Joss Whedon Just Has One Problem With The Empire Strikes Back

And it’s that horrible face Luke makes when he finds out Darth Vader is his father.

No, I’m just kidding, that’s just the reason that 10-year-old me didn’t like The Empire Strikes Back.

The truth is, Whedon is like most Star Wars fans: Empire is his favorite of the series, and it’s on a short list of sequels that he thinks got it right. “Sequels” are undoubtedly on the mind of the writer/director, as he puts the finishing passes on the script for The Avengers: Age of Ultron, a sequel to the third highest grossing film in history. But he still has one problem with the second film in the Star Wars franchise…

It’s that Benedict Cumberbatch never should have played Khan.

No, that bit was a joke, again.

The actual bone he has to pick with The Empire Strikes Back is its ending.

Empire committed the cardinal sin of not actually ending. Which at the time I was appalled by and I still think it was a terrible idea… It’s not an ending. It’s a Come Back Next Week, or in three years. And that upsets me. I go to movies expecting to have a whole experience. If I want a movie that doesn’t end I’ll go to a French movie. That’s a betrayal of trust to me. A movie has to be complete within itself, it can’t just build off the first one or play

Everybody knows that if you really want to end a story you should impale a character on a stick suddenly and way to close to the credits for the audience to get any closureHEYYOOOOOOOOO Serenity SLAM.

Uh, ahem.

I’m not sure if I entirely agree with Whedon. On the one hand, I was cheesed off about the ending to Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, since it felt to me like while things had happened in the book, they’d mostly happened in service of setting up for Deathly Hallows. On the other hand, I reached the end of Catching Fire and was happy to immediately find a copy of Mockingjay to devour. The difference there could be that I didn’t have to wait for Mockingjay. The books had already been out for years at that point.

But it’s an interesting question. Is a series obligated to have discrete narrative installments if it’s open about how many installments the story will take?

(via Entertainment Weekly.)

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Susana Polo

Susana Polo thought she'd get her Creative Writing degree from Oberlin, work a crap job, and fake it until she made it into comics. Instead she stumbled into a great job: founding and running this very website (she's Editor at Large now, very fancy). She's spoken at events like Geek Girl Con, New York Comic Con, and Comic Book City Con, wants to get a Batwoman tattoo and write a graphic novel, and one of her canine teeth is in backwards.

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