Before Disney bought LucasFilm and took control of “Star Wars” a few years back, it was a super dense universe of stories, all entangled and connected. It had a history.
Most of that history was erased in 2014, a necessary part of moving forward with the film saga because accommodating it would have been extremely creatively-limiting. So those hundreds of novels, comics and video games I spent years of my life absorbed in no longer “count.”
“Star Wars” as I have known it no longer exists.
Yes, some old stuff carried over — the movies, obviously, and the “Clone Wars” TV show — but most of “Star Wars” existed outside of those things. I refer to all the old “Star Wars” stories together as a history because that’s what it felt like to me. “Star Wars” is a place and all this stuff happened there.
In the long term, I’ll get used to the new reality — you’d have to put a gun to my head to get me to stop being a ridiculously obsessed nerd. But in the short term, it’s still awkward. This week we did take a step in the right direction, though, with the new novel “Bloodline.” But we’ll come back to that …
I had hoped that “The Force Awakens” would be an anchor to the new world of “Star Wars” for me. A new movie that I see on a big screen several times should be something real I can latch on to. It didn’t work out that way, though, but “The Force Awakens” featured a badly-told story that didn’t do nearly enough to establish itself as a part of this universe’s history. It favored homage at the expense of real storytelling, and I ended up more disoriented than I was before because of that. Looking more like a remake than a sequel is not how you set yourself apart.
I mentioned the new novel “Bloodline,” which takes place six years before “The Force Awakens,” as a counter that finally does get us moving in the right direction because it seems to exist in order to complement “The Force Awakens” so that the two combine to be the anchor I was looking for. It’s a solution to the problem of “The Force Awakens.”
“Bloodline,” from author Claudia Gray, is hardly perfect — it makes a lot of little mistakes, of the same sort we saw in the early days of the Expanded Universe when authors were figuring out “Star Wars” by pulling stuff out of their asses. For example, in “Bloodline” Han Solo mentors starship racers and Chewbacca apparently abandoned his life-debt to Han to be a family man on his home planet of Kashyyyk. Also, the galactic government apparently doesn’t have an intelligence agency because the plot kicks off when someone makes claims about a major galactic-scale criminal cartel that nobody knew existed and Senator Leia Organa and her aids are the ones who do all the investigating. That’s spy shit, not Senator shit. Where are the spies?
Maybe somebody at LucasFilm has an explanation for these things, because they’re weird and “Bloodline” is currently isolated in the timeline in the mostly empty 30-year gap between “Return of the Jedi” and “The Force Awakens.” Meaning we can’t really infer answers because there’s nothing to infer from. These are the kind of growing pains we knew we’d experience for a long time after the continuity reboot, though, so this is forgivable.
But while “Bloodline” swings and misses with a lot of the small stuff, it delivers exactly what we need in the bigger picture. It establishes the political landscape that would lead to the rise of the First Order and sets up the power dynamic between it, the Republic and the Resistance. It has one particularly great grounding detail — that it’s a secret that Darth Vader was Luke and Leia’s father. We get insight into how the generation that was too young to fight in the war look back on it. And it tells us what it was about the Empire that so many found attractive. “Bloodline” does a lot of great world building in service of a cool political thriller type of story. It’s not trying to ape somebody’s misguided template for what a “Star Wars” story looks like — the mistake both “The Force Awakens” and the previous major new tie-in novel “Aftermath” made. It’s doing its own thing, and that’s exactly how it should be.
But perhaps its greatest accomplishment is that it feels like it improved “The Force Awakens” (at least in theory, as I haven’t watched it again since finishing the book). That movie failed completely to set its own stage, but “Bloodline” is here to do just that. “Bloodline” makes “The Force Awakens” make sense, finally, by providing the context the film couldn’t bother with. Story beats that lacked any meaning before now have some.
This interaction is why so many of us were troubled by the thought of the old Expanded Universe going away — yes, most of those stories were bad but they worked together to form something greater. We hadn’t really gotten that with “Star Wars” in the Disney era, but “Bloodline is, as I said above, the first step in the right direction.
We still have a long way to go before all this really feels like “Star Wars” to me. But it could be that now I do believe it’ll actually happen someday.