Spencer and Patrick dissect Star Wars’ original six films, dismissing Solo and later sequels as irrelevant, while critiquing fan-driven "retconning"—like the Millennium Falcon’s Kessel Run in "less than 12 parsecs"—as a tool that risks undermining artistic intent by overanalyzing fiction. They warn this behavior can distort reality, comparing it to political disinformation like Holocaust denial or Trump supporter rationalizations, and contrast it with Star Trek’s technical manuals, which still preserve storytelling magic. The episode ends by linking these trends to modern films like Her, urging listeners to question when reinterpretation becomes harmful. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that is, what are we doing?
What are we doing today?
We are looking at movies.
We're going to look at movies today.
We don't have a tagline.
Screw taglines.
Taglines suck.
We're going to look at some movies, plural, sort of, in a roundabout way today.
That's what we're doing today.
So no tagline.
Switch it up.
Real Charlie Brown style.
Rip the football away, just as you're going to kick it.
But before we get into that, here today, I'm your host, Spencer, and I'm here today with my friend Patrick, who helps me with these episodes about movies.
Hi, everyone.
He is not a movie professional.
He's just a guy I know who also watches movies.
We're not professionals at this.
So as you can tell, I have no tagline.
It's arguable whether I'm a professional at anything.
Well, I didn't want to get into that.
Don't talk to my coworkers about my professionalism.
There will definitely be some liabilities assigned.
Well, to protect the podcast, we're really not going to talk about that.
Liability.
Yeah, that sounds.
Yeah.
Okay.
So I don't think, I don't know what I need for a spoiler warning.
I'm going to give a spoiler warning for like we're going to do Star Wars, the cinematic universe, but like not and or minus and or and or is a separate piece of Star Wars property that's completely its own thing.
It's brilliant.
It's beautiful.
It's golden, but it's also dramatically different in theme and setting and timeline and all of the other things.
It's a whole separate thing.
It's just a beautiful piece of art that just happens to happen in the canon Star Wars world, but it's not included.
We're not talking about and or today at all.
I'm a little relieved.
I haven't seen it.
Yeah, but everything else, everything else is on.
And even if you haven't seen it, generally, you'll know enough because mostly we're going to talk about the episodes one to six.
And because we have to do it, we have to talk about the solo movie.
But we're not like going to go exhaustively through all these.
So spoiler warning for the Star Wars cinematic universe in general.
And we're not going to even talk about episodes seven to nine because they don't matter.
They don't matter.
That's, that's my take.
Come at me.
I don't care.
You have seen these movies, right, Patrick?
You've seen generally, you've seen Star Wars movies?
Yes.
Yeah.
In your lifetime, they're a thing that you're familiar with.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'd even say I've seen the ones we're talking about in the last like five years.
Oh, I just watched recently.
Yeah, good.
Okay.
Yeah.
Well, what did you think of solo when you watched it?
I liked it.
You know, good storytelling.
It didn't slap me around, but it was still a good time.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it's, it's good.
I mean, you know, for what it was doing, it was just, you know, Han Solo as a young man.
It's weird.
It's funny.
It almost follows like all these, there was a lot of efforts to do like a young version of a hero.
And we've had this reverberate through time.
There was at one point there was going to be a young Indiana Jones TV series.
Did you remember that?
Way back in the 90s.
Yeah.
A young man named River Phoenix was going to star in it.
And he not because of this TV series.
It didn't last.
It just, whatever was going on with who was making it, it didn't last.
But he also didn't last, sadly.
He died.
I can't remember.
I think it might have been drugs.
Very sad.
Very incredibly sad.
But there was a lot of this.
There was also the spoof movies about this.
There was like things like Young Einstein and Young Frankenstein and these sorts of things.
There was a series of these movies where there was young versions of heroes.
And of course, we had young Sheldon, right?
We had very, very popular sitcom series with a guy named Sheldon that was anchoring the whole thing.
And then we had a young Sheldon that maybe now has almost as many seasons as the original.
I don't know.
And I think there's no young Doogie Hauser.
Wow.
Yeah.
You really just be a baby.
That was a missed opportunity, I think.
That was, yeah.
But there's this idea that when you're searching for ideas, you're just like, oh, we have this hero.
Like at some point, you know, in some kind of room somewhere, someone tossed around the idea of doing like a young James Bond, right?
Like someone thought of that idea and thought, oh, let's not do that one.
That one seems bad.
Like, but someone was going to do that movie in Hollywood at some point.
I'm like, oh, yeah, how great would that be?
How much money would we make on that thing?
Just another thing we could throw the James Bond name on, you know, and just have, you know, and they're young, young actor doing it.
So we don't have to pay some guy huge money for this.
That would be awesome.
Yeah.
And it always has to, you know, have those elements where the young story of them explains how they became so cool in the future, right?
Yeah.
Wow.
Parts of them are born into the.
Look at the big brain on you, Patrick.
You've really segued into this in a way that you don't even realize that's so good because that's what solo is about, right?
It's it's about explaining a lot of things.
Okay, so we're gonna we're gonna get into this now.
So at some point in our culture, in our in the zeitgeist of our sort of movie watching and TV watching society, there became like a like a fad.
And it's, I, I think it started, it definitely started before we had the internet, which for people who were doing this sort of thing before the internet, it must have been very, very difficult, right?
But I think it, it started with, and it, well, I should say it was mostly with groups of of entertainment products that were spanned across multiple pieces.
So, you know, James Bond probably had some people who looked at this sort of thing and went, you know, how do these things connect together?
How does this all make sense?
And, but the one that I think really made this idea explode and expand as a as a thing that people were going to do was Star Trek, right?
So Star Trek started, I think it was 1962 or 63.
And it had its run and it was it was interesting.
And, and, uh, but people started to pick this apart.
They were like looking at the ways in which everything could work.
And then, of course, in our generation, we had the next generation that we watched in high school.
We're not going to say exactly how old we were, but we watched that show in high school.
And it was, it was, you know, it was great.
It was brilliant.
It was some of the best TV on when I was in high school.
But again, we got this new wave of people interested in this thing.
And we got, we had already started this process and it expanded with the new generation of things like technical manuals and people who would they would make up what the actual Klingon language was.
Right from things that were said in the tv series.
They would come up with an English To Klingon dictionary sort of thing right, and be like, why?
Why do you need this right?
And of course, if you're Gene Roddenberry, you know why you need it.
You want to make that money, bro.
Like you know, you're going to sell in addition to these tv series, you're going to sell also books to like, stack up the cash.
Of course you will right, but these things become like uh, they're not just additional ways for Gene Roddenberry to make money.
They sort of become uh like like additional pieces of of explanation that uh add to the story, that that help to enhance the suspension of disbelief, that you don't need suspension of disbelief anymore, that these are real in some strange way.
I mean, they're fiction, but people liked, especially about Star Trek, like to believe that they could be real in this way that we had all these.
You know we had you and I we're not going to mention him, but he, we had a mutual friend who was a big Star Trek guy.
He had many of these technical manuals.
He had like a bookshelf that was growing full of these things right, and he, he had English To Cling on dictionaries, yes, he had the dictionary.
I screamed Kapla in the face of a stranger once like yes, that's real behavior taking place in our world arising from yeah, this additional fictional element, right?
So one thing that I think about when I think about uh, you know that the side industry attached to Star Trek, I think of all of those extra little bits as something like a macguffin factory.
So you know, you and I both know that in Star Trek the the, the idea of a transporter happened because it allowed the story to be told like you'd go to a planet and it allowed the story of moving from the ship to the planet to happen more cheaply and more efficiently for the storytelling it.
It took less time.
You, you just pressed a button and you, you know, in five seconds you were there.
And then you just pressed a button, in five seconds more, you were back on the ship.
You didn't have to climb into a shuttle craft and fly that shuttle craft up, and you know it, it facilitated all the things and it was also incredibly cheap to make.
Yeah, you know those scenes, the effects go.
Yeah, there's a whole interior of a shuttle you don't need and there's a whole shuttle bay you don't need.
I mean, there's all sorts of things that that make the budget easier to go, and so this was a thing that was facilitated by the storytelling caused them to make this imaginary technology.
But then someone said, how does this really work?
And then they had to come up with a way that it might conceivably work which, which is a really strange thing.
Why couldn't you just say, oh yeah, in this magical place, they just beam people down and they beam people back up.
Why does it have to have an explanation?
But they, someone did they.
They, you know, came up with this stuff and, of course, all of the additional things that come with all of that get explained too, you know, including how they maintain the ship.
There's a thing called jeffries tubes, and they climb in them.
And then, and then, because someone put that in a technical manual, someone else said, oh, you know what we can do in in Star Trek Next Generation, we can include these in one of the plots that we have for the show.
A person can go into a jeffries tube and like, escape the prying eye of people looking for them or whatever like, and it fed back into the show in a weird way.
You know what I mean, and so we had this.
So people right now are probably wondering why i'm talking all about Star Trek instead of Star Wars.
So I think that the the idea to do this, to try to pick apart the art, to explain it in all this way, went directly from Star Trek to Star Wars, right?
So in Star Trek we have uh um, it sort of almost makes a weird kind of sense that you might want to do this, might want to have the technical manuals about how this could be, because Gene Roddenberry's vision was strictly of our future.
This was a future that he thought humanity could eventually reach.
If we were able to give up our capitalist pursuits and, you know, stop just being money grubbing and and having all this disparity in wealth and and if we really pooled our things together, we could uh, we could become this utopian future in which we go into the you know galaxy and kill aliens, right.
Um but uh exactly, drawing in all the details, it sort of uh uh, it almost makes it have less heart it, it takes away, it shines the light away from the purpose of his vision and away, in sort of making it look to the.
You know, the way to get this done wouldn't be to make a decision to stop capitalism.
It would be almost like a decision to build a transporter instead right like, like I think more people have tried to build a transporter than have tried to end capitalism in a meaningful way right yeah, you know which Gene Roddenberry would roll over in his grave?
It'd be like you missed the entire point.
You know what I mean?
Um, but this, this sort of this idea, gets in the zeitgeist really strongly with Star Trek, and then we get Star Wars, which is oddly like Star Trek, I mean, I think George Lucas, when he makes Star Wars, he has to do something specifically that he has no choice but to do like Star Trek did them.
But he has to do them specifically differently because he doesn't want to get sued by Gene Roddenberry or whoever owns the rights to the TV show or whatever, right?
Paramount or whoever owned it.
I don't know who, CBS or whoever.
So, you know, Star Trek has a warp drive.
And so, you know, but you need to get from planet to planet, right?
Star Trek to Star Wars Route00:14:57
So you're George Lucas and you're like, well, how do you get, you know, you're going to have multiple planets.
You're going to move between them.
How do you get from planet to planet?
Can't call it a warp drive.
Well, it's hyperspace.
You know what?
Hyperspace drive.
It doesn't matter.
It's hyperspace.
It's just, it's a different word.
It's essentially doing the same thing, whatever.
It's just, you need to get from planet, from star to star.
Like, it's fine.
So, all right.
But we see what's already happening here is that you, Star Wars comes out and people have already had some time where they're building this sort of side industry on the side of Star Trek.
And then they see Star Wars and it's incredibly popular, more so than most of the other star-related movies and TV shows that ever happened around that time.
And people start doing this same thing that was happening with Star Trek to Star Wars.
Well, how does the hyper drive work?
How does hyperspace work?
How does all this thing?
But of course, George Lucas, I think he didn't really care about that.
For George Lucas, again, it wasn't the point, right?
It was, it was, it was fantasy in space.
I mean, he has these strings.
He wanted us to take it for granted the same way we saw the characters taking it for granted.
Yeah, of course.
Of course they did because how that worked wasn't the point.
It was, yeah, he, yeah, there's a way for you to get planet to planet, all right?
There's a way.
Like, just accept that there's a way and then we move on.
Because what happens when we get there is the real thing you're going to want to see, right?
There's a lightsaber duel.
There's a, there's an, there's a bad guy all dressed in black with a, you know, mask on his face.
Like there's all kinds of other cool things going on.
Those are the things you're going to want to focus on.
But of course, in the way that he's making the movie, again, the same thing with Star Trek and the Transporter.
He has he has the Millennium Falcon.
It has to leave Tatooine and it has to go.
But he needs this moment of tension where they might not escape.
There's spacecraft chasing them.
They're going to be pursued, right?
There's things firing at them and they have to shoot back.
And it's a space battle, right?
So we need to say, okay, well, there's some reason why that they are delayed.
They can't leave right now.
They have to leave in three minutes from now.
So we need some explanation, some MacGuffin, some explanatory thing that allows us to leave in three minutes, but not right now.
Oh, you know what?
We have to calculate the route.
Okay, calculate the route, right?
Okay.
So that's how the hyperspace works.
They're going to calculate a route and then you hit a go and then you just, you're off and you're zooming through space.
Okay, that's great.
Well, then do you get there instantly?
Well, we check the script and find out, oh, you know what?
We need some time because our main hero, Luke, he needs to go on a training montage.
He needs some time to learn some of the force and we need some character moments.
You know, Han Solo has to do a big grin as he's just, you know, says that he, you know, trusts his blaster more than some old religion.
And we need these character moments.
We need to know that Chewbacca is really good at a game that looks a lot like chess and he's also incredibly strong and could rip people's arms off or whatever.
Like we need those moments.
So transit dialogue.
Yeah.
Hyperspace can't just get you there instantly because we would miss all these character moments.
Right.
And, you know, like for the purpose of the thing, he could have just folded space and been there instantly, right?
Except that he needs that time in his movie to tell this other part of the story.
So, you know what?
Hyperspace takes some time, an undefined amount of time.
It's, you know, more than a day, we think, at least a day.
I mean, I don't know how long Luke was in training for.
I mean, he didn't have any training before he got on the Millennium Falcon.
He got there and he had some training done.
So he must have done some, you know, so a couple days, maybe.
I don't know.
Hard to say if it was as much as a week.
If there was a week on that little ship, they probably would have, you know, been a lot more angry at each other.
I don't know.
But, well, you know, like he doesn't specify.
And I think that's on purpose because the exact amount of time isn't what's important to him.
Having all the details filled in and exactly lined out of with an equation of hyperspace goes this fast.
And this is why the stars seem to be zooming past as quickly or whatever.
Like those bits aren't important to George Lucas.
I can guarantee it.
Right.
But that's the reason why hyperspace works the way it does because it needed to fit the story that way.
In the same way that that was why the Transporter worked that way in Star Trek, because it needed to work that way for the budget of the show and to make everything fit in the timeframe he had.
So, and this is what science fiction is supposed to do.
It's supposed to arrange the technology to facilitate the story being told.
It's not really supposed to be a thing where you like, we could maybe invent this thing or whatever, right?
Like it's not really meant to be an exact model and prediction of the future based on the physics that we know.
Often they try to not do something that's physically fully impossible, whatever that looks like, right?
But, you know, aside from that, anything goes, right?
Like, you know, you want to have a story about how bugs, alien bug creatures are coming to the earth and fine, you do that, you know.
So I'll stop here.
I've been talking for a long time.
How am I so far?
Am I coming across?
Am I making sense or am I just babbling?
What am I doing here, Patrick?
Well, I mean, I think what's what's coming through pretty clearly is the structure of the storytelling, you know, and how these things are accomplished.
I mean, for me, looking back at Star Wars versus Star Trek is kind of looking back at my own geeky history and comparing like arcade games to computer games, right?
Like one had a more, you know, like required a greater degree of investigation or at least rewarded a greater degree of investigation.
Like the computer games were usually more sophisticated.
Arcade games were a more limited interface, right?
And so I've always kind of looked at like, or, you know, it's hard, right?
Because like my baseline for Star Trek is entering at next generation.
I didn't watch the previous anything before next generation until after next generation.
So for me, next generation was quite cerebral compared to anything Star Trek had shown us.
And so, and a lot of moral lessons and things like that embedded and also began to develop continuity.
But yeah, it's interesting to look at them.
I'm curious where we go in this discussion to discuss.
Good.
Well, I've had a moment to collect myself and regenerate my oxygen level after all the talking.
And I'm ready to go.
Thank you for vamping on that for that amount of time.
So we see how we get here, right?
Where we built these technologies based on how they would fit the story that we needed to tell.
But of course, the dialogue, many people have pointed out that the dialogue, especially in episode four, the first, the very first movie that was ever made of all these movies, had some had some, it had some gaps.
It had a couple of moments that were like, some people say, well, you know, this could have worked a lot better or whatever.
I think we should just move past those because those aren't the things that we're really there for.
Like George Lucas had to do most of this on his own.
He did all the dialogue himself and he had to try to direct the movie.
And I think he might have produced that one too.
I don't know.
Like he was doing most of the things, wearing a lot of hats.
And there was a couple.
What are the gaps?
Like, are these like inconsistencies in the video or the story?
In the dial.
So, okay, there's one particular line that I'm going to mention next.
It's a famous, famous line that was said in the Millennium Falcon by Han Solo just as they're taking off and getting ready to leave Tatooine.
I think that Luke says, we can't go in this ship.
It's a hunk of junk.
And Han Solo says, hey, this is the ship that made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs.
So the Kessel run, we don't know what that is.
No one knows what that is.
It's just a, you know, it's a thing that Hans Solo thinks other people should know.
Right.
So it's a run.
It's a run.
We think it's a lot of fun.
Some sort of travel with a start and it's a route, maybe, or whatever.
But a parsec is not a unit of time.
Like we think of moving through a route as like, you know, you, you ran a marathon in a certain amount of time or whatever.
You, you made the route from, you know, you drove from New York to LA in a, you know, certain number of days or whatever it took.
You know what I mean?
Like you did it in some length of time and this made it an impressive feat to have done.
That's our most common reference for it.
Yeah.
But a parsec is not a unit of time.
It's a unit of distance.
So it didn't, you know, like this is a thing that has been noted.
I didn't find any footage of him mentioning this, but this is a thing that's been noted by many people for decades is that, yeah, okay, yeah, parsec's not a unit of time.
But of course, in the solo movie, we have this is no longer George Lucas in charge, but we have Disney working this into the plot of the solo movie is the Kessel run occurs and it happens in less than 12 parsecs.
And they have some arcane explanation as to how this goes.
And they make they plan a different route through these insane, you know, moving black holes and whatnot that, you know, okay.
All right.
But what we just did when we did that was retroactive continuity, right?
And that's what I'm really getting at here is that in addition to, in addition to this sort of MacGuffin factory thing that happens where you get all the like Star Trek manuals and whatnot,
you also get this sort of free form, crowdsourced retroactive continuity force.
I don't want to cut a factory because it's not organized and they're not like producing anything on a, you know, timeline or whatever.
It's just fans of these things that love these things so much that they want to protect them and they don't want them to be flawed in any way.
So they try to explain away all these little inconsistencies.
So like this, this one phrase, this Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs had many varying explanations from many fans based on all kinds of speculation that included all manner of, you know, potential, well, what if it was from this or what if it had this thing or whatever?
And I was one of those people.
Yeah.
What was your explanation when you?
Well, it wasn't an explanation.
It was just kind of like a question, like maybe the our measure of performance isn't what they were measuring the performance, right?
Like for me, I thought about, well, there's going to be certain space dangers.
So how close can you come to black holes or how risky do you make the run by adjusting?
So I thought, oh, if he's, it's like if you, if you were going to trace your path on a map with a string, but you're taking a bunch of weaves, you're using more string.
And if you could make that string shorter and still get to your destination, that could be like a measure of performance.
That's kind of how I envisioned it was possible anyway.
Yeah.
But I mean, I think probably more likely that whoever included it was like, oh, fuck, this is a spacey term.
Yeah.
This in here, right?
Like, I think that's how it started.
But still at the end, it just, for me, it led me to question like, is it within any realm of possibility?
And I kind of thought it was.
It's what's far more likely and actually, you know, really likely is that you had a young filmmaker who hadn't made many films yet.
He was swinging from the fences with this one, this space opera.
And he's doing many, many things.
And he's actually like rewriting many parts as he's going.
Like this is, there's stories about the, how they made this.
And everyone was like, this is crazy.
No one knows what this is going to look like, this movie.
And they're like, you know what?
We need some space jargon here, techno jargon here.
And he just throws something out and says, that's good.
Run with that.
And then there's no other attempt in the movie series to be technical.
So why would this be the one time that they got incredibly hyper technical in a way that they never ever, you know, nobody on earth would understand?
Yeah, because it just needs to be something.
It's like when you throw technical jargon like this out in this way, it's meant to be something we don't understand.
Retroactively Rewriting Han Solo00:13:20
Yeah.
Like, and Harrison Ford pulls off this line perfectly because we like, when I listen to it anyway, I get what he's going for.
He's like, screw you, my ship is good.
That's what he's really saying.
Yeah.
But he doesn't say those words.
He says, this is the ship that made the Kessa run in less than 12 parsecs.
It's meant to be impressive.
Yes, it did this impressive thing however long ago or whatever it was.
This ship is good.
Trust me, bro.
Right.
Yeah.
And he says it the right way so that we get that.
Like there's a way that you could deliver, you could deliver that line.
Some actor, other actor might have got the role, deliver that line wrong.
And we wouldn't understand that this is meant to be, screw you, my ship actually is good.
It felt like something else.
But because Harrison Ford is who he is, we understood what he meant.
I wonder if like when those movies were first airing, there was like some astrophysicist in the theater and that line's on the screen.
It's like, what throws this popcorn in there?
This is nonsense.
And everyone's like, I think, you know, that's kind of the test of the gap too, right?
Like, is how much does it alienate the audience from the story?
Yeah.
Like, and like I say, this sort of techno jargon, there's all kinds of other little bits of it in this sort of scene where they're, you know, talking about the, or not just the scene, but this movie.
They're, they're talking about the droids.
You know, there's a bad motivator or whatever.
Like, what's a motivator?
Is it a motor?
It's a motivator.
It causes something else to go.
It's a little tiny robot inside going, you can do it.
Yeah, yeah.
So it's just, it's just a, it's just a word that they have for some piece of machinery that helps the droid go do what a droid does.
And it's not meant to be a thing that you could draw a technical diagram of.
It's just meant to be part of the magic of the universe in which droids actually are creatures that are almost like real thinking creatures.
Maybe even are real thinking creatures.
We don't really know.
But that's the point of it.
It's supposed to be, it's supposed to be something you don't know rather than something that you can listen to and pick apart and know.
So even doing the exercise of picking it apart to know how it works and how it fits with the physics of how you'd move across a galaxy or whatever also sort of drains the art of its point and its purpose.
It's supposed to feel magical.
It's not supposed to feel technical.
Technical usually brings things into full knowledge, like a schematic, but there's nothing magical about a schematic unless you don't understand anything that's there.
Right.
Yeah.
So this whole process of doing all this, these, this retroactive continuity on all of these things, that sort of rips away at the art, but it also, it also does another thing.
And this is sort of the bigger point I'm going to, I'm working towards here in my long, long-ish way, is that in doing this, I could have just done this with Star Trek, but I think it's more telling when this happens with Star Wars.
Because it happens a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
It's not meant to be our future.
It's not meant to be a thing we are doing or whatever.
It includes humans in the world just because we have humans acting on set.
And, you know, it costs less than to have a race of, you know, mouse beings or whatever that the humans dress up as like a planet of the ape style or something that are that race that takes the place of humans, right?
It's just we identify more with them when they look like us because we're selfish social creatures.
But so in that way, it also doesn't make sense that there'd be humans in another galaxy far, far away.
That also, you know, by everything we know about science, that wouldn't make any sense.
But that's the thing we're supposed to put aside.
That's the, that's the suspension of disbelief we're supposed to put into this to say, yeah, it doesn't matter.
It's, it's just about telling this magical tale of, you know, the force and overcoming, you know, light, overcoming darkness.
And that's, that's the real point.
Yeah, we expect that.
Yeah, just, just get over yourself already.
It doesn't matter that humans would have evolved and changed in some form between then and now if this was blah, But in engaging in this in this way, and again, not no one intended for this to be, but it is a thing that happened.
We have been slowly building up our ability to retroactively reinterpret previously seen things in order to make them not just make more sense, but to make them a thing that isn't a thing that makes less sense, if that makes sense.
So it's because we have moments like this where Han Solo threw out a line that appears to not make any sense.
We almost feel that in order for the movie that we love to not have this sort of like weird hole that we have to step over every time we watch it, it'd almost be great if this just had a full explanation of why he said this.
And so that's why the retroactive continuity happens.
That's why it gets thrown into the solo movie, right?
So that we have this no longer this weird gaping sort of pothole that we drive around whenever we rewatch episode four.
We just go, oh, no, no, that piece right there, I get that now.
That's perfect.
That's, I don't have to, I don't have to disassociate when we get to that part where it appears to not make any sense.
It makes perfect sense now and I'm good.
But we're not just doing it with that moment.
We're doing it with many, many, many, many moments in the Star Wars universe, many more of those in the Star Wars universe than we are in the Star Trek universe, actually.
Because the first three that were made were done in this way that wasn't meant to, it wasn't meant to be hyper-examined in this way.
It was never a thing where they were ever going to really make, you know, technical manuals.
I think there is even probably technical manuals of things like the ships and whatnot, the Millennium Falcon and other ships, right?
I think there might even be some of those.
I didn't look it up.
I know that there are role-playing games that include stats for these ships.
But yeah, like these aren't real ships.
It doesn't really matter if the size of a human compared to the Millennium Falcon doesn't justify it having as much space as it appears to have once the characters are inside it.
Well, it might matter to some people.
I mean, if they care.
Well, I guess, but we're so few things happened on the inside of it that, you know.
Yeah.
No, I know, but I mean, that's that's like that's I don't know if this is where it started, but somewhere in our culture emerges the nitpickers, right?
Yeah, before the nitpickers was just blanket, wide-eyed acceptance.
So, what I see must make sense because it's on the screen and I can't make that screen.
But then, somewhere along the way, we start to see inconsistencies, which developed a breed of you know detail sleuths who go around examining that.
And so, like when Star Wars was first running in the theater, again, like everybody just, you know, popcorn through it, right?
But after you've seen it five times, people start to lock on, and then there's the discussions and things like that.
And that to me is what makes this neat, you know, to bring it back to this retroactive examination.
I also think like one part of that is just how Disney is kind of cheeky.
You see it come out in the Marvel movies a lot more, but in this way, like it's well known that there's been so much discussion, so many defenses and attacks of the whole Kessel run under 12 parsecs thing, right?
So, in a way, it's almost like just it's issuing a little bit of social commentary by including it in the thing.
Because like, you know, the whole movie wasn't about that, but they included enough of it to be, you know, now once and for all, like maybe they end the discussion and they say, oh, well, we can move on to other inconsistencies or what have you.
So, yeah, I mean, you're right, but I like what you said there because we can almost sort of track the age, right?
So, we start with the age of the age of the wide-eyed acceptors, right?
They come on the scene and there's science fiction and the movies and things happening in space and it looks really incredible.
And Star Trek moves the line forward as far as what it looks like in space.
And they have models.
And then Star Wars moves it even further ahead.
And you have lightsaber duels and things.
And that's really cool.
Wide at acceptors.
But then after the wide-eyed acceptors comes the age of the nitpickers.
And no one likes the nitpickers, right?
Like the age of the nitpickers.
The age of the nitpickers lasts a very short time.
I think it's a very short time, right?
It's wide-eyed acceptance.
And then someone says, yeah, but and then it's like, and then right after the age of the nitpickers comes the age of the retconners.
And that's where we are now, where we have been informally many of us, like I can't say all of us, but many people generally in our society and in the zeitgeist of people who partake in these sorts of fiction and the discussions about this sort of fiction,
we have been training ourselves in how to properly perform this retroactive reconstruction, reinterpretation of the things to make them make more sense in this way,
which is fine as long as we're not then in some ways using the skills that we develop to do that to also do things in the political sphere.
Because to me, the act of actively reinterpreting what you imagine happens in Star Wars to explain away bad dialogue in episode four is nearly identical to the skill that's used for fans of Trump to explain away the inconsistencies and things he
says to try to make sure that they get to still be fans of Trump.
Right.
Like those two skill sets are so amazingly similar that, you know, it's, it's, it's not that, it's not that only that people, you know, everyone, you know, it would be remarkable to find out that everyone who was a Trump fan was like really into Star Wars or whatever.
Like, I don't think that's true.
I don't think it's that everyone who did this went on to be a big time Trumper or something like that.
Right.
But I do think that we're in an age, we're in a disinformation age, in part because of our ability to reinterpret so as to assuage our cognitive dissonance when we are having to face with,
you know, you're a fan of Trump and you're faced with the Epstein files and you have to come up with explanations for why it is that this guy seems to be mentioned almost more than Epstein himself when he's supposed to be the guy that's the one that's the, you know, soldier of light fighting against this.
And you're like, oh, it's, it's a, he, he was doing it to infiltrate them or whatever.
Manipulating Moment by Moment00:04:35
Like he, they, they actually come up with explanations like this to to marry these two ideas to make them latch together.
And we've been doing this.
Many of us have been doing this sort of recreationally.
I mean, they're also doing it recreationally.
So that's not really fair to say, but more recreationally for things that matter less for much of our favorite fiction in order to in order to make it feel more like it's it was planned all along or something, right?
Which again, the idea that it's planned all along is also an idea that we often assign to people who, you know, politicians who have done very bad things, that they had some plan all along.
Like people think of Trump like he had a plan all along.
Trump hasn't had a plan all along.
He's, this is how this works.
Like people look at cult leaders as though they had a plan all along to get to the place where they got to.
But that's not really how cults work either.
They are just people who are opportunistic and they're really good at manipulating people to take advantage of the opportunities that are presented to them.
And they develop momentum.
Well, when it becomes, you know, as it becomes a cult, it develops momentum.
Like it, it becomes, yeah, the things that we call cults generally have are the things that have developed momentum.
You must imagine in any garden where you have, say, 10 tomato plants, you might have planted 100 seeds, but you only got 10 tomato plants.
Same thing is true of like cults.
When we see 10 cults that are big enough and organized enough and have enough momentum that we call them cults, there's probably at least 100, there was at least 100 different people who were trying to manipulate people enough and would have made a cult if they had the right opportunity and the right skill set and everything else.
But they just, the cars didn't fall their way or they weren't good enough or whatever, and they failed to make a cult.
They weren't consciously trying to make a cult either.
They were just incredibly selfish and manipulative people.
But they're also never brought to our awareness the same way prominent cult leaders are because they're under our notice.
And well, if they weren't able to manipulate enough to take enough from people that we notice them, that's the thing that, you know, we notice them once they get to a dangerous place.
So what usually what people usually do when they look at cults is they look at the cult leaders who have formed those sort of what might be termed as successful cults, the ones that made it.
But that's already a filter for all the ones that got that far.
Like there must have been many times, at least 10 times that number that were trying to get there by their manipulative tactics, but they just didn't.
And the ones that we see are just the ones who made it there.
Right?
Same is true of a lot of industries where there's a high attrition rate or whatever, right?
Like acting.
If you look at whoever makes it to the Academy Awards each year in the crowd, there was easily at least 10 times their number trying to get there and only that number got there, right?
And some of those names we'll never know, like they tried and gave up before we ever learned their names.
You know what I mean?
Like, so in these ways, they are just people who had behavior that some of them got dangerous enough that we heard about.
But I'm off track.
I'm already off track with this cult thing.
We are cult leaders don't have a master plan to get to where they are.
They are moment to moment just like anyone.
They're moment to moment manipulating the people around them.
And mostly they just want to feel powerful.
And the thing that makes them feel powerful is that.
So they're not masterminds.
They're not playing, you know, X-dimensional chess or whatever it is.
And neither is Trump.
He's just essentially the same.
Chumping along.
Simple Fan Theories00:03:50
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's just doing his thing.
He's just demanding things and doing it in a way that happens to work.
And that's pretty much how that's going.
That will continue until people stop giving him things he demands.
That's, it seems simple.
It seems simple.
It's not once it has momentum, as you say.
But let's get back on track.
I want to talk about the sorts of things I think about when I think about this sort of what's almost like a side industry of people who come up with this sort of thing.
So I just pull up a bunch of pages here.
And we're going to add myself off screen.
Sorry.
Oh, is this going to work?
Yeah.
So this was a page I was served on, I think, my Facebook feed originally.
But yeah, it's just plot holes from the prequel movies, episodes one to three.
And for each of these, each of these individual points will have posts and they'll have Reddit posts and they'll have endless seemingly endless conversations about how they're not really plot holes, how they're just fine.
This is explained away because of something that some other detail that they'll link it up with or whatever.
I mean, this is just one article.
Has 15 things here, how things that don't appear to make sense in the prequel movies.
This is the people who make these lists are the nitpickers, as you say.
And then the people who comment to explain the way are the retconners.
Are you, is your audio still there?
Yeah, no.
Oh, okay.
Okay.
All right.
Yeah.
So these individually seem, I mean, I don't know.
Like, I don't usually read these.
I don't care enough to read the nitpickers, but here's another one.
This is a page.
It says makes Jar Jar look good.
Like, what is that?
Yeah, yeah.
For some reason, that's like the ranking at the bottom of a thing.
I don't know why that's there.
I think that might be a username.
And that's the that's a person that, yeah.
So this is a, these are individual individual lists, I think.
These are all, you know, fan theory.
Why is Rogue One actually a horror movie instead of the real thing?
I mean, people are reinterpreting Star Wars things.
And this is one of the ones that's really interesting.
A fan theory on Reddit has convinced, has people convinced Jar Jar Banks was the greatest Sith Lord of all time.
So people are doing this where they're taking this and they're making their own fan fiction from it.
They're posting about it on Reddit.
New Evidence Challenges Star Wars00:08:08
They're saying, no, no, check this out.
If you look at it from this angle, it looks entirely different like this.
And yeah, we're getting, we are training people, building this, this reinterpretation software inside their brain so that they can do things like this.
But that same software also helps them do other things that when applied to really important stuff like politics and the news and reality can help them just break reality for themselves.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, so for some reason, my computer doesn't like this.
I'm going to remove that.
But what do you think?
What do you think of my take on this that we're building our reinterpretation software?
And in some cases, that is lending strength to help our downward slide into unreality.
Well, my position, I think, is that being able to reinterpret our past in the light of new evidence can be really powerful to bring us closer to the truth.
But it's always going to come down to what is the quality of that evidence?
What is the quality of our examination, right?
Like if we have a bias examination, we're trying to use it to paint a certain thing, then are we being really, you know, scientifically receptive to evidence or are we just cherry-picking?
Right.
Because some of the reinterpretations that we've had have been, I argue, very, very socially useful.
If you look at, you know us re-examining how we came to appropriate uh, the lands of North America, or to be able to re-examine, with uh, new evidence the, the presence of of uh graves in residential uh schools and whatnot.
These have allowed us to get real about some of the things that perhaps we were just kind of not not giving the the proper look at to, to come to terms with who we really are and how we really got here.
So I would just argue that like, the question just boils down to what is, what is the actual quality of the process and what is the intent of the person executing that process.
So, when we get new evidence and we re-examine it this is the province, generally speaking, of skeptical inquiry, to uh not just believe everything, even the things that we previously came to believe were true.
Being able to set aside the things that you previously believed in order to take on new evidence and uh and examine both the things that you previously believe and the new evidence critically.
That's skeptical inquiry in general right, and uh, it is important to not just have wide-eyed acceptance for the, the stories that we were previously told the, the things that we previously thought were true the, the story that our UH ancestors told themselves and passed down to us as what they claimed was our history, being able to re-examine that history with new evidence.
But in this case, I will point out that this isn't a case of where you're looking at new evidence for things.
Wait, you know there, you mean in the, the Solo movie, the Solo Movie, they.
This isn't, this is a fictional universe.
Patrick, I don't know if you knew that this isn't a historical document.
I'm so i'm, i'm sorry, i'm just trying to figure out where you're at.
It was fictional yeah, they didn't discover a new thing yeah, but if you're looking at the Solo movie as being canon, you're treating it as evidence for the fact that the Kessel Run, taking place in less than 12 parsecs, makes sense in a context that will henceforth should persevere in any further examination of that universe.
Yes yes, they made, they created, with their Deus Ex mocking, a god machine.
They made a new piece of evidence to include among the right, and so the Kessel Run should be over and final as of the premiere of the Solo movie.
Right uh, which is fine, but that doesn't stop anyone from making a Reddit post that has, on that page anyway, 94 000 views of uh, you know, Darth Jar Jar Binks being the greatest lord ever.
You know what I mean.
Like like, there was no new evidence that they used to interpret that.
They interpreted that based just on Jar Jar Binks's appearances in the movies that he appeared in already the previous thing sure, which in those movies?
By my reading I don't know what movies you watch, but in the versions I saw, Jar Jar Binks was not a Darth of any sort.
He wasn't a Sith lord, he wasn't.
Uh, I will say he certainly did not present as one.
Yeah okay, you're gonna keep your mind open to the possibility.
Who knows?
Yeah sure okay, I don't want to believe it.
I don't want.
I'm certainly not.
I'm not looking towards any bias.
It doesn't appear to be the story that was being told because he wasn't even a major character in those movies.
He did one thing that facilitated a plot point in one of the three movies.
But they didn't add any new evidence.
It wasn't like a new movie that included Jar Jar that had him doing some crazy new thing that made him think, you know what?
This guy might have been a Sith Lord.
This new evidence I saw might add into that.
Doesn't the story arc include him going on to take on an actual government role?
Like he becomes an ambassador or something.
He is like this hapless gungan that no other gun likes.
Two and three, he is the that's the plot point that he facilitates is that he is the whatever the title is.
Amidalla is the queen of Naboo and she is the representative from the planet.
He is the whatever would be vice representative.
He would be the second representative.
So she's gone and she's not available.
And then her vote is necessary.
She's not there.
So he's there.
He's he casts the vote and it's the deciding vote for making Emperor Palpatine a thing.
And everyone's like, oh, well, you know, this dummy should never have been put in charge.
And yeah, they're probably right.
And they should never have had this very important position, even though he's just a stand-in for Amidalla.
Probably should have had someone who had more with it than Char Jar.
Anyway, not to sideline, but whatever.
Yeah, yeah, that's that's a thing.
And I don't know why, you know, George Lucas just liked Jar Jar, man.
He just refused to put him down.
Like he could have just not included him in the other movies.
Well, he's clear people weren't into it.
So much like dislike, like the people that disliked him because of his mannerisms were so vocal, right?
Jar Jar Bistro00:06:42
Yeah.
Like, oh, I'm annoyed by it.
Like, it was what was wrong with that whole movie, et cetera, et cetera.
Yeah, they, they, they put that down as a lot of the things that made it seem like this movie was for kids instead of for adults.
But it did have a lot of curbside appeal for kids.
Kids were, that was what that, that was what extremely rich at the time George Lucas told them was that I don't give a shit what you think.
I did make it for kids.
Go fuck yourselves.
Like essentially, yeah.
Yeah, great.
It wasn't serious fiction.
It was, it was entertainment mostly for children.
That's what I made it for.
Sorry.
Can I ask a question?
I don't know if this is a sideline, but I'm just trying to think like to apply this idea of retroactively examining something in a negative sense.
Does this have a parallel with, say, Holocaust deniers?
Yes, sure it does.
Yes.
There are a host of people who deny the Holocaust.
Many of them do it in order to facilitate their hatred of Jewish people.
Some do it just because they are they are determined that reality itself is wrong and any answer except reality will do.
And I don't have like a name for that group of people, how they fit in, but that's the only phrase I can come up with that really describes the collection of their behavior is that to them, it doesn't matter what the answer is as long as it's not what society says is the answer.
It's much more of a like chaos counter culture information warfare thing.
So this is why you'll get things like, you know, 20 different models of a flat earth and the flat earthers love them all.
And they didn't, they, each one should debunk each of the other ones, but they don't care.
Any answer except reality will do.
And the same thing is true for a lot of people who engage in anti-vax stuff.
I mean, they, they don't like, you know, some people do it because they don't really want to take vaccines.
Some of them do it because they like the idea that, you know, the medical establishment has been lying to everyone and trying to kill everyone for years.
Whatever sense that makes.
It doesn't make any sense, but it's a thing that some people will say.
But most of the things that they say won't make sense even when just compared with each other.
They don't have a cohesive worldview.
Like it's not even something that you're trying to compare to reality and say it doesn't work.
It doesn't work just the set of lies that they tell themselves.
But what does explain it is the idea that to them, the only thing that matters is that it's not reality.
Interesting.
You're a big Douglas Adams fan, right?
Yeah.
In the third book, we talked about the two modes of travel in Star Trek and Star Wars.
So it makes sense that I should talk about a mode of travel that happened in the Hitchhiker's Guide of the Galaxy.
There's warp drive in Star Trek.
There's hyperspace drive in Star Wars.
And of course, there's the bistromathic drive in the Hitchhiker's Guide of the Galaxy universe.
it is the fastest form of travel um it's uh it's it uh the the way in which it works is of course just comical and fictional of course but But it relies on a specific mathematical principle known as the Recipriver's Exclusion.
Do you remember this?
I don't remember that term.
I do remember Bistromathic.
The Bistromathic drive.
While you're flying, you have to mimic the actions of being in an Italian bistro because in an Italian bistro, it turns out, according to Douglas Adams, that every number has a value that can be anything except that which it is defined to be.
And once you step into this Italian bistro mode, you can then just make it up as you go along.
You can just go any speed and it can be get there in any amount of time and all the numbers don't matter anymore.
And of course, he has this incredibly comedic explanation about what?
Yeah.
The number of people who show up is not the same as the number of people that the reservation was made for.
And it's not the same as the number of people who are there at the end of the meal.
And the number of meals on your order is different than the number of meals that you actually ordered and all the different things, right?
But that was his term.
It's also hilariously long tour of reciprocal reverse exclusion.
And yeah, but this is the term I bring up in this in this aspect because in his bistro mathic drive, he was saying it's any value except the real value.
And that's sort of where some of these people are.
Any answer except reality will do.
And I, I, yeah.
and they they work all kinds of all kinds of additional reinterpretations of things just to warp it from reality to like this other place i think you know some of that is well you know there's two outcomes or it's the same outcome but it's two different paths like one outcome is just severely weak reasoning uh the other outcome is like some sort of um you know,
like there could be mental conditions which cause people to not be able to apprehend or make the relationships between causal factors and effects and things like that.
So, you know, or hallucinate or delude, you know, because of just the presence of illness even, you know, sure.
But in many cases, they know where reality is in order to avoid it.
Apathy's Avoidance Strategy00:03:53
Yes.
I think.
Yes.
I mean, it's hard to say if they consciously apprehend it or if their entire, like how their minds work might be just to avoid any notice of it.
Like in their mind, they just have hands.
Oh, are we working?
Are we working toward another Hitchhiker's Guide of the Galaxy reference here?
Someone else's problem?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Kind of, you know, and I think there is an analog in society where people have that.
Like we just generally regard it as apathy, right?
But apathy has different degrees.
And apathy.
Oh, this is definitely not in the category of apathy.
They have much more energy than the apathetic about these topics.
They won't shut up about them.
Well, I mean, I just generally regard like the byline of apathy is that it's somebody else's problem.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
That is true.
But like I say, apathy can't apply because in some cases they seem almost incapable of not talking about it.
No, yeah, granted.
Yeah, yeah.
Yes.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
Anyway, we should probably wrap this up.
We've been over an hour.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So was this fun for you to just kind of do this, this examination of how we look at Star Wars in this context in this way?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I had a good time.
How about you?
Yeah, it's good.
So if anyone has any questions, comments, complaints, concerns about anything they heard on this podcast, you want to get really angry with me about how I won't accept that Jar Jar Binks is a, you know, Sith Lord or whatever, you can send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
I promise to read it.
I won't necessarily respond, but I mean, if it's fun, I might.
I'm still getting a lot of emails from people who want to convince me to let them on the podcast for something, but they seem like they're really automated emails.
It's weird.
They say specific things that I say.
They're like, I really like a thing that you said, but the rest of the email is like, feels like a form letter.
And I'm like, yeah, I don't think I should respond to that.
That seems like a robot to me.
I don't know.
But yeah, with that, I think we'll sign off.
So thanks for helping me out with this one, Patrick.
Yeah.
Thank you for having me.
Have a good night.
Till next time.
Yeah.
So we're not really done.
We're going to, we need to tell people what movie we're doing next, Patrick.
I think we should do her.
It's uh, it's not, it's as movies go.
This would make it uh, probably the newest movie that we've, most recent movie on the list of movies that we've done so far or might even ever do, I don't know um, from 2013, starring Joaquine Phoenix uh, brother of River Phoenix that was mentioned earlier.
Um and yeah, we can, we can do her.
I think it's a, it's a very good movie and I think it's got good, good content for for this, for an examination, for how it relates to this.
Yeah, and uh, it's also very contemporary, like it's an important movie in terms of the discussions that yeah, oh yeah, it gives rise to definitely yeah so um, With that, we'll sign off again.