Episode 5 of The Mandalorian takes place on Tatooine. Not content with the Mos Eisley-style towns and cantinas of scum and villainy of the first few episodes, The Mandalorian ventures back to where it all began – that fateful cantina, the Dune Sea, Beggar’s Canyon, Dewbacks, a surprise encounter with the Tusken Raiders.

A cinematic blend, Star Wars is steeped in a couple of traditions: Flash Gordon adventure serials; Sergio Leone Spaghetti Westerns; World War 2 aerial combat films; the Japanese cinema of Akira Kurosawa. What Star Wars actually is is a surprisingly difficult question, and the answer will differ from person to person. For some it might be the dogfights between X-Wings and TIE Fighters; for others the climatic swing across a Death Star chasm to John Williams’s gorgeous, soaring score; for others it’s Han Solo’s swaggering, cynical cowboy; for others it’s the throwing away of a lightsaber in the face of evil, the refusal to succumb to our baser instincts even at the pain of death.

Star Wars is all of these things, and more. But for this current crop of filmmakers – JJ Abrams, Rian Johnson, Dave Filoni, Jon Favreau – Star Wars is that original film, a magnificent space western with extraordinary special effects and an epic score. And fair enough. To sit in the cinema as a child and be swept away by it all was undoubtedly a magical, life-changing experience – and several of those names have attested it was.

But this is where the problems begin. Returning to Mos Eisley in the Mandalorian, returning to the twin suns of the Lars Homestead for the final scene of TROS, returning to a planet-killing superweapon (twice!), returning to a leafy Rebellion base, returning, returning, returning…

It’s not that these new films, or the Disney-era canon more generally, are devoid of originality. Solo, The Last Jedi, Jedi: Fallen Order, and aspects of Star Wars: Rebels forged new and exciting paradigms and possibilities in the lore. Maligned moves like killing off Snoke? Well, at least it’s new. We weren’t expecting it, and it spurred on the development of Rey and Kylo Ren.

Which does make me wonder whether the problem is, specifically, JJ Abrams. We know that The Force Awakens was deliberately a retelling of A New Hope. This was, I believe, the wrong move, and set the trilogy off on the wrong foot – the same Rebellion/Empire dynamic, the same Emperor/Vader dynamic, the same Master/Apprentice dynamic. But Abrams publicly credited Rian Johnson for inspiring him to go for it a bit more for this last film; in other words, he said, ‘fuck it’.

And yet this was a film heavy on nostalgia and retelling of other, better films. Unnecessarily fanservicey callbacks included:

• Chewbacca receiving a medal 35 years after the Battle of Yavin
• Luke raising his destroyed, submerged, and yet somehow now operative X-Wing to Yoda’s Theme
• That same X-Wing still being Red 5, 35 years after that designation in A New Hope – did Red Squadron just not have a fifth member, allowing it to be loaned out to Luke as he searched the galaxy for 20-30 years?
• And non-sequiturs like ‘The Dark Side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural’, directly quoting a prequel meme to distract us from the fact that Palpatine EXPLODED – twice!

These references felt like red meat to throw out to the die-hard fans and the memers in order to distract and delight us.

A film is not good because it has references or callbacks.

But as displeasing as all of this is, it is not my main issue with the film. I could survive it – I still like The Force Awakens, despite its insistence on recreating A New Hope.

No, the thing that soured me on the entire thing was the godawful Rey Palpatine plot.

This was never the plan. Palpatine’s return was never the plan – and I believed Kathleen Kennedy and JJ when they said it had been planned since the beginning. No, it was a last-minute scramble to recover after the bad reaction to The Last Jedi.

‘Your parents were nobodies,’ Kylo Ren told Rey, who agreed with him. It was something she had always known, however much she denied it. They were junk-traders who had sold Rey and were now buried in a pauper’s grave.

This scene was written, filmed, and released as the truth. No, it was not ‘subverting expectations’ (a phrase Rian Johnson has never publicly uttered) for the sake of it. It was the most challenging thing for Rey to hear at that moment. From her first scenes in The Force Awakens, Rey sought belonging. Easy answers and parental figures. She latched on to Finn, Han Solo, Leia, and Luke like a child. Uncomplicated, uncritical.

And to hear that her parents – the people she’d been obsessed with, waiting for – were nobodies forced Rey to confront herself, to develop, to become self-sufficient. It was a hard truth that developed her character.

But fans didn’t like it. Fans had spent years releasing popular YouTube videos theorising about Rey’s parentage. Was she a Skywalker, a Kenobi, a Jinn, Kylo Ren’s secret sister, had her mind been wiped? Fans needed lore, canon, explanations, information for Wookieepedia pages. To hear that all of that theorising had been for nothing? Unconscionable. (There was a similar process with Snoke)

The general audience liked The Last Jedi. It remains, according to YouGov, one of the most popular Star Wars films. That may be the result of recency bias, but if it were as much of a disaster as the internet would have you believe, it would not be nearly as high as it is. But the hardcore fans, the theorisers, the canon-swallowers, the people who need information, did not like it, and made loud and aggressive noises about it.

There were also, to be entirely fair, large concerns about the film’s treatment of Luke Skywalker. I would argue that those concerns stem from the exact same place as the desire for Rey’s lineage to be significant, but that is another blog post.

So. LucasFilm, or Abrams, or whoever, moved to respond to these fan concerns. Screw The Last Jedi; Rey must now have a secret lineage, contradictory though it may be. So now she’s a Palpatine. There are no hints of this in either of the preceding films – the entirety of the setup and payoff is done in this film. It is a gigantic, transparent arsepull in the name of searching for a twist.

Give me a second.

PALPATINE HAD A SON?

WHAT?

This MASSIVE addition to the lore is glossed over in seconds. Palpatine wanted Rey. But WHY DID HE NOT WANT HIS SON? How did his son get away? How did his son have a normal life? How was he just a normal person, easily discarded, but Rey is the new chosen one?

WHAT?

It is ludicrous. The exact same pathetic, fan fiction-tier twist that Harry Potter and the Cursed Child attempted. It does not comport with the source material. It is laughable to imagine these pure evil, Satan-incarnate characters desiring or having sex.

And yet it’s elided, because we need a twist. And it doesn’t matter what’s been established, or not established, in the previous two films. It doesn’t matter that the retcon of Palpatine’s survival makes a mockery of the last 30 in-universe years. Why does he only reveal himself (exclusively in Fortnite!) and act now?

There is a litany of other problems. The film falls foul to generic blockbuster tropes – big, emotional twists like Chewbacca’s death or Kylo’s first death are reverted almost immediately. The film has its cake and eats it – big emotions without consequences. The film’s manic pace elides numerous plot holes and nonsensical aspects. Palpatine’s death is comically stupid – why didn’t he just stop shooting lightning?

But what really left me cold, what left me walking out the cinema utterly disappointed, is Rey Palpatine. A cheap twist that throws away the character work of the first two films, aimed at pandering to lore-obsessed fans.

Star Wars can be new. The Prequels, for better or for worse, were new. Different.

But right now, Star Wars is creatively bankrupt, trapped between 1977 and 1983.