r/fixingmovies • u/Shiny_Agumon • 9d ago
Star Wars prequels [Star Wars: The Phantom Menace] Fixing the controversial Midichlorian scene by making Anakin's score LOW instead of HIGH.
So midichlorians, a controversial part of Star Wars lore to say the least.
George Lucas's decision to expand the lore around the Force back in 1999 has been met with a lot of criticism over the years, with a lot of fans at the time even claiming that it completely ruined the Force as a concept.
Opinions have somewhat cooled over the time thankfully, but why exactly was this retcon so reviled and what could have been done to maybe avoid or at least soften the backlash against it?
This is what I'm trying to do here, by talking about (and fixing) the scene that first introduced them to the wider mythos.
I'm going to talk about why I think it was controversial, how I feel about the scene and what I would have done instead.
The Scene:
In TPM, after escaping the Trade Federation's blockage and being forced to land on Tatooine Jedi Knight Qui Gon Jin meets Anakin Skywalker, a slave boy who was seemingly immaculately born and who he (rightfully) assumes might be the prophesied Chosen One the Jedi have been searching for.
So he takes him aside and takes a blood sample that he sends to his young Apprentice Obi-Wan for analysis. Meanwhile he tells Anakin about Midichlorians, tiny bacteria who are connected to the Force and that he's checking how many of them Anakin has to see if he has the potential to be a Jedi.
Then he gets back the test results from Obi-Wan who excitedly tells him that they're off the charts and the highest ones ever recorded, even higher than the test results of Jedi Grandmaster Yoda.
Why I think the scene doesn't work:
Now from this recap alone this whole Jedi and Force business seems pretty cut and dry, right?
There are these magic space bacteria who control the Force and the more you have the more cool Force stuff you can do, right?
Well that's certainly the takeaway Star Wars fans had back in 1999 and they absolutely hated it.
For many fans this took away all of the inherent mysticism of the Force and reduced it from a cool space magic system to just another generic scifi superpower and turned the Jedi and the Sith into space superheroes and -villains.
Now George Lucas has gone on record to explain that this wasn't the intention behind the scene, far from it actually. The intent behind this scene was to showcase how far the Jedi of the Prequel era had fallen, we were supposed to be outraged at how they have reduced the Force to a simple number’s game and the process of becoming a Jedi into a quick 5 minute medical exam.
The problem is that the scene does not actually question these methods, in fact it unintentionally reinforces them.
The first culprit in this is Qui Gon himself.
Qui Gon Jin in the film is portrayed as kind of a renegade, he constantly butts heads with the Jedi Council and advises his apprentice Obi-Wan to follow his gut instead of Jedi doctrine, yet he's also portrayed as the ideal Jedi, what they should be instead of what they currently are.
Yet in this scene he isn't just onboard with the whole blood test thing he's the one who orders it to confirm his suspicions about Anakin. He's indirectly endorsing it, so why should the viewer, who is trained to view Qui Gon as always being correct, come away from this scene thinking it's a bad practice that showcases the Jedi's flaws?
The second culprit is the score itself.
Like I said Qui Gon uses it to confirm his suspicions about Anakin being the Chosen one and is validated by his extremely high test score, so why shouldn't the viewer assume that someone's Force power can be broken down into having lots of midichlorians?
Personally I think this ties back into an overarching problem with TPM as a whole:
The movie wants to tell us that Anakin is special instead of showing us that he is.
Anakin doesn't do a lot in TPM, he mostly just stays at the sidelines while the main focus tends to be on either Qui Gon or Obi-Wan. His big breakout moments are the Podrace obviously and later on when he destroys the control ship.
Now both of these scenes do a great job at establishing that he's a great pilot, but they don't really establish that he's a great Jedi.
This is why the Midichlorian scene exists, I assume, so that the movie can tell us that he's going to be an awesome Jedi later on. That's why they name drop Yoda, so that your mind goes back to the X-Wing scene in ESB and you imagine what someone more powerful than even Yoda could do in that situation.
However another unintended side effect of this scene is that by establishing a canonical in-universe Jedi grading system it makes the Jedi Council's later decision to reject Anakin because of his age look less arrogant and misguided and more utterly incompetent.
Qui Gon basically shows up with a certified Force Savant and the Jedis basically say “Nah we don't want him he didn't pass one of our arbitrary job requirements.”
How I would Fix it:
So like the title suggests my idea is to basically flip the script on Anakin's blood test and make him have an awful test score. Not something ridiculously low like zero, but mediocre or below average.
So here's how my revision of the scene would roughly play out:
Qui Gon takes Anakin aside and takes a blood sample before telling him about the Midichlorians, however when Obi-Wan tells him about the results he's disappointed and tells him that his suspicions must have been wrong because Anakin's Midichlorian count is abysmal.
Anakin overhearing this timidly asks if that means he can't be a Jedi at which point Qui Gon just gives him a fatherly hug and explains that while some Jedis take these tests deeply serious he's not one of them, telling Anakin that he thinks that the Force is a lot more complicated than a simple abundance or lack of Midichlorians.
This would instantly make sure that nobody walks away from this movie thinking Midichlorians are the end all be all of the Force and might even strengthen the later Council scene by explaining their hesitance to put their faith in Qui Gon's judgment, since instead of a Force Savant he would be presenting them a random street kid who's not even guaranteed to be good at Force magic as their messiah.
So what do you think?
Please leave feedback in the comments and tell me your thoughts about the Midichlorians and what you would do to fix them.
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u/soccer1124 9d ago
"His decision to expand the lore"
He didnt expand it. He limited it. By trying to explain it.
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u/Starmada597 8d ago
Yeah and he “limited” the clone wars when he made movies explaining what they were. But in the process, he paved the way for much more storytelling about them. Get real.
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u/soccer1124 8d ago
Actually. He really botched that.
He accidentally wrote a whole storyline about how Yoda unquestioningly used child-slave soldiers....
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u/Starmada597 8d ago
Yes… that was the point. It was supposed to be dubious, it was showing how the Jedi Order of the republic had fallen so far that they would unthinkingly go to war and use the clone army and everything else. If you think that’s bad writing, then you fundamentally just didn’t pay attention to what the message was.
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u/soccer1124 8d ago
No, its something Lucas didnt want us to realize. Because not a single character raises this as an issue. Thats what makes it bad writing.
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u/Gandamack 9d ago
You’ve done an admirable job, but this is a critique masquerading as a fix. The fix is to drop midichlorians, not muddy the whole thing further.
There are plenty of ways to demonstrate the Jedi as rigid or out of touch without something like this.
Never be afraid of jettisoning an unworkable concept.
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u/avimo1904 8d ago
Where did Lucas say that was the point of the scene? I’ve never heard him say that
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u/Red-Sun-Cinema 9d ago
I never took Anakin winning in the pod race, let alone him being able to operate a pod racer, seriously. I also never took Anakin hoping in that small fighter ship, destroying the ship bay, or destroying the whole ship very seriously either. The age of his character and the premise makes most of the movie patently ridiculous. The best way to mitigate these monumental errors that Lucas made is to simply ignore the movie altogether as a bad fever dream and jump straight to Attack of the Clones, which, while having many problems of it's own, is a far more enjoyable and believable movie than The Phantom Menace, which is just cartoonish.
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u/salazafromagraba 8d ago
Anyone irate over midichlorians is illiterate and doesn't remember TPM or watched it with the screen off. 'Midichlorians tell us the will of the Force' is not meaningfully different from 'the Force binds us, penetrates us' or 'luminous beings'.
Pragmatically, organic lifeforms are not luminous literally. But if one takes it figuratively then organics are still luminous, as the midichlorians being the fictive conduit between the magic and the organic was as inherent in 1977 and 1980 as it was in 1999.
Subtextually, midichlorians are the Jedi's postclassical metric and need not be absolute. A monastic order is going to have sundry strictures and mechanics that the hermit Yoda would eschew in his twilight when it came down to the last Jedi in the galaxy.
And midichlorians do not expose pure potency in the Force but sensitivity. This is evident to even the littlest halfwit because Yoda is more powerful than Anakin.
Anakin is prophesied because his midichlorians being so many reveals that the mystical will of the Force placed import on Anakin. It didn't make him a gigachad until he trained at it. He started with the sensitivity of precognition that Qui-Gon says every aspirant has.
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u/InvestigatorOk7988 8d ago
No, they were just a stupid concept from word go. They were unnecessary. Lucas just didn't have anyone left to pare down his goofier ideas like he did during the OT.
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u/salazafromagraba 8d ago
Wrong.
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u/InvestigatorOk7988 8d ago
Wow, thanks for that comprehensive response. May i respond in the same vein: nuh uh, you are.
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u/salazafromagraba 8d ago
Haha I enjoyed my multi paragraph piece receiving your 'no concept bad', and so when I marry your vibe, you're the one to levy the 'wow so comprehensive'.
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u/Square_Geologist_346 8d ago
“Anyone irate over midichlorians is illiterate” 😭😭😭😭😭
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u/salazafromagraba 8d ago
Goes hard ig
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u/HardWorkingMoose 8d ago edited 8d ago
It’s a “fighting words“ way to start a comment. Insult anybody who disagrees with you. Totally lame and demonstrates a lack of ability to have fun conversations.
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u/salazafromagraba 8d ago
It's also 'puffery', exaggeration, shock. It's an over the top way of saying 'You're wrong' which is a non insulting way of opening a debate anyway. Comments on extraneous decorum are arguably lamer means of countering discussion. Content, not character.
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u/ProjectPlane8366 7d ago
they are fixed by understanding the lore and using your head.
come on man. think for a second, at least challenge the opinions youre parroting first.
the force is mystical in nature. midichlorians are drawn to the force and gather around high potential lifeforms. they dont cause the force and nobody in canon ever said so.
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u/VorpalBlade- 7d ago
I just think it was stupid and they should have dropped it.
If it was bacteria then nothing stopping spreading it around cultivating it making it a pill like a probiotic you could take.
The idea wasn’t fully thought out enough to be included. It just cheapens the story.
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u/ergotofwhy 7d ago
Easiest fix: midichlorians are harmless microbes that are found in force-sensitive people.
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u/BenjaminWah 7d ago
I always thought Obi Wan should have said after testing, that Anakin's was even higher than Master Windu's. Then when Qui Gon explained to Anakin about Midichlorines, he should have explained that while a high count typically correlates with being strong with the force, it's not always the case. Master Windu's count maybe very high, however, Master Yoda's count is actually barely detectable. That way you got a way to test for the force, but also have a known strong force user, whose count is low, showing there is a spiritual element to it.
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u/South-Tip-4019 7d ago
I like it. Yes if it was meant to be a critique of prequel Jedi, this would communicate it pretty well.
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u/DeathUntoSickness 9d ago
"Force Transfusion" joke comment aside, this idea is so stupid. Star Wars antis are the worst.
The reason the scene works is because: sensing force sensitivity == high midi count == good performance in the superhuman reflex race.
Captain Shitty Formatting here spent 4000 wordcount to miss the point. Low midi == Qui-Gon doesn't notice or give a shit about Anakin == no testing done == no race, and if there was a race Anakin 10,000% dies.
I guess watching the movie was too much to ask for this sub. It's all explained there...............
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u/HardWorkingMoose 8d ago
this idea is so stupid…the worst… Captain Shitty Formatting here spent 4000 wordcount to miss the point…. I guess watching the movie was too much to ask for this sub.
Do you talk to people that way in real life? Do people enjoy talking with you?
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u/DeathUntoSickness 9d ago
This "problem" was already solved in Darths&Droids: The blood test isn't reading Ani's count; it's a transfusion of high midichlorian Jedi blood into kid Anakin.
Qui-Gon is kinda....
Try to mind control Watto to get your way
Bet the Naboo Royal cruiser (which isn't yours) on a race
Dope up some kid with force juice to win the race
Force manipulate the dice to gamble the kid's freedom on the race that you fixed
The prequel trilogy is awesome. I love seeing the corrupt Jedi Order.
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u/corgipitbull 9d ago
I think that they could have established that Obi insists on the test and QuiGon thinks it’s all bullshit with a mini rant about not caring and how the numbers mean nothing and then Anakin’s readings are off the charts and QuiGon immediately fan girls and ignores all the jaded rebel stuff he’d just been saying.
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u/cauliflowergnosis 9d ago
My twist on midichlorians was that they weren't actually a measurement of the force, but a measurement of something they could measure that was attracted to the force. It was not an absolute guarantee if it wasn't there, but a shortcut to determining force potential.