One thing I dont understand Dan is how you have disdain for JJ's "mystery box" approach to writing. He raised questions, that were and are completely valid (who are reys parents, who is snoke, how did maz get lukes lightsaber) but didnt get a chance to answer them himself because of what Johnson did. Basically shut them down for whatever reason, and now to me, there isnt really a lot to look forward to in Ep 9. I would have loved to have those questions JJ brought up in 7 be either on their way to being answered at 8, or at least have some of them explained.
Let me explain my larger problem with "mystery box" stuff.
In general, I kind of view the use of "mystery boxes" as akin to "jump scares" in horror movies. It's meant to simulate something in the audience, rather than do the hard work of accomplishing the real thing. In a horror movie, a "jump scare" is used to activate the audience's fight-or-flight response, which simulates fear. Doing that is really easy, which is why horror fans tend to disdain jump scares. Actually making audience members genuinely afraid, though? Like, "Maaaaaybe I'll just sleep with the lights on...just for tonight..." scared? That's a lot harder to do.
Mystery boxes are similar. What they do is take a piece of information, withhold it from the audience, and then highlight it to create a mystery. What this simulates is audience interest. The problem is that mystery boxes are very often (a) filled with a pretty ordinary answer, (b) filled with
nothing because the creator is more interested in getting you wondering than providing the answer to the mystery, and -- and this is the really bad one -- (c) entirely part of the meta-narrative.
By "meta-narrative" I mean something that is outside of the story itself, rather than something that is part of the story. I'll give you two examples of this from another work: Battlestar Galactica (the reboot, that is). In BSG, you had (among others) two really big mysteries: (1) what was the Cylon "plan" that the opening mentioned in every episode, and (2) who were the "Final Five."
Both were "mysteries" that drove the series, essentially creating a "mystery box" for the audience. The identity of the Final Five human-looking Cylons turned out to be unknown to the creator himself until they got to the first episode that introduced the "All Along the Watchtower" thing (which I think was the last episode of Season...3? I dunno. I forget). The characters were picked literally because they thought "Wouldn't it be interesting if we picked these folks?" There was no answer to that mystery until they needed to answer it, rendering it nothing more than a meta-narrative device designed to hold the audience's interest, with no idea of where it was going until they actually got there. The worst example, though, is the one of the "plan." At the end of the show, the Cylon plan turned out to be "KILL ALL HUMANS" and...that was it. When the show ended, the answer to "What was their plan?" was "Kill the humans." Which we pretty much figured out IN THE PILOT EPISODE WHEN THEY TRIED TO KILL ALL THE HUMANS. In other words, it was a fake mystery. It was created purely to get the audience to wonder "What could the plan be?!" and tune in to find out or piece together clues about the plan. The plan, however, was not a mystery to the Cylons. They knew it all along. Nor was it even really a mystery to the humans, who were painfully aware that they Cylons wanted them all dead. So the only people who really cared about the mystery was the audience itself, and it only cared because someone decided to say "Oooh...look over here....A MYSTERY!!"
TFA introduced stuff like that, through a combination of what I think were deliberate choices, and other general sloppiness in writing. Rey's parents, I think, are a good example of a deliberate choice. TFA goes to great lengths to suggest that Rey is somehow special, that she's "somebody" even as she denies it and says she's "nobody." Part of that is who her parents are, and we never get to see them in the film (just their ship flying away while 6-year-old Rey screams for them to come back). But Rey knows what her parents look like, and at least has an idea of who they were (even if her idea could turn out to be wrong). The thing is, the film conceals
all of this from the audience. It spends a lot of time asking questions, but it provides no answers. Compare that to Luke in ANH. Luke starts the film believing that his father was a navigator on a spice freighter. Then Obi-Wan tells him the truth: his father was a powerful Jedi who was killed by Darth Vader, which suggests Luke could become one too. Later we learn that -- no! Vader was his father all along!!! -- and that's important to the audience...but it's way more important to Luke. In TFA, though,
all we have are questions. Who is Rey? Why is she like this? Who are her parents? Why did they leave her? WTF is going on here?!
JJ could have done some stuff to, for example, show us who
Rey thinks her parents are. That way, an ultimate reveal of their true identity would be meaningful for her. But all TFA does is introduce the question. To me, that suggests that JJ was more interested in the audience's reaction to the question than to actually answering it. The answer is more important to us than it is to Rey, at least the way the whole thing ends up playing out in the film.
Other stuff is more a question of timing and pacing. Nobody knew who Snoke was, where he came from, how he was powerful in the Force, how the First Order got so powerful, what the hell a "Knight of Ren (and Stimpy)" was and where the hell they were, etc. Lots of stuff introduced or teased or referenced without a lot of background provided. Authors have gone to fill in some of the blanks (as they do), but there was no, like, two minute recap the way Obi-Wan offered in his house in ANH, so everyone was basically sitting around wondering WTF was going on. Much of that is because the answers to those questions aren't directly relevant to the action on screen, but leaving them out was, I think, a mistake. I still think he should've cut or shortened the Rathtar sequence and instead done a few minutes of freakin' exposition. Instead, these became yet more "mysteries" for the mystery box, when really what they are is questions. But JJ's stuff is, I gather, full of this sort of thing. Teases, hints at bigger stories, mysteries, etc. Only I tend to wonder if he actually even knows the answers to this stuff, or if he just kinda wings it, picks stuff that sounds cool, and then figures "We'll fill in those details later."
Basically, I think "mystery box" writing is a cheap way to get an audience interested in your story, without actually needing to make your story interesting. In that sense, it creates simulated interest. You aren't interested in the story itself; you're interested in solving the puzzle the creator has presented to you. And JJ's philosophy is that it's always way more interesting to keep asking questions than it is to open the box. That may indeed be great if you're making your
own stories, but when I'm coming to
you to tell
me a story, I want a ******* story with a ******* ending in mind. Not "Well....that's the mystery! And you get to imagine whatever answers you want!" I also think this makes writers prone to sloppiness in crafting their narrative, because an unanswered question is just "more mystery!" rather than crappy writing. So, you can get away with a lot of crappy writing and failure to really engage in world-building by introducing something that sounds really neat (e.g., "Knights of Ren") without ever elaborating on what it is. (And, of course, the answer ended up being utterly mundane: they're the Jedi who joined Ben when he destroyed the Academy. Pretty much what you'd expect. But we still have no idea what their ethos is, why people would choose to join him and turn to the dark side, etc., etc. See? More sloppiness. All for the sake of a cool sounding "mystery.")
