Spoilers ahead. Also, all credit for that epic headline goes to improv superstar Sean Paul Ellis

Imagine for a moment that J.K. Rowling, while writing the seventh book in the Harry Potter series, said to herself, "Fuck it," and actively chose to undermine everything about her creation that had earned her millions of fans (and dollars) in the pages of that final tome. Think about how differently the fifth season of AMC's Breaking Bad would have been had Vince Gilligan decided to redeem and ultimately save Walter White despite the character's no-turning-back transition "from Mr. Chips to Scarface." Or ponder, if you will, what our world would be like had the final season of LOST actually been good, or if Dexter paid for his crimes instead of becoming a lumberjack. What these stories have in common is a creative force at the height of power and popularity who held their fandoms in the palm of their hands, and, with a guaranteed turnout and payday for their efforts one way or the other, chose whether to reward their fanbase with a satisfactory conclusion, or bring it all crashing down around them out of a narcissistic desire to destroy their own creation.

I'm a fan of the chaotic creative. Without such unpredictable forces, the arts would never advance. Andy Kaufman never would have blurred and pushed the boundary between the acceptable fiction of TV and the rock-solid foundation of reality. St. Elsewhere's final hour, "The Last One", would never have blown the minds of viewers after 136 episodes by creating the fiction-within-a-fiction of the Tommy Westphall Universe. And, honestly, Loki would be a lot less fun if he always had to play by the rules. These creators are the demigods of their own universes, and they can do with them as they please.

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Image via Lucasfilm

Star Wars, however, is neither Rian Johnson's nor Disney's creation, even if Star Wars: The Last Jedi happens to be. That honor belongs to George Lucas ... or at least it did until his tinkering with the original trilogy and the substandard performance of the prequel trilogy weakened his foundation before ultimately handing over the Star Wars deed to Disney for $4 billion. That might still sound like a lot, even when compared to the $52.4 billion valuation of Disney's Fox buyout, but it's a reminder that Disney rarely makes bad investments. What they do better than anyone is acquire, adapt, and transition existing properties into a form that fits their well-oiled machine. They know that the fandom, which has buoyed Star Wars since Day 1, remains hungry for--perhaps even addicted to--more content.

So does it make sense to think that Disney would be all smiles to see Johnson's The Last Jedi shitting all over the dedicated fandom's forty-year investment into every conceivable nut and bolt in the Star Wars mythology? No ... unless you consider the idea that the Old Fandom (ie Lucas-era fans) is being pruned away like dead limbs to make way for the New Fandom (ie Disney-era fans), an eager bunch who are ready to buy up Porgs and all manner of BB-8, Finn, Rey, Kylo Ren, and Poe merchandise while the foundational fans embarrass themselves with petition tantrums.

The burning down of the previous Star Wars mythology to make way for the new one is an ugly, mean-spirited truth beneath the progressive narrative veneer of The Last Jedi, and the decision to do so was every bit as much a financial and marketing decision as it was a creative one. While critics and the New Fandom are busy fellating the creative forces for the forward-thinking story of The Last Jedi that tears down previously established mythology, they're also blinded by the fact that the Disney machine is playing a grand confidence game, undercutting Lucas' creation for their modern, more profitable version of Star Wars. The worst part of this grift? We're eating it up by the handful.

Luke's Disdain

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A Brief Concession: There's a lot to love about Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Johnson's handling of the franchise's characters, new and old, was remarkably and refreshingly done, if a bit safe at times; I'll go into more detail about that sure-to-be inflammatory statement later. But as a longtime fan of the franchise myself, I'm flummoxed as to how Johnson, a self-professed fan of Star Wars, apparently took such delight in quite literally burning the hero's history down to the ground while metaphorically slapping the fandom in the face in the process. At worst, he's the architect of that approach; at best, he's complicit in the decision. I'm betting on the former but hoping for the latter, if only because this trilogy has been loosely plotted out, as the creative forces themselves have admitted. The Last Jedi will long be a divisive film for many reasons, some worth more discussion than others, but for me, it will be the cognitive dissonance between the highs of seeing a diverse cast of characters engaging in complex, multi-layered relationships with each other, and the lows related to the mind-boggling decision to rub the Old Fandom's nose in the ashes of everything about the franchise they've ever loved, while simultaneously and disingenuously encouraging a New Fandom to take hold.

Perhaps the best bit of evidence to this idea is the behavior of Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) in The Last Jedi. While I was most interested in finding out more about Rey's (Daisy Ridley) arc in this film, it was Luke's increasingly odd behavior that needled at the back of my brain, warning me that something was not quite right with this movie. The Last Jedi is incredibly jokey, a decision which masks the cynical and nihilistic motives of the franchise's fan-favorite protagonist until it's too late and you're in too deep. Luke casually and quickly tossing aside his lightsaber was funny at first ... until you think about it for a moment. This is the same lightsaber crafted by his father Anakin, the same lightsaber handed down to him by Obi-Wan Kenobi and guarded by Maz Kanata for decades, a family heirloom and weapon with quite the complicated history. To be tossed aside so lightly was more than a reflection of Luke's state of mind at the time (which made some narrative sense), it's a message to the audience that every little bit of importance we've associated with lightsabers for 40 years is ultimately worth nothing. Sorry you wasted your time studying blueprints of handgrips and Kyber crystals, but please, still feel free to craft your own lightsaber at home!

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Image via Lucasfilm

Johnson defended this decision, saying:

“It wasn’t coming into it and thinking, ‘Okay, they’re expecting this. Let’s have him toss the lightsaber. Ha, ha, ha.’ The reason he did that was because I can’t imagine any other honest reaction from him to that moment.”

No other honest reaction? Was Obi-Wan a tantrum-throwing child while training Luke, despite years of reclusive living? Was Qui-Gon a reactionary nutjob while dealing with an impatient and impetuous young Obi-Wan? No, there's an infinite spectrum of other honest reactions. Clearly Luke had not matured much in his years in isolation as it takes a special sort of petulance to toss away something that others have literally died to protect. Imagine being presented a Hattori Hanzo sword or the Elder Wand and simply throwing it over a cliff. Even Harry Potter put the contentious wand to good use before opting to discard it for the greater good. And if Luke's act doesn't convince you that The Last Jedi is ditching the existing mythology bit by bit, the fact that Luke steps out of the galaxy far, far away and basically into the theater in order to call the lightsaber a "laser sword" should be a slap to the face. It's what clued me in that something greater than, "Isn't this version of Luke silly?" was going on. And if even that weren't enough, the fact that the lightsaber is literally torn apart during the struggle between Rey and Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) should be the coffin nail. Will Rey learn how to construct her own lightsaber in the next film, using the parts of her pseudo-master's destroyed weapon? The Last Jedi doesn't give a shit about that question and certainly isn't concerned with answering it, so don't get your hopes and theories up about Star Wars: Episode IX doing so either.

But it's not just Luke's rejection of the weapon and it's bloody (or technically bloodless, but you know what I mean) history that scratches Star Wars lore from the annals. Deadspin has compiled an epic list of over 50 times that The Last Jedi supremely dunks on the prequel trilogy and other Star Wars movies that came before it, like the bizarre green milk scene, Luke's description of the Force, and much more. The Last Jedi is a step-by-step dismantling of everything the Old Fandom held sacred, warts and all, in favor of raising up everything the New Fandom is obsessing over; the real lightsaber through the heart here is that our ol' buddy Luke is the one delivering each of a thousand cuts.

The Laming of Snoke and the First Order

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Now that's not to say Luke pulls off this epic betrayal alone. Plenty of fans got sweatin' mad about the lack of any connections between Supreme Leader Snoke and the rest of the Star Wars mythology. (And when you get that mad, you obviously need to start a petition.) This is easy to poke fun at and deservedly so to an extent, but the previous 40 years of Star Wars have also trained fans to expect these sorts of connections, narrowing what's in theory supposed to be a vast universe. The Last Jedi subverts these expectations and should be rightly lauded for that. That's not what had me upset about Snoke. Just like I didn't need Rey's parental lineage to be explained or to have an unbelievably convenient connection to existing mythology despite the vastness of this universe, I didn't need Snoke's gruesome face to be a familiar one. However, I did need him to be a worthwhile adversary, and what I got was a laughably safe choice on the part of Johnson.

Safe choices; The Last Jedi is replete with them. Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) has become an Untouchable, quite the feat for a character who was intended to die off in the early goings of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. But now, the dreamy-eyed Isaac and his infallible (or, at least, immune-to-punishment) Poe has become a darling of both the New Fandom and of Disney brass. I love watching Poe carve up the First Order opposition in his T-70 X-wing fighter "Black One" (will you please stop blowing it up...) as much as the next person, but when it's clear he's not going to suffer so much as a scratch, it sucks the tension out of the telling. Finn (John Boyega) and his adventure with Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran) was more a prequel for Star Wars: Episode IX than an integral part of The Last Jedi, but the decision to keep them both alive at the movie's end rather than die in an act of self-sacrifice was another safe, character/New Fandom-preserving decision. Offing the relatively unknown entity of Paige Tico (Veronica Ngo) in order to give Rose an emotional arc works fine despite its tropey nature until you consider that most of the film's people of color are tangential to the main plot. And while The Last Jedi casts some positively badass women with appropriately badass moments, most of them serve either sacrificial or "babysitter" roles. (Or they're just snuffed out entirely for not being marketable enough; Sorry, Captain Phasma!) Those are safe decisions in the sense of, "Well, we need to make sure we have a diverse cast doing cool stuff, but we're not quite ready to go all-in on them leading the A story just yet." But yay! Everyone who's marketable is alive and happy!

Supreme Leader Snoke reaching out with his hand in The Last Jedi.
Image via Disney

And then there's Snoke (Andy Serkis). Supreme. Leader. Snoke. This is a Force-wielding dude with mysterious origins who's strong enough to not only have led the First Order to power in the vacuum left by the defeat of the Empire, but who can also shut down the grandson of Darth Vader with a Force Lightning clapback and can bounce General Hux's (Domhnall Gleeson) pale chin off the floor from untold parsecs away. Your telling me this bro is going to be done in with a bit of hand-waving trickery due to his hubris? Please. Serkis deserved better than that if nothing else.

Johnson, of course, clarified his decision to keep Snoke as an unknown entity rather than give in to various fandom wish fulfillment:

When I was working on the character of Kylo, I came to a place where I thought the most interesting thing would be to knock the shaky foundation out from under him at the beginning of this movie…By the end of this film, he’s gone from being a wannabe Vader to someone who is standing on his own feet as a complex villain taking the reins.

 

But then the question is: What place would Snoke have at the end of that?…That made me realize the most interesting thing would be to eliminate that dynamic between the ‘emperor’ and pupil, so that all bets are off going into the next one. That also led to the possibility of this dramatic turn in the middle, which could also be a really powerful connection point between Kylo and Rey.

 

It would have stopped any of these scenes dead cold if he had stopped and given a 30-second speech about how he’s Darth Plagueis…It doesn’t matter to Rey. If he had done that, Rey would have blinked and said, ‘Who?’ And the scene would have gone on…and I’m not saying he’s Darth Plagueis! ...

 

We got the whole story of Palpatine’s rise to power in the prequels, but in the original films he’s exactly what he needs to be, which is just ‘The Emperor’. He’s a dark force: the scary thing behind the thing. That was entirely how I approached Snoke. I wasn’t interested in explaining where he came from or telling his history, except where it serves this story.

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Image via Lucasfilm

I respect and agree with Johnson's decision to avoid playing into fan theories, especially after the unmitigated bit of fan-service that was Rogue One; that's what fan-fiction is for and it's a great arena to flesh out idea and play "What if?" However, your antagonist still has to have some heft to them, even if, as my colleague Allison Keene has pointed out, he ends up being nothing more than a red herring. Even Darth Maul got in an emotional killing blow before being dispatched (only to arrive in insane cyborg-spider form in Star Wars: The Clone Wars). Was Kylo Ren playing the subservient apprentice all along while biding his time, waiting for a moment to strike? Was Rey's arrival and subsequent torture at the Force-hands of Snoke enough to push Kylo over the edge toward a second act of patricide? You could make those arguments, but you could just as rightly say that Snoke was a cookie-cutter version of Palpatine who held little value with the story that lies ahead. (And let's face it, those Snoke Plushies probably aren't flying off of the shelves ... though I wouldn't mind a comfy Snoke Robe.) Killing him so easily was a safe choice, as opposed to say, killing Rey or Kylo at one extreme, or maiming one of them severely, a la Cool One-Handed Luke in The Empire Strikes Back. Instead, the New Fandom got to salivate over "Kylo Rey" teaming up to take down not only Snoke but also the Elite Praetorian Guard, who came nowhere near living up to their name. I mean, why bother fighting at all once ya done fucked up and let your leader get kill't? Perhaps the new Supreme Leader Kylo Ren, or rather J.J. Abrams, will bring his Knights of Ren out of the ether to act as his new guard, but either way, The Last Jedi doesn't care; it's just clearing out the dead wood.

Burning Down the Old Fandom ...

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And that's really the crux of my argument here. Star Wars: The Last Jedi deservedly ranks among the most subversive and non-traditional installments in a major blockbuster franchise, ever. But it's subversive on a second level, one that's actively undercutting even the praiseworthy critics, because the choices that elevated the progressive aspects that have been embraced by the new fandom come at the cost of burning away any semblance of the old. Quite literally. Crazy-ass Yoda returns in ghost-puppet mode to call down the thunder and the lightning from the sky (Why bother worrying about being corporeal at all if you can do that?), igniting the literal and metaphorical roots of the Jedi Order before Luke, who's the last Jedi at that moment, can make good on the threat to do the same. Sure, Rey may have spirited away the early Jedi tomes, but since "page-turners, they are not", does that even matter? The Last Jedi tells us that the Jedi have failed; that at the height of their power, they failed even more spectacularly. Extending that line of thought, everything the fans ever loved about the Jedi in the history of the franchise is built on failure. Did you love that farm boy's rise to challenge the powerful leaders at the head of an authoritarian government? Too bad, the Jedi never should have let that happen in the first place. Oh and then the hero of the Rebellion failed again, so clearly this Jedi teaching isn't up to snuff. Sorry to have wasted your time all these years. But we have a shiny new Resistance for you to get attached to!

That's an even more cynical outlook on the history of the Jedi, the Knights of the Old Republic, etc., than my opinion that profit margins and merchandising drove a good portion of the decisions in The Last Jedi. What's most bizarre to me where The Last Jedi is concerned is not so much Johnson & Co.'s decision to gaslight the fandom, but rather their decision to include any old nods at all. Why bother bringing Han Solo's golden dice back into the mix at all, only to weirdly phase them out of (local) existence as part of Luke's Force Projection ruse? Why reference young Luke Skywalker staring off into the Tattooine binary sunset as old Luke Skywalker does the same while he dies on Ahch-To? Why not smash the Millennium Falcon into bits during the skirmish on Crait?

Because Disney's only willing to push the inflammatory fandom-bashing so far; they can still sell Millennium Falcon merch after all, and they've got a big park attraction planned for it, as well. When you realize that the decision behind what stays and what goes in The Last Jedi was driven as much by marketing plans as it was by creative decision, that takes a bit of the steam out of the praise-train for the film and its maverick filmmaker and puts a little real-world capitalistic bile back in the system. Or at least it should, because the moral of this story is this: Clear out the old to make way for the new, but make the transition just entertaining enough to swallow.

... to Raise a New One

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Wait, no, don't go! We didn't really want you to give up on your obsession with Star Wars! Why, here's an all-new book going into great detail about all the shiny new things in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, isn't that neat? At the end of the day, Disney isn't about making avant-garde films, especially not where multi-billion-dollar franchises are concerned. Simply put, the Old Fandom has just about run its course and the New Fandom is on the rise. This is the way of the world, the way of profit-driven businesses, and even the way of nature.

In biology, there's a word for an organism that uses an existing life form to provide itself with structure and shelter while it competes with said host for resources in order to grow, develop, and eventually multiply; that word is: parasite. I can think of no better description for what Star Wars: The Last Jedi is to Star Wars overall. I know, that sounds harsh, but remember that a parasite is merely doing what its genes direct it to do in order to survive, what it's "designed" to do; it's only a "parasite" in a negative sense where the host is concerned. That host is Lucas' version of Star Wars and, by extension, the fandom who embraced it.

A "strangler fig" is a tropical plant that starts its life by using an existing tree for support, competing with the much larger organism for resources until it's able to root itself into the ground. Often, the host tree dies, rotting away from the inside, while the strangler fig stands astride it, a skeletal approximation of what once was. This is The Last Jedi, a Johnny-come-lately's reinterpretation of nearly a half-century of mythology that acts as the corrupted bones of a new body of work. Johnson and The Last Jedi pulled everything they wanted, everything they needed from the Star Wars mythology in order to warp, twist, and adapt those aspects to their own designs, forever changing the landscape going forward.

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Image via Lucasfilm

I get it. Every creative out there wants to leave their mark on the world. Everyone wants their "Jesus overturning the table" moment, their Tyler Durden victory, to succeed where Guy Fawkes failed to blow up Parliament and reset the system. For Johnson, congratulations are in order because he's done it. For Disney, the same can be said, because a new fandom is coalescing, even as the remnants of the old are staving off their impending disillusionment by clinging to such suppositions as, "Maybe Snoke's not really dead. Maybe he can come back as Cyborg Plagueis after all!" and, "Nope, Rey's parents have to be special. They just have to be!"

Let it go, my friends and fellow fans. Embrace the fact that the existing mythology of the Star Wars franchise will always be there in the films, TV series, books, and video games, for better or worse. Disney, Johnson, Abrams, and the Lucasfilm braintrust are taking Star Wars to some interesting places in the future, places designed for the next, progressive generation of fans. We can come along if we leave the baggage of the last 40 years behind us and look forward to new interpretations, adventures, and discussions in the years to come, or we can cling to old ideals and lament of what could have been like some sort of cultural refugees. Some day, perhaps 40 years in the future, this current cycle of Star Wars films will be subverted, reinterpreted, torn apart and put back together again, as is the nature of all things. We don't have to like it now, and we won't have to like it then. We can choose to be flexible enough to adapt along with it, or remain rigid in our rejection of it. The good news is that, ultimately, that choice doesn't belong to anyone else but you, and that's something that no amount of money in the world can take away.

Keep this (and your hard-earned dollars) in mind when Disney's version of the franchise continues with Ron Howard's Solo: A Star Wars Story opening on May 25th, followed by Abrams' Star Wars: Episode IX opening December 20, 2019.

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Image via Lucasfilm