26 The central Jedi Temple in modern UF is on Alderaan because at present there is no Coruscant in the UF universe. (Some earlier stories mistakenly referred to the former Santovasku capital, Santovask, as Coruscant; this has been corrected.)

57 Zaerdra is named after, but is not intended to be the same character as, a briefly-seen supporting character in the first act of Knights of the Old Republic. Her last name is the name of the capital city of the Democratic Republic of Congo, following an age-old Star Wars tradition of naming aliens after foreign places. The stuff in the middle, which she almost never uses, means that she was born in the the city of Kevtiin on Ryloth and that she's Slaarti's rykom - a twi'leki word that has no direct Standard translation, but indicates a sort of non-sexual pair-bonding. (UF twi'leks would call Jay and Silent Bob rykomvi.)

64 Vert is one of my favorite UF-original characters ever. Obviously his species background comes from Invader Zim.

70 Faloon's name comes from a person whose name I encountered in the course of working as a reporter at the Katahdin Times. When I first ran across it, I thought, "Wow, that's totally a Minbari name." Later, I needed a Minbari name, and there we are.

83 I created Bolo because I just loved the idea of a creature like a Rodian, with so many distinctive (not to say obtrusive) non-humanoid physical features, being a Master of Disguise.

99 Though a number of the Red vs. Blue characters give their full names at some point or another in the series or one of the accompanying "public service announcements", I don't think Tucker had when I wrote this piece, so I just gave him a random name. If it now differs from his canonical one, well, sorry. I haven't been keeping up with RvB, so for all I know this may not even be an issue.

160 Apparently a pistol-sized disruptor isn't powerful enough to cause permanent damage to TacDiv bodyshields, as we will later see that the larger models do.

163 Another little Red vs. Blue reference.

339 Ardie originally named this Klingon officer "Commander Krotj", but I decided that was a little too obvious. (She insists it was unintentional.)

363 The Black Fleet is a facet of the rather Norse-flavored Klingon afterlife found in John M. Ford's writings, the notional fleet of black starships in which dead warriors' spirits will eventually fight the Final Battle. A "boatman of the Black Fleet" would thus be someone who sends warriors to join the Fleet.

399 "Oh yeah? Suck on this, infidel!"

432 Unlike the Repo Men, some members of Red Team - McCandless, Van der Groot, Asaki, Waldron, and Berry, to be exact - are entirely original characters.

Except for Waldron, they first appeared in UF in The Vastru Encounter, which also introduced Jedi Anne Springsteen, and prompted me to draw art of her in her Jedi robes. PJM

468 A souvenir of the Death of Dreams.

540 I have among my varied possessions an ancient Star Wars licensed magazine from sometime around 1980 that contains a lot of information released by Lucasfilm at the time, and later contradicted by other official materials. One of the most interesting of these superseded articles was one about stormtroopers that, among other things, identified their armor's main constituent as a lightweight duralloy called impervium and stated unequivocally that stormtroopers are clones. Nowadays I believe the official line from Lucasfilm is that their armor is made from plastoid and that, unlike the troops used in the Clone Wars, the stormtroopers of the Rebellion era are not clones.

600 Readers may recognize the agonizer table as an affair very similar to the one used to torture Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back.

639 Sometimes a joke is just irresistible. This was one of those.

743 The fact that Tucker is the Repo Men's squad sniper is a play on the fact that, in Red vs. Blue, he's always whining about never being able to use the sniper rifle.

792 The Repo Men call Pete Stacker "Wrong-Way" because of the time he called down an air strike on his own position during a training exercise. This in turn comes from a blooper from the recording sessions for Halo 2 that Bungie put on their website, in which a character voiced by the real Pete Stacker informs his air controller, "I got hostile artillery 200 meters south-northeast of my position - whoops!" Similarly, Mendoza is called "Two-Backs" because of a clip of his voice actor exhorting his fellow marines to "Stop making the beast with two backs! Get moving!" Amusingly, the phrase "making the beast with two backs" as a euphemism for sex is from Shakespeare.

966 Like many UF characters, Van der Groot can't pass up a perfectly good chance for a Highlander reference.

998 We couldn't pass up the obvious gag of Star Warsifying the name of Red vs. Blue's Mexican robot, Lopez el Pesado.

1005 HK-47 pulls a similar stunt at a critical juncture in Knights of the Old Republic, if you pick him to be the one character who bails everybody else out of a jam.

1006 Three more characters from RvB. And no, we're not the ones who gave the last character in the list the name "Franklin Delano Donut".

1013 Doug Berry is derived from a guy former Suspect Kelly St. Clair knows. I was looking for a sniper for McCandless's strike force in The Vastru Encounter, and Kelly, IIRC, said, "Hey, I know one." I gather the real Berry actually is, or was, a military sniper.

1094 Chips Dubbo is a Halo character, but his full name is a UF invention. He's named after famed 20th-century aviator Charles Augustus Lindbergh.

1233 Based on a real anecdote from Vietnam related by Pete Stacker during voice recording for Halo, later posted to the web by Bungie.

1313 The Master Chief, also known as SPARTAN-117, has no last name in Halo. In UF, where he's a Salusian soldier, Queen Asrial dubbed him "Sir John Spartan" when he was knighted, giving him a surname as a gesture of respect (and a kind of apology for the callous way in which the Salusian military-industrial complex erased his previous identity when he became a SPARTAN; Asrial's disapproval of the SPARTAN team's methods had much to do with why the project was eventually shut down).

1321 Skuld's name for this device, technically known as the High-Speed Tactical Insertion System, comes from the fact that, from the ground, it very much resembles the way the Martian invaders arrived in H.G. Wells's classic sci-fi novel, The War of the Worlds. It has little to do with UF's actual Martians.

1376 Exactly what 343 Guilty Spark (canonically the Forerunner machine intelligence in charge of the first Halo) is and how Chad came to possess him are matters for another time.

1412 Richard B. Riddick, the Hound of War, is one of those development ideas people either love or hate. Frankly, I'm not that fond of the Riddick movies - I would much rather have seen Diesel do the second xXx film - so when the time came to pick one of his characters to import into UF, X won without even much of a debate. As for why Riddy here is a dog, well, have you ever taken a flash photo of a dog? I have many, and one, showing my own beagle wearing a pair of Doggles, has a flash effect that bears a striking similarity to Riddick's eyeshine. Since my beagle already plays one in UF, the role of Riddick is played by Chad Collier's family dog, Lucy. (Sure, she's a girl dog and Riddick's not, but hey, most of the dogs who played Lassie were male.)

1553 We've got spite and dedication as a vehement brew
The world hates us, well we hate them too
But you're exempted of course if you
Come join us
Independent self-contented revolutionary
Intellectual brave strong and scholarly
If you're not one of them you're us already
So come join us

1707 I guess Bastila didn't like Messrob of Torikia.

1723 I arrived at Roger Tremayne's Sith name through the standard practice of clipping the first syllable off a suitably violent-sounding word (in this case, "avenger"). Only later did some with a clearer memory of the old Dungeons & Dragons cartoon series - Rob Shannon, I think - point out that it's also the name of the villain in that cartoon.

1786 Pagh is a Bajoran word that loosely means the soul, though it also has connotations of one's karma.

1809 Though the later version ("In brightest day, in blackest night") is much more famous today, the original Green Lantern oath served as the basis for this incantation: "And I shall shed my light over dark evil, for the dark things cannot stand the light: the light of the Green Lantern!"

1824 This is very similar to the technique used by Sakura Shinguuji in Aegis Florea to determine that Gryphon was not the Butcher of Musashi.

1875 One of my favorite lines.

1914 I drew Dubbo's attitude here from a passage in Bill Bryson's In a Sunburned Country, in which Bryson summarizes the average Australian's attitude as an easygoing, sympathetic belief that anyone unlucky enough to have been born somewhere other than Australia is tragically unfavored by fate, and probably has a tiny dick as well, poor bastard.

1948 US Army General Anthony C. McAuliffe's famous one-word response to a German demand for the surrender of Bastogne in December 1944. Chancellor Krojaar's strength may not lie in military leadership, but like most Klingons he is a keen student of military history.

2054 In Knights of the Old Republic, it took Darth Malak several weeks to break Bastila in a similar manner using various methods of torture and persuasion. Roger's Psi Cop training gave him the edge he needed to pull off the same feat in a much shorter span of time.

2151 Delta City being the capital of New Detroit is a reference to RoboCop, in which much of the city of Old Detroit is slated to be knocked down to make way for Delta City, OCP's "City of the Future". In the UF universe, the grungy, crime-ridden planet New Detroit is largely the result of a similar failed attempt at an urban utopia.

2226 The P-ration is the main constituent of a 25th-century Meal, Ready-to-Eat. An MRE contains a few other items, like a dessert item, a piece of gum, and a wet-nap. Outfits like the Repo Men commonly strip the pouches out of their MREs and just carry them, trading the loss of the extras for a saving in weight and bulk without having to resort to the deeply unappetizing tube rations made for serious limited-space situations.

2483 The Woodman's Pal is a real product, a sort of combination machete/hatchet favored by people who find themselves in the out-of-doors a lot. Like the real Chad Collier, UF-Chad was raised in airboat country and is fond of things that help a person deal with troublesome vegetation.

2638 "I am a robot soldier. My designation is L0-P3Z. Call me Lopez the Heavy."

2815 The Justy 23ST is one of the most powerful rifle-type weapons a Ranger can get her hands on in Phantasy Star Online. It has a special-fire mode that knocks off half of its target's hit points - no matter how many that might be.

3238 Anybody who's played Halo knows exactly the set of sound effects involved here.

3254 Janice quotes one of my favorite Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes, Warrior of the Lost World, in which that remark is applied by Tom Servo (IIRC) to a group of Faceless Dystopian Government Minions who charge a guy who has a machinegun, with predictable results.

3261 Is there any sweeter sound in Halo? I think not.

3288 "The Final Jump" as a euphemism for death comes from Brian Daley's Han Solo novels.

3376 Not until Ash Knight do we learn that this was, in fact, Corwin.

3748 Halo 2's BR-55 is a welcome relief after the colossal uselessness of the assault rifle in the original Halo. Then again, that weapon was only upholding a time-honored Bungie tradition. The assault rifles in the Marathon games were no damn good either.

4072 Shii-Cho, Soresu, Ataru, Djem So, Niman, Jar'kai, and Vaapad, if you're curious about such things.

4167 This was an interesting experiment to illustrate. I had to adjust proportions somewhat so that the size difference between Utena and Emissary One, as well as get them both into suitable charging poses with their respective weapons. Still, for a two-character shot, it worked pretty well. PJM

4327 Exactly what it is. Culturally, amber is the Klingon equivalent of red.

4379 Elites often go berserk when their shields are dropped, which is tactically useful in Halo.

4449 Apart from Akio, whom she mortally wounded but did not actually kill, this is the first time Utena has killed another being in a duel.

4521 Jedi Anne's ability to detect and attack flaws and weak points in an enemy's defenses is a legacy from her teacher, Mace Windu, who is a master of that esoteric art.

4647 The Colonial Forces really have no business being involved in this mess, but Cain has always been a bit of a maverick, and he owed Lore a favor. He's from the original Battlestar Galactica episode "The Living Legend", in which he was played by Lloyd Bridges.

4658 In UF, the Pegasus is an "old-fashioned" battlestar, resembling the original 1978 version of the Galactica.

4805 19th-century circus impresario P.T. Barnum famously included exit signs in his New York City museum with slogans like this on them, so that the yokels would think it was another fabulous exhibit of a strange animal or something and leave the building.

5060 The NS-5 is the main type of robot featured in the 2004 film I, Robot.

5082 Jamie Hyneman as a Jedi Knight? Why not? The man's been practically everything else in his long career. PJM

5092 Buster was originally an industrial search and rescue model, a special type of NS-5 built with sturdier materials than the consumer model. His cranium is especially durable; the housing around his positronic brain is made of nearly indestructible inertron and has a backup power source that can sustain his positronic flux even if the unit is separated from the rest of him. Thus, in his capacity as the Mythbusters crash test subject, he can be nearly destroyed again and again and always come back for more.

5096 The real Kari Byron's first appearance on Mythbusters was as the intern whose butt is scanned and computer-modeled to make the artificial butt prop used to examine the "stuck to an airliner toilet" myth.

5205 As this line indicates, normally this would be entirely Utena's job, but while we were kicking this scene around in the studio, we decided that this scene provided a good opportunity to demonstrate that X isn't just some musclebound adrenaline junkie - he's very well-read and knows (and thinks) a great deal more than his tough-guy routine leads casual observers to believe.

5229 X's quotations from ancient Jedi Masters are, in reality, slightly reworked passages from the Rule of St. Benedict, the ancient religious law by which the Benedictine monastic order operates.

5237 I'm not sure that the particular reason for it in this case was quite what I had in mind, but all I really wanted from Slaarti's appearance in this Movement was that he be allowed to utter a Hutt Laugh at some appropriate moment. :-) CJP

5338 Occam's Razor is a philosophical axiom stating that the simplest explanation is probably the right one. It should not be confused with Hanlon's Razor, which says, "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence."

5367 Some readers have noted that Utena is unusually abrasive in this scene. That's true, but it's also by design. Not only does Master Lock rub her the wrong way personally, but also, the whole situation has her deeply frustrated. Admittedly, the implied threat to Lock here was a little beyond the pale, but even she acknowledges that.

5399 "How can you be deaf with ears like that?"

5426 Actually, considerably longer than that, but Yoda is specifically thinking of the reign of Nemo, last king of Atlantis, because of the fall of Nemo's son Anakyn, better known as Darth Vader.

5494 Machete baseball is just what it sounds like - one player throws an object, usually some large citrus fruit, at another, who tries to intercept it with a machete. This is, you understand, an activity that is only really entertaining to the intoxicated, who have the least business wielding machetes in the first place.

5642 Vert and Morpheus may or may not be right; for that matter, the prophecy itself may or may not be true. Then again, prophecies often fulfil themselves whether they were made in earnest or not.

5705 Here we see an echo of the planned plotline for the side story there was a hook for at the end of Second Chances: Janice, X, and Sgt. Krummell were assigned to go undercover at Beiwiru District High, under the supervision of the Master Chief and Cortana, and ferret out a group of criminals selling BTLs - addictive simsense programs, the initials stand for "Better Than Life" - to the students there.

5860 This, not the start of the Klingon Civil War, is the revolution referred to by this movement's title - which is why the movement is so very long, since the battle on Qo'noS is thus largely setup for the Jedi Council's moment of truth.

This movement went through quite a bit of "Development Hell" before it settled into the form it now has. Originally, the Klingon Coup parts were to be a separate movement, possibly as a part of the aborted ...In For a Pound story. The problem was, while individual scenes were easily created, tying the Coup together as a solid narrative just wasn't working. In turn, the story where the incident got brought up before the Jedi Council was going to be pretty much nothing but a bunch of talking heads. It was only when the decision was made (I forget who suggested it) to cut between the Jedi Council and the events on Qo'nos used as "testimony" that the entire movement came together. PJM

5909 Studio conversation: "Dude, Lock sounds like he's running for office or something." "In effect, he is."

5920 In its way, Bastila's first steps on the road to recovery - recovery from problems she had long before she became Darth Venger's puppet - is the greater victory.

6136 Attributed to good productive work in both the film and orchestral fields, and quite a sufficent dose of, as Sumire Kanzaki would put it, "Vitamin J". PJM

6185 The Magnificent Ten are very careful not to do anything that would make their ongoing conflict with the International Police personal, because they know that if Gryphon ever swore personal revenge against them, the resulting open warfare could wreck a considerable part of the galaxy they wish to control. Conquest is their goal, not destruction.

6356 The UF version of Kari is from Bgtzl, homeworld of Phantom Girl in Legion of Super-Heroes, where everybody can phase through solid matter like that. (As such, she was probably not in quite as much danger back in the lightsaber scene as Bastila thought.)