedy in Anakin’s conversion to the Sith. That’s how far gone he is at this point.
At this point in the battle, both Obi Wan and Anakin are tired and spent. Obi Wan is desperate for one more move, and he makes it, finally being able to leap to high ground on the side of a river of lava, and there he warns Anakin that he has the high ground and thus stands at a significant advantage right now. It might be hard to figure out, but this is actually a pretty interesting callback to Obi Wan’s battle with Darth Maul, when he managed to use the Force to propel himself up and over Darth Maul. He sees Anakin about to attempt the same thing, so he knows what move to make, and when Anakin leaps, he makes the move, dropping down and slicing Anakin’s legs off. Ouch. I’m not sure what result Obi Wan expected by warning Anakin not to attempt anything; was his plan to capture Anakin? Let Anakin commit the Star Wars version of seppuku? Not sure, but it’s not that big a deal.
Anyhow, here’s where I would make one fairly big change:
OBI WAN and ANAKIN continue dueling as their respective platforms come close to one another…and then in a spectacular leap, ANAKIN jumps from his across a wide gap of flowing lava to land on OBI WAN’s platform. The platform wobbles dangerously but stays upright, and ANAKIN presses OBI WAN in very close combat. ANAKIN holds nothing back, delivering a blinding series of attacks that tax OBI WAN’s ability to parry them to the limit. The outcome seems clear, and with one massive slash, ANAKIN sends OBI WAN’s lightsaber flying, where it lands in the lava river and immediately combusts. ANAKIN barely pauses to run OBI WAN through, and OBI WAN leaps backward, desperately flinging himself across the lava to land miraculously on dry ground. He pushes himself to his feet, weaponless, as ANAKIN swings his platform around.
ANAKIN: This is the end, Master.
OBI WAN prepares himself….
ANAKIN: I will hunt down the rest of the Jedi and destroy them. You were a Master once, but your time is at an end.
ANAKIN lifts his lightsaber high over his head. OBI WAN looks up…the landing platform is nearly directly overhead. He makes a motion with his right hand.
ANAKIN: Prepare to meet your destiny!
On the landing platform, underneath the ship, the lightsaber that PADME dropped twitches and then rolls away, dropping over the side. Down below, ANAKIN leaps in his last attack on OBI WAN. OBI WAN drops, holding his right hand up to snatch ANAKIN’s original lightsaber from the air. In one smooth motion, he ignites the weapon and uses it to cut off ANAKIN’s legs and left arm below the elbow. ANAKIN shrieks and tumbles in a heap to the black sand, where he starts to slide down toward the lava. He lashes out with his one remaining appendage, his already-mechanical right arm. His glove begins to scorch, as does the syntho-flesh beneath it, revealing the structure of his mechanical hand. ANAKIN screams. OBI WAN retreats and deactivates the lightsaber.
OBI WAN: You were the Chosen One! It was said that you would, destroy the Sith, not join them. It was you who would bring balance to the Force, not leave it in Darkness!
ANAKIN’s lower extremities, what is left of them, are beginning to smoke.
ANAKIN: I hate you!
OBI WAN: You were my brother, Anakin. I loved you.
ANAKIN: I…hate….
ANAKIN cannot finish, as his lower body catches fire. Now he can only shriek in agony as the flames begin consuming him.
OBI WAN: I loved you, Anakin.
The flames reach ANAKIN’s head, and his shrieks become more and more terrible and pathetic. He reaches up with his remaining arm, partially to try to attack and partially a reach for help. OBI WAN can watch no more and starts back up the hill, leaving ANAKIN to burn.
EXTERIOR: Landing platform
OBI WAN arrives back at the ship, where C-3PO awaits him at the bottom of the ramp.
C-3PO: Master Kenobi! We have brought Miss Padme on board. She is hurt very badly. We must leave this dreadful place!
OBI WAN: Start up the ship, 3PO.
C-3PO: Will Master Anakin be joining us?
OBI WAN: No, he won’t.
OBI WAN strides up onto the ship. He is walking slowly, painfully.
C-3PO: Oh dear….
C-3PO follows OBI WAN on board. Behind them, the mining installation is starting to succumb to the lava blasts. The ship’s ramp closes and the engines begin to glow.
INTERIOR: Naboo ship – cabin.
OBI WAN leans over PADME as a concerned R2-D2 whistles sadly nearby. PADME is very weak. An oxygen mask is on her face.
PADME: Obi Wan….
OBI WAN: Relax, Padme. Save your strength.
PADME: Anakin…
OBI WAN: Shhhh….
PADME: Anakin…why?
She lapses into unconsciousness. OBI WAN looks at R2.
OBI WAN: Stay with her.
He exits.
A special shoutout to the next shot, which has an exhausted and overwhelmed Obi Wan slumping into the copilot’s chair as C-3PO flies the ship away from Mustafar. The music at this point in the film is very sad and bleak, in keeping with what has happened.
In the film, at this point Anakin is somehow still alive, and Palpatine arrives to rescue him. I’d change this slightly by having the resident droids of Mustafar intercede, collecting Anakin and putting him on a stretcher. I would assume that they have some kind of programming for if a human handler gets into trouble. The main problem here is that the sudden arrival of Palpatine makes it seem as if Mustafar and Coruscant are right next door to one another. Still, I love the imagery Lucas used here: the closeup of the fine, ash-like sand as Anakin’s machine hand tries to drag the rest of his body up the slope. It’s pathetic and sad, but it also shows the drive that Anakin still possesses, which he will channel over the next twenty years as Darth Vader.
What’s left is mainly wrapping everything up, isn’t it? Palpatine’s rescue of Anakin from Mustafar is intercut with Obi Wan’s arrival at some medical station with Padme. I wouldn’t have Yoda there, but virtually everything else in this entire sequence works for me. I would have the medical droids work to save Padme from the injuries Anakin inflicted upon her, but I would still keep the sense that what is killing her is her broken heart. A lot of people have complained about this over the years since the film came out, but it’s never bothered me in the least. First of all, dying of a broken heart is a very common thing to happen in mythic storytelling; it happens all the time in opera. Second of all, it happens in real life. Yes, I would have Padme be grievously injured, but I would also have the medical droids flummoxed because her injuries should be survivable…but aren’t.
The birth sequence, intercut with Anakin’s conversion into a cyborg, is in my opinion nearly perfectly done in the film. This entire sequence is visually stunning as it switches from the gentle lighting of Padme’s maternity room to Anakin’s droid-run facility, starkly lit and with no hints of warmth at all as the droids attach things to Anakin’s body with almost no regard for his comfort. When the mask is lowered over Anakin’s face, the transformation is complete, and the moment is very troubling. I love the POV shot as the mask is positioned, and there’s a tiny shot of Anakin’s face, the last time we see his eyes, and his eyes widen with fear just as they disappear from view. The mask is pressed into position and there is a hissing sound as the air is sucked out, Anakin is sealed within, and aside from whatever rare moments he takes to himself inside his meditation chambers, his face will not see the light of day again until he is near his own death.
Meanwhile, Padme names the babies “Luke” and “Leia”, begs Obi Wan to save Anakin, and then she dies. Again we cut to Anakin, who is now fully Darth Vader. For some reason this scene always gets made fun of, but it’s never bothered me. I like how Palpatine lays the guilt for Padme’s death right at Anakin’s feet. It’s the masterstroke that will keep Anakin stoked toward the Dark Side for many years to come, this knowledge that he destroyed the love of his life himself. It amazes me that Palpatine is often able to use the truth to get what he wants. Nothing he says here is a lie: “In your anger, you killed her.” He is stoking the same old guilt in Anakin’s heart, which guarantees that Anakin will never embrace his own heart again. As Anakin screams that infamous ”Nooooo!” (which I have never had a problem with anyway), Palpatine grins evilly in the background.
Now, Obi Wan and Bail Organa have to return Padme’s body to Naboo, whereupon they must have the discussion as to what should happen with the children. Remember, in my version, Yoda’s whereabouts are unknown….
Interior: Alderaan cruiser – hold.
OBI WAN and BAIL ORGANA watch through a window as Padme’s coffin is taken away by Royal Naboo Guards.
BAIL: We have heard nothing from Master Yoda.
OBI WAN: Yoda lives. More than that, I do not know. I will find him, in time.
BAIL: I have made arrangements to adopt the girl. My wife and I have been talking about children for some time. She will have a good home and she will be loved.
OBI WAN: I will take the boy to his family on Tatooine.
BAIL: We’ve just learned that Anakin Skywalker is still alive…as Darth Vader. You don’t think he will find his son?
OBI WAN: He’s Darth Vader now, not Anakin Skywalker. He’ll never go back there. There’s nothing for him on Tatooine anymore. Luke will be safe.
BAIL: I must go to pay my respects to Senator Amidala’s family. Will you join me?
OBI WAN looks outside at the gathering funerary procession and shakes his head.
OBI WAN: It’s best that no one knows I am here.
BAIL: Very well.
BAIL turns to go, and then stops and faces OBI WAN again. He steps in closer so he won’t be overheard by anyone.
BAIL: This is not the end, you know. The fight will continue.
OBI WAN nods, and BAIL leaves. OBI WAN walks into a tiny cabin where LUKE and LEIA are asleep. He sits down beside them, and dabs a cloth to one of their mouths.
OBI WAN: The Force is strong in your family. Perhaps one day….
VOICE: (from the air) Obi Wan.
OBI WAN: What…Qui Gon?
VOICE OF QUI GON JINN: Obi Wan. All is not lost. I have things to teach you…many things…about the true power of the Force….
OBI WAN is stunned.
A very common complaint about Revenge of the Sith that I’ve never understood is that it’s dumb for Obi Wan to take Luke to Anakin’s own family, because then Anakin will find Luke, and that it’s doubly dumb to not even change Luke’s name. This has always sounded dumb to me. The Lars family isn’t Anakin’s family. His only connection to them is that his mother married Cliegg Lars, and now she is dead. Under what possible circumstance is Darth Vader going to drop by the Lars homestead for a visit? The complaint makes absolutely zero sense to me.
I do like withholding the idea that Qui Gon has somehow managed to live on as part of the Force until this moment, too, when it seems that the Dark Side stands completely triumphant over everything. Obviously I have Yoda disappearing into apparent exile, so I have to have Qui Gon personally manifest himself to Obi Wan. There is dialog in the original scripts which indicates that Lucas originally intended to have Qui Gon’s voice be heard again, but obviously that never happened. I don’t know if it was because Lucas decided not to do it or because Liam Neeson refused to do the voice work, but in my version of Revenge of the Sith, that happens.
At this point I would cut to:
Exterior: Space – Dagobah.
A tiny ship emerges from hyperspace and approaches the swamp planet.
Exterior: Dagobah – swamp.
The ship descends and lands in a clearing by the side of the swamp. As its engines cool and go dark, the ship opens, and YODA emerges. He moves slowly, perhaps limping. He walks out onto the land and looks across the swamp, to a tiny hut made of mud. YODA breathes out a deep and heavy sigh, and then he turns to his little ship and lifts his hand. The ship levitates, and then YODA uses the Force to move it to the middle of the swamp, where he releases it, allowing it to sink. Then he begins hobbling in the direction of the hut as his ship sinks into the water.
I remember how enigmatic Yoda is when we first meet him in The Empire Strikes Back, how ambiguous he is. His refusal to train Luke, his deep skepticism – it’s almost as if he has given up on the very idea of a new hope at all. That’s what I would hope to convey here: that Yoda is hiding not so much to rise again, but because he’s failed and genuinely doesn’t know if there is anything else he can do.
After this, all that’s left is the last arranging of the pieces: First, the burial of Padme. This is a beautiful sequence, again intercut with Vader and Palpatine. Padme’s funeral is extremely well-done, ending on the little wooden pendant in her hand, the one made for her by a young Anakin. I would change the last shots of Vader and Palpatine, though: I’d keep Palpatine on the bridge of the Star Destroyer, but I’d ditch the construction of the Death Star, and instead have him looking over the beginnings of the Imperial Fleet, with the first real incarnations of the Star Destroyers. Then I’d cut to Darth Vader, somewhere on some planet, confronting a straggler Jedi Knight and destroying him as a couple of stormtroopers look on. This seems to me more likely: first of all, I’m not sure what to make of the apparent suggestion that the first Death Star took twenty years to build; was the second one built at the same time, or was it one of the greatest “rush jobs” in Galatic history?
Also, I think we need to see Darth Vader in some kind of action, in the armor, looking like the classic Darth Vader. Obi Wan later tells Luke that Darth Vader “helped the Emperor hunt down and destroy the Jedi Knights”, and it seems to me that seeing him do just that might be a good place to leave him. He has no regret by this point; he has given himself fully to the Dark Side and is content to do evil.
In the original script, Lucas included Yoda’s arrival on Dagobah here; he later cut it on the basis that it doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know. Still, I’d show it. There’s little better sense of how far the Jedi have fallen than to show Yoda’s final destination, as far from the glorious marble of the Jedi Temple as you can get.
And then, at the end of it all, two sequences I wouldn’t change at all: Bail Organa arriving at home on Alderaan and presenting their adoptive daughter to his wife, and Obi Wan turning young Luke over to Owen and Beru Lars. That ending brought the entire Star Wars saga full-circle…and that’s where everything ends.
If there was a better way to end the story, a better final shot to look upon before the final smash to the credits, I can’t imagine what it is. There is “A new hope”, and he’s growing up right there…until his own saga can begin.
Another thing I like is that there is no dialogue in the film at all after the final scene in the ship’s hold. Lucas relies on his images and his music to bring it all together
With that, we reach the end of Revenge of the Sith. I will have one more post in this series, tying everything together and addressing a few issues that apply to the Prequels as a whole and thoughts on this entire project, which ended up taking longer than I ever expected. Tune in, Star Warriors!
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“Shiny in the Black”: A FIREFLY Christmas! (part two)
(Continuing my repost of this Very Special Christmas episode of…)
Wash put Serenity down on the landing pad, nice and gentle. So nice and gentle that Zoe complimented him on it.
“You’re getting’ more gentle all the time, honey,” Zoe said. “You have such a gift for handling sensitive equipment.”
“Thanks for sayin’ so, my love,” Wash replied. “But I could always use more practice–“
“All right, enough of that, you two.” Mal came up onto the bridge, fully dressed in his usual brown shirt, brown pants, brown belt, brown holster, brown boots, and probably brown socks too, if one could see them underneath all of that. “Wash, you keep the ship warmed and ready to lift if some part of this job goes south. Zoe, you’re coming along.”
“I figured, sir.”
“Captain,” Wash said, “is it really necessary to have contingency plans for this job? We’re actually conducting an honest transaction for once.”
“Yeah,” Mal said. “For once. We don’t get a whole lot of practice with this kind of thing, so who knows what might go wrong. You and Kaylee keep the ship ready. River and the Doc will keep you company. Zoe, you’ll be with Jayne, the Shepherd, and me.”
“What’s Inara doing?”
“Well, I think she’s still on her shuttle, writing long entries in her diary about how much she hates me right now.”
Zoe knew what that meant. “You told her no clients.”
“We ain’t got time. Why am I always the bad guy on this?”
“Oh, I couldn’t begin to venture a guess, Captain,” Zoe said. “Let’s go.”
Mal and Zoe began to exit the bridge.
“Zoe?” Wash called out.
“Yes, love?”
“You’re going to buy toys,” Wash said. “I could use a new stegosaurus for the collection.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
The Captain and Zoe left then, and Wash reached into the small footlocker next to his seat and pulled out a handful of his dinosaur figurines.
In the cargo hold, Shepherd Book and Jayne had the cargo hauler ready to go.
“Jayne,” Book said, “do you really need that many guns?”
“Preacher, are you carryin’ that Bible of yours right now?”
“Good point.”
They lifted a crate containing coin up onto the back of the hauler as Mal and Zoe arrived and descended the criss-crossing stairs down to their level.
“Awful lot of coin to be givin’ up,” Mal said.
“A purchase of good will is never a bad purchase,” said Book.
“You get that from that Bible of yours?”
“No, it just came to me,” Book replied. “A preacher can’t live on the words of one book alone.”
“All right,” Mal said. “Let’s go. Kaylee, open her up.”
“Be careful, Captain,” Kaylee said as she opened the ship’s cargo door and lowered the ramp. Mal, Jayne, Zoe and Book drove off in the hauler. Then Kaylee closed the ship back up. She turned away from the control and nearly jumped out of her skin when she saw that River was standing there, unblinking, just inches away.
“River! You scared me!”
“Would you like me to teach you a song?” River asked.
Kaylee blinked. “Uhhh…sure, honey. I’d love to learn a song.”
“It goes like this. ‘On the first day of Christmas, the operatives brought to me….'”
“Uh, River?” Kaylee interrupted. “Is this one of those creepy songs you learned while you were captive at…that place?”
“Yes,” River said. “I guess I should learn some new songs myself.”
“Yeah,” Kaylee said. “That would be great.”
Mal drove the hauler through a warehouse district of Ariel’s main city. Unlike the shiny, wealthy area they had visited a few months earlier – to steal some medicine – this area was much darker and dingier. Every planet, no matter how rich, had parts like this, Mal had long since learned. No one was rich enough to banish dirt and grime forever.
“You know where this warehouse is, right, Book?” Mal asked.
“I’ve got the address right here,” Book said, holding up an electronic data organizer. “And the crate number of the merchandise we’re getting. It’ll be in and out.”
Jayne growled. “Every time one of you people says we’ll be in and out, I go through half my ammo. I haven’t had an in and out job since–“
“Jayne, I’m sure that’s fascinating,” Mal cut in. “But just in case it ain’t, why don’t you hold it to yourself?”
“Sure, Mal,” Jayne said. “I’ll just sit here and be quiet as usual while you and Zoe tell each other the same stories over and over again. Hey, can I hear that one about that time you both got your asses kicked by the Alliance? I love that one.”
“Captain,” Mal said, pointing to himself. “First mate,” he said, pointing to Zoe. “Gun for hire.” He pointed to Jayne.
“Thank you for clearing us up on the chain of command, Captain,” said Shepherd Book. “But we appear to have reached the warehouse.”
“All right.” Mal brought the hauler to a stop near an entrance. “Standard procedure. Zoe, you’ll get us in. Then, Jayne, you’re in first, followed by me, then the Shepherd, and Zoe, you bring up the rear. We’re going to try and find this crate, get it, and be done with it before anyone knows were here.”
“In and out, Captain?” Zoe said.
“In and out,” Mal agreed.
“Not usually our thing,” Zoe said as she walked to the door.
“See, Mal?” Jayne said. “This is what I’m talkin’ about.”
“Well Jayne, that’s six hours since I last regretted hirin’ you.” Mal smiled. “I think that’s a new record for you, ain’t it? Hey Zoe, you got that door open yet?”
“Think so, sir,” Zoe said as she pressed a button that made the large bay door swing open. “Pretty easy, too.”
“Huh,” said Mal.
“Anybody else thinkin’ that was a little too easy?” Jayne put in.
Mal shrugged. “Well, we’ve got guns, so if we get into some local color, we can make our way out.”
“There might be armed guards inside,” Book pointed out.
“Cold feet, Shepherd?” Mal said. “This was your idea. But we’re here, and I’m not in the habit of runnin’ away at the first sign of something unexpected, especially if that unexpected thing is something that actually makes my life a little easier. Like an unlocked door. Shepherd, grab the coin. Jayne?”
Book picked up the crate of coin, and Jayne came forward and led them inside.
The warehouse was, pretty much, like every other warehouse in the ‘Verse. There’s only so much you can do, really, to dress up hundreds of stacks of thousands of cargo crates in an enormous, cavernous room.
“Well, would you look at that,” Jayne said. “A warehouse. We don’t see these too often.”
“Sure, Jayne.”
“I mean, yeah, we go into our share of storehouses, stockpiles, armories…there was that one depository we knocked over that one time…and before I joined you people, there was that distribution center job…but not a lot of warehouses.”
“Jayne,” Mal said, “are you trying to get on my gorram nerves?”
“Just commentin’ on the unique nature of this job, Mal.”
“Shut it, Jayne,” Zoe said. “Preacher, you got the crate number?”
Book consulted a slip of paper. “It’s 29-94-75.”
Mal looked at the manifest markings emblazoned on the side of several nearby crates, and determined which way they needed to go. “This way,” he said, and with Jayne in the lead and Zoe in the rear, they made their way down the corridor created by line upon line of stacked crates.
It didn’t take long to find it. The crate was pretty large, taller than Mal by about two feet, and about eight feet long and six feet across. Mal shone his flashlight on the crate and read the number. “This is it,” he said. “29-94-75. No other markings.”
“There wouldn’t be,” Book said. “The number is all they need.”
“Yeah, I know how shipping works,” Mal said. “All right, here it is. Now we just gotta get it out of here.”
“That crate’s a little big for me to haul out on my back,” Jayne said. “Of all the gorram–“
Zoe cleared her throat. “I think that’s the solution to our problem, Captain,” she said. She pointed to an open area about thirty feet away, where two forklifts stood silent.
“There it is, then,” Mal said. “Easy. Jayne, you’ll drive the lift. We’ll get the goods back out to our hauler, get back to the ship, before anyone knows we were here. No problem. See, I told you! Easy job.”
At that moment six floodlights turned on, three from each side, all trained on Mal and his crew.
“Malcolm Reynolds!” a voice boomed out from the darkness behind the floodlights. “Malcolm Reynolds, you are bound by law to stand down.”
Jayne muttered something in Chinese.
“In and out, right, Captain?” Zoe said.
All Mal could do was raise his hands and nod for the others to do the same.
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“Shiny in the Black”: A FIREFLY Christmas! (part one)
It’s a Christmas tradition here at Byzantium’s Shores! I rarely commit acts of fanfiction, but…this is one of them. If Firefly had ever had a “Very Special Christmas Episode”, I think it might well look like this. Enjoy! It’s in four parts; they will run each Monday this month.
Take me where I cannot stand
I don’t care, I’m still free
You can’t take the sky from me
Take me out to the black
Tell them I ain’t comin’ back
Burn the land and boil the sea
You can’t take the sky from me
There’s no place I can be
Since I found Serenity
But you can’t take the sky from me…
Captain Malcolm Reynolds was usually the first one to exit his bunk in the morning, which, coupled with the fact that he was also usually the last one to retire to his bunk at night, went a long way to making him the way he was. Even on mornings like this one, when the night before he and the rest of his crew had been up abnormally late celebrating a score on Persephone, he was up before anyone else, no matter how much his head throbbed and the metallic taste of too much bad whiskey filled his mouth. But on this morning, as he climbed up the ladder to the hallway and shuffled toward the mess, he slowly realized that he wasn’t the first one up this time. Someone was in the mess already, and they were singing. Mal could make out the words – “God rest ye, merry gentlemen…” — and he inwardly sighed. On a typical day, Mal needed at least three cups of green tea before he was ready to deal with Shepherd Book. Today he figured to need six cups before he felt ready to talk to anyone.
“Ah! Good morning, Captain! There’s water on the stove, just off the boil, if you’re looking for tea.” The Shepherd beamed.
“Yeah,” Mal said. “I’ll get to the tea in just a moment, Shepherd, but just now I’m a bit flummoxed as to why there’s a tree in the corner of my mess.”
“Oh, that,” said the Shepherd. “I hoped you wouldn’t mind. Just a little something I picked up before we left Persephone yesterday.”
“I didn’t notice you bringing a tree on board?”
“Yes, I was worried about how to sneak it onto the ship, when I realized that God had provided me a perfect way to get it past your eyes.”
“And that was….”
“You and Jayne were ripping drunk. Zoe and Wash and the Doctor carried you on board. You weren’t noticing anything last night.”
“I wasn’t that drunk!”
“Maybe, Captain, but you got out of bed and came all the way to the mess wearing your gun, your slippers, and a pair of women’s underwear.”
“Oh.” Mal staggered over to the stove. “I think I’m gonna have that tea now, while you explain why there’s a gorram tree on my gorram boat.”
“There’s no need for language, Captain.” The Shepherd folded his hands in front of his chest, in that prayerful stance that Mal hated. Of course, Book well knew that the Captain hated it when he took that tone, which is why he did it so much more often now. Mal just grunted as he fumbled in the cupboard for his favorite mug and the tea leaves.
“Hand me the kitchen robe,” Mal said.
“Certainly.” Book opened another cupboard and pulled out a bundle of cloth, which he tossed to the Captain. This was the ‘kitchen robe’, a bathrobe that Mal kept stashed in the mess just for situations like this. He put on the robe as his tea steeped, and just in time, too, because that’s when Zoe and Wash arrived. Zoe looked all cleaned up and ready to go, as did Wash, even if no one could tell because Wash generally looked all cattawumpus, with his unbuttoned shirt over a tank top, shorts, and sandals.
“Well, this is very nice,” Zoe said. “Care to let us know what you’re wearing underneath the kitchen robe, sir?”
“I do not,” said Mal. “And you can stop laughing. We’ve all had mornings like this.”
“Not laughing, sir.”
“You laugh on the inside,” Mal countered.
“It’s true, honey,” said Wash. “You do. I, on the other hand, plan to laugh joyously out loud at our Captain and his self-induced plight.”
“I hold my liquor better than you,” Mal said.
“I never get much chance to develop my skills in that regard,” Wash replied, “seeing as how somebody‘s gotta be sober enough to fly the ship. Speaking of which, do we have a destination, Captain?”
“Can I drink my tea first before I think about business?”
“Certainly, sir.”
Shepherd Book took a step forward. “I actually have a few thoughts as to that–“
“Ooooh, pretty!” And with that, everyone turned to greet Kaylee, who had just arrived in the mess as well, wearing a freshly cleaned pair of overalls over a shirt with little red hearts all over it. “I didn’t know we could grow trees on board!”
“We can’t grow trees on board,” Mal said. “This here is a flight of fancy by the good Shepherd, who I’m sure will be explaining himself momentarily.”
“Well, I like it,” said Kaylee. “It’s shiny.”
“It’s not shiny yet, actually,” said Book. “It will be, after we decorate it.”
“Decorating?” Mal said. “A tree?”
“Yes sir,” said Book.
“So just the fact that there’s a tree on my boat isn’t even the strangest part of this whole business?”
“It’s not strange, Captain,” said Book. “It’s a tradition.”
“Preacher, you got any notion as to how many weird things people do are explained by casual use of the word ‘tradition’?” Mal sipped his tea. “That explains a lot of your whole ‘Shepherding’ job, you know.”
“Traditions become traditions because they mean something to people,” Book said. “You’ve got some traditions yourself, Captain.”
“Name one.”
“For one, your finding of an Alliance-friendly bar every year on Unification Day. And also your overindulgence every time we get a little more money for a job than you’d planned.” He smiled. “At least this tradition doesn’t involve a headache and the burning of another set of clothes.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll be taking that explanation now, if you don’t mind.”
“Certainly, Captain. It all began on–“
He was interrupted by a loud burst of raspy Chinese as Jayne Cobb staggered into the mess. “Smells like a ruttin’ forest in here,” Jayne said when he’d finished cursing in Chinese.”I hate forests. They remind me of my grandmother.”
This, as did many things Jayne said, made everyone stop talking and stare at him.
“What? Oh, I suppose you all think that forests are nice places filled with happy little creatures. Like one of Kaylee’s storybooks.”
“I don’t read ‘storybooks’,” Kaylee protested. “I’m not a child, Jayne. I’m an engineer and I’m a woman with all the needs of a woman, like—”
“Stop! Please!” Mal burst out. “You know I don’t want to hear about that, Kaylee.”
“Sorry, Captain.”
“Wash, can you just get us in the air, please?”
“I wanted to hear about this tree first,” Wash said. “I mean, since you haven’t given us a destination yet for our next job and all.”
More silence, until Zoe cleared her throat.
“By any chance, Captain, did you think to line us up a new job when we finished the old one?”
Mal shrugged. “I had other things on my mind last night,” he said.
“I’ll say,” said the newest arrival into the mess. “Although I don’t think he was exactly thinking with his mind last night.” It was Inara, who looked typically resplendent in her kimono-like morning robe. “Was she memorable, Mal?”
“Well, she–“
“You don’t remember her, do you?”
“You know, I think we’ve all got off the main topic here, which is why there’s a gorram tree on my boat!”
“Well, Captain,” said Book, “as I tried to start explaining–“
“A Christmas tree,” said yet someone else. Tensions went up as the voice of the ever-enigmatic River Tam cut through. “We had a Christmas tree at the institute. The men there said there would be presents. That was before they started the mental probes.”
River stood there in the doorway, with her brother, Simon the good doctor, standing behind her.
“River?” Simon said. “Do you remember something?”
“I remember everything,” River said. “I just choose when to talk about it.”
“So,” Simon said, “you know what the tree is?”
“I just said so,” River replied. “It’s a Christmas tree. But it’s naked. It needs decorations to make it shiny.”
“Ah,” said Book. “You see, Kaylee? That’s what I was getting at. We’ll decorate it.”
“With what?” Kaylee asked.
“Oh, all sorts of things,” said Book. “Ornaments made of painted glass. Little lights. Popcorn that we put on strings. And I even have a figurine of an angel for the very top of the tree.”
Jayne cleared his throat. “Anybody else here havin’ a hard time figurin’ out who’s crazier here, the Shepherd or the Doc’s sister?”
“I don’t think it sounds crazy,” said Kaylee. “I think it sounds nice.”
“It kind of does,” said Wash. Noticing Zoe giving him a skeptical glance, he went on, “What? I’ve been saying for years that this boat could use some more color on it.”
“My boat’s got all the color it needs,” said Mal. “Look, people, next person other than the Shepherd who talks is on mess patrol for a month. Shepherd, explain this. You’ve got until I finish my cup of tea, and if your explanation ain’t convincing, you’re the one on mess patrol.”
“A hard bargain as always, Captain,” said Book. “It’s an Old Earth tradition. The Bible tells us that one day, God decided to come into the world in the form of an infant, so he could save his people. Ever since then, believers have celebrated that night by doing things like exchanging gifts, and bringing trees into their homes to decorate. That’s what I’m doing here.”
“Shepherd,” Mal said, “didn’t I once tell you that God ain’t welcome on the Serenity?”
“You did, Captain. But it’s my belief that God is here, whether you consider him welcome or not.”
“Well, be that as it may, you’ve brought a tree onto my ship without asking me.”
“Would you have said ‘yes’?”
“No, but that ain’t the point. I like to be asked anyway. It’s my ship.”
“I just thought…it might be a source of pleasure for us,” Book said. “You don’t have to believe to celebrate.”
“You said somethin’ about exchangin’ gifts,” Jayne said. “What’s that?”
“Well,” Book said, “we could each randomly select a member of the crew and get that person a gift.” He noticed the scowl on Mal’s face. “Or not.”
“We should,” Kaylee said. “We don’t do enough nice things for one another.”
“I let you all stay on board,” Mal said. “That’s nice of me.”
“And your hospitality is known throughout the ‘Verse,” Inara said. “That’s why so many people flock to us to give us money.”
“Yeah,” Mal said, “I’m a loving man. But as to the money thing, you said something about a job, preacher? You got a lead for us?”
“I do,” said Book. “Of a sort.”
“Of a sort? The paying sort?”
“Not as such, no.”
“Then what is it?”
“There’s an orphanage on Haven,” Book said.
“Lot of orphanages on Haven,” Jayne pointed out.
“Yes, but as it happens, I know this orphanage particularly well.” Book looked like he was remembering something…but then he snapped back to the moment. “I would simply like for us to take some of our recently abundant bounty – not all of which was obtained through means the authorities would entirely smile upon – and use it to purchase supplies for the orphanage. We would then deliver said items to the orphanage in time for an upcoming festival.”
“Supplies?” Mal asked.
Book nodded. “Food, clothing, and…toys.”
“Toys?” Mal repeated.
Jayne frowned. “And we’re doin’ this in exchange for what?”
Book just smiled.
“No way,” Jayne said. “No way, uh-uh. No way I’m givin’ some of my ruttin’ money to some bunch of orphans. Ain’t my fault they ain’t got no home. Let ’em grow up, find work, and make an honest livin’.”
“Is anyone besides me,” Simon said, “unusually touched by Jayne’s newfound belief in making an honest living?”
“Shut up, Doc,” Jayne said. “Least I ain’t hidin’ behind a slip of a girl.”
“No,” River said. “You hide behind a gun that you gave a girl’s name.”
Jayne’s only response to that was a grumbled growl.
“Let me get this straight, preacher,” Mal said. “You want us to spend some of the money we’ve fought and scrimped for and use it to give stuff to children? And you want us to do this on a time frame of…what?”
“Three days, Captain.”
“Three days. And we’re doing all this with no reward for us?”
“Not all rewards come in the form of money, Captain.”
“The ones that keep this boat in the air do,” Mal said.
“Come on, Captain!” Kaylee said. “I, for one, would like to do a job for once that don’t make me feel like I need a shower after.”
“Maybe we put it to a vote of the crew?” Simon offered.
Mal glared at him. “My ship ain’t a democracy,” he said. “But…Jayne?”
“Can’t decide, Mal,” he said. “Normally I’d be against this sort of stuff, but I’m thinkin’ that if we don’t do it, Kaylee here’ll be complaining about it for months. Might well be worth doin’ to keep her quiet.”
“Thanks, Jayne,” Kaylee said. “But really, it’ll feel good. Don’t you all want to feel good about something for once? I mean, feel good about something other than stealin’ from the Alliance?”
“There’s other things to feel good about?” Jayne asked.
Mal turned to his second in command for help. “Zoe?”
“I don’t know, Captain,” Zoe replied. “Normally I’m siding with you, but right now, I find myself a bit swayed by Kaylee’s youthful exuberance.”
“I can’t believe I’m even considering this,” Mal said.
Shepherd Book put a hand on Mal’s shoulder. “I think that maybe some part of you is seeking redemption,” Book said.
Mal glared at him.
“Not really helping your cause there, preacher,” Zoe said.
Book removed his hand.
“If we do this,” Mal said, “I’ve got some conditions. Kaylee, you are not allowed to badger me for an optional ship’s part for one month. Shepherd, you will do all cooking and mess duty for the same month. Jayne, one word that this job makes me soft, and I’m shooting you out the airlock.”
“What about me, Captain?” Inara asked, purposely blinking her beautiful eyelashes as she did so.
“Uh…I’ll think of something,” Mal said. “All right, Shepherd, where are we going first?”
“To buy some toys,” Book said. “Which means a trip to Ariel.”
“Wash, you heard the man. Let’s get in the air. I’m gonna go clean up. Can’t believe I’m doing this….” And with that, Mal left the mess to return to his bunk. Wash and Zoe headed for the bridge, and Kaylee left for the engine room. River gave Shepherd Book a look of reproach.
“You didn’t tell him the part about the elfin-man dressed in red who flies through the sky to give the children their presents,” she said.
“On the whole,” Book replied, “I figured it best to leave that part out of it.”
“Yeah,” Simon said. “That was…probably wise.”
Minutes later, Serenity lifted off and flew away from Persephone and toward Ariel.
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The Millennium Falcon Flies Again!
Unless you live in some kind of cave, you’re aware that there’s a new Star Wars movie coming out in a year, and that the first teaser trailer erupted upon the world today.
And if you’re not aware of those things, hey! There’s a new Star Wars movie coming out in a year, and the first teaser trailer erupted upon the world today!
Here’s the trailer:
And here’s a breakdown, shot-by-shot.
A few thoughts:
:: I like the look of the new hero (?) and the heroine (?). A stormtrooper unhelmeted, and the lady who rides the odd-looking speeder bike.
:: The tech looks Star Warsish, but also different: the R2-unit-like droid with the rolling body, for one, and the heavy-duty speeder bike.
:: X-wing fighters roaring across a lake: cool!
:: OK, this particular thing seems to be generating the most discussion I’m seeing online, which is very weird considering this film is the seventh in a series of space opera flicks that feature more and more gonzo weaponry each time out. I’m referring to the Sith lightsaber we see ignited, by the shadowy figure in the forest; it appears to have two little lightsaber wristguard things, which is indeed rather odd. But we only catch a glimpse of this weapon, so maybe there’s logic here that we don’t know yet.
:: The trailer sounds like Star Wars, not just the ships, but the sound of the speeder bike and the Imperial droid language heard in the background as we see the unhelmeted stormtrooper.
:: Finally: the Millennium Falcon. Wow. Even with the arrival of the Prequels, I never thought I’d see that ship on the big screen again! The longest continuous shot in the trailer, which is as it should be, as that’s the biggest payoff. (By the way: Remember how in the Battle of Endor, Lando got the Falcon‘s dish antenna knocked off while navigating the Death Star’s superstructure? It’s been replaced with a sleeker square dish!
And just because I’m curious, I’m sure it’s already been linked over at Metafilter, so let’s see how many comments it takes before someone rips on the Prequels or George Lucas! Answer: Technically, zero, since the poster who links the trailer in the first place gets it right out of the way! But in the comments proper (which number 205 as of this writing): It happens in the very first comment, and then the thread devolves from there into a lot of folks whose faith in everything has been wrecked by three movies they didn’t like (and yet they still watch the trailer and comment a lot). Fancy that.
I guess it’s still true:
Anyway, I’m excited. I’ve noted many a time that while I had problems with JJ Abrams’s Star Trek movies, his direction was not one of them, and neither was his cast. I maintain my optimism pretty much because I did not hate the Prequels, and because somebody had the good sense to keep Orci and Kurtzman (the writers who are in the process of ruining Trek) the hell away from Star Wars.
Obviously, we’ll see — but my hopes are high.