Ultimate Geek Fu

It was one of those ideas that seemed almost brilliant in the moment of inspiration and nearly daft in retrospect. In my ongoing effort to try to understand why the original Star Wars trilogy was so very good and the prequel trilogy was so very, very bad, I would do something I'd never done before, and watch Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope in sequence.

In practice, it took me three nights, because I dozed off about halfway through Sith and then again the next night when I tried to finish it. Once I had completed the whole exercise, though, something I'd never noticed before suddenly became quite clear to me. There was an important character present in the original movies for whom there was simply no equivalent in the prequels.

No, not Han Solo. I've commented on his importance and absence many times before. No, the character that was in-your-face present throughout all of the original movies, subtly shaping the course of events, and utterly missing in the newer movies, was—

The Millennium Falcon.

Think it through. In the newer movies there are tons of hardware flying around, but all of it is just so much CGI furniture. Not one of the ships has any personality, character, or for that matter, even a name. Heck, a lot of the stuff only appears in one scene. Just how does Annakin wind up with a different flying car every time, anyway? Can Jedi simply commandeer any car they want? Do they have a really great fleet deal with Space Hertz? Is this some sort of socialist utopia where nobody personally owns anything, so therefore you can take whatever you want whenever you want it? In which case, where are the flying yellow bicycles?

Never mind that now. The Millennium Falcon had guts; it flaws and strengths, warts and wonders; it had soul. Han Solo without the Millennium Falcon would be like... Captain Kirk without the Enterprise. Commander Adama without the Galactica. Doctor Who without the TARDIS. Michael Knight without KITT. Batman driving a beige Camry. Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn fighting their way down the Congo River in the Monkey Business IV...

Cars, boats, airplanes, spaceships: time and again, they're the important silent character that makes the story. Which are some of your favorites, and why?

Let the arguments begin.

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ULTIMAGE GEEK FU runs every Wednesday. Have a question that's just bugging the heck out of you about Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate, Battlestar Gallactica, Farscape, Firefly, Fringe, Heroes, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Smallville, The X-Files, X-Men, The Man From Atlantis, or pretty much any other SF-flavored media property? Send it to slushpile@thefridaychallenge.com with the subject line, "Geek Fu," and we'll stuff it in the queue.