Star Wars: The One, The Force, and Legion by John Erik Ege - HTML preview

Authors note.

Have you ever been to Chinoike Jigoku, the nine pools or gates? This was part of a dream that inspired the completion of this trilogy. When you become lucid in your dreams, you will be lucid in life. I don’t know how to communicate the complexity of my thoughts and feelings beyond that. As I write, I see things I write unfold on a screen. They occur, I witness. I see no apparent direct influence over what occurs. I have had emails complaining of Waycaster’s abilities, making him too God-like. It wasn’t me. He simply was. What’s funny is that “Star Wars: the Last Jedi” brings bilocation as a Force power to the screen, after Waycaster! One soul, living on a Kibbutz in Israel gave me one of the nicest correspondence ever, sharing his faith with me. He explained how my treatise of the Force paralleled his spiritual beliefs and imagined I was a member in his paradigm. We do share a world, don’t we?!

Again, it is difficult for me to say what I want to say. Partly because in today’s environment any criticism is met with disparaging labels of being a hater at best. When I say I hated ‘The Last Jedi’ so much that I nearly walked out, and that I fear seeing another Star Wars movie, you might actually think I hate Star Wars. I had an active thought not to complete this trilogy, the after taste was so bad. It is my love that has me critical of what was given us. But more than that, there are things in the movie that more than paralleled my stories. This added some unwanted flavors. Waycaster’s ability to bilocate is just one thing. In one of my criticisms of “Star Wars: the Force Awakens,” I wrote- don’t give us something we have to throw X-wings at. Funny, Leia says that in the movie. My lament was, just duplicating ‘Star Wars: a New Hope’ doesn’t make a Star Wars movie. Vader in that movie gives us something to be afraid of in his line: “Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed. The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force.” Lead with that! That’s scary! The parallels go on. My character Priya, a Sith turned Jedi, is exposed to the vacuum of space and survives using the Force, and gets onto an enemy ship. Leia does this, too. After me!

I did write some folks. I was told to stop whining and move on with life. Ah, the circle is now complete. I, too, am a Skywalker!

Now, trust me when I say, I am not accusing anyone. I did. That’s not going to go anywhere. Disney and lawyers, check and mate. Also, I am open to there being parallel developments of story lines. I am fan of Jungian philosophy and the collective unconsciousness. That could happen. If someone did; HEY! I would have liked to have been consulted on the script. We would have had a much different movie. The thing is, who am I? Disney has money, writers, and there are millions of Star Wars fan; so there are no famous, good writers that want to do a Star Wars movie? Bring in James Cameron! I know he is a fan! Hell, Terminator exists because of his backwards engineering Star Wars! How successful are his movies? Or, at least, when writing a trilogy, have a plan? Have a sophisticated bad guy that isn’t so stereotypical you have to kill him right off because there is nowhere else to take him? The best bad guy ever was Darth Maul, and he should have been center piece of three prequels! No one matched his screen presence.

How does one turn this around? I don’t know. I love the Ray and Finn. Less love of Poe, especially after his tantrum. (Seriously, can an actor say this is not a good thing, my guy wouldn’t do this?) Never been a fan of Kylo, though I will give him this, he is whiny little Skywalker. And by God, a superior, knowledgeable Admiral, especially if the context is correct and she was the last available, superior leadership within the resistant she isn’t going to selfsacrifice! She would have order Poe to do it. And, given the ballistic capabilities of ramming star ships, she wouldn’t have waited till the entire fleet was out of fuel and everyone was being shot out of the sky; from the very beginning, the only answer was a kamikaze run, and that should have been the foregone conclusion, not an afterthought. Also, the enemy should know this! There would be a defense. We, nerds, tech fans, science fans, fantasy fans, we are not dumb folks. We like sophisticated stories, smart scripts. We love intelligent, strong women. Maybe no one can write without bringing in some ideology; our paradigms always leak through, but making Chewbaca feel bad for being a meat eater, well, that’s a bit too much. I am okay with sentient penguins and not eating sentient beings in general. But no one had any problem with Luke spearing a dolphin size whale of a fish that could have fed him, Rey, and Chewbaca for weeks! And by the way, Mark Hamill had legitimate complaints about the direction of the script and his character, which he made the mistake of sharing. He was publically shut down. Maybe it’s not cool that he shared his thoughts. It’s definitely not cool that he was socially shut down for it. One against many, that’s mob rule, and not cool. Why can’t we celebrate his opinions as much as anyone else’s? From the stand point of legitimacy, doesn’t he get a voice? Sure, it’s not his ‘character;’ he doesn’t own ‘Luke,’ he just plays him. But he did have a point; the writing for his character was abysmal. If you intend to write him off, just kill him. You would think after all these years he would not be whining about his plight. He is one with the Force! Yoda laughing. I am actually more okay with that, but he seemed a bit ADHD compared to anything seen previously.

And now, back here, spotlight on the Waycasters. My brain wouldn’t let me leave this story uncompleted. I say I wrote this, but it was more a thing in my head that I simply narrated. The characters gave me this. It is so dark in places. I don’t think I captured just how dark it gets. Star Wars doesn’t really ever get as dark as it could be, should be. When I hear Tarantino is making a Star Trek movie and promising it will be R rated, I am thinking- that’s not Roddenberry’s vision, but he could do a Star Wars and make it R and that would be consistent with WARS! Lucas has hints of it, Leia in a slave costume, Droids being tortured, which was ludicrous, but that was the only thing that kept it a ‘family’ show. Still, if you think of it in terms of metaphors- that’s not a safe metaphor. If you’re familiar with Jung and Campbell, there is an archetypal structure in the original Trilogy that is unshakeable. That, if you accept further, is in all of us. The Force is with you! I find that structure here in mine, with the redemption of the Mother Figure. Father’s aren’t the only ones needing saving. Maybe we all need saving, because we’re all parents and children and good guys and bad guys- all the time. And there is a pervasive light and a continuity of stories and character that flow with us in constellations. This is my experience. I share it unapologetically. I write because I write. I write because I love.

Should this very small voice, from an insignificant person among billions of persons, on a small, tiny planet, in an even smaller room, so small it has no closets, barely room to contain the shadows and ghosts spinning around the chair facing the too large of a monitor, orbiting a common star, in a universe where the stars outnumber the grains of sands on all the beaches of the tiny planet on which he temporarily resides, spinning around a galaxy’s primary black hole that is way too loud for this author’s sensitive hearing touch you in even the smallest of ways- May the Force be with you, Always. Love

John Erik Ege.