ST Midi-chlorians in Episode VII

EHT

I had to watch it twice to catch it

 

This isn't something I've thought about for a while, but since you brought it up it was definitely one of the ideas I hated. It's really hard to buy parents willingly surrendering their very young kids to some weird group of warrior monks and cutting ties. Coupled with the whole 'Jedi don't get attached' thing it really dehumanizes the Jedi (for lack of a better word). I'm sure there are some cultures on Earth that might go for it but it didn't work for me at all.

The Jedi Order were sort of exposed in the PT as an odd bunch. You didn't really see it with Obi-Wan or Yoda in the OT, but Han and Uncle Owen had it right. And they were a lot less likable than I'd imagined.

 

i think having your child picked by the jedi is very rare and like winning the lottery. most parents would probably be glad their child would have the opportunity for a better life. i don't think the jedi would just snatch them away. the parents would have to be willing. jedi uphold the law they don't break it.

in the tcw episode were force-sensitive kids are being stolen for sidious the jedi save them and return them to their parents.

 

I also hated the sight of seeing a Jedi use a device to confirm his feelings about Anakin. It should be intuition alone.

thejeditraitor

A better life? You make it sound like most of these parents lived in poverty.

 

jedi are esteemed. they live a very privileged lifestyle and many families were in poverty. jedi get to go to the capital of the republic, coruscant in the inner core. that's a big deal.

 

Qui-Riv-Brid

It still felt like comparing, particularly to the audience, because they were talking about who had the highest count. Is it any surprise that Yoda was at the top? It made the whole thing feel cheap. I like how the OT Jedi were above this.

I would say these two remnants represented how the PT Jedi should've been portrayed. No where in the OT do I get the sense that the Jedi Order had fallen largely because of their blind, dogmatic ways. Yoda had never expressed any personal regret over his contribution to the fall of the Jedi Order and Republic. It was because of Anakin's betrayal and Ben getting in over his head with the training.

Nobody said they needed to be perfect, but they were portrayed in a way that I don't see in the PT.

Like what, "This weapon is your life!"? Does that sound like a Jedi talking? "Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering."? That doesn't make any sense because those emotional states are interchangeable.

We never got anything extensive that showed how Anakin handled his training or how he felt about the burden placed upon him. He was called "The Chosen One", but he never really felt like anything more than a regular Jedi Knight with an arrogant streak. What special precautions did the Jedi Council take on his behalf? Not only was he the Chosen One, he was also foretold to be bad news.

"A whole different way"? They were already using blood tests and electronic devices that took samples and gave readings. It took a mysterious thing, connected it with our blood and gave it a number. It might as well have tested Anakin's blood sugar level while it was at it.

What did Vader do that was so uniquely special from any other Sith apprentice fill-in? He just felt like a strong but ordinary hero/villain throughout the Saga. As Red Letter Media basically said, "In the original Star Wars, he was just a bad guy in a robot suit that showed people the Empire meant business. He wasn't Space Jesus." I see no reason to justify making him larger-than-life in the PT other than fan service.

 

Can't see midichlorians being mentioned in the sequel trilogy any more than I can see Jar Jar being a major character. Just such a pointless introduction to the saga.

 

We'll never see midichlorians in the ST.... they're too small!

Boom boom (Basil Brush reference - most won't get that)

 

That is not Jedi though. That is beings before they are trained as Jedi. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that Yoda has the highest MC count ever. A being that is almost 900 years old probably would!

I don't know why anyone makes something so massive out of something that is really so simple.

Which they largely were but even then 2 Jedi are not an Order.

They aren't going to bother telling Luke the ways of the Jedi Order and it's inner workings of the past. What good is there in that? The Emperor and Vader don't even use the term Sith once in the OT. Did you not like the PT calling them Sith?

Did they mention living in a temple? No. Did they mention that they had Jedi starfighters? No. And on and on and on...

They weren't portrayed at all. They didn't exist. The Order was dead.

It is Jedi talking.

Of course we did. That is AOTC. We see how Anakin is handling his training. Bad news? What are you talking about?

As I said a whole different way. Think Star Trek or CSI or The Matrix.

Survive. That is what the PT showed us.

Then your problem starts in TESB. Once he goes from bad guy in suit to Overlord of the universe and Luke's father he HAS to be important. He's no longer just some guy as seen in ANH.

That is not fan service as it is audience service. People went crazy for Vader.

Additionaly RLM are total morons.

 

Qui-Riv-Brid

My argument here is about the way the PT Jedi were presented to the audience. I didn't like how midi-chlorians put a number on their potential. Why should it matter how old Yoda was? You can't alter your count with training.

I'm well aware that two Jedi are not an Order, but they represented a taste of the old, a taste I did not see in the PT.

This isn't some trivial thing like mentioning that they had lived in a temple. Their poor judgment resulted in Anakin turning to the dark side, the Jedi Order being wiped out and the Senate blindly accepting the clone troopers without anyone on the Council doing a thorough investigation. Not only should the guilt and shame from their carelessness be reflected in their portrayals during the OT, having had a good 20 years to ponder where things went wrong, they would've used their past mistakes as lessons in Luke not taking his training too lightly.

Excuses. While the Order was technically dead, OT Yoda and Ben represented the old ways, ways which were not reflected during the PT.

Indeed. It also reflects the lack of insightful training scenes in the PT.

Anakin is never trained during AOTC, certainly nothing along the lines of Luke in V. AOTC skipped most of his training. Bad decision, IMO.

When I say "bad news", I'm referring to the Council seeing anger and such in Anakin's future.

What Lucas gave us was enough of a change. Midi-chlorians and blood tests belong in Star Trek, not Star Wars.

Vader survived because the story needed him to, but there was nothing in his portrayal that justified his high midi-chlorian count or specialness.

"Overlord of the universe"? You mean after he screwed up and got the Death Star blown up?

There's a difference between Vader's importance in the saga and his importance to US. Despite his humongous popularity among Star Wars fans, OT Vader didn't need to be "The Chosen One" or Space Jesus. When he had killed Palpatine and redeemed himself, he wasn't fulfilling prophecy or being some be-all, end-all puzzle piece to the galaxy's/Force's problems. All that stuff was shoved in during the PT to make Vader more important than he was.

Do you really need a prophecy to have a robot man give some old dude the shaft decades or centuries after some mysterious dude wrote it down? Seriously?

Nothing more than an ad hominem argument used in an attempt to discredit someone you disagree with.

 

A better life? I am stumped trying to picture how bad life could be that what we saw could be considered a 'better life' ... the only parents who would consider sending their child off to that equivalent to winning the lottery would be the kind who look longingly at whatever they call duct tape and dog crates in that galaxy.

 

Anyway, in short: I think the Jedi had the legal right to take the children. That is certainly the impression I got there, that they could take them and the hypothetical other galaxy parents didn't have a say in the matter. It was for the greater good after all...

(too late to edit to finish my thought)

 

What also is startling to me about the people that don't get what the midi-chlorians mean and don't mean is that they decided very early on to totally ignore what is actually said in the movies. To their minds it is said that they are the Force itself and they have never been able to shake that.

What also is odd is that they don't seem to understand the way that Lucas tells his stories. The way he has ALWAYS told his stories. He is really no different across the 6 movies. His goal was always to tell as little as he possibly could.

In the OT he went beyond that and actually told less than he should have. The OT is so bereft of context and background (as he wanted it to be) that other than explaining what was going on at that moment he wasn't concerned with having a proper foundation. The point was that if you didn't understand everything that was going on around you that was too bad you should have watched the previous episodes. Of course that wasn't possible at that time. As he has said many times he very deliberately didn't explain things and how things came to be. In the prequels he now had to explain things but once again he made sure to limit it to the most essential information to be seen in his silent movie graphic and musical method.

The fuller explanations of things like midi-chlorians, the Chosen One, the prophecy, the foundation of the Republic, Jedi and Sith and the rest he once again deliberately didn't get into. As with all the movies the novels get more into that. By the time he was doing ROTS he already had TCW in mind so he must have decided at the time to pass a lot of that information into the TV series instead. Hence the much lamented Qui-Gon appearance in ROTS was cut as was any explanation of the follow-up to the mystery of Sifos-Dyas and the creation of the Clone army. These were to be saved and explored in TCW.

As for midi-chlorians there was a lot more to them but a Star Wars movie is no place for a meditation on the workings of the Force. One example is the makers of Star Wars Detours Seth Green and company were working on the show with Lucas. They of course took the opportunity to ask him all kinds of questions about everything Star Wars:

http://thestarwarsheresies.blogspot.ca/2012/12/why-midichlorians-matter.html

At Celebration VI, apparently Seth Green and the other creators of Star Wars Detours were joking with George Lucas about the hated midis. And that was when Lucas apparently launched into a brilliant, half hour long philosophical of explanation of them. Word on the street has it that everyone present came out of it loving midichlorians.
This only makes sense. After all, they've been part of Lucas' notes on the saga since the seventies. And since it's been canon since the original trilogy that Force ability is in fact passed down through bloodlines, the notion that there is - horror of horrors - an actual biological connection lines up perfectly. But so many people wandered out of the theaters utterly dumbfounded in '99.


In a TV series like TCW Lucas was able to spend an entire 22 minute episode to explore the Force and midi-chlorians place:
Season 6, Episode 12:

Yoda:What is this place?

Serene Priestess: All that surrounds us is the foundation of life.
The birthplace of what your science calls "midi-chlorians"
The foundation of what connects the living Force and the cosmic Force.
When a living thing dies all is renewed.
Life passes from the living Force to the cosmic Force and becomes one with it.
One powers the other. One is renewed by the other.

This was done in the most mystical scene ever seen in Star Wars. If in the ST they present it in some similar way with Luke then no one but those already closed minded on the subject are going to complain.

 

preaching to the choir, man.

 

Qui-Riv-Brid

Miss the forest for the trees, you do.

Let me put it simply: A lot of people do not care if midi-chlorians explain force sensitivity (and that's how most understand it, despite you speaking for them) or the force itself. A lot of people do not care that the blood test simply identifies how force sensitive one might be based on that midi-chlorian count.

People have a very simple reason for disliking the midis and the blood test: It quantifies force sensitivity, and uses a mundane, biological explanation for that quantification. That's it. There's nothing else to it.

People liked the total mystery of force sensitivity in the OT, and felt that the mystical "pillar" of the OT had been knocked down. This is a common, reasonable and understandable position to take.

You don't have to agree with it, but c'mon. People aren't "totally ignor[ing] what is said in the movies." They just don't like anything force-related being quantified.

 

Yep, well said. As I've already alluded to in this thread, fantasy doesn't need quantifying. It's fantasy. And Star Wars, and The Force are exactly that. It's akin to telling a religious person (of which I'm not btw) the strength of their conviction in God is all down to their mitochondria count lol.

 

Well I agree with your thinking

I don't really see Luke actively searching for apprentices, and I especially don't see him checking midichlorian counts of younglings and seeking to adopt them to the Jedi order.

The Jedi Order under his guidance may well take a new approach, and only recruit willing apprentices who are older.

 

There was no need to show Anakin's "school training" because Jedi Training is quite boring to watch when you're not accidentally in a war situation where everything depends on you (as it was with Luke) and when we'd already seen that (or about to see it with Luke, depending on the order you watch the films).

What AOTC did show was how Anakin handled his training and him being a Jedi and how he struggles with that, though. The whole idea that he feels restricted by the Jedi, limited in his abilities is a part of that.

He is called the "Chosen One", but he is not even allowed to make the choice to go to Tatooine to save his mother. Those are the kind of questions and "lessons" he deals with in AOTC because this is directly linked to his training as a Jedi since the Jedi Training during the PT era taught emotional detachment: As long as Anakin still wanted to see his mother, he was in training and he failed in that regard.

This failure and his struggle with that was also made extremely obvious and clear in the scene where he breaks down in front of Padmé after his mother's death, where he exclaims his desire to become more powerful and stronger, even explicitly stating: "I'm a Jedi, I know I'm better than this." - how can you say that this is not Anakin dealing with the Jedi teachings and his training?

Thoese are the same things that Luke deals with in TESB, the difference just being that Luke was shown explicitly to be in training while Anakin was shown as a Padawan learner on his first mission, which required him to implement what he had learnt.

The PT was supposed to extend the OT, not replicate it.

Everyone is special in some way, why wouldn't Vader to be the center of a prophecy?
Luke was a very special person. He was son of a very powerful Jedi (special), who was trained by another powerful Jedi (special) and later turned into the ultimate bad guy of the universe (special). He was then chosen to be trained by the same man (special), repeatedly reffered to as being very "strong with the Force" (special), belonging to a very powerul blood line of the Force ("I have it. My father has it...." - special). He may be no "Space Jesus"; but he's no "ordinary" man either and the boundaries between all of this are random.

 

I have to disagree.

Luke would not sit back and wait For students to come to him.

Doing so would allow the Darkside to gain hold.

He would be looking for students in order to teach them to beware of the darkside.

 

And how's he going to find them? Hang out at playgrounds and take blood samples? I wonder if the Force can effectively shield against purses and mace? One guy is not going to be able to find all the Force-senstive kids out there anyway... unless, of course, there are none to be found, hence the Force needing to 'awaken'.

If there was no one to train, it would certainly explain Luke hanging out alone with the nerfs or whatever.

 

A better life? maybe this is just me but I would not call being a Jedi in the PT era a better life than a ordinary life, I would rather be able to love and be close to people than spending a life as an emotionless stiff just so I can use the force and have a lighsabre, The Jedi were turning themselves into droids, heck that's insulting to droids some of them had more life in them than Jedi did, Jedi followed goals because thats what they were told to do, if you become a Jedi your life is mapped out for you, you practice the force how they teach it, you live in the temple with the other Jedi, you go on missions of peace and protection or in times of war your out on the front lines, everything is dictated.

Edit - and I find taking children so young and teaching them deeply wrong, where's the choice, the free will.

I think the PT Jedi were badly done and off putting. They should of made us want to become Jedi, where as after watching the trilogy and TCW I would want to run away from them...as fast as possible

 

There was a very dark undercurrent to the Jedi Order I saw.

 

I think you've hit on the truth here. My guess is that at some point before TFA, the force somehow weakens considerably in the universe, and there are simply no Jedi candidates to be found. And then, there is an awakening. And Episode 7 gets rolling.

 

Qui-GON Jinn "The Force will guide us."

 

I feel like people just complain about anything they can from the PT, specially because half of what they say is just silly. I would like it to be involved in the next movie, so their is that connection to the PT