Is this... death?

Afternoon everyone. Happy July. half way through the exciting futurism of 2010 and still no flying cars or robots trying to murder me in the brain. But I do have a memory stick the size of a thumbnail which contains more data than my brain usually does, so that's a bit like being in Blade Runner I suppose.

Doctor Who and the football have both finished, leaving us with nothing to do but talk to one another and dance in the sun. Or, in our case, to wander around the internet in search of pictures of kittens. Well, I have no kittens for you, but I do have more Star Wars stuff. Enjoy. Or don't. It's your life.

D

Death Star Droid.


That’s why the original packaging called the toy of the snout-nosed threepio-like thing with insect eyes. It lived in the sandcrawler, not on the Death Star, which leads me to suspect that the toys were marketed by idiots, who got their information from the Bothans. Unlike the 90s figures, which were made by gay fantasists who thought Luke would look better if he has rippling pecs.


E

Evil

Apparently, what Obi Wan calls evil, Anakin calls good. He says so on firey death planet of doom, shortly before their long and tiresome light-sabre duel. In an otherwise reasonably scripted film, this is one of the really awful lines that is clearly inserted by Old Beardy to make some kind of point. As a concept, it’s quite profound, I suppose. The childlike division of the world into easily quantifiable moral compartments is worth challenging and the seeds for this are sown excellently by Palpatine, who ruminates on the subject while watching some giant blue squids have sex at the opera. The idea that concepts of right and wrong are subjective, that we are all powerless elements of a wider discourse, is a fascinating area ripe for exploration. How glorious would it have been to see the Empire rise subtly and seductively around our heroes – an apparently good and necessary force to combat the materialist agenda of the Trade Federation. Planets could have willingly subjugated themselves to the protection of the Empire and the idea of rebellion in the subsequent films would have been problematised: are they simply terrorists, opposing a galactic force for order?




But no. All this is turned into a conversation which effectively says



‘You smell.’



‘No – YOU smell.’



‘Ah, but I think you will find it is YOU who smells.’



‘What you call me smelling, I call… you smelling. Smelly.’



Sigh.