When Star Wars Took a Nose-Dive

[Valandil]

Just been thinking about this lately.

I think one epic moment changed the Star Wars franchise... for the worse. It was at the end of the second movie made, now Episode 5, "The Empire Strikes Back" - when Darth Vader revealed to Luke that he was his father.

First thing that did was to bring into question the integrity of the "good guys" of the story. This point had been danced around - really, flat-out lied about. By the good guys. The Jedi Knights. The servants of the good side of the force. The defenders of Truth. BTW - I thought at the time that it also produced a lot of plot-holes. And for the next three years, I held that Darth had simply lied to Luke. Man - was I let down.

Second though - and this is what I've just thought of, and maybe it was bigger. It reduced the scale of Star Wars. It went from being galactic - to being about a family. Now - there's no credibility of anybody else in the galaxy being strong with the Force - unless they're from the family line. I mean - it was so ridiculous that Leia was Luke's sister. She had a family situation of her own. It's hard for me to swallow that this was in the concept when the first Star Wars movie came out in 1977. And I thought 'what next... Chewbacca is their great uncle?'

And now - as more movies are produced, they just can't avoid this. It's sort of ridiculous, when you think about it. They should not have gone that way - way back then.