The Guardian takes aim at a canon for science fiction. Via io9.

Twitter gives me access to instant commentary on things from some of my regular readers, which gave me a head's up about what to expect for last's night return of Battlestar Galactica, which I watched this afternoon. (Catch up on BSG minutiae here. Get Steve Benen's take on politics and BSG here.)

Bill wrote: BSG=meh. more melodrama. I won't be sad to see it go.

And Fred wrote: I didn't even know the season premiere of Battlestar Galactica was tonight. Man, my enthusiasm for that show is waning.

It's absolutely true that Battlestar Galactica is a far worse show than it was in its first season, when it was easily one of the best science fiction series ever aired. Ron Moore let the show get away from him in a few senses:

* He attempted to "humanize" the Cylons without thinking through "cylonicity," turning the series's main antagonists into confused and jumbled mush;
* he got so caught up in trying to fool the audience that he forgot to tell an intelligible, coherent story;
* he fell in love with poorly thought-out cliffhangers;
* he thinks the audience cares about the sexual relationships of these characters far more than most actually do;
* he left himself far too many Secret Cylons (12!) to get through in too little time, unnecessarily turning the final season and a half of the show into Who's The Final Cylon? Hour;
* and this is the worst crime, encompassing all the others, the one that cuts down so many great series: he failed to plan ahead.

All that said, I think it's too early to turn Battlestar into Star Wars; the reputation of the series will live or die in what happens in these next few episodes and it could still go either way. Melodrama aside—and yes there was a lot of it last night—I think there are reasons to believe. The Final Cylon mystery has finally been resolved, unless it turns out that either Tigh is wrong about Ellen or else the forums are right and Cylon Ellen is actually an aged version of either Kara or Number Six.

And with that mystery aside and Earth apparently discovered, destroyed, and rejected, the show appears to be setting its sights on the wonderful silent mystery that has sustained it all these years—really, a mystery about narrative continuity itself—and which drove so much of the initial interest in the show: "All this has happened before, and all this will happen again." The cyclical nature of history in this universe is more than just a metajoke about the existence of the original series—the epic size and scope of the universe gave the show an expansive depth that it almost completely squandered in the hermetic middle seasons. If these final episodes are to be about history, and History, alongside everything else, that's very promising.

For a time these teases helped make Battlestar Galactica seem somehow bigger than itself, and with the final season returning to that place I'm hopeful it can regain some of that early luster. Earth, and everything after, should help—the show hasn't felt this utterly desolute since 33. I haven't lost hope for BSG, and god knows I'm usually the first one off the bus. So sit tight: I think there's still a chance for Moore to pull this thing off, if he does everything right, and if this last half-season is better than good.

Last night's episode was the capper of the first season, made immediately following the start of the writers' strike. In that sense it's sui generis, for good and for bad, with the real last season starting next week...

Also from my Facebook newsfeed: Somebody told Harvard the canon's dead.

In an early draft of Star Wars, Han Solo was married to a Wookie.

This somewhat surprising development in Han Solo's love life comes from a reputable source: the official Star Wars website itself, which is currently celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Star Wars Holiday Special by interviewing people involved in the ill-fated production. One of those people is screenwriter Lenny Ripps, who drops the bombshell when discussing Lucas' involvement in the project:

To me, it didn't come together. The ideas were all right but I'm not sure that they belonged in the same room. What was interesting to me was that Lucas started talking about Star Wars as if it was a real world. He said things like "Well, you know Han Solo is married to a Wookiee. but we can't say that." Now that was 20 years ago [in 1998], so my memory may be wrong.

According to starwars.com's Ross Plesset, however, his memory is surprisingly good:

As outrageous as Ripps's recollection sounds, there is evidence supporting it. Pat Proft corroborates it and an early draft of the Star Wars script (January 28, 1975) has Han Solo living with a furry female creature who he kisses. Proft also remembers learning that Han was raised by Wookiees, which is verified on pages 46 & 131 of Laurent Bouzereau's Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays.

As every schoolchild knows, George Lucas wrote out nine original movie scripts in 1975 from which he never deviated in the slightest, so we must conclude that this is canon...

Being George Lucas: The Times has a long, wide-ranging interview with the man himself, touching on everything from his quasi-religious relationship with Star Wars canonicity to the chilling possibility of yet another Indiana Jones sequel. Via AICN.

“We were hoping for box-office figures like that, which is, ultimately, with inflation, what the others have done, within 10%,” Lucas explains. “So, we squeaked up there. Really, though, it was a challenge getting the story together and getting everybody to agree on it. Indiana Jones only becomes complicated when you have another two people saying ‘I want it this way’ and ‘I want it that way’, whereas, when I first did Jones, I just said, ‘We’ll do it this way’ — and that was much easier. But now I have to accommodate everybody, because they are all big, successful guys, too, so it’s a little hard on a practical level.

“If I can come up with another idea that they like, we’ll do another. Really, with the last one, Steven wasn’t that enthusiastic. I was trying to persuade him. But now Steve is more amenable to doing another one. Yet we still have the issues about the direction we’d like to take. I’m in the future; Steven’s in the past. He’s trying to drag it back to the way they were, I’m trying to push it to a whole different place. So, still we have a sort of tension. This recent one came out of that. It’s kind of a hybrid of our own two ideas, so we’ll see where we are able to take the next one.”

This pair of scans_daily posts are by themselves a nearly complete lesson in just what superhero comics have become in the so-called Dark Age—incredibly dark, yes, but also deeply layered and remarkably postmodern. Grant Morrison's current story on the Batbooks requires at least a passing familiarity with the entire sixty-nine-year history of the franchise to make much sense, including long-abandoned plot points like the Batman of Zur-En-Arrh and Bat-Mite and a rather advanced understanding of meta-concepts like continuity and canonicity.

These features, to varying degrees, dominate the major creative output of both DC and Marvel, and have for at least a decade, though Grant Morrison's comics are certainly near the top of the curve.

Personally I think this sort of labyrinthine narrative complexity is always unequivocably wonderful, but opinions on this point definitely vary.

*Here's a list of 2008 genre movies to complement the wider list I linked to the other day.

* When Letterman returns next week, he'll be the only late show on the air with writers—Worldwide Pants made a separate deal with the writers' union that will allow him to return with union approval. I have to say, this doesn't help my uneasiness with what John Stewart and Colbert are doing one bit. (UPDATE: The Deadline Hollywood blog has a comprehensive, well-thought-out post about what the Letterman side deal could mean for the WGA, the AMPTP, and for Leno and his writers. Check it out.)

* And in Massive Nerd news, Joe Quesada has finally done what he's always wanted and eliminated Peter Parker's marriage from continuity. (Even the story's own writer thinks it's stupid.) Now Peter Parker and Mary Jane were never married in the first place, and everyone in the Spider-Man comics has either been de-aged or else we've traveled back in time. As is common with these sorts of retcons and reboots, it's pretty unclear what's supposed to have happened in the past or what is actually going on now. In other words, Marvel continuity at last is as ugly and convoluted as DC's. And the nerds are pissed about it.

There is an optimistic gloss that can be applied to the proliferation and popularity of movie superheroes. The phenomena may indicate a subconscious desire to return to a more polytheistic religious culture. Like the ancient Greek and Roman Gods, today's cinematic superheroes have human foibles and they constantly intervene in the affairs of our world. If human beings are somehow genetically hardwired to look to the sky for salvation, then at least we have an array of exotic choices. And as historian of religion Jonathan Kirsch points out in his recent book about the war between monotheism and polytheism, "The core value of paganism was religious tolerance..." You prefer Superman, I prefer Batman. Someone else warms up to Wolverine. If a rain of new Gods is falling from the sky, at least they aren't demanding singular and supine obedience.

But Spiderman 3's central and perhaps subliminal message is reactionary and anti-democratic. The mass of people are inert, victims of vast forces that are beyond their control. The debris of shattered windows and skyscrapers caused by these warring forces descends from above -- as does deliverance. This is the antithesis of the democratic promise, that people freely joining together in a common cause can make history and determine their own fate.

That's Kelly Candaele at the Huffington Post om Spiderman 3. I'm just amazed anyone bothered to think so hard about such a terrible movie. (via NeilAlien, which also links to this brief but useful comparison between comics canonicity and Arthurian legend)