a.k.a. V.J.

“‘Remember when’ is the lowest form of conversation.”

~Tony Soprano

After finishing the second season of Andor, I decided to watch Rogue One for the first time in at least six or seven years. Rogue One is a film that I mostly like but have always had some mixed feelings about. When I first saw the movie, it seemed very uneven with a choppy and rushed beginning before eventually settling down into a satisfying third act. I wondered if seeing the film on the heels of Andor might give me a newfound appreciation for it.

Somewhat surprisingly, Andor didn’t make me like Rogue One any more. It actually made me like it slightly less because the movie suffered in comparison with the much-superior streaming show. But, for the most part, the elements of Rogue One that didn’t work for me the first time around still didn’t work for me in 2025 and the parts that I liked originally, I still liked.

There was one brief moment in Rogue One that I hated when I first saw it, then forgot about. Then, upon seeing the scene again, I hated it with a fresh intensity. There’s a scene where our protagonists, Cassian Andor and Jyn Erso, are making their way through a crowded city. They bump into a couple characters who instantly get hostile and threaten them before moving on. Said characters are Dr. Evazan and Ponda Baba (a.k.a. Walrus Man) — the same pair who threaten Luke Skywalker in the first Star Wars movie, leading to Obi Wan dismembering Ponda Baba with his light saber. The Rogue One confrontation is set up to closely mirror the scenario from the 1977 Star Wars cantina.

In the parlance of modern corporate IP-based franchise filmmaking, the inclusion of those two characters is what is called an “Easter egg.” It’s a quick cue from an earlier movie designed to give viewers well-versed in the lore of the franchise a brief moment of satisfaction when they recognize the callback.

When done sparingly and subtly, Easter eggs can be fun exploitations of what psychologists call the mere-exposure effect. (That’s the idea that we tend to be positively disposed to things we are familiar with simply because we are familiar with them.) That said, there was nothing subtle about this particular Easter egg — one can practically feel the suits at Lucasfilm nudging us in the ribs and pointing at the screen when those two characters appear. If you think about it too much, the presence of Baba and Evazan on this particular planet about a week in plot time before they show up again on Tatooine seems awfully coincidental. If you think about it at all, it’s simply a distraction that takes you out of the story.

It’s also hard to categorize the use of Easter eggs in franchise films as “sparing.” Some such movies seem to simply be an excuse to expose us to as many Easter eggs as possible. In fact, there is a cottage industry of YouTubers who make videos pointing out exhaustive lists of Easter eggs in the latest movies, TV shows, and video games. A YouTube search of the term “Easter egg,” filtering results from only the past month, returned videos dedicated to Easter eggs in Red Dead Redemption II, Doom, Muppet*Vision 3D, Fortnite, Predator, Grand Theft Auto, Doctor Who, and even my beloved Andor, just to name a few.

The fact that so many fans are taking to YouTube and celebrating Easter eggs might suggest that filmmakers are just giving the people what they want by sticking them in so many properties. Fair enough, but there can definitely be too much of a good thing. Plus, it points to the lazy cynicism that seems to infect most of these corporate franchise entertainments. The same movie makers that lavish us with Easter eggs seem quite stingy when it comes to serving up well-realized stories or compelling characters. Their logic seems to be: Why spend the effort to create art when all you have to do to make money is provide quick reminders of the fictional universe people fell in love with decades ago? Based on the breathless enthusiasm of some of the YouTubers, maybe the studios can’t be blamed for thinking that way.

There’s a larger discussion to be had about the ability of corporate behemoths like Disney and Warner Bros. to consistently make satisfying art while also serving shareholder interests; and about the practice of strip-mining beloved stories from the past and repackaging the random spare parts inside the reanimated corpses of the originals. The overuse of Easter eggs is a fairly small part of those macro issues, but it’s the part I just bumped up against after watching the nine-year-old prequel to a forty-eight-year-old movie, shortly after watching Season 2 of the prequel to the prequel. So here we are.

It’s all enough to make me wish I had the death sentence on twelve systems.