Warning: this post contains spoilers for Season 1 of Star Wars Rebels.

Anyone who knows me, or has spent any time perusing this website, probably knows I’m a big Star Wars fan. I have been since I first watched the trilogy on VHS (a late-nighter with a cousin, and I fell asleep during the last half hour of Return of the Jedi). I’m not old enough to have seen the original trilogy in theaters, and I was in high school when The Phantom Menace came out in 1999. I actually made the premiere showing of Revenge of the Sith and wound up sitting in the front row. I spent the first twenty minutes of the movie (the opening starfighter sequence, plus a little recovery time) motion sick from watching it at a weird angle.

The Star Wars media marched on, most notably in the TV show Star Wars: The Clone Wars. This isn’t a post for getting deep into that show, but suffice to say, I didn’t like some of the choices they made. Mostly, I found it lacked the sense of adventure that the original trilogy had evoked. It felt more like the reimagined Battlestar Galactica with a Star Wars skin, and the themes and level of violence felt a bit inappropriate for a kids’ show. (Don’t get me wrong, I liked BSG; but it should be and is a different beast from Star Wars.)

The great Disney buyout happened, The Clone Wars ended, and a new show was announced: Star Wars Rebels. (Look at that! I got to my subject by the third paragraph!)

I was rather skeptical at the start, mostly because of The Clone Wars. Setting it in the original trilogy period seemed like a great idea, but as more details started trickling my skepticism grew. A Jedi character central to the cast in a show set after the Jedi had been wiped out? A pink Mandalorian graffiti artist? An alien from a species we haven’t even seen before (sort of – it was based on concept art for the Wookiees)? A random street kid thief? Okay, I bought the pilot character and the astromech droid, but that’s two out of six.

I didn’t watch the shorts before the Season 1 premiere (which was a good thing, or I might not have watched the one-hour opener). My wonderful wife and I settled in to watch, though, and we were both prepared to dislike it. (Incidentally, my wife liked The Clone Wars even less than I did, though she’s a Star Wars fan as well.)

An hour and several bowls of popcorn later, and we were both stunned. We actually liked it.

Even more stunning, I liked the Jedi character, Kanan.

Side note: as I’ve grown older, I have found I dislike Jedi more and more. I don’t have some Karen Traviss-level hatred; I’m certainly not going to call fans of Jedi characters Nazis. Rather, I’ve disliked how, more and more throughout the Star Wars Expanded Universe (now Legends; we’ll see if the new canon does this any better) nothing happens without a Jedi being involved. It wasn’t always that bad – for example, the Rebel Alliance in the original trilogy and the old EU was composed of common people and political firebrands who chose to fight the Empire.

Then The Force Unleashed video game and novel happened. Suddenly, no one was willing to act unless a Jedi was involved. The common people never act in their own interest, but rely on the Jedi for, well, everything.

Star Wars Rebels flipped that on its head. The Jedi character, Kanan, is nominally the leader of the resistance group in question, but even in the premiere (and later confirmed in the story) the true leader is actually the pilot, Hera. She’s allowed Kanan to take the public face as leader because he’s a more capable combatant, but she’s the one who actually has all the knowledge.

As the series progressed, we find not only are people capable of acting without the Jedi, they have. Bail Organa is building cells of resistance, using another Jedi as his agent. While the Jedi are certainly important in the grand plan, they are also not necessary – even without Fulcrum or Kanan, the resistance effort would certainly be built.

Early episodes were on the childish side (and hey, this is a kids’ show!) like “Fighter Flight”. Surprisingly, though, the series maintains an extremely strong sense of continuity. Even the seemingly stand-alone and kid-friendly episodes tie into the later plot, and mistakes the crew makes along the way – even those that seem inconsequential, like breaking protocol to use a name instead of a callsign – come back to haunt them.

Surprisingly, the character (as explored thus far) have more depth than would be expected from a kids’ show, particularly on Disney. The aforementioned Kanan is uncertain of his own powers, having hid them away to survive the Jedi purge and only recently begun using them again. While he initially projects an aura of invincibility, the first time he crosses lightsabers with an Imperial Inquisitor shows just how outclassed and out of his depth he is when it comes to actually acting as a Jedi.

Ezra, the boy and the viewers’ hook into the group, has emotional issues ranging from uncertainty to rage to a fear of vulnerability. If Ezra had stood before the old Jedi Council and asked for training, they would’ve tossed him out so fast he would’ve suffered whiplash. And it shows – he’s unintentionally tapped into the dark side of the Force, and his future is very uncertain.

The Twi’lek pilot, Hera Syndulla, has an unexplored past but a delicately approached present. She has a strong sense of duty, to the point she was willing to let Kanan die to prevent her mission and the larger rebellion-in-progress from failing. It wasn’t until her own crew disobeyed her to pursue Kanan that she was willing to take a chance on saving him.

Zeb (Garazeb Orrelios, but only to his mother and to Hera when she’s chewing him out) is one of the few survivors of the genocide of his people. He burns with hatred toward the Imperial agent responsible for the deaths of his people, and pursuing vengeance nearly kills him in the first regular episode of the series. He’s a bit of a loose cannon, but he can generally be talked down by his own allies.

Chopper, the token astromech droid on the crew, is a bit of a controversial character. While he does the usual R2-D2 type work by fixing the ship and generally going places only droids can go, he’s acted in ways that endanger the crew. He was indirectly responsible for the near-death of Hera and Sabine in “Out of Darkness” and Ezra’s fall off the Ghost in “Rise of the Old Masters”, and was nearly as much harm as help. Perhaps the writing team understood the character was over the line, giving him heroic moments later in Season 1 like summoning a Rebel fleet in “Fire Across the Galaxy” to save his crew.

Sabine is the final major protagonist, and the least explored. There are hints she was at one point an Imperial and had been betrayed, but only hints – hopefully hints that are followed up on in Season 2. She’s the team’s demolitions expert and very good with blaster pistols, though the latter actually nearly gets  her killed in the Season 2 premiere, “Siege of Lothal”.

The show isn’t perfect by any means; the Empire seems extraordinarily incompetent, though the arrival of actually dangerous characters makes the incompetence rather blatant. And while the show was very light-hearted in early episodes in spite of subject matter (arms trafficking, for example), it becomes far more serious when the Inquisitor arrives and is shown to be a danger to the crew. A later episode turns even more serious when Tarkin shows up and summarily has two Imperial officers executed (off-screen but heard) for incompetence, and Kanan is captured and tortured.

The show started out very light, but by the end of Season 1 there were complaints that the show was violating the spirit if not the letter of its TV-Y7 rating.

Do I recommend it? Absolutely. It brings back the spirit of the original trilogy – the sense of adventure, the mystery of the Force, the danger of an Empire unchecked, and the heroic spirit of those who oppose it.

If you’re concerned about your young children watching it, I’d recommend screening episodes in advance. There are certain sequences and scenes that could be disturbing for young children.

I’m currently sitting in my office, waiting for the washing machine to kick out so I can move laundry over to the dryer. As is the norm for me, I’ve been reading current event threads and stories to see what’s going on in the world.

Lo and behold, I ran across yet another article about the Joint Strike Fighter.

For those who don’t know, the JSF (also known as the F-35) is an ongoing money pit project to build an aircraft that can fulfill multiple roles. In essence, it’s designed for air superiority, light bombing, and close ground support roles.

It’s one of the most expensive projects in history, with some $200 billion already sunk into it (last I checked), and an estimated total cost of $1 trillion.

In the last year, reports keep surfacing of problems with the JSF project. Aside from the almost-expected delays and cost overruns, there have been reports of simulated dogfights with the JSF not able to keep up with last-generation fighters in a scrap. Detractors of the project point to the JSF as a failure that we should pull funding from (and usually add things like redirect the money to refurbishing or building new A-10s and F-22s); supporters tend to point out the limitations of the fighter v fighter tests or discuss the F-35s ability to fight beyond visual range (BVR) with standoff missiles.

What some of the naysayers seem to understand, and supporters don’t, is that a Swiss army knife approach to building an aircraft is a poor philosophy.

Why do I say that? Gaming experience.

Star Wars Galaxies was, depending on your perspective, one of the finest games or worst failures ever pushed out onto the market. And lost in the discussion of the various revamps the game went through is arguably the finest expansion ever released for an MMO: Jump to Lightspeed.

JtL, as I’ll abbreviate, allowed players to build and equip starfighters and engage in combat. The various ships were given stats based on their “canon” roles as fighter, bomber, or interceptor. Essentially, all ships were on a sliding scale with high speed and maneuverability worked opposite equipment hardpoints and total ship “mass”. In essence, the more firepower you could put on a ship, the slower and less maneuverable it was.

In fiction, the “balanced” fighters are usually the best, most noticeably with the X-wing, the supposed perfect blend of speed, maneuverability, and firepower. In stories that works out well, but players are competitive, and they tend to look for the advantage rather than the story. Competitive players in anything, be it a video game or a sport, will work to maximize their chances of winning, both offensively and defensively.

And gamers are competitive.

Early in JtL, as people were beginning to understand the system, players flocked to those “balanced” craft – not unlike a JSF, they could do everything a player needed. They could fight in a turn, carry plenty of firepower, were reasonably fast, etc.

As the metagame aged, players began moving away from the “balanced” craft in favor of the interceptors. Faster, smaller (and thus harder to hit), and lighter-armed, players found the additional speed and maneuverability were more important than the additional firepower of the “balanced” craft. They went from jack-of-all-trade ships to dedicated dogfighters, and the “balanced’ craft couldn’t keep up.

The metagame truly hit maturity when an enterprising group of players found a weakness in the high-speed, high-maneuverability dogfight and instead switched to slow but missile-heavy bombers. The interceptors initially had plenty of trouble trying to save themselves from multiple missile hits – hits the light interceptors generally couldn’t absorb.

Initial response to the metagame shift was to slip back into the “balanced” multirole craft. However, the slow missile-dedicated craft were still fast enough and plenty powerful enough to kill the multirole craft nearly as well as the interceptors. Players slid back away from multirole craft into either more missile-heavy craft, or back into interceptors with different approach tactics and loadouts to kill the missile-spammers.

“How in the world does this apply to the JSF program?” you’re asking.

It’s pretty simple: the best aircraft (or spacecraft, if you were playing Jump to Lightspeed) is one that maximizes its advantages and minimizes its disadvantages.

Interceptors maximized their speed and agility and minimized their fragileness through superior maneuvering and their firepower by loading that single offensive hardpoint with the biggest gun they could manage.

Missile craft maximized their straightline speed with high-performance engines and large boosters to minimize their maneuvering disadvantage, and loaded up the biggest missiles possible to maximize their firepower.

Those “balanced” craft? To stay in the game, they wound up doing much of the same, but were never as effective as either the interceptors or the missile craft. While they could actually keep up with many interceptors in straight-line flight with dedicated speed engines, they were massacred in the turn. Their heavy firepower took the form of lasers instead of missiles, which were harder to aim and hit, which meant the bombers could more reliably land blows. They fell into a middle ground where they weren’t the best at anything.

That’s the road we’re walking down with the JSF. By putting everything into a single platform, it can’t do everything well, because there are always trade-offs. By trying to do everything, it will be outperformed by platforms that are committed solely to their task.

Too long, didn’t read? “Specialization is a good thing.”

With that thought, the laundry is done.

Also, I’m working on another fiction-writing column that started with a short story I read about a B-wing squadron. Working title: “Keeping the small details consistent.”

I watched the Supernatural Season 10 finale tonight. When it finished, I felt like I should go back and watch the Season 5 finale to get something more satisfying.

Supernatural is something of a guilty pleasure of mine. I first caught an episode while home sick from work one day – the Season 3 episode “Jus in Bello”. It intrigued me at the time, but I never got around to watching more of it (in part because, at the time, I didn’t have Netflix).

Fast forward to two years ago, when I began watching Supernatural on Netflix to catch up, and then getting one episode per week like longtime viewers. Ultimately, after watching the Season 10 finale, I concluded the show’s run could be a modern case study in what happens when the story goes too long.

The ur example, I suppose, would be Sherlock Holmes – Doyle wound up writing Sherlock stories much longer than he ever intended, bringing him back after killing him in “The Final Problem.” But Supernatural is a great modern example.

For those uninitiated in the ten-year-old show (which was renewed for an 11th season), it follows the exploits of two brothers as they battle supernatural evil in various forms. Elder brother Dean followed his father’s footsteps as the loyal son, while younger brother Sam rebelled and abandoned the lifestyle of the “hunter”, only to be pulled back in by Dean during a quest to find their missing father.

The series started as a “monster of the week” type show, with a surprisingly creepy atmosphere and genuinely threatening creatures, overlaid with rock music and a cool classic car. By the end of Season 1, though, the show had become something more – Jensen Ackles and and Jared Padalecki found a surprisingly convincing chemistry as brothers who loved and hated each other all at the same time.

Season 1 ended with a gut-wrenching twist; after escaping the Yellow-Eyed Demon, the murderer of their mother, with their father in tow, their car was t-boned intentionally by a demon-possessed semi driver, leaving open the question of who had survived and who had died.

The following season would end with revenge upon the Yellow-Eyed Demon for the death of both the boys’ parents, but the unleashing of hundreds of demons on Earth, setting in play the story elements that would wind through the next three seasons, culminating with Season 5’s season-long story arc of the boys’ campaign to kill the devil to prevent literal Armageddon. Ultimately, they prevailed, but with younger brother Sam sacrificing himself to bind the devil again.

The first five seasons followed a great story arc. The brothers grew in both skill and maturity, starting as young hunters inexperienced enough to be troubled by simple hauntings to veterans capable of taking the war to the devil. As brothers, they began as immature siblings with trust issues and tension over their father’s love but blind loyalty to each other, repeatedly lying to each other but eventually growing to trust each other, with Dean willing to let Sam go at the end of Season 5 for the sake of victory.

While the story felt stitched together at times, their was also clearly a long story planned from the beginning, and the writers team executed their part with great pains. It doesn’t mean there weren’t flop episodes in there (Season 1’s “Bugs” immediately jumps to mind, or Season 3’s “Seven Deadly Sins”), but as an arc of episodic episodes it was amazing.

The problems began with Season 6.

In part, the story suffered from the “Nuke the fridge” problem. The Winchesters had beaten Lucifer himself; what could be more threatening than the Prince of Darkness himself? To continue the story, the writers had to undo far too much of what had happened in the first five seasons. Sam was resurrected after his heroic sacrifice, the brothers’ relationship backslid, and they seemed to have forgotten important lessons about hunting and brotherhood that they had spent the previous five years learning the hard way.

The big story arc involved a civil war in heaven after the derailing of Armageddon, but because it was beyond the boys’ capacity to help, it was largely executed off-screen, leaving the episodes feeling disjointed and unimportant. Not until the very end of the season did it seem to actually matter, and then it was quickly resolved.

Season 7 tried to bring back a “big bad” to defeat (which they did in the finale), and Season 8 wandered aimlessly for quite a while until they stumbled onto an epic quest to close the gates of Hell. Season 9 reverted to “brother lies to brother” for dramatic tension – after eight years of hunting together, you’d think they’d have learned to tell each other the truth, as those lies always backfire – and Season 10’s arc was about Dean under a curse.

Season 11 looks to be bringing in another “big bad” for them to fight – one that, by all rights – should be beyond their capability, since apparently it took God and the archangels to beat back the last time. (Side note – Season 11 could actually be a great throwback to Season 5 if the writers bring back the prophet Chuck and the two surviving archangels from their prison, but I’m doubtful about whether they’re willing to go that direction.)

Looking at the series as a whole, Season 5’s finale would have wrapped the series up in a neat bow. The ending wasn’t happy for all the main characters, but that’s okay. It was satisfying. Unfortunately, the money and the ratings were apparently more than satisfying, too, since they continued a story that clearly was finished.

None of this is to say that the later seasons didn’t have some good stories. For that matter, there are some standout episodes (including my favorite episode in the entire series, “Weekend at Bobby’s”, which was early in Season 6). As a whole, though, the arc storytelling simply lost its punch.

I’m a writer by trade – I’ve finished five novels (the first three were fanfictions that gave me the experience and the confidence to actually try something original), and I’m by no means an expert. I’m still honing my craft, and I suspect I will be for many years to come…probably until they plant a headstone on me.

But at some point, the story needs to end. When the good guys have won, and sacrificed, and learned their lessons, they need to be able to go home. Continually pitching them into the flames again and again ebbs the life and spirit of a work.

Let it go when it needs to go. Zombies are never a good thing. Dean himself states, “What’s dead should stay dead.”

So bring on Star Wars: The Force Awakens!