There has been much hype in the Star
Wars community surrounding the infinite possibilities of havoc and hope which a
Disney self-emancipated from any semblance of continuity with the entire
artistic corpus of “The Maker” George Lucas—including, most especially, Lucas’
crowning masterpiece, The Prequel Trilogy—could
reap upon the Star Wars franchise. But if one conjectured possibility—time
travel or dimensional rifts—were admitted into Star Wars, it would fundamentally alter the similitude of “The Galaxy
Far, Far, Away” (GFFA) to our own, thereby destroying the power of epic myth,
in which there must be commonality and yet distance. The iconic opening line of
the saga establishes the necessity of linear progression as the means of
establishing a human manner of interacting with the GFFA: A long time ago in a galaxy far [, far] away… is only intelligible within
the framework of our everyday experience vis-à-vis
reality, that is, of a linear past and a three-dimensional expansion of space.
We exist in a linear progression of
time; time travel would turn the epic into mere science fiction. By this I do
not mean to imply that science fiction franchises such as Dr. Who, et al.
are not amazing things in themselves, but nobody would contend that they
contain the same power of epic myth that Star
Wars always had since its very debut. These create interesting moral
situations and things, but the element of time travel detaches them from our
common experience of linear temporality, in which concrete actions and choices
cause future results and which cannot be undone. Anakin's radical choice in
Star Wars III is an example. He goes down the path of the Dark Side, and
forever it "dominates his destiny". He cannot undo what he has done;
he even remarks in horror at his fundamental choice "What have I
done?!" while still in Palpatine's office; it is only in the linear
progression of his actions and his son's actions that he is able to make a
contrary choice; he cannot undo what was done, but—like us—he can make a choice
for the good no matter how much evil has been done.[1]
There is a
fundamental distinction, however, between going impossibly large distances in a
short amount of time, and going back/forwards in time itself: the former is a
mere variation of degree in a thing that bears familiarity; the latter is a
fundamentally distinct kind of interaction with time. While I concede that the
GFFA is not of necessity subject to our physical laws and often ignores them in
the Saga itself—to the horror of a post-logical modern scientific establishment
baptized in the name of the logically dubious methods of induction, inference,
and generalization—I maintain that the physical laws of the GFFA should, in
order to preserve the necessary similitude between our experience and the
experience of the epic myth, be distinguished only in degree, and not in kind,
regarding the effects—and not necessarily the causes—of those laws.[2]
