Hey everyone! How's it going? I'm doing pretty well. I'm back for another edition of My Geek Life. This week I'm going to be talking about the season 2 premiere of Superman & Lois, Star Wars and the characters that have been appearing in live action from other mediums, such as animation, books and comics, and I'll be talking about the first novel to come out in the Star Wars canon continuity in 2015, Star Wars: Aftermath as I just finished reading it before I went to sleep last night. As with the last edition, I'll be going into minor spoilers with everything I talk about here, so if you haven't watched them yet, then please do so before reading this post. Let's get into it, shall we?
I can't tell you how glad I am that Superman & Lois is back for it's second season. That show got me through the beginning of 2021. As I said in my review of the first season over on The Review Basement, what kept me engaged with the show was the focus on Clark and his family without falling prey to the lame teen drama tropes that The CW is well known for. Especially with the actual teenage characters, Jonathan, Jordan, and Sarah. Tropes that Smallville fell into numerous times over it's ten season run. Also, I'm warning you right now that this is not the last time I'll be referencing Smallville in this post.
This week's episode was really interesting. Not just because Lois is dealing with the aftermath of John Henry Irons's daughter, Natalie, showing up at the farm, but Clark also has to deal with the fallout of General Lane retiring from active duty, leaving the DOD under the command of Lieutenant Anderson, who is less than thrilled with Superman's decision to place the good of the world above the good of the United States of America.
One of the things that I love about DC superheroes over Marvel heroes is that the DC heroes aren't loyal to one country. They're loyal to the world. With the exception of Thor, the Guardians of the Galaxy, Black Panther and the Submariner, most of the Marvel superheroes are either agents of SHIELD or loyal to the U.S. in one way or another. So to have this guy challenge Superman on that, brings new problems for Superman.
Honestly, the best parts of last night's episode was the non Superman stuff. I can't always relate to Superman, but I can relate to Clark Kent. I always have been able to relate to Clark Kent, ever since I read my first Superman comic back in 1994, Action Comics #0, and watched Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman on TV. In fact I think because Lois & Clark was my introduction to Superman and that show focused more on the Clark Kent aspects of the mythos, I was able to connect to the character easier than I would've had I seen the Christopher Reeve movies first. In fact one of the reasons I got into Smallville (see? I told you I'd be referencing Smallville again) as hard as I did 20 years ago is because the early seasons focused on Clark and his life living in the small town of Smallville. Which is why I like Superman & Lois so much.
Before I switch over to my next topic, because this isn't a review of the season premiere of this show, I would like to voice my concerns about one thing. As I mentioned earlier the first season managed to not fall into the tropes that characterize TV shows that air on The CW (and any series produced by Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, but that's a topic for another time), but I'm afraid that could potentially happen with Jordan this season. The whole premise of this show is Lois and Clark trying to navigate being parents while she's a journalist and he's Superman, with Jordan's powers blooming as he went through his teenage years, much how Clark's powers manifested. But it doesn't seem like he's going to be a big focus this season like he was last season, which kind of sucks because I have been able to relate to Jordan alot so far, because of his emerging powers, he had to handle things differently, much like how I had to handle things differently because of my physical disabilities as well as my Autism. And his parents had to handle things differently with him, the way my parents had to deal with things differently with me than they did with my brother and sister.
My big concern though that has to do with Jordan, is that his relationship with Sarah is going to end horribly wrong because it looks like she's keeping something from him from her time at summer camp. Which just leads to stupid teen drama stuff that doesn't belong in a Superman series and this show has somehow managed to avoid. But that's just me though. Before I talk about The Book of Boba Fett I do have a few things to say about Star Wars: Aftermath.
I first got this book from a friend for my birthday in 2015. I read it, I don't think I reviewed it on my blog at the time, and then haven't read it since, and that was just over six years ago now. I remember Star Wars: Aftermath to be unmemorable and kind of bland. In fact I had completely forgotten about it until 2020 when season 2 of The Mandalorian aired and Timothy Olyphant appeared as Cobb Vanth, a character who appears in an interlude in the book, but doesn't have any connection to anything else going on in the book. And even though I had read the book already at that point, he was such an unmemorable character that I totally forgot he was in that interlude. Also, by the way people were talking about Vanth online, I thought he was a bigger deal within the book than he actually was, and I'd just forgotten.
The book is decent. As I read it, I found that I actually remembered more about it than I thought I did. It's well written, but the characters are too numerous to be interesting, with a constant switch between the Wexleys, Admiral Sloane, and the various characters that we meet in the interludes. There's also just too many storylines going on. Star Wars is well known for having multiple storylines going on at once, but I find that the Star Wars novels I enjoy the most are the ones that focus on a single character, or a single group of characters. Which is why I love the Star Wars: X-Wing books so much. With this book I just found it hard to keep up with what was going on.
Also I found it pretty bold of them to write a novel, which serves as the first novel in the new post-Return of the Jedi canon continuity, where Luke, Leia, Artoo, Threepio, and Lando don't show up at all, Han and Chewie show up for five seconds, and the only familiar characters are Wedge Antilles, Admiral Ackbar, and Mon Mothma, two of whom were more prominent in the novels and comics of the Legends continuity than they were in the movies. Especially because this book was a chance to bring new fans into the Star Wars novel universe. Mainly those who avoided the hundreds of Legends books that had been published since 1976 when the novelization of Star Wars was first published. Which now leads me into what I want to talk about concerning Star Wars in general.
Both The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett have been bringing back aliens that we haven't seen in live action in 20 years or more. For example, the Tusken Raiders haven't been seen in live action since Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones came out in 2002. The Hutts haven't been seen in live action since Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace came out in 1999. And the fact that two TV shows are bringing back these legendary Star Wars species, and adding new depth to them is fascinating to borrow a phrase. I've always been intrigued by the Hutts and their society, ever since I read Star Wars: The Han Solo Trilogy by A.C. Crispin, and I'm really glad that The Book of Boba Fett is actually fleshing out their society for the canon continuity.
Another thing that both shows have done well is bringing in characters from other mediums into the live action universe. Cobb Vanth from Star Wars: Aftermath and Ahsoka Tano, Hera Syndulla (who is mentioned in Rogue One), and Bo-Katan from Star Wars Rebels are good examples of that. But the one I want to talk about is Krrsantan, the Wookiee bounty hunter who has appeared in the second and third episodes of The Book of Boba Fett.
I haven't read very much set in the Star Wars canon continuity. I gave up on the comics after issue 12 of the 2015 Star Wars series published by Marvel. So when Krrsantan appeared in episode 2 of The Book of Boba Fett I had absolutely no clue who he was and had to look up where he appeared. His first appearance was in Darth Vader #1 published by Marvel in 2015, around the same time that Star Wars #1 came out. So he was created by Kieron Gillen and Salvador Larroca for the comics. He's a side character in Darth Vader but with ties to both Boba Fett and Darth Vader, so that's interesting.
However, Krrsantan became a main character in Doctor Aphra #1, basically acting as the opposite of Chewbacca to Aphra, the opposite of Han Solo. So he's had quite a bit of history since Doctor Aphra began publication in 2016. So it's no wonder people went nuts when he appeared in episode 2 of The Book of Boba Fett. I'm usually against tying movie/TV tie-ins too closely to the show or movie in question, because not everybody reads the tie-in material and putting characters who are created for supplementary material in more than just a quick easter egg cameo is basically asking the general audience to check out the supplementary material, to find out more about the character, even though they're clearly going to be in the show for a long time.
This isn't the first time that Star Wars brought characters, ships or locations from the books and comics and put them in the movies and TV shows. George Lucas did this as early as 1997 when he placed the Outrider, a YT-2400 (next model up from the Millennium Falcon which is a YT-1300) freighter owned by Dash Rendar, into the expanded Mos Eisley scene in the Special Edition of A New Hope. The ship was created by Steve Perry for the novel version of Shadows of the Empire, a massive multimedia project that was released in 1996 and consisted of a novel, a comic book, a comic book sequel, a video game for the Nintendo 64, toys, a soundtrack, and Making Of book. The design of the ship though was created by Doug Chiang, who would later go on to be production designer for the Prequel Trilogy in the late '90s and early 2000s. It was incorporated into the comic book and the N64 game as well.
Another major example of this also happened in the Special Edition in 1997. At the end of the Special Edition of Return of the Jedi, there's a montage of three planets, Tatooine, Bespin's Cloud City, and a planet spanning city. That last one was Coruscant. Back in 1989-1990, Timothy Zahn created Coruscant to be the Imperial homeworld/seat of the New Republic government for the first novel in the Star Wars novel trilogy he was writing, Heir to the Empire, which was published in 1991. Coruscant was based on a concept that George Lucas had for a city planet that went all the way back to the mid-'70s when he was writing the script for Star Wars. And because Coruscant was used in all of the post-Return of the Jedi novels and comics after Heir to the Empire came out, George ended up putting it into the montage at the end of Return of the Jedi: The Special Edition before using it as a major location in The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith (1999, 2002, and 2005 respectively), with modifications to include the Jedi Temple and the Senate Building, both of which were later incorporated into the shot of Coruscant in Return of the Jedi for the 2004 DVD release of the movie. So Star Wars has been incorporating elements from the Expanded Universe into the movies since 1997.
I think that's all I wanted to talk about today. Just some geeky talk since Superman & Lois returned, I finished reading a Star Wars novel, and The Book of Boba Fett was decent. I'll be back tomorrow to talk about the movies that I actually saw in theatres over the course of my childhood. And yes, I will be getting to that Blu-ray post that I mentioned in a post last week. So until then have a great evening and I will talk to you later. Take care.
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