Star Wars: Broken Inheritance

A post-mortem of the narrative decision that broke the Disney sequels

I left The Last Jedi with a knot in my gut.

Luke Skywalker was old, bitter and defeated, but none of those things really explained it. Heroes are allowed to fail. Age can hollow a person out. Even wisdom may decay. A man may lose faith in the institution he once hoped to rebuild and discover that the qualities which saved him in youth no longer answer the world in front of him. The tragedy of an older Luke might have become one of the richest stories within Star Wars.

The film had done something else entirely. It had preserved Luke’s face, his history, the robes and the Force, while severing the moral logic that once held those things together.

I felt that before I understood it. Something no longer followed from what came before, though I could not yet name the broken connection. What remained was discomfort, then anger, then years spent arguing around a wound.

Perhaps nostalgia was responsible. Perhaps I wanted Luke protected from time. Perhaps the people defending the film were right that an audience raised on his heroism simply could not tolerate seeing him diminished. I tried to accept the film on those terms. Luke didn’t owe me invincibility. He didn’t owe the galaxy a flawless restoration of the Jedi. He didn’t even owe us the preservation of every belief he carried out of the original trilogy.

Yet, two scenes remained impossible to reconcile with one another.

Luke Skywalker standing above Darth Vader with a weapon in his hand.
Luke Skywalker standing above Ben Solo, repeating the image.

Rian Johnson had placed those scenes in direct relation, whether he intended the comparison or not. He had built Luke’s collapse around the same moral pressure that once completed him. The choice felt too exact to be careless, and Johnson is plainly capable of telling a story. His films show a writer fascinated by perspective, inherited roles, self-deception and the myths people use to understand themselves. The Last Jedi is deliberate in almost everything it does.

That made the question harder.

What did Rian Johnson think he was doing?

The answer took me backward through Luke’s story, then beyond Johnson, into a production decision made before he ever created his movie. What first appeared to be the destruction of one character became the point through which the failure of the entire sequel trilogy could be seen.

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The Man Who Threw Away the Saber

Luke’s original arc is often reduced to hope. He believes there is still good in his father. He refuses to surrender to hatred. His faith allows Anakin Skywalker to return.

That may be true, but hope is the visible expression of a deeper achievement.

Luke begins with a hunger to act. He wants to leave the farm, enter history and become someone capable of changing the world. His restlessness contains courage and vanity, compassion and impatience. He is drawn toward the larger life because the small one feels intolerable.

Once the larger world opens, Luke moves toward it instinctively. He follows Obi-Wan, helps Leia, joins the Rebellion and destroys the Death Star. Action liberates him from the life in which he felt trapped, and for a while action appears to be the form his goodness naturally takes.

The Empire Strikes Back exposes the danger inside that pattern.

Luke sees his friends suffering through the Force. Yoda warns him that visions reveal fragments, that the future remains in motion, that his presence may not produce the result he imagines. Luke leaves Dagobah anyway.

His decision comes from love. It also comes from an inability to remain helpless while the people he loves are in pain. Their suffering creates an immediate demand to intervene. Action feels morally necessary because inaction has become emotionally unbearable.

Love becomes fear. Fear becomes urgency. Urgency demands control.
The attempt to control the future creates the catastrophe it meant to prevent.

Luke reaches Cloud City and walks into Vader’s design. He fails to save Han. Leia and the others eventually have to rescue him. He loses his hand and the secure identity he carried into the confrontation. The father he imagined as a dead hero reveals himself as the monster standing before him.

This is the Skywalker danger. Anakin also begins in love. His fall grows from the terror that love might be taken from him. He cannot accept a future in which Padmé dies, so the future itself becomes an enemy to be subdued. Death must be mastered. Fate must be preempted. Any power promising control begins to look morally available.

The dark side teaches Anakin to call cruelty necessary. Luke carries the same inheritance. Return of the Jedi brings him to its completed form.

The Emperor places Luke before a future he cannot control. The Rebel fleet is trapped. His friends are dying. The shield remains active. Every loss outside the window is presented as proof that the Emperor has already determined the outcome. Luke is made to feel that refusal is cowardice and that action, however terrible, is the last remaining form of love.

He reaches for his weapon.

Vader blocks him, and temptation turns into combat. Luke regains his composure until Vader discovers Leia. The threat against her is what breaks him.

Protective love becomes fear. Fear turns into rage.

Luke attacks his father with genuine killing force. He drives Vader backward, overwhelms him and cuts through his defense until Vader lies beaten beneath him. A mechanical hand falls to the floor. Luke stands above him with the saber still alive in his own.

This is Luke’s darkest moment, and nothing about it is innocent.
Vader is already a murderer, torturer and servant of genocidal tyranny. He has threatened Leia, mutilated Luke and helped sustain an Empire capable of destroying worlds. Every visible fact appears to justify killing him.

Then Luke sees the hand. Vader’s severed machinery lies before him. Luke looks down at his own mechanical hand.

Fear creates certainty. Certainty creates entitlement. Entitlement authorises violence. Violence presents itself as protection.

Vader is no longer only the enemy Luke must defeat. He is the completed form of the logic currently passing through Luke himself. The Emperor has used love’s terror of loss to make domination feel righteous.

Luke recognises the cliff while he is standing on its edge.

His anger remains. His capacity for violence remains. His love for Leia remains terrified and exposed. His achievement consists in seeing what those forces are asking him to become before they complete the movement.

Then Luke throws away his saber.

The act refuses more than violence. It refuses the Emperor’s definition of victory.
Kill the father. Inherit his place. Become the next instrument through which order imposes itself upon the future. Call the succession liberation.

Luke rejects the bargain. He no longer accepts that the horror of the situation grants him permission to reproduce its moral structure.

He also moves beyond the surviving Jedi. Obi-Wan and Yoda understand Vader as a fallen man whose destruction has become necessary. Their conclusion is grounded in everything Anakin has done. But Luke sees one further truth:

A person is not exhausted by the worst thing they have become.

He doesn’t deny Vader’s crimes. He refuses to treat those crimes as the final boundary of the person who committed them. He confronts Vader as an enemy while continuing to address Anakin as a father.

Mercy here is neither softness nor absolution. It is the refusal to let fear close another person’s future before that person has chosen. Luke cannot force Anakin to return.
He can only refuse Vader’s logic and remain present long enough for his father to act freely.

The Emperor attacks him. Luke does not reclaim his weapon. He does not reverse his decision once pain arrives. He simply stays.

Anakin chooses, and the cycle breaks.

When we leave Luke at the end of Return of the Jedi, he is unfinished, vulnerable and correctly aligned. His temperament may have survived, but his relationship to it has changed. He can still feel fear without treating fear as guidance. He can still experience rage without granting rage command. He can possess power without making control the proof of his goodness.

Character development does not erase vulnerability. It changes what a person understands when the vulnerability returns.

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Same Weapon, Opposite Choice

That is why the comparison with Ben cannot be dismissed as Luke merely remaining human.

Vader has already become nearly everything Luke fears. He has committed mass murder, served tyranny and helped destroy countless lives. Luke still refuses to reduce him to the monster he has become.

Ben is Luke’s nephew, his student and the son of the two people closest to him. He is asleep. He has not yet become Kylo Ren. Luke sees a possible future and ignites his saber.

The sequel gives Luke the easier moral case and makes him fail in the precise manner he overcame in the harder one. In Return of the Jedi, he confronts completed evil and refuses preemption. In The Last Jedi, he confronts anticipated evil and prepares it.

The brevity of the impulse does not resolve the contradiction. Luke’s original achievement was never “freedom from dark thoughts”. He had already acted upon murderous rage in the throne room. The meaning of that scene lay in the recognition produced by the near-fall.

Luke had learned how preemption disguises itself.

A possible future becomes certain in the mind. Certainty becomes judgment. Judgment prepares violence as prevention.

The saber may only remain active for a moment, but the symbol is complete. Luke has moved from fear into preparation for lethal control. The darkness inside him is not the problem. The problem is that the insight which once defined him appears to have lost all governing force.

People regress. Wisdom erodes. A person may betray the deepest truth he has ever understood. A story about Luke’s gradual corrosion could have been extraordinary.

Perhaps mercy repeatedly produced terrible consequences. Perhaps visions he dismissed began coming true. Perhaps students suffered because he hesitated. Perhaps the burden of protecting many lives changed his understanding of restraint. Perhaps the legend of Luke Skywalker made uncertainty impossible to confess.
The man who saved Vader might become terrified that he alone must prevent another Vader. That terror could begin with small compromises. He watches Ben too closely. He interprets anger as inheritance. He hides his doubts from Leia and Han. He turns toward visions and away from relationships. A possible future becomes a diagnosis.

Then he enters the hut.

Under that pressure, the ignition of the saber becomes the culmination of a tragedy. Luke still reverses his defining achievement, but the reversal has become the subject of the story. We understand how mercy became surveillance, how responsibility hardened into paranoia and how the fear of creating another Vader helped create one.

The Last Jedi gives us the endpoint.

“People change” establishes possibility. It does not establish causality. Drama lies in the pressures and decisions through which one moral posture becomes another.
The greater the achievement being undone, the more substantial that road must be.

Luke’s regression spans the philosophical climax of the original trilogy.
A brief flashback cannot carry thirty years of invisible corrosion.

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What Luke Does After Failure

The scene in Ben’s hut contains the clearest contradiction. Luke’s response afterward creates an even deeper one.

Luke has always moved toward endangered people. His immaturity once made him arrive too quickly. He left Dagobah before he was ready and entered Vader’s trap because he could not tolerate helplessness. By Return of the Jedi, that movement has matured into responsibility. He still goes toward danger, but he no longer confuses action with control. After nearly falling in the throne room, he remains present, unarmed and vulnerable.

Failure increases his obligation to stay.

The sequel moves him in the opposite direction. Luke fails Ben and disappears.

He leaves his nephew inside the identity Luke helped precipitate. He leaves Leia and Han inside the destruction of their family. He leaves the galaxy exposed to another dark-side regime.

Original Luke says: I failed. Now i must face what follows.
Sequel Luke says: I failed. Everyone is safer without me.

The second statement sounds humble because Luke condemns himself. Its centre remains Luke’s judgment. He decides that his failure has made his presence poisonous, and the decision becomes binding upon everyone else.

Leia receives no meaningful voice in whether she still needs her brother. Han confronts their son without him. Ben is abandoned to the consequences of a moment Luke helped create.

Fear becomes destiny in the hut. Shame becomes destiny on the island.

Luke stops trusting that relationship can produce an answer beyond his own conclusion. His established response to guilt—responsibility under pain—becomes abandonment through self-condemnation.

Crait repairs part of this. Luke returns as an image, confronts the First Order without physical violence and allows the Resistance to escape. The boy who once threw away his weapon defeats an army through refusal.

On paper, it’s beautiful.

But it allows Luke to die before the harder work begins. He does not have to live with Leia’s grief, face Han’s death, teach Rey through uncertainty or confront Ben over time. The legend is restored through one perfect gesture, and the man is relieved from responsibility.

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What Was Rian Johnson Solving?

That was the structure beneath the knot in my gut. Mercy had become preemption. Responsibility had become exile. Luke had been made to repeat the lesson that once completed him.

The obvious conclusion seemed unavoidable. Rian Johnson had either misunderstood Luke, or he had understood him and chosen to dismantle him.

Neither explanation quite accounted for the film’s intelligence.

Johnson’s treatment of Luke is too patterned to dismiss as carelessness. The hut, the exile, the critique of the Jedi, the rejection of the legend and the final restoration on Crait form a deliberate argument. His wider choices follow the same impulse.

Snoke dies before becoming another Emperor.
Rey’s anticipated ancestry collapses into anonymity.
Kylo attempts to stop serving as another Vader.

The inherited forms are challenged before some return in altered shape. The film knows what it is doing.

The better question was no longer whether Johnson had made a mistake. It was what problem he believed he was solving.

The answer was to be found at a point before he had ever joined the project.

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The Decision That Came First

Johnson did not decide to remove Luke Skywalker from the sequel trilogy.
Luke had already been removed.

His absence is the organizing mystery of The Force Awakens. His students are gone. Ben has fallen. Han and Leia’s family has broken. The First Order is rising. A map to Luke drives the plot while Luke himself remains beyond it.

That arrangement began as a practical writing problem.

Michael Arndt has described early versions of Episode VII in which Rey encountered Luke much sooner. Whenever Luke entered the story, attention moved toward him. The established hero began to overwhelm the new protagonist. The solution was to delay him until the final scene.

The difficulty was real. Luke Skywalker was the completed protagonist of the original trilogy and one of modern cinema’s defining heroes. Rey had only just entered the story. Holding both inside one narrative without allowing Luke to consume it required confidence, restraint and a problem whose decisive answer belonged to her.

That was the assignment. That was the job.
The creative question therefore should have been:

“How does Rey become necessary in a galaxy where Luke Skywalker still exists?”

The production settled upon another:

“How do we prevent Luke Skywalker from taking over Rey’s story?”

A new protagonist does not become central because every more experienced character has been disabled. She becomes central because the story discovers a conflict, relationship or choice that belongs uniquely to her.

Luke might understand the Force and misunderstand the new world. He might possess power without possessing the relationship required to reach Ben. He might be capable of defeating Kylo physically while knowing that such a victory would destroy any possibility of saving the person beneath him.

Rey could learn from Luke, reject his answer and prove correct. His presence could make her story harder without making it smaller.

The challenge existed because the inheritance was valuable. Disney treated that value as a production liability.

Outside the fictional world, Luke was removed to protect Rey’s centrality. Inside it, the decision became an enormous moral event. Luke had apparently abandoned his family, his students, the Jedi and the historical responsibility created by the original trilogy.

That is the narrative decision that sent the sequels off course. Disney wanted Rey, Finn, Poe and Ben to carry Star Wars forward. The ambition was sound. The error was the assumption that the older generation had to become smaller before the new one could matter.

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What Johnson Did With It

Johnson inherited the consequences. And took them seriously.

He was handed a Luke whose established character could not easily explain his established situation. Luke had withdrawn after Ben’s fall and the destruction of his Jedi. He had remained absent while Leia fought another rising authoritarian power and Han returned to the wreckage of their family.

Ordinary discouragement could not explain this. Luke had already faced Vader and the Emperor. His entire history pulled him toward endangered people. He would not sit on an island while his family suffered because the task ahead had become frightening.

Johnson understood the extremity of the problem. His solution was to make Luke believe that Luke Skywalker himself had become dangerous.

The hut makes him partly responsible for Ben’s fall. The destruction of the temple turns error into catastrophe. The history of the Jedi expands private shame into institutional judgment. The rejection of Luke’s legend removes the moral obligation to return. Exile becomes an attempted act of responsibility.

Johnson does not look at the man at the end of Return of the Jedi and discovers that withdrawal grows naturally from him. He looks at the withdrawal required by Force Awakens and constructs a Luke capable of remaining there.

This explains both the strength and the falsity of the portrayal.

Johnson refuses to leave Luke’s absence as an empty plot mechanism. He gives it psychological weight, philosophical coherence and tragic consequence. He knows Luke cannot simply be cowardly, so Luke must believe intervention itself has become the danger.

The same impulse governs his treatment of the story around Luke. The Force Awakens had restored the external machinery of Star Wars:

another imperial power,
another embattled resistance,
another desert orphan,
another masked Skywalker,
another hidden dark-side master,
another planet-destroying weapon.

The familiar forms offered safety. Star Wars could return by recreating the emotional rhythm of A New Hope.

Johnson saw the trap.

Kylo could not remain a lesser Vader.
Snoke could not remain a substitute Emperor.
Rey could not spend three films waiting for a surname to explain her importance. Luke could not return merely to perform the expected gestures of legendary power.

Johnson begins cutting the repetitions.

Snoke dies before his promised mythology arrives.
Kylo becomes Supreme Leader instead of exchanging one master for another.
Rey is severed from dynastic importance.
Luke refuses the anticipated heroic return.
The Jedi inheritance is placed under judgment.
The final image transfers the myth of Luke Skywalker to an unknown child beyond family, institution and sacred weapon.

This is not random sabotage. It is an attempt to force the trilogy to become its own story.

Johnson may have believed he was saving Star Wars from Disney’s method of reproducing Star Wars. His themes are real. His challenge to repetition was necessary. His understanding of myth as something larger than the flawed person who carries it contains genuine beauty.

But he challenged the repetition while accepting its deepest premise.

He did not challenge the necessity of Luke’s removal. He made the removal psychologically and philosophically real.

Disney removed Luke because the story was harder to organise with him present. Johnson created a Luke who believed the world was morally safer without him.

That is why The Last Jedi can feel intelligent, deliberate and fundamentally false at the same time. Its internal argument is coherent. Its foundation was imposed backward upon the character.

He also left the final film with the possibility of a genuinely different conclusion.

Kylo ruled in his own name.
Rey stood outside prestigious ancestry.
The substitute Emperor was gone.
Luke’s myth had escaped family ownership.
The Jedi inheritance had been broken open without being entirely discarded.

Johnson handed Disney a well developed and seemingly interesting setup.
Disney’s answer was to retreat.

Palpatine returned.
Rey received the most consequential bloodline available.
Kylo returned to redeemed son and sacrificial Skywalker.
Luke partly repudiated his earlier withdrawal.
The Skywalker name became the final object of inheritance.

The trilogy had now enacted three incompatible relationships with its own past.

The Force Awakens reproduced it.
The Last Jedi dismantled it.
The Rise of Skywalker attempted to reclaim it.

None of them continued it.

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Three Generations, One Broken Inheritance

Luke reveals the founding error because his arc carried the moral resolution of the original saga. The same error moved backward into the prequels and forward into the characters created to replace him.

The original trilogy ends with sacrifice and growth altering the world.

Han moves from detachment into commitment. Leia helps defeat the Empire and opens the possibility of political restoration. Luke breaks the Skywalker cycle through mercy and responsibility.

The sequels return all three toward familiar earlier positions.

Han is a smuggler again. Leia leads another resistance against another imperial power. Luke’s Jedi have fallen, and another Skywalker serves the dark side. The Republic disappears before becoming a meaningful dramatic world.

The old heroes are not tested by the consequences of victory. Their victory is removed so the conditions that first made them heroic can be reproduced.

The prequel generation loses a different completion.

The prequels reorganise the saga around Anakin’s fall and redemption. His final act on the Death Star closes six films. He rejects the Emperor, saves his son, abandons the identity of Vader and ends the succession Palpatine had prepared for Luke. The man who once tried to conquer death through control finally accepts death in order to preserve another person’s freedom.

Palpatine’s return reopens the completed confrontation.

The Emperor remains the hidden author of the Skywalker catastrophe. Another Skywalker falls under his influence. The Sith project survives. A later protagonist must finish what Anakin appeared to resolve.

Anakin’s redemption retains its intimate meaning between father and son. Its larger mythic consequence contracts into a temporary interruption.

The past is summoned to give closure to a trilogy that never established a final conflict of its own.

The sequel generation loses the most.

Disney diminished the old heroes to create room for new ones, then failed to use them properly.

Rey begins inside abandonment. She has built her life around waiting for someone to return and explain who she is. Her competence allows her to survive. Her hope keeps her imprisoned. Each film gives her a different relationship to inheritance. Episode VII turns her identity into a mystery. Episode VIII tells her that no prestigious lineage will answer it. Episode IX makes her Palpatine’s granddaughter and resolves her story through adoption into the Skywalker name.

Each answer could sustain a coherent arc. Together they reveal a trilogy repeatedly changing its mind about what identity means.

Finn has one of the richest premises Star Wars ever created: a stormtrooper recovering his personhood. He has been raised inside a system designed to erase individuality. His first moral act is refusal. His story could have opened the interior world of the First Order and turned personal awakening into collective liberation.

The trilogy abandons the promise entirely.

Poe enters as a charismatic pilot and possible heir to Leia’s political responsibility. His role shifts between heroic ace, reckless subordinate and chastened leader without enough continuity to form one developing life.

Ben receives the strongest material because his conflict remains attached to every earlier generation. He is Leia’s son, Han’s son, Anakin’s grandson and Luke’s student. Even his direction changes with the trilogy. He begins as a Vader successor serving a hidden master. Johnson pushes him toward independent rule. Episode IX returns him to redeemed son and sacrificial Skywalker.

The new generation never receives a stable world because every film renegotiates the meaning of the old one.

Rey does not become more coherent because Luke exists less.
Finn does not become more essential because Han dies.
Poe cannot inherit political responsibility because Leia’s political world has been erased.
Ben cannot become a genuinely new antagonist once Palpatine returns above him.
The old generation is diminished. The prequel resolution is reopened. The sequel generation remains unfinished.

Three generations occupy the same franchise without being allowed to inhabit the same continuing story.

The deepest failure of the sequels was an inability to imagine succession without displacement. This habit extends beyond Star Wars. Legacy productions often treat inherited heroes as competitors for attention. Their cultural gravity becomes a problem to manage. They are weakened, disgraced, killed or removed so that a new protagonist can occupy the centre.

Living inheritance works through relationship. The new generation receives something, misunderstands part of it, preserves one truth, rejects another and encounters a condition the previous generation cannot solve. The inheritance changes without becoming meaningless.

Disney attempted to manufacture that process by clearing the space first.

Luke’s presence threatened Rey’s centrality, so Luke was removed.
The Republic complicated the return of the familiar rebellion, so the Republic was erased.
Anakin’s completed victory limited the reuse of Palpatine, so the victory was reopened.

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The final irony

The final irony is that the production itself repeated Luke’s central failure.

It saw a feared future—Luke overwhelming Rey—and treated that future as settled. It intervened preemptively, removed the danger, and created the catastrophe it hoped to avoid. Luke was diminished, the inheritance was broken, and Rey still did not receive a coherent story.

The lesson Luke had once embodied was violated first inside the fiction, then in the making of it.

This is where my anger finally dissipated.

Rian Johnson may have written the visible wound. He gave Luke the philosophy of exile and ended his life before prolonged repair could begin. Those choices remain open to criticism. But they also belong inside a chain.

The writers of Episode VII faced a genuinely difficult problem and chose removal. Johnson inherited the moral consequences and gave them the strongest meaning he could. The final film inherited his rupture and retreated toward familiarity.

No single villain destroyed the sequels. A series of intelligent people made consequential decisions inside a project that had never asked the correct first question.

How does a new generation become necessary while the old generation remains fully alive?

The harder story would have trusted both.

It would have allowed Luke to remain Luke and required Rey to become someone he could never replace. It would have allowed Leia’s political victory to stand and given Poe problems rebellion alone could not solve. It would have allowed Anakin’s sacrifice to remain complete and discovered an evil born from the consequences of his age. It would have allowed Finn’s awakening to spread through the institution that created him. It would have placed Ben at the meeting point of three generations and forced him to choose a future none of them had already lived.

That story demanded patience, confidence and a shared understanding of what Star Wars had become across six films.

The safer path recreated the old war, removed the old hero and postponed the explanation.Johnson saw the repetition and broke it. The final film saw the break and reversed it. The trilogy ended reaching backward for an inheritance it had never learned how to carry.

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What Remains

Truthful critique matters because affection without truth preserves the wound.
We have to name what failed, which decisions produced the failure and what those decisions cost.

Once the truth is visible, hate adds nothing.

What remains is love for these Characters. Love for Luke, Leia and Han; for Anakin and Padmé; for Rey, Finn, Poe and Ben. Respect remains possible for Johnson’s seriousness without pretending his solution succeeded. Sympathy remains possible for artists working inside systems larger than any one of them.

I began this exploration by trying to understand what Rian Johnson had done to Luke Skywalker.

I ended by seeing a studio, several filmmakers and an entire production system trying to manufacture succession without trusting its inheritance.

They were right to believe Star Wars needed Rey, Finn, Poe and Ben.
They were wrong to believe Luke, Leia, Han and Anakin had to become smaller for the new generation to live. The sequels failed three generations at once because they never allowed those generations to belong to the same continuing story.

The past does not have to be obeyed. It has to be understood.
The future does not have to repeat what came before. It has to grow from something real.

Inherit honestly. Change courageously.

And never destroy the past merely because continuing it may be the harder task.