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Let's say something that feels uncomfortable the first time you say it out loud but that becomes more obviously true the more you examine the evidence: the Jedi Order deserved to fall. Not in the sense that the individuals within it deserved the horror of Order 66 — the massacre of thousands of Force-sensitive people, many of them children, is a tragedy that no one deserved. But in the institutional sense, in the sense that an organization whose failures were as profound and as consistent as those of the Jedi Order could not have sustained itself indefinitely, and that the specific...

There are characters in Star Wars who exist to serve the plot, and there are characters who transcend it — who start as functional narrative devices and grow, through the specific alchemy of great writing and great performance, into something that feels genuinely alive, genuinely complex, and genuinely irreplaceable. Asajj Ventress is the finest example of this second category in the entire Star Wars canon, a character who began as a one-dimensional villain in a 2003 animated micro-series and who ended, through years of development across multiple media, as one of the most emotionally resonant and thematically rich characters the franchise...

There is a moment in "The Empire Strikes Back" that has been debated by Star Wars fans for over four decades, and it happens in a hallway on Cloud City. Lando Calrissian — who has just betrayed Han Solo, Princess Leia, and Chewbacca to Darth Vader — is walking away from the carbon freezing chamber where his best friend has just been frozen solid and handed to a bounty hunter. And then he stops. He turns around. He makes a decision. And everything that follows in his story — everything that makes him one of the most fascinating characters in the...

There is something about Naboo that produces heroes. Not the manufactured heroes of military academies or the destiny-chosen heroes of ancient prophecies, but the specific kind of hero that emerges from a culture that genuinely values service, that teaches its citizens from childhood that leadership is a responsibility rather than a privilege, and that maintains — even in the middle of galactic conflict — a commitment to the idea that how you fight matters as much as whether you win. Naboo is a small planet by galactic standards, a world of rolling green hills, underwater Gungan cities, and baroque human architecture...

On October 30, 2012, the entertainment world changed forever. George Lucas, the man who had created Star Wars in 1977, who had spent thirty-five years building it into one of the most valuable and most beloved entertainment franchises in human history, announced that he had sold Lucasfilm — and with it, the entirety of the Star Wars universe — to The Walt Disney Company for approximately 4.05 billion dollars. The announcement sent shockwaves through fan communities, financial markets, and the entertainment industry simultaneously, and the questions it generated have never fully quieted down. Why would he do it? Why would the...