O for a thousand eyes, that I might roll them at once....

That can mean only one thing: another gathering of those weirdos on AICN for a roundtable discussion of Star Wars and everything that is wrong with the Universe! Yep, you can read parts one and two today, with a promise of a third installment in another day or two.

Actually, it isn't nearly as bad this time as in previous installments (which set me to a lot of mouth-foaming, here, here and here). A big reason, I think, is that some guy named Carl Cunningham, who is apparently a fairly prominent Star Wars fan on the Net, is participating, and he seems to be both articulate and a guy who hasn't sipped the "George Lucas is a money-grubbing hack who has totally lost it" Kool-Aid. So, a lot of the discussion this time actually revolves around fannish speculation on the plot of Episode III: just when Anakin turns, how it might tie in with the other Episodes, et cetera. Not too bad, although some of the mental gymnastics the group performs get a bit weird -- especially in Part Two, when they start in on when the Original Trilogy will show up on DVD and what kind of filmmaker George Lucas really is and whatnot.

Moriarty's insistence on proceeding from the default assumption that every rumor is true until it is directly contradicted gets a bit annoying, but hey, at least no one mentions Greedo shooting first. Particularly refreshing is the afore-mentioned Carl guy, who immediately responds to the first whiff of "Lucas is out for our money" with something I've long maintained: If all he wanted was the fans' money, he'd have crappy DVDs of the Original Trilogy in stores already. And a bit later on, when someone mentions some interview that Gary Kurtz once gave, this Carl fellow actually points out that maybe, just maybe, Gary Kurtz (the producer of A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back) doesn't know what he's talking about. Huzzah. (Kurtz's name is often invoked by fans who hate the Prequels as the real reason the first two films in the Original Trilogy are so good, as part of the "They're good in spite of George Lucas" argument that I reject completely.)

So, it's not as bad as the previous incarnations of the AICN Jedi Council. (I expect that the TalkBacks will, in due course, get flooded with all the annoying idiots who hate Star Wars because it's not The Matrix.)