Star Wars Will End Like Lost
Warning, there is a spoiler in this.
It’s official. In an interview with Rian Johnson, director of The Last Jedi, the film maker made it clear that while The Force Awakens teased hidden plots we would eventually unravel, it was, like Lost, a great mystery with nothing behind it; the plot is being made up as the writers go along. The new movie may be very entertaining, but that is simply discards certain characters and plots, like Snoke, is further evidence that J. J. Abrams writing blueprint is in use at Lucasfilm.
Why am I bothered by this? I love Star Wars. I have always loved it. I actually worked as a Star Wars expert when I was in high school, and the original trilogy holds a special place in my heart. I’ve previously addressed why I’m not a huge fan of The Force Awakens, on a number of fronts. Here’s where I address a simple problem: writing without a plan.
In television, it is possible to make a show without a blueprint, but that often doesn’t turn out as well as shows made with a plan. Carnivàle failed because of production problems, not writing problems. If you look online, you can find a giant, multi-season arc written for the show, meaning every character, every detail, lead somewhere.
Shows that had a blueprint but decided to detour for a season to squeeze one more year into the show suffered as a result. Buffy The Vampire Slayer famously has saggy seasons, where the writing was ad hoc and not compelling. When you just make up a story as you go along however, it inevitably leads nowhere. This brings us to Lost.
When the pilot for Lost aired, I watched it with a good buddy of mine who loved the show and watched every episode. My spidey sense tingled and I told him I wasn’t going to watch the show, but predicted the end of the series with total accuracy. How could I do this? Because the mystery was so deliberately and overtly obscure, it was cleat that it guarded an empty safe.
If a story posits a mystery, on TV, in film, or in a book, there has to be an ending as satisfying and inevitable as the mystery is mysterious. The comic book character Cable was very compelling until we learned that he had this silly past, being Cyclops’ and Jean Gray’s son from the far flung future. Darth Vader was cool until we saw him as an annoying brat. Lost ran into this problem, but by then it was too late for fans to turn away, because the show was already over.
This methodology is poisonous. It squanders the good will of audiences worse than having a world where dead doesn’t mean dead. When any Marvel character can die and come back, any Vampire Diaries character can die and come back, when no plot detail means anything in a Star Wars movie, none of it matters. When none of if matters, you eventually lose audience emotional investment, and you lose the whole game.
Star Wars is skating by right now on an emotional bank account backed by decades of fans getting good products in the forms of the books and the original trilogy. If the new series meanders, squandering its meaning on a roller coaster ride of pure nostalgia for the original films, then what is the point of making them? More importantly, what is the point of watching them?
