Thing I saw on Tumblr recently, reacting to a great picture of Mark Hamill hugging Lupita Nyong’o: “I love that Mark Hamill has just unilaterally decided Luke is everybody’s father, and also gay. :D”
To which I can only say this…
It’s even better than that.
If you check out Hamill’s full quote, here’s what you’ll read:
“Fans are writing and ask all these questions, ‘I’m bullied in school…I’m afraid to come out. Could Luke be gay?’ I’d say it is meant to be interpreted by the viewer. If you think Luke is gay, of course he is.”
And, of course, that works for more than just gay. Gay, straight, bi, pan, ace, demi, trans, cis…anything at all. If you think Luke is, of course Luke is.
Even things you might not be able to think Luke is, Star Wars finds a way. Is it possible for Luke Skywalker to be a cis woman? Sounds like a stretch, I have to imagine. But then…as many people have established, in early drafts of the screenplay, the character occupying Luke’s place was a woman. Who’s to say that isn’t as much “Luke” as anything else?
The one thing Luke always is, through everything, is the one we look up to. That’s why it’s so important to the people writing in to Hamill. “If Luke can be gay,” they are saying, “it can be OK. I can face my fear. I can see Luke as someone to emulate, to be like. Luke can give me strength.”
No matter what you are, Luke can be you.
And that’s when you realize what Luke really is. And of course it’s what Luke is. What Luke always was, from the beginning.
I need to talk about Han Solo. Specifically Han Solo as a father.
This is something that has bothered me since the first time I saw The Force Awakens, but it’s also something I’ve felt reluctant to talk about because we’re all in mourning for one of our childhood heroes.
But I do want to talk about it because it hits on a fairly personal issue for me and I suspect for a lot of people.
When Han says that they did everything they could, that there was too much Vader in his son, this was a man rejecting responsibility for the role he may have played in how his child turned out. This was a man saying that that child had a fundamental flaw that had nothing to do with him.
Think about who Darth Vader is to Han Solo. He’s the man who had him frozen in carbonite. He tortured Leia and had a direct hand in the destruction of her home. He severed Luke’s hand.
He was responsible for the deaths of millions. I have a feeling that Han put about as much stock in the depth of Vader’s end of life redemption as Kylo Ren does.
Does anyone think for one second that Ben Solo was not fully aware of what his father thought of him? Children hear and understand so much more than we give them credit for. Even if young Ben never heard anyone refer to him this way, he is a powerful telepath (and possibly, despite how he tries to kill it, an empath like his mother.)
Headcanon time. My feeling is that Ben Solo was a sensitive, serious child, and that he and Han were never truly able to relate to each other. Ben may have acted out early on, whether because of Snoke’s influence or because of his own inner turmoil. (Make no mistake, even if his home was loving there is no way it was stable. He was born at the end of a war, to a family in the vanguard, and wars never tie up neatly.)
So did his parents make the same mistake so many others do when their children go astray? Instead of looking for a flaw in the child’s nurturing, looking at it as a flaw in the child’s nature? We know from the novelization that Leia was aware of Snoke’s influence but didn’t tell Han. If Han had known, would he have looked at his son differently, or would it have made the situation seem even more hopeless?
I think the reason it struck me as hard as it did is because it only took one time for me to overhear my mother telling someone how much like my deadbeat, addict father I was, for it to have a huge effect on my sense of self and personal agency.
But, hey, maybe Han didn’t think about his son this way at all when Ben was growing up. Maybe “there was too much Vader in him” is the thing he said to himself afterward, so he wouldn’t go crazy wondering what he could have done differently.
All of this. For me, so much of the power in TFA comes from the depressing realization that my childhood heroes were, in the end, overwhelmingly human. When Kylo Ren tells Rey, “He only would have disappointed you,” that sounds so much like someone speaking from experience.
I love Han Solo, I do, he’s one of my childhood heroes, like I said, but ultimately, I think as a human being, he was possibly the worst possible father a kid like Ben Solo could have had. Not out of lack of love or concern–it’s obvious that he loved his son–but just because of a lack of understanding. (I get that. I was an sensitive, shy kid and I grew up feeling like the cuckoo in the nest.) I’m sure Leia tried to help bridge the gap (of the original trio, she comes out the best, honestly), but I don’t think it was enough.
We don’t know what Luke’s relationship was to Ben. It’s one of the things I am DYING to find out, what that dynamic was. Did he try to act as a surrogate father, and if so, did Ben resent him for it? And I want a damn good explanation for why he packed up and ran away from all of his responsibilities beyond some sort of half-assed spiritual quest, because I am VERY disappointed in him.
Ultimately, that’s another reason I want a redemption arc for Kylo Ren–not just for his own sake, but as a chance for the adults in his life to fix what they helped break, and for Han, Leia, and Luke to redeem themselves too.
Rewatching Agent Carter, I got the thought about how Howard uses the term ‘friend’. I feel like he views everyone as his friend. Wait! Hear me out on this!
So, basing myself slightly off of this post and what’s said in the series, it’s clear that Howard did not have a happy, carefree childhood. He likely grew up Jewish, he clearly states that there’s a ceiling for people like him, and he’s had to learn to lie to advance.
But let’s back up.
Howard Stark is clearly a genius. He’s not exactly street-smart, and he has this enhanced IQ that wasn’t well-suited for the area. So what friends did he have growing up?
Well, none and several. He probably had no friends in his neighborhood. Here was this boy, arguably smarter than everyone around him, who wanted out and was willing to do whatever it took to get there. And how better to get out than to make friends with the right people. I mean, everybody wants something and Howard was smart enough to make sure that he was the one who got it for them, even if he had to steal (or get someone else to steal it for him – sound familiar?). He became everyone’s new best friend.
Now don’t get me wrong. He knew they weren’t really his friends. He’s not stupid. But friendship, to Howard, became this thing. Anyone was a ‘friend’ because everyone had something they wanted. And they were often willing to pay for that.
So he used this idea he had crafted of friendship to climb his way out of his old life. He probably told himself that he was going to help people when he got out. But living a lie, stealing to get a better position… it weighed on Howard until the idea of ‘helping people’ once he was where he wanted to be became just another lie, one that he told himself.
So what happened later? Well, he met Edwin Jarvis. Like so many others, there was something that Jarvis wanted. But see, what Jarvis wanted wasn’t something petty and material. What Jarvis wanted was to save the woman he loved from ending up another casualty of war. Jarvis did something that made Howard turn his head. He risked his own life to save that of another.
Why this made Howard stop, I can only guess. But something clearly changed in Howard after that. Suddenly it wasn’t only about the money. He remembered that it was about saving people. Helping them. Oh sure, he was terrible at it a lot. He has no idea how to connect with real people.
He knows, of course, that everyone is a potential ‘friend’, but there are only a handful of people who go beyond his idea of friendship. In fact, he can count them on one hand. Edwin Jarvis. Peggy Carter. Steve Rogers. These are the three people who showed him that humans aren’t only petty creatures out for themselves and he really has no idea how to handle that.
So when he calls Peggy and Jarvis his favorites, I don’t think that’s just a sentiment. When he says to Peggy there’s no one else he can trust with the mission of clearing his name, there’s no doubt in my mind that he believes that. Because to him, there’s nobody else he trusts.
So when Sherlock deduces Mary is pregnant, he bases it on three symptoms: increased appetite, change in taste perception, vomiting. One theory is that Mary could have easily faked those symptoms.
But another option I haven’t seen (and if someone has written this up already, please help me out with a link!!) is that those symptoms were genuine but Sherlock deduced pregnancy when in fact they are symptoms of something else. Something possibly deadly? And that’s why Mary looks so worried in TSoT, because she knows for sure she isn’t pregnant.
And maybe now Sherlock is working that out? Because this whole consumption thing in TAB is pressed so hard on us. And this is a really heavy moment, there’s a pause like this is a VERY important revelation…
The bride was dying. For awhile I kept wondering if this meant Jim was dying, because Jim is the bride. But it’s not Jim’s whose symptoms Sherlock has deduced. And the bride is also a mirror of Mary.
There were clear signs…she wasn’t long for this world. // All the signs were there. The signs of three.
Mary is very not pregnant in that mind palace. Sherlock doesn’t even think about the baby. He goes through a fast-forward Victorian version of everything from meeting John through the tarmac and says “the stage is set,” but it’s not, because while he set up to the point where the Watson’s marriage was obviously in trouble, but there was NOTHING about the pregnancy. Maybe here, finally, Watson’s saying she’s dying is his brain telling him that this is because he deduced wrong?
So she decided to make her death count.
TAB: She was already familiar with the secret societies of America.
HLV: All those wet jobs for the CIA.
Then there’s the whole Moran thing, and/or the idea that Mary is carrying out the Moriarty legacy, that Moriarty really is “more than a man,” that it’s a GROUP.
ASiP: You’re not the only one to enjoy a good murder. There’s others out there just like you, except you’re just a man … and they’re so much more than that. What d’you mean, more than a man? An organization? What?
TAB: A legend to strike terror into the heart of any man with malicious intent. A league of furies awakened.
And there’s also the planting of an idea, the technique Jim uses in TRF to get people to think Sherlock’s the liar.
TRF: You can’t kill an idea, can you? Not once it’s made a home in there. Moriarty is playing with your mind, too – can’t you SEE what’s going on?
TAB: Once the idea exists, it cannot be killed. This is the work of a single-minded person…
Ack. Crap. I don’t know…this is definitely a cracky crack theory, but….Mary as a dying vigilante. Adding it to my list of maybes.
NO BUT I HAVE FEELINGS because okay, what if Mofftiss took this two dimensional female character who served as a wife for Watson and then wasn’t even granted the dignity of an on-page death and were like “Well Mary, you have to die but we will give you a REASON, YOUR DEATH WILL COUNT”
Posting this today, as it appears to be a quiet day for news in the fandom.
We know that TPLoSH is the template Mark and Steven use for BBC Sherlock. TPLoSH is considered canon, and so we should look there for references and clues. Here are several nods to that film which appear in BBC Sherlock.
TPLoSH; case solved in Yorkshire when Holmes timed the rate the parsley had sunk into butter. In BBC Sherlock: Many Happy Returns sees an official state he solved a case by measuring the time it took for a chocolate flake to sink into the ice-cream.
TPLoSH: Holmes tells Watson he envies the peace and quiet of John’s mind, as his own races like an engine. In THoB Sherlock tells John the same.
TPLoSH: Watson angry over being assumed ‘gay’. In BBC Sherlock; same.
TPLoSH: Holmes states the ‘curtain goes up’ when he discovers a case. In BBC Sherlock, we hear that ‘the curtain rises’ in TGG.
TPLoSH: Holmes is outplayed by the spy Gabrielle. Parallel to Irene in ASiB.
TPLoSH: the naked woman with Holmes showing zero interest. In ASiB we have the same scene.
TPLoSH: the kiss on the cheek for Holmes from Gabrielle. In ASiB the same for Sherlock from Irene.
TPLoSH: Gabrielle uses a parasol to Morse code her secrets to the German monks. In ASiB Irene uses her mobile phone to send the information to Moriarty.
TPLoSH: Mycroft states Gabrielle is better than most of his agents. In ASiB Mycroft tells Irene; ‘I wish our lot were half as good as you.’
TPLoSH: Watson hides the cocaine in the files at 221B. In THoB John hides the cigarettes in the skull. In both, Holmes/Sherlock plead for John to tell them where he has hidden the items.
TPLoSH: Gabrielle is given clemency as Holmes requests it for her but later she is executed. In ASiB Irene is saved from execution by Sherlock.
TPLoSH: Dr Watson leaves a case that contains items associated with Holmes and himself, to be opened 50 years after their deaths. BBC Sherlock, in Many Happy Returns, Lestrade brings a box to John with items related to their cases.
TPLoSH: Holmes meets the Queen via Mycroft. In ASiB Sherlock and John are in Buckingham Palace to take a case with royal connections..
I am sure I am overlooking several other references. Let me know!
This is totally brilliant. I’m reposting because I thought of some more:
TPLOSH: The director of the Russian ballet explains to Petrova that “women not his (Holmes’) glass of tea.” In ASIP Sherlock says to John that girlfriends aren’t really his area.
TPLOSH: Holmes goes looking for Gabrielle’s suitcase, which is exactly what Sherlock does in ASIP.
TPLOSH: Holmes complains that there are “no great crimes anymore”, just as Sherlock does in TGG when he says he’s bored.
TPLOSH: Holmes gets an appeal to find some missing midgets which he dismisses because he thinks they just ran off to another circus for more money. Only then it turns out the midgets are actually relevant to the big case. In ASIB there are two clients (a man who says the ash in the urn isn’t human, and two children who weren’t allowed to see their granddad after his death) that Sherlock dismisses but then those cases were actually related to the Bond air plot because the bodies were used on the plane. Also, Sherlock ridicules Bluebell in THoB, only then it becomes relevant later.
TPLOSH: Holmes is doing a study on tobacco ash. And we know Sherlock wrote an epic article on tobacco ash that he published on his website. (There are other mentions of ash in both the film and the show).
TPLOSH: Just after the mention of the ash study, Mrs. Hudson comments: “I’m sure there’s a crying need for that.” We get her saying the same exact thing in Sherlock in TEH when Sherlock talks to Mycroft about a blog he wrote on natural fibres.
TPLOSH: Holmes’ direct and harsh way of questioning Gabrielle is reminiscent of Sherlock’s rather rude way of asking the house mistress in TRF what happened to the kids in the school.
TPLOSH: Holmes asks Mrs. Hudson about the last time she dusted, Sherlock does the same in TRF when he’s looking for the bugs Moriarty planted in the flat.
I have to raise an eyebrow when he says things like, “This movie really is the origin story of Eggsy,” or, “I joke that we’ve made the prequel to the Eggsy movie.”This movie is a Pygmalion story. It’s about Harry Hart shaping Eggsy Unwin in his image. So when Vaughn says he’s making the “origin of Eggsy”, which trope is he playing to, exactly?
Kill your father to become a man? The offspring is new and improved?
Or tragic death-of-lover origin story? Older gay mentor and young man?
One could say “both”, but I personally think there’s a disconnect between the movie Vaughn thought he was making and the movie the audience saw. He says things that seem to jive with the “offspring” trope:
Eggsy is really the real, true modern gentleman spy. It really isn’t Harry Hart. Harry Hart is the old cliché of what you think a gentleman spy is. [x]
Even blatantly talking about “new blood”:
Harry even says, ‘There is a reason why we’ve developed weak chins.’ He said that meaning, ‘Look at us, we need to get new blood into this system,’ and that’s what Eggsy is. [x]
Comments like these seem go jive with the “kill your father” trope. Harry was lesser, he was a cliché, he needed to make way for a new generation. I think this is what Vaughn means for us to see when he sets up all these mirrors between Eggsy and Harry. Having Eggsy repeat Harry’s lines, dress in Harry’s clothes, even movie into Harry’s house (according to cut footage). The odd absence of on-screen grief also seems to back this mentality. When Eggsy is left to finish the mission/movie on his own, he doesn’t do so in a tear-stained homage to his lost loved one–in fact, upon Harry’s death, he fully comes into himself. He puts on the suit. His confidence goes through the roof. He shows the world what he can do. He fucks one of his enemy’s hostages and seems to have forgotten Harry’s existence. All of this is classic “kill your father.”
Vaughn didn’t even seem concerned with Harry Hart’s presence in future movies–as a reborn character or as a ghost hanging over Eggsy’s head. From what I can tell, he sees Harry Hart’s part as fulfilled. Maybe he’ll find a way to bring him back if ticket sales in America look good, he says callously. But he clearly doesn’t see Harry Hart as particularly important beyond his role in Eggsy’s origin story.
Thing is, this is not the movie ANYONE saw.
Okay, maybe that’s hyperbole, but come on. The only thing people wanted to know after the first movie was, “So when does Harry come back?” In the kill-your-father model, this would be a step backward. But people didn’t see Harry as the father. They saw him as the love interest.
Love interests don’t have to be explicitly sexual or romantic to be love interests. Hmm, what’s a great example of a movie where there was no explicit on-screen confirmation of a sexual/romantic relationship, but the audience clearly understood that they were seeing the dynamic of lovers playing out before them…? Oh right. My Fair Lady.
See, this conversation trips me up:
Harry: Did you see the film “Trading Places”? Harry: How about “Nikita”? Harry: “Pretty Woman”? Eggsy: No. Harry: My point is, the lack of a silver spoon has set you on a certain path, but you needn’t stay on it. If you’re prepare to adapt and learn, you can transform. Eggsy: Oh, like in “My Fair Lady”?
The one thing all these movies have in common is that it involves someone who finds themselves in a “low” position in life (a street con, a convicted murderer, a prostitute, a low-born) being placed into a position of higher status by outside forces, and subsequently earning it. Exactly what Harry is preparing to do for Eggsy. The thing is, those last two movies involve the elevation happening via a romantic relationship. Which brings us to the eternal queerbaiting question: is it subtext, or is it a joke?
It’s such a fine line, because if it’s a joke, then it’s a self-aware joke. If it’s subtext, then it’s subtext in the form of a joke. You could slice that distinction with a hair. But it means everything in terms of the director’s intentions.
Going by what I’ve seen of the director’s personality? I think it was a self-aware joke. But I think the audience saw subtext in the form of a joke. Again, huge distinction.
The father-offspring thing is a total miss. The vibe that everyone got from this movie was romantic tension between older mentor and young lover.That’s what people see in the mirroring. That’s what people see when Eggsy wears Harry’s clothes, speaks his lines, moves into his house. That’s what people see when Harry Hart fucking says things like, “One does not use dressing room two when popping one’s cherry,” and generally saunters in front of Eggsy in an opaque cloud of pheromones while Eggsy trails after him with stars in his eyes.
Maybe part of the garbled messages is that nothing ever dimmed those stars in Eggsy’s eyes. I think the church scene was meant to be Harry’s fall from grace, but no one read it that way–not even Eggsy. In other words, the metaphorical father-killing never takes place. Eggsy is never disillusioned.
Vaughn also completely fails to communicate his assertion that Harry is an old cliché who needs to be replaced. In fact, the movie tells us the exact opposite. It practically punches us in the fact with constant dropped hints that Harry is a rebel, that he’s new skool, that he’s got rebellious ideas of how to do things. He comes across as Eggsy’s perfect match, not Eggsy 1.0.
Why does any of this matter?
Because people are going to show up to the sequel and go, “Wtf?”
We were left without an emotional resolution to Harry Hart’s death in the first movie. That’s the only cliffhanger anyone gives a shit about. That’s the only reason they’re going to pay money to see movie #2. They want to know if Harry Hart is really secretly alive and see the emotional reunion, or they want to see Eggsy spend an entire movie wrestling with Harry’s ghost. I have a sneaking suspicion that Vaughn is just going to make an entire movie of Princess-Fucking Eggsy that in no way connects to the emotional plot of Harry and Eggsy’s relationship that he dedicated the first movie to. To the audience, this will look like he just completely dropped the main character’s journey. It will be an incomprehensible non-sequitur.
The nail in the coffin here is that Vaughn cut that breakfast scene specifically because it “unintentionally” made it seem as though Harry and Eggsy had hooked up. It tells me that he was explicitly trying to avoid the love interest read, and it also tells me that he had already hopelessly shot himself in the foot. If all it takes is them eating breakfast together, then your audience already has enough to fill in the blanks.
I could be wrong, here. What do others think?
I think you’re a fucking genius. Take my keys, go to my house, fuck my wife.
God I live for meta like this
Exactly what I thought after the movie: Matthew doesn’t understand the movie he actually made. And it’s clear in that he thinks the anal sex joke works. It doesn’t. Eggsy’s not looking for a tumble then. Would Harry have done that?? No way. Eggsy’s 100% going to check on his mum and he’s going to Kentucky. He’s not looking to get laid. He’s going to bring Harry home, even if it’s in a coffin. He’s going to honor Harry.
The movie is better and more emotional than he planned. It’s not a spoof. Matthew had better actors than he anticipated, and far more subtext between them than he realized. Those characters loved each other, gay or not. They hurt for each other. Adored each other. It’s not Austin Powers. Your movie is better than you know, Matthew. Step back and watch it with fresh eyes.
Ok so I had an epiphany the other night and I’m pretty much 100% certain I know what the mysterious creature in Midnight was. But first off, let’s review what we know about the Midnight entity.
It was able to survive at least in some form on the surface of the planet where the x-tonic radiation vaporized any living thing in split seconds.
It communicated by repeating what the people in the transport were saying, first with a lag-time, then instantaneously.
It was able to inhabit the body of a human.
It was able to take over the mind of the Doctor.
There was something about the transport that it was drawn to, but it had never attacked a transport previously.
So that’s what we know, and it’s not much to go on. But there is one significant other entity in the Doctor Who canon who exhibits all these traits. Ready for it?
The Midnight Entity is a Tardis.
If a Tardis were somehow to crash onto the surface of Midnight, one could assume that the x-tonic radiation would effect it in the same way as it would any other living creature, vaporizing it instantly. However, the interior of the ship exists on a different dimension than the exterior so we can safely assume that only the exterior would be destroyed, while the interior was preserved. Without a physical exterior however, a Tardis would loose the ability to materialize in another location, essentially trapping it both on, and equally not on the planet.
Aside from It’s human form in “The Doctor’s Wife” we never hear the Tardis speak directly. However, this is not completely true, in another sense we nearly always are hearing the Tardis speak… through the translation matrix. Translation, a Tardis’ main form of communication, is in essence, simply listening to what someone says and repeating it after them. Typically this is done in another language, however, if the Doctor’s Tardis was already translating instantly we wouldn’t hear this, instead it would just sound like an echo. As the Midnight Entity, superseded the link of the Doctor’s Tardis, we would lose the echo first of the other passengers, then of the Doctor. Once the mental link to the Doctor is fully established the translation would become instantaneous, however since the entity is still inhabiting a physical body it would be physically voicing the words as well.
In the Doctor’s Wife, we see that it is possible for a Tardis to inhabit the body of a human.
We know that a Timelord has a mental link that enables him to pilot a Tardis. However, a Tardis is an incredibly powerful entity and one would assume that were it’s motivations malicious, or were it particularly desperate, the same link could be taken advantage of to enable a Tardis to essentially “pilot” a Timelord. In fact, it’s hard to imagine any creature besides a Tardis, having that sort of power.
So under the circumstances I’ve described, a trapped, and damaged Tardis would need two things to escape the Midnight planet. Firstly, it would need an external hull that could withstand the x-tonic radiation. This it found in the transport ship itself. However, there would have been no point in attacking any previous transports until it found the second thing it needed to escape, a Timelord to pilot it. In this light all the creatures actions make sense. The first thing it does is remove the driver’s cabin, because it needs to sever the shuttle controls in order to replace them with itself. Secondly, it finds a way to get it’s consciousness inside the cabin, it does this by taking over Sky’s body. Next it forges a mental link with the Timelord, this process is complicated by the fact that he is already linked to another Tardis. Once that is done, the entity would need to get the Timelord out of the transport and into it’s own interior. I believe that while the exterior of the entity Tardis was lost, there would still be a non-physical portal of some sort to the interior. This would be the shadow the Mechanic sees on the surface of the planet. The if the entity could convince the crew to throw the Doctor out of the transport, then it could line it’s portal up with the door so that they were essentially throwing him into the ship’s interior. Once that was done, then the final step would have been to take on the outer hull of the transport and dematerialize out of there. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite work out that way.
Anyway, so there you have it. The Midnight Entity is a Tardis.
Absolutely brilliant. Also, somebody correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure Midnight is the only episode of New Who to not feature the Doctor’s TARDIS at all. The Doctor frequently gets separated from his ship, but here we never even see it in the first place (or at the episode’s end). The lack of the conventional narrative framing in this episode that shots of the TARDIS usually provide adds to Midnight’s general eerieness – but I am completely on board with the suggestion that its place has been usurped by another more malevolent model.
