Luke Skywalker Can't Read

by Ryan Britt

  * Famously, Nick Meyer received no screenwriting credit for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and that’s because he offered to rewrite the messed-up screenplay from scratch in an amount of time that made it impossible to negotiate union rights. Meyer didn’t care about getting the credit; he just wanted a script he could direct. Make no mistake, this excellent movie is his baby, 100 percent.

  * Irene Alder is a blackmailer in the Doyle story “A Scandal in Bohemia.” She’s frequently the love interest in Holmes adaptations. She was portrayed by Charlotte Rampling in 1976’s Sherlock Holmes in New York and by Gayle Hunnicutt in 1984’s “A Scandal in Bohemia.” More recently, we’ve seen Rachel McAdams as Adler in both of the Sherlock films starring Robert Downey Jr. Lara Pulver played her on Sherlock, and Natalie Dormer on Elementary, where Irene Adler also has ANOTHER secret identity. Imagine whichever Irene Adler actress you like as Spock’s maternal ancestor.

  * This is a little like Harry Potter. It is my belief that J. K. Rowling will be forced to write another Harry Potter novel by the universe or the same god that is keeping Holmes alive. You heard it here first. She’ll do it before the decade is out.

  * Who am I kidding. I cry as an adult, too. I also cried when I saw Christopher Lloyd speak at New York Comic Con in 2012.

  * Other than drinking. Marty never really drinks.

  * I happen to love both Coldplay and Huey Lewis. Just to be clear.

  * Which is also fake, in a way, since a lot of people who liked Star Trek 2009 still don’t care about 1960s Star Trek.

  * What if Crispin Glover had done Back to the Future Part II and played Marty Jr.? How much weirder of a movie would that have been? Tom Wilson got to play his own grandson, so why not? Next, imagine Crispin Glover with a crazy Irish accent playing Seamus McFly in Back to the Future Part III.

  * Weirdly, Sisko’s dead wife was also named “Jennifer,” and she was featured in at least one time-travelish episode. Luckily, Felecia M. Bell was always able to play her, even when she was an evil Jennifer from an alternate universe.

  * There were two more revised Hobbits, published in 1958 and 1966, respectively. Broadly, they’re similar enough to the first revision, at least for our purposes here.

  * I know “The Battle of the Five Armies” is in the book, but using it as the subtitle of the movie, when they had a perfectly good subtitle—“There and Back Again,” which is the actual subtitle of the book—is just baffling. For now, I’ll only call this movie Misty Mountain Hop, because I hate the “real” title so much. For comparison of just how annoying I am, I also irrationally call the American version of The Office “The Fake Office.”

  * My alma mater, Tor.com, and Gawker’s geek empire, io9, were both launched in 2008.

  * Unrelated, but I love reminding people that the other big novel that Pierre Boulle wrote other than The Bridge over the River Kwai was Planet of the Apes. Seriously, I will never shut up about this when people mention Kwai, Apes, David Lean, or, occasionally, Alec Guinness.

  * To be fair, this is confusing, and ironically arch in only a way that the British could be capable of. It’s made even more confusing by the fact that there are weird remake movies in the ’80s in which the character is played by Peter Cushing (Tarkin in Star Wars!) and is actually named “Dr. Who.” Obviously the Cushing “Dr. Who” films, Dr. Who and the Daleks and Daleks—Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D., don’t count as part of the real Doctor Who canon, but their existence prior to the current popularity of the “real” show certainly helps excuse why the character’s name—or lack thereof—is confusing for the uninitiated.

  * Read Queers Dig Time Lords (Mad Norwegian Press, 2013) for tons of excellent exploration of gender politics in Doctor Who and its spin-offs.

  * Donna Noble gets a good dig in about this fact in “Planet of the Ood,” when, seeing another, more traditional spaceship, she exclaims, “A real proper rocket! Now that’s what I call a spaceship. You’ve got a box, he’s got a Ferrari.”

  * This episode was part of a serial called The Tenth Planet, written by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis. The entire story is actually “missing,” meaning you can’t watch the whole thing, which is tragically true of a lot of early Doctor Who recordings. Meanwhile, Doctor Who itself was created by Verity Lambert and Sydney Newman just prior to 1962. There’s a lot of history to delve into here, but the fact that Verity Lambert was a woman in a male-dominated industry, partly responsible for creating an iconic and enduring and primarily nonviolent sci-fi TV show, is something everyone should remind everyone all the time. The 2013 TV movie An Adventure in Time and Space, though it takes some broad liberties with history, is a heartwarming, must-watch docudrama about the early days of the show. In fact, if you’ve never seen Doctor Who, it’s not a bad place to start.

  * People freaked out about this—crying fits and everything—particularly when Tennant left. My friend Emily Asher-Perrin wrote an essay about this called “When Your Doctor Is No Longer the Doctor: How to Survive Regeneration” for Tor.com in December 2013, right before Matt Smith left. It’s tops.

  * The contemporary version of the show has outright established that Time Lords can and do regenerate into other genders. The Master, the long-running male nemesis of the Doctor, returned in the eighth season, in 2014, as Michelle Gomez’s “the Mistress,” or “Missy.” The old show used to call female Time Lords like Romana (Mary Tamm; post-regeneration, Lalla Ward) “Time Ladies.” Every day on the Internet, everyone (including myself) asks if the Doctor will ever become one. My personal vote for a future lady-Doctor is Michelle Dockery.

  * BUT, when we did get to “see” the Time War in various episodes, most notably “The Day of the Doctor,” it didn’t do much for giving us feelings, mostly because the Time Lords seemed so generic and white. Still, it did do a better job than, say, showing us why Anakin Skywalker fell to the Dark Side of the Force during the Clone Wars. Some wars, whether they be Clone or Time, should stay offscreen.

  * Also known as Matthew Crawley’s mother on Downton Abbey.

  * Prior to Doctor Who, Davies was most famous for creating the original version of Queer as Folk. Current showrunner Steven Moffat wrote and created the show Coupling before being placed in charge of Doctor Who, following Davies’s departure, which coincided with Tennant’s. Davies is still remembered fondly among fans for his twenty-first-century progressive politics, whereas Steven Moffat has rapidly become the George Lucas of Doctor Who, an embarrassing dad whom we love because, you know, we have to.

  * David Tennant did three full seasons (a season is called a “series” in England) of Doctor Who, which in the context of the relaunched show are seasons two through four. However, because he was playing Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company, he created a long swan song from Doctor Who by doing four stand-alone episodes from 2009 to 2010 that were a little longer and ended in his regeneration episode, “The End of Time, Part 2.” These are either considered “the specials” or part of season four. When Matt Smith became the Doctor in “The End of Time, Part 2,” Smith’s subsequent season was referred to as season (or “series”) FIVE exclusively. Tennant of course came back in 2013 for the “Day of the Doctor” anniversary episode, which combined with his “half” season makes it seem like he was in the role for longer than he really was.

  * Though, after both left Doctor Who, Tennant and Tate played Benedick and Beatrice in a run of Shakespeare’s rom-com Much Ado About Nothing on the West End in London.

  * This is a Star Trek episode with almost no science fiction in it at all, other than the fact that it’s set on a spaceship. It’s a murder mystery that features a company of Shakespearean players who are hanging out on the Enterprise.

  * This quote is a little bit different than it is in the novel. Kirk turns “rest” into “resting place.” Similarly when Picard quotes Moby-Dick in First Contact he says “if his chest were a cannon
,” which is a change from the book’s “if his chest were a mortar.” I guess we can excuse these guys because it’s the twenty-third and twenty-fourth century respectively?

  * See the title essay of this book, “Luke Skywalker Can’t Read.”

  * I do like the idea that we should all love bad novels and bad movies because they more accurately reflect the human experience than good ones, but I worry I already live in that world a little bit and don’t want to make it worse.

  * We excuse Luke Skywalker for the mass murder of everyone who lives on the Death Star, for example.

  * In the 1991 Star Wars comic book series Dark Empire, that is exactly what happens. Luke’s relationship with the Dark Side is treated way more like a drug addiction and the moody art by Cam Kennedy reinforces this perfectly. If we see the Dark Side as “addiction,” it’s too bad Trainspotting’s Ewan McGregor had to play a goodie-Obi-Wan-Shoes in the Star Wars prequels. After playing Renton, he would have actually made a killer Anakin Skywalker.

  * Star Trek had one real dad, Captain Sisko in Deep Space Nine. Sisko is such a good person and a good dad that I’ll not disparage him here. You can read more about him in my “Back to the Future” essay, too (“All You McFlys”).

  * The original Battlestar Galactica was a 1978–79 TV show created by Glen A. Larson, who also wrote and created Knight Rider and Magnum P.I. That version of BSG was the target of a frivolous lawsuit from 20th Century Fox that tried to prove the show was a rip-off of Star Wars. The Cylons in the old show were classic robot-robots with roboty voices and super-slow gaits.

  * Late in the BSG game, it was revealed that several generational cycles of Cylons fighting humans had existed in the distant past. This made the singularity-style “leap” moment from the “Centurions” (the boxy, robot-style Cylons) to the human “skin jobs” really hard to pinpoint.

  * Harlan Ellison wrote a screenplay for I, Robot that was never filmed. It’s awesome.

  * In fairness, Asimov did have some sci-fi cops in other stories and novels. Just not in I, Robot.

  * The 2015 film Ex Machina. It’s also split the difference: the robots are great and do kill us, but really, we had it coming. In Ex Machina, most of the action isn’t about robot murder but instead involves questions of how to prove self-awareness. For this reason, I don’t count it as a “killer robot movie.”

  * As excerpted in Opus 100 by Isaac Asimov, Dell Publishing, New York, 1969.

  * I’ve just seen Neill Blomkamp’s new robot flick CHAPPiE. It got killed critically, but is not a terrible robot story. If anything, it’s more of an Oliver Twist homage than a hard-core robot flick. True, there are murder and violence in this movie, but the titular robot is mostly good. It’s a tiny bit of progress and I think Blomkamp’s heart was in the right place.

  * The Law of Accelerating Returns is the idea that all of this advanced robot stuff will be exponential in its advancement.

  * Does the presence of two actors from Inside Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac and Adam Driver) in the new Star Wars movie mean it will be the most arty/nuanced Star Wars yet? Let’s meet at the bar in 2016 and talk about it. First round is on me.

  * The opposite of this would be the Joel Schumacher Batman movies: Batman Forever and Batman and Robin, both of which start like comic book movies and end like an acid-filled, hallucinogenic rave with neon glow-sticks everywhere.

  * Similarly, future cultural critics who are like five years old right now will read this essay of mine in their thirties and find my assertions totally quaint. They’ll also probably have absorbed the essay through some sort of futuristic reading cream, but whatever.

  * Carey Mulligan also starred in the same season of Doctor Who as Andrew Garfield, in 2007. Then they did Never Let Me Go together. Why are neither in the new Star Wars? It’s baffling.

  * As happens with a lot of periodicals, the comic was put on sale in advance of the publication date printed on the cover. So, the first issue of Captain America is the March 1941 issue, but it was sold in December 1940.

  * For now. Rian Johnson has been tapped to direct the sequel to The Force Awakens. Maybe J.J. couldn’t take the pressure? Maybe nobody wants to direct three Star Wars movies in a row?

  * See all essays in this book for “proof.”

  * The song is called “Wonderful,” and it’s just the worst.

  * Science fiction critics a few generations older than I am would argue the terrible crap I refer to here is “everything.”

  * Buck Rogers originally was conceived as Anthony Rogers in Philip Francis Nowlan’s 1928 novel Armageddon 2419 A.D. Subsequently Buck appeared in radio shows, comic strips, and movie serials. Buster Crabbe played Buck Rogers in 1930s serials, and later played Flash Gordon. In the late ’70s a TV revival of Buck Rogers starring Gil Gerard existed, which, without irony, was made possible by the popularity of Star Wars. Flash Gordon was a comic strip character who started appearing in 1934. He is connected to Buck Rogers specifically because he was created by Alex Raymond to compete with Buck Rogers.

  * Obviously, this became Samuel L. Jackson’s character, Mace Windu, in the prequels.

  * For many, countless permutations are nothing new. In 2013, Dark Horse Comics released a limited run called The Star Wars, which supposedly showed the “original” version of Lucas’s idea in comic format. While really pretty and interesting, the idea that it’s the “original” story is such bullshit. There are so many different versions of Lucas’s original story that the word “original” starts to lose its meaning the same way the name Anakin Skywalker has no meaning next to that of his alter ego, Darth Vader.

  * I know there are no “literal” laser bolts because laser bolts don’t exist or whatever, but just calm down. If you watch Merriam-Webster’s “Ask the Editor” on YouTube like I do, you’ll learn “literally” almost literally doesn’t mean anything.

  * This research can be found mostly in the out-of-print and amazing book Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays, by Laurent Bouzereau.

  * Of course, there are multiple “Special Editions,” with variations great and small. The initial special editions were theatrical, then made for VHS. And then, in 2004, there was a DVD release. The DVD special edition of Return of the Jedi was the most controversial of all because the ghost of Anakin Skywalker was no longer played by Sebastian Shaw but, instead, by Hayden Christensen. Obviously, there’s no way Lucas could have put the ghost of Hayden into the 1998 special edition of Return of the Jedi, because Hayden would have been like seventeen years old and he and George Lucas didn’t even know each other then. Still, I often wonder what would happen if Hayden’s ghost were digitally inserted into a bunch of other classic movies. Think of him in the final scenes of The Wizard of Oz! Or better yet, Casablanca!

  * I’ve been dying to say this for years, but it seems like poor Irvin Kershner was only allowed one good sequel. He directed RoboCop 2 and a random non-canon James Bond movie called Never Say Never Again. RoboCop 2 is borderline unwatchable and Never Say Never Again was a James Bond movie starring Sean Connery that actually lost at the box office to a James Bond movie released the same year starring Roger Moore (Octopussy). How is a James Bond movie called Octopussy better than Never Say Never Again? I know. This sounds fake. But it’s true! Though I’m sure if Kershner had directed Octopussy it would have been even better than it already is. (Which is to say, marginally. I mean, it’s called “Octopussy.”) He’s not to blame for these bad movies he directed, but it’s not like he had the magic touch with established franchises.

  * When Luke lets himself drop into the abyss in Cloud City toward the end of Empire, I guess you could argue he knew he’d get rescued somehow because he trusted the Force—a religious leap of faith. But, it’s also just as easy to interpret this as Luke defiantly killing himself rather than joining what he perceives as pure evil.

  * Re
d Letter Media’s satirical Mr. Plinkett videos make this point fairly effectively, specifically in their review of Revenge of the Sith, in which they assert that Anakin actually does have a reason for turning that Luke never had. Part of this is just that Luke has a healthier social life—i.e., he has better friends than Anakin did, meaning he feels more secure as a person.