Midichlorians never bothered me.
The way everyone reacted you'd think GL explained away the force itself or something. Not even.
Suppose a character in the prequels mentioned in passing that the Jedi would routinely measure how much weight kids could levitate using the Force. Big whoop. That's about how much midichlorians did to "ruin the Force" IMO.
I don't think they "ruined" the Force. Rather, it was that change, plus a ton of other things that went wrong with TPM, plus the massive deflation of fan expectations and hopes, that was the problem. The midichlorians thing was one of those "tangible details" that people point to about what sucked about the movie. In my opinion, the real flaw of the midichlorians thing was threefold: (1) it explained something that nobody had asked a question about, (2) it changed an established "rule" of the universe to a degree (now the Force is pseudo-scientific rather than a pseudo-mystical energy field), and (3) most importantly,
they didn't do anything else with it. It served no dramatic purpose whatsoever, and its main effect was to tell the audience that it was changing the rules of the game, so to speak. In that sense, it was jarring for no real reason.
When you're building a fictional universe, you establish certain rules by which that universe is governed. You can break these rules, but you have to do so for a reason. Ghostbusters does a terrific job with this in that it sets up a "rule" with the "no crossing the streams" thing, and then promptly breaks that rule
for dramatic purpose. You'll note that nobody particularly complained that they crossed the streams
and then did not have total protonic reversal the way Egon described. The film
flagrantly breaks the rule it's established...but no one cares because they (A) acknowledge that they're breaking the rule, and (B) do so for dramatic purpose at the climax of the film. It's the heroic sacrifice (or might be, until the guys survive it) that's necessary to defeat Gozer. People are so caught up in the drama of the moment, that nobody notices that either Egon was flat-out wrong, or that he lied, or that the
film lied and broke its own rule. None of this matters because the rule-break serves a dramatic purpose.
The midichlorian thing, however, served no dramatic purpose
as a breaking of the rule. It was just...there. And then it was totally abandoned for the rest of the film series. Nobody ever touched it again (maybe they did on CW, but I haven't gotten there). It'd be as if Geordi LaForge had a scene in a ST:TNG episode where he explained to an alien fascinated by the warp core of the ship that these "dilithium crystals" Geordi had been referring to were actually crystalline gnomes made of dilithium who powered the ship with happy thoughts of gumdrops, and then
never made mention of this ever again. Has the universe of Star Trek changed, really? Nah, not really. The ship still flies, the warp core can still need to be jettisoned, etc., etc. But what you've done is undermine the legitimacy of the world by suddenly changing the implicit "rules" of the universe.
You can break the rules for two reasons: (1) because the drama of the moment is so important and so overpowering that nobody cares, or (2) because the act of breaking the rules actually serves the drama itself. You can get away with a "Ghostbusters" style rule-breaking. You can also get away with showing that the rule break is a part of the story (e.g., Jedi hubris believed the midichlorian theory, but it was all just another example of them becoming further alienated from the true Force and its mystical roots). But you can't just break a rule and leave it broken on the floor for no reason.
I never understood the counting part. They live in your cells, right? Which cells? I mean, a count of ten thousand is nothing compared to how many cells you have in your body.
If you google Midichlorians, you can find a Starwars.com article where Lucas goes into more detail. Suffice to say...he's not a biologist.
