(Traduce en español/translate to Spanish) By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) September 14, 2025; UPDATED 9/21 to include one key detail; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating as I make my overdue comeback! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

SILVER SPRING—Apologies for not posting this earlier, as my life has been too interesting lately, and I am not even going to try to treat this as any kind of review of the singularity known as Andor, a Star Wars show on Disney+ starring Diego Luna as the titular Cassian Andor alongside the legendary Stellan Skarsgård and a soon-to-be-legendary ensemble cast..

Some Context on this Amazing Show You Definitely Should Watch

While I have certainly had my issues with Disney, I have so, SO much to say about the greatness of this show on so many level and its searing relevance to the crises consuming America and the world in 2025, so much so I that had to redo my GOAT list; quite simply put, Andor is one of the most amazing shows I’ve ever seen, tied for the best of all time on my list, actually (shared with Rome from HBO/BBC, with HBO’s The Sopranos a close second).

Nominated for 14 Emmy Awards this year—including the awards for best drama, writing, direction, and cinematography—it’s also one of the most unique shows I have ever seen, breaking convention and genre like it is fighting its own rebellious revolution.  And Andor has been called the best dramatic show of 2025 by Hollywood press heavyweights Variety, Vanity Fair, and The Hollywood Reporter, along with The Guardian, just to name a few.  Furthermore, it has some of the highest-rated television episodes in history and a special IMDB record.  Even with the 14 Emmy nominations this year, The Hollywood Reporter was particularly snarky in its expressions of still feeling Andor was “robbed” of a bunch of acting nominations, and they are not alone.

Rather, this is simply a viewing guide to get the most out of your viewing experience, much like my popular guide for watching Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith alongside the Star Wars: The Clone Wars series finale that thousands of you have appreciated (I did not see Disney matching the finale of Clone Wars as far as quality with any big Star Wars project, but wow, was I wrong, Andor being the proof!  And if you’ve seen Clone Wars through Season 5, check out my take on how the show sheds lights on lessons we can learn from 9/11).

Anyway, all you need to know are two things: 1.) The first season starts roughly five years before the events of the earliest-produced Star Wars movie, 1977’s original Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope. The first scene of the first episode is introduced timeline-wise BBY 5, which stands for “before the Battle of Yavin,” referring to the events of the original 1977 film.  It’s kind of like a BC/AD (CE preferred) year dating system. UPDATE 9/21: 2.) The second thing to know is that, in Season 2, the guy on the right in the first image below (actor Benjamin Bratt) is playing the same character (Senator Bail Organa) as the actor on the left and below (Jimmy Smits) in Rogue One and in Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, respectively (he also appears as Organa in Episode II: Attack of the Clones).

That’s it, and even genius showrunner Tony Gilroy has made it clear you really don’t need to know about Star Wars, or even like Star Wars, to respond to the show well and many viewers have confirmed this.

THE BEST DAMN ANDOR VIEWING GUIDE IN THE GALAXY

If you’re curious about the show, whatever your politics or background, just trust me and watch it, but be PATIENT and PAY ATTENTION: if you missed a line, rewind, for the journey is so worth it and this is so sophisticated that you need to embrace the slowness of some earlier episodes. Details and people matter, even seemingly small ones!  Watch on a big screen and with surround sound.  Turn your phones off (genius showrunner Tony Gilroy says so—watch only 19:48 until 20:59 and ignore comments and other videos!).  I’M SERIOUS, PHONES OFF! And Silent, no vibrating!  Turn off the lights too, and minimize interruptions.  Have some drinks. Immerse yourself.  Also, the music is phenomenal, so I strongly suggest letting the credits for each episode play out (especially after S1 E11 and S2E8).  Don’t skip the intro theme music, either, because it is different for each episode and give tantalizing clues as to what is coming as the show goes on.  Not a big fan of the more general Disney Star Wars jingle, though, so personally I choose to mute that little flourish…)

I HIGHLY recommend watching the main arcs as min-movies in single-sittings, without interrupting the arcs. 

SO, for season 1, it’s mostly simple:

STEP 1—Andor Season 1

BBY 5 Episodes 1-3 uninterrupted, then Episodes 4-6 uninterrupted, then Episodes 7-10 uninterrupted, then Episodes 11-12 uninterrupted (don’t forget the END CREDITS SCENE at the end of Episode 12!)

The only trick to remember is that the third arc works best as four episodes, with a tighter closing arc of two episodes.

For the second and final season, it’s easier, but I am adding twists.  Each arc here is three episodes and jumps roughly a year forward (BBY4-BBY1).

STEP 2—Andor Season 2 part 1

BBY4 Episodes 1-3 uninterrupted, BBY 3 Episodes 4-6 uninterrupted, BBY 2 Episodes 7-9 uninterrupted (no matter what, do not break up Episodes 7 and 8, if you compromise elsewhere make sure to watch these two still in the same sitting)

STEP 3—brief interlude (21 minutes)

Now here is where things get complicated.  In 2017, the animated show Star Wars: Rebels aired an episode—Season 3, Episode 18, Secret Cargo, a little over twenty-minutes long—that picks up almost immediately after Andor Season 2, Episode 9.  The first few minutes you might be like WTF but just trust me and realize the episode is only 21 minutes without credits.  You just need to know the main characters on that show are a secret rebel cell that is in the process of joining the larger Rebellion, a cell that is led by a pilot named Hera, with her number-two in the form of Kanan, a grown-up Jedi trainee from the Republic, before it fell and became the Empire.  They took in with their merry band a young potential Jedi, Ezra, from the planet of Lothal (which Ezra will mention to a key Andor character).  The show is not as good as its precursor, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, so don’t judge all Star Wars animation by this, and it’s certainly tonally and stylistically different from Andor, but it’s still a solid episode featuring one of the main characters from Andor voiced by the same person playing this character in live action.  I would dive into this interlude just after finishing STEP 2). 

STEP 4—finishing interlude (about 6 minutes)

Then, jump ahead to Rebels Season 4, Episode 3.  You can start at 3:29 and go to 9:27.  This involves a very important conversation between the same character and another important character from Andor. Watch this just before you start up STEP 5, it is just about 6 minutes from that episode (if you’re interested in the backstories raised here, I will have more information on that in the future because there is more content with characters featured in Andor…)

STEP 5—Andor Season 2 final arc

BBY 1 Episodes 9-12 uninterrupted (only start if you can also do STEP 6 in the same viewing; don’t compromise here, either; worst case, make sure to watch at least Episode 12 just before STEP 6)

STEP 6—Rogue One

Watch 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (do not break and do this immediately after finishing the final episode of Andor.  Again, no ifs, ands, or buts)

STEP 7—back to the OG

Go back to where it all began and knock out 1977’s Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope (with the actual Battle of Yavin at the end!).

Conclusion: A Call to Watch

Andor changed my life.  I am a different and better person for it.  I hope you understand after you watch.  And if you watch this all in the ways I have recommended, you will feel the most emotional impact. Seriously, if you watch one show this year, make it this one.

I will close on this: art has a power to inspire like nothing else, and I experienced that with Andor.  With all that is going on in the world today, the big names behind the U.S. television and film industry can take a real stand to help promote this exquisite meditation on collective consciousness, oppression, resistance, and the costs and nature of revolution, on the nature of fascism and its costs, on sacrifice and death, on hope and perseverance, on the nature of good and evil.  To not recognize the powerful homages to forces contained in Andor would be doing our nation and humanity a disservice at a time when we need art desperately to move to action, provoke and inspire, not just entertain.  To not do this is a choice to choose entertainment at the expense of helping people wake up, to choose relative frivolity by favoring stories detached from wider struggles mirroring those erupting around us, to numb and distract with bread and circuses when a true revelation is at hand, one that wallows gloriously for many hours with some of the toughest moral questions of our time.  In too many ways, this year is the year of Andor, and the Emmys should have recognized this more in the acting categories yet still, tonight, during the Emmy Awards, there is still a chance justice will be done not simply for Andor and its awe-struck, rightly-fanatical fans, but for public audiences all around the world in times that try men’s souls.

© 2025 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Traduce en español/translate to Spanish) By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) August 20, 2025; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating as I make my overdue comeback! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

SILVER SPRING—A small yet extraordinary series of events happened after a regional U.S. Border Patrol office posted a video on its official social media of a clip from a Star Wars movie (spoilers for Star Wars in general and specifically about Anakin Skywalker, Darth Vader, the film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and its precursor masterpiece of a series, Andor).

The Force…Is Not with This Video

In the video posted by the regional U.S. Border Patrol office for California’s “Premier Sector,” a.k.a. “El Centro Sector,” the Premier Sector agents are portrayed as Sith Lord Darth Vader in his final scene in Rogue One, in which he is shown mercilessly cutting through Rebel soldiers trying to hand off the Death Star plans to those escaping on Princess Leia’s ship.  In the movie, the plans were obtained by the Rebels because of tremendous suffering, horrific sacrifice, and the heroic efforts of Cassian Andor, Jyn Erso, Saw Gerrera, and many others rebels.  Some of the Rebels here in the Border Patrol video facing Vader are labeled as “Fentanyl,” “Sanctuary Cities,” “Cocaine,” and “Fake News.”  Vader has already disabled and boarded the Rebel command cruiser (their biggest space ship at the battle) and is trying to intercept the plans—transmitted only through bloody fighting by the rebel leaders on the planet Scarif below—before the rebels can get them to Leia’s ship, docked with the cruiser.  As Vader chases deflects with his red Sithlightsaber the Rebels blaster bolts as they are standing their ground against him, we can see other Rebels labeled “meth,” “human smugglers,” “the swamp,” “cartel terrorists,” and “gang member” as Vader makes his way down the docking hallway.  Some he kills by deflecting their own blaster bolts at them, others he cuts through with his lightsaber like a scythe into wheat, still others (the “fake news,” “cartel terrorists”), he uses the Force to toss around or pull their weapons from them before slicing them to death or choking them while suspended in the air by Vader’s Force powers.  In the movie, the Rebels are mostly massacred by Vader but just manage to get the plans abord Leia’s ship, which undocks and escapes with Vader looking on.  His further pursuit is captured in the very opening scene of the very first original Star Wars movie, Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope.  It is these plans that enable Luke Skywalker to know how to blow up the Death Star at the end of the movie and to save the day, but not before it is used to partially destroy one planet and totally destroy another, killing billions of innocents.  Darth Vader was trying to stop the rebels from stopping this genocidal Death Star.

Yet Vader is with whom these Border Patrol agents, in one of the most important and prolific sectors in the country, wanted to publicly identify.  Not Luke blowing up the Death Star, but Vader killing those who would ensure Luke and the Rebel planners were able to make use of the Death Star’s weakness to destroy it.

Just think on that.

The Border Patrol regional account has since either deactivated or turned on privacy settings, not allowing the account or video to be seen by the general public if it hasn’t been deleted (at least there is some self-awareness as to the problematic nature of this post) but it was still posted on an official federal government account and indicates the views of the people in that office. And it is still proudly up on Twitter!

The Response: Fascist Icing on a Fascist Cake

But this is only the beginning.  Appropriately, the team of the indispensable John Oliver, who discussed this all last week on his Last Week Tonight show on HBO, reached out to the government for a response.  He pointed out that rather than the labels on the Rebels in the absurd Star Wars video, most being snatched by these draconian raids are not violent criminals.  Rather than slaying “fake news,” the government was spreading it.

The government—specifically, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), under the authority of which the Border Patrol operates—did actually reply. While ignoring most specific questions posed by Oliver’s team, the government communications staff did write: “Not to spoil the plot, but as any Star Wars fan knows, Darth Vader is also Anakin Skywalker,” continuing that “I don’t think DHS needs to regale the American public on the heroism of Skywalker, they know.”  They really seem to think that this was a serious clapback, not mortifying self-own.

John Oliver characterized this as “an incredible, deeply shitty response.”  He then went on to satirically laud Thanos, form the Avengers series, as a similar “hero,” since, at one point, he was a baby.

Oliver is spot-on and actually understands Star Wars.  Because any serious Star Wars fan knows that the hero Anakin Skywalker succumbed to evil to become Darth Vader, that both Obi-Wan Kenobi and Vader himself viewed Anakin’s new persona of Vader as having killed the man who was known as Anakin Skywalker.  (Obi-Wan series spoilers)Years before Rogue One, in a climactic duel captured in the problematic Obi-Wan Kenobi series, Vader even tells Obi-Wan “Anakin is gone.  I am what remains.”  Obi-Wan apologizes for how things turned out, to which Vader replies “I am not your failure, Obi-Wan.  You didn’t kill Anakin Skywalker,” now smiling, “I did” (End Obi-Wan series spoilers).  Even without this more recently-produced scene and series, in the words of Obi-Wan to Luke Skywalker three movies chronologically after Rogue One, “Your father… was seduced by the Dark Side of the Force.  He ceased to be Anakin Skywalker and became Darth Vader.  When that happened, the good man who was your father was destroyed.”  Later in the film when Luke references Anakin Skywalker to Vader, Vader’s response is to say “That name no longer has any meaning for me.”  And that was the case for nearly Vader’s entire life as Vader, from the end of Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith—when Anakin became the Sith Lord known as Darth Vader—to the last moments of Star Wars: Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, just before he finally abandons Vader to die as regretful Anakin in the arms of his son.

Thus, both Obi-Wan’s and Vader’s own statements, while not completely true—deep, deep down, Anakin was still in there as Luke, his son, felt, only coming back out in extreme circumstances just before Vader’s death to try to save his son Luke—were the measure of the man in the scene the Border Patrol office posted in that video, which took place in the timeline years before Vader’s redemption.  In this scene a Border Patrol account posted from Rogue One, Vader was solidly the Emperor’s right-hand man, a full Lord of the Sith, evil and acting as an enforcer for an evil, illegal, genocidal, tyrannical, expansionist, fascist regime.  The Rebels Vader casually murders are fighting to stop all this, to destroy the Empire and restore the democratic Republic the Empire overthrew.

But given Trump’s own fascist, dictatorial tendencies, should we be surprised his cultists in and out of government openly identify with the bad guys?  With fascism?  While all this on certain levels is funny, it is also revealing and terrifying:  the fascists are not hiding their fascism and are openly identifying with an evil, murderous Sith Lord.  They did not show Anakin fighting as a hero or Luke blowing up the Death Star, they showed Vader—clearly at that point a fallen hero, not a hero, fighting against heroes as a clear villain.

From the White House to DHS and Border Patrol, our republic has fallen to control of Empire and fascist fanboys, embracing the Dark Side, not the Light Side.  The mainstream press continues to miss the gravity of the situation, toning things down, using euphemisms, or missing the plot entirely.  We must shed light on all this so people understand what is truly at stake.  It may not be a whole galaxy or a whole planet under threat, and Trump and his MAGA minions may be far less interesting than the Imperial bad guys, but with no Luke Skwalker or Cassian Andor coming to rescue us, it’s time to wake up and save ourselves (and as I hope to discuss in a future piece, community-consciousness-building is one of the main themes of the Show Andor…).

© 2025 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Russian/Русский перевод coming soon; Если вы состоите в российской армии и хотите сдаться Украине, звоните по этим номерам: +38 066 580 34 98 или +38 093 119 29 84; инструкции по сдаче здесь)

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) January 1, 2023; see related articles from February 17, 2017: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part I: Defining Democracy, Fascism, and Democratic Fascism Usefully, and Spin vs. Lies and Trump, the Global Democratic Fascist Movement, Putin’s War on the West, and a Choice for Liberals: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part II

SILVER SPRING—Not even a full month after Trump’s inauguration, I published a massive two-part essay discussing what I called the rise of “democratic fascism,” with Trump’s victory and being sworn into office one of largest developments on this front.

This is not a democratic fascism as in the Democratic Party of the U.S., but in terms of fascists nonviolently and legally winning elections, using their resulting power to chip away enough at what I have called the four main pillars of democracy—1.) popular elections, 2.) a law enforcement and highly-independent judicial system that is applied relatively equally and not used as a political tool for aggrandizement or persecution (“rule of law”), 3.) a free press that can hold all parties accountable and provide an accurate picture of reality to the public, and 4.) a public free to express itself and not stupid enough to be manipulated too much by propaganda and demagogues, that can make at least somewhat informed decisions based on reality—to twist the system into unfairly favoring themselves and keeping themselves in power as they continue to enact illiberal policies that only further stack the political and societal deck in their favor.

The first part of the two-parter focused on definitions of important terms like “democracy,” “fascism,” and my conception of what I called “democratic fascism.”  In particular, the term “fascism” is highly overused and often poorly understood or defined, a lot like the word “terrorism,” an issue I have previously discussed in detail: as I argued some time ago, “terrorism” must mean more than simply violence or threats of violence from people and organizations we personally dislike, and, similarly, fascism must mean more than the politics of someone or something we personally dislike.  The first part also discussed the difference between political spin and outright lies and how fascism embraces outright lies, as fascism is, among its other horrendous characteristics, a war on truth and reality itself.

In the second part, I looked specifically at why Trump very much fit the definition of “democratic fascist” as I had defined it.  As the word fascist is so strongly associated with Nazis, the Holocaust, and mass arrests and mass executions, I felt separating the traditional conception of fascism from the current wave that was, at least for the time being then, eschewing violent means to achieve and maintain power was useful back in 2017.  But in the roughly five years since Trump’s democratic fascist movement emerged to take over the Republican Party—one of America’s two major parties—and transformed it into a cult of Trump, the leader himself and bulk of that Trumpist movement have clearly transitioned already to accepting and embracing violence and overthrowing the rule of law illegally in their quest to achieve and maintain power, as most notably demonstrated in the culmination of the Trump Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021.  That coup attempt did not stop with its failure on that day, but has since continued through the present. 

Once their embrace of violence and their failure to repudiate Trump’s insurrection became clear, I have felt “fascist” became more appropriate label for them, as the Trumpists are now trying to use undemocratic and/or violent means to achieve power, the latest being MAGA Republican Kari Lake trying to use false lawsuits to overturn her clear defeat in the Arizona governor’s race (I think she is a favorite to be Trump’s vice presidential-nominee in what I think will be his highly successful quest to rewin the Republican Party’s nomination for president).

The rest of my second part detailed how Russia’s Vladimir Putin was leading a global fascist movement as part of his war on Western democracy and how all who opposed such fascism needed to put pettier differences aside to defeat it (a spirit recent political victories in France, the United States, and Brazil embody).

As fascism has very much become an important theme in global politics today—from the Trumpist movement to Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, from multiple political parties in Europe to Putin’s Russia and its war on Ukrainian democracy, from Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel to the Narendra Modi’s India, from the Taliban’s Afghanistan to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, I think it is important to revisit the definition of “fascism.”  In this spirit, I am reposting parts of part one of the two-part piece discussed above because I think they are deeply relevant to our current circumstances. Not all fascism will be as obvious and violent as Putin’s Russian fascism, so a common definition is essential to fight fascism in all its forms (and on a side note, please do see the 10/10 spectacular Andor television series for a beautiful meditation on the nature of fascism and of resisting it).

Excerpt begins:

Fascism comes in many forms; if Hitler and genocide can be one end of the spectrum, there’s plenty of room for fascism that falls far short of that standard, eschewing pogroms and other forms of mass violence, forms of fascism that include what we are seeing now: a democratic fascism (small “d” referring to democracy in general, as opposed to a capital “D” associated with America’s Democratic Party) empowered by populations, media, and elections that rewards and empowers those willing to feed off division and fear as it overwhelms norms, dissenting minorities, and even the law. As this democratic fascism rises, the losers are the liberal democratic governments that have been dominant since the end of WWII; in effect, it is no longer a question of if, as I posed nearly a year ago, but how fast we will see the unraveling of the post-WWII U.S.-led international order. What we do now will define the West and the world for decades to come, but the growing far left must grow up quickly and act within the clear choices of present reality if we are to have a good chance of stopping democratic fascism from destroying our societies, the West, and the international order as we know it.

“American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information, and those who stand for the K.K.K. type of demagoguery.”— Henry A. Wallace, 1944, Vice President of the United States 1941-1945

One can easily go back to the domestic tyranny of Athens’ democracy in ancient Greece, of the will of the demos often trampling over minority rights, to begin a long history of systems that were democratic in that a majority had power and chose leaders or voted on legislation, but with that being the extent of the democracy. In fact, as happens all too often, people—especially when consumed by fear and hate—will choose someone who merely reflects the base instincts of their majority, will use democracy to create a political culture of persecution, intolerance, and even brutalization of those who are not in the majority, will create a system designed to favor and perpetuate the rule of this majority, and will actively suppress those speaking, acting, and organizing against it. 

This is a Tocquevillian tyranny of the majority on steroids, a system where only the people in power and those who support them can even approach having the feeling they live in a democracy or that their opinions count in the public square, while everyone who feels differently is made to understand that even expressing their counternarrative, their dissent, their dissatisfaction will carry consequences for their level of freedom, or even their health, up to and including the lethal variety. Such “democracies” exist to empower the majority or the plurality of those supporting the current leader/government/system and only them; the rest of the population is made to feel that they are tolerated at best by the good graces of those in charge and to embrace their second-or-third-class status meekly and enthusiastically, to be deferential to their oppressors’ views and whims, or else…

Such a system uses democracy to destroy it. Such a system embraces limited (and the most salient) forms of democracy, mainly elections and the right of those winning the elections to rule (and in this case, rule uncontested)…

…the following quote illustrates, if in a slightly oversimplified way, some of the dynamics behind this as far as people and mentalities are concerned:

The following joke circulated in Italy in the 1920s. According to Mussolini, the ideal citizen is intelligent, honest, and Fascist. Unfortunately, no one is perfect, which explains why everyone you meet is either intelligent and Fascist but not honest, honest and Fascist but not intelligent, or honest and intelligent but not Fascist.—Maurice Herlihy and Nir Shavit, The Art of Multiprocessor Programming

Yes, as before, a cadre intelligent people willing to be extremely dishonest are leading a new move towards fascism that wins the hearts and minds of the unintelligent who are honest with their backwards beliefs, leaving a cadre of intelligent, honest, non-fascists to be in the unenviable positions of selling less attractive trusts juxtaposed to often more attractive fascist lies. Sure, there are rich exceptions, but you could do far worse as far as accuracy than categorize most people in politics these days into one of these three categories.

No, it’s not the 1930s, but today, the democracies of the world are collectively facing a cancer of populist, and, yes, democratic fascism that threatens to erase democratic norms, destroy liberal democratic values, and that seeks to remake many of the world’s leading democracies in the image of Vladimir Putin’s Russia and its “democracy” that relies on an intolerant majority that understands democracy simply as the gratification of their emotional desires, with dissenters, minorities, and others who don’t agree with them be damned, their complaints of abuse at the hands of the state dismissed and ignored.

Yet terms like democracy and fascism are thrown about quite casually, and not necessarily in a way that is accurate; in fact, I earlier engaged in an exercise in defining the word “terrorism” usefully that amply demonstrates how important it is for a reasonable and universal definition of certain commonly-used-in-our-political-discourse terms to be sounded out so that the terms are spared from being bandied about in a way that virtually anyone can use to make any point, rendering them meaningless and their use pointless.

In his seminal 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell expressed his understanding of how slippery the uses of both “democracy” and “fascism” not only could be, but were when he wrote that

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable”. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.

Such tendencies that flourished in Orwell’s time still, sadly, flourish today, over 70 years both after Orwell penned those thoughts and after the defeat of fascism in Europe. We shall do our best to avoid such traps in the discussion below by discussing the definition…of…“fascism.”…

Defining Fascism

Which brings us to a discussion of what we should understand fascism to be…

“Fascism” as a word in English comes into English in the 1920s from the Italian fascismo, describing the movements (maybe gangs is a better word) that would eventually put Mussolini in power in Italy but a word also alluding to the ancient Roman symbol of authority, the fasces. The English definition of “fascism,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is mainly twofold: “An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization” and a subdefinition: “(in general use) extreme right-wing, authoritarian, or intolerant views or practices;” both are useful, and, especially, the subdefinition is applicable here, but a further, less vague, and more detailed definition is needed for our discussion.

Like “terrorism” and “democracy,” “fascism” as a term can easily become overly and poorly used. Writing in 1944, Orwell noted how “there is almost no set of people — certainly no political party or organized body of any kind — which has not been denounced as Fascist.” Still, even noting the sharp disagreements of the people of his day over who or what was fascist, he noted that “[b]y ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’.”

The enthusiastic admirer of Orwell and recently (and very sadly) late Christopher Hitchens, unsurprisingly, echoes some of what his hero had to say, but goes farther; for Hitchens, “[h]istorically, fascism laid great emphasis on glorifying the nation-state and the corporate structure,” is “based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind…[and is] hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons).” He also describes fascism as “bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories,” as “obsessed with real and imagined ‘humiliations’ and thirsty for revenge,” as “chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia (interestingly, also, with its milder cousin, anti-Freemason paranoia),” as “inclined to leader worship,” and as a “threat…to civilization and civilized values;” perhaps Hitchens’ most pithy description is as follows: “[t]he historic essence of Fascism is the most retrograde people using the most revolutionary rhetoric.”

For Rebecca West, writing in 1935, “Fascism…is a headlong flight into fantasy from the necessity for political thought…persons supporting Fascism behave as if man were already in possession of principles which would enable him to deal with all our problems, and as if it were only a question of appointing a dictator to apply them.”

In his preface to the Third Edition of his The Mass Psychology of Fascism, written in 1942, Wilhelm Reich notes that:

In its pure form, fascism is the sum total of all irrational reactions of the average human character. To the narrow-minded sociologist who lacks the courage to recognize the enormous role played by the irrational in human history, the fascist race theory appears as nothing but an imperialistic interest or even a mere “prejudice.” The violence and the ubiquity of these “race prejudices” show their origin from the irrational part of the human character. The race theory is not a creation of fascism. No: fascism is a creation of race hatred and its politically organized expression.

For U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), one of the handful of men who can be said to have been a primary architect of the successful plan to defeat fascism in the 1940s, he felt that “the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself,” and what stood out for him was that “[t]hat, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.” In other words, when one ruler/party/faction/group considers that it owns the state and that the state’s machinery, power, and largesse exist as personal tools for those in power, when that controlling entity does not feel it needs to share the state, and its machinery, power, and largesse with others different from themselves, we have fascism.

Henry A. Wallace, FDR’s Vice President before Truman, told The New York Times in 1944 that

A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends. The supreme god of a fascist, to which his ends are directed, may be money or power; may be a race or a class; may be a military, clique or an economic group; or may be a culture, religion, or a political party.

Wallace notes how American fascism is different from Nazi German fascists in a way that is quite relevant today when we are attempting to discuss democratic fascism:

The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

For Umberto Eco, whose own childhood took place in Mussolini’s fascist Italy, fascism was something that could be any combination of a number of key elements. Writing in 1995 in an incredibly prescient and far-too-underappreciated essay on what he termed “Ur-Fascism”—that eternal and incoherent fascist current within humanity—the Italian master saw fascism as something that espouses a “cult of tradition” in a way that was “syncretistic” and produced little if anything original (in this, Eco’s fascism resembles the evil forces in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, which is described here in The Lord of the Rings in a discussion of the nature of Sauron’s orc minions: “The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don’t think it gave life to Orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them.”). He also saw it as a “rejection of modernism” and, in turn, an embodiment of “irrationalism.” For Eco, fascism values “action for action’s sake” in a sense that despised deliberation and intellectual discourse and the intellectual world in general; building upon this, he also noted how fascism is unable to “withstand analytical criticism” to such a degree that “disagreement is treason.” As a natural follow-up to this, he notes fascism’s hatred of diversity and its “exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference,” that (nascent) fascism’s “first appeal…is an appeal against intruders,” making fascism “racist by definition;” it feeds on “individual or social frustration” in a way that is an “appeal to a frustrated middle class” that is “frightened by the pressure of lower social groups;” Eco feared that “the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.” The psychology of fascism is obsessed with identity, particularly appealing to those lost and confused in a changing and challenging world, and offers them a crude way out based on nationalism (for Orwell, “power-hunger tempered by self-deception”), a nationalism defined by exclusion of “enemies” of the nation; this psychology is based on “the obsession with a plot” against them, domestically and internationally. Those subscribing to such a fascist movement “must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies” but also “be convinced that they can overwhelm” them (leaving them “constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.”) With such movements, “pacifism is trafficking with the enemy” and “life is permanent warfare” such that even in victory, there is still a pervasive sense of insecurity, unspoken inferiority, and anxiety. Eco’s fascism is also embodied by a “contempt for the weak” that is crucial for its “popular elitism:” the leaders of the movement convince their mass followers that they are the true elite, even as they thrive by exploiting the weaknesses of their captains and both, in turn, exploit the weaknesses of their mass followers, who feel superior to those not in the movement in a dynamic of trickle-down elitism (“Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on,” as Sinclair Lewis writes in his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, in which a man remarkably like Donald Trump becomes president running a campaign remarkably like Trump’s and ends up transforming America into a fascist dictatorship). Here, Eco continues, “everybody is educated to become a hero” in a sense that engenders a constant hero martyr-complex (often literally reached by death or sending “other people to death”). In fascism, Eco also finds a misogynistic, homophobic machismo that addresses its sexual inadequacy through the “ersatz phallic exercise” of “play[ing] with weapons.” He also finds fascism to be based on a “selective populism” that is “qualitative” not “quantitative” in nature; “the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction,” and “[t]here is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.” Fascism, then, is “against ‘rotten’ parliamentary [i.e.., democratic] governments,” and “[w]herever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.”

Pondering the reality of a fictional German Nazi and Imperial Japanese-occupied America in the 1960s in Philip K. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle, a Nazi defector to Japan’s Pacific States of America defines the fascist system of insanity and its adherents as one explained by:

…something they do, something they are. It is their unconsciousness. Their lack of knowledge about others. Their not being aware of what they do to others, the destruction they have caused and are causing. No, he thought. That isn’t it. I don’t know; I sense it, I intuit it. But—they are purposelessly cruel… is that it? No, God, he thought. I can’t find it, make it clear. Do they ignore parts of reality? Yes. But it is more. It is their plans. Yes, their plans…Something frenzied and demented…

Their view; it is cosmic. Not a man here, a child there, but an abstraction: race, land. Volk. Land. Blut. Ehre. Not of honourable men but of Ehre itself, honor; the abstract is real, the actual is invisible to them. Die Güte, but not good men, this good man. It is their sense of space and time…

…They want to be the agents, not the victims, of history.

For long-time New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik,

What all forms of fascism have in common is the glorification of the nation, and the exaggeration of its humiliations, with violence promised to its enemies, at home and abroad; the worship of power wherever it appears and whoever holds it; contempt for the rule of law and for reason; unashamed employment of repeated lies as a rhetorical strategy; and a promise of vengeance for those who feel themselves disempowered by history. It promises to turn back time and take no prisoners. That it can appeal to those who do not understand its consequences is doubtless true.

*****

From these writers, thinkers, and leaders, then, like democracy, we can approach a definition of fascism that avoids the pitfall of being too specific but is still meaningful past use as a simple pejorative, thus avoiding Orwell’s trap as well.

For a brief, poetic, and literary understanding of what we may now say about fascism, allow me to satirize Paul’s lovely passage on love from First Corinthians (by far “Saint” Paul’s best work when compared to the rest of his generally contemptible legacy):

Fascism is impatient, fascism is cruel. It is jealous, is pompous, it is inflated,it is rude, it seeks its own interests, it is quick-tempered, it broods over injury, it rejoices over wrongdoing but does not rejoice with the truth. It bears only itself, believes only itself, hopes only itself, endures only itself. Fascism always fails.

Furthermore, fascism is hateful, irrational, fearful, childishly boastful; it thrives and survives on misinformation and disinformation, lies and deceit; it brooks no criticism and is an eternal enemy of intellectual discourse, debate, diversity, inclusion, and being part of the wider world, relies on racism, bigotry, ignorance, misogyny, and brute bullying in all manners of ways, loves cultish leader-worship, lusts after a false imagined past and “tradition,” is corporatist, nationalistic, incoherent, and contradictory, and is all of these things not mildly but intensely; it takes more typical, offensive, intolerant, and reactionary right-wing politics to a far more elevated level, so that even liberals will wistfully miss their old right-wing nemeses with the advent of the new fascism. There may not be a clear line where it is absolutely obvious where one has passed the realm of the more banal, typical right-wing politics into the realm of the far more dreadful (but still banal) and less manageable fascism (democratic or otherwise), but when one is well past that ill-defined line there can be a sickening clarity, a retroactive realization of one’s fetid new surroundings and a sheer terror that there may not be any going back anytime soon…

Henry A. Wallace…was onto the same truth that Orwell would most masterfully present to the world in his masterpiece 1984 with its concept of Newspeak, a formal language of propaganda, deception, and control: “The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of [the regime], but to make all other modes of thought impossible.” In his earlier-cited essay, Eco also identified Orwell’s Newspeak as the final enumerated element of fascism, noting how it makes “use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.” Eco also echoed Wallace when he noted that

Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, “I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.” Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances—every day, in every part of the world.

End excerpt

It is my earnest hope that, with the above discussion perhaps shared widely and profusely, we can more easily combat fascism by agreeing on what fascism is, and I do believe that herein I have presented a useable and workable definition by citing minds far greater than my own. From our elections at home to the battlefields of Ukraine, nothing is more urgent than defeating this fascism and calling it out by name and agreeing on what that name means is a crucial step to defeating it.

See related articles from February 17, 2017: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part I: Defining Democracy, Fascism, and Democratic Fascism Usefully, and Spin vs. Lies and Trump, the Global Democratic Fascist Movement, Putin’s War on the West, and a Choice for Liberals: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part II and see all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

Brian’s Ukraine journalism has been praised by: Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; Scott Shane, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly of The New York Times & Baltimore Sun (and featured in HBO’s The Wire, playing himself); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the only Republicans to stand up to Trump and member of the January 6th Committee; and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Jenni Russell, among others.

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981; LinkedIn, Facebook), July 21, 2022

WARNING: Spoilers for Star Wars in general, especially Obi-Wan Kenobi and other Disney+ Star Wars series

Author’s note: Regrettably, I have been sitting on this for nearly a month (mostly as is, with minimal edits).  I was excited to have this come out for an entertainment site—I will not get into specifics names here—for which I had written about Star Wars before.  No real history of any real issues there, certainly none with my editor at the time, but apparently that editor—again, not going into names, and I go into details I won’t go into here in a Twitter thread you can find if you really want to—despite never, not once, sending any critical or negative thought or communication to me about me or my work, couldn’t stand my views on Disney Star Wars or me as a person and projected a great deal onto what I did and did not mean in my communications, going far beyond my actual words into speculation and distortion.

This piece below, in earlier draft form, though, put this editor over the edge.  That editor then engaged in a temporarily successful political purge against me because of the views expressed here and projection related to them, but eventually the company realized major mistakes were made, apologized, and more or less fixed the situation to one acceptable to me after admitting the editor had behaved very inappropriately towards me.  So I was pleasantly surprised my attempts at open, reasoned discussion paid off (not with this editor, but with the company I freelanced with for some time; still, please do not seek out, bother, or engage the editor on my behalf, I absolutely am not trying to make this about this particular person, site, or company, but, rather, the larger issues this whole situation represents).

I really wanted to get my deep-dive on the Obi-Wan Kenobi series out to readers though, so here it is, with some edits/updates and a further explanatory note at the end* on what I touched upon here in this note, tying it into the larger issues I focused on on my original article. And oh, if you really hate what I have to say, feel free to disagree by actually sending me your critiques and views! Don’t be like that editor, engage and exchange!

SILVER SPRING—I try hard to go into new Disney/Lucasfilm Star Wars projects with an open mind.  Yes, mistakes are human, but refusing to learn from the body of dedicated fans giving consistent feedback is unforgiveable.  But when you don’t have a passionate, informed person or duo leading the effort from the top (three is a crowd), you basically get a committee trying to please everyone, do everything at once, shoehorn way too much in, and executing each part of the overburdened project with less finesse than more focus and time would allow.

While in George Lucas’s films, there are occasional technical errors that usually only a close rewatch can catch—a stormtrooper hitting his head on a Death Star doorframe, some of the droid voices or random side character voices in the prequels being slightly inconsistent—there are glaring moments of cringe here in Kenobi that, unlike in the J.J. Abrams Star Wars movies, stick with you in the moment because it is not trying to move at Abrams’ blazing lightspeed, skipping or not (not that Abrams’ flaws in his Star Wars films do not come flooding through as soon as the roller coaster ride ends and the credits roll, they do and easily stick with you when your brain can take a pause from the sensory overload and actually process what you have seen).

I don’t mind an awkward sequence or two.  But what we have is almost lazy, consistent, substantive flaws that are damn distracting—that is, when the show isn’t distracting with its own intentional distractions that they confuse for major plot lines betraying the titular choice of the series.

Bait and Switch

And what I mean is that Disney/Lucasfilm is constantly faking out its audiences, trying to make each new series as much as it can a “ONE-SIZE FITS ALL FOR ALL AGES!”-snare, baiting with what looks like one thing, but ends up being something else.  The key examples:

What we were sold:

A Badass Show about a Mandalorian bounty hunter!

What we got:

Mando and son, whereas Mando learns to be a dad! (I’m partly kidding, but partly not. There is less bounty-hunter badassery than we mostly all wanted, but the balance is still on giving Mando screen time vs Grogu, who can’t speak and definitely doesn’t compete for screen time, but the father-protective/mentoring dynamic, not the bounty-hunter dynamic, dominates.  But I guess we MUST HAVE the mentoring dynamic with a kid (CHECK)… (Still, I love this show)

What we were sold:

Bad Batch: A badass show about hardcore mutant clones

What we got:

Those clones babysitting an admittedly cool kid, Omega, but still…. Hero/kid mentoring/family dynamic (CHECK) dominates the series, not mutant clone badassery (I do like this series though)

What we were sold:

A show about the OG bounty hunter from the Original Trilogy, THE BOBA FETT, being a total badass!

What we got:

A show in which Boba mostly decides “I wanna be a super nice guy,” farms out most of the badassery to the more badass Fennec Shand (LOVE her, but she shouldn’t outshine Boba in his own show), the series being extremely inconsistent with storytelling/pacing, and the best episode by far is actually a Mandalorian prequel to that show’s third season, an episode in which Boba does not even appear , but we get the mentor-kid dynamic again (CHECK)

What we were sold:

“Hey, want a badass, mature show that’s about Obi-Wan’s dark, traumatized existence after Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith? Here’s Obi-Wan Kenobi, with Ewan McGregor, and, bringing Hayden Christensen back, we might even give you some deep introspection on Vader while we’re it at!”

What we got:

The Adventures of Obi-Wan, Lil’ Leia, and Reva!  Plenty of kid stuff for the kiddies, and plenty of Reva (because I guess the idea is Millennials and “Gen Z”—really baby Millennials—would get “bored” with Gen-Xer-age Kenobi so we need to add a younger-adult focus! Maybe my annoyance is clouding my judgment, but I think Leia and Reva get more screen time combined than Kenobi does in most episodes. And, of course, the mentor-kid dynamic (CHECK)

And don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of those Reva haters (again, screw the racist attacks against actress Moses Ingram), and knowing what I know now after the big Part V reveal and the ending, I am not upset with her story like some or her performance, I actually like it: it works fairly well and explains a lot of what people complained about initially, but I do agree it would have benefitted from letting it breather a little with more development over more episodes or at least longer episodes.  And I like Lil’ Leia!  A LOT!  But I don’t need THAT MUCH of her.  This isn’t the Lil’ Leia show.  It’s not the Reva show.  Instead of coming off as a series where the focus is on Kenobi where there are new (Reva) or reintroduced-at-a-younger-age characters (Leia), for a show billed as Obi-Wan Kenobi, it feels like they are just about equal stars.

We Were All Oversold on Obi-Wan Himself for No Good Reason

And this is where I get really angry with Disney/Lucasfilm.  I know they are a profit-driven corporation that is constantly trying to grow audience and hit new demographics (and we know, to appease Chinese censors, they minimized Nigerian-British actor John Boyega’s Finn’s appearance on Chinese posters, and Boyega felt misused by Disney overall).  I’m ok with trying to grow audience and expand demographics if done well, but the bait and switch—here is something we know longtime and hardcore fans will want, Obi-Wan, but instead of truly giving due focus in a show named after him to the titular character, we’re going to throw this other stuff in to the point Obi-Wan is competing for screen time with these new elements—has left a bad taste in my mouth and many others.

What’s crazy is that, for a show with just six episodes, we only got two episodes that focused on the Obi-Wan/Vader/Anakin dynamic above all else.  The rest all had way more going on, in many ways to their detriment.

If they called the show: Star Wars: The Hunt for Obi-Wan and Leia, I’d have been fine with what we got.  We are focusing on the main objects of the hunting—Obi-Wan and Leia—and we are focusing on the main actor on the hunter’s side, Reva.  It would be a great three-thread story on how they all tied into each other’s destinies, with some great Vader stuff mixed in.  But it’s a freaking show called Obi-Wan Kenobi.  And we didn’t see Obi-Wan before we saw Reva; it was the other way around, which may be coincidence, or it may not be.

I respect Deborah Chow, who, like Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau and unlike Rian Johnson and some Disney/Lucasfilm executives/producers, respects Star Wars for what it is has been and is and could be, not far more for what it could be, not as something they can “fix” or make better because it was sooo lacking, soooo missing modern sensibilities.  And trust me, anything older could use a few updates to better fit into any new era, but you can tell the difference between people who love and cherish the old and give thoughtful updates and those who are on a mission to “correct” beloved franchises in ways destined to offend longtime fans unnecessarily.  That former is what Dave Filoni did spectacularly with George Lucas with Clone Wars, that’s what Dave and Jon Favreau did with Mandalorian.

So here, again, we get to corporate plotting to have everything at the same time and nothing as an individual element being truly standout.  Some corporate committee decided they wanted to insert X stuff for the “new fans” or “potential new fans” and for “the kids” on top of the obvious elements in Obi-Wan Kenobi built on the legacy characters of Obi-Wan and Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker.  No, we couldn’t possibly just have a show focused on those two, it doesn’t check enough “boxes.”  Gods forbid!

To do this, said corporate committee hired a nobody writer to lead the writing for the series who virtually none of us have heard of before who has little ownership/attachment/knowledge of the existing material and who the committee can easily push around: Joby Harold, whose writing credits before Kenobi are only three films: Zack Snyder’s 2021 Netflix film Army of the Dead, 5.7 rating on IMDB and written with another; 2017’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, 6.7 rating by fans onIMDB and written with Guy Ritchie and other randos; and Awake in 2007, 6.5 IMDB rating, directed by Joby Harold, too, and starring Hayden Christensen (I guess that’s why??).

Except that Deborah Chow told us that we were getting a deep “character-driven story,” like the masterpiece Logan—about Wolverine, the only superhero movie, in my view, that can compete with Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, which was tight-knit and very focused on Logan and his relationship with Charles Xavier and Laura, with three standout performances—or the deep psychological drama Joker, centered only on the Joker, with him being the only main character.  But at the point I was writing much of this, in the half-day before the final episode aired, I thought, no matter how good the final episode is, no matter how different it is, with five-sixths of Kenobi sealed, delivered, and opened, that is definitely not what we got (the finale mixed episode, with an amazing Vader/Kenobi showdown and a decent culmination of Reva’s story, has not changed this understanding for me).

I checked for how long each episode was not including credits: Part I included a more-than-4-minute recap of the Prequel Trilogy, so not including that nor the credits, it’s not much over 44 minutes, I’m not cutting out the recaps for the other lengths, but keep in mind these do include recaps that take over 1 minute, sometimes closer to 2 minutes, off the length: Part II isn’t even 35 minutes; Part III isn’t even 41 minutes; Part IV isn’t even 33 minutes; Part V isn’t even 36.5 minutes; and the finale Part VI is the longest, at 44.5 minutes.

I am sorry, Disney/Lucasfilm, but if you want to engage in prestige TV, the general rule for being considered top-tier is to give your viewers about an hour an episode: this has been the case since The Sopranos, with everything from The Wire and Rome to Homeland and Dexter to Westworld and Game of Thrones (AMC with Mad Men, Walking Dead and Breaking Bad is the main example otherwise, cuz commercials, and Disney/Lucasfilm doesn’t have that excuse).  Yet half of Kenobi’s episodes feel little more than half-an-hour: they feel like half-episodes.

Which brings me to this next point, what drives me crazy even more so:  we could have had every second of Reva and Lil’ Leia we have now, and if this was a proper prestige show, given the status, respect, effort, and budget those shows had, we had plenty of time to have WAY more of Obi-Wan-himself!  That’s way more time for Ewan to act, to speak, way more time for him to reminisce, to possibly commune with Qui-Gon Jinn or Yoda (as I was hoping we would get and discussed elsewhere and finally got in the finale), to watch Luke, to have Clone Wars flashbacks (and not necessarily expensive battles but some nice downtime with Obi-Wan and Anakin, maybe even Ahsoka, which I thought maybe we would still get in the final episode, but oh well).  Disney, you had Ewan hired, and these scenes could easily have been written and produced with not a tremendous amount of effort, just a writer who really knew Star Wars and had the confidence to tackle it respectfully, or even if you had to drag Filoni in to write them, I am sure he would have obliged.  You could have added three, five more minutes of each episode, even easily more, still not exceeded an hour, and given us far more character development for Obi-Wan, you know, the main character the show is named after.

Quality Control, Please: Consumers vs. Fans

Instead, we get Obi-Wan having two episodes where the main thing he does is try to find and rescue Leia, two whole episodes in a six-episode series dangerously retreading incredibly similar ground.  We also have two chase sequences involving Leia, both of which are slow and poorly directed.  Again, I like Deborah Chow, and can’t explain this.  Maybe it was the Second Unit or Assistant Directors, of which there are literally eleven for the few episodes I checked (including the lowest-rated-by-far one at 6.3 on IMDB), something I’ve never seen before, but which explains the incoherence: Chow probably directed the best parts, and pick from among the other eleven to explain the WTF moments…

Before this final episode aired, I was dreading the fact that apparently young Luke is being dragged into this, and at least his role was kept to a minimum, but still, I think we would have been better off not bringing in Luke/Owen/Beru into the final episode for Reva’s culmination because we already made the decision to take Obi-Wan off Tatooine and to focus on Leia; making Luke the focus for the end of the final episode when Leia has been the focus of the previous five just feels contrived, and, in such a short series, rushed.  And the contrived, forced way we had Bail Organa needlessly name-dropping Owen and Tatooine when Kenobi already knew that information was just ridiculous, really bad writing along with it just being dropped like that and left for Reva to find.  It was as if once not killing Reva off during the Vader fight they did not know what to do with her or how to wrap the next episode up and they just forced everything together.

We already have three main axes around which the show has revolved: Obi-Wan, Reva, and Leia, with a sub-focus on Vader.  After five episodes, bringing in a fifth axis with Luke… in a six-episode show, just no.

With Reva and Leia, I almost felt like we were getting a product testing sample: let’s see how the audience response to X and Y, and, depending on the reactions, we may develop a new product line, more products for more money.  Hell, we could have had a whole new series: Star Wars: Inquisitor, focused solely on Reva, with her being brought into the Inquisitorius, hinting at her backstory, and setting up a crossover with Kenobi.  Instead of getting a Reva series and/or an Obi-Wan series, it seems like Disney/Lucasfilm tried to do both in one and succeeded at neither.  I could say the same for Leia.  We get some great scenes for all the main characters, but the ways they were all put together make me feel the marketing boxes having their checks drawn in them, that I am being subjected to some sort of corporate algorithm.

Which I wouldn’t mind if the show was put together in a much better way, if the final produce was of a much higher quality.  We’ve already seen this with The Mandalorian (but even it can come off as uneven sometimes).  We know of one aborted spinoff (Rangers of the New Republic) and one currently in production (Ahsoka, but, to call that series a Mandalorian spin-off doesn’t do Ahsoka Tano’s character’s history in other Star War content justice; with Dave Filoni helming that, I very confident it will be amazing).  If a show is good enough, I won’t realize, won’t notice too much, or won’t care that you are trying to sell me or pitch me an upcoming product; Ahsoka and other Mandalorian cameos did not feel shoehorned int.  It won’t feel grossly commercial or too corporate-y because I will be enjoying the content so much. 

There are people who consume and enjoy a product—let’s call them the consumers—who enjoy most of what’s thrown at them without really thinking about it much or ever allowing themselves to get that bent out of shape over a particular property.  They enjoy Baby Yoda or Rey or whatever, but it’s not that important to them and they don’t feel that deeper connecting to Star Wars.  They may even post Baby Yoda memes or own Baby Yoda dolls or get their kids Baby Yoda lunchboxes, but they are primarily consumers without any deep emotional attachment even if they find Baby Yoda adorable.

But then there are the people who care deeply about the characters, themes, and worlds of Star Wars—let’s call them fans, who will think carefully about anything, will still consume but do far more than that and not without thoughts and reactions, analysis, or sometimes protestations.  Star Wars for fans is much more than entertainment and distraction.  And, at least in the George Lucas era, that is what set Star Wars apart from, say, the Transformers series, Fast and Furious series, all the Jurassic Parks after the original, and most of the other current blockbuster franchises.

The Star Wars consumers aren’t really thinkers when it comes to Star Wars content, they will happily take the flashy distractions, but the fans, they demand vision, storytelling, something more than exciting sequences strung together.  For them, Star Wars—a lot like the Lord of the Rings—was never just another fun property; it transcended entertainment, was about so much more than just fun, spoke to our souls, and was something that has to be treated gingerly and respectfully in order meet the minimum standards of what made these franchises great.  Instead, Disney had made its era feel like the Hobbit Trilogy if the Hobbit had the same weight and reverence as Lord of the Rings (it doesn’t so it was easy to shrug off those problematic, drawn-out films and even they did not mess up the main characters in the ways Disney often has).

If Lucas didn’t make the Original or Prequel Trilogies, just the first movie, and it kept being handed off to different directors and a whole plethora of different writers selected by a corporate committee, it would never have evolved into the franchise it is now: a staple of global pop culture for four decades, quoted so often in other movies (Tom Holland’s Peter Parker plays with Star Wars Legos), the subject of so many amazing video games and novels (including bestsellers), its exact costumes from 1977 appearing all over the world constantly, its references seeping into politics and everyday references, its music played at nearly every major sporting event from NCAA college sports—played by college bands—to being played on the organ at Madison Square Garden during New York Rangers hockey playoff games.

Such a team would perform embarrassingly poorly, out of line with tis stories history.

With Kenobi, this has manifested itself in significant ways.  The action apart from the lightsaber duels was almost invariably sloppy and poorly coordinated.  Things that defied belief—not sending Tie-fighters after a snowspeeder or a refugee ship (even when the Millennium Falcon had a tracking beacon on it after leaving the Death Star, a few token ties were sent to make it convincing), a roadblock that can easily be walked around, Bail’s ridiculous holomessage to Obi-Wan in Part V that forces the whole Luke subplot for Part VI, that cartoon moment when Obi-Wan walked out of a base full of Imperials with Leia walking with him under his jacket, and apparent canon issues—were just fed to us as if we should simply accept them and not think about it, let alone complain.  All of this is symptomatic of laziness, lack of respect for the audience, and rushing, none of which belong in our Star Wars.

And keep in mind, this comes after a whole Sequel Trilogy that they made up as they went along with no real plan and poorly handled, to varying degrees, the legacy characters of Han Solo, Leia Organa Skywalker, and, especially, Luke Skywalker, ranging from missed opportunities to just doing a character dirty with a postmodern deconstructionist attitude wholly inappropriate for the Skywalker Saga (but admittedly could have worked in Star Wars in a different era with all new characters unrelated to the original characters).

So the idea is that they would take more care this time around…

I will admit that I loved Liam Neeson back as Qui-Gon Jinn, I loved the final battle between Kenobi and Vader (and the first), hell, I even cried during that final duel, and I cried when Kenobi was telling Leia about her mother and father—those two scenes alone were worth the price of admission—but the journey matters, not just the destination, and so much of what got us to that final lightsaber duel was just so-so, B-level TV writing and action of questionable quality.  On my 4k TV, some of the scenes even looked poorly shot, with some of the larger scenic shots in the final duel looking grainy and buffer-y, even low-quality, not anywhere near how it should look in 4k.  Disney, where was the quality control?  Why the RUSH??  While I could give the fight a 9 or a 10, I cannot give the whole episode that, let alone the series.

Star Wars vs. Marvel MCU and the state of Disney Star Wars

I will confess that I have been turned off by the Marvel MCU its sheer volume of content (and the X-Men comics were my big Marvel reads growing up), most of which isn’t terribly highly rated (of over two-dozen films, only a handful have an 8.0-or-higher IMDB rating and the two highest are only 8.4, plus, you can’t count the Spiderman movies because they aren’t Disney), because it seems like the point isn’t to tell a great story or a great movie but to simply keep pumping out content that will be consumed by linking it to all the existing content.  If I feel like I am being fed one thing just so I will consume the next thing, I because suspicious, old geezer that I am.

But I must put some stock in die-hard Marvel fans, because they seem to generally love the MCU.  I hear relatively few complaints, let alone bitterness, rage, betrayal, or that combination leading to indifference, common to find these days among a large portion of Star Wars fans.

So Marvel must be doing a better job, because Star Wars fans are not eating up their version of the MCU.

Some were fooled on a nostalgia overload by Force Awakens, and most longtime fans hate Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker, both of which help people who missed the shallowness of Force Awakens realize it upon subsequent viewings (two directors pissing on each other’s work over the course of a trilogy is not how you make a quality trilogy.  For anything.  Ever.).  Rebels is hit or (mostly) miss but I think people just took the excellent Vader/Ahsoka content and pretended the rest of the repetitive, underdeveloped, low-production-value rest was good when it was just ok or meh…  Resistance?  OOPS.  Solo is underrated (best of the Disney-era films!) and Rogue One is overrated (an awesome final combined-space-and-ground battle with Vader icing and sprinkles a great movie does not make).  The entire approach to Book of Boba Fett left most people scratching their heads, and even if the show was overall enjoyable, it was also incoherent and disjointed in some ways similar to the Sequel Trilogy, just not as horrifically so.  Yes, Favreau and Filoni were attached, which makes is even more confusing, but let’s just say we lucked out with the different-director-episode-to-episode-approach when it came to Mandalorian, let’s not repeat that with anything else. The point is, that’s three major projects with a patern.

That leaves Mandalorian and Clone Wars as the only newer content that united nearly all fans.

I think about how the Marvel section within Disney can take a new show about a second- or third-tier hero and generally please both its audience and its critics, tend to do this consistently, and then I think about this Kenobi show, from a mile away pretty clearly going to feature two of the four most important characters for the bulk of the more than forty years Star Wars has existed—Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker—which will even include some of the other two, Anakin’s children, Luke and Leia—and I am mystified as well as enraged: how could Disney allow a more coherent, well-thought-out, crowd-pleasing vision and production for even lower-tier Marvel shows get the treatment and effort that should obviously have been there from a corporate organizational standpoint for Vader and Kenobi?? As a case in point: the apparently meh The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is not even in the top ten Disney-era Marvel TV-shows by rating, and yet even it is rated slightly higher (7.2 on IMDB) than Kenobi (7.1 on IMDB) but with nearly 50% more ratings.

(Or even getting away from Marvel, I never heard of The Boys before the show, and the show just keeps banging out well-produced, well-written, coherent, consistent, good-looking episodes episode after episode.  Why is The Boys getting better treatment than Star Wars??  Or how about Peacemaker?  A very diverse show, dealing with complicated issues, that turned out to be superb, about a character I never knew and never cared about, why is this character given grade-A treatment?? [Because a person of stature with a great track record and with a vision was able to execute that vision as that person saw fit, and a studio gave him pretty much as much as he wanted to be able to do that.])

In short, why is Disney not pulling out all the stops, bringing in the best talent, bringing in veteran hands, throwing money (it has plenty), giving Obi-Wan Kenobi A-list, first-tier treatment?

Don’t try to answer this question, because there is no logical way to understand the paths that led Disney to more of less succeed and skillfully execute shows for non-top-tier Marvel characters like Wanda Maximoff (7.9 on IMDB), Loki (8.2 on IMDB), and Jessica Jones (7.9 on IMDB) but not so much with Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth freakin’ Vader.  Or to understand the management approach behind any masterpiece film or TV show compared to what Disney did with Kenobi.  Those successful showrunners and film creators do not, for one thing, bring in a writer like Joby Harold.  But let’s not hate on Joby: the blame is with the mentality of the corporate powers that be thinking it would be anywhere near acceptable to do this for a series with flagship characters.  There are numerous writers who have written well-received Star Wars novels—some New York Times bestsellers for years, but, hey, let’s go with some guy who doesn’t seem to even know Star Wars particularly well.

It would be like one of the most storied franchises in sports history—Real Madrid, Manchester United, the New York Yankees, the New England Patriots, the Boston Celtics, or the Montreal Canadiens—hiring some person who done an ok job as a college coach for a few seasons and just that in any of those sports (I know some of you Star Wars folks are like “what is sports?” I promise the analogy works).  Or, better yet, it is like Disney/Lucasfilm hiring Rian Johnson to do Star Wars: Episode VIII…  I don’t blame Joby Harold, though; I do, again, blame those who put him in that position.

Imperial Hubris

For my other recent work, I have been reading and writing about the 1939-1940 Soviet Finnish Winter War between the USSR and plucky little outgunned Finland as a prism through which to examine the current Russian invasion of Ukraine.  For most of the fairly short war, the Finns embarrassed a colossally misled, improperly equipped, poorly led, mind-numbingly-stupid Soviet Red Army, inflicting enormous losses on the Soviets to far fewer losses for their own forces, with far-less advanced equipment and far less ammunition than the Soviets (think the Ewoks vs. the Imperials at the Battle of Endor and it’s honestly not that much different, except think Arctic snow instead of temperate forest.  I’m not kidding).  In other words, like the Empire vs. the little fuzzy bears, they had the resources, technology, and manpower to crush the little furballs.  But they kept making the same mistakes, week after week after week, and it boggles the mind.

At this point, that’s how I feel with Disney/Lucasfilm when it comes to Star Wars.

Those who study business in MBA programs would be at a loss, too: it is incredibly hard to understand the rhyme or reason of their approach because they keep taking an ad hoc approach where vision and consistency is obviously needed.  They did not do this with Sequel Trilogy, and it is painfully obvious.  Now, we are hearing about how Disney/Lucasfilm is making it up as they go along as to whether Kenobi really is going to be a limited six-episode series or to have a whole second season.

Enough… please!

The fans, as opposed to consumers, really want art.  They have every right to expect the prestige treatment, the quality of the Sopranos or Rome or most seasons of Game of Thrones.  Apart from Mandalorian and Clone Wars, fan reception—and with Star Wars, there is a massive fanbase, not just a consumer base—has been decidedly mixed, hit or miss.  We have every right to expect the studio to take the time, expense, and consideration to churn out a Star Wars series featuring Kenobi and Vader as the presumed centers of the series actually focus mainly on them, that matches the efforts put into the best of television and movies, not some cheaper, wildly uneven mishmash put together by twelve directors per episode and a committee of generally not-known writers without serious resumes as writers.  This isn’t your experimental product test-balloon, this is the first time we are seeing Kenobi against Vader since literally 2005.  Instead, we get unfocused and uneven, repetitive episodes.  We get cheap-looking scenes.  We get some things that really don’t make sense in jarring ways.  We get lightsabers that look like the expensive replica lightsaber toys, that look like they are rounded glass 3D blades used by coplayers but with brighter lighting that made otherwise solid-to-excellent action scenes sometimes look off visually.  We get a flashback with Anakin designed to show “ANAKIN AGGRESSIVE WANT TO WIN TOO MUCH” and that’s it, nothing deeper.  We get mostly unmemorable music (compare to the Fallen Order soundtrack; hell, compare the writing and action in that game to this series, the focus on great characters, the excellent pacing from world to world, level to level, without characters feeling shoehorned in, to Kenobi…).

Yes, we ask for a lot.  But the thing is, it has been done with Star Wars before, and Lucas, Filoni, Favreau, and the developers of Fallen Order at Respawn have shown us it can be done.  Instead, Disney/Lucasfilm keep doubling down, to one degree or another, on the errors of the aimless, non-planned/poorly-planned direction of the Sequel Trilogy.  Book of Bob Fett was the worst offender since Rise of Skywalker until Kenobi, but let’s be honest: I love Boba but he’s not Anakin and he’s not Obi-Wan.  So the carelessness is even worse here, given the weight of the material.

I loved certain scenes in this show.  That doesn’t forgive the rest of the series.  Don’t tell me we needed buildup and that explains it.  So do all other great series and the best Star Wars movies, the issue here is the quality not just of the execution, but the approach taken to hiring writers and directors, planning, staffing, everything.  Kenobi is a microcosm of the range of Disney’s version of Lucasfilm’s Star Wars: highs, lows, end everything in-between.

Especially with the finale, I can say “Obi-Wan Kenobi is pretty good!”  But not great.

I’d rather they just slowed down, hired much better and better-established writers (ideally one or two-maximum, with VISION) that idolized Star Wars, better assistant/second directors, had Filoni involved as an executive producer, and spent another year developing everything far more carefully, limiting the side-plots, side-characters, giving us more of the main characters and in live location shots in the desert, not only The Volume (as Vader himself said of the Death Star in A New Hope, “Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed. The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force.”).  I want Rome and Game of Thrones and Band of Brothers and production values.  I want a masterpiece of high-art television for Star Wars, Logan-level character development and scripts, Star Wars-quality music (Clone Wars’s and Narcos’s Kevin Kiner or the Fallen Order guys, Stephen Barton and Gordy Haab), your best damn effort, Disney!

That isn’t what we got.  We got a product, trying to do too much, appeal to too many audiences, we did not get art with a singular vision, which is perhaps what characterizes the best Star Wars Content: I-VI and Clone Wars.

Please, Disney and Lucasfilm.  PLEASE.  It’s time to take a different approach.  All-things to all people run by a corporate committee just hasn’t worked, and even if it has made you money, it has really divided and disappointed audiences.  Learn from what has united, not divided fans, form both within Star Wars and Disney and without.  Don’t fall the corporate Dark Side, open your minds to the artistic light-side, and stop repeating the same needless, careless mistakes.

And, as a writer, above all, bring quality writers who know Star Wars to write these scripts.  It all starts with the script matched with love of the material.  When you do that, it’s hard to go wrong.  When you don’t, you fail, and have no one to blame but yourselves for the messes that get created and recognized for the messes that they are.

Please, stop giving us messes.  Slow down.  Take your time.  Listen.  And learn.

Postscript

Between “finishing” this piece and its final publication, I rewatched the last episode of Season 3 of HBO’s magisterial Westworld and the premiere of the brand-new first episode of its Season 4 (and, since sitting on this piece, the next three episodes).  To appreciate my argument on its most simple, visceral level, I ask simply this:  if you are caught up on Westworld, watch the same two episodes I did; if not, watch the next two episodes from where you are in the series, and if you have not started the show, watch the first two episodes.  As you watch, notice and then compare the incredible story, mix of high-level and crass yet superb dialogue, the seamless general writing and transitions, the deep philosophical references, the Emmy-worthy acting, the lush set design and quality mixed with incredible location shots, the high general production values, the mesmerizing cinematography, the spectacular lighting, the evocative and highly memorable music, the incredibly detailed pacing and editing that gets to almost exactly an hour or even occasionally more, the dance-like-conceived action choreography, the intricate way character arcs develop and characters make decisions, the nuance competing with the intensity—and all of this built upon the overall level of effort, care, and planning that was required to pull all this off throughout the entirety of the episodes, along with the budget and patience to execute these scenes as well as they were executed—to all their counterparts in even the two best episodes of Obi-Wan Kenobi.  Then ask yourself: which is the prestige and artful television show, and which is not.

And then, you will understand where I am coming from.

After that, ask yourself why this is the case.

Then, you will understand the depth of my frustration.

*Explanatory note for author’s note: I knew next to nothing of editor’s views or work until right around the time all this went down and after I had sent this draft as a submission.  Instead of simply rejecting the draft, sharing what problems this person as an editor or human had with it, or engaging with me at all—and I would have welcomed a spirited discussion, been ok with rejection—this editor went around me and gathered a number of other folks at the company (freelancers like myself and the editor) with whom I had little to no direct interaction (most likely none) but who really didn’t like my views on Star Wars.  They went like a woke mob of the type that saw Bari Weiss and Donald McNeil, among others, driven from their journalistic home (two people whose work and views I often admire, even if I don’t always agree with them; Weiss has, since her departure from The New York Times, disappointingly moved somewhat to the right in ways with which I don’t agree, but she is still a voice worth hearing and I embrace her resignation letter’s criticism of the Times).

After days of no response of my editor to some different and related inquiries (nothing hostile), I got an e-mail with this pretty Orwellian line from a much-higher-up at the company: “Our chief goal at ___ has always been to establish active communities around each of our sites. We accomplish that through our content, primarily, and that is, in part, why we welcome and encourage opinionated content from all points of view. Some of your work, however, has challenged other members of the site and left them feeling uncomfortable. Some of the criticism you’ve included in your work has crossed outside of their comfort level.”  After that series of wholly contradictory thoughts, the conclusion was a variation of adios/sayonara to your role here, an abrupt unilateral act with no warning that seemed an extreme overreaction.

Again, this was from an editor’s and other staffers’ reactions to a series of Star Wars articles published with the approval of the staff (I cannot post directly, only an editor or higher-up can) that no reasonable person would react to this way.  Not Trump.  Not Gaza.  Not abortion.  Star Wars.  Reasonable people could disagree with my Star Wars views (and admittedly I myself in some of those pieces bring some heavy issues into the discussion), of course, but for reaction to rise to that level an enraged secret purge campaign, thinking that was a justifiable response, was extremism run amok, liberal Millennial snowflake intolerance at its worst (and I say that as a lifelong liberal). 

I suspected what was going on and was able to later directly confirm, but before I confirmed, I did my own research.  I had already known that a number of authors were very into leftist social and political activism, particularly around identity-driven issues, and were also vert pro-Disney (I’d even go as far as to say they are shills for Disney Star Wars), enthusiastically greeting each new movie, show, comic, book, toy that comes out with Star Wars on it from Disney.  Looking at the site in general, the vast majority of the content is positive on Disney Star Wars and you’d never know how incredibly serious the problems are between Disney’s Lucasfilms’s version of Star Wars and the Star Wars fandom.

To be fair, lots of Star Wars content out there is like this, particularly from voices attached to larger entertainment fan sites that seek to have a relationship with Disney to have early access to products and to interview folks involved in Disney Star Wars.  This is a serious problem in journalism, not least in political journalism, as I highlighted with The New York Times’s Glenn Thrush and that paper’s biggest political reporting star, Maggie Haberman.  Access can either blind journalists or, at worst, corrupt them.

Anyway, I specifically did my due diligence on this editor, and found this person’s articles and Twitter feed, especially, full of a crusader mentality, a clear history of not getting along well with almost anyone who challenged this person, an abhorrence of engagement with people who held sharply different views, and very much focused on this person’s social causes in a way that demanded they be fused with Star Wars and Star Wars fandom, anyone who disagreed be damned (or, blocked and denigrated as “toxic” simply for not being in full agreement with this editor).  It was appropriate to be controversial if you were in agreement with this editor, but if not, you did not deserve to speak or be heard.  Star Wars was to primarily (or at least as much as anything) be about advancing social and political agendas, and if people didn’t like it, well, they shouldn’t complain and should just be grateful for the content, the thesis of an entire article by this person (unless, again, you were unhappy from a social/leftist political perspective, and then, your complaints were valid and enthusiastically supported, the contradiction laid bare).  In particular, any Star Wars content that promoted a non-male/white/heterosexual character in a strong way was to be celebrated as wonderful, regardless of the quality of storytelling, writing, production values, plot continuity, if it damages the existing key Star Wars films and canon, if it made no sense… you get my drift, per my above article; if that person overpowers, saves, or corrects a non-diverse character (say, Obi-Wan or Luke Skywalker), then it’s even more awesome, cuz, it’s about time!

Quality is redefined as that which advances the agenda, the views of the editor and that editor’s self-selected allies.  Personally, I deeply value and respect elevating marginalized and underrepresented or poorly represented groups if done well, with care and not at the expense of story or tearing down beloved characters to make a political/social point that takes us away from a Galaxy Far, Far Away and right into the muck of our current culture wars.  That’s not to say you can’t touch on sensitive issues that resonate in our world, of course you can, but you should do so without making it so pointed and specific that it feels like your bringing us back into our world in a way that will staunchly alienate many needlessly and make them feel like they and their favorite Star Wars characters are being attacked or denigrated; again, I am a liberal, but don’t want to cheapen Star Wars by making it about scoring shallow points in a culture war at the expense of quality and coherence, hence my title).  And, again, with this editor and this crowd, if you complain about the content lacking good writing, pandering instead of really representing, or anything else reasonable to complain about, you’re bad, your views are bad, and you shouldn’t be given a platform.  You should not get a response, just a nothing or a block; there is no engagement unless it comes from a perspective these people want to elevate.

The more the Disney Star Wars content offended more longtime fans, the more they loved it and attacked the people criticizing it.

This nonsense resembles only one other thing in my writing career:  when a Russia-government affiliated think tank, the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC), censored, purged, and gaslit me as a contributor for publishing views very much against the Kremlin line on the human-rights related U.S.-imposed Magnitsky sanctions that infuriated Putin and were the subject of a clear attempt to bribe and corrupt the Trump campaign in 2016 at an infamous meeting at Trump Tower, on Jared Kushner-linked Prevezon and Russian influence campaigns (all the details are here, including the gaslighting e-mails from RIAC).

Needless to say, I wasn’t going to just meekly slide away.  I did not, ended up engaging a very respectful senior staff member at the company, and that staff member admitted major mistakes were made, that I was treated in an extreme and unfair manner, that the whole situation should have been handed much differently, that the editor had behaved wrongly and disingenuously concerning me on a number of fronts, and basically rescinded the other e-mail ending my relationship with the company for a mutual, shared understanding that would have me step away on Star Wars content, at least for now, with a chance to perhaps reengage on that front in the future.  I was inspired by the company’s response to my concerns and it was an inspiring victory for decency, openness, engagement, and hashing out difficult issues respectfully and fairly and being able to admit mistakes (all the things which the editor’s approach and those who think like this editor don’t practice).

I took on a woke mob on a corporate level and was surprised by the results.  Treat people as people, that’s the main lesson I took away from all this.  And I was almost certain it would be pointless but forced myself to give respectful engagement a chance, anyway. There needs to be far more of such engagement in our society, with journalists and commentators having serious engagement with their critics, like I was surprised to find in this awesome video

Snowlfakes need to purge intense disagreement and wrap themselves in a Linus-blanket of an echo chamber, but the adults in the room need to know better and need to teach the younger Millennials (I will note that corporate staffer I engaged with was [or was almost] a fellow Gen X-er, like me) especially, how to do better.  It’s not just Star Wars at stake: it’s our increasingly polarizing entertainment culture overall (look at the different intense reactions to the Lord of the Rings prequel-prequel, Rings of Power, and, on the other side, The Terminal List) and our politics and society overall. 

The original George Lucas Star Wars. Like J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, UNITED people, did not divide them.  If Disney and Amazon are finding that their new content for these storied franchises are doing the opposite, and not just dividing people who did not like them from those who did over taste, but dividing intensely along social, political, and identity-driven axes, they really, really need to rethink their approach, just as Trumpist fascists and the far-left need to rethink their approach to politics.

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981; LinkedIn, Facebook), July 11, 2022 (**updated July 13 with an excellent exposure on the part of The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin on how the mainstream press distorts their narratives on Biden; *updated July 12 with new polling data proving my point)

SILVER SPRING—I’m a big Star Wars fan (spoilers for Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith in this paragraph), and this past month was a big one for Star Wars fans with the (somewhat, but not entirely, disappointing) Obi-Wan Kenobi series, with key scenes bringing us back to Order 66, when clones with chips implanted in their brains were forced against their will by the chips to turn on their Jedi leaders.

I feel that the members of the “respectable” (as opposed to fascist propaganda/disinformation) media might even have some sort of chip in their brains when they cover Democrats: from the New York Times to the Washington Post, from CNN to MSNBC and many, many other outlets, it seems there is a near-constant need to push a “Democrats in DISARRAY!” narrative regardless of the facts.  These hot takes or seemingly analytical pieces almost invariably take one of a few approaches:

• “I, Smarty McSmart-Pants, awesome journalist that I am, am going to call out Democrats/President Joe Biden for not accomplishing X, Y, and/or Z!”—but with little to no regard for the actual balance of power or even proper procedure, let alone historical precedent, how Congress or the presidency actually work and what each can and cannot do or what it would actually take to actually do said thing(s).
• Interviewing and quoting a selective selection of activists, voters, or party folks (“some” or “dozens” out of WAY, WAY MORE—literally out of hundreds, thousands or, when it comes to voters, millions), nearly all of whom are obscure and folks 99% of readers have never heard of before and who will all complain (“whispers”!?) about Democrats’ leadership/direction; this will be presented without noting that their collective complaining is not representative but while offering some token pushback from a couple of people who are far more representative without noting they are, in fact, more representative; aggregate polling data (as opposed to citing one or two polls, if any) showing how most relevant people feel is usually ignored because of either laziness or “the narrative.”
• This or that outlier or outliers within the Democratic Party or its caucus (usually the Squad, Bernie Sanders, or other far lefties—wonderful clickbait for click-hungry websites—but sometimes the defiant two-headed albatross of relatively conservative Democratic senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema) complain/tweet and/or their criticisms of the Party as a whole are presented as major stories in and of themselves and as examples of overall Party “dysfunction.”
• Sensationalizing the clickbaity thoughts of anonymous staffers, usually in the White House (and the White House has a lot of staff) or a campaign but sometimes in Congress, griping about this or that, which upon review are usually just the result of banal office politics, generational conflict also typical in today’s newsrooms, devoted acolytes wanting “MORE” for their masters or stans wanting “MORE” for the object of their stanning, and personal egos blown way out of proportion; even if you read between the lines, it’s more about individual staff clashes/competition or their projected desires for this thing or that person than anything originating from the big-name figures with whom they are associated.  Typical red-flag sentence emblematic of these articles: “This article is based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former administration officials, lawmakers, congressional aides and other Democrats close to the White House who spoke on the condition of anonymity to freely discuss the president’s private conversations.”

Sometimes, yes, these types of articles are on to something.  Most of the time, it’s just hot air, unrepresentative whining, or simply “whispers,” as in, articles that resemble more tabloid gossip columns than news articles that should actually be written.

In Data We Trust: The Current Congress in Historical Context

The problem is, almost none of this—and I mean absolutely none except for the best-of-the-best of such takes—is based on any serious data-oriented research.  The data is there, it just isn’t properly engaged with, but let’s set the record straight with some mind-blowing facts for those of you being inundated by the “Dems in Disarray” narrative:

1. No party has ever been as unified in its Congressional voting (“party unity vote” average) in both the House and Senate as today’s Democratic Party, with the possible exception in the Senate of just one year of Federalist Party Senate voting in the first few years of the 1800s
2. Specifically, the Democratic Party has never been more unified in terms of its Congressional voting records than it has in recent years, including a record high for all of-American history in 2021 in both the House (98% average) and Senate (97% average)
3. In recent years (last decade), party unity has been close between the two parties in the House, but in the most recent years the Democrats have been more unified, while the parties have alternated in recent years in the Senate, Republicans beating Democrats for all of Trump’s term but Democrats winning for all of Obama’s two terms and with Democrats setting a new record for unity in 2021

Reread that if you need to, but let’s be clear: this current Democratic Party in recent years overall and especially in 2021 was the most unified major party in history where it counts the most: in its votes in Congress.

It’s even more impressive when you realize that the Democrats have only a narrow edge in the House and are essentially tied in the Senate with Vice President Kamala Harris as the tie-breaker.

I came across a telling, wonderfully-data-driven article by that guided me to this understanding by Niels Lesniewski and Ryan Kelly for Roll Call from March 1 of this year, covering the years of the half-century from 1972 to 2021, and have used its chart above and table below:

Being the data- and history-oriented researcher that I am, I wanted to know the full record, and while I plan to continue finding more presentations of this data, so far the below chart from this other study is the best (and only) full account I have come across thus far in chart, table, or graph form (plenty for recent decades but not going all the way back the Founding of our republic):

In that all-encompassing chart, “Democrats” and “Republicans” include their antecedent parties from early American history, thus, the Federalists would account for that “Republican” spike in the Senate that comes close to 100% in the very early 1800s; the graphs are small and it’s hard to tell the exact year or numerical value, so I laid that out as the only possible exception to the numbers the 2021 Democrats put up the in Senate and clearly no one has beaten them in the House (where average party unity has only increased since the end of the chart).

The other chart below the comprehensive one shows the level of majority strength in each Congress since Republicans were first seated there in 1855.  As anyone can see, a tie “majority” in terms of party balance in the Senate is exceedingly rare, and since the Senate seated Alaska’s and Hawaii’s first senators in 1959, bringing the Senate’s total to 100 senators when fully seated, the only other time there was a 50-50 Senate at all was during the 107^th Congress, from January 20, 2001, until May 24 of that year, when Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords left the Republican Party to caucus as an independent with the Democrats, giving the Democrats an effective 51-49 majority for the remainder of that Congress until January, 2003.  For those few months before Jeffords’ defection, the situation was the same as now just in reverse in that the Republicans had a 50-seat “majority” with a tie-breaker vote able to come from their Vice President, then Dick Cheney, as Democrats have with Harris today.

Other than that, there are the odd the exceptions during the 83^rd Congress, from early 1953 to early 1955, when throughout its term the deaths of nine senators and resignation of one caused a number of leadership changes in a close Senate, some of which led to shorter-term ties but with one situation leaving a tie for more than two-thirds of a year.

Before that, you have to go all the way back to a crazy situation from the 47^th Congress in 1881, which began with a tied Senate that lost its tie-breaking ability when President James Garfield was assassinated late that year and replaced by Vice President Chester Arthur, as there was no constitutional provision for replacing a vice president and, therefore, no person to cast a tie-breaking vote after Arthur was sworn in, a situation that thus lasted until the beginning of the next Congress in 1883; before that, a Senate balance-of-power tie had never happened in all the years of the Senate’s existence going back to 1789.

Biden’s and Democrats’ Accomplishments in Context: A Bipartisan Past vs. Our Partisan Present

In all these instances, like the situation today, there was only a small lead for the same party with the tie-breaking vice president in the other half of Congress, the House of Representatives.  But as the graphics I have provided above show, partisanship was significantly less intense, bipartisanship significantly more common, in these other eras than today.  This allowed some major accomplishments to actually happen easily even in 50-50 Senates.

In 1883, President Arthur was able to get the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, which formed the basis of the modern civil service.  The next time there was a split Senate in the 1950s, there was also a spirit of bipartisanship on a broad variety of issues, leading to legislation passing that established both the Small Business Administration and what would eventually become the Department of Health and Human Services; President Dwight Eisenhower’s major legislation concerning tax reform, along with major bills regarding nuclear regulation and expansion of both unemployment and Social Seucrity benefits, were all enacted with overwhelming bipartisan support, among other bills passed in a similar spirit.

In the next period when there was an effective tie in the Senate, no major legislation was passed, but just days after Jeffords’ late May defection, President George W. Bush saw his massive tax cut bill’s final Senate passage by a significant bipartisan margin.  Yet the massive reorganization of the government’s security apparatuses (including the Patriot Act and the bill creating of the Department of Homeland Security) and major reforms to education and prescription drug benefits for Medicare during the 107^th Congress all occurred only after the 9/11 attacks of September 11, 2001, when there was a period of historic bipartisanship, if only temporarily (these big wins came from Republicans even when the Democrats had a 51-49 Senate majority with Jeffords).

Of course, today’s situation is quite different from these: not only are most congressional Republicans in a long–extremist and increasingly-fascist Republican Party openly shielding former president Trump and other plotters of his 2020-2021 attempted coup (a term I used at the time) and perpetuating the lies that the 2020 election was stolen by phantom “fraud” while preparing to be able to carry out another coup attempt if Republicans lose the 2024 presidential election, on legislative issues, they are engaging in extreme obstructionism and partisanship.  Their primary method for this is in utilizing the 60-out-of-100-vote-threshold filibuster for just about everything they can to block about as much as they can of the Democrats’ agenda from passing.  As both parties have 50 votes, in most cases, Democrats need 10 Republicans senators to advance legislation and overcome a filibuster, so even when there is bipartisan support, inaction can reign unless at least a full one-fifth of Republican senators are on board.  In recent decades, filibuster use (and abuse) has become unprecedented, particularly so by the Republican Party and especially—even exponentially—so since Mitch McConnell became the leader of Senate Republicans in 2007, a role he still holds today.

In the face of these key differences, looking at all that Biden and Democrats in Congress have been able to accomplish so far—including numerous large votes through one of the only ways to circumvent a filibuster in what is known as budget reconciliation (among them a massive COVID relief bill) as well as a once-in-a-generation historic infrastructure bill, historic aid for Ukraine in the face of rampant Russian imperialism, and the first federal gun legislation in roughly three decades (the last being hammered out by Biden himself in 1994, when he was still a senator), and with time still left in this Congress for passing further major legislation—this much is clear: no majority has accomplished more with such low margins in the Senate in American history in the face of such extreme partisanship and organized obstructionism from the opposition party.  The few major accomplishments of the Biden Administration and the Democratic-led Congress that were bipartisan were the exception, not the norm, a departure from the entire modern era and the last few times there was a Senate evenly divided as today’s is.

I am not suggesting there are not other factors or that this tells 100% of the picture: falling just short of enough votes on Biden’s would-be-signature Build Back Better legislation surely counts more than most typical legislation, and there are things that are sometimes not brought up for votes because of awareness of existing problems within a caucus or opposition from Republicans wielding a filibuster.

Yet the main point made above still stands: of all the different individual metrics out there, the average party unity not only counts a lot, but it is hard to think of a metric that counts more.  In this current record heights of party unity on display from Democrats with Speaker Nancy Pelosi leading Democrats in the House, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer leading Democrats in the Senate, and Joe Biden leading the Party overall from the White House, the Democratic Party in 2021 and in recent years collectively, then, has been the most disciplined and unified major national political party in U.S. history when it comes to actual legislative votes.

Another Inexcusable Media Fail

Churchill once famously remarked: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”  With Joe Biden, we can honestly say: “Never in the field of American presidential politics was so much expected by one man with a narrower political ‘majority’” (really a 50-50 tie with a tie-breaker in one-half of Congress and a very slim majority in the other.  And despite major, entrenched opposition to most of the Democrats’ efforts, they have still accomplished much and improved the situation where they are actually capable of effective change quite dramatically compared to the situation they inherited: an America reeling from COVID and its accompanying economic meltdown as well as reeling from Trump’s treasonous coup attempt.  Obviously, the elephant in the room today is inflation, which presidents and congresses generally have little ability to mitigate well in the short-term even if people don’t want to acknowledge this simple Economics-101 truth (with their record profits, why are we not questioning oil companies more??).  And apart from inflation, the metrics for the economy for Biden for most of his presidency thus far have been strong (admittedly less so the past few months).

Yet there is a huge gap in the public perception of Biden and Democrats and their actual popular accomplishments.

The relentlessly negative coverage of Biden and the Democrats—the media’s pursuit of the whole “Democrats in Disarray” narrative in the face of historic data that thoroughly discredits this narrative—is a big part of the reason for this.  Just as was the case during the Democratic primaries, the media is also relentlessly portraying Biden as just-about-to-collapse in terms of his Democratic support, based on no serious larger empirical analysis, with near-mindless, pointless speculation about who might be the Democratic nominee in 2024 other than Biden more than two years out from that year’s presidential election (and even before this year’s midterms!) despite Biden’s and his vice president’s repeated, clear statements on running together again in 2024 as a ticket.

**Update July 13: Perhaps the most exemplary recent example of the mainstream press’s gross distortions has been adroitly addressed by Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, a Never Trump conservative who is one of the most incisive of the major newspaper columnists on the media’s failures in the current era. She notes that in a recent New York Times article trumpeting its latest poll with Siena College, the framing is almost entirely anti-Biden, beginning with the headline (and, again, this is just one poll): “Most Democrats Don’t Want Biden in 2024, New Poll Shows” and how key findings from the poll that Biden would still beat Trump and that 92% of Democrats would stick with Biden vs. Trump in 2024 are buried after 15 paragraphs of negativity and after multiple graphics. In this Biden hit-job, Times clearly chooses to emphasize what will damage Biden (CNN and others discussed the headline all day) while making the reader really put in effort to find the positives mentioned so deep into its story. Behold, the Times, exposed and noted. And this is the default tone most reporters and editors in the mainstream media resort to when it comes to Biden and Democrats in general, because… “narrative.” Their preferred narrative.**

But just as much to blame is the childishness of the American people, who clearly expected Biden to fix, well, pretty much everything within a year and now blame him for the country not being back to a total normal after a once-in-century pandemic, after four years of fascist-leaning insanity under Trump, and now during a twice-in-a-century large-scale European war.  Americans currently clearly do not understand the unique gravity of historic problems faced—and well-mitigated—by Biden and that none have easy solutions, especially with a country and a Congress as divided as they are.

No president could have righted all the wrongs plaguing the U.S. on January 20, 2021 in one, let alone two, years—certainly not the criminal coup plotter Trump or his Republican Party focused more on overthrowing the constitutional order and preventing the legitimate peaceful transfer of power than on actually governing or dealing with real problems affecting actual Americans—so for the media and the public to hold Biden to such a standard is not just down-right myopic, but threatens to undo so much of the progress that has been made by returning incompetent would-be-fascist demagogues to power.

Yet even with one of the worst polls for Biden from a major, respectable pollster to date (the June 25-28, 2022 Economist/YouGov poll), he still has the approval of over three-quarters of Democrats (76%: 34% strong, 42% somewhat) while only 18% expressed disapproval (only 9% strongly).  On top of that, the Democratic Party was still seen in that poll as more favorable (if just slightly and within the margin of error) than the Republican Party.  And, again, I abhor highlighting single polls to discuss a president’s approval rating—all too common an article headline or framing in the press these days (a general weighted average should always be included in those, but rarely is)—but I did this just to show how high his approval rating is among Democrats in, again, one of his worst polls among respectable polls begun no earlier than June 22 up through the first respectable poll conducted and released in July (since I wrote most of this, polling from early July is not much different, but Democrats’ approval of Biden went slightly up in a newer Economist/YouGov poll [77%] poll while being significantly lower in a different pollster’s most recent data [69%, from Reuters/Ipsos from July 5–6, their lowest yet, down from 72% in their previous poll]; new polls are coming out even as I am about to post this, too, but, to quote the great Jedi Master Yoda: “Difficult to see.  Always in motion is the future;” they may be up or down in a week or a month, and we will only see what happens in time; *update July 12: as if to make my point for me, the next Reuters/Ipsos poll, from July 11-12, has Biden’s overall approval up up 3 points, his overall approval down 4 points, and his approval among Democrats up 5 points, to 74%*).

Those numbers would still mean crushing defeats for anyone challenging Biden in a primary (although, again, that hypothetical would be happening a year-and-a-half from now, a different world).  Still, the overall numbers with voters are not good, though it should be noted that, especially in today’s overcharged media cycles, the overcoverage both of such polling data and especially inflation (relative to other major aspects of the economy like low unemployment and growth in both jobs and wages) creates something of a negative feedback loop for Biden, helping to drag or keep those polling numbers down.  In contrast, polling for Democrats has just improved in the wake of the radical judicial activism of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade, with now just under four months to go before the midterm elections.  And if Democrats surprise many and hold on to Congress or even gain seats in the midterms (and, at least in the Senate, polling is indicating they may very well increase their number of seats there), there is a good chance Biden’s approval will increase, too.  And all of this in the context of the myopic coverage that inexcusably misses the data proving the Democrats’ historic discipline and organization, which will be key in they succeed in the midterms, even if the media does not acknowledge this reality.

Conclusion: A Need for Professional Journalism

So, to recap, 1.) not only is Biden’s job performance as president still eliciting approval from an overwhelming majority of Democrats, who are still overall united behind Biden—making all the “who will replace Biden?” news stories irresponsible, premature speculation—but 2.) Democrats’ performance in Congress is the empirically provably best of not only any major political party in the modern era, but in all of American history (with one possible exception of the Federalist Party in the early 1800s in just one half of Congress), higher now than the supposedly better organized Republicans 3.) and Biden and Democrats’ accomplishments are the greatest of any party with such a narrow “lead” (tie) in the Senate when facing such intense partisan opposition and obstruction.

These are not my opinions: these are simply the facts, fully supported by data, history, and context, as I have proven here.  It’s far, far overdue for coverage in the media to reflect these empirical realities, for journalists, editors, and producers to stop ignoring this irrefutable empirical data in favor of their own biased, selective, and inaccurate “narratives.”

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

WARNING: Spoilers for Star Wars in general, especially Obi-Wan Kenobi and Clone Wars

SILVER SPRING—I predicted we would be getting a Liam Neeson as Qui-Gon Jinn-appearance for Dork Side of the Force not too long ago.  With Obi-Wan’s constant appeals to his old master and what has been included in the series’ “previously in Star Wars” prologue—along with the revelation that Liam Neeson will be voicing young Qui-Gon Jinn in the upcoming animated series Tales of the Jedi—it is incredibly likely we will be seeing Obi-Wan’s old master offer some sort of Force Ghost-ish support for his seemingly shattered former padawan.  And if that happens, we should expect a little bit of a Yoda appearance.

The reasons are fairly obvious when you consider the history.  In the final arc of season 6 of Clone Wars, Qui-Gon, dead but able to communicate to Yoda, explains he has been chosen to show Yoda the way to preserve his consciousness after death, as Qui Gon has, though imperfectly: he cannot appear as a Force Ghost, just as a voice, telling Yoda he died before he completed his training.  But he sets Yoda on a journey that reveals more of the Force to Yoda

As I noted when I was predicting a Qui-Gon cameo, Yoda’s final words in Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith are to Obi-Wan, telling him he will teach Obi-Wan how to commune with Qui-Gon.  Fast forward to all three Original Trilogy films, when Obi-Wan appears to Luke as a Force Voice or Force Ghost in all three films (and Yoda. along with Anakin, appearing at the end of Star Wars: Episode VI: Return of the Jedi as Force Ghosts), and it is clear that Obi-Wan eventually learns how to do what Qui-Gon passed on to Yoda.

So Yoda is kind of the vessel through which Qui-Gon’s Force-self came to Obi-Wan’s attention, and we know he is paying close attention to stuff like this from his lines in the Original Trilogy about watching Luke from Afar and with Ezra Bridger in Star Wars: Rebels.  So we can be sure Yoda is paying attention to what’s going on now with Obi-Wan.  If he can communicate from afar with Ezra in Rebels, he should be able to reach out to Obi-Wan in his namesake show.

With it already looking more and more like Kenobi will connect with Qui-Gon, especially considering how Yoda is the one who would have set that possibility up, we can expect Yoda to be involved now, too.

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) November 12, 2021 (see my related THE Way to Watch Star Wars’ Andor and Rogue One for Max Emotional Impact (or, The Best Damn Full Andor Viewing Guide in the Galaxy from September 14, 2025)

SILVER SPRING—This is one of my shortest posts ever on my site, and counts among one of the few that stray from the real world, but on Disney+ Day 2021, behold: the “Bfry Cut” for the combined viewing into one supercut of the Star Wars: The Clone Wars finale arc and Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, which mostly take place concurrently with each other.

This presentation is for maximum emotional impact and makes for one of the most emotional Star Wars viewing experiences possible (perhaps even the most). At the very least, this presentation hopes you have seen Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace, Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones, the 2008 Clone Wars movie, and the rest of the Clone Wars series (the 3D, not the also-riveting 2D microseries).  While you may have seen other relevant installments like the Original Trilogy, The Mandalorian, the recent The Bad Batch, and Clone Wars’s far-lesser successor Rebels (spoilers in that link!)—as I did, meaning that I knew the fates of all the main characters—this presentation works in terms of giving the viewer the maximum emotional impact whether you know the eventual fates of Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Padmé Amidala, Chancellor Palpatine, Yoda, Ahsoka Tano, and Captain Rex or not (given Disney’s remarkably haphazard chronological storytelling here, plenty of you may know and plenty of you may not know what happens, and either is ok).

WARNING: SPOILERS BELOW for The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, Clone Wars, and Revenge of the Sith.  I could do a whole other discussion of how this presentation fits into wider Star Wars in a deeper sense, and perhaps I will another time, but for now, let’s set up the presentation itself.

We have followed the developments of Chosen One Anakin Skywalker, at least chronologically, since The Phantom Menace, when he was ripped apart from his mother and ended up with Obi-Wan as a brother-and-mentor figure and something of an oedipal complex with Queen Padmé Amidala as a replacement for his mother figure and feminine love in his life.  In Attack of the Clones, that love becomes a full romance (and a forbidden marriage) as a teenage Anakin fails to rescue his dying other and is thrust into the Republic’s civil war as the Clone Wars begin, seeing Chancellor Palpatine also take on something of a mentor relationship with Anakin but being more of a father figure to him than Obi-Wan.  The Clone Wars movie and series have shown us Anakin’s deepening relationships with those we already know but also shows us the new relationships with Clone Captain Rex and, especially, a padawan he reluctantly takes on under the prodding of Master Yoda, Ahsoka Tano (and the relationship between Ahsoka and Rex, too).

We have followed their many ups and downs throughout the war, Anakin seeing the war strain his relationships with Padmé, Obi-Wan, and the Jedi Council and also seeing his padawan tearfully leave the Jedi Order after it accused her of being a terrorist.  Not long after this, a heartbroken Anakin almost had Padmé leave him after the Council involves her in a dangerous investigation into her old flame’s involvement with the Banking Clan.  The final season of Clone Wars begins with two arcs, the first four showing Anakin (albeit not as the central character) willing to walk and cross the line to achieve victory, the second showing us how an Ahsoka on her own gets sucked into the whole Darth Maul/Mandalore saga, so you should finish those two arcs (they take place in reverse chronological order, so I recommend Season 7, Episodes 5-8 and then 1-4) first if you have not seen them already. As a bonus refresher, I also recommend two of the YouTuber AD_edits’s reimagined modern trailers for The Phantom Menace (here) and Attack of the Clones (here) before beginning my supercut.

The Bfry Cut for Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith and the Clone Wars Finale

Here, my recommended Bfry Cut presentation begins with a deleted scene from an unfinished arc of Clone Wars, produced and voiced before Disney acquired Lucasfilm and recently finished by a fan using the unreal engine; here, Anakin vents his frustration to Obi-Wan about Ahsoka leaving the Order, how he blames himself, and asks Obi-Wan how he would feel if he, Anakin, turned out to be a disappointment. Each step represents starting a viewing of one item and then a switch to another piece of media or back, and I recommend alcohol (my vote is for whiskey) during the viewing (roughly 3 hours, 50 minutes and I recommend doing it in one sitting if possible

1.) Watch this aforementioned deleted scene (below, watch in full-screen to avoid possible spoilers from video suggestions):

2.) Start the first episode of the final arc of Clone Wars (CW) Season 7, which is Episode 9.  Roughly midway through that episode, switch at 16:22 (when some major characters have to interrupt a meeting and run off) to Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (ROTS).

3.) Start ROTS.  At 27:37 in ROTS (right after a reunion for two major characters and a cut to s ship flying in space), switch back to where you left off at 16:22 in CW (to see what is happening back at this end during what you just saw in ROTS). 

4.) Finish CW Season 7, Episode 9.  Continue into CW Season 7, Episode 10 until 2:57 (the end of a fight and a cut to a subsequent after-action meeting).  Then switch back to ROTS where you left off at 27.37.

5.) Continue into ROTS until 52:24 (when it fades to black after two main characters part ways as one goes off on a mission) then go back to where you left off in CW, Season 7 Episode 10, at 2:57, to how things tie in directly there.

6.) Finish CW Season 7, Episode 10 (if you must break into two separate viewings, I recommend breaking after finishing this episode, but if you can do it all in one sitting!).  Then go back to that fade-to-black spot in ROTS at 52:24.

7.) Finish all of ROTS, and do finish all the music/credits after the final shot.   Then go back to CW, to start Season 7, Episode 11.

8.) Finish the final two episodes of CW (Season 7, Episodes 11-12) straight-through, including the final episode’s music/credits after the final shot.

You will be in shock, perhaps tears.  I recommend taking some deep breaths and drinking more whiskey or your drink of choice.

© 2021 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

See my related take for Dork Side of the Force about how the Clone Wars finale is some of the best Star Wars out there and my own takes here on what Star Wars can teach us about good and evil in the real world and how Clone Wars was one of the most popular shows of 2020.

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) April 15, 2021; see my relevant Twitter thread on the Natanz attack

Minor spoilers for Clone Wars, some moderate spoilers for the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Rogue One, and Original Trilogy

SILVER SPRING—They may not center on massive battles, lightsaber duels, or major developments for the most well-known Star Wars characters, but “Heroes on Both Sides” and “Pursuit of Peace,” episodes 10 and 11 in the Third Season of Clone Wars, bear some remarkable similarities to situation the world is still trying to understand surrounding the mysterious attack against Iran’s premier nuclear research and development facility at Natanz.

Real-World Background

On early Sunday local time, the power system within the secretive, isolated, and secure nuclear facility at Natanz in Iran was “completely destroyed” in an explosion both Israeli and American intelligence officials have confirmed Israel is at least partly (perhaps and probably mostly) behind, in what may not or may yet be determined to be a cyberattack.

Iran is asserting what it sees as its right to pursue nuclear technology, and Israel is pursuing what it sees as its right of self-defense against what it sees as an existential threat: a nuclear-weapons-armed Iran. 

Iran has claimed that its intentions are purely for civilian nuclear power, an explanation Israeli dismisses as a lie, and Iran has long been hostile to Israel, with the two having engaged in proxy conflict against each other among Palestinians and, currently, in Syria and Lebanon, which both border Israel (it should also be mentioned here that it is the worse kept secret in the Middle East that Israel is the only nuclear weapons power of all the countries in that region).  Even if Iran is lying about its nuclear intentions and fully plans to develop nuclear weapons, it is entirely possible that it wants them for purely defensive and deterrent reasons (every nuclear power since after Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 has refrained from offensive use, or any use in war, for that matter, and Iran’s enemies have openly debated military campaigns against it), yet Israel’s people and military have been targets of Iranian-sponsored terrorism in the past.

Still, this concern about Iran’s nuclear intentions and ambitions is one shared by most world powers, to the degree that Iran and the five permanent-veto-wielding members of the United Nations (UN) Security Council—the U.S., the UK, France, Russia, and China—as well as Germany and the European Union (EU) all signed an agreement to severely limit nuclear activity on the part of Iran in exchange for partial relief of sanctions on Iran for much of Iran’s rogue activity involving military buildups, terrorism, and interference in the affairs of other countries in the Middle East.

Israel’s political leadership under long-serving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a right-wing hawk with much in common with former U.S. President Donald Trump’s leadership style (which I noted in detail several times) was bitterly opposed to this deal, seeking to undermine anything that could benefit Iran without a total dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program.  Furthermore, Israel has in the past put the kibosh on hostile regional powers’ nuclear ambitions with airstrikes against then-under-construction nuclear reactors in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1981 (ironically with Iran’s help) and Bashar al-Assad’s Syria in 2007.  To thwart Iran’s project, Israel has carried out a series of operations—including sabotage, assassinations, and cyberattacks—against Iran’s nuclear program and nuclear personnel, Sunday’s only being the latest.  And it has long sought, and failed, to push the U.S. into militarily attacking Iran and, especially, its nuclear program.

But Israel did get both the Bush and Obama Administration’s help in carrying out Operation Olympic Games’ Stuxnet cyberwarfare attack against Natanz, an attack that took out many of Iran’s centrifuges used to enrich material needed for nuclear advancements and set back Iran’s nuclear development as much as two years, and to get both American administrations to engaged in other cyberwarfare with Iran (those wanting to know about this and cyberwarfare in general should check out Nicole Perlroth’s indispensable recent book on cyberwarfare, This is How They Tell Me the World Ends).

With its nuclear program sabotaged after Stuxnet and facing increasing economic sanctions as part of intense pressure from the international community organized and led by the Obama Administration, Iran agreed to the aforementioned nuclear deal in 2015.  But after Obama’s successor Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018 (even though Iran had been in full compliance according to the most intrusive nuclear inspections in the history of such nuclear monitoring agreements, and, I would argue, foolishly withdrew, as the agreement was the only realistic, logical option), Iran has since begun activities beyond the agreement that move it closer towards (though not close to) nuclear weapons capability.  Saturday it was poised to make serious advances along this path until its Natanz facility was devastated Sunday.

Complicated Clone Wars

“OK, Brian, what the HELL does this have to do with Star Wars?” you may be asking.  By now, you’ve probably heard of, hopefully even seen, the stellar show Star Wars: The Clone Wars, the final season of which dominated streaming during our pandemic summer and, as I have noted, involves some of the best Star Wars ever made including the best movies (and far better than any of the Disney Star Wars movies); if not, get to it (especially before Bad Batch premieres on May the Fourth)!

The series takes place during the Clone War(s), which begin at the end of 2002’s Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones and ends during 2005’s Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and are mainly a series of confusing battles and campaigns between the Galactic Republic and its breakaway Separatist Alliance.  The Republic is served by a religious order known as the Jedi—including Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Anakin Skywalker—whose members operate traditionally as peacekeepers and now generals, while the Separatist Alliance in Star Wars is clearly the side of “the bad guys,” led by Count Dooku, an ex-Jedi turned Sith Lord (the Sith are the ancient enemy of the Jedi).

Dooku and key Separatist military leaders are clearly evil and clearly carry out war crimes and atrocities the Republic takes pains to avoid.  While most but hardly all of the soldiers for the Separatists are droids and, thus, not usually moral actors, it is very different for the political leaders and citizens of the planets that voted to leave the Republic and form the Separatist Alliance (a.k.a. Confederacy of Independent Systems), as noted by famous Republic Senator Padmé Amidala in Clone Wars’s “Heroes on Both Sides.”

Padmé is Naboo’s now former queen from 1999’s Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, and is thus one of the most famous senators of the Galactic Senate (her new role after stepping down as queen).  She is also secretly married to Anakin Skywalker as of the end of Attack of the Clones, a big no-no for a Jedi and a senator.

After a debate on the war’s politics in the Senate, Anakin suggests his secret wife Padmé teach Ashoka Tano—his padawan apprentice (and now a rising superstar in the Star Wars universe)—about politics.  Anakin keeps talking, and presents a black-and-white view of the conflict with the Separatists, with which Padmé expresses disagreement and then takes Ahsoka under her wing, take up Anakin on his earlier suggestion.

Shortly after, we hear Padmé tell Ahsoka that she has friends who are Separatists, that they are not simply evil “pawns” in Dooku’s war.  She complains that she is not able to talk or meet with them because the Senate has made any formal negotiations with the Separatists illegal for fear of legitimizing their secession and cause, noting Ashoka with her clearance as a Jedi could get Padmé to neutral Mandalore, from which they could travel to Raxus to see her old mentor and current Separatist Senator Mina Bonteri.  Up for breaking the rules to help Padmé initiate peace talks, Ahsoka travels undercover with Padmé to see Bonteri on the Separatist capital of Raxus while the Separatist Senate is in session.

In a discussion with Bonteri and Padmé, Ahsoka learns that many Separatists view the Republic (and the Jedi) as the bad guys and that far from being all mindless droids or heartless killers like General Grievous and Asajj Ventress, many Separatist are real people with families who fight—and die—to defend their families and their worlds as well as their right to separate from the Republic.  Among those who died fighting Republic forces were Mina’s husband and father to their son Lux, with whom Ahsoka has humanizing exchange: he and her mom are the first Separatists besides military officers like Grievous and Ventress Ahsoka has met, she the first Jedi he has met.

When Padmé reveals there are many Republic senators eager to explore peace, despite their sharp differences of opinion, Mina decides to introduce a motion to her Separatist Senate to begin formal peace negotiations with the Republic, a motion that easily passes, Dooku himself presiding remotely over the session.

Greedy members of the Trade Federation, Banking Clan, and Techno Union are distressed by this news, as an end to the war is bad for their business interests (in which they get to play both sides off of each other [SPOILERS: as the Sith are doing]), but Dooku assures them an attack is being planned against Coruscant, the Republic’s capital world where the Senate is located, that will derail the peace process and ensure the war will continue. 

In fact, it was even in motion before the possibility of peace talks, apparently timed to ensure a vote to allow deregulation of banks so that the Republic can obtain more funding to produce and purchase more clone troopers (the bulk of the Republic’s fighting forces) would pass after the obvious outrage and bloodlust such an attack would inspire.  The special droid units that will carry out the attack have been designed to look just like the Republic cleaning droids that service one of Coruscant’s main power generators, right by the Senate.  These droids also have been given security passes that will allow them to bypass security.  All in all, it’s a pretty sophisticated plan, utilizing information obtained from the inside and obviously planned long before we find out about it.

Shortly before the deregulation vote, when Padmé tells Supreme Chancellor Palpatine, the leader of the Republic (from her planet Naboo and a senator from there before becoming Chancellor, with Padmé’s help, at the end of The Phantom Menace), that they should give the Separatist offer to engage in peace talks a serious chance, he responds by saying “I can see why you would want so badly to believe that the Separatists. desire peace…In the past whenever we’ve reached out our hands in peace, they’ve been slapped away.  Can we believe that they’re ready to sue for peace so easily?” (such is a common refrain from many in the real world arguing against peace talks or diplomacy).

In response, Padmé confides to Palpatine that she knows the offer is genuine because she “been in contact” with her “old friend” Mina Bonteri and that Bonteri is the sponsor of the proposal.  The Chancellor takes special note of remembering it was Bonteri, (SPOILER) as he is secretly Dooku’s Sith Lord master, orchestrating the war from both sides so his power can rise and the Jedi can fall both in public opinion and from their position of power in the Republic, to be cute down and wiped out (we already see the war, from Lux’s point of view, has damaged the reputation of the Jedi for many regular Separatist citizens).

Just as voting begins in light of the new Separatist peace proposal, the Separatists droids, which have been smuggled into Coruscant and the nearby power station, change form from their cleaning droid disguises to instruments of death and destruction, killing the generator workers and then turning themselves into bombs for a “suicide bombing” (as the intro the next episode calls it) that destroys the power station, plunging that sector of the capital into chaos as the power goes off for millions (maybe even billions) of people and explosions rock the area, terrifying civilians.

Sirens wail inside the Senate as eerie red emergency lighting kicks in, and it doesn’t take long for some Senators realize (or are told?) it is a Separatist attack.  Outraged, they begin calling for revenge and to pass the bill to deregulate the banks so they can pay for more clones.  Padmé pleads with her fellow senators that the peace proposal is serious, an argument not well-received by the panicked and angry Senate.  “Obviously a tactic to lower our defenses and launch this attack,” responds Palpatine’s right-hand man.

On their way out of the main Senate chamber and still bathed in the emergency lighting, Ahsoka and Padmé are approached by Anakin in the hallway, scolding them for their unsanctioned diplomacy, but Ashoka closes out the episode by admitting that while maybe she had gone too far, “I did realize something: the politics of this war and not as black and white as I once thought they were.”

The next episode, “Pursuit of Peace,” we learn that the Senate in their anger has “overwhelmingly” passed the bill to deregulate the banks so they can move forward on new loans for more clones and an intensification of the war effort, but Padmé isn’t giving up on her pursuit of peace. 

But many of her colleagues feel differently.  A Senator (a Kaminoan, the species responsible for manufacturing the clones) proposes legislation to purchase five million more clones from the Kaminoan government and to raise the funds from the Banking Clan (now free to charge exorbitant interest that would bankrupt the Republic) to make the purchase.  When Padmé states she’d rather “stop the war, not escalate it,” the Senate erupts, many calling her a traitor and a Separatist.

The Naboo senator hardly backs down: “Whoever attacked the power grid wants us to continue the fight.  It’s a calculated attempt to destroy the peace process,” she pleads earnestly to the Senate.  Almost immediately after, a message is received and played from Count Dooku, informing the Senate that an apparent Republic attack has killed Mina Bonteri and that he is formally withdrawing the peace proposal as a result.

Padmé is crushed; the Chancellor tries to contain a smile.

Leaving the Senate chamber, her ally Senator Bail Organa (later the adoptive father of Anakin’s and Padmé daughter, Leia) approaches Padmé to let her know Republic spies found out that Dooku’s people were the ones who killed her friend, Mina, making Dooku’s message pure gaslighting (SOILERS: what many viewers will know but which probably only Dooku and Palpatine will know in the Star Wars universe is that Palpatine would have been the one to pass onto Dooku that Bonteri was responsible for the peace process on the Separatist side after Padmé confided this to Palpatine and Palpatine’s telling reaction to this information, such that Palpatine clearly instructed Dooku to silence Bonteri to derail the peace process on the Separatist side).

Aside from Senators who genuinely want to increase the war effort, Bonteri’s death—though she is a Separatist—has a chilling, intimidating effect on those in the Republic Senate who are undecided or wanting to vote against the proposed legislation.  Furthermore, Dooku has hired underworld elements to intimidate (even beat) key Senators wavering or against the bill, including Organa, and to eventually try to assassinate Padmé (and let us not forget that, in our own world, former President Trump clearly tried just a few months ago to incite a violent insurrectionist mob to intimidate Congress into overturning the results of an election he lost, members of whom wanted to assassinate Vice President Pence, Speaker Pelosi, and others).  This is a great episode where a lot of important things happen, but for our purposes we can end this review by noting Padmé, after just barely surviving an assassination attempt, ends up delivering on the Senate floor one of the best speeches of the whole series, preventing the passage of the bill that would bankrupt the Republic and escalate the war effort.  But the chance for peace has been dashed and the war will go on and on.

Real-World Debates and Another Attack on a Power System

Back to our own world.

The tactic to time an attack to derail diplomacy or undermine one or more factions, and the responses to those seeking peace that “we cannot take the other side seriously because diplomacy didn’t work last time” or that “negotiations themselves are a ploy meant to get us to let our guard down” are extremely common in real life; so is questioning the loyalty of those wanting peace, or calling them traitors who side with the enemy.

As far as the situation in the Middle East there is some important context to what very much seems to be the Israeli (or at least Israeli-led) attack on Natanz and its power station.  The day before, Iran had just introduced and announced putting into operation advanced centrifuges at Natanz.  Just a few days later would be Israel’s Independence Day.  And the week before, negotiations between the original nuclear deal signatories were beginning in Vienna.  Netanyahu has made no secret of his longstanding opposition to the Iran nuclear deal, opposition shared by most Israelis but that fails to recognize the constraints of reality.  Though it was a top priority of the Obama Administration, Netanyahu actively campaigned against it, even both challenging it in a direct address to the U.S. Congress in 2015 and claiming in 2018 to have convinced Trump to follow through on his pledged to scrap it. 

Apart from symbolically playing to a domestic audience just before Israel Independence Day and hitting Iran’s centrifuges just as Iran was celebrating their upgrades, then, there is the far more substantive timing-related goals of Netanyahu’s to derail the restart of the diplomatic process with Iran that Biden and many others hope will resurrect the nuclear deal Trump destroyed and to sabotage Iran’s program until it can be destroyed or ended.

Clearly, Netanyahu prefers confrontation and war (ideally, for him, led by the U.S.) that will rid Iran both of its nuclear program and its current regime entirely, a preference shared by his new Gulf friends in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who have been brought together through their hatred of Iran and at Trump’s encouragement; in essence, a Sunni-Shiite Cold War led by Saudi Arabia on one side and Iran on the other has merged into the longstanding hostilities between Israel and Iran and the U.S. and Iran, making for some strange yet enthusiastic bedfellows.

So, much like Dooku, Netanyahu seems to have launched an attack that hit a power station that was about more about attacking a power station.  Like the attack on Coruscant, a big part of the rationale for the attack on Natanz was derailing promising diplomatic negotiations, to destroy trust between the parties, and provoke a reaction that will make good-faith negotiations much, much harder.  As in Clone Wars with the Republic, Iran sees this as a terrorist attack.  Like the Separatists and the Republic, there are complicated factions and rivalries both on and under the surface: segments allied and in relationships with or part of the parties meeting in Vienna that are not fully on board with the negotiations and want them to fail whether or not they say so publicly, and who supported an attack and will want the other side to think those with whom they are negotiating supported the attack, too.

In fact, there is vigorous debate in both America and Iran, as we saw in the Republic and Separatist Senates, about pursuing war vs. diplomacy, with moderate and liberal camps in each emphasizing diplomacy and hardliners in both camps preferring confrontation.  To some degree, the U.S. as Israel’s closest ally is tainted by this attack regardless of whether it was for or against it or took part in it or not; at the same time, those in the Iranian diplomatic delegation know that they, too, may be painted by Iran’s response if it is deemed to go “too far.”

Still, unlike with the Separatists successfully derailing peace negotiations, it is very likely the nuclear negotiations will continue (indeed, they have already resumed with Iranian officials, as of today) and that a breakthrough will be reached eventually, as, unlike the Separatists, Iran has few friends and no massive Separatist Alliance spread throughout the galaxy, let alone a Sith Lord like Dooku to lead it; Iran, thus, is in a far weaker position than the Separatists, one only further weakened now that this attack is estimated to have set Iran’s nuclear program back around nine months, undermining its position for negotiations.

As Clone Wars teaches us, things are not “always as black and white” as we think or as straightforward as they seem, Natanz being a prime example.  As in “Heroes on Both Sides” and “Pursuit of Peace” demonstrate, conflict can often be complex and multilayered, so we should look at the Natanz attack and its motivations and surrounding issues as complex and multilayered, and avoid simplistic criticism or reductionism in most cases.  Only then can we begin to truly understand the broader strategic and tactical calculations at work in the minds of the various parties here.

Padmé, Portman, Politics, and Blowback

I would also like to note that I remember seeing this pair of episodes for the first time and realizing how perfectly these roles for Padmé would suit Natalie Portman, who played Padmé in the live-action movies (nothing against the excellent Catherine Taber, who voices her in Clone Wars).

I say this because Portman as a young Jewish, Israeli-born adult became quite a vocal defender of Israel at a time when Israel became one of the centers of world politics as the Second Intifada (the second main grassroots rebellion of Palestinians against Israeli occupation and their own ineffective leaders) raged.  And yet, in more recent years, she has not shied away from criticizing the Israeli government and Prime Minister Netanyahu for their right-wing (in her words, “racist”) policies, to the degree that she even refused to accept an the Israeli Genesis Award, often referred to as Israel’s version of the Nobel Peace Prize.  For this, an Israeli government minister said that “Natalie Portman’s actions border on anti-Semitism,” that she “played into the hands of the haters of Israel and those who aspire to destroy the State of Israel,” sounding an awful lot like Padmé’s fellow senators’ criticism of her in the “Pursuit of Peace” episode. 

The politically active and passionate Portman, then, is someone who could appreciate both sides of a conflict and would have appreciated her character’s role in these Clone Wars episodes that mirror not only the Natanz attack today but other issues that were fairly common in the past in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with Portman’s own life perhaps influencing at least a little the showrunners’ interpretation of Padmé in Clone Wars.

(Minor SPOILERS next two paragraphs) It is also worth noting that, in the following season, we find Lux Bonteri has become radicalized after the death of his mother and seeks out an alliance with an extremist Mandalorian terrorist group—the Death Watch—to plot revenge against Dooku for ordering his mother to be murdered… kind of like happens so many times in war or counterterrorism operations, when collateral damage turns family and friends of the wounded and dead into violent extremists who support and/or join terrorist or insurgent movements all around the world.

In the following season, Lux has joined a rebel movement to overthrow a Separatist-controlled government on his homeworld of Onderon.  A key member of this rebel group is Saw Gerrera, who is radicalized further in this fight after the death of his sister, Steela, and would be instrumental in the future in helping the Rebel Alliance from the Original Trilogy get off its feet and, in particular, in the events that led to the Rebels discovering the secret weakness of the Empire’s first Death Star in Rogue One, a discovery that allowed Luke Skywalker to destroy the Death Star at the end of the very first Star Wars movie, Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope.  The willingness of Palpatine and Dooku to use Lux’s mother and the people of Onderon as pawns in their game would end up leading, over many years, to the Sith’s undoing.

The lesson here?  It’s always worth considering the less-anticipated potential effects of any particular action.  In our present, Iran, Israel, and the U.S. may find their actions will come to haunt them in unimaginable ways for years to come if they are not careful.

Dooku Disclaimers

I want to be clear: I am not claiming the Israelis are just like the Separatists or that Netanyahu is an evil Sith Lord (nor, for that matter, am I claiming that Iran is like the Republic in any general, overall sense).  I am in no way claiming the Jewish people or Israelis are like “the bad guys” in Star Wars, just simply noting how specific plot and thematic elements from these Clone Wars episodes fit illustratively into the current events discussed (and even in Clone Wars, we can see that most of the civilian Separatists dislike the Republic, understandably, for its very real corruption on display in these episodes more than usual and that they take their ideals and independence seriously).

Count Dooku and Chancellor Palpatine could in part certainly fit the descriptions in longstanding anti-Semitic stereotypes and conspiracy theories—shadowy, big-nosed, behind-the-scenes manipulators in dark robes practicing the occult and controlling financial interests—but that is not the at all the intent of George Lucas or the showrunner Dave Filoni, nor the producers, cast, and staff of Clone Wars, nor is that how we should read into any of this.  And yes, the Banking Clan is led by the Muun species that has big noses, but it’s a stretch to claim they are supposed to represent or denigrate Jewish people: they are aliens who look like… aliens. 

At a time of rising anti-Semitism in the United States and elsewhere, it is crucial to note that there is no serious hint at Dooku, Palpatine, or the Muuns being Jewish or that the intent of portraying the Sith Lords or Muuns in these ways is to try to equate them with or make them resemble Jews or associate their factions with the real-world Jewish state of Israel.  Anyone who really thinks this is what Star Wars is getting at simply does not understand the true spirit of Star Wars or the artists’ intent, though it’s understandable some would interpret this differently in our hyper-politicized, hyper-racialized times.  At its heart, Star Wars celebrates diversity, with waking carpets, humans of different colors and genders, and even robots coming together to fight for freedom and justice throughout the galaxy.

Yet as “Heroes on Both Sides” and “Pursuit of Peace” demonstrate, conflict can get ugly and complicated, whether in Star Wars or our current Earth, including the attack at Natanz.  I lived for over five years in the Middle East, from 2014-2019, studied abroad there briefly in 2011, studied the region from afar for many other years.  And I can tell you that, while, yes, some things are pretty black-and-white—say, ISIS is terrible—other things are a lot more complicated.  As examples:

• Iran is seen by many as a bad-guy pariah in the region, yet the current pretty awful government only came to power in the Islamic Revolution of 1979 after, and in reaction to, the U.S. and British orchestrating the overthrow of the democratically-elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in a 1953 coup that saw a far more monarchical and repressive government put in its place, and while expanding its power through supporting various Shiite Islamic militias throughout the Middle East that many view as terrorists, it is important to remember that Iran is only serious Shiite Muslim power and that Shiite Islam has been oppressed by Sunni Muslim leaders throughout the region for centuries (Sunnis are by far the largest bloc of Muslims, Shiites being the one major minority), to the degree that, without Shiite militias and Iran’s support for them in places like Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen, often few if any people stick up for the rights and dignity of Shiite Muslims.
• Saudi Arabia is one of America’s oldest allies in the Middle East and supplies much of the world with oil, but has a terrible human rights record and when it comes to Islamic extremism, the Saudis are, to quote Brookings scholar William McCants from an amazing article by the amazing journalist Scott Shane, “both the arsonists and the firefighters.”
• Israel and Turkey are two other longtime regional allies of the U.S., Israel a fellow democracy and Turkey a longtime member of the de-facto-U.S.-led NATO Alliance, but both have been veering hard to the right under right-wing leaders (Turkey into dictatorship territory) and actively oppressing the region’s Palestinians and Kurds, respectively. 
• And while America promotes human rights throughout the Middle East—even saving Yazidis from Genocide in 2014 with anti-ISIS airstrikes and coordination with Kurdish forces on the ground ordered by Obama—it has often supported oppressive dictators and kings, such as Saddam Hussein when he was willing to fight Iran (until we didn’t, eventually overthrowing him in a disastrous war launched in 2003), even as it still confronts its own domestic injustices in the present. 

I could go on, but the point is, there are a lot of complicated motivations and behaviors going on, often many good and many bad acts being committed by the same leader or country, and even many of the more destabilizing and violent actors have their own very legitimate grievances while some of the actors with the best of intentions inflict incredible amounts of harm.  There is often plenty of blame to go around.  As just one example, Israel deserves a lot of the criticism directed at it, while at the same time, a lot of the criticism direct at Israel is outlandishly unfair and anti-Semitic; the context and specifics of each specific criticism need to be evaluated separately. 

This is hardly to claim that all the parties involved in this Natanz drama are morally equal or moral equivalents (far from it), but we’re not going to focus on such questions (which I have dealt with elsewhere) here; the main takeaway is that Ahsoka’s lesson from “Heroes on Both Sides” is quite applicable to our current drama.

In the end, I am simply noting the similarities in details and context between some events from two great episodes of Clone Wars and our own reality, how pondering the fictional galaxy from a long time ago and far, far away can shed light on our real world, how a Star Wars cartoon can surprisingly teach us lessons about nuclear intrigue and Middle East diplomacy in 2021 as well as about our past and even our future.

© 2021 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s Twitter thread on the Natanz attack and his eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out my podcast interview with Georgia election officials Brad Raffensperger and Gabriel Sterling, both cited in Trump’s second Senate trial!

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981)  July 18, 2020 (UPDATE: JULY 20)

Author’s note: A version of this article was published by Dork Side of the Force on July 9, but the editor made a number of substantive changes, altering or subduing my opinion, focus, and meaning significantly in ways that went beyond the scope of a typical editorial role, so I have decided to publish the full version here. I am grateful for being published by Dork Side of the Force but felt readers were safe in reading, and deserved to hear, my full views on these subjects as the focus in my full version below includes much more on the quality of Dave Filoni’s work and the direction Disney should take from the success of Clone Wars in approaching Star Wars in the present and future. Also, SPOILER ALERT for all kinds of Star Wars content, from the films to the multiple TV series, including Clone Wars.

SILVER SPRING—The Force is strong with Star Wars: The Clone Wars, its fans, and the show’s showrunners and cast.  From the announcement of its revival through the aftermath of the final episode of the final season, from Dave Filoni (showrunner and Jedi apprentice to George Lucas himself) and Ashley Eckstein (Ahsoska Tano), to Dee Bradley Baker (Captain Rex and all the clones) and Sam Witwer (Darth Maul), to Matt Lanter (Anakin Skywalker) and James Arnold Taylor (Obi-Wan Kenobi) and the rest of the cast and crew, they understood and openly expressed for some time that by far the main reason Clone Wars was getting a proper sendoff and a final storyline as its creators had intended from the beginning was its passionate, insistent fans, who never let Disney off the hook for prematurely ending a series that was hitting its stride and producing absolute gold in the second half of its run, fans who kept demanding Disney revive the myopically-cancelled series.

The joyous but frustrating burden of Clone Wars fans

For years for the legions of Clone Wars fans, there has been and still is something of a burden we carry: we know how good the show is, but we also know that the initial theatrical release was hardly given rave reviews (and, admittedly, it is, by far, some of the weakest Clone Wars content, though still worth watching).  Furthermore, the seasons were all on Cartoon Network except for the sixth half-season, which ended up on Netflix along with the other seasons for a time after the Disney takeover.  Thus, by not being on a major network, so many people who would have seen it did not end up seeing it.  Additionally, Disney has hardly put much effort into promoting Star Wars content produced before its takeover, favoring its own Star Wars films and animated series.  So for me and other fans, we felt a responsibility to push Clone Wars on people and push and proselytize it hard.  It’s not that hard to sell people on other great shows like The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, Dexter, The Wire.  People on the fence can be easily convinced by close friends on shows like that. Trying to get them to watch a cartoon series with relatively weak opening is a whole other matter.

Then there is the issue of competition with The Mandalorian.  It’s not a hard sell to get people to watch a live-action show starring a fan-favorite from Game of Thrones and Narcos, the other dude from the classic Predator, and co-helmed by a man who was both the director of Iron Man and an executive producer of The Avengers series.  Trying to convince people that a Star Wars cartoon is one of the best dramatic series in years, and that its is one of the series with one of the most complicated intersections of plotlines that took years to build, in a similar way to Game of Thrones but with a final payoff that succeeds in all the ways the final season of Game of Thrones fell short and then some, is a far harder sell.  An even harder sell, as I have attempted to make before, is that Clone Wars has some of the most complex themes on politics, war, and terrorism of any show in recent memory other than Homeland, and, as I have written before, the show faithfully reflects the deepest themes of films of the Lucas-helmed Star Wars movies.  Yeah, to many, you generally will come off as crazy making these claims, as I am sure I have to many people.

Yet all this is true for Clone Wars, and its best storylines are among some of the best screen experiences I’ve ever experienced, whether film or TV.  I am not saying that there aren’t other stellar moments throughout the series, but, as I wrote for Dork Side, the very final four episodes of the final season are as good as anything I’ve ever seen in Star Wars, including the Original Trilogy, because of the loving care and respect that beloved characters are given in building up incredibly emotional climaxes that pay off beautifully.  Frankly, after five Disney Star Wars movies, none of those attempts came anywhere near such intricately woven and long-developed emotional payoffs as (spoilers) Luke’s redemption of Vader and Vader’s subsequent death in Return of the Jedi or Anakin’s fall to the Dark Side and Padmé’s dying of a broken heart at the end of Revenge of the Sith, but Clone Wars has at least two clear stories (and arguably several others that rise to that level) at the ends of seasons five and seven.   The moment in season five (spoiler), when Ahsoka leaves the Jedi order, breaking Anakin’s heart and his faith in the Jedi Order, came out all the way back in March 2013.  The half-season six in 2014 had some great stories but not at the level of that season five finale, so it’s been more than seven years since anything like that level of emotion has happened in Star Wars movies or shows, despite Disney’s “efforts.”  Let’s discuss those efforts, then…

Disney falling short

Solo is easily the best of the crop of Disney films overall, but especially in terms of character development and emotion.  Rogue One is a competently executed action film and has one of the best battle scenes in all of Star Wars, but there’s no serious attempt at character development or building emotion, and performances and “characters” are dull and barely developed, with only a robot even being somewhat interesting or funny and no one else even coming close to the robot.  Despite fine actors being attached to the actual Sequel Trilogy and even solid acting performances, the writing and storytelling were so insanely terrible that no acting could save the convoluted mess.  The Force Awakens negated the sacrifice of Vader and his redemption by Luke by basically putting the galaxy in the same peril Vader’s sacrifice and Luke’s redemption of Vader was supposed to save it from, as if just a few decades later, the Chosen One(s) might as well have never even existed. The middle chapter—Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi—was a betrayal of Luke Skywalker and the very heart of Star Wars itself, and the final movie in the trilogy—The Rise of Skywalker—shoved so much unnecessary, poorly-conceived and barely-explained random junk and characters into the nonsensical plot that any major power behind the climaxes was severely diluted or fell flat (not to say that there weren’t some nice moments, but the totality was a train wreck of storytelling that would make even Transformers sequels look coherent in comparison; it was almost as if J.J. Abrams was parodying the worst flaws of his style of filmmaking).  And Star Wars: Rebels had nowhere near the character development or emotional buildup not because the show was shorter but because the majority of the show was predictable and redundant and there was not as much effort to develop the characters.  There were some excellent moments and payoffs (spoilers: basically everything with Vader, Ahoska, and, to a lesser degree, Thrawn), but the best moments of the show—(spoilers) Ahsoka’s confronting Vader (the one honorable mention in that high-emotion category over this seven-year period, but which felt so brief and did not have a resolution the same way the highest emotional Star Wars acts have), her reuniting with Rex, and the final Obi-Wan/Maul duel in an episode that otherwise felt wasteful—earned their payoffs nearly entirely from content outside of Rebels, essentially piggybacking on the efforts and gravitas of Clone Wars (honorable mention, also, to Kanan as a solid new character with a real arc).  And as for Resistance, well, like you most likely, I haven’t seen it (and very few people seem to have).  So even with so much content over the past seven years from Disney, those of us seeking character-driven, emotional buildup on par with the Lucas films and Clone Wars‘s season five ending have been left bitterly disappointed, with only the rarest of moments even being anywhere near that ballpark.

A new hope against the odds: Clone Wars provably nailed it

Thus, with the announcement of The Mandalorian and especially with the surprise that Clone Wars was being resurrected, reason for cautious hope broke through like a ray of sunshine coming through dark storm clouds.  I love The Mandalorian, as I have noted before, for its excellent storytelling and am glad for it.  But as cute as “Baby Yoda” is, the show is not as deep or emotional as the great moments I have mentioned from the Lucas-era movies; it is not on that epic level, nor is it trying to be, nor does it need to be, and that’s fine.  Not only was it refreshing that it was not trying to be all things to all people, but the idea of telling scaled-down Star Wars stories in live-action format is welcome.  But with the final arc of final-season of Clone Wars, we see that Disney is capable of producing 10/10-level amazingly deep, resonant, built-up, theatrical-quality, and epic Star Wars content with transcendent payoffs—pretty much every moment of the final four episodes, a level of quality I have not experienced in entertainment since the best of Game of Thrones­—that can earn rave reviews from critics and fans alike and actually unite, not divide, the fanbase.

Even so, it was clear that Disney put way more effort into marketing The Mandalorian, even creating a separate behind-the-scenes show about the making of the show (over a good stretch over several months, a large portion of my YouTube viewings involved an ad for the show).  In contrast, I saw almost no marketing for Clone Wars.  And what’s so satisfying for we Clone Wars fans is that Clone Wars partly outperformed Mandalorian almost entirely on the backs of the show’s fans and the word-of-mouth buzz they have been so passionately trying to create for years.  Maybe a pandemic helped, but the numbers for Clone Wars speak for themselves, all without the huge marketing/media boost that Mandalorian got before its release.

And perhaps now, besides giving Disney a full-proof roadmap, the world is finally awakening to the amazingness that is Clone Wars, and the stunning number prove this. 

For one thing, Clone Wars has four of the top thirty TV episodes of all time and three of the top ten on IMDB by user ratings with at least 1,000 viewer ratings or more: #25, #6, #5, #4, as well as for shows with 5,000 or more user votes: #23, #6, #5, and #4, both having these be the four final episodes I have referenced before in ascending order (fans, you can add your votes at those previous links!). Yeah, this has Clone Wars in line with shows like Breaking Bad, Chernobyl, Game of Thrones, and Mr. Robot (admittedly lists that are biased against older shows like The Sopranos and Rome, but still an impressive achievement for Clone Wars on a list with still solid and renown shows).

“Ratings” for streaming content is an iffy concept, but Parrot Analytics has a useful substitute measure that was recently profiled in The New York Times involving individual consumption (i.e., downloading and streaming), social media posting and engagement “for” the content, and searching or consuming material about the content (e.g., videos or articles), putting these together into a metric the analysis firm terms “demand expression.” It is a weighted measuring system, so downloading a pirated copy is weighted much more than a like or a retweet of content, and a personally-written post fits in between. Backing up my claim about the passion of fans for Clone Wars being instrumental in the success of Clone Wars, Parrot’s Wade Dayson-Penney provided the following chart showing demand expressions for Clone Wars and The Mandalorian:

The two lines are not concurrent time-wise, as it tracks demand for each series before, during, and after the series aired, and the two did not air at the same time (Mandalorian ran about seven-and-a-half-weeks from November to December, Clone Wars from February to May over about eleven-and-a-half weeks.  Clone Wars had far-higher pre-release demand expressions by fans than The Mandalorian, and also had the highest single-week stretch of peak of demand expressions of all streaming content in 2020 thus far, including Mandalorian.

For the entire first half of 2020, Clone Wars was the third-highest in digital original streaming content (behind only Stranger Things and Mandalorian, way ahead of series like Netflix’s Narcos: Mexico, The Witcher, and Tiger King, and CBS’s Star Trek: Picard) and the tenth-highest overall streaming series in terms of demand expressions, with over fifty-six times the demand expressions of the average streaming content in the U.S. for that for that entire six-month stretch, as Payson-Denny explained in an e-mail to me.  It held the top spot in demand expressions for digital streaming originals throughout the coronavirus lockdown period, too.    

Even more impressive, while Mandalorian had overall longer heights of demand expression, as noted, at its weekly peak, Clone Wars surpassed not just Mandalorian, but all series streaming content, both digital originals and all streaming TV series, so far in 2020; that’s right, no other series reached the peak level of viewing in one week as Clone Wars, which peaked for a whole week at close to 130 times the average amount of demand expressions in the U.S. for streaming content.  Even if you go back an entire year, to the beginning of July, 2019, only Stranger Things, the latest season of which premiered that month, had a higher week peak-level than Clone Wars.  Throughout that entire year period, Clone Wars, with not even being on air for nearly eight months of out that twelve-month period, was the fourth-most in-demand digital original streaming series and earned the twenty-fourth highest in-demand expressions of any show, with over thirty-six times the U.S. demand for an average series.

In fact, a whole month before the season seven premiere, after just the season seven trailer’s January 22 release, the show saw a huge increase in demand, landing it the number-nine overall streaming spot, and the following week, while dropping slightly, it held the fourth digital original spot.  The first week of February, it fell to tenth digital original, then ninth the week after, and, finally, during the season seven premiere as the end of the third week of February, it climbed to sixth, not far behind The Witcher and Picard.  The new season’s first full week of availability saw it rise to the fifth overall and second digital original spot, only behind Stranger Things.  The show began March tenth overall and third with digital originals, staying in the same spot overall and rising to second, again, with digital originals the following week.  It lost its top-ten overall spot but stayed second among streaming originals in the third week of March, falling to third digital original the following week.  It stayed even spot-wise among originals the following week, fell to fifth original the first full week of April, then rose to fourth mid-April, with the first installment of the truly spectacular final arc premiering at the end of the week.

And wow, did the fans spread their approval for that episode, as word of mouth and fans telling everyone they knew “YOU HAVE TO SEE THIS!” brought the series the next week to the number-one overall digital original slot and the fourth overall slot the week the second episode of the arc premiered.  And the following week, when the penultimate Clone Wars episode premiered, the show stayed in the first digital original spot (though with far higher numbers) and rose to the first overall streaming spot.  The ensuing week, when the series finale premiered earlier than usual on Star Wars Day, May the Fourth (get it?), it maintained both top spots with dramatically higher demand that dwarfed everything else, including nearly one-and-a-half times the demand of the second overall spot (Spongebob) and far more than doubling the number-two and number-three originals, Mandalorian and Stranger Things, respectively, achieving the peak demand of anything thus far this year.

Even after the final episode was released, throughout the entire following week, it stayed in the number one original slot for the fourth consecutive week and only fell to number two in the overall streaming competition.  The next week, it was still seventh overall and barely got edged out by Stranger Things in digital originals, coming in just behind at number two.  The final full week of May, the show was still second in digital originals, and the next week, Parrot’s Payson-Denney confirmed to me in an e-amil that, a full month after the premiere of the final episode, Clone Wars was still held the third spot among original streaming content.  It was fourth in originals the following week, was still fifth in mid-June, maintained that spot the next week, was still seventh in digital originals the week ending July fourth—two months after the final episode premiered—and last week, it was back at fifth for digital originals, with nearly forty-times more U.S. demand expressions than the average show. UPDATE: July 20: July 12-18, the show skyrocketed back to ninth overall and second in digital originals, with nearly fifty times the U.S. demand expressions of an average show, after the announcement of the Clone Wars spinoff series Bad Batch.

Good content wins and the future and the Force is Filoni

Not bad for a show that had close to no marketing (I seriously don’t recall seeing any ads anywhere specifically for Clone Wars but do remember seeing tons of video ads and others for The Mandalorian, even after the final season Clone Wars premiered, if I’m not mistaken about that last part).  Considering Stranger Things and The Mandalorian both have far more intense marketing campaigns, one can only imagine how much serious paid marketing could have boosted the popularity and viewership of Clone Wars.  And we have to keep in mind that this was mainly because of just four episodes—the final four—out of the twelve-episodes of the season.  The first four were fun, for sure, with even a few deeper moments, but felt a bit drawn out, while the middle four were definitely drawn out and formed the weakest arc by far of the final season (it was, admittedly, build-up for the final four-episode arc, and I still enjoyed them all at any rate). 

After twelve years, Clone Wars seems to have finally earned some of the critical respect and mass appeal that its fans have known for so long it has deserved but which had, until this final season, eluded it.

And not just Clone Wars, but showrunner Dave Filoni, who, alongside Jon Favreau, is the main force behind The Madnalorian. NOTE TO DISNEY: PUT DAVE FILONI IN CHARGE OF LUCASFILM PROJECTS GOING FORWARD!  LET HIM HELM MORE SERIES AND FINALLY MOVIES, both animated AND live action.  Filoni also directed more than half the episodes of the first season of the animated Avatar: The Last Airbender (including some of the highest-rated of the whole series, the pair of episodes that closes out the first season), a show that ended twelve years ago but is even now one of Netflix’s surprising top hits for the past few months since Netflix acquired rights to the show, which is shattering most records of longevity and views on the platform for this year, becoming one of the most-watched items on Netflix since Netflix started releasing viewership rankings.  And, similarly to Clone Wars with Disney, this show received no marketing from Netflix (it was not Netflix-original content) and beat out other competition that benefited from heavy marketing.  Filoni is simply gold and resistance is silly, Disney!!

I get the sense that Disney was irrationally reluctant due to some sort internal division or even infighting, because if the top executives had any brains, they would have insisted on producing the eight unfinished episodes that became the highly-rated novel Dark Disciple by Christie Golden to make the final season twenty-episodes instead of twelve.  Those additional eight episodes, unlike the first eight episodes, would have been near and perhaps even at the quality of that astounding final arc, and I would know: I read the Dark Disciple novel, which debuted on The New York Times Best Sellers list, and it was excellent, a challenging story unlike anything else in Clone Wars or the movies (except perhaps the Rey-Kylo relationship being a pale reflection, with Dark Disciple in many ways showing what could have been made of that relationship).  I have no doubt that Disney could have seen demand similar to what happened with its final episodes throughout the eight-episodes of the Dark Disciple arc, with unique story that would have generated a lot of buzz and another stellar, strong, independent, and complex female character in Assajj Ventress, a story which would have also featured, Count Dooku, Quinlan Vos, Boba Fett, and Obi Wan Kenobi, just to name some of the main players; it would have been dark (but probably not too dark for Disney) and filled with edge-of-your-seat emotion and tension throughout and could easily have opened up the season, generating far more interest compared with the other weaker arcs that ran before the finale and giving Disney two additional full months of top-level consumption   Twenty episodes with eight weaker episodes in the middle and twelve top-notch episodes to begin and end them would have been even more fitting, but it’s hard to criticize the final season too much given its solid buildup and transcendent ending.  Disney can and easily should still make these eight episodes for Disney+ or into a feature-length movie, slated for theatrical release (same with the final four episodes of the series).  If this seems an unrealistic ask, consider that work on the Dark Disciple episodes, like the season seven-opening Bad Batch arc, had already begun years ago (you can watch some of that Dark Disciple work here).

It is a tragedy that Disney did not put more muscle behind Clone Wars.  It’s almost as if Disney was spiteful of its non-creation inspiring so much more passion and acclaim that its theatrical releases, which divided fans fan deeply as opposed to unifying nearly all Star Wars fans, like Clone Wars did.

If nothing else, let these numbers show the Disney corporate executives that Filoni and Clone Wars represent a future than can be profitable, artistic, epic, and well-executed in non-polarizing ways, as opposed to whatever adjectives we may use (some certainly unprintable here) to describe what the Sequel Trilogy was and was not.  Dave Filoni’s and George Lucas’s Clone Wars stands as a testament to the value of careful planning and storytelling and allowing creative control in ways that stay true to the real spirit of epic Star Wars even while breaking new ground, giving us content that can stand the test of time and match some of the best content of any type out there.  Clone Wars is not just Star Wars at its best, but entertainment at its best, and, in an era of depressing disaster that makes you lose faith in the choices and taste of people, the show also finally now has the numbers to prove its success and popularity and that good content can and will be rewarded.

See Brian’s related Star Wars articles for Dork Side of the Force here, including The final arc of The Clone Wars is Star Wars at its best and Mandalorians and cultural trauma in The Mandalorian.

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s latest eBook,Coronavirus the Revealer: How the Coronavirus Pandemic Exposes America As Unprepared for Biowarfare & Bioterrorism, Highlighting Traditional U.S. Weakness in Unconventional, Asymmetric Warfare, available in Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and EPUB editions.

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 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse December 22, 2015  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) December 22nd, 2015

This piece was also posted on Moviepilot

All images from Star Wars films or Star Wars: The Clone Wars (Lucasfilm)

One thing that is missing (among other things) in the new Star Wars: Episode VII: The Force Awakens is the interesting meditation on the nature of good and evil that all the Lucas-helmed projects—Episodes I-VI and the underappreciated Clone Wars TV series—contained (in fact, for anyone who appreciates the deeper aspects, even if executed imperfectly, of what Lucas tried to do, the disappointing Force Awakens is missing a lot: it seems to be more of a Jacksonesque Hobbit-like simple action-centered movie with Star Wars frosting on top of a blah-meh-typically-soulless action movie, just with a good cast that did the most they could with the material they were given; it lacks all of the deeper mythos and philosophical aspects that made Star Wars more than just action movies set in space, but I digress).

In particular, there are several key themes about the nature of good and evil that are particularly well illustrated by the Lucas enterprises, including Clone Wars. Below, a number of these themes will be discussed in detail, with FULL SPOILERS (and out of courtesy for those who have seen the movies but not Clone Wars, I will start each sentence with specific Clone Wars spoilers with a bold CW SPOILERS, and END CW SPOILERS will let you know when it is safe to keep reading). If you’ve already seen all six movies but need a refresher, this video here should do the trick.

 Below are five of the main lessons we can take from the Lucas-helmed parts of the Star Wars saga.

1.) Often the worst and most destructive evil is driven by naked ambition for power at any cost

In Star Wars, we have the Jedi order, users of the Light Side of the Force (the universe’s mystical, magical, living energy field), and the Sith (usually two), users of the Dark Side of the Force; the Jedi use their powers, generally, to protect and help others, while the Sith, generally, use their power to empower themselves and harm others. We have Senator, then Chancellor, Palpatine (who all along is Darth Sidious) in Lucas’s six movies and Clone Wars, a man who is secretly a Sith Lord who wants to dominate the galaxy and rule with an iron fist, who is willing to kill anyone, and kill any number of people, to achieve these ends, even to the degree of starting two wars and destroying an entire planet. Close behind is his apprentice before Anakin, Count Dooku/Darth Tyrannus, whom we see—especially in Clone Wars—is willing to go to extreme lengths and to kill many innocents in his pursuit of power as well. He is also dreaming of overthrowing his master and ruling for himself, and he goes through several apprentices in trying to set all this up but is eventually killed by Anakin at the request of Palpatine himself, not long before Anakin becomes Darth Vader, Sidious’s new apprentice. To Palpatine and Dooku, everything and everyone exists just to serve their ends of attaining and keeping power: the biggest mass murderers in history—Hitler, Stalin, Tamerlane, etc.—operated under this idea, with other human beings being seen as just means to their ends, not ends in and of themselves, violating Immanuel Kant’s great ethical precept. From the start of a galactic-wide civil war between the Republic and Separatists to the destruction of Alderaan, the Sith showed there were truly no limits to the amount of death and destruction they would allow to happen to advance their personal goals for gaining power.

2.) Good can produce evil

Evil can also be done far too often for understandable or even good reasons. Unlike Palpatine and (presumably) Dooku, Anakin does not turn to the Dark Side and become Darth Vader mainly for power for himself (while this is not indisputably clear in Episode III, a good watching of Clone Wars does remedy this). Rather, Anakin is becoming increasingly worried about his secret, forbidden wife—Natalie Portman’s Padmé Amidala—who is now pregnant with his child(ren!); his dreams show her dying in childbirth. Anakin is still haunted by the death of his mother, who died in his arms when he tried to rescue her after being tortured by the Sand People; Anakin’s response was to slaughter the entire village of Sand People: men, women, children, even pets. This act is one of unmistakable evil, and yet we are feeling for Anakin who is feeling the pain of losing his mother. He even tells Padmé about his murderous vengeful rampage just after it happens and she, like the audience (presumably), takes him in with open arms. At the grave of his mother, he voices his guilt for not being powerful enough to save her and swears that he will never be so weak again that he fails to protect someone he loves. Thus, when Chancellor Palpatine begins dropping hints to Anakin in Episode III that there are ways that the Force can prevent someone from dying, Anakin is all ears. What we don’t know is how deeply and justifiably upset and disillusioned he is with the Jedi Council, which some of the best Clone Wars episodes of later seasons show us.

CW SPOILERS We know from a story arc which has Anakin meeting Captain Tarkin (before he is Grand Moff) that Anakin finds the Jedi Code and philosophy as frustratingly inappropriate in wartime, that by not going far enough, the Jedi constantly miss opportunities for victories that could end the war, and that by holding back even with good intentions, the war—and suffering—are prolonged.

In small ways throughout the series, we see that Anakin and Jedi Master Mace Windu’s personalities clash repeatedly. Additionally, in one story arc, the Jedi Council decides to have Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin’s mentor and best friend, appear to be taken out by an assassin as he fakes his death. We learn it is Obi-Wan’s decision to keep Anakin in the dark on this because Anakin’s raw emotion is a strong selling point to the enemies of both the Jedi and the Republic that Obi-Wan is really dead. Obi-Wan then goes through some interesting (temporary) surgery to take on the appearance of the bounty hunter who was hired to kill him; the idea is that an assassin who killed a Jedi Master would get a lot of street cred in prison and be able to find information on a major plot against the leader of the Republic, Chancellor Palpatine. Anakin, meanwhile, is consumed by pain and anger and nearly kills Obi-Wan while pursuing who he thinks is Obi-Wan’s assassin. He eventually realizes that something is not right, and confront Masters Yoda and Windu about the deception. Anakin is hurt and angered and disappointed that he was kept in the dark by the Council, and even more so when he learns Obi-Wan was key in the decision. Anakin voices that he suspects the Council is hiding more things from him and that Obi-Wan might not even be aware of this.

As bad as this experience was for Anakin, not long after, there is an even worse experience for him. At the beginning of the Clone Wars, Anakin is assigned a young female padawan apprentice named Ahsoka Tano. At first he does not want the responsibility and views her as a nuisance, but he admires her spirit and takes her in despite his misgivings. He quickly becomes very attached to her, and even early in the series, we see Anakin torture a Separatist prisoner to get information that could save her life when she is in danger. 

The series shows a very rewarding evolution in their relationship, as they both grow and change over the course of the war; over the show’s movie and six seasons, they go from constantly arguing with each other, with Anakin having to teach his headstrong apprentice some tough lessons, to being more respectful and trusting of each other, to being near-peers and admiring each other’s growth, skills, and abilities greatly; Anakin feels a true sense of accomplishment in helping Ahsoka to grow into a great Jedi, while Ahsoka feels a real sense of accomplishment that a great Jedi like Anakin would place so much trust and faith in her as a padawan.

When another Jedi frames Ahsoka for a terrorist attack against the Jedi Temple, the Jedi Council as a whole turns on her and refuses to accept her claims that she is innocent; in a decision that is not unanimous (apparently Masters Yoda, Plo Koon—who brought Ahsoka into the Jedi Order—and Obi-Wan, it is implied, did not side with the majority), the Council bars her from the Jedi Order and decides to turn her over to the Republic’s military courts. During the preceding debate, Obi-Wan argues passionately that they should be the ones to judge Ahsoka, but Master Windu counters that that move could be seen as a biased one and that throwing Ahsoka under the bus would be more politically convenient for the Council as the Jedi are losing public support as the war drags on and on. That the Council chooses political convenience over loyalty to one of their own is but one example of how the war is twisting the values of the Jedi. Windu also questions whether Anakin is too emotionally attached to Ahsoka to be involved at all, to which Anakin angrily replies “Master Windu, with all due respect, she’s my padawan.” Even before the Council pronounces its verdict on his padawan, Anakin sees that this is about political convenience and, enraged, he yells at the Council that the proceedings are “just a formality;” he has to even be checked by Temple guards when he protests after the decision is announced. But Anakin is hardly giving up: he gets Padmé, whom Ahsoka has helped repeatedly, to represent her in the military court. But they all know that the cards are stacked against Ahsoka, so Anakin knows he needs to figure out who really committed the terrorist act. None other than (now Admiral) Tarkin leads the prosecution at her trial, and just before what is almost certainly a guilty verdict is announced, Anakin bursts in with the real Jedi traitor, who confesses to being a terrorist.

At a meeting with the council, Anakin and Plo Koon offer heartfelt apologies to Ahsoka; an unapologetic Windu seems almost to suggest Ahsoka should be thankful for the incident since it has made her stronger; and Master Yoda invites her back into the order. Anakin emotionally adds “They’re asking you back , I’m asking you back.” Trying to keep her own emotions in check, she turns down the offer, telling Anakin, “I’m sorry Master, but I’m not coming back,” and walks out of the Temple. Anakin is crushed, then quickly runs out to catch Ahsoka in a very emotional confrontation; Ahsoka notes the Council did not trust her, but Anakin counters that he stayed by her the whole time. “I understand, more than you realize, I understand walking to walk away from the Order.” Frustrated with the Council and forced to live out his marriage in secret, Anakin has good reasons for being fed up. “I know,” is Ahsoka’s response, hinting that she has actually figured out Anakin and Padmé’s secret relationship. She tearfully walks off into the sunset, leaving Anakin crushed.

The Council also asks Padmé to endanger herself on covert missions in several instances, instances of which Anakin does not approve, instances which cause conflict between him and Padmé. One of these instances happens very soon after Ahsoka has left the Order, and Padmé is only saved by a last-minute rescue from Anakin, and both events are happening just before Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. Anakin’s faith in the Order is at an all-time low, and for good reasons: he sees (not without some validity) that the Jedi Code is prolonging the war and that Jedi peacekeepers are not well-suited to being generals in a war, that decisions of the Council—with which he completely disagreed—just lost him his padawan and put his wife in serious danger (repeatedly); the Council and even his own Master have also kept him in the dark on at least one big operation, causing him emotional pain on multiple levels… END CW SPOILERS

Thus, when Anakin does finally turn on the Jedi after Mace Windu tries to execute Chancellor Palpatine—whom Anakin has exposed as a Sith Lord but has also told Anakin that only his Sith powers can help save Padmé from “certain death”—rather than put him on trial, we can, in light of The Clone Wars, have a much better—and much more sympathetic—understanding of why he turns on the Jedi Order and chooses the Dark Side. Having lost much following the Jedi and nearly even more, his faith in the order and the Light Side crushed, Anakin chooses a different path, one that a war orchestrated by the Sith combined with poor decisions by the Jedi Council have made it the far more convenient and attractive path for Anakin to take. He wants power for himself, yes, but mainly to save another. Thus, even in Anakin’s decision to become a Sith, we have very un-Sith-like motivations. That is why after Padmé gives birth to Luke and Leia, she can still tell Obi-Wan with her dying breath “There’s good in him, I know, I know there’s still…”

Additionally, idealism taken too far can produce unintendedly evil consequences. The Jedi’s idealistic prosecution of the war also empowered their enemies and prolonged the suffering of millions. The sad truth that Lucas is getting at is that there is no escaping the corrupting influence of war, that well-meaning actions can even increase suffering, and that war by its very nature destroys ideals and can corrupt even the noblest of people, turning them into instruments of evil. Yet war doesn’t corrupt on its own…

3.) When good people/institutions compromise their values too much, it leaves room for evil to flourish and destroy them, both from without and from within

In the prequels and especially The Clone Wars, we see ideals fall far short in reality, whether in the corruption of the Senate or the peaceful philosophy of the Jedi order giving way to the violence of war and political convenience. Early in the series, Yoda worries aloud that “In this war, a danger there is, of losing who we are.” In particular, Master Mace Windu seems to push the Council to compromise its values more than anyone else and advocates for questionable actions that are contrary in spirit to the Jedi Code. Yoda always seems to voice concerns but fails to take a stand, and while there are Jedi that move forward with such actions with regret, Windu does not seem to even blink an eye or hesitate for a moment. When the Jedi choose a warrior path, deception, arming rebels illegally, political convenience over loyalty, and even (in an unfinished but canon Clone Wars story) assassination, there is room for Anakin to and his padawan Ahsoka to doubt. The doubts created by the Jedi Council’s own decisions—albeit under very trying circumstances—open doors that lead to their destruction and the destruction of the Republic. Of course, the Sith very much have a role in this too, but if the Jedi Council had behaved differently and closer to their ideals, the Jedi would not have lost Anakin to Darth Sidious and the Dark Side.

CW SPOILERS Perhaps the best expression of these sentiments occurs when the Jedi-turned-terrorist traitor who tried to frame Ahsoka is given a chance to speak after being caught, in this speech that is given:

“I did it. Because I’ve come to realize what many people in the Republic have come to realize. That the Jedi are the ones responsible for this war. That we’ve so lost our way that we have become villains in this conflict. That we are the ones that should be put on trial, all of us! And my attack on the Temple was an attack on what the Jedi have become: an army fighting for the Dark Side, fallen from the Light that we once held so dear. This Republic is failing! It’s only a matter of time.”

END CW SPOILERS

The Jedi mean well, but under the massive pressure of war, they betray many of their values. Many in the public around the galaxy come to see them simply as one side’s leadership in a terrible and destructive war, just as responsible for the killing as the other side. Yes, the Jedi do clearly conduct war more humanely than the Separatists, but it is a distinction that is lost on much of the galactic populace and one that is less pronounced the more the war drags on. And this is all part of Darth Sidious’s plan: as the Jedi are his biggest obstacle to power, he creates a war that will not only kill many of the Jedi but also destroys their reputations and credibility as “the guardians of peace justice in the galaxy,” forcing them into a new role of military leaders in a war that kills many innocents.

4.) Evil often involves people losing their humanity and becoming more like machines

In the prequels and The Clone Wars, the “bad guys” are often unthinking droids. The droids in the armies of the Separatists carry out their orders and their killing without question, as they are, literally, machines. We also never see the faces of Imperial Stormtroopers, and their all-encompassing armor tends to make them feel more robotic and less human, some humorous dialogue aside. In contrast to the droids (and, apparently, Imperial Stormtroopers), there are some great stories involving the Republic’s clone troopers realizing that they are human beings and not robots or automatons and that they can think for themselves and even challenge orders that they believe to be wrong.

CW SPOILERS This is not lost at all on the Sith Lords who orchestrated the clone army’s creation, as they made sure from the beginning to be certain that when it comes time for Order 66—the order to execute all the Jedi—that the clones’ minds will be taken control of as far as following that order, removing any choice for them. END CW SPOILERS 

The droids in the droid armies are metaphors for the mass-killers of many human armies, who lose their humanity and become little more than droids when they unthinkingly, robotically kill their fellow humans, even unarmed civilians, by the hundreds of thousands and millions. From Genghis Khan’s Mongol riders to crusading knights, to Hitler’s Nazi SS and Rwandan Hutus with machetes, to mass shooters in America to ISIS executioners, cold, brutal killing can be said to reduce people to unthinking, unquestioning automatons.

While the contrast between Jedi heroes and villains is simple, what Lucas excels at is showing us the transition from feeling, moral human to monstrous, callous droid. A the end of Episode II: Attack of the Clones, Anakin has his hand cut off by Count Dooku, and his missing hand is replaced by a robotic one; this happens after Anakin has already engaged in a mass killing of Sand People in response to the torture and death of his mother; his path to unthinking killer has begun, literally and symbolically. In Clone Wars and Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, we see the top general of the Separatist Droid Army, General Grievous, and we can tell that behind his mask there is a living head with malicious eyes; before Obi-Wan kills him at the end of Revenge of the Sith, we also see that there are some organs encased in his cyborg body, but it is clear from the beginning that with Grievous, there is little living and breathing that is left of him; he is at least 90% machine, a soulless, callous killer that is simply a slave to power. He is very much meant to be a preview of what Anakin will become when he himself becomes encased in the living tomb of his black Darth Vader armor. This is after Anakin’s legs have been cut off by Obi-Wan on Mustafar, where volcanic flames had burned him beyond recognition. He will spend most of the next two decades (the rest of his life) alone in silent torment, having lost everything—his friends, Obi-Wan, his wife Padmé—and living a life of servitude to his master, Darth Sidious, a life in which he now has become little more than a machine for his master’s bidding, killing without a second thought.

In the original trilogy of Episodes IV-VI, especially if you have seen the prequels, you watch realizing how Luke staying true to the Light Side is no certain thing. Like his father before him, Luke gets his hand cut off in a lightsaber duel (fighting his father, Anakin, now Darth Vader) and also gets a mechanical replacement hand, foreshadowing a potential following in his father’s footsteps. At the end of Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, we are meant to feel nervous that Luke will give into his hate, kill his father, lose his humanity, and become a robotic servant of the Emperor just like his father has, and we are meant to feel relief when both he does not and his father redeems himself out of love for his son.

We meet Anakin as a cute little boy who wants to help people, and he grows into a monstrous, machine-like mass-killer. We are meant to be reminded that even the worst of us are not born that way and that the process of becoming evil is in part a process of trading away one’s humanity in favor a becoming more of a machine.

5.) Even the noblest may fall into darkness, but the most villainous may also come back to the light

Which brings us to our next point: human beings will always be human beings, with both elements of Dark and Light always present within us. Anakin is first a hero with dark tendencies who manages to overcome them until he does not; then he becomes a villain with deeply-buried good tendencies who manages to suppress them until he does not.

CW SPOILERS In Clone Wars especially we see Obi-Wan face the same temptations—both of true love and of how to react when his love is killed—that Anakin did, but Kenobi reacts in polar opposite ways, maintaining faith and fidelity to the Jedi Order and mastering his emotions so as not to give into hate and desperation, and we see Yoda is powerful enough in the light side to avoid his own temptations to go to the Dark Side. CW SPOILERS END

While characters like Obi-Wan and Yoda stay true to the good, we expect characters like Grievous and Palpatine to stay evil, and they do not disappoint.

But that is why Anakin is so important: ultimately, Sidious is only as successful as he is by winning over Anakin; without Anakin coming to his aid, Mace Windu kills Palpatine and there is no Emperor, no Empire, no Order 66, and the second Anakin turns on Palpatine in Return of the Jedi, Palpatine is destroyed and his reign is at an end. In short, the people in the world that are closest to pure evil always need people like Anakin to accomplish their goals. It serves their interests to suppress their minions’ humanity because it is that humanity that is ultimately a threat to their order: no mass murderer has ever succeeded without getting thousands of others to surrender their humanity and carry out his or her evil plans. It is very hard to tell the difference between a Palpatine and an Anakin without intimate knowledge of each; thus, in the real world, we must confront and fight evil while still giving it a chance to redeem itself: America had no desire to fight and kill every Nazi and every German soldier in WWII; modern counterterrorism and counterinsurgency doctrines rely heavily on the ability to separate the hardest core from the rest of their followers, and winning over those less hardcore followers rather than having to kill them. Luke Skywalker succeeding in bringing the Empire’s second-in-command over the Light Side, no small achievement by any standard. Thus, Anakin dies in a state of redemption, not a fallen state.

Conclusion

Lucas’ imagined universe has much to teach us about our own. We see that ambition can destroy whole worlds, people, and nations. Evil can result both from good intentions and from the good failing to live up to their ideals, yet, perhaps most disturbingly, good intentions can also result in evil outcomes. Even in the most seemingly black-and-white of conflicts, Star Wars teaches us to have faith in the humanity of the other side even while being prepared to fight and kill when necessary. Having too much faith or too little can each be destructive, as Anakin teaches us, and people can change for either the better or for the worse. The more of our humanity we retain, the less we can become robotic killing machines in the service of unbridled ambition, but our emotions and attachment can come to be used against us, too. No one is above potential corruption or incapable of potential redemption. In Star Wars as in life, we cannot take either a person’s good or evil for granted; such things are fluid, not permanent, just as the Force is, just as life is. In the end, the future is dependent both on our own reactions and how we react to others’ actions, whether we are powerful in the Force or think the Force is “all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.” Even if sometimes clumsy, at least the George Lucas-helmed parts of Star Wars are in part defined by asking their audiences to think about these ideas, something J.J. Abrams is less interested in pushing his viewers to do.

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What Cosmos, Abraham Lincoln, The Leftovers, and Star Wars: The Clone Wars Can Tell Us About 9/11

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse September 12, 2014 

By Brian E. Frydenborg-LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow me there at @bfry1981) September 12, 2014

WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE LEFTOVERS AND STAR WARS: CLONE WARS FOLLOW

Often, there are times in life when an experience is so overpowering, that life and art not only continue, as always, to imitate each other, but you find life and art continually imitate such an experience. 9/11 is one of those experiences. It has now become so a part of our memory and our living consciousness that the effects on our culture are broad and deep and ever present. And while is it natural for the anniversary of any event to lead to thoughts tying it and other things together, I have been deeply impacted by certain recent shows—Cosmos, The Leftovers, and Star Wars: The Clone Wars, each among the best the television medium has had to offer in recent memory—in such a way that their connection and significance to 9/11 and our post-9/11 America should be clear on any day of the year.

In both life and art, people have an intrinsic tendency to want to ascribe meaning, and to have themselves attached to this meaning. This is a concept which Neil deGrasse Tyson tackles early on in Cosmos, in episode three: “When Knowledge Conquered Fear,” when he talks of man’s unique ability for pattern recognition. In fact, it’s so strong it has created a tendency to find patterns when there aren’t even any there:

“The human talent for pattern recognition is a two-edged sword. We’re especially good at finding patterns, even when they aren’t really there, something known as ‘false pattern recognition.’ We hunger for significance, for signs that our personal existence is of special meaning to the universe.

To that end, we’re all too eager to deceive ourselves and others, to discern a sacred image in a grilled cheese sandwich or find a divine warning in a comet. Today, we know exactly where comets come from and what they’re made of.”

When it comes to 9/11, we must be especially careful for our tendency for “false pattern recognition.” For 9/11 is all about 9/12. It’s about whether we can look back at 9/11 one day and see it as a catalyst for our growth and self-improvement or, instead, for our ruin and self-destruction. When speaking about the Battle of Gettysburg and helping his nation to search for meaning amid incredible death, division, and destruction, Abraham Lincoln said, in his famous Address, that “The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” Likewise, the world will little note, nor long remember, what we said after 9/11, but it will never forget what we did and continue to do in response to it. Our actions over time, not our words, will give 9/11 its true meaning, at least on the macro level, anyway. In the meantime, we have to suffer through the grand pronouncements and baseless wishful or doomsday thinking of many an ignorant or devious person, but here, too, Tyson’s Cosmos offers us a road map for how we can analyze our own society in the wake of 9/11 using the scientific method as first formally conceived a millennium ago by Ibn al-Hazen in Basra, in what is now Iraq. He

…was the first person ever to set down the rules of science. He created an error-correcting mechanism, a systematic and relentless way to sift out misconceptions in our thinking: ‘Finding truth is difficult and the road to it is rough. As seekers after truth, you will be wise to withhold judgment and not simply put your trust in the writings of the ancients. You must question and critically examine those writings from every side. You must submit only to argument and experiment and not to the sayings of any person. For every human being is vulnerable to all kinds of imperfection. As seekers after truth, we must also suspect and question our own ideas as we perform our investigations, to avoid falling into prejudice or careless thinking. Take this course, and truth will be revealed to you.’

Tyson then adds that “This is the method of science,” but it is no less relevant to understanding our nation or ourselves, for we must look at the facts, results, and realities of our behavior for us to truly have self-awareness, we must be vigorous in separating myths from reality, and avoid seeing and believing what we want to be the truth as part of a natural tendency to seek comfort.

There is another great truth about 9/11 that Tyson’s Cosmos can show us: just because we can’t see something, doesn’t mean it’s not there, or that it’s not extremely powerful and affecting everything around it. The show talks about John Michell, an eighteenth century British astronomer, who

…imagined a star so big, so massive, that nothing, not even light, could escape its gravitational grip. Can you find the dark star? You can’t see it with your eyes, not directly, but it may leave a kind of footprint on the cosmic shore. Michell realized that we might be able to detect some of these dark stars because of their extreme gravity. If one happened to be near a smaller, luminous companion star, that star would appear to travel in a tight orbit around nothing. Even though we can’t see it, we know something with a lot of mass has to be right there. A dark star, or what today we call a black hole.

Well, that’s what 9/11 is, especially in lower Manhattan: a black hole, an invisible star of massive, undeniable size and power, pulling on everything that is in its orbit. Today, there is no smoking, rubble filled-crater; a truly inspiring memorial and museum fill the void left by the Twin Towers, and the new Freedom Tower stands almost in their places. I remember the first time I saw the Freedom Tower, from a distance, and as beautiful as it looked, it felt almost as odd to see a new anything in place of that void as it did when I saw that former gaping void for the first time a few months after 9/11, a void left by the destruction of the Twin Towers. This void may have been partially physically replaced, though the sites of the towers are building-free waterfalls ringed by the names of the victims set in bronze, but it is still very much there: an invisible dead star, pulling on history, pulling on hearts, pulling a city and a nation into its orbit. It is massive and huge and there—you can feel it, if you knew New York before 9/11—and it is a part of us, our very own black hole.

Which brings me to HBO’s The Leftovers and a major point that all should realize about 9/11. The Leftovers is a truly unique and remarkable program, different from anything I’ve ever seen on television. We are taken in this series to a small town in suburban New York State, when all of a sudden, people disappear. They simply vanish into thin air, and are never heard from again. No explanation, no message from above. Just disappearances. Globally, about 2% of the world’s population in an instant, to be more exact. Some lost their entire immediate family, one character loses her unborn child, others lost no one. Nearly three years later, we begin to follow the lives of people in this town as they cope with and attempt to understand the loss of these people. On the one level, most people try to continue to go about their daily lives, but everyone knows things are different. As people everywhere search for meaning, many cults spring up and try to make this point about things being different in very provocative ways, to the degree that the small town we come to know is truly ripped apart at the end of the first season, and descends into anarchy. The catalyst for this is a cult deciding to break into the homes of the people who lost loved ones in the vanishings and to place life-like replicas of these disappeared people in the same dress and positions they were when they disappeared. Even after three years of time to recover and heal from these losses, the reaction is swift, base, primitive, and very human: after many months, perhaps years of this cult obnoxiously harassing the whole town, the town becomes a mob, all semblance of law and order gone, that descends on the cult members and their compound, motivated purely towards death and destruction. All along, over the course of three years, the wound of losing loved ones for these people was always there, perhaps not as raw, but always there, ready to be reopened and to become just as raw if ripped open too harshly. That is what the cult did: open those wounds so harshly that young and old, meek as well as strong, became animals wailing in grief, animals bent on violence and destruction. The pain, sorrow, and loss of suddenly and unexpectedly losing a loved one, especially when it happens to so many people at the same time, is not something that ever does go away, and it is not something you “get over;” there is no “moving on,” no future where that black hole is not a part of you, pulling on you no matter how hard you try to escape its gravitational pull, for as Tyson notes in another episode of Cosmos, “one thing never changes: gravity.” In the finale of the first season of The Leftovers, this was made perhaps most clear in the moment when one character who lost her husband and two children, who all vanished from the breakfast table while she was looking in the fridge, sees the life-like dolls the cult set up of her whole family at her own breakfast table, dressed in replicas of their own clothes (the cult had broken into people’s homes earlier and stolen pictures so they would know how to dress the human replicas). Three years of progress in trying to move on from losing her entire immediate family is shattered, and she lets out a primal scream of despair and pain, anguish and grief. She’s right back to that moment of the vanishings; soon we hear her voice reading what sounds like a suicide note to one of the other major characters with whom she has become romantically entangled:

Dear _____ [trying to reduce spoilers here], I need to say goodbye to someone I care about, someone who’s still here, so I’m saying it to you. You were good to me _____, and sometimes when we were together, I remembered who I used to be before everything changed, but I was pretending. Pretending as if I hadn’t lost everything. I want to believe it can all go back to the way it was, I want to believe I’m not surrounded by the abandoned ruin of a dead civilization, I want to believe it’s still possible to get close to someone. But it’s easier not to. It’s easier because I’m a coward and I couldn’t take the pain, not again. I know that’s not fair, _____. You’ve lost so much too, and you’re strong. You’re still here. But I can’t be, not anymore. I tried to get better, _____. I didn’t want to feel this way, so I took a shortcut. But it led me right back home. And do you know what I found when I got there? I found them, _____, right where I left them. Right where they left me. It took me three years to accept the truth, but now I know there’s no going back, no fixing it. I’m beyond repair. Maybe we’re all beyond repair.

I was only yesterday watching the ceremonies at Ground Zero—the former site of the Twin Towers—and even after thirteen years, the raw pain was still amazing. The ceremony is very simple: family members and friends of victims stand in pairs, and each pair reads a small portion of the nearly 3,000 names of the victims. String instruments, or a flute playing “Danny Boy” or “Amazing Grace” or the like, fill the background, along with the rushing water of the reflecting pools in the spots where the towers once stood. A uniformed member of the NYPD, the FDNY, and other local uniformed services who tried to rescue people and had many of their own perish on 9/11 stand behind each pair. After each pair reads the names, each member of the pair says the name of his or her loved one, usually with a brief message about how missed he or she is, or something about his or her Yankees, Mets, Jets, or Giants, or about the son or niece he or she would never know. Sometimes the readers are totally calm and then break down right when they utter the name of their loved one. Sometimes, you can see the police officers or firefighters standing right behind them struggle to keep their emotions in check. The readers they read and people in the crowd as they listen often hold pictures of their loved ones, holding them up for all to see. But it is clear for many of them that the pain is very much there, is with them even now, all these years later, like an invisible star that surrounds them which they continually orbit. Like the people in The Leftovers, they, too, are unable to let go. Like the sudden rapture-like vanishings in the series, the real-life deaths of 9/11 were also very sudden, leaving a black hole in the lives of those who orbited them that is impossible to fill or escape.

The damage is clear on the individual, micro level, but what about the macro level? That is what The Leftovers season finale does such of great job of showcasing: the falling apart of many individuals converges on one point in time, from micro to macro, and we see an entire town fall to lawlessness and anarchy, certainly provoked but choosing to be this way nonetheless. Star Wars: The Clone Wars shows such an occurrence brilliantly over the course of its five-and-a-half seasons. It may be CGI animated, but it’s also one of the most underrated shows in recent years, dealing adeptly with a number of difficult, deep, and pressing issues, from emotional ones to political ones, from terrorism and loyalty to war and peace. Set in the era when Anakin Skywalker is fighting side-by-side with his best friend, mentor and master, Obi-Wan Kenobi, in the Clone Wars, it is the tale of how war and manipulation undoes an entire Galactic Republic of a democracy, how the moral-bedrock-of-the-Republic Jedi Order loses its way, how an Emperor rises to destroy democracy and create an Empire. And, of course, it is the very human story of how Anakin loses his faith in the Jedi and the Republic and how the war consumes him, the Republic, and the Order. We steadily increasingly see Anakin being put into uncomfortable positions, where the war pushes him and his relationships with the Order, his padawan (trainee), his master Obi-Wan, and his secret (and against the rules!) wife, Padmé Amidala, to the breaking point, and not without good reason. The whole show does a great job of showing how the Republic is crumbling on the inside, and how the Jedi Order gets caught up in the politics of the day and makes questionable decisions, all in a mature, well-written, believable way that shines a brilliant, morally ambiguous gray. It is a show, written and produced while the U.S. was itself at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, where both sides are shown to have heroes and villains, and where even the cloned soldiers who make up the bulk of the Republic’s army question why they are fighting, wrestling with their identity as warriors bred and engineered for war. This show is about how a hero can fall, how good can lose, how evil can win, how those closest to you can unintentionally and intentionally betray you, and how good intentions are not always enough. It is very appropriate for both kids and adults in our post-9/11 world, this show that was called one of the most political shows on television several times and causes us to question some important things about our own society and actions.

At the end of the fifth season, a major character is accused of sedition and of committing terrorism against the Republic. In one of the most powerful scenes of the series, just when the leader of the Republic, Chancellor Palpatine (later the Emperor in the old Star Wars movies, and at this point voiced by none other than Tim Curry) is about to read the verdict of a military tribunal, determining the fate of this character, Anakin breaks in and saves this character, to whom he is extremely close, by presenting the real culprit, a young member of the Jedi Order who is actually the accused and on-trial character’s best friend and who can barely contain bitterness in exclaiming

I did it. Because I’ve come to realize what many people in the Republic have come to realize. That the Jedi are the ones responsible for this war. That we’ve so lost our way that we have become villains in this conflict. That we are the ones that should be put on trial, all of us! And my attack on the Temple was an attack on what the Jedi have become: an army fighting for the Dark Side, fallen from the Light that we once held so dear. This Republic is failing! It’s only a matter of time.

And, for those who don’t know the story, it is very close to the time when the Jedi will be wiped out by their own Clone Troopers in Order 66, when Palpatine will turn and twist the good man Anakin Skywalker into the evil shell of a man, Darth Vader, and when Palpatine will transform the democratic Republic into an autocratic Galactic Empire ruled by fear and oppression. No one listens to the young traitorous Jedi, and we don’t know how much that Jedi knows, but the words spoken ring ever so true: the Republic has become hopelessly corrupt and it has given up much of its power to Chancellor Palpatine, who is preparing to use the war to assume dictatorial powers and to wipe out the Jedi, themselves being used by him to further his nefarious purposes and to increase his power and control. The Republic very much was failing when those words were spoken. Early in the Clone Wars series, Jedi Master Yoda troublingly observes that “In this war, a danger there is, of losing who we are,” though he probably did not know how right he was at the time. And even though Anakin saved his friend, who was also a member of the Jedi Order but had been expelled by the order prior to being put on trial, this friend saw the Order and the Republic up close in a new light and did not like what was revealed; this character rebuffs an offer from the Jedi Council to return to the order, leaving the Order and Anakin after five seasons of both being this character’s “life,” crushing Anakin and his belief in the Order and the Republic. He tells his friend, just before the friend leaves, “I understand. More than you realize, I understand wanting to walk away from the Order,” to which the friend replies: “I know,” and walks off into the sunset. A shattered and battered Anakin is now perilously close to becoming consumed by his own black hole, which will soon transform him into Darth Vader.

Do I think the U.S. is about to become the evil Empire in Star Wars? Hardly. Is it too late for us? I don’t think so, but I have written about how we’ve already lost a decade to the disasters of our decisions after 9/11. We, too, have been provoked by 9/11 into less-than-stellar reactions and we, too, ultimately chose these actions as a society. Clone Wars shows how easy it is even for the best of us to get wrapped up in the momentum of war and politics to the degree that we lose sight of why we are fighting or campaigning and whether or not we’re having the effect we wish to. These were questions the Jedi Order and the citizens of the Republic should have been asking during the Clone Wars, and they are questions our leaders and we should have been asking over the many years we fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, which I’ve also previously expressed.

If there is any discernible lesson yet that we should take from 9/11, it is that we need to avoid falling for easy answers and solutions and that instead we should be asking ourselves tough questions in the method of Ibn al-Hazen as shown in Cosmos, and that our own black holes of death and loss can pull us in the wrong direction, for, as Yoda told Anakin in Episode I (the movie), when he first met him, “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. I sense much fear in you,” and also later when he told him “Careful you must be when sensing the future Anakin. The fear of loss is a path to the dark side.” In both The Leftovers and Star Wars, we see how our fears and pain and loss can bring out the worst in us, one of Cosmos’ black holes constantly pulling us and keeping us in its orbit, and how there is no fully recovering from loss. Clone Wars reminds us that if we don’t rationally and critically examine our decisions carefully, we risk losing ourselves in war and scorched-earth politics. By asking tough questions, Cosmos-style, we can avoid having our pain consume us like certain characters in The Leftovers and Star Wars. But each show also leaves open the possibilities of new hopes, new beginnings, and redemption. May 9/11 always motivate us to keep those options available to us and help us to avoid falling into the black hole of fear, grief, despair, and anger, which truly are paths to pain and the Dark Side.