Latest / Aggressive Negotiations: A Star Wars Podcast / Issue 351: Entombed

Transcript

Issue 351: Entombed · Aggressive Negotiations: A Star Wars Podcast

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We must be cautious. Welcome to the ned Palty. Hi. This is
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Nick and Ostasu, story editor on Star Wars, The Clone Wars and Star
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Wars bad Batch, and you are listening to aggressive negotiations. Well, hello,
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and welcome to aggressive negotiations. That wonderful little slice of Star Wars Heaven
0:32
coming at you from well, we can't tell you where, because we just
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found a secret compass and it's led us to a planet nobody's been to for
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a very long time. And I'm just one of your hosts here Matthew rushing
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and with me as he is always Jedi Master Indiana Jones. Wait, your
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name is Indiana. I was named after the Wookie actually, oh oh wow,
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I'm sorry, Okay, it's it's awkward. It made holidays weird because
1:03
the presence always got mixed up. It's like, who is this for?
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Really? Yeah? So, I mean he knew when you got his satchel
1:10
and you got his pants, which was which so well, that's true,
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that's true. It was also you know, it was awkward because the we
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had to share the special VR helmet every life day. Oh yeah, that
1:22
was right. Well, it's always a weird thing. It's a weird thing
1:25
you feel, right, but you know you make allowances for yeah, I
1:30
mean sharing it. That's that's anyway. You can find us all over the
1:34
place wherever you're getting your podcasts and listening. Please do us a favor in
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subscribe on that way you will get our episodes as soon as they drop,
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Party, and you could find all of the shows that we're doing of course
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at the nerd Party dot com and see everything that's going on here at the
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network. But John, so we come to another episode off the heels of
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Faster. This one is Entombed, and this is I would say, another
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lighthearted episode, in fact, much more lighthearted in some ways than the previous
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episode. This is very much an adventure episode in the kin to a tomb
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Raider game or Indiana Jones. You know, this is that is very much
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what this episode is. And so how did you feel coming into this episode
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knowing that, yeah, we're not really going to touch on kind of in
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some ways the mythology that we've been building, but we might be touching on
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some mythology that we've never touched on before in Star Wars at all. I
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was called a little off guard by this episode because, in all honesty,
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knowing that you know how many episodes we have, I honestly expected it would
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have been faster as an episode and then right back into something more along the
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lines of Solitary Clone, so we'd have our deep three episode arc. Breather
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started another three deep arc sort of thing. So the fact that it was
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another standalone was a little weird at first as I was getting into it,
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where I was kind of like, oh, okay, okay, this is
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what we're doing. This is what we're doing. But additionally, especially with
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the ominous tones from the ending of the previous episode, to have Sid completely
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a wall basically in this episode, that was weird. That was one where
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I was like wait, wait, okay, Like I to not even have
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her have like a major conversation with anybody at any point. It was it
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was an unexpected choice. Not saying it's a bad one. I'm just saying
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it's unexpected. And I think when the episode started working for me was when
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I realized, oh, this is to get Fee more airtime so that we
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get to know her. We had a whole season with Sid getting to know
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her. Now obviously Fee is going to become more important to the story,
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so we're giving ourselves a Fee episode as it were. Now. I think
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as I'm thinking about this episode because of the rewatch, one of the things
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that really jumped out to me as well is that this is an episode that
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shows us how uncomfortable Hunter is with doing anything that doesn't have to do with
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missions. And I think it's interesting because we've already seen the way in which
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that's affected Omega, right, We've seen how impressionable she is, and she
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has picked that up, right. I mean, in the second episode of
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the season, she didn't really know what a toy was, something you would
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play with or just enjoy for its own sake, and that didn't really have
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any utility. And so I think by introducing Fee, have them going on
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a mission with her like this, you know, you can see how impressionable
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Omega is you know, she's copying fees movements. She's really into this idea.
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But in some ways, you know, this is giving Omega another taste
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of what the galaxy is like outside of the structure of the military, outside
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of the Empire in some ways, and what life was like for many people
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in the galaxy, you know, during the time of the Republic. You
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know, the idea of going treasure hunting is something that she would never have
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thought of, you know, without Fee, and so I think this has
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a real impact then on her as a character in her development, her growth.
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And again you see the juxtaposition between Fee and Hunter specifically and the impact
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again that that's having on Omega. And so there's just I'm so fascinated with
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the way in which they are working in all of this character development in these
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episodes. And again, if you're paying attention closely, you can really see
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the work that they're doing because it is not a throwaway episode. It's telling
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you a lot about these characters, and it's informing you then about kind of
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where their trajectory is going to be going. You know, we're getting a
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taste of some of the things that Omega is going to be struggling with and
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kind of learning in this season, and it's going to come to a head
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later. And so I love that and I think that you're you're right to
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point out about all this stuff with Fee and Hunter playing off of each other.
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Sid sees Hunter's desire to go on missions and turns it into his working
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for me. Phi sees it and she's more about, oh yeah, it's
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gonna be a lot of fun. Hey kid, come with me. And
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she knows Hunter is gonna go. Like she's not hiring them to go.
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She's basically saying like, no, no, no, come on, it's
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gonna be well, let's get together. We're gonna hop the ship, we're
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gonna go. We're gonna go off and do a thing. It's a different
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approach to life sort of thing. I like the fact as well that well,
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I mean she's treating them like friends, you know, like, come
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with what's going on a venture? You know, Well, she has her
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own ulterior motive, but she's you know, she's somebody who has this energy
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of she wouldn't understand why somebody wouldn't want to do the fun thing. Right,
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Well, you're coming with me just because you know it's funny, Like
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we all know people like that where they're like, Okay, come on,
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let's go, and you're like, okay, sure, i'll go. But
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I think also we kicked off with a lot of Indiana Jones jokes. But
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I like the fact that we don't necessarily want to han solo type of scoundrels.
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So to get an Indiana Jones type of scoundrel who is a liberator of
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artifacts, and that's what she's all about, you know, being a treasure
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hunter. How can you not enjoy that? Like, that's a fun type
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of character that has always been Star Wars adjacent, and now we've got an
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actual person who's in it for Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones, fortune and
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glory. Yeah, I mean her being an Indiana Jones type, and like
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you said, I think it just creates a good sense of adventure. But
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there are so many layers of references in this episode. I mean, yeah,
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there are layers of references to you know, things like the Fallen Order
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video games type of thing, the idea of the Ancients. There's this whole
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idea of like you said, Indiana Jones tomb raider. But we've also got
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the fifth element in there, yes they use I mean, and the laser
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dish that lights up is basically the same dish as the Enterprise Ease deflector dish,
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just in blue instead of orange, which I thought was a really fun
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look. And so it's like there's just so many layers to this where you
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can tell that the animators were having a blast putting this together and just like
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do you get this one? Well? I think that the best reference,
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in my opinion, that I think is pretty much there for anybody who's a
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fan of like Studio Ghibli stuff is the reference to Nausica and the value of
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the Winds, where that doomsday machine looks like the doomsday machine, big monster
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thingy that wakes up at the end of NAUSICAA that you know, destroyed the
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world and that's the whole you know, that's the big doomsday machine. We
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can't ever activate one of those things again. In NAUSICAA, it's all a
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you know, it's all a metaphor for nuclear weaponry and everything like that,
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but like here it works as well. It's like, oh, look,
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here's this desolate planet that's gray and it's a husk of its old self,
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and we activate this thing and it's like, oh, that's how that happened.
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Okay, okay, good to know. Good to know this big,
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unstoppable machine might have been more than one of them. They're just having a
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blast with these things. No pun intended. But I like the fact as
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well that the interior design of it, this is something I consider very thoughtful.
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Is a lot of times there's this impulse when you see quote unquote ancient
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machinery that it seems almost animated by magic. But when Fee is climbing around
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in the insides of it, trying to get the block back, trying to
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get the heart back, you see cabling and you see all of these things
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and you're like, oh, well, it's not familiar to me. However,
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it's put together. It's a machine. Like when I get on the
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insides, it looks like a machine. Here's an interesting thing. I want
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to float by you. When I saw it activate this time and they were
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inside basically the command bridge, I got a sense of Morgan Elsbeth's ship in
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Ahsoka. That is very interesting, and I think they sort of feel in
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lines and lighting. I mean, not exactly one one, but similar.
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No. I get what you're going for though, and what you're saying,
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and just just thinking of the lined nature of the inside that creates kind of
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the lighting and everything as well, and the map work that we got in
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uh, you know, the Ahsoka series, and of course knowing that you
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know, these these people learn to tame space whales so they could get to
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another galaxy and all this stuff. So, yeah, the idea of this
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having something to do with ancients and them creating a device that destroyed themselves,
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you know, I think, like you said, you're playing with so many
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great ideas here that harken back to like Godzillo type films and everything with creating
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the atomic weapon that destroys us, you know, and all that kind of
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stuff. So I think all that's awesome. And the other beauty of this
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episode to me is that they find a compass that leads them to a weapon
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to which you could absolutely see Palpatine wanting to use to find a way to
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recreate. And a thing to me is that this episode, by them destroying
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it, they take a weapon off the table that the Empire could have used.
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It's a kin in some ways to the way Rebels takes away the fighter
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that was working on Tie Defender. Yeah, the Tie Defender, Thank thank
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you, and but this one was completely unintentional. But you just know that
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this is the type of stuff that Palpatine would be looking for in the galaxy
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and would love to come across, you know, the same way they did
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with the Zilo Beast and maybe to hide in his special little mountain somewhere.
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Yes, yes, exactly. Yeah. What it was a freaking laser beam
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with you know, yeah, sharks with laser beams on their heads. You
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know. Okay, that'll be for the next series. But I what I
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like is this is a bit of world building, because we talked about it
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with the with Faster, this is a bit of Star Wars galaxy world building,
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giving a sense of history in that they just found this thing laying there
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and so you know, you have the accental discovery and those sorts of things.
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But what it does is it layers on this idea that I think also
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ties into what the Ahsoka show and what Rebels went into and Clone Wars as
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well, the idea that there there is a civilization, even older that's gone
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away, that these things go through cycles, and that it that it really
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ties into that idea that things move in cycles, civilizations rise, and fall,
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and why would we think that the arc of galactic history had never advanced
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to the point of a death star before? Right? The death star is
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a unique thing, but it's really a variation on a theme, and it's
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a theme that's been playing throughout the history of the entire galaxy, which would
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be inevitable. It would have to there's no way it couldn't. And you
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know, it was probably just sectioned off better and harder to access, you
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know, plant you know, systems could destroy themselves without other systems knowing about
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it until you have one cent realized government that you know, could could dominate
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them all. But I think that that that is the thing that's easy to
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overlook, is that it's it's important to have something like this so that you
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can say, oh, okay, we've been here before. Yeah, the
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same way that like, let you know, let's say you go just because
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it or you know, my own faith tradition, Like I think of something
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like the Tower of Babbel, which speaks to the idea that like, oh
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no, they build all these great big technological things and everything's great, and
15:31
it got wiped out and they had to start over sort of thing, and
15:35
even ties into like some of the stuff that used to be dismissed as crank
15:41
like in the nineties. But we're all sort of like plugging into now this
15:46
idea that maybe there was an even more ancient human civilization that did go through
15:52
some sort of apocalypse right well before you know, our modern civilization then picked
16:00
up the baton of what was left and ran with it as best they could
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until eventually we got to this age and we'll wipe ourselves out again. And
16:07
I know I'm rambling, but it's like just a tiny little episode like this
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then really opens up even more possibilities for me to interact with Star Wars on
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that sort of like intellectual gut level about what other stories are out there.
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Yeah, yeah, I think you know. One of the things that Star
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Wars did, of course, saw the way back even in nineteen seventy seven,
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right, is you open with a crawl, right, which sets the
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story, and even before the crawl, it tells you a long long time
16:41
ago in a galaxy far far away, so it's setting a context, and
16:47
then it sets it in a universe where you can tell there was history that
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came before, and then there's stuff that's going to happen afterwards, and we're
16:55
kind of in the now. So what's happening now now now is happening now?
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When when will then be soon? You know? And so I think
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that that's something that this does too, right, This helps ground the fact
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that, yes, the galaxy has been around for a long time, and
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there have been civilizations that have risen and fallen, that have died because of
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choices that they've made, you know, cataclysms that have happened. So just
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like our own world, we have civilizations built on civilizations, and it makes
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it fun, you know. I think that's what Star Wars, you know,
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we kind of forget sometimes that it can just be fun. And so
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I think that this episode brings some of that fun in and I would say
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it's good for it to bring some fun in here at the beginning of this
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season because as we know this season and where it's going is the Empire strikes
18:03
back of this show, and it's gonna get pretty dark, you know,
18:12
with what happens, especially when we start to peel back even more of the
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layers of you know, what they want with Omega, what they're trying to
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do with that, and then those are the things that were fully I think
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going to finally explore in the third season. And I just these two episodes
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together of Faster and then Entombed are really enjoyable. And this one again,
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I think like Faster, it's the character work and really setting up Omega.
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We're setting up the character fee, We're still setting up the relationship between like
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her and Tech. We're also setting up her relationship with the rest of the
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Clones. We're setting up the relationships that the Clones have with Omega, especially
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Hunter. You know, I mean, it's just all of these things that
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are happening to which I think make this an enjoyable episode. Plus, I
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think every show, even if it's serialized, it's nice to have those episodes
19:11
that you can kind of just pop on and enjoy and not necessarily feel like,
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oh now I've got to watch four more episodes because they all connected and
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I can't stop right, this is one of those episodes in the Bad Batch
19:23
or I have to watch three episodes before it to get exactly right. Yeah,
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some of the best, Like I actually just recently started rewatching Just on
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a Lark, the original series of Star Trek. I was like, you
19:37
know, you know, because I put in disc one and it's like,
19:41
oh, the man Trap. They're you know, they haven't arranged in airdate
19:44
order, and everybody knows Mantrap was technically the fourth episode or something like that,
19:48
but they aired it first because that's the decision that they made. And
19:52
then actually the actual pilot was number four, like and so like, so
19:55
which one is number one? And then you look at it you're like it
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kind of doesn't matter, does it. And so episodes like that could be
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fun where it's like, eh, you know, it's okay, we'll we'll
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take what we can get. Now, the thing is, I'm afraid before
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we go that people are and yes, unfounded, I'm sure, But like,
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was there anything about this episode you didn't like? Because you know,
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obviously we've been just really loving the whole series and we've had a lot of
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positive comments. And this is not a loaded question to try to like set
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you up so that I can say, well, this is what I had
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a problem with, because okay, I'll lay my cards on the table.
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I didn't have a problem with anything in the episode. I loved. Even
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the music cues sounded a lot like Indiana Jones at certain points, and I
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was like Okay, cool, cool, cool, And you know, I
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liked it. Was there anything that didn't work? Was there anything you wish
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they had done differently? Yeah, I'm glad that you asked the question because
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I think it's a good one. But I find myself like you or this
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was just an episode that I just enjoyed. I love what they were doing,
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I loved all the references, and like you said, I think the
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music is a standout on this episode in the sense of bringing back all of
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those feelings of watching those adventure type films like Indiana Jones and whatnot. So
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I got a kick out of it, and I actually just got a kick
21:26
out of rewatching it. And again, I think I'm really enjoying the way,
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even these type of episodes that don't have as much to do with the
21:37
overarching massive mythology that they're building for the show, the look and the feel
21:45
of this episode is just so good. Like again, it's where the animation
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is just it's so subtle right in this episode. But man, the stuff
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they're doing and the just the lighting is usually the thing that where I feel
22:04
like this show has so progressed, the lighting choices that they're making, Like
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when you know Omega does this, she's looking through the compass and she's seeing
22:15
it in a different light and everything. Yeah, I just those are the
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type of things that I love getting in the episode where you because there isn't
22:25
a ton going on, you get to focus on the little stuff, and
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that's the type of thing that I just enjoy. So, I mean,
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I'm sure people can think, ah, they're just just fanboys or whatever,
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but legitimately it's kind of like how I feel about and you know, I
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know people don't love and a lot of people didn't love Star Trek Enterprise,
22:45
but like, I really enjoy Star Trek Enterprise, and I also enjoy the
22:48
first two seasons of Star Trek Enterprise a lot more than other people do.
22:52
I feel like, yeah, this is akin to that where you know,
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people just kind of like to be like eh about it, but they don't
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really, and it's like it just feels like they're doing that because it's not
23:03
meeting their expectations more than it is about the actual episode itself. It's interesting
23:08
you bring up Enterprise because that's one where I was really hard on that series
23:12
for the first couple of seasons, and then when I went back, I
23:18
started rewatching. I was like, oh, no, no, this is
23:19
actually pretty good, kind of like this kind of like what they're doing here.
23:22
So I like that you brought that up, and I'd say that,
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you know, Omega looking through the compass works a lot better than a mystery
23:29
dagger that lines up with a you know, huge chunk of death star that
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shouldn't have survived. But if people want to connect with you out there in
23:36
the wilds of the Internet looking for your own heart of the Big Monster machine
23:41
that will broadcast all of the podcasts that you're on, where can they find
23:47
you? Well, you know, you can find me looking for the Heart
23:51
of the Mountain under the Mountain with the Dwarves and the Hobbit, since that
23:55
was another reference. But you can also find me on social media under the
23:59
name at zero two here on the network talking about the Harry Potter series one
24:03
chapter of the Time an OWL post. Over on the TFM network, you
24:07
can find me doing the six or two Club, where we're talking about all
24:11
of those franchises we love outside of Star Trek, and John's a frequent guest
24:15
there, so you want to check that out. Also find me doing Litery
24:18
Treks, the orb Warp five, The Artificial Tango and Saddle up. But
24:22
John, when you're not trying to figure out what your next adventure is going
24:27
to be, where can people find you? Oh? Every day is an
24:32
adventure with me. Join me, won't you. I'm Kessel John Ky.
24:34
Every dayDay it's a new day. Oh stop that. And aside from being
24:41
Kessel Junkie online, you can find me on another show here on the Nerd
24:45
Party network called house Lights, where we look at the work of directors and
24:49
someday I'll talk them into doing the works of Neil Breen and that will that
24:55
will probably be the day that I finally ascend into heaven because I've made all
25:00
all of my dreams come true. And I co host that with Tristan Radell
25:03
and Darren Moser. But I'll tell you what so that I can go keep
25:07
lobbying for Neil Breen to direct the next Star Wars movie. After Jon Favreau,
25:12
Matt, I think it's time to close these negotiations. Okay, somebody
25:18
bring in the Wampa and just let them have at it with John so we
25:21
don't get that movie. Negotiations are closed. Join the Revolution, Join the
25:27
Nerd Party.