• Registered: 2015-06-21
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Re: Star Wars: The Force Awakens *Here be spoilers!*

So... Carrie Fisher isn't going to appear in EPISODE IX in any form; not in repurposed outtakes. Not as a digital character. On one level, it really sucks. On another, death always sucks, so if the production can find some way to mine Fisher's absence and make the audience feel it in a way that serves the film as opposed to detracting from it, it could work. Maybe EPISODE IX could be set after a large time gap from EPISODE VIII in which Leia died.

  • Registered: 2015-06-22
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Re: Star Wars: The Force Awakens *Here be spoilers!*

I still wonder if that's the way to go.  Carrie's brother thinks that Leia should live on, even if Carrie didn't.  And I'd still wish that they'd keep her alive, even if it means just mentioning her a couple times in Episode 9 and not showing her.  For one of the more iconic players in this universe to just die offscreen seems wrong.  Maybe she will die in 8, and she'll get proper closure.

If not....you're right, it just sucks.

  • Registered: 2015-06-21
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Re: Star Wars: The Force Awakens *Here be spoilers!*

I do think there's a certain courage in refusing to make Episode IX by pretending that Carrie Fisher isn't dead, accepting that reality and trying to work with it?

The CG Tarkin and Leia in Rogue One were necessary for telling the story of the Death Star and leading into A New Hope, but if not for that narrative purpose, they probably wouldn't have done it.

  • Registered: 2015-06-23
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Re: Star Wars: The Force Awakens *Here be spoilers!*

There's no good way to deal with it. There's no good way to play it in the story, where it will be perfectly seamless. Unless her death was already a part of the next movie, it's just a hole in the Star Wars world, and there is no way to fill that hole.

Just like any future Star Trek movie is going to have an obvious and distracting hole where Anton Yelchin should be.

  • Registered: 2015-06-22
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Re: Star Wars: The Force Awakens *Here be spoilers!*

Well, with Anton Yelchin, I think it's an easy fix.  Chekov, the excellent officer he is, got his own command.  He's doing great.  Kirk just had dinner with him right before this new adventure began - he's gonna make admiral soon enough.  Has a wife.  A kid on the way.  Nothing can stop him.

Chekov is part of the family, but nothing is tying him to the Enterprise.  So he can go off and have his own adventures without Anton Yelchin.  We can be happy for him, even as we're saddened by what happened to Anton.

With Leia, I don't think it's that easy.  We don't know, at all, where her character ends up in episode 8.  Maybe there will be a natural breaking point where she can go off and live happily ever after.  But right now?  Sure, her husband's dead.  But her son is a major villain that she desperately wants to save.  Her brother has just been found.  The war isn't close to being over.  If she ran off now, it'd feel just as cheap.

The question is....would Leia be justified to abandon the war if it all just became too much.  Her planet.  Her mother.  Her adoptive parents.  Her husband.  Her brother.  If they all die, would it be okay for Leia to get in a ship and never come back?  Try to find a little happiness after this damned war took everything else from her?

Because that's the only way I could write it.  She did her part.  Lost enough.  And wants to salvage what's left of her life.  Let someone else be the hero for once.

Is there any precedent (EU or otherwise) for a non-Jedi to become a force ghost?

  • Registered: 2015-06-21
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Re: Star Wars: The Force Awakens *Here be spoilers!*

Leia is a Jedi, which introduces another wrinkle in Carrie Fisher's death as Obi-Wan, Yoda, Anakin and Qui-Gon were Force ghosts. Will they have to find some way to explain why she doesn't appear as a ghost? Even Alec Guinness appeared in THE FORCE AWAKENS despite being dead.

  • Registered: 2015-06-23
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Re: Star Wars: The Force Awakens *Here be spoilers!*

Right, but even if Chekov lives happily ever after, there is no way to address that fact or not address it without it being a huge distraction to the overall plot. It's all any of us will be thinking about.

Leia was a much bigger player, but the problem remains the same. There simply is no good solution. It is a bad situation. People die and they leave a hole in the place they should be standing. No matter what they do and how well it blends into the story, it will still be a hole where she should be standing and we will all be thinking about it every time we watch the movie.

  • Registered: 2015-06-22
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Re: Star Wars: The Force Awakens *Here be spoilers!*

Informant wrote:

Right, but even if Chekov lives happily ever after, there is no way to address that fact or not address it without it being a huge distraction to the overall plot. It's all any of us will be thinking about.

I think something like this would work:

KIRK enters the ENTERPRISE BRIDGE.  MCCOY approaches him.

MCCOY - How'd it go?
KIRK - Good.  They want us to go to Starbase 117 to pick up the ambassador.
MCCOY - Klingons?
KIRK - Klingons.  Oh, by the way, I got a message from Chekov.
MCCOY - You mean Captain Chekov.
KIRK - At this point, it'll be Admiral Chekov before any of us know it.  I'm going to have to salute him before long.

Something like that.  It might make us feel sorry for Yelchin, but we can still be happy for Chekov smile

  • Registered: 2015-06-22
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Re: Star Wars: The Force Awakens *Here be spoilers!*

ireactions wrote:

Leia is a Jedi, which introduces another wrinkle in Carrie Fisher's death as Obi-Wan, Yoda, Anakin and Qui-Gon were Force ghosts. Will they have to find some way to explain why she doesn't appear as a ghost? Even Alec Guinness appeared in THE FORCE AWAKENS despite being dead.

Is Leia a Jedi?  Is it established that she ever trained?

And I was under the impression that becoming a Force Ghost was something that had to be learned.  I guess if Leia trained as a Jedi (between ROTJ and TFA), she might've learned that trick.  But if she was just a general the whole time, would she have learned how to become one?  I thought the deleted scene in Revenge of the Sith implied that Qui-Gon had figured it out after a long time of people not knowing how to do it.

  • Registered: 2015-06-21
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Re: Star Wars: The Force Awakens *Here be spoilers!*

JJ Abrams says she didn't train and that he doesn't consider her to be a Jedi in THE FORCE AWAKENS, but she clearly remains Force sensitive. I don't think Anakin ever trained to become a Force ghost, but he appears at the end of RETURN OF THE JEDI, so there's some wiggle room, but Lucas deciding in the prequels that not all Jedi bodies fade into the Force does allow an explanation for Leia's ghost to be a no-show in EPISODE IX. The truth is that the prequels are not a particularly helpful source of information as their information is regularly at odds with the original trilogy from details (all Jedi inexplicably dress in Tatooine desert outfits) to large strokes (the arcane religious order of the Jedi served as leading political figures in the Republic?). There's no squaring those circles.

  • Registered: 2015-06-22
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Re: Star Wars: The Force Awakens *Here be spoilers!*

A Force Ghost is a pretty solid way to show that she's still "alive" and "happy" if that's an option.  I just had no idea if that's even something that could be considered.  Because even though she's Force sensitive, it takes a special training to become a Force Ghost, and like you said, even other Jedi in the prequel don't become Force Ghosts.

  • Registered: 2015-06-21
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Re: Star Wars: The Force Awakens *Here be spoilers!*

This is just my personal approach -- for me, the prequels are not canon because they're hopelessly in opposition to the original trilogy. Saying Leia didn't train to become a ghost and wouldn't become one ignores how Vader didn't train to bcome a ghost either, and here is no reconciling the discrepancy, just as there is no explaining how Leia remembers her mother in ROTJ but is shown to be adopted at birth in ROTS. The prequels are not a viable source and the two Disney SW films have, aside from using some of the actors, largely stepped away from them, treating them almost like the novels, comics and video games that were relabelled under the LEGENDS brand.

  • Registered: 2015-06-22
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Re: Star Wars: The Force Awakens *Here be spoilers!*

ireactions wrote:

This is just my personal approach -- for me, the prequels are not canon because they're hopelessly in opposition to the original trilogy. Saying Leia didn't train to become a ghost and wouldn't become one ignores how Vader didn't train to bcome a ghost either, and here is no reconciling the discrepancy, just as there is no explaining how Leia remembers her mother in ROTJ but is shown to be adopted at birth in ROTS. The prequels are not a viable source and the two Disney SW films have, aside from using some of the actors, largely stepped away from them, treating them almost like the novels, comics and video games that were relabelled under the LEGENDS brand.

I actually looked into the Vader thing today, and there's a theory that sorta works on how Vader would've learned how.  He would've seen Obi-Wan disappear and would've been freaked out by it.  A student of the Force, he'd look into how that was possible (much like Qui-Gon did), maybe even following Qui-Gon's footsteps.  He might've studied it, not knowing that it only works for Jedi....or possibly learned it anyway...and then it worked when he redeemed himself.

It's very flimsy, but it's the only theory people seem to have on how Vader could've learned it.

  • Registered: 2015-06-22
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Re: Star Wars: The Force Awakens *Here be spoilers!*

Every time I hear the name "Snoke", I roll my eyes.  In a universe with Jar-Jar Binks, Boba Fett, Dexter Jettster, Sheev Palpatine, and a species called the Mon Calamari....Snoke stands above the rest as the goofiest name.

  • Registered: 2015-06-23
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Re: Star Wars: The Force Awakens *Here be spoilers!*

Too close to Snookie.

116 Reply by Slider_Quinn21 (edited by Slider_Quinn21 2017-04-21 10:42:27)

  • Registered: 2015-06-22
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Re: Star Wars: The Force Awakens *Here be spoilers!*

Snoke just sounds like a character from a Dr. Seuss book.  It's not cartoony but intimidating like Vader or Maul or Sidious or even Grevious.  It's just cartoony.

Try to imagine that Snoke appears in Episode VIII and kills Luke.  Now imagine Rey screaming "SSSSNNNNNOOOOOKKKKKEEEEE" (like Kirk's "Khan!" line) without that line being utterly ridiculous (infinitely more ridiculous than Kirk's "Khan!" line).  I just can't take that name seriously.

  • Registered: 2015-06-23
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Re: Star Wars: The Force Awakens *Here be spoilers!*

True. I guess it doesn't matter as much for me, since I've never been able to take the franchise too seriously. I honestly laugh whenever I see Luke get his hand cut off and discover that Vader is his father.

118 Reply by Slider_Quinn21 (edited by Slider_Quinn21 2017-04-24 09:26:28)

  • Registered: 2015-06-22
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Re: Star Wars: The Force Awakens *Here be spoilers!*

So I don't know why this Leia stuff is bothering me so much, but I think I've decided what I would do.  It'd involve pushing the release date of Episode VIII (or working really quickly).

I'd reshoot the ending to VIII. 

I'm assuming there's a time where Leia is in danger and doesn't die.  I'd reshoot it where she does die.  CG, body double, the ship she's on exploding...something.  I think her dying offscreen is just wrong, and if she's going to die, it should be in one of the movies.  It'd involve adding a funeral to Episode VIII and possibly making a handful of changes to the ending (which would have ripples in Episode IX, of course) because if Luke was supposed to die, I don't think both can die in the same movie.

She gets a hero's death, and it's all contained on screen.  If she can't ride into the sunset then I think her character deserves that much.

(Again, I don't know why this is bothering me.  I don't even like Star Wars that much).

  • Registered: 2015-06-23
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Re: Star Wars: The Force Awakens *Here be spoilers!*

I would do the same. I think it's a mistake to have this hanging over their heads for a couple more years.

Actually, if she and Luke died together, that would be kinda poetic. Twins and all that.

  • Registered: 2015-06-22
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Re: Star Wars: The Force Awakens *Here be spoilers!*

Informant wrote:

I would do the same. I think it's a mistake to have this hanging over their heads for a couple more years.

Actually, if she and Luke died together, that would be kinda poetic. Twins and all that.

Yeah, but I think these are still movies for kids.  Killing off one of the big three is fine, I think.  Two might be too many.

IV: Obi-Wan
V: No one?
VI: Yoda, Vader, Palpatine, Boba Fett
I: Qui-Gon, Maul (?)
II: Jango Fett?
III: Padme, Dooku, Grevious, Mace Windu, random Jedi
VII: Han

Those are all the main deaths, right?

And does no one really die in Empire Strikes Back?  I'm changing the subject to that now.

  • Registered: 2015-06-21
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Re: Star Wars: The Force Awakens *Here be spoilers!*

Slider_Quinn21 wrote:

I'd reshoot the ending to VIII.  I'm assuming there's a time where Leia is in danger and doesn't die.  I'd reshoot it where she does die.  CG, body double, the ship she's on exploding...something.  I think her dying offscreen is just wrong, and if she's going to die, it should be in one of the movies.

Hmmm, yes.