The Skywalker Saga - I

IV 

A Farm Boy intercepts a message from a Captive Princess. He is trained in ancient mysticism by a Veteran Hero, and fires the shot which saves the universe in the final battle. 

IV-VI 

A Young Man, the son of an Ancient Hero, is trained in ancient mysticism, but recklessly confronts the evil Dark Lord before he is ready. He discovers that the evil Dark Lord is in truth his father. He tries to bring his father back to the light; and seems to fail. But when he is brought before the Dark Lord's Master to be killed, his father has compassion, turns against his Master and slays him. The Young Man is reconciled with his father and lays him to rest. 

I - VI 

A long prophesied child, the Chosen One, is discovered and trained in ancient mysticism. But a parallel, evil stream of ancient mysticism is working behind the scenes. The Chosen One is initiated into the evil cult; he wipes out the good mystics and helps the head of the evil cult become ruler of the universe. The Chosen One's children are hidden from him. But when they grow up, the Chosen One's Son confronts his father, and causes him to turn back to the light and to kill the leader of the evil cult. The Chosen One and his Son are reconciled, and the Son lays the Father to rest. The long prophesied child has ended the evil cult; the prophecies have come true, after a fashion. 

I -IX 

A long prophesied child, the Chosen One, is discovered. He is initiated into evil mysticism by the Dark Lord, and he helps the same Dark Lord rule the universe. But he has two children of his own, a Son and Daughter. The Son confronts his father and causes him to turn back to the light, and to kill the Dark Lord, at the cost of his own life. But the Dark Lord soon recovers from his death, rejoins the rest of his evil cult, and starts building a powerful, non-mystical army. The Chosen One's Son tries to create a new order of good mystics. The Chosen One's Daughter has a son of her own, who joins the new mystical order. But the Dark Lord corrupts him. He too turns evil; and slaughters the new order of mystics. The Chosen One's Son, now the last of the mystics, runs away, intending that the teaching of the mystics dies with him. But the Dark Lord had a consort; and children; and one of his children had a child of his own. The Dark Lord's Granddaughter has inherited his mystical powers, but seeks to use them for good. She finds the Chosen One's Son, in his exile, and persuades him to train her in good mysticism. The Chosen One's Evil Grandson tries to turn the Dark Lord's Granddaughter to evil; while the Dark Lord's Granddaughter tries to turn the Chosen One's Grandson back to the light. The Dark Lord intends that his Granddaughter should replace him. But at the very last moment the Chosen One's Evil Grandson comes back to the light; and gives his life to save the Dark Lord's Granddaughter. She kills the Dark Lord (with the help of the spirits of every good mystic who ever lived). The evil cult, and all the children of the Chosen One are dead; but the Dark Lord's Granddaughter takes on the Chosen One's name in memory of him. 

The opening seconds. 

The logo, shrinking into space. The fanfare; the march, so heroic it is almost whimsical. The scrolling text, slanted away from the audience, slowly receding into space. The music quietly going "twinkle twinkle" in front of a screen of black stars.

Someone must paint them, I suppose. That could be a job on What's My Line? "I'm the guy who paints the stars in Star Wars." And then a space ship flies across the screen. This time we start with the baddies. 

That's what they all have in common; all nine films. Doctor Who doesn't have the same title sequence it did when I was a kid nor even really the same theme music, and that makes me sad. Every Star Wars movie starts like every other Star Wars movie, and so did many of the computer games and this makes me happy. This is the last time we will ever see a Star Wars movie with exactly this beginning and that makes me old. 

We start with Kylo on a quest to find the Emperor. We see him cutting people down with his lightsaber. And almost immediately, while we are still in a prologue, we see the Emperor. 

Not dead. Lit in such a way that the theaters have to warn epileptics to stay away. And in a sentence the last two movies are overwritten. I was worried about Snoke. The guidebooks and novels said he was some kind of baddie. Not a Sith. Some other kind. 

My friend thought that should be enough for me. He's a baddie; that's all you need to know. But I thought that the first film set Snoke up as a mystery; and a mystery needs a solution or else it's a cheat. 

"I made Snoke" is an explanation and a back story but it changes everything and not for the better. It removes something from the Force Awakens that was rather clever. The First Order were wannabe baddies, Nazi cosplayers with some big ships to back them up; keeping the Empire going even though they knew it had lost. Kylo Ren was a tragic kid with impostor syndrome who wants, slightly ludicrously, to be the new Darth Vader but realizes he'll never be good enough to be that evil. But the First Order is now the Emperor's pet project; Kylo Ren is now the Emperor's special pawn. 

In the Last Jedi, Kylo is said to have turned to the Dark Side because Luke Skywalker recklessly drew his lightsaber when he perceived his pupil's potential for evil. That was interesting; unexpected; challenging: a failure of the Light gives birth to the Darkness. "The clone Emperor's puppet put a mole in Luke's Jedi school" is just that little bit more obvious. 

This may be the third time that a military conflict between fascists and liberals has turned out to have been part of a Sith plot to rule the universe. A third of A New Hope was given over to a thrilling battle to escape the Death Star: but it turns out that it was always Darth Vader's plan to let Leia escape so he could find the location of the Rebel's hidden fortress. We know that Luke's Jedi Dad fought in the Clone Wars. We are coming to the end of a very good 133 episode cartoon series about those same wars. But they were only ever a trick to get Palpatine elected president of the galaxy. He is in fact running both sides. 

Maybe that is the point. The Message even. Star Wars was originally going to be an oblique critique of American foreign policy, and maybe the very first film kind of was, so we are allowed to look for an allegory without spoiling the fun. In the foreground, there will always be good people fighting against bad people; blowing up space stations; swinging across chasms and falling in love. But behind the curtain, the forces of Evil are always running the show. Wars will only end when Evil itself is routed out. It is rather feeble to say "The cartoon villain from the previous trilogy was planting evil thoughts in Kylo's head." But if you flip it round and say "Kylo had terrible thoughts and urges; and he went on a quest and found those thoughts and urges personified as a scary old guy in a black cloak" it sounds a lot better. 

Scrolling text. Scrolling text slanted away from the audience. Scrolling text receding into space. "It is a period of civil war. Brave rebels, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory over the evil galactic empire". 

Even in 1977, it was incredibly anachronistic. That was the point. In the 1930s movie serials had used printed captions to bring audiences up to speed on what had happened in the previous episodes. Flash Gordon used silent-movie style captions; Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars awkwardly used panels from the original cartoon strip. But the rather ambitiously titled Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe had a slanting crawl, just like the one in Star Wars. 

It never served any particular purpose. It told us that the Empire are the baddies and the Rebels are the goodies, but we would have worked that out for ourselves -- just about at the point when the big guy in black armour walks in and starts strangling people. It tells us that the Princess has stolen plans in her possession; but Darth Vader's men are telling him that the Death Star Plans are not in the main computer from the moment the curtain rises. We would have understood Star Wars just as well if we had not been told up front that the DEATH STAR is the Evil Galactic Empire's ULTIMATE WEAPON.

But the crawl still wrong-foots us. It says to us, before anything else has happened: hey! You are coming in part way through this story. We'll try to fill you in along the way, but you won't understand everything. That's fine. You're not meant to. 

We never saw the beginning of Star Wars. We had always come in half way through. 

The opening crawl isn't there to give us information. It's there to tell us how to watch the movie. Read it as if it was a fairy tale, says the opening caption. Read it as if it was a 1930s cliffhanger movie serial says the crawl. 

Can one film be both things at once? we ask

Just wait and see! says George. 

Star Wars is full of traps and escapes. But it doesn't end on a cliffhanger. It ends on a high-note. The universe has been saved and everyone gets medals. (Nearly everyone.) This is not how individual chapters end; this is how whole sagas end. Star Wars was the final episode of a serial. We missed most of it, but we came in at the end and worked out what was going on. 

We expected Star Wars Two to start where Star Wars One ended. That's what the Marvel Comic did. Everyone steps off the pedestal and locks up their medals and Luke Skywalker flies off on a new mission to a water world and Han Solo flies off on a new adventure involving a giant green rabbit. (Beneath the Planet of the Apes began with Charlton Heston kneeling on a beach, yelling at a statue. You could watch the first two Ape films back to back as a single five-hour movie, although I wouldn't recommend it.)

But instead of Star Wars Two there was Star Wars Episode V: the Empire Strikes Back. And suddenly, Star Wars is not the end of the saga, but the middle. Lucas swears blind there are going to be twelve episodes. There is still a fanfare, a blue fairy tale caption, a yellow logo, and that all-important scrolling text.

If this were really a serial, that text would tell new viewers what they had missed; recap the plot of what-is-now-called A New Hope. Instead, it told us what we had missed: what had happened while we were away. The Star Wars universe had moved on in our absence. The Empire has forced the Rebellion into retreat; Darth Vader knows Luke Skywalker's name; there is a new base on Hoth.  It is, in short, a dark time for the Rebellion. If Star Wars made us feel we are seeing the end of a serial of which we missed the first episodes; Empire Strikes Back makes us feel we have skipped a few chapters and have some catching up to do. 

There were, incidentally, those who said that the unconventional structure of Empire Strikes Back which opens with a climax and ends without a resolution, felt a lot like seeing the second half of one film and the first half of another. And that, in the days of Saturday Morning Pictures and continuous performance was what audiences often did.

But we did eventually go right back to the beginning and find out how the story had started. Didn't we?

There is certainly a film labelled Episode I and it was definitely marketed with the slogan "Every saga has a beginning..." But The Phantom Menace doesn't stand in the same relationship to A New Hope that, say, Planet of Peril does to Battling the Sea Beast. It is not an earlier chapter of the same story. It's a different story, set in an earlier period of the same history. It shows us some of the characters when they were younger. It shows us how some of the conflicts began. But we don't come in at the beginning. Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon's mission is already underway when the film opens. The saga begins with a crawl telling us stuff which has already happened. Chaos has engulfed the Galactic Republic, apparently. And we are assumed to already know what a Galactic Republic is. 

It would be an interesting exercise to imagine how the Phantom Menace would have been constructed if it really had been released, in 1976, to a world which knew nothing of the Republic or the Jedi or the Force. My guess is that it would have been told from Anakin's point of view. We would have met the strange boy with the strange parentage on the strange planet; and marveled at the aliens and the robots and the two suns; and only learn about the Jedi Knights and the Trade Federation when Obi-Wan arrives bearing the letter from Hogwarts school. And that might have made a better movie.

And now Rise of Skywalker is the end of the saga. Kind of. 

If we were still following the metaphor of the movie serial, there should have been one last caption. After Rey takes the name Skywalker the words "THE END" should have appeared in big yellow writing on the screen. Or maybe there should have been a green slide that said "...And they all lived happily ever after." But it isn't and they won't.

All the Skywalkers are dead and all the Sith are gone, but Rey still has a lightsaber and she still has the Jedi books. Episode VIII hinted that the Jedi were coming to an end and the mystery of the Grail was going to be revealed to anyone and everyone. That has not happened. Rey either will or won't start a new Jedi school; and she either will or won't repeat Luke's mistakes; and there either will or won't be more Dark Side users for them to contend with. It may take 28 years. It may find Daisy Ridley sulking on a lost planet at the other side of the universe. But sooner or later the saga will continue.

Stories have endings. History goes on forever.

Rise of Skywalker was true to its B-Movie roots. There was quicksand and secret McGuffins and last minute reprieves from firing squads. There were cliffhangers and implausible escapes from cliffhangers. Some people were annoyed when Chewbacca was definitely killed and then turned out to be perfectly all right after all. This suggests they haven't seen a lot of Flash Gordon. But Star Wars is no longer a movie serial. Star Wars is a fragmentary future history. The nine movies would be better described as Volumes or Chapters or Scrolls than Episodes.

But the opening crawl still has a purpose. The nine films together entirely fail to add up to a single, coherent narrative. The text introductions give us a sense that we are dropping into and out of the action; seeing The Star Wars Galaxy in a series of disconnected glimpses. I dislike the timelines of history and maps of the Galaxy that you can find in some official and semi-official guidebooks. I don't want to know that there was a Sith Empire 2000 years ago or that the various planets have known locations relative to the "outer rim" and the "core". I enjoy starting in the middle. And would there have been so many comics and books and films and RPGs if there were not so many gaps to be filled in?

Star Wars came forty years after Flash Gordon. Rise of Skywalker comes forty-three years after A New Hope. The children who paid a tanner each week to see the adventures of Flash and Dale at their local fleapit are nearly all dead. Even the ones who watched on BBC 2 during the 1976 Christmas holidays are well into middle-age. Story-so-far captions no longer signify that we are in the realm of Republic Serials. But they do signify that we are still in the realm of Star Wars.

Scrolling text. Scrolling text slanted away from the audience. Scrolling text receding into space. "The dead speak! The galaxy has heard a mysterious broadcast, a threat of REVENGE in the sinister voice of the late EMPEROR PALPATINE."


I'm Andrew. I like God, Doctor Who, Star Wars, Wagner, folk-music and Spider-Man, not necessarily in that order. I have no political opinions of any kind.

If you are enjoying my essays, please consider supporting me on Patreon (by pledging $1 for each essay)

Doomsday Clock

Issue #1

Issue #2

Issue #3

Issue #4

Issue #5

Issue #6

Issue #7

Issue #8

Issue #9/10

Issue #11

Issue #12

Andrew Rilstone is a writer and critic from Bristol, England. 

If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider supporting Andrew on Patreon. 

if you do not want to commit to paying on a monthly basis, please consider leaving a tip via Ko-Fi.

Pledge £1 for each essay. 

Leave a one-off tip

Watchmen and Doomsday Clock are copyright DC Comics. All quotes and illustrations are use for the purpose of criticism under the principle of fair dealing and fair use, and remain the property of the copyright holder.

 Please do not feed the troll. 

31/1/2020 23:00

Doomsday Clock #12

When I was a kid, my mum used to say "If you make a funny face and the wind changes, it will stay like that forever." 

When I write a critique I try to start with what I honestly felt about the book or film I am talking about. I try to catch what was in my mind when the credits were rolling or when I had just turned over the final page. First reactions may not always be right, but they are always true. "It grossed me out"; "it embarrassed me"; "I was bored"; "I didn't understand it" are the most truly true things you can ever say about a work of art. "I found the tunes catchy; I was singing them all the way home" is the best thing you can possibly say about a musical. If you say "I shouldn't think the writer meant me to feel disgusted. I probably misunderstood. I will try and manufacture a response more in tune with what I imagine the writer wanted me to think," then you are no longer providing an authentic response to the work. 

I try to apply this to my essays on the Bible and my essays on old comic books equally. 

"This shocked me," "This confused me," "I laughed at this" can't be the end point of a critical essay. But it should usually be the starting point.

This may be what the people who say that we should "accept Talons of Weng Chiang for what it is" have in mind. And they are not quite wrong. It is valid and useful and important to say "This is a tongue in cheek pastiche of a Victorian penny dreadful. It's awfully well done and I found it exciting and funny". You can then say "But the depiction of Chinese people in it was horrible," and then go on and ask the hard questions. Some of us feel that some kinds of critics jump straight into the exegesis without having spotted what kind of work we are talking about. I have myself more than once read essays on old 1960s Doctor Who and wanted to cry out "You do get that this was a Saturday tea time adventure serial for kids, don't you?" 

I get that someone's first reaction might be "The silly caricatures of Chinese people freaked me out so badly that I couldn't see anything else in the story." There is more than one authentic response to Talons of Weng Chiang, just as much as there is more than one authentic response to Paradise Lost or My Struggle. 

This essay is not about Talons of Weng Chiang. 

Imagine three stories. 

STORY ONE: A dead child is discovered, carefully laid out on a table in a Mayfair pub. The child is of European appearance, but is dressed in traditional Indian clothes. There are no marks on his body, and he has been dead for several months. Absolutely baffled, the police ask Mr Sherlock Holmes to investigate. 

STORY TWO: One evening while Mr Sherlock Holmes is in Sussex hunting for vampires, a news reporter -- in reality Moriarty in disguise -- offers Mrs Hudson a large some of money if she will provide incriminating evidence that Dr Watson is carrying on a clandestine love affair with Mycroft. 

STORY THREE: Sherlock Holmes starts to wonder how there can possibly have been such a large number of bizarre murders in a single city over such a short space of time. It gradually becomes clear that most of Holmes' cases have been created, or at any rate heavily fictionalized, by Dr Watson in order to help the public understand Holmes' methods. Holmes -- ventriloquized by Watson -- wonders whether, in the future, any of these fake cases will be turned into plays or even moving picture stories. 

For the sake of argument, let's call stories of the first kind "Open", stories of the second kind "Closed" and stories of the third kind "meta". 

A story of the first kind creates a new situation, and then shows the reader how an established character reacts to it or deals with it. The story is about the new situation much more than it is about the character. Sherlock Holmes can solve as many different murder puzzles as writers can devise; and the mystery of the Indian Prince could be perfectly well investigated by some other detective.

A story of the second kind generates a new situation from within a pre-existing structure: the writer looks at established characters and comes up with a new way for them to interact. "The baddie tried to convince the goodie that the goodie's friend was in love with the goodie's brother" is, of course, an intelligible narrative; but the particular interest of this story depends on us already knowing and caring about who Holmes and Mycroft are.  

A story of the third kind is a story about other stories; it is a piece of literary criticism masquerading as a narrative. "What if Watson was falsifying Holmes' career?" is only an interesting question if we already know and love the Holmes canon. "What if Some Guy's friend were writing inaccurate short stories about his career?" would be of hardly any interest.

Most series fiction on TV -- Doctor Who, Star Trek, Columbo -- deals with stories of the first kind. The writer creates a new monster, a new planet or a new crime and then imagines how the Doctor, Captain Kirk or Columbo would deal with it. Soap-operas, on the other hand, are almost by definition stories of the second kind: the established characters are the starting point, and the writers try to come up with new ways for them to come into conflict or misunderstand each other. And while stories of the third kind are rather rarer in mainstream fiction, anyone writing Sherlock Holmes stories or Superman stories or Doctor Who stories is sooner or later going to be very tempted to write a story about how those kinds of stories work.

Traditional, jobbing writers have tended to think that proper stories are always stories of the first kind. Fan fiction writers are much more likely to write stories of the second kind. But as culture eats itself and all writing turns into fan fiction, stories of the second kind become more and more common. In the olden days, Doctor Who writers were discouraged from using established villains as points of departure. The writer pitched an idea about time travelling terrorists or a funeral planet and the script editor said "Hey...we could put the Daleks in that as well." But fan pitches always take "what if..." questions as a point of departure. What if the Daleks went after the Key to Time? What if the Guardians and the Time Lords came into conflict about who controls the timelines? If Major Clanger and Papa Smurf had a fight, who would win? 

My honest and authentic reaction to the final instalment of Doomsday Clock is utter bafflement. I don't fully understand what is supposed to have happened; I don't fully understand why I am supposed to care. And I don't know who half the characters are. I have re-read it; and re-read the issues which preceded it; and even read the episodes of Batman and the Flash which form a kind of prequel; and I am still confused. So I cannot offer you an assessment: all I can do is share my confusion.... 

The final panel ends with a boy arriving at a house, claiming that a friend of his father has promised that the couple who live there will take care of him; and that "Jon" calls him "Clark". He looks a little like a young Clark Kent, but he has the Doctor Manhattan hydrogen symbol on his forehead. I had to spend several minutes flipping through pages to work out what was going on here. The child is the son of Mime and Marionette; the couple who adopt him are Dan and Lauire, Nite Owl and Silk Spector from the original Watchmen. One of the first questions raised in issue #1 was why Doctor Manhattan wouldn't kill Marionette while she was pregnant, when he has had no compunction about killing humans in the past. It turns out that his time sense told him that her child would make Laurie, who he used to love, very happy some day. In the space of two or three panels, Doctor Manhattan has taken the child of Mime and Marionette, brought him up, and transferred his powers to him. (Mime and Marionette also have another child of their own, so that makes it okay.) 

Doctor Manhattan understands that the Watchmen world is grimdark and that the DC Universe is hopeful because of the existence of Superman; and that what makes Superman a hero is having loving parents like Jonathan and Martha Kent. His tinkering with time -- including moving the power battery a few inches so Alan Scott never becomes Green Lantern and the Justice Society never comes into being -- has made the DC Universe grimdark like Watchmen. He is now making the Watchmen universe more hopeful by supplying it with a Superman. That's why he takes the child and gives it to Laurie and Dan. Why it had to be this particular child and why it had to be those particular parents I am unclear about. I get that Superman is a Hero because he was adopted and brought up by a good, salt-of-the-earth Smallville couple. But surely any empowered child and any loving couple would have done the trick?

Halfway through the comic we get to the meeting between Superman and Doctor Manhattan that we've been building towards since issue #1.

Superman confronts Doctor Manhattan on Mars. Doctor Manhattan admits that he's the one who has been editing DC continuity; removing the Justice Society from history and causing the death of Superman's parents and generally getting poor reviews from the fan community. "I am the one who you are going to destroy" says Doctor Manhattan. "Or I am the one who is going to destroy everything." "Maybe there is a third choice" says Superman. The third choice is, and stop me if you have heard this before, Love. Superman points to the picture of Jon and Janey at the fairground before the accident. 

So Doctor Manhattan destroys the universe.

Like, totally. Black page. Another black page. A whole page of black panels. And then blow me if we don't go into a whole "destruction of Krypton" sequence (drawn in the style of John Byrne) and lots of little panels of Superman arriving on earth in lots of different times and places. Because in every parallel world there has to be a Superman.We go right back to the scene in issue #1, where Pa and Ma Kent drive their car into a tree right after Clark's high school prom; but this time Superboy is there to save them. Because now Superman isn't the first Superhero on earth; he can be inspired by the heroes of the past; and thus become a much happier hero much earlier.

"Because the Justice Society exists again, so does Superboy and because Superboy exists again so does the Legion. As the metaverse reforms, time catches up." 

It goes on. "Every time there is a change in the metaverse, the multiverse grows. To preserve every era of Superman." In 1938, Superman was the only Superhero, and that had implications for his character. In 1968, he was one of thousands, and that had implications for his character as well. Over the years, DC has rebooted the character many times, giving us a singular version who can work in a contemporary comic. The DC:52 reboot, largely regarded as a failure, decreed that Superman was a relatively recent arrival on Earth, and that humans still treated superheroes with suspicion. Fans felt that this produced a version of the character too far from his roots. So: it was Doctor Manhattan messing with the timeline that created the DC:52 version of Superman; and now Doctor Manhattan has set things right. But that version, along with every other version, still exists as a parallel world. (Doomsday Clock, uniquely, takes place in "the metaverse"; the universe of which all the other worlds are copies. Future DC comics will, I suppose, take place in one of the parallels. The Clark Kent of mainstream continuity is never going to say "And then there was that time I met the big blue naked guy on Mars.") There are lots of parallel worlds we have never heard of. "On July 10th 2030 the Secret Crisis begins, throwing Superman into a brawl across the universe with Thor himself and a Green behemoth stronger than even Doomsday who dies protecting Superman from these invaders."

Please, please, make it stop.  

Final scene. Doctor Manhattan and Ozymandias in front of the Washington Monument. Ozymandias thought that the only person who could stop the Watchmen universe degenerating into atomic war, again, was Doctor Manhattan. But he knew he couldn't ever persuade him to come back and do it. So everything which has happened has been a plot by Ozymandias to engineer a confrontation between Manhattan and Superman, because he, Ozymandias, could see that Superman would be able to persuade him, Doctor Manhattan, to save the world. By saying "all you need is love", apparently.

Doctor Manhattan destroys every nuclear weapon on earth and then "gives his powers" to the Earth, and to the boy, and then ceases to exist. The Watchmen universe has its own Superman. DC Continuity is restored to something like the Silver Age Multiverse. And we never have to waste any of our lives reading drivel like this as long as we live. 

In or about 1983, Roy Thomas decreed that Jack Kirby's Eternals should become a part of the Marvel Universe. Roy Thomas believed everything should become part of the Marvel Universe which is  why Spider-Man met Conan the Barbarian and SHIELD fought Godzilla. He put his plans in motion in Thor #283 under the headline "They said it couldn't be done!" To Marvel's credit, Thor #284 included a letter from a fan beginning "What they said was that it shouldn't be done..." 

The incorporation of Watchmen into the DC Universe is something which should not have been attempted. And no-one should have tried to tell us what happens after the final panel of the final page of Watchmen #12. Anyone who sees a novel with an open-ended conclusion and thinks "I know, let's close it off!" didn't ought to be writing fiction in the first place. But having made the bad call, it beggars belief that Geoff Johns could have written a comic so unremittingly, tediously boring. (The aforementioned Eternals/Thor crossover climaxes with the Destroyer walloping Arishem with the Odinsword, which may shit on two different Kirby koncepts but is nevertheless, kind of kool.) Characters called Ozymandias encounter characters called Luthor and someone called Batman meets up with someone called Rorschach but there is no sense of magnitude or audacity. Just pages and pages of exposition. No-one is having any fun. For goodness sake: if you are going to mix up incompatible settings, at least give us a double page spread of Superman with Captain America's shield in one hand and Thor's hammer in the other. 

Doomsday Clock is a narrative of the third kind: not a story, but an essay. It is completely uninterested in the themes and questions raised by Alan Moore in the original comic. But it doesn't have anything particularly interesting to say about the DC Universe. Superman's story has been told in lots of different ways over the years, and the different versions of him are all equally valid. We can like the muscular liberal pulpy version from the 1930s and the smiley campy cartoony 1960s version as well. Hold the front pages. 

A story which deconstructed the characters of the DC Universe in the same way and to the same extent as Alan Moore deconstructed his own Watchmen characters might have been worth telling. But while Watchmen leaves the whole idea of Superheroes in ruins; Doomsday Clock asserts the primacy of Superman (and therefore DC Superheroes) over everything else. 

I suppose that is what we would expect. On the last page of Watchmen, Alan Moore tells us that Ozymandias appears to have successfully saved the world from nuclear war; on the first page of Doomsday Clock Geoff Johns tells us that the ploy didn't work and the world got blown up after all. So naturally, the end result of Doomsday Clock is to reconstruct the idols that Watchmen had so comprehensively torn down. 

There could, in fact, be some interest in a Watchmen sequel of the second kind -- one which looks at the characters who Alan Moore left alive at the end of his epic; looks at the situations they were left in; and then imagines what would have happened next. Did Robert Redford really become president? What did Laurie do after Doctor Manhattan left earth? Did Ozymandias live out his days in peace? How was Rorschach remembered? What would it be like to be born ten or twenty years after the giant squid destroyed New York? 

And with very fine irony, the final instalment of H.B.O's Watchmen TV series came out in the same week as Doomsday Clock #12. It turns out that you can shit on Alan Moore's legacy but nevertheless create a compelling story. 

All the objections still apply. It is wrong to take over someone else's characters without their permission -- while, indeed, they are alive and begging you not to do so. It is silly to write sequels to works which require none. But "this should not have been done" and "this is artistically bad" are two different propositions. 

Yes: I know. Alan Moore is not the first writer to have been screwed by his publisher. Young writers often are. If there was a loophole in his contract then there was a loophole in his contract. 

When Len Wein created Swamp Thing, he knew he was creating a new entry in DCs roster of narrative workhorses. He must have fully accepted the possibility that other hands -- Alan Moore's not the first -- would take over his character when he was done with it. But still. Alan Moore had his first big success by dissecting someone else's creation. 

Jerry Siegel and Joe Simon could not possibly have envisaged anything like Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? when they created Superman. But by 1986 Superman had grown way beyond his original creators; and DC Comics were paying them a moderately generous stipend. But still: one of Alan Moore's most fondly remembered works is the hypothetical final chapter in the life of a character he never created. 

Alan Moore did not, in the end, write a deconstruction of Captain Atom and Blue Beetle. But he  wanted to; and if he had done so, he would have been the last in a long line of distinguished creators who have ripped Ditko off. And of course, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a very interesting new thing created entirely out of already existing old things. There isn't a single character that Alan Moore hasn't borrowed from another creator. That's kind of the point of it.

It is wrong for H.B.O to "borrow" Watchmen to create a new artistic work of their own. It is equally wrong for DC to have done so. Doomsday Clock is a catastrophic artistic failure; H.B.O's Watchmen TV series is a resounding artistic success. But both are moral offences. What we said was that they shouldn't be done.  

Two wrongs. That was what my mother used to say. "Two wrongs don't make a right."

Andrew Rilstone is a writer and critic from Bristol, England. 

If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider supporting Andrew on Patreon. 

if you do not want to commit to paying on a monthly basis, please consider leaving a tip via Ko-Fi.

Pledge £1 for each essay. 

Leave a one-off tip

Watchmen and Doomsday Clock are copyright DC Comics. All quotes and illustrations are use for the purpose of criticism under the principle of fair dealing and fair use, and remain the property of the copyright holder.

 Please do not feed the troll. 

Ai! laurië lantar lassi súrinen,
yéni unótimë ve rámar aldaron!
Yéni ve lintë yuldar avánier
mi oromardi lisse-miruvóreva
Andúnë pella, Vardo tellumar
nu luini yassen tintilar i eleni
ómaryo airetári-lírinen.

Sí man i yulma nin enquantuva?

An sí Tintallë Varda Oiolossëo
ve fanyar máryat Elentári ortanë,
ar ilyë tier undulávë lumbulë;
ar sindanóriello caita mornië
i falmalinnar imbë met, ar hísië
untúpa Calaciryo míri oialë.
Sí vanwa ná, Rómello vanwa, Valimar!

Namárië! Nai hiruvalyë Valimar.
Nai elyë hiruva. Namárië!

There is no Nativity in Mark. This is my favorite Gospel song.

Did You Like Star Wars Episode IX: Rise of Skywalker

There is a big bad. Exactly how he came to be there and where he came from is pretty much ignored. There is a dark lord on a dark throne on the planet of Exidor where shadows lie. That is all we know and all we need to know. 

There is a series of McGuffins which will eventually reveal the coordinates of the planet on which the big bad is hidden. There is a big metal eight sided dice which is very carefully not called a Holocron; and there is a magic dagger, possibly quite a subtle one. So a group of characters go off to find them. They are precisely the group of characters who have been the heroes of the previous movies. They are the only people who can undertake the mission because they are best friends. They love each other, but they only have 16 hours to save the universe. 

For two thirds of the movie, they bounce from exotic location to exotic location, falling into traps, getting captured and escaping. There is a festival on a desert planet; quicksand; sleazy backstreets; a high tech city out of Blade Runner; a possibly familiar forest moon; and an evil spaceship whose corridors feel suspiciously like the interior of the Death Star. Although the universe is going to come to an end in a few hours, and although their mission mostly looks kind of hopeless; all the player characters are clearly having great fun; bantering and scoring points of each other, laughing and joking their way to near certain oblivion. Goodies get killed off and get apparently killed off and get kind of virtually cybernetically killed off; but no-one really seems to mind or believe it. 

There is a deep heavy serious sub-plot. We have been building towards it from the very beginning. But it is sensibly kept in the background. One of the heroes is, to coin a phrase, a space wizard of uncertain and mysterious parentage; with a mysterious link to the evil space wizard who is now in charge of the evil empire. They keep kind of meeting and kind of having psychic sword fights and kind of revealing surprisingly unforeshadowed facts about each others' backstory. But none of that distracts from the Adventuring. 

The forces of evil are very much split. The evil space wizard is the enemy of the new dark lord and the evil empire contains a high level double agent passing information to the goodies. 

Two thirds of the way through the movie, all the McGuffins are secured. The good and evil space wizards go off to confront the dark lord as part of their personal development; everyone else gets into space ships to fight the dark lord's redundantly obscene stockpile of weapons. 

There is an absolutely huge battle and the goodies win. 

There is then a Jacksonesque fifteen minutes in which the film keeps doing call backs to all the previous films and completely failing to come to an end. There are brief Ewoks but no Gunganss. There is a final final scene which is really nice but which has pretty much no bearing on the rest of the movie. (I suspect it was filmed or at any rate scripted before anyone knew what Episode IX was going to be all about.) 

The best description of Star Wars I ever read was "a Saturday morning serial with Wagnerian pretensions". I don't think that the original Star Wars movie can quite support the sheer weight of Jungian psychology and fan-fictional universe building that has been piled on top of it. Somewhere along the line -- around the hundred and fiftieth minute of Empire Strikes Back -- Star Wars ceased to be about fathers and became about Fathers, or Father Archetypes. But Star Wars is and should always have been pulp adventure and space opera. Luke Skywalker is much more Flash Gordon than he is Siegfried. It should have been about heroes doing derring deeds. It's pulp. Since the Phantom Menace -- arguably since Return of the Jedi we've lost track of that. It's been too much about Darth Sidious telling Darth Vader about Darth Plagius during the ballet. 

I have argued elsewhere that a similar thing happens to Robert Galbraith's children's books. Volume 1 is a joyously ripping yarn about secret tunnels, school bullies, caddish teachers, unfair detentions and critical sporting fixtures; with just enough hints about a supremely evil wizard and the hero's mysterious heritage to give it some gravitas. By volume 7, the evil wizard has become the entire focus of the story. All the fun has gone away. 

There are some movie prequels which consist largely of elderly wizards sitting in boardrooms explaining the back story to each other, so the analogy actually works rather well. 

So with Star Wars. It isn't that the Jedi are not part of the magic of Star Wars. They are very probably the single most important element in the whole saga; the thing which distinguishes Star Wars from every other nine part Space Opera sequence you have ever seen. It isn't a coincidence that I started a Jedi Knights Club as opposed to a Rebel Pilots Club. But they are just not that interesting in themselves. The right place for them is in the background. Vader is the Emperor's henchman oh and by the way he used to be a Jedi Knight. Luke is a shit hot fighter pilot oh and by the way he wants to be a Jedi Knight. 

For many of us, the "real" Star Wars, the place where we encounter the joy and fun and excitement and exoticism and retro-nostalgia long-time-ago-ness at the heart of the saga has not been the increasingly flawed movies, but the mostly pretty good comic books, the very good cartoons, and the very, very, very good role-playing game. 

I have probably told this story before. (When nine hundred years you reach, tell the same stories again and again will you too.) Back in the day, when there were only three Star Wars movies, me and a group of gaming buddies put the video of Return of the Jedi into the VCR. (A "video" is kind of like an early version of Netflix, but with a choice of only one movie.) You remember the scene where Luke defrosts Han in Jabba's palace, and there is a brief exchange: "How we doing kid?" "Same as usual." "That bad?" All the role-players called out, as with one voice "I know that feeling"

We knew what it was like to be Star Wars characters. Luke and Han were just overgrown PCs. 

So please believe me that I am in no way criticizing Rise of Skywalker to say that it felt like a Star Wars role-playing game; like an extended episode of Star Wars: Rebels. Yes, sure, the entire universe is going to be over-run with evil, and yes, sure, the Emperor appears to have acquired a whole fleet of Death Stars and yes, one, several, or fewer beloved characters may or may not be mostly dead by the final scene. And yes, everything that Rey thought she believed about everything turns out to be wrong, again. But "Wheee----hayyyy" we're on a starship shooting along a trench and all is right with the world. 

I am totally in earnest here. The film may not survive multiple rewatchings; and I am not yet sure what it will do or has done to the Holy Franchise. But, to take just one example. When all the heroes appear to have drowned in the Lightning Sand but actually find themselves in a network of tunnels; and when they encounter a big scaly dragon Rancor thing, which Finn wants to kill but Rey wants to make friends with -- I could literally have whooped with joy. 

This is how it should always have been. Not hours and hours of Rey or Luke or Anakin talking to Luke or Yoda or Palpatine and approaching a dangerous time when they will be tested by the dark side of the Plot. Just a group of heroes. One of the heroes' Thing is that he is reckless; one of the heroes' Thing is that he is strong and furry; one of the heroes' Thing is that she is the Last But One Jedi. All together on one last adventure. Threepio gets some lines! Chewbacca gets to break things! No-one sings the Wookie Life Day Song! 

Obviously, they were going to figure out how to make Star Wars movies in the final volume of the ennealogy. That's how this stuff works.


I'm Andrew. I like God, Doctor Who, Star Wars, Wagner, folk-music and Spider-Man, not necessarily in that order. I have no political opinions of any kind.

If you are enjoying my essays, please buy me a "coffee" (by dropping £3 in the tip jar)

Or consider supporting me on Patreon (by pledging $1 for each essay)

I had a weird dream last night.

I dreamed I went into a 24 hour shop on Stokes Croft. 

I dreamed it was mostly selling booze, but had some bread and milk and chocolate and polish cakes.

I dreamed there was a shiny electronic machine which said "Instantly By And Sell Crypto". 

I don't know what Crypto was: a drug? A friendly alien dog? But you could buy it and sell it instantly.

In my dream, I turned around, having bought some bread and some milk and some cheese (but no Cryptos) and saw a pile of tomorrow's papers. 

In my dream, the Prime Minister was a man named Boris. And the newspaper headline was "Boris Promises New Golden Age." 

I dreamed a dream my life would be so different from this hell I'm living. I see the English living in my houses and the the Spanish fishing in my seas. Bring me my amazing coloured coat.

Did you like Star Wars Episode IX: Rise of Skywalker

You don't actually want to know whether I liked the Rise of Skywalker. You actually want to know what I will say early next year, when I have seen it a few times and feel ready to talk about Campbell and Canon and Continuity.

And anyway, you are going to go and see the movie over the weekend, and you'll decide whether you like it or not for yourself. If I liked it more than you (like Phantom Menace) that's probably because I'm overinvested in the product and can force myself to like anything with the Star Wars logo on it. Even the Holiday Special was "not quite as bad as I had been expecting." If I liked it less than you (like The Last Jedi) that's probably because I've been watching these movies for so damn long that I overthink them and worry about stuff that no sane person would even notice.

But still: I have to start off by doing a straight review. Saying if I liked it. It was a nice movie. It made me feel like I was ten years old again. It was a dreadful movie. I felt like someone had pissed on my childhood. And I have to to do that without giving away any of the twists, revelations, or surprises. I assume that you already know the big ones: the Emperor is still alive and Chewbacca is Rey's mother.

Rise of Skywalker has to justify itself as a mega-blockbuster, a blockbuster squared. (Star Wars invented the whole idea of blockbusters) There are nutters like me who went to see it in the middle of the night -- enough of us to fill at least three screens of the Bristol Showcase. And there are a lot of perfectly sane people who saw The Force Awakens and the Last Jedi and quite want to know what happens next. Never mind the dangerous doll decapitating nutters on YouTube: millions of perfectly sane not-especially-fannish people really care about what happens to these made up characters in the next two and a half hours. This isn't a niche interest any more. And they aren't just any made-up characters. They are iconic character; characters we literally grew up with; characters many of us can't imagine a world without.

Or, to be strictly accurate. These are some fairy nondescript characters; we first encountered them four years ago and we are still waiting for them to acquire back-stories. But there are cameo appearances by several iconic figures from the 1970s. One of the original actors has, very sadly, died: this casts a massive shadow over the whole endeavor. It is painfully obviously what Princess Leia's role in the movie would have been if Carrie Fisher were still alive; we have to watch Abrams tiptoeing around a script from which fate has deleted all the pivotal scenes He does a technically clever job of  pasting cutting-room-floor clips of Carrie saying "I don't agree with you" and "This is a very important mission" into scenes from the new script. But it still feels terribly awkward and conspicuous.

There are X-Wings and TIE Fighters and the Millennium Falcon. They are totally still iconical.

And this is not just any blockbuster event movie. This is the Last Star Wars Movie or at any rate the final part of the trilogy of trilogies envisaged by George Lucas.

Can The Rise of Skywalker pull all the threads together and answer the many outstanding questions?

Can Abrams provide payoffs to all the setups he created in Force Awakened while honouring some of the more outre detours introduced by Rian Johnson in Last Jedi?

Can Episode VIII generate a "sense of an ending" which feels big enough and significant enough to be the final destination of the journey we collectively embarked on in 1977?

No. No of course it can't. No one film could.

But it is still manages to be a  very, very, very good Star Wars movie.

Did you like Star Wars Episode IX: Rise of Skywalker

Yes.

it's only a movie


these are only made up characters

the person writing the film isn't even the person who made them up

it also isn't even the person who made up the last film


if you like it that is cool

you liked the last one more than some people did

and you liked the three before the one before last WAY more than most people did



it isn't an exam you are going to take

it isn't sensible to feel nervous and apprehensive


not in a 'I am looking forward to this way'

but in a 'I hope I am not disappointed way'


in any event it will not be the biggest disappointment in the last week.


this is the way people who feel who were driven mad by the last one

mad to the point of cutting up dolls and demanding someone make it again

although maybe they were mad already

probably they were mad already



if someone makes a bad Batman film then there can still be a good Batman film

if someone makes a bad Spider-Man film there will be another one a long in a minute

but because of the funny way the rules have panned out; this film can never be made again

this film will define and redefine the universe and whether the universe continues


you do not break faith with the your younger selves if you do not like this film

this film does not break faith with your younger selves if it is not very good

all previous films and action figures and memories at 3am will be exactly as they were at 11pm


symbols and archetypes and flags and relics matter

either they became archetypes because we invested in them, or we invested in them because they were archetypes

it is possible to be overinvested


i wish this was something I could just sit back and enjoy


possibly taking it a bit too seriously


i wish this was only a movie

Mark 7

"This 'Jesus': the one who controls the weather and raises the dead and can out-Elijah Elijah. The one the King thinks is a beheaded man come back to life and the People think is a Celestial Prophet come back to earth. What did he do next? The whole 'walking on the water' thing must have been a hard act to follow."

"Oh: pretty much what you would expect. He met up with some religious lawyers and had a pedantic argument about dietary restrictions and the canonical status of oral tradition."

"Oh... right."

When you find something odd or troubling in a text, the best thing to do is focus on it. The oddness or troublesomeness is probably the point. Some people might look at this passage and say "Aha. So here we see the True Historical Jesus -- the reforming Rabbi who had some controversial ideas about ritual ablutions. The miracle stuff in the other chapters is just silly folklore we can ignore." And other people might look at it and say "Aha. For some reason, and way after the fact, someone has looked at a lot of stories about a cosmic world-saviour and rather clumsily added some Jewish stuff to make it look a bit more historical." 

But Mark was a human being and a story teller. If there are contradictions and clashes of register in the text, they didn't get there by magic: Mark put them there. If something seems odd, it is highly likely that he meant it to seem odd.

So let's keep both sides of the story in our heads. Jesus is accumulating titles like "Son of Man" and "Holy One of God". God (literally God) called him "my one-and-only Son." How does Mark want us to picture this One And Only Son of God?

Apparently, as a religious expert, having a pedantic argument with other religious experts.

then came together unto him the Pharisees 

and certain of the scribes 

which came from Jerusalem. 

and when they saw some of his disciples eat bread with defiled, 

that is to say, with unwashen, hands, 

they found fault. 

for the Pharisees, 

and all the Jews, 

except they wash their hands oft, eat not, 

holding the tradition of the elders. 

and when they come from the market, 

except they wash, they eat not 

and many other things there be, 

which they have received to hold, 

as the washing of cups, and pots, brasen vessels, and of tables. 

then the Pharisees and scribes asked him 

"why walk not thy disciples according to the tradition of the elders 

but eat bread with unwashen hands?" 

he answered and said unto them 

"well hath Esaias prophesied of you hypocrites, 

as it is written 

'this people honoureth me with their lips, 

but their heart is far from me. 

howbeit in vain do they worship me 

teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.' 

for laying aside the commandment of God 

ye hold the tradition of men 

as the washing of pots and cups 

and many other such like things ye do" 

and he said unto them, 

"full well ye reject the commandment of God, 

that ye may keep your own tradition. 

for Moses said, 'honour thy father and thy mother' 

and, 'whoso curseth father or mother, let him die the death' 

but ye say, 

'if a man shall say to his father or mother, 

"it is Corban (that is to say, a gift)

by whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me" he shall be free' 

and ye suffer him no more to do ought for his father or his mother; 

making the word of God of none effect through your tradition, 

which ye have delivered

and many such like things do ye."

So. We have a debate between two approaches to religious law. In this corner, the pedantic, literalist approach which says that you achieve a state of holiness by rigorously following the Word as it is laid down in the holy texts. And in this corner, the more dynamic approach, which says that the law is a living thing and you must perpetually adapt it to the real life circumstances you find yourself in.

No surprise there. The awkward thing is that Jesus appears to be taking the rigorous, literalist approach; the Pharisees the more lenient, interpretative one.

The story has three different components. There is what Jesus said to the Pharisees; what Jesus said to the Multitude; and what Jesus said to his own Disciples. And then, cunningly concealed by the King James translators, there is Mark's comment about what Jesus meant, which, when we get to it, will make our jaws drop to the floor and our minds boggle in amazement.

We have to keep reminding ourselves that there is a regional conflict going on. Jesus is from Galilee in the North; he has not so far gone more than half a days ride from the lake. The Pharisees come from Judea in the South. The last time we heard from them they were conspiring with Herod's faction to have Jesus killed.

If we keep this in mind we can avoid a massive textual heffalump trap. Mark says that the Jews insist on all kinds of ceremonial ablutions. This suggests to some readers that he must be directing his Gospel at pagans, who may not know about Jewish beliefs. Some would take the as evidence that there is a racist element creeping into Christianity even at this early stage: "the Jews" are already seen as an alien tribe. But this leaves us with a text that makes no sense: a text which says that the Jesus who attends synagogue and talks about Moses is not a Jew; that Jesus at some level considered the prophet Isaiah to be not a Jew. If, on the other hand, when Mark talks about "the Jews" he means not "the Jews as opposed to the Christians" but "the Judeans as opposed to the Galileans" then everything falls into place. The Scribes have come up specially from Jerusalem to complain that Jesus's students don't wash up before meals. Mark points out that the Pharisees -- and indeed, all the Judeans -- have got a lot of cleanliness rules we Galileans in the North don't bother with.

The Pharisees, as we have seen, believe in an oral Torah which can modify and interpret the written Torah. Jesus treats "what Moses said" and "what God said" as synonymous. The Ten Commandments and Leviticus are "the word of God" and "the commandments of God"; the Pharisee's teachings are merely "the commandments of men" "the traditions of men" and "your own traditions". 

Christians have tended to see this passage as making a distinction between a purely internal, spiritual orientation towards God and a preoccupation with external cleanliness. But Jesus accepts the authority of the law of Moses. His complaint against the Pharisees is that they are operating a double-standard. They use their supplementary traditions to add obligations to the law when they want to find fault with Jesus's students; but they use those same traditions to subtract obligations from the law when they find them inconvenient.

It's a very lawyerly argument; and Jesus's language, at least in translation; has the whiff of the courtroom about it. "Thus do you make the law of null effect by your teaching..."

"Your disciples do not follow our Traditions, thus excusing themselves from certain onerous tasks!"

"Yeah! Well look at the way your lot use the same Traditions to excuse yourselves from onerous tasks when it suits you!"

The word for hypocrite is "hypocrite" which in English generally means hypocrite. But it literally means a person who wears a mask: an actor. The accusation is not "you don't practice what you preach" but "you are only playing at religion". ("You are nothing but show offs!" says the Contemporary English Bible.")

and when he had called all the people unto him, 

he said unto them, 

"Hearken unto me every one of you, and understand: 

there is nothing from without a man, 

that entering into him can defile him 

but the things which come out of him, 

those are they that defile the man. 

if any man have ears to hear, let him hear." 

and when he was entered into the house from the people 

his disciples asked him concerning the parable. 

and he saith unto them, 

"are ye so without understanding also? 

do ye not perceive, 

that whatsoever thing from without entereth into the man, 

it cannot defile him; 

because it entereth not into his heart 

but into the belly, 

and goeth out into the draught, 

purging all meats?" 

and he said, 

"that which cometh out of the man, 

that defileth the man. 

for from within, 

out of the heart of men, 

proceed evil thoughts, 

adulteries, 

fornications, 

murders, 

thefts 

covetousness 

wickedness 

deceit 

lasciviousness 

an evil eye 

blasphemy 

pride 

foolishness: 

all these evil things come from within 

and defile the man"

"You don't put anything disgusting into your body; the disgusting stuff is what comes out." We would probably not regard this saying as a parable; but the disciples do. Jesus has stated an obvious fact about the world: if anything, earthy and a little bit vulgar. Food is nice; puke is disgusting. Smells good going in but bad coming out. The disciples are not being willfully stupid. They are saying "That much is obvious, Lord: but we do not see the application."

Jesus's explanation does not quite follow from the parable. Jesus says, in effect "When I was talking about yukky stuff which comes out of you, I wasn't talking about excrement. I was talking about what comes out of you: yucky behaviour." 

And now we come to a rather fascinating textual crux.

King James says that Jesus said that what you put in your body can't pollute you "because it entereth not into the heart, but into the belly, and goeth out into the draught, purging all meats." The King writes "draught" or "drain" to protect our embarrassment, but aphedrona definitely means "toilet" (literally "the place where you go to sit by yourself"). Now, the English Bible runs the sentences together: "out into the sewer, purging all meats". That makes it sound like the sewer is doing the purging; which makes fairly good sense. "Food just goes through your body and down the toilet where we get rid of all the yucky stuff." At least one modern paraphrase takes "purged" to mean "flushed".

But katharizon panta ta bromata means "purifying all the food." When Jesus healed the leper a few chapters ago he said katharistheti. English Bibles render that as "be cleansed!" or "be purified!". Maybe we should imagine the Leper saying "If you will, you can flush and disinfect me." Maybe the world is a great big smelly latrine and Jesus has come to pull the chain.

Most translators now agree that "purging all meat" is an authorial interjection: Mark's words, not Jesus's. I am sure they are correct: but they have to use an awful lot of words to convey this in English. The Good News Bible has "In saying this Jesus declared that all foods are fit to be eaten". The New English Bible goes with "This means all foods are clean." And the Message, as ever, just makes something up: "That put an end to dietary quibbling." But a literal translation would have to run along the lines of " '...It goes into your tummy and then down the drain' (purifying all food)".

Mark wasn't a disciple. He didn't hear Jesus say any of this. But since the third century at least, Christians have said that Mark got his material from Peter. We know that Peter gave up the Jewish cleanliness laws only with great reluctance; he and Paul have a stand-up row over the issue. Is it possible that we should imagine Peter chiming in with the "purging all the food" comment?  In these confused and confusing passages, it is very easy to imagine the rambling voice of the old, old fisherman who perhaps still has problems with this aspect of his Master's teaching. "There was that time he walked on water. And then he had a big debate with the lawyers. Food makes no difference, he said. It just goes down the loo. (So everything's clean.) It's what we're like on the inside he cares about..."

When the Pharisees asked why Jesus' disciples weren't fasting, he said "they don't have to fast as long as I am here." When they asked why his disciples were breaking the Sabbath, Jesus said, in effect, "The Sabbath is whatever I say it is." Here again, the Pharisees think they have caught Jesus out. Jesus points up their hypocrisy and inconsistency; and then, in a parenthesis, wipes out the entire kosher system. Mark doesn't say that Jesus revealed that the idea of ritual purity was based on a terrible error which he could no fix. He certainly doesn't say that God has changed his mind. It's just "Jesus made all the food pure." 

Yesterday pig-meat was dirty: today it isn't. Because I said so. The godsplainers have been trying to quibble about the Law with the person who wrote the book. Jesus has indeed just done something more god-like than walking on the sea.

and from thence he arose,

and went into the borders of Tyre and Sidon,

and entered into an house,

and would have no man know it:

but he could not be hid

for a certain woman,

whose young daughter had an unclean spirit,

heard of him,

and came and fell at his feet:

the woman was a Greek, a Syrophenician by nation

and she besought him that he would cast forth the devil out of her daughter.

but Jesus said unto her,

"let the children first be filled:

for it is not meet to take the children's bread,

and to cast it unto the dogs"

and she answered and said unto him,

"Yes, Lord:

yet the dogs under the table eat of the children's crumbs"

and he said unto her,

"for this saying go thy way;

the devil is gone out of thy daughter"

and when she was come to her house,

she found the devil gone out,

and her daughter laid upon the bed.

You know what I said above, about odd and troubling passages? Well, here is one of the oddest and most troubling of all.

Tyre is about 30 miles from Capernaum; in what we would now call Lebanon. Sidon is about a further 20 miles up the coast. This is the furthest Jesus has traveled from home-base. A Syro-Phoenician means a Syrian who was born in Phoenicia. Greek probably just means foreigner: Greek as opposed to Jewish. Probably we don't need to worry too much about the lady's triple nationality. For Mark's purposes, what matters is that she is foreign and we are a long way from home.

A foreigner asks Jesus for healing. Jesus doesn't want to heal her because she isn't Jewish. Instead of calling him a racist and challenging the whole idea of Jewish exceptionalism, she repeats her request, humbly and with wit. Jesus relents because of the way the question was asked. 

Moral: Little girls with clever mummies get healed. The rest of them carry on suffering.

We can soften the passage in a couple of ways. "Cast it to the dogs!" may have sounded milder to Mark's listeners than it does to us. Kunarion is "little dog" or even "puppy". He isn't saying "doing miracles for non-Jews is like throwing good food on the rubbish tip." It's more like "We aren't going to feed the puppies until we are sure the kids have had enough." And he doesn't say that the gentiles won't be fed, only that they won't be fed yet.

The Jews are God's People. This isn't in question. God has a special relationship with Jewish people; and the Nations don't know the Law. The God of Israel, in the person of Jesus, has walked into gentile country. One of them comes and asks him a favour. His first answer is the one you would expect. The Jews are the special ones; God's children's. Everyone else -- well they can wait. They have lessor status. Not filthy hounds, but little doggies: less important than the kids. 

Very well: says the woman -- but little doggies do in fact get the kids' leftovers.

So she gets a little bit. A little crumb. Whatever the kids didn't want. Specifically a crumb of bread. Which pulls us right back to the crucial and unexplained story of the Loaves and the Fishes. The disciples gathered up the crumbs which were left; and what did they get? Loads and loads. Tons. Basketfulls. More than they could possibly want.

The foreign lady gets her crumb: and that crumb was precisely the very thing she most wanted; her daughter healed of an incurable affliction.

So the message is clear. We modern readers are universalists. We are surprised that there would even be a question about whether Jesus would refuse to help someone on the basis of their ethnicity. But Mark and Peter were Jews. They belonged to the chosen people. God's special favourites. They expected Jesus to say "no; definitely not". Not "okay; just this once."

We say "Only the crumbs? That's a bit mean." 

They say "The crumbs! That's incredibly generous"

God has plenty. Even his leftovers are more than you could possibly want. 

That is what I think this passage means. I think that my reading is superior to Mrs Govey's, who thought that Jesus said "let the children first be fed" with a "twinkle in his eye", a twinkle which the Greek woman immediately understood and played along with.

But it is still a very troubling passage.

and again, 

departing from the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, 

he came unto the sea of Galilee, 

through the midst of the coasts of Decapolis.

and they bring unto him one that was deaf

and had an impediment in his speech

and they beseech him to put his hand upon him

and he took him aside from the multitude

and put his fingers into his ears

and he spit

and touched his tongue;

and looking up to heaven, he sighed

and saith unto him, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened.

and straightway his ears were opened

and the string of his tongue was loosed

and he spake plain.

and he charged them that they should tell no man

but the more he charged them, 

so much the more a great deal they published it

and were beyond measure astonished, 

saying, 

"He hath done all things well: 

he maketh both the deaf to hear, and the dumb to speak."

There is near-universal agreement that this passage demonstrates that Mark can't have been Jewish, and certainly can't have been a Galilean, since going from Tyre to Galilee via Decapolis makes about as much sense as going from London to Edinburgh via Truro. 

To which my response is "Yes: he didn't go the obvious way, but took an indirect route. That is why Mark bothered to mention it." 

Similarly everyone tells me that this story is called "The Healing of the Deaf Mute in the Decapolis" even though the text says that Jesus went through Decapolis and ended up back at home in Galilee. I sometimes wonder if I am over-subtle, or a complete block-head.

This passage puzzles me. There is no twist or moral message and nothing unusual about the healing. Jesus has been curing hundreds of people every day -- they are literally lining the roads with them. What gives this fellow a story in his own right? 

"Because, in a very real sense, many thousands of people were healed but one of them is described in the Bible; because in a very real sense we are not just a crowd; we all matter to God and Jesus would have cured this one man of his stammer even if he had in a very real sense been the only stammerer in the world." 

That might make a good sermon. But it is not very good literary criticism. We are going to have to wait until the end of the next chapter to work out what is really going on. 

I'm Andrew. I write about folk music, God, comic books, Star Wars and Jeremy Corbyn. I have no political opinions of any kind.

If you are enjoying my essays, please buy me a "coffee" (by dropping £3 in the tip jar)

Or consider supporting me on Patreon (by pledging $1 for each essay)