Taxation Of Trade Routes To Outlying Star Systems, you say?

My hottest Star Wars take remains that if The Phantom Menace had only been about 6% better than it was, everyone would have thought it was brilliant that the spark that set off two major galactic conflicts was a pointless & performative trade dispute to a planet no one had ever heard of that got out of hand. Instead, everyone used that as shorthand for how boring the movie was. Even at the time, I was like, no, that’s one of the actually good ideas in here, especially when it turns out the crisis was entirely manufactured for someone’s political gain without anyone realizing it until it was too late.

There’s something really darkly amusing that as much as everyone claimed to hate the idea at the time, everyone sure remembered that so they could make a joke about it this past weekend.

Of course, it turns out the most prescient part of that movie was the senate kicking the problem to a committee, rather than—you know—sending someone to go look.