Imaginary Worlds - Workin' on the Death Star

Episode Date: December 15, 2016

Think of all the movies and TV shows that reference Star Wars. Most of those scenes are pretty forgettable -- except for a scene in the 1994 film Clerks, which set off a debate that's still going on today. One of the characters notes that the second Death Star in Return of the Jedi was still under construction when it got blown up. So there must have been independent contractors still trying to finish the job. Is it fair that they got killed along with the Imperial Army and the Stormtroopers? Judge Matthew Sciarrino, Josh Gilliland of the podcast Legal Geeks and economist Zachary Feinstein of Washington University in St. Louis discuss the value "good guys" should place on the lives of "bad guys." ** This is part VI is a series that will probably go on forever about the influence of Star Wars **Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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So recently I was at WinterCon, which is like a small version of Comic-Con that's held at a casino in Queens. I like going to these mini Comic-Cons because they're way more casual than the big ones. You can actually get to know people. Like I was talking to this guy named John, who was a member of the 501st Legion. It's a charity organization of people that dress up as stormtroopers. And their costumes are dead on perfect. And he does it because he loves seeing the faces of kids when they march into a room. I think that I'm pretty sure that if a stormtrooper walked into your classroom in 1983, you would have lost your mind way before Han Solo walked in.

That is true. And the cool thing is with a costume, you can just be the stormtrooper. It's not like you can't be Harrison Ford of 1983 all of a sudden. Yes. There's a certain level of autonomy, you know. Nobody quite knows what you look like or whatever the case may be. You get a lot more attention when you're wearing the helmet than when you're not wearing the helmet.

I've been thinking about Stormtroopers lately for two reasons. First, there's a new Star Wars movie coming out, Rogue One. It takes place right before the original film, and it's about how the Rebels stole the plans for the Death Star, which allowed Luke Skywalker to blow it up. The power's led me to start thinking about this other movie, which has one of the most famous scenes about Star Wars that is not a Star Wars movie. It is the 1994 film Clerks, written and directed by Kevin Smith. And this scene has been debated for decades because it brought up some kind of uncomfortable issues about

the Star Wars universe. There are two guys at a convenience store talking about the fact that the second Death Star was only half completed when it was blown up. So? So a construction job of that magnitude would require a hell of a lot more manpower than the Imperial Army had to offer. I'll bet they brought independent contractors in on that thing. Plumbers, aluminum siders, roofers. Not just Imperials. Is that what you're getting at?

Exactly. In order to get it built quickly and quietly, they'd hire anybody that could do the job. Think the average stormtrooper knows how to install a toilet main? All they know is killing in white uniforms. All right, so they bring in independent contractors. Why are you so upset at its destruction? All those innocent contractors brought in to do the job were killed. Casualties of a war they had nothing to do with. So now during the scene, an independent contractor

comes up to them, and he says he is picky about the jobs that he takes. Any contractor working on that Death Star knew the risk involved. If they got killed, it's their own fault. You know who else agrees? The guy I talked to at WinterCon who plays a stormtrooper. Oh, without a doubt. Without a doubt. You know your risks the minute that you get to the Death Star. So I think this question that takes place in the Star Wars universe is interesting because it's about class, it's about morality, it's about agency, and it's also a legal question.

So I turned to Josh Gilliland, who's a lawyer in Silicon Valley. He hosts a podcast called Legal Geeks. You might remember him from my episode last year about the Han-Shot First controversy. I asked him who's at fault for the death of these independent contractors, and do we consider them innocent under the law? Independent contractors are viewed as business invitees under the law. The empire would have had a general duty to provide an independent contractor with a reasonably safe work environment or give warnings of danger. Now, to be fair, the name of the place is the Death Star. That should carry a little assumption of risk right there.

And the first one was blown up. On the flip side, you do have to provide a reasonably safe work environment. Now, there's a huge issue whether or not working in a Death Star would be reasonably safe because, again, it is named the Death Star. And if you look at either design, there are no handrails on that and a really polished floor. That just screams slipping and sliding and getting hurt. So the Death Star does not look like a safe place to work for either an employee or an independent contractor. Case closed. Or not. Because you know what trumps a lawyer? A judge.

Judge Matthew Sciarino sits in the Kings County Supreme Court in Brooklyn. When I met him at his chambers, I completely geeked out because he has two bookcases of Star Wars paraphernalia and posters all over the wall. He's such a Darth Vader fan, he arranged Anakin's entire life cycle in action figures. Imagine that in the background while he's having a conference with lawyers. Now, for legal reasons, I need to state that we were not allowed to record the interview

in his chambers. But luckily, the courthouse is across the street from the studios here at Panoply, where he told me that in his opinion, everybody that worked at the Death Star got a raw deal. I always thought about the people that worked on the Death Star. And I brought the numbers because I can never remember them, but it was a crew of over 265,000. There were 52,000 gunners. There were 607,000 troopers. There were 31,000 stormtroopers. There were another 50,000 ship support staff and there was another 180,000 pilots. So there was a lot of people that were on that ship when it blew up. So then what makes them a noncombatant?

If you look at an aircraft carrier in our Navy, there's everything from barbers to candy store operators that are on those ships. Those huge ships are cities unto themselves. And the Death Star,, why it was going, what its mission was. They were servicing the support staff and all of the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people that were on that ship. I want to see the candy store on the Death Star. And the barbershop. One of the interesting things, the new movie that's coming out, Rogue One, one of the scenes in the trailer shows one of the Death Troopers. He picks up a doll that's a stormtrooper. And you don't think about that, but why wouldn't there have been? I mean, especially with the propaganda machine that the Emperor used in the galaxy. Of course, he would have had posters and toys and things for kids to get indoctrinated into, you know, the love of the empire and its shoulders and its uniforms, etc. And so why wouldn't there have been toys? So that,

you know, that candy shop might have sold, you know, little miniature Death Stars or something so that they can bring them home when they were on shore leave. And he agrees with another point that the characters made in Clerks. Independent contractors would have been drawn towards a well-paying government job. In any totalitarian regime, in the Communist Party in Russia, the best jobs were controlled by the members of the Communist Party. In Nazi Germany, the best jobs were controlled by the Nazi Party. A lot of people, in order to get those best jobs, had to become members of that party and that regime, whether they really wanted to or not. And you can make certainly a lot of arguments that it's still non-excusable.

But the average person who's not getting the complete story because the empire controls all of the media is going to believe the stories that the Jedi were evil, that the Jedi tried to overthrow the democracy. In fact, the independent contractors that we never saw but assume are there in Return of the Jedi may not have even known there was another Death Star that got blown up. The imperial propaganda machine really didn't say, we blew up the planet, you better get in line or else. It almost was very quiet on the entire episode. And rumors trickled out as to what had happened to Alderaan. And the rebels always said, you know, the empire did this. But there was no imperial edict or propaganda war that we did this to this planet and we're going to do it to you,

get in line. Really? Was that in some of the novels? In some of the novels, et cetera. Now, what's canon and not canon, who knows? But if the Death Star had been successful, because with the Death Star gone, they can't say, we did this to Alderaan. And we're going to keep you in line. We're going to keep you in line or we're going to do it to your plan because they didn't have the ability at that point to do it to someone else. The whole incident was kind of covered up. But what should we think about the stormtroopers themselves? In the original trilogy, they're recruits. They're not mindless clones. And it does give you pause. I think it makes for, when you see the Death Star explode and you realize how many hundreds of thousands of people were on it,

I think it has more meaning than it just being a bunch of mindless soldiers that were all gung-ho for everything that the Empire believed should happen. I have to admit, until I saw Clerks, it had never occurred to me to think about stormtroopers or independent contractors. When I was a kid and we played Star Wars, we just argued over who got to be Luke and who got to be Han Solo. Maybe as we get older, we realize that in life, we don't all get to be the hero that changes history. I'm a big fan of Grey, and part of it has to do with I balance for a living. gray and part of it has to do with I balance for a living and the entire judicial and U.S. criminal justice system is based on advocacy and you're going to get one person arguing white and one person arguing black and sometimes the answer is gray. The Sith and the Jedi had been fighting each other for thousands and thousands of years before any of these movies

happened, if you read any of the expanded universe. And in that Sith-Jedi fight, countless millions of people who could care less about the Jedi or the Sith were killed. And that's almost a common theme in a lot of the expanded universes. You do have these evil people fighting these incredibly good people. But there's a lot of us here down in the janitorial staff of the Death Star that get caught up in that fight between the evil and the good. And we'd be well enough to just be left alone to live our nice life. And I agree that that might be the why the Kevin Smith line really did resonate with all of us. Josh Gilliland objects, Your Honor. He says, look at Finn in The Force Awakens, who, by the way,

did know how to install a toilet main, which may have been a nod to clerks. Now, unlike the willing recruits in the original trilogy, his generation of stormtroopers were brainwashed, but he still managed to liberate himself and defect to the side of the resistance. This is a rescue. I'm helping you escape. Can you fly a TIE fighter? You're with the resistance? What? No, no, no. I'm breaking you out. Can you fly a TIE fighter? I can fly anything.

Why? Why are you helping me? Because it's the right thing to do. Free will does have to play a part in this. And so when you look at, you know, our own cases dealing with I was just following orders, you should know on its face when an order is illegal. And Kylo Ren giving the order to shoot all the civilians, that on its face would be an illegal order from our point of view. Kill them all.

All might come out. Five. You know, it reminds me of Judgment at Nuremberg, one of those amazing lawyer films. And when you look at those who were on trial in that movie, you include former, you know, former judge. You know, while the judge still thought he was, you know, trying to help in doing his duty in Nazi Germany, you know, he violated, you know, his own oath when he sentenced his, you know, the first person he knew to be innocent. Now, for the record, Josh Gilliland and Judge Cherino are friends. They love getting into these kinds of debates. But after the break, we'll hear from an economist

who says the big question isn't whether we should feel bad about independent contractors. The big question is whether the rebels should have blown up the Death University in the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering. Zach says when he was a teenager, he and his friends would get into all these really nerdy debates about Star Wars. For instance, about why Luke was a moisture farmer on Tatooine in a galaxy with interstellar travel. That really did not make much sense. You could have just created some sort of irrigation system with simple Keynesian economics. Luke would have been happier. He would not have joined the rebellion. And really, that would have been the end. But they figured the Empire did not invest in its people or infrastructure. It poured all of its money into the military, which made Zach wonder how much the Death Star would cost

and what would be the economic fallout if it were destroyed. Not the first one, but the second one that also took out the empire's leadership. So he crunched the numbers and wrote an academic paper called It's a Trap Emperor Palpatine's Poison Pill. It's a great title. In order to come up with the cost of the first Death Star, I started with actually the results from the U.S. government. So in 2012, there was a petition to the White House to build a Death Star. That petition has gained over 34,000 signatures, but the White House has politely declined the

petition with a response that has gone viral on the internet. The White House has now shot down the idea. One reason they cited it would add nearly a quintillion dollars to the federal budget deficit. I looked into where this came from because they just gave this headline number and then had a footnote. And going back through the citations, there was a group of students at Lehigh University that calculated the cost for steel to build a Death Star. But there are so many other factors besides the cost of steel. So in the end, it would cost $193 quintillion. US GDP is roughly $17 trillion. So you go trillion, quadrillion, then quintillion. So that was for the first Death Star. The second Death Star is actually much larger. The first Death Star was 140 kilometers

in diameter. The second one was 900 kilometers in diameter. The second one was 900 kilometers in diameter. After doing that, we got a number of 419 quintillion dollars. Next, he had to figure out what was the scale of this project in relation to the GGP, the Gross Galactic Product, which is something he completely made up. The only comparison he could think of was the Manhattan Project, the U.S. government's program to develop an atomic bomb, which cost over a four-year period 0.21% of U.S. GDP per year. He crunched the numbers again and figured that the first Death Star

would cost 4% of the GDP over 20 years. That's much bigger than the Manhattan Project. But the money would be guaranteed by the intergalactic banking clan, which does exist in the Star Wars canon. It is the Federal Reserve of the Empire. They back the currency, they back the galactic credit, and they really are this huge too-big-to-fail institution. That's why he called his paper, It's a Trap, Emperor Palpatine's Poison Pill. I actually posit that this is mutually assured destruction. Due to the pure scale of the Death Star's costs, if they were to be destroyed, then it's of such a magnitude that it would destroy the galactic economy. And what would happen is that really will make people blame the rebels for doing this.

People aren't worried about politics when they're worried about where they're going to get their next meal. But wouldn't this be apparent? I mean, if the first Death Star gets destroyed and then we've got time between the second Death Star gets created and destroyed, I mean, obviously they must have already felt the economic impact of the first Death Star getting destroyed. Not necessarily, because the first Death Star was built by the Empire. The Empire will still pay off the debts that it incurred in building this. It's only once you destroy the second one and kill off the leadership of the Empire and repudiate the debts on the Death Star, would this crisis really start to foment? But if the rebels are led by wise people like Princess Leia,

and they knew that blowing up the Death Star would cause an economic collapse, wouldn't they do the right thing and pay off the empire's debts? This is a ragtag group. The rebels kind of just took whatever ships they could find. a ragtag group. The rebels kind of just took whatever ships they could find. They did not have resources to do this. The one thing that they can actually agree on is that they should be fighting the empire and destroying the empire. Once it comes to what's going to happen next, they're going to devolve into infighting into political parties into what the republic was that we saw in the prequel trilogies. As far as Zach is concerned, the question about independent contractors isn't just moral or legal, it's economic. In other words, if you're the good guys, what kind of value do you place in the lives

of the people you consider bad guys? And what about their families back home? We're depending on those paychecks. They really need to have some sort of payment scheme to the widows, to the children of those that were killed, the construction workers, the contractors. We know that they're the Geonosians, but just because they're not a humanoid species doesn't mean that they're negligible. They were just doing a job wait gina wasn't that jar jar binks's uh no uh the geonosians were at the end of episode two um where they have the the start of the clone wars oh oh oh i didn't realize they were also building the death star yeah so this was uh if you watch the director's commentary, this is mentioned.

The Geonosians build robots and build things. They're sort of the construction workers. They would be the ones that would probably be contracted to build the Death Star. And they were the ones that Jay and Silent Bob worried that they got killed on the Death Star. But they are, after all, just a bunch of large termites. So that was George Lucas' response to the question of human life and its value in the Death Star. The independent contractors weren't human. But that doesn't seem like much of a repudiation of this problem. It's just saying, well, it's a different species,

so let's not care. When Zach Feinstein finally published his paper, he got a lot of pushback. People were still mad about the U.S. government bailing out the banks on Wall Street, and now he's asking them to imagine bailing out the Death Star? I think part of the problem is that his paper is all about accepting necessary evils in life. But the example he uses is Star Wars, which is a world that's usually split between pure good and pure evil. Zach says that doesn't matter. The point is he got people arguing. If I wrote about 2008 or some other financial crisis that people know about, the same five people who read any of my other academic papers would have read it.

Instead, by writing it about Star Wars, by really academically studying fiction, I'm able to talk to you. I'm able to kind of get the latest research, the latest ideas out there into the real world. It's funny. I remember in 1983, I was a little disappointed that Return of the Jedi was so similar to the original film, ending with the explosion of yet another Death Star. And then people complained last year when The Force Awakens came out and it followed the same formula. But I actually find this idea poignant because it means the good guys aren't learning from their mistakes.

Often in life, we think that every problem can be solved with a big bang and a victory celebration. But if we don't deal with the messy consequences afterwards, we'll find ourselves right back where we started. Well, that's it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Zach Feinstein, Josh Gilliland, and Judge Matthew Sherino. Imaginary Worlds is part of the Panoply Network.

And by the way, I definitely want to continue with this Star Wars series, especially when Episode 8 comes out next year. If you guys have ideas for Star Wars topics, let me know on the Imaginary Worlds Facebook page. I tweet at emolinski. You can also support the show on Patreon. I have a link on my site, imaginaryworldspodcast.org. But there must have been a Death Star canteen, yeah? There must have been a cafeteria downstairs in between battles where Darth Vader could just chill and go down. I will have the penne a la Arabiata.

Go for Papa Palpatine. You have a collect call from... Darth Vader. I gotta take this. Hold on. Vader, how's my favorite Sith? What do you mean they blew up the Death Star? Who's they? What the hell is an aluminum falcon?