I’ve read and heard enough about Star Wars: The Last Jedi (henceforth TLJ), both from people who liked it and people who hated it, to know that I’m never going to willingly see it. This review makes a fairly good case that TLJ is Star Wars for those who hate Star Wars. Before I get to my main point, I should put in a defense of some people who liked TLJ. I don’t think that you have to hate Star Wars to like TLJ. I think it’s sufficient to simply not care about Star Wars. The original movies, I mean, not the franchise.

A close friend of mine enjoyed TLJ, and one of the curious things about him (in the sense of being very different from me) is that he almost never re-watches or re-reads anything. Fiction is, for him, an experience which is then over. Characters don’t live in his memory, as far as I can tell. As a result, once he’s watched a movie, when he watches a sequel to it the original movie is simply backstory they don’t need to cover with exposition to him. As such he simply doesn’t care whether a sequel urinates all over an original movie; he was never going to go back and re-watch the original movie anyway. All that matters to him (as far as I can tell) is how much he enjoys the story he’s in right now. In other words, complete indifference to the original Star Wars movies will suffice.

Anyway, as I was explaining to this friend why some people loathe TLJ so much, he objected that you can’t have Star Wars without an Empire. He was at least correct that Star Wars is not Beaurocraaaaaaaats Iiiiiiiiiin Spaaaaaaaaace (henceforth BIS). But you don’t need the Empire to be reset as if it was a syndicated TV show to avoid making the sequels to the original movies BIS. Granted, though, this is a place where having a few scraps of historical knowledge would really come in handy, so writers “educated” within the last 50 years are pretty screwed. Here’s the thing about empires collapsing: they don’t just get replaced by another empire as if a democratic election just took place. They fracture into smaller empires and kingdoms. The Empire in Star Wars was patterned on the Roman empire even down to having regional governors. When the roman empire collapsed, at first the big difference was that taxes stopped flowing from the governor to Rome, and stayed with the governor. In some places the governor was too weak to stop local kings from rebelling, while in other places they were. The exact same thing would happen in the Star Wars universe after the events in Return of the Jedi. Regional Governors who were several weeks journey away would not suddenly swear fealty to Leia and the rebellion; they would simply give themselves all of their orders instead of most of their orders, with a few orders coming from the emperor.

Likewise, the Rebellion would not suddenly become supremely powerful. As they work to reconstitute the Republic, a few planets most directly under the emperor and far away from regional governors would probably join them, augmenting their strength considerably. And the regional governors would probably not just unite, since most likely they were men of ambition, so their fights with each other over territory would probably keep them from just outright crushing the rebels in retribution for killing the emperor. But thirty or forty years after the death of the Emperor the Rebellion-turned-New-Republic would probably still be one of the smaller forces in the galaxy.

And this is a perfect setting for what you want to do with the next trilogy: shift the old actors to advisory roles for rising young stars. You want to do this for many obvious commercial reasons (as the death of Carrie Fisher demonstrated), but also because this is actually how life works. Heroics are a young man’s job; mentoring is an old man’s job. Transitioning the older actors’ characters into age-appropriate activities—political leadership, mentoring, etc.—would not only be good commercial sense, it would be good story telling. And equally importantly, it would pay tribute to the characters which fans of the original movies loved. I mean, I know that these days the concept of not hating the fans of your work is quite alien to the writers of popular fiction, but couldn’t the suits who are supposed to oversee the creative types have enforced a little bit of discipline? That is, in theory, why the investors entrust their money to the suits and not directly to the creative types.

Incidentally, I think that this hatred of fans stems from the fact that fame is hollow. Fame makes huge promises; fame claims that it is the face of God smiling on the famous. But it isn’t. And I think that people who do popular art in order to become famous so often end up hating their fans precisely because they find out that their fans are not God. That realization makes the pain of their separation from God all the worse. There are two and only two viable ways of dealing with fame and not hating one’s fans:

1. Purely as a business transactions. This isn’t ideal, but it will at least admit of gratitude. It will probably predispose the artist to too much fan service, but many well-executed stories have been done this way that ended well.
2. As service to God, since much of the work he gives us to do is service to our fellow man. This is much harder, but it is obviously the better route, and one is more likely to keep a level head whether one is loved or hated (or as is common for public figures, both). If one is service God, praise by one’s fellow men is nice, but beside the point, while hatred is inevitable and also beside the point. And you’re very unlikely to hate your fans since the only reason you’re doing what you’re doing is to love them even if they hate you for it.

Anyway, that (or a direction similar to it) is how the third Star Wars trilogy should have gone had Disney not hated Star Wars.