The Real Problem With Midichlorians
Karolina Dean.....Unauthorized...and proud of it
Lately, when people ask Lost's producers if they're going to answer
our questions, they bring up Star Wars' midichlorians, as proof that
some things are better not explained. But like so many people, they're
missing the real reason midichlorians sucked.
Damon Lindelof told E! Online a while back:
There are certain questions about the show that I'm very befuddled by
like, 'What is the Island?' or 'What do the numbers mean?' We're going
to be explaining a little more about the numbers, maybe significantly
more about the numbers, but what do you mean by 'What do the numbers
mean?' What is a potential answer to that question? I feel like you
have to be very careful about entering into Midi-Chlorian territory. I
grew up on Star Wars; I've seen the Star Wars movies hundreds of
times; I can recite them chapter and verse, and never once did anyone
ever say to me or did it occur to me to say, 'What is the Force,
exactly? Can you explain that for me, better than Alec Guinness does?'
I understand, 'When are we going to find out about Libby?' That's a
very finite question. 'Who is Jacob?' OK, yes, we've been talking to
this guy named Jacob, so those questions then should have answers, but
'What is the Island?' That starts to get into 'What is the Force?' It
is a place. I can't explain to you why it moves through space-time-it
just does. You have to accept the fact that it does.
Carlton Cuse similarly told the Chicago Tribune's Maureen Ryan:
I mean, mystery exists in life and we kind of always go back to the
midi-chlorians example [in the 'Star Wars' prequel films]. Your
understanding the Force was not aided by knowing that there were
little particles swimming around in the bloodstreams of Jedi.
This is part of a wide-spread problem with midichlorians — I would say
a galaxy-wide misconception, in fact. People understand that
midichlorians were a terrible idea, but they don't understand why they
were a terrible idea. And this misunderstanding allows storytellers to
get away with saying they won't explain stuff which they really should
explain.
(And for the record, I still have faith that Lost will answer the
questions that really need to be answered — including why the heck
this island is so important, and why the battle over the island's
future isn't just a random real-estate dispute, no different than your
uncles fighting over your grandma's Florida beach condo. This isn't
especially a slam against Lost — just trying to clear up a disturbance
in, you know, the Force. And stuff.)
So let's break this down once and for all.
1. We already had an explanation for the Force.
Check out what Obi-Wan Kenobi says in the original Star Wars:
Well, the Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It's an energy field
created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It
binds the galaxy together.... A Jedi can feel the force flowing
through him.
That's actually a pretty clear-cut explanation, although it doesn't go
into particle physics or anything. But compared to a lot of science-
fiction explanations, it's refreshingly free of technobabble, and it's
fairly specific: The Force is an "energy field created by all living
beings." Possibly mystical and soul-related, as Han suggests, or
possibly just some kind of life-energy. And certain people have an in-
born ability to sense and interface with this life-energy.
What's so hard to understand about that?
But midichlorians actually contradict this explanation. All of a
sudden, instead of there being an energy field that "binds the galaxy
together," there are little microscopic life forms inside of the Jedi,
allowing them to... do what? What do the microscopic entities have to
do with the galaxy-wide life force? Are they like symbiotes that allow
you to connect to the energy field? If the Force is in every living
thing, then why do only some people have midichlorians? Does the Dark
Side of the Force have different-flavored midichlorians than the light
side?
What was a fairly clear-cut explanation suddenly becomes incredibly
muddled.
It's like the sort of thing that happens to superheroes all the time.
Spider-Man used to have a clear-cut (if silly) explanation for his
powers: he was bitten by a radioactive spider. But then, at some
point, the writers of his comic decided there needed to be a "Spider
totem" involved, and a spider queen, and Anansi knows what else. Flash
suddenly had to have the "Speed Force" bolted on top of his previously
simple origin, and Green Lantern had to have a whole emotional
spectrum, with different colored rings for different emotions. And so
on. It's part of the nature of retcons: What was once simple becomes
baroque.
Instead of building on the explanation we already had, Phantom Menace
demolished it to put up an ugly new monstrosity.
2. If someone had told you Episode I explains more about the Force and
how it works, you'd have been stoked.
Seriously. Imagine if, back in 1998, someone had told you the new
movie includes the Jedi finding young Anakin and discovering his huge
potential Force powers — including the means by which they determine
that the Force is moving strongly in this one. You'd have thought,
"Ooh, Lucas is going to open up the mysteries of the Jedi. There'll be
cool Yoda-esque koans and riddles and spiritual disciplines, and
possibly more blindfolds."
And you'd have been right — in theory, more understanding of the Force
would have been a good thing. It's one of the coolest things about
Star Wars. If you wanted to go back in time and take all of the
discussion of the Force out of Empire Strikes Back, I would have to go
back in time and stop you, because that stuff all rules. So yeah, more
of that type of exploration of the Force would have been terrific.
It's not that midichlorians were an explanation for something which
should have been mysterious — it's more that they were a dumb,
ridiculous technobabble concoction. And they're not an explanation you
can build on, which is even worse. You can build a whole architecture
on top of "an energy field that connects all living beings," and the
original trilogy did, quite well. But you can't build on top of
"microscopic critters in the blood."
It's the difference between explanation (Empire Strikes Back) and hand-
waving (Phantom Menace). What the Force is, and how it works, is
something that we're better off being shown, through examples like
Yoda's Taoist teachings. Telling us how the Force works, by tossing
around silly jargon, isn't really an explanation — it's just Lucas
flailing around with a glue-gun, sticking things together randomly.
So your take-away point here is that it's not that explanations are
bad — ham-handed, idiotic explanations that make things less cool are
bad.
3. Star Wars never made "What is the Force?" into a central mystery.
There's a reason that Star Wars explains what the Force is the very
first time we hear about its existence: It's part of the set-up. We're
not supposed to sit around wondering what the Force is, except to the
extent that we see Luke learning how to use it. Luke's lessons in the
Force are our way in to understanding its subtleties — but the over-
arching question of what the Force is? We know that from square one.
Likewise, we're not really supposed to wonder how the Enterprise flies
on Star Trek, or how the TARDIS dematerializes on Doctor Who, or how
the ships can "jump" on Battlestar Galactica. Those things are not set
up as huge mysteries that the characters are trying to get to the
bottom of. We don't get tossed clues about the nature of the
Enterprise's engines. The mystery of the Enterprise's engines and how
they work does not deepen over time. Scotty does not say "I'm doin'
the best I can, Cap'n, but I canna understand what these Dilithium
crystals have to do with anti-matter in the first place!" Every now
and then, these shows will throw fans a bone, by mentioning some new
details of how these things work. But we're not supposed to think of
these things as central mysteries to be solved.
The Force is the same way.
Lost's island, though, is mysterious from the moment our castaways
crash on it, and its mysteries deepen in every episode. Even now, I
constantly see promos for Lost reruns which show Charlie asking where
the hell this place is. The show has gone out of its way to play up
the mystery of what the island is, and who Jacob is, and how the Man
In Black got there, and so on. It is the central mystery of the show,
and one I still have great confidence will be resolved, in spite of
Cuse and Lindelof's statements trying to lower our expectations.
Why would Cuse and Lindelof be trying to lower our expectations
anyway? Could it be because they saw another show with a cult
following, which promised "all will be revealed," over and over again,
and then turned out to have a somewhat... idiosyncratic definition of
the word "all"? But let's not reopen old wounds.
The point is, there's a difference between your set-up and your big
mysteries. We don't expect Lost to explain how the plane that crashed
on the island was able to fly in the first place — Even though I don't
fully comprehend all the principles of aerodynamics that go into
keeping a jet plane in the air, I know they work because I've flown in
them. I'm not even looking for a detailed explanation of, say, how the
island is able to move through time and space. We've seen it work, so
we know it works, and we've gotten enough details about unique
magnetic forces to let us fill in the blanks.
But when you set up something as a central mystery and you make people
start talking about it in grandiose terms (i.e., referring to the
island as more important than, say, Tuvalu) then you owe us an
explanation, all right. It doesn't have to be a series of diagrams or
schematics, or go into ridiculous detail. It shouldn't contradict what
we've already learned. And it would be nice if it had some element of
showing along with the telling. But one way or another, if you make a
big deal out of asking a question, then you have to provide an answer.
That's just basic storytelling.
So let's stop using midichlorians as shorthand for "explaining stuff
which should remain a mystery." Midichlorians are more like "a clumsy
retcon that screws up an explanation we already had."
Send an email to Charlie Jane Anders, the author of this post, at
charl...@io9.com.