The Orville and What it Isn't

I'd like to take a moment to talk about Seth MacFarlane's television show, The Orville.  I've written about this a couple times on Twitter and Facebook, but somehow it keeps coming up so I'm going to nail down my problems with it here so I can link it in the future and not have to re-hash my same arguments.  I've yet to come across a meaningful refutation of any of my points - hopefully putting all my thoughts in one place will present a more organized point for rebuttal.

To be perfectly fair, I gave this show only 3 episodes before I quit.  Upon initial review, I actually really enjoyed the third episode, entitled About a Girl.  But the first two episodes were basically garbage to me, and it didn't take me long to realize that, despite some smoke and mirrors, the third episode was more of the same.

So, starting at the first episode, the show is just extremely shallow.  The whole gimmick is built on this very old "wife is caught cheating on husband because he works too much" shtick.  The only way that they tried to add any kind of twist to it was to have the alien ejaculate some kind of spore when they were caught.  Which... really didn't change anything.  It was very cookie cutter.  The relationship MacFarlane's character has with his ex-wife through the rest of the run is predictably boring comedy moments of being forced into a confined space with your ex-wife.

The other characters have interesting designs, as do the ships.  In fact, to the show's credit the design is a love letter to Star Trek: The Next Generation (which is MacFarlane's favorite Star Trek, despite his appearance in Enterprise).  But as characters they are, strictly speaking, just more tropes thrown together to make a predictable comedy crew.

I'm not even editing these gifs, it just does it to itself.

This is not to say that the actors don't do a good job of being funny - they are, basically, entertaining to watch.  But there's no nuance to anything.  Everything feels very bare bones, and it kind of feels like maybe that's because MacFarlane doesn't let or encourage the actors to find anything interesting about their characters outside of the written tropes.

I don't really even remember the story of the first episode aside from MacFarlane's character being assigned his ex-wife as a first officer and it turns out she doesn't hate him.  That's how bland it is.  I can remember the first episodes of every Star Trek series, regardless of quality, because the adventures themselves pushed limits.  Which is what The Orville should have been doing.  But I'll come back to that later.

The second episode is a very classic "human zoo" scenario.  And who are the two characters that are placed in close quarters captivity to increase the drama and hilarity?  If you guessed that it was the captain and his ex-wife, you're correct, Scooby Doo.  It was the captain and his ex-wife.  There was sort of, kind of, almost a decent story in there about the struggles of command.  But it didn't really push any boundaries, either, and I think this is largely because the characters are just empty comedy shells to funnel jokes through.

So then we come around to the third episode.  About a Girl.  Any time I bring this up as a point of contention, people like to assume it's because I'm trans.  Because the little girl ends up being assigned male at birth.  I'm not gonna lie, I ugly cried after watching the episode because of the decision of that council.

But let's look more carefully at the episode.  The cracks become very obvious very quickly if you apply any sense of logic to it.  The Moclan people in the show are depicted as having only one gender (presumably only one sex as well).  They call this gender male, likely for ease of understanding to the audience, and because the designers elected to create the character as masculine rather than a nonbinary androgynous alien.  Okay, that's... a choice.  Nothing really inherently wrong with it because science fiction does have to remain accessible.

The Moclan character, LtCdr Bortus (played by Peter Macon), lays an egg which hatches into a child that does not, presumably, conform to traditional Moclan anatomy.  They label this anatomical abnormality "female."  Okay... accessibility... but... actually that doesn't make too much sense.  What would female even be for a species that, presumably, only sees this anatomical abnormality once every 75 years?

Often the decision of whether or not to reassign the infant surgically (in the context of this episode) is tossed up as a trans issue.  I'd like to point out that... no, it isn't.  Not in the way that they're talking about it.  It's actually an intersex issue.  The IS community really does need more light shed on this subject, and it would have been a really good idea to explore the ethics involved in a debate that is far more common for IS people than it is for trans folk.  Because you can't discover if you're trans until later in life - but doctors do usually identify IS children at birth.  And, as a result, there have been a lot of gender reassignment surgeries done on the spot.  On babies.

Way.

I don't think the writers really knew they were writing about an IS issue, though.  Because the debate shifted from whether or not you should perform surgery on an otherwise healthy infant very quickly to whether or not it is okay to be a woman.  And somehow the Moclans don't... like... women?  Even though they don't have them.  Maybe they've seen other women from other planets and...

...I don't know, it just doesn't seem very plausible to me that that's the reason the whole species dislikes the female gender.  Especially because in a big galaxy fully of all kinds of organisms, you're going to encounter more than two genders.  They don't address any of that nuance at all.  We stay focused on the binary male/female dynamic, and the debate is from the theoretically progressive humans/everyone else and the repressive Moclan.

So the "creative solution" here is to trick LtCdr Bortus into watching the old Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer cartoon from Earth so that he understands that sometimes differences make someone special.  (Again this is not a trans-specific thing - anyone can be different for any number of reasons).  When that works, they host a trial a la To Kill a Mockingbird.  The nest egg they bring in?

The only Moclan female alive.  Who turns out to be a great writer, thinker, philosopher.  Bully for her.  Him?  Her.  She identifies as female, that's good enough.  Not sure why exactly, for reasons outlined above, but again that's nuance lost to either time restrictions or unimaginative writers.

But what's this?  Oh, yes.  The only bit of the show that could be construed as relating to the trans issue.  LtCdr Bortus's partner is a "trans male."  Only... no he isn't.  Again, his story mirrors that of IS babies - born with abnormal genitals and then reassigned to a certain gender.  They often find out later in life that they were born intersex, and live most of their childhood into puberty (when they start noticing that their bodies aren't doing the same things as their peers) before finding out that they were not born as their assigned sex.  Sometimes this causes dysphoria, and they may shift away from the gender they were assigned.  But that's an intersex issue.  That's not transgender.

Different people experience dysphoria for different things, even if they're seemingly related or similar.

So then what was the trial about?  The trial was about women's empowerment.  That's a hugely important issue in and of itself.  But it holds no bearing on the ethics of performing gender reassignment surgery on an infant with uncommon genitals (which is all a "female" Moclan can be, biologically speaking).  The episode wanted to be a lot of things, and it wanted to say a lot of things.  But, because it's just a lot of tropes mashed together with no actual substance to tie it together, it ended up saying absolutely nothing.

None of this addresses the further problem that LtCdr Bortus and his partner have decided to raise their baby on the Orville.  On the spaceship.  The spaceship that belongs to the interspecies union of planets.  The one that's filled with an assortment of non-Moclans.  Who wouldn't ostracize a child for having genitals that don't conform to its species' norm.  Probably because they won't even know.  And not only are extremely rare children sort of a staple of Star Trek (the show the Orville is supposed to be a love letter to), they are most often some of the most pivotal characters in the show (Spock, Data, Bashir, Kes, Mayweather, and Burnham).

So I am disappointed with the outcome, not because it didn't make sense for the trial - unjust trials are a powerful narrative tool.  Executed properly, they make a very important point to an audience.  But the trial was on the wrong subject entirely, and was really pretty unnecessary since the thing the Moclans feared was that the child would be reviled on their homeworld.  Which the child was never obligated to go to, nor would it likely feel any attachment to, having been born in spaaaaaace.

I want to make it clear that I don't think using tropes in a show is bad or wrong.  Tropes can be extremely useful shorthand for getting ideas across in a short amount of time.  But you must temper your use of them carefully to avoid building stacked cliches, and it is important to sometimes subvert your cliches to allow your audience to feel smart and keep your world feeling believable.

Since I stopped watching the show, I've gotten some brief synopses of the subsequent episodes from my boyfriend.  Although he enjoys watching the show, and I would never begrudge him that, I have heard absolutely nothing in those reports that leads me to believe that it is becoming anything like interesting or meaningful.  At its best moments, it falls just short of being worthy of any of my attention.

If you like the show... well... more power to you.  Get your laughs.  You deserve them.

LLAP.

Discovery Discovered

It's finally here!  The new Star Trek!  How did it do?

Well I've had two episodes to consume and consider and there are some things I think are really great and there are some things that really just baffle me.  Here's your content spoiler warning: I discuss the first two episodes with the assumption that you've either seen them or don't care about me citing some very specific things about the show.

Let's dig in!

First of all, the intro is ... interesting.  I got bubbles of uncontrollable joy at the very beginning of it, but really nothing about the opening is enough to really hold my focus.  The artwork is of a very cool style, and is evocative of the human aspect of exploration a la Enterprise, as well as the technological developments on display because "Hey guys, look at these cool models we rendered!"  Maybe there's another point to that, but it's not very clear what it could be.  Especially when you feature a phaser pistol as one of the objects in the introduction, the first time any Star Trek has made overt reference to the already confused application of phasers in the wild frontier of space by a theoretically peaceful organization in an intro sequence.  Really lends credence to T'Kuvma's insistence in the show that the Federation lies when they say they come in peace.  Scope out the intro here if you haven't seen it yet:

But that's not really where the first episode starts.  The first episode starts with a cold open of a Klingon talking in Klingon with subtitles.  I hope you're tuned in and paying attention because if you're not you're about to miss some very important plot points.  Fortunately Klingon is a strange enough language to make you turn your head.  The Klingon design is, in and of itself, kind of cool.  But I do have some problems with it.

Scream at the Honorable Dead!  May they find triumph in Sto-Vo-Kor!

The skin tones are no longer consistent with anything we've seen from any Klingons ever.  This wasn't like a super big deal to me at first, since they also have cranial ridges and since they established pretty clearly that this takes place a scant 8 years before TOS, that these might be a fringe sect of Klingons whose biology is just a little different from the rest of the species.  Nope!  The whole lot of them have these skin tones (albino is apparently the new outcast color in Klingon society) that cover up completely any ethnicity that might belong to the actors beneath.  These are now wholly aliens, and totally outside the scope of where the species is supposed to be in the Prime timeline where Alex Kurtzman, Gretchen J. Berg, and Aaron Harberts insist the show takes place.

Chris Obi is black, but not that black.  Let us see this actor's beautiful skin!

We first see that this look is sported by more than just these evidently fringe fundamentalist followers of Kahless when they are successful in summoning the 24 houses of the Klingon Empire for this big ol' battle with the Federation that they want to start.  Because they're Klingons.  Well, okay, that checks out.  But we're losing important connections to the DS9 episode when Worf hastily informs his colleagues that Klingons do not talk about this time period because of the disgrace of not having cranial ridges, and the small arc in Enterprise where Phlox was kidnapped and forced to create an antidote for abused gene-enhancing that caused them to lose their cranial ridges in the first place.  Not to mention every appearance of Kor and Koloth in TOS (including the iconic original Trouble with Tribbles).

It's a good thing the computer tells us because that looks like some H.R. Giger shit.

I expected all of the tech to be updated to 2017 standards.  I'm fine with it.  It looks cool!  It's pretty and engaging and exactly what I want to see in Star Trek!  This doesn't bother me too much because they don't spend a whole lot of time in any of the other series focusing on why things were designed in the particular way that they were.  Although I was disappointed that absolutely zero of the Klingon ships resembled anything we'd seen from Klingon ships before - save, perhaps, for T'Kuvma's battleship which looked kind of like a big Gothic-style K'T'inga battle cruiser.

Neat!

After the cold open with the Klingons, we return to the now-familiar scene from Star Trek Into Darkness where Kirk and Bones are trying to save the natives from their planet by covertly violating the prime directive.  Wait... no, wait that's not Kirk and Bones.  That's Captain Georgiou and Commander Burnham.  And, yeah.  They're still doing the covert subversion of nature's course to save a species because sometimes complex ethical quandaries are for chumps.  Of course, they fail to be covert at the end and violate the prime directive.  Go figure.

Oh, wow!  Someone opened the well spring for my people!  Who do I thank?  Wait, what's that?

I hope nobody notices this giant spaceship in the sky above this wide open desert!

The entire scene is filled with clunky exposition dialogue that is important to set up the emotional impact of Captain Georgiou eventually kicking the bucket at the hands of T'Kuvma and in front of her friend of seven long years, Commander Burnham.  And Burnham makes it so painstakingly obvious that she's worried the Captain will die, there's pretty much no chance that she'll survive the encounter with T'Kuvma at all.

We KNOW!

Then there's this cool space walk, and Burnham fights a Klingon and we get to see the tall alien guy be a total wimp.  After fighting the Klingon, we are exposed to perhaps the most interesting tie to Star Trek lore yet: Michael Burnham is Spock's step sister.

And they really nailed that Vulcan hairstyle on young Michael Burnham!

I really like this addition to the Star Trek canon.  I don't really see it as interfering with anything because Sarek and Spock are both logical enough for the added complexity of having another person in their household to be essentially irrelevant to anything else that happened in Spock's or Sarek's life.  Even if that person is a human.  And the method by which Burnham became Sarek's ward is reminiscent of Worf's past, with his family being destroyed by a Romulan attack and being forced to be raised by humans.  But where Worf went on a journey to reclaim his Klingon heritage, Burnham is on a journey to reclaim her humanity.  It makes for a great combination of the logical Spock and the lovable Worf.  Good move.  We'll come back to where her arc looks like it's going to go a little later.

Aww, man, oh jeeze!  Look at all those... are those Klingon ships?

Ultimately they set up a very dramatic mutiny scene where Captain Georgiou becomes the first person to recover from a Vulcan nerve pinch in seconds in order to foil her first officer's plot of trying to preemptively strike the Klingons as a show of force.  The discussion of whether or not it was right to take that course of action is very short, and our heroine, Commander Burnham, is thrown in the brig.  Then the Klingons decide it's time to tear the Federation a new one.

It's a good thing we've got... shields?

Pretty sure that used to be the science station....

Oh man you've never seen this much space from inside a Federation starship!

The Klingons make a very dramatic move by booping the Admiral's ship after duping him into believing that the Klingons and Federation would have a cease fire.  Which is like... MONDO dishonorable.  Can't really see how you'd justify that.  So... is today a good day to die?  Because not one Klingon said it.  They sure did make sure to let us know they believed in racial superiority.  The Klingons then pulled out of the battle instead of finishing because... um... because I guess they felt like they won?  It did look a lot like Wolf 359 after they were done with the Federation.

Explosions!

Overall this was a really dramatic two episodes of Star Trek.  It lacks the episodic nature of all the previous series - which isn't in and of itself a bad thing.  But what we don't get in these episodes in any meaningful way is an exploration of social issues or philosophy.  The closest we get is some teased racial tension between the Klingons and their distaste for their one albino Klingon.  At the end of the second episode, Burnham is on court martial for mutinying against her captain.  This part I really didn't care for in its presentation.  Just not an artistic style I felt was appropriate to the organization.

Burnham is lit so we can see her face and expression, but the tribunal that is judging her is in complete darkness.  Since when has the Federation ever run this way?  Now the Federation has turned into a large, shadowy faceless government.  I don't like that.  It's not the Federation we've seen before and I think it was a poor choice made solely for the purpose of theatrics.  I think it's important to maintain a certain level of fidelity to the franchise, especially when your season trailer teases that you're going to give us an idea of how the Federation might have a seedy underbelly.

All in all I am not put off by Discovery.  But I am wary of it.  It hasn't grown its beard, and it's making it difficult for itself to do so by removing the episodic nature of its episodes.  I'm not thrilled about the life sentence Burnham received at the end of the second episode, and how it basically turns her into the next Tom Paris on board the Discovery later in the series.  But Sonequa Martin-Green is captivating and I want to see more of her.  I'll be coming back for more of this show.

Live long and prosper.

A Little Reflection on Star Wars History

There's a lot out on the Internet about Star Wars's history, both in real life and in the Legends and canonical universes.  I am not versed deeply in the lore of Star Wars Legends as there is a great deal of it, and I am at best a journeyman in my knowledge of the new canon's history.  But I am a history buff (both for Star Wars and for real life) and an armchair philosophy who uses popular culture as the lens for my personal philosophies.

Maybe you don't know Star Wars very well, maybe you like it but you never took the time to synthesize everything that's been going on in all the movies and television shows and comic books and novels and... *gasping breath* ...whatever else is out there.

[Excited Whistle]

I'd like to reflect on the current state of affairs in Star Wars history, and the interesting direction it's taken since the Legends have been thrown out.  I feel that, since so many people were attached to the Expanded Universe stuff (now called Legends), the current canon is not usually given a fair shake.  My own personal views on Star Wars philosophy will play into my interpretation of what I've read, and that's the touch that I hope will convince you that what I'm writing is worth having read.

So what follows is a -- *ahem* -- brief synopsis of the Star Wars saga so far.

I'm not much more than an interpreter, and not very good at telling stories anyway.

For those who do not know, the Star Wars calendar (as recorded by the New Republic) measures time before and after the Battle of Yavin (ie. the destruction of the first Death Star above the planet Yavin).  So the First Galactic Empire and its New Order was established in 19 BBY (Before the Battle of Yavin) and fell in about 7 ABY (After the Battle of Yavin) with the Battle of Jakku.  This is important to know for a clear understanding of the time frames that I'm talking about.

To get a quick backstory on how the Empire came to be, it's important to understand the history of the Clone Wars.  All of this started about 40BBY with a Jedi master named Sifo Dyas.  I won't go into too much detail about Sifo Dyas, but suffice it to say that he predicted the whole Clone War thing coming and so went, in secret, to have an army of clones made for the Grand Republic.  This eventually became the Grand Army of the Republic, and it was all made from the genome of a Mandalorian bounty hunter named Jango Fett.  The dark lord of the Sith, who had been developing his power in hiding, caught wind of Sifo Dyas's behavior, and sent his apprentice to mess around with the clones and set in motion the circuitous plan that would make the Sith Lord the Emperor of the galaxy.

Twenty years later (yes, there's no shit that big a gap between important events here), a nobleman named Count Dooku takes a grip of star systems that were once part of the Grand Republic and secedes, forming the Confederacy of Independent Systems.  It is because of this that the supreme chancellor, Sheev Palpatine, secretly the dark lord of the Sith, is able to receive emergency war powers that let him officially found the Grand Army of the Republic.  The Separatists employ battle droids in armed conflict against a force of primarily Jedi in the First Battle of Geonosis which kicks off the Clone Wars.  Nobody seems phased by the fact that the Grand Army was hot and ready to shoot when Palpatine called for them.

Through twists and turns, Palpatine manipulates both the Separatists and the Grand Army to weaken the infrastructure of the galaxy until he can take a new apprentice: Darth Vader.  Palpatine is convinced that Darth Vader is a prophesied and powerful warrior who will help him reign over the galaxy for all eternity.  In order for that to work, however, Palpatine has to find the secrets to eternal life.  So he begins to look for that.  Meanwhile he sends Vader on a killing spree.  Vader kills all the Jedi on the capital world of Coruscant, including all the Jedi children.  Then Vader is sent to kill the Separatist leadership, and the Clone Wars end very suddenly.  Along with this, Palpatine's earlier interference with the Grand Army allows him to force the Clones to execute all the Jedi out in the field.  The galaxy is told that the Jedi betrayed the Republic.  Palpatine reorganizes the Republic into the First Galactic Empire in 19BBY.  The regions throughout the Core of the galaxy easily accept the peace this brings, because much of the fighting had damaged their worlds tremendously.

That's the nitty-gritty of the Clone Wars, distilled into three paragraphs.  There's a lot more intrigue and development, but this post is already quite long and I'll assume you haven't got all day.  You now know enough to move onto the Galactic Civil War.

To begin the Galactic Civil War era I want to answer a question that I myself have asked, and recently have heard asked, about the Rebellion.  Why did it all take place in the Outer Rim?

The simple answer is that the Core Worlds, the Colonies, and the Mid-Rim were all mostly happy to fall under Imperial rule.  These are worlds primarily inhabited by human beings, and although some key non-human races inhabit the Core Worlds, most of the prominent members of non-human races come from the Outer Rim.

The Outer Rim is also more vast and lawless, so the Empire is stretched thin trying to keep it all under control.  The Hutts gangsters have their kajidics reaching outward from Hutt space to the Western reaches with the help of Jabba the Hutt (through 6ABY).  Although the Hutts officially paid lip service to the Empire, they considered themselves above Imperial law and asserted their own authority wherever they lay their greasy tails.

But the Outer Rim is not as resource-rich as the Core-ward regions.  There are some key strategic planets, and the Empire certainly pinpointed those first, but until the Alliance to Restore the Republic stole the Death Star plans the Empire never considered the Rebels to be a credible threat.  Whatever small victories the Rebels may have had on planets like Lothal and Mygeeto, the Empire responded by doubling down its strength to great effect.  For the most part, if the Empire wanted any one planet in the Outer Rim, they took it.

Tarkin Town, a ghetto on Lothal created by Imperial sanctions against aliens and dissidents.

In response to Rebel activity, Tarkin Town was razed to the ground.

There was the issue of keeping the planets they took, and all of the others, after they had been placed under Imperial Authority.  Rebel cells acted as nuisances, disrupting the efforts of Imperial governors and causing problems for the Imperial foothold in the Outer Rim.  So a project left over from the Clone Wars was brought forward by Director Orson Krennic and the Imperial Governor Grand Moff Wilhuff Tarkin.  Tarkin pitched the idea to the Emperor, and Director Krennic set off trying to reclaim the one guy in the galaxy who'd figured out how to turn kyber crystals (the focus of a Jedi's lightsaber energy blade) into a source of near-infinite power: Galen Erso.  And Krennic wanted this man to weaponize that power for the Death Star.  Go figure.

During much of this ruthless expansion into the Outer Rim territory, the Emperor continued to be slowed down somewhat by the existence of the Imperial Senate.  A holdover from the Grand Republic, the Senate gave the galaxy some semblance of democracy.  Although the Emperor held supreme military power, much of the actual governing of planets was handled by the Senate until 0BBY.  So the Emperor set about a plan to get rid of the Senate.  Because when people are voting, you'll never get them to agree which planet ought to be blown up.  And the Emperor does like playing with his toys.

When Jynn Erso stole the Death Star plans and delivered them to the Tantive IV, the Rebellion earned the close and continued attentions of Darth Vader.  Though Vader had a hand in dealing with Rebels on Lothal, he was really only interested in hunting down a missing padawan: Caleb Dume (aka Kanan Jarrus).  Until the Death Star plans were stolen, Vader's job wasn't routing out Rebels it was continuing to eliminate the Jedi as an overseer of the Imperial Inquisitorius.  It took an encounter with his old padawan, Ahsoka Tanno, to divert his attention from the Jedi of the Phoenix Squadron Rebel cell.

Vader on Lothal

Vader was a legendary physical manifestation of the Emperor's will, and, eventually like Luke Skywalker, was a bit of a myth among the people of the galaxy fortunate enough not to cross his path.  Few Imperials even dealt with him, and during the early Empire Era Vader operated out of his castle on Mustafar.  Having Vader as a common presence would have disrupted the general belief that the Force was a bunch on nonsense made up by the Jedi to bamboozle the galaxy (an important tenet of Imperial propaganda).

Most importantly, Jyn Erso and the Battle of Scarif legitimized the Alliance to Restore the Republic in the eyes of the Empire.  They weren't just dealing with a few disparate dissidents, they were dealing with an organized and armed militia.  Tarkin took up residence on the Death Star and Vader chased after the Tantive IV to recover the stolen Death Star plans.  Quite honestly, this one task is the most involved Vader ever was in rooting out the Rebellion as a fighting force.  After failing to recover the plans, Vader devoted himself to locating Luke Skywalker, not to destroying the Rebels.  Ostensibly, he was still continuing his mission to eliminate the Jedi.

If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

But as much as the Skywalkers would like to believe it, the galaxy doesn't orbit them and their weird family squabble.  The Empire never planned to have only one Death Star, and began right away on a second one.  In traditional Imperial fashion, they doubled-down on their military, and an interesting thing happened in the Core, Colonies, and Mid-Rim regions: there was a schism of opinion in the Empire.

Two things happened to cause this: the Death Star destroyed Alderaan, and then the Rebels destroyed the Death Star.  Both of these events cost millions of lives.  Possibly collectively billions (the population numbers are always estimated really low in science fiction).  People who cared more about the atrocity that the Empire committed against a Core World began to dissent.  People who cared more about the ferocious terrorist attack on an Imperial military facility strengthened their resolve.  In short, the civil war got worse.  This is hard to see in the Star Wars trilogy, but it has a lot to do with why The Empire Strikes Back is so dark, and why the Rebels lose so much footing in that movie.

The Rebel Alliance is on the run so badly that it cannot gather except in the depths of the Outer Reaches.  Out beyond the Outer Rim, they begin to amass an unprecedented fleet of ships from all over the galaxy.  Everyone was starting to show up to the party, including larger numbers of Imperial defectors.  It was at this time that the Rebels learned from Bothawui of the second Death Star being constructed above the forest moon of Endor (which is technically not a moon, but a dwarf planet).

The Empire felt pretty good about its chances against the Rebels.  Between 1ABY and 6ABY, they had the Rebels on the ropes.  They had no reason to suspect that the enemies they made during those years would contribute to their demise.  Did you ever notice how much larger the Rebellion military seemed to be in Return of the Jedi compared to A New Hope or Empire Strikes Back?  Well, people weren't happy about what the Empire was up to and they showed up with guns to do something about it.  When the second Death Star was destroyed, there was much celebration by rebel sympathizers throughout the galaxy.  But there was also a sudden and horrible retribution from the remaining Imperial powers.

You see, those in power aren't likely to give it up quickly, especially when they got that power by bullying in the first place.  And the Empire was made up of no one if not a multitude of the most clever, brutish, and cold-hearted bullies that ever terrorized the galaxy.  But these bullies were also people, and often people of strong convictions.  The slaughter on worlds like Coruscant following the tear down of Sheev Palpatine's statue was just what you would expect from a military dictatorship struggling to retain its power.

In the first few months following the Battle of Endor, the Empire executed a powerful campaign of misinformation.  The official story was that the Emperor was not at Endor, and that he was alive and well on Coruscant.  You see, Palpatine had plans in place in the event of his death, and his subordinates were able to keep much of Imperial High Command fooled in the time after his destruction.

The Empire was, however, extremely fractured.  Without central guidance from the Emperor, and without a replacement for the missing ruler, Moffs and Admirals took it into their own hands to steer their diaspora forces to victory over the New Republic fleet.

To say the New Republic made short work of the Empire is not entirely accurate.  Imperial forces continued to fight on with as much fervor as ever in the wake of Endor.  It was at about this time that Luke Skywalker split fully from the Rebellion to begin researching the ancient Jedi ways.  He had yet to decide to found his temple, and Leia and Han hadn't yet produced baby Ben yet.  Nevertheless, a cadre of the more capable Imperial commanders regrouped and planned one last ditch effort to try to defeat the New Republic once and for all: the Battle of Jakku.

Exactly one year and a day (I think) after the Battle of Endor, the Battle of Jakku was a huge failure for the waning Empire.  Jakku had been the site of an Imperial listening post during the height of the Empire, and Palpatine had even ordered some top secret research be done there.  According to Palpatine, this planet was going to be a big deal some day in the future.  Who'd have thought?

But the battles aside, the politics of what was going on behind the scenes start to get really interesting at this point.  With the war ending, the Core Worlds are beginning to realize that they are under new leadership.  Being that they supported centralized government, they more or less welcomed the New Republic.  To your average citizen, it wasn't much different in the Core Worlds (except there were lower recruitment quotas for the demilitarizing New Republic military).  Tariffs were lifted and trade lanes opened up.

But in the Core Worlds, something was missing.  Nobody talked about it openly for many years (about 24 years, Bloodline takes place about 6 years before The Force Awakens).  But over two decades, political sentiments in favor of a more fascist, utilitarian government have started to come to the fore.  So the New Republic splits between two diametrically opposed factions: the centrists and the populists.

You can start drawing a lot of parallels here between American political parties and the political parties of the New Republic.  You can even see how whenever there's a political official that someone doesn't like they're compared to Darth Vader.  Well, okay, that's not exactly what happened -- Leia's relationship to Darth Vader was released and the galaxy balked.  But it wouldn't be a stretch to imagine that kind of tactic being thrown around a heated senate chamber in the New Republic.

Officially, the Empire had no political parties because they were pretty clearly a fascist organization.  The centrists in Star Wars desire the social benefits of that fascism.  The more naive centrists see the benefits of that organization and believe it can be achieved without the iron fist of men like Darth Vader and Sheev Palpatine.  Most, however, simply miss the Galactic Empire and the fringe benefits they had from being at the top of their societal food chains.

The climate is right for the First Order to return.  The First Order, built from the remnant of Imperial forces that survived the Battle of Jakku, have been hiding out in the Western reaches for three decades.  In the final years before The Force Awakens, they have begun to more radically mobilize because the political atmosphere has begun to support it.  They choose the name First Order because they want to be clear that the Republic is the usurping power in the galaxy, and the Galactic Empire's New Order (founded 19BBY) is the legitimate government, and that it never went away in the first place.

What we don't get to see in The Force Awakens is that the galaxy after the destruction of Hosnian Prime is going to be split like a pane of glass, with a thousand fragments breaking off from several large pieces.  The destruction of the New Republic doesn't just allow the First Order to assert a foothold, it allows Centrist systems to swear fealty to the Supreme Leader of the First Order, Snoke, outright and reestablish the Empire in one fell swoop.

Other members of the New Republic will lose faith in it and split off to be sovereign states of their own.  The First Order doesn't consider this a problem - with the backing of the centrist systems and the might that they have been developing in the Western Reaches the individual stragglers will offer no resistance.

With Rogue One out in theaters and Star Wars: Episode VIII due out next December, trailers will likely be released soon offering glimpses of what is to come and sparking speculation about where the authors of this saga will take us in the future.  You're now caught up with everything that's been going on in Star Wars.