The Death Star Human Resources Department Newsletter: January 24, 2025
We found the missing Jedi.
Hello there
Welcome back to the Death Star Human Resources Department Newsletter. It’s always a little strange after a series ends. For 8 - 12 weeks, and usually for a good 4 - 6 weeks leading up to a show, I’ve always got something to write about. There was a weekly Skeleton Crew review/recap and all the teasers and promos leading up to it. Now, the show is over and it usually takes a week or two getting back to writing about the other randomness in the Star Wars universe. So this week, I plug going on another podcast, a missing Jedi shows herself, another missing Jedi shows himself, and the Death Star HR book club returns.
This Is Where The Fun Begins
Trying to convince Emperor Palpatine’s #1 Fan that I found the perfect spot for our anniversary trip this year.
The owner should really offer the “Anakin Skywalker Experience” where for an extra $100.00, they give you a plastic lightsaber and you get to chase around some people dressed as Sand People.
I Occasionally Talk About Things Besides Star Wars
One of the fun things on Substack is it really reminds me of Twitter before Twitter completely turned into a dumpster fire. You have a lot of people with various interests who really want to just nerd out on whatever their topic is. I mean, there are multiple Star Wars newsletters on here. Taking a little break from writing about space wizards with laser swords, friend of Death Star HR
over at The Oscar Project asked me to be on a podcast with him. If you’ve got any interest in movies, you really need to check The Oscar Project out. Jonathan started by trying to watch all the Oscar nominated films and has expanded to movie news, reviews, and interviews with all sorts of filmmakers and film buffs. And I guess he ran out of interesting people to talk to since he asked me to discuss about the silent film Underworld. It’s an interesting movie, Underworld is considered the first gangster movie. Plus, I had never actually watched a silent film the whole way through, so that was a new experience. I can’t say anything more, you’ll just have to give the podcast a listen!
I mentioned this a couple weeks ago but there is a Death Star HR podcast in the works. If you’re a writer on here who wants to plug your newsletter or whatever you write and discuss your favorite obscure Star Wars character, hit me up.
The Skeleton Crew Jedi That Wasn’t There
In the couple weeks leading up to the finale of Skeleton Crew, real life and Death Star HR friend, known only the Crazy Old Wizard Who Lives Beyond the Tarrant County Line had mentioned a couple times he thought that there would be a woman Jedi who would save the kids. I wasn’t quite sure where this came from, don’t get me wrong I love an off-the-wall theory as much as the next guy, but I hadn’t seen anything to suggest there was going to be any Jedi in the show. Other than Jod the quasi-Jedi of course. But he kept telling me, knowing that I try to avoid spoilers, that based on the credits there was going to be a Jedi.
The season (series?) finale of Skeleton Crew came and went, and there wasn’t a Jedi. Then we got a post from Yasmine Al Massri, an actress best known for pulling a “Parent Trap” and playing identical twins on Quantico.
She doesn’t say exactly who her character was, but pretty clearly she was supposed to be Jod’s master. While it would have been cool to see, there was a reason. As Jon Watts and Christopher Ford explained in an EW interview:
EW: Jod finally shares his backstory here as a kid who was saved by a Jedi, trained a bit, and then Order 66 came around. Are there other details of that backstory that you came up with — like, say, the Jedi who saved him — that didn't make it on screen into the episode? How deep did you go?
FORD: In our heads, it's like the potential to go deeper. That part of the story is something that could be explored in the future. So when you have something that's a kind of work in progress like that, you leave it open enough to get worked on and made better.
WATTS: If you want to, I could fully describe the bottle episode where we see Jod as a kid and what happened to him and why.
FORD: The challenge though was, as fascinating as Jod is, we always wanted to keep it from the kids' perspective. The kids are like, "I don't understand this guy." They've never been out in the galaxy and met someone as damaged as him. So I don't think we could have done a flashback in this season.
Honestly, I’m glad we didn’t get the scene. I think the showrunners are right that Skeleton Crew is the kids exploring the galaxy, all they know about the Jedi is what they’ve learned in school. A flashback out of nowhere doesn’t make a ton of sense. I do hope we get it in the blu-ray release though.
Jake Lloyd is Doing OK
Jake Lloyd’s tale is not quite the tragedy that Darth Plagieus had, but he’s had a pretty rough go of it. Lloyd should have had a role that would set him up for life, playing young Anakin Skywalker in The Phantom Menace. TPM was released in 1999 and Lloyd was out of acting by 2001. The reaction to Lloyd’s performance in TPM was…well…it wasn’t very wizard. Much like Ahmed Best, Lloyd was on the recieving end of abuse from fans, proving that once again that some Star Wars fans need to work on differentiating real people from the fictional characters they are asked to pretend to be in front of a camera. Like almost every other issue with the Prequels, it’s less the fault of the actors and more the fault of the writer/director. As Harrison Ford very famously said to George, “You can type this shit, but you sure can't say it!”
After getting out of acting, Lloyd’s mental health severally deteriorated. In 2012, he stated that he retired from acting due to bullying from Star Wars fans and the hostility from the press. However in 2024, his mother stated that wasn’t the case.
Lisa is also eager to dispel what she says is a common misconception: that an avalanche of negative reaction to "The Phantom Menace" drove Jake to quit acting and contributed to his mental illness.
“It would have happened anyway,” Lisa insists, pointing to a history of schizophrenia on his biological father’s side of the family. “I believe that it was genetic. And his psychiatrist also agrees that Jake was going to become schizophrenic.”
Unfortunately that is what exactly what happened. In 2015, as Lloyd’s mental heath struggles got worse, he ended up spending 10 months in jail after an incident in South Carolina. In 2023, Lloyd had a “full-blown psychotic break” as his mother put it. This instead of jail, he was able to do an inpatient program at a mental health facility. As of January of this year, he completed the 18 month program and his back living with his mother. Writer Clayton Sandell caught up with Lloyd and his mother in the article below.
Contrary to popular belief, Lloyd is still a fan of Star Wars.
Today, Jake remains a Star Wars fan with fond memories of making The Phantom Menace and, he says, interacting with other fans. (At this point, I take a moment to tell him about the hugely-positive response I received to the first article, which I believe demonstrates that there’s a lot of love out there for Jake Lloyd.)
Jake has—for now—stopped making public appearances at fan conventions like he used to, but says Star Wars is still a happy place for him. He recently watched the Star Wars: Ahsoka series, and lately has been “intensely” playing a few classic Star Wars video games, including Star Wars: The Old Republic and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.
“I want to play The Force Unleashed II,” he tells me. “I just beat the first one.”
The interview with Lisa and the follow up article are both worth reading. I am glad to see that Lloyd is getting the help he needs and is doing better, and that he looks back fondly on his Star Wars career. It’s also a good reminder that you never know what’s going on with someone and how they can be struggling even if it doesn’t seem obvious. Things are uh, not great right now for a lot of people. The world is fire, both figuratively and literally if you’re in Southern California. Maybe a good goal for all of us in the new year is give people some grace.
The Death Star Human Resources Department Book Club: New Jedi Order #12
Another week, another New Jedi Order book. Like I said, I am determined to finish by the end of February. I’ve been trying to decide what books I want to read next once the NJO series is finished. There’s two options, but that’s a discussion for another day. On to book 12!
Title: Enemy Lines II: Rebel Stand
Series: New Jedi Order. Book #12
Author: Aaron Allston
Date published: May 28, 2002
Pages: 366
Status: Legends
Summary in 20 words or less: The story we were promised in Rebel Dream finally happens, fairy tales are real, we get the first Holdo maneuver.
So if you remember from the Death Star HR Book Club a couple weeks ago, I had a minor gripe that the first book in the Duology, Star Wars: New Jedi Order: Enemy Lines I: Rebel Dream1 teased that Luke was going to go on a top secret mission to Yuuzhan Vong-occupied Coruscant because he felt some Dark Side presence down there and it didn’t happen. It really didn’t even get talked about until the end of the book when Luke and Mara were assembling their crew. The other thing about the duology books is they often spend the first one focused on a narrow part of the story, and then in the second book pull back and have anywhere from 3 - 5 plots going at once. Which is what we get back to here.
The main plot, and the most fun one is the Jedi Strike Team2. Luke, Maria, Tahiri the Shoeless Jedi, and a crew of New Republic Intelligence folks head down to the “surface” of Coruscant to find whatever Dark Side vibes Luke has been feeling. What do they find, besides some Coruscant citizens resorting to implied cannibalism and a bunch of Vong? They basically found Frankenstein’s Monster but as a Dark Jedi. Meet Irek Ismaren aka Lord Nyax. Irek was a 3 meter3 tall Force-sensitive guy who’s mother was one of Emperor Palpatine’s concubines. What a very weird sentence to type. Irek first made an appearance in Children of the Jedi, and had essentially been in suspended animation since the end of that book. When the Vong started terraforming Coruscant, they woke him up and he went on a murderous rampage. It didn’t have a ton to do with the Vong really, but was a nice little adventure of the Jedi and a change of pace from fighting all Vong, all the time.
Meanwhile what’s left of the New Republic is stilling using psychological warfare to convince the Yuuzhan Vong that they’re building a Palpatine-style superweapon. The New Republic is of course not doing this, but they’ve got the Vong pretty convinced that they are. The second part of their strategy is continuing to treat Jania Solo as if she actually is Yun-Harla, the Trickster Goddess. Because of her top notch pilot skills, aided of course by being a Jedi, she has more and more of the Yuuzhan Vong at least questioning could Yun-Harla be such a trickester as to show up as a Jedi? Especially after she disobeys orders and saves Jagged Fel, the boy she’s sweet on.
All the trickery has been an effort by the New Republic to simply buy some time. Coruscant is lost, and the more time the New Republic can get to regroup and figure out what they’re going to do, the better. Led by General Wedge Antilles from his command center on Borleias, they’ve bought enough time and kept the Vong focused on the fake superweapon that it’s time to strike. The New Republic had stripped down a Super Star Destroyer and launched it straight into a Yuuzhan Vong Worldship, destroying it and giving the New Republic time to regroup and fight another day.
The Good:
Viqi Shesh finally gets what’s coming to her. The turncoat New Republic Senator had worked as a Yuuzhan Vong spy. Sorry, Viqi but nothing good comes from being a human working for the Vong.
The storyline with Luke, Mara, and Tahiri was a nice almost throwback to earlier Expanded Universe books where the villains couldn’t just be normal Sith or Imperials so they had to get bigger and weirder. A almost 10 foot ball genetically engineered Dark Side user who has lightsabers attached to his body does the trick.
The Bad:
I’m not sure this is really a complaint, but the book it could have been tightened up and maybe taken the duology into say, a 450-500 page single book.
Wild Card:
Tsavong Lah, the main Yuuzhan Vong antagonist de jure has been paranoid that other Vong are out to get him. He solves this problem by feeding those working against him to a rancor.
Next up is book number lucky 13, by one of my favorite Star Wars authors.
Things My Wife Has Said About Star Wars
For context, our cat, Taco is getting up there in the years and while it’s not likely to happen tomorrow, I know that sometime in the next couple years she’s going to be heading to the Great Litter Box in the Sky. This makes me sad, because Taco and I are best buddies and have a very close and strange man/cat relationship. And I’ve said that when she goes, I am going to get my first tattoo and it will be her paw prints. So, with that in mind…
Me: I’ve decided to upgrade my Taco tattoo when she goes.
Her: Oh…
Me: It’ll be me and Taco as Sith Lords, and it says “The Rule of Two.”
Her: Hmm…
Me: Do you know what the rule of two is?
Her. Don’t care.
Me; That wasn’t my question.
Her: That’s my answer. I don’t care that there can only be a master and an apprentice.
Her: [silence]
Her: That’s what it is, isn’t it?
Me: [laughing]
Her: Fuck.
This Day in Star Wars History
January 24th has a few births and a bunch of comics.
Adrian Edmondson was born in 1957. He looks like a pretty prolific actor over across the pond. For us, he played a First Order officer in The Last Jedi. He was the guy who thought Hux was a failson nepo baby.
Movie, TV, and voiceover actor Phil LaMarr was born in 1967. In the Star Wars universe, LaMarr provided voice work for Clone Wars, Rebels, Resistance, The Bad Batch, Book of Boba Fett, and Tales of the Jedi. That’s quite a list.
Third President of the United States Daveed Diggs was born in 1982. While best known for playing Thomas Jefferson in Hamilton, he also voiced Resistance spy Norath Kev in Resistance.
From the Depths of Wookieepedia
In what is a far lengthier entry than it probably deserves, I stumbled upon an entry from Knights of the Old Republic II, the Duel on the Ebon Hawk. I’ve mentioned a few many many times how much I love KOTOR II so when I saw this, it was worth clicking. I’m just surprised this one single bit of the game got a whole entry.
At a point in the game, the Jedi Exile, your character, has to duel with Visas Marr, a Sith Apprentice. Yup. that’s it. A lightsaber duel between a Jedi and a Sith. It’s interesting that the KOTOR games are open ended, or at least somewhat opened ended. There’s Light Side and Dark Side stories where depending on your choices, some characters live and die. But there are “official” version of the story that Lucas had deemed canon. That’s how we got Light Side Revan and the not great Legends novel about him.
News From the HoloNet
Rumor: New Star Wars Game Announcement Leaked
If you’ve been waiting for a Star Wars: RTS game, your moment is now. Or maybe April when it will supposedly be released.
Star Wars fans think they've found a prequels plot hole involving Anakin Skywalker
A plot hole in Star Wars? Surely you can’t be serious.
Every Star Wars Movie That Has Been Canceled At Disney
I can’t decide what I want more, the Rian Johnson trilogy or Guillermo del Toro’s Jabba movie.
Skeleton Crew Creators Talk ‘Rules for Star Wars’ and Season 2 Hopes
Season 2 should just be 8 episode of Neel.
That’s it for this week. If you like what I’m doing, please subscribe. I’ll catch you next week, and may the Force be with you.
An always fun “quadruple colon” title.
A name that doesn’t sound like it would work with the Jedi Code
9.8 feet, if we’re using Freedom Units
Del Toro's Jabba movie is the one that crushed me the most.
I just received a video message from my niece last night that I need to watch Skeleton Crew so I suppose I now will! Twice in one day I’ve heard about this one!