The intricacies of expanded universes

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I thought about expanded universes a bit staring at a T-Shirt of my son's, featuring a tryptychon of a stormtrooper, Captain Phasma, Finn and Kylo Ren. Captain Phasma, I came to realize, is a bit of an oddity in the new canon. So, let's wind back a bit to 2015, where the only thing in existence was "The Force Awakens", just before additional material was released.

In the movie, Captain Phasma is in a grand total of two scenes. I understand her part was originally much larger but ended up on the cutting room floor, a creative decision that was largely undertaken after all the merchandise went into production, leading to Phasma playing a prominent role as a baddy en par or even greater than Kylo Ren himself on T-Shirts, as action figures and so on.

In the final movie, that is not really noticable. The arc involving her goes a bit like this: Phasma is Finn's first large obstacle. When he is still a storm trooper, she's a combination of his drill seargeant from Full Metal Jacket (although much of that role is implied and only hinted at in the acting) and a political commissar (very much explicit in the text). He then manages to overcome his fear of her and the terror apparatus she represents, free Poe and flee. In the end of the movie, his loyalty to Rey leads him to return to Starkiller Base, where - as luck might have it - he encounters Phasma again, quickly disarms her and gets rid of her in the trash compactor (off-screen, no less).

It's a very short and barebones arc, but it's workable on its own. It fits with the general weakness of "Force Awakens"'s third act, but the film makers are competent enough to cut the movie in a way that does give a kind of closure to all its major characters (see also Dameron, Poe). In theory, Phasma's story could be over. Her ignominious end in the trash compactor that wasn't even on screen is incredibly pathetic, but it fits Finn's arc in that he outgrew the fears of his (metaphorical) abusive childhood on Starkiller Base, symbolically killing his abusive mom.

It didn't happen that way, though. Unlike with the first Star Wars movie, the full merchandise blitz was preplanned months, even years in advance. And Phasma was an integral part of it, with her chrome stormtrooper armor and all. The kids didn't mind that she wasn't really in the movie (at least my son didn't) as they generally don't care too much about coherence in these things, but the other kids (around my age) very much do.

So, comics and novels were released, expanding on Phasma's background and story and exploring what she's been up to since she left the trash compactor (unharmed, of course). Thus happened what always happens with geek stuff these days: the canon grew wildly. And that isn't a problem. If you're a Phasma fan, all the more power to you. But it posed a problem for Rian Johnson, because when he started working on "The Last Jedi", he needed to incorporate this new backstory somehow. Phasma needed not only a bigger scene than before, this scene also needed to be brought in line with the new canon.

And Phasma is only one aspect of this headache for the writers. A LOT of other moving parts within this mega-production faces the same intricacies. If you watched the Deleted Scenes and read my comments on them here on Patreon (which of course you did, right...?), then you know that there was a scene with Finn that adressed the whole thing about his past in Phasma's squad, building her up as the big bad, and an alternate version of his duel with her in which the whole trash compactor and lowering the shields business from "The Force Awakens" is adressed.

Rian Johnson ultimately though the better of it in the cutting room and left that stuff out, instead once again only implying (at best) all that stuff and relying on the audience's head canon to figure out that Phasma probably didn't tell anyone she lowered the shields of Starkiller Base and eventually purged the records. It really didn't matter for the story, and curiously enough, this lack of an explanation so far never came up in the (long and misguided) criticisms of "The Last Jedi".

However, if you are not such a deft director, and/or the studio is forcing you to take that stuff in in order to better tie in with the merchandise and Disney's bottom line, you're essentially fucked as a creator. You will need to add crunch elements to your story that really shouldn't be there, that kill momentum and pacing and slow everything down. Worse, wise guys like me will criticize them for it, and if they ever want to work for the Big Mouse again, they'll have to suck it up and take it on the chin. Poor bastards.