Monday, May 26, 2008

In which "Legacy of the Force" annoys me

We all know that setting up secret police forces, internment of various broad groups, and indefinate inprisonment of suspects without charge are bad things.

Now, imagine you're Luke Skywalker, Jedi Grand Master and the head of the New Jedi Order. One of the members of your order has gone dark, and started instituting all of the above. Due to the nature of Force-users, and the power of this individual, only your order are equipped to deal with him. Do you

(A) stand by impotently while he leads the galaxy into darkness, occasionally asking him nicely to come back to the light, and generally not to be nasty because "totalitarianism is bad, m'kay"? Or do you

(B) Remove him from public life, by force if necessary, so that through isolation you can attempt to detox him from the Dark Side, and so that in any case he cannot institute a tyranny over the lives of trillions of citizens?

See, I would have thought (B) was the obvious answer, because even if the rogue Jedi was doing what he was doing because he sincerely thought it was the right thing to do, he remains a dangerous threat to everyone else in the galaxy. However, if you guessed (A)...

And so it is with the "Legacy of the Force" series. It seems to be a sequence of moronic decisions from the good guys, while all the time the bad guys go about their agendas unchecked. Of course, if the good guys had done the sensible thing at the start, there would be no story.

Still, it's reached a point where I'm now rooting for the bad guy, because at least he actually understands how to achieve things:

1) Decide what you want
2) Make a plan to achieve what you want
3) Execute the plan to achieve what you want
4) Profit

Although, I'm also thinking that if I were a non-Force-user in the Star Wars universe, I would now be at the point of thinking that our "guardians of peace and justice" just create much more trouble than they stop. I mean, seriously, I would be considering finding a way to eliminate Force-users entirely.

Of course, it's worth noting that "Legacy of the Force" isn't the only instance of Jedi who are too dumb to live. The best example comes with "Attack of the Clones", in which none of the Jedi think to remark, "Gosh, wasn't it lucky that someone placed an illegal order for a clone army ten years ago, so they'd conveniently be ready just when Palpatine declared he would set up his Grand Army? (and, coincidentally, so they'd be ready just when we need them)", or perhaps, "Isn't it a bit odd that all our clones are copies of that bounty hunter who was fighting alongside that Sith Lord we've just discovered?" (Still, even that's not as silly as having a mixed-sex educational facility for young Jedi, and expecting them to be celibate... Have I mentioned that I don't really like the prequels?)

4 comments:

Captain Ric said...

You're wrong. Step 3 is profit.

Steph/ven said...

But then, what's step 2?

Captain Ric said...

That's a tough one.

Steph/ven said...

True to form, and as if designed specifically to annoy me, exactly fifty pages after I posted this, the series kicked into high gear. The good guys finally started to take action about the mess they'd manage to get themselves into, and the bad guy's plan started to unravel.

Still, I'm not convinced by the storytelling mechanism of building false suspense by incompetence, and then resolving it through competence.