A family is torn apart by the arrival of the Empire

The eighth episode of Visions is produced by Geno Studio.

Where the other stories so far have largely focused on the hinterlands, the out of the way places far from the Galactic core of the Star Wars Universe, Lop & Ochō is set on a planet teaming with culture and millions of lives.

The show starts with the truth that in the SWU many people are slaves – a fact often overlooked or treated bizarrely (I’m looking at you, The Phantom Menace) in the western canon. We follow a young runaway who’s adopted by a powerful clan, one who is, itself, torn by the Empire and what it brings.

The heart of this story is how external forces can tear us apart. In a world in which many families are split down the middle because of politics this story explores exactly how we can arrive at this point.

The planet in the story has invited the Empire in to modernise and bring all the benefits of advanced technology. Not everyone’s happy about this but not because the Empire is bad but because they would rather things stayed the way they were.

In fact it’s not entirely clear that the Empire is evil at any point in this episode, instead offering a progressive stance around technology and communications the traditional culture of the planet itself couldn’t reach or develop on its own terms. The downsides are what any capitalist, colonialist venture brings – pollution and rapacious exploitation – these people already had slavery.

The core conflict here is about progress versus tradition, centred around who best represents cherished ideas of what it means to be authentic.

Of course, siding with the incomers, the Empire in this case, means, ultimately rejection of tradition, of the kinds of meaning which used to work. Holding onto what made the people who they were, their sense of identity also means rejecting the change the new brings – neither option delivers everything you might hope for and both options end up losing the good for the sake of the idea.

The show does a good job of showing that, in the end, the road to balancing the demands of two world views is precarious and, often, doomed to failure. This is not because there’s no middle ground – there actually isn’t. Failure beckons because of what most people calling for centrism fail to understand – in order to meet in the middle we have to share a common view of the world within which compromise does not feel like surrender to someone with whom we do not share values.

Just like for many people in contemporary western society – it is not a singular world view within which we’re arguing but competing and incompatible world views (for example White supremacy and multiculturalism). These cannot be reconciled because they are, in part, defined by who they exclude and once people are excluded they must then be side-lined and erased. If we were arguing within the same world view then we’d not have this fundamental problem.

For the protagonists in this episode they are stranded by circumstance. They’ve walked, slowly, from a shared world with differences over how those shared values are expressed into different worlds with fundamentally different values. Now they’re there and they feel like home, there’s no coming back without abandoning what makes them who they are. The demand to abandon ourselves for the sake of others when what we’re abandoning would, in its loss, undermine that very act of sacrifice means neither side in this story can compromise.

Where there is no compromise there can only be conflict and so it happens here with the family fighting one another, sliding towards lethal outcomes without even recognising it for what it is – only that it seems inevitable and obvious to them all that this is the way it has to be.

In many ways we’ve seen this kind of conflict a million times in shows all through the years, but it’s deftly delivered here with a real sense of passion, without losing the sense you’re watching Star Wars and also with an ending that feels bereft of hope.

Verdict: An excellent episode.

Rating? 9 dark sides out of 10.

Stewart Hotston