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When Darth Vader forced Lando Calrissian to modify the carbon freezing chamber, Lando warned the Sith Lord that putting people into carbon freeze could prove fatal. And from the moment Han Solo was frozen in carbonite in The Empire Strikes Back, one aspect of Star Wars technology went on to redefine what was even possible in the faraway galaxy. Even as recently as The Mandalorian, carbon freezing technology has been treated as commonplace, no longer as dangerous as Lando made it sound in Empire. That is, until now. In the sixth episode of Star Wars: Visions Season 3, “The Lost Ones,” the massive power of the carbon freeze isn’t just directed at one person at a time in a carbon freezing chamber. Instead, the episode imagines what would happen if the raw carbonite material were unleashed as a kind of storm. Warning! Spoilers ahead for Star Wars: Visions Season 3 Technically a sequel to the Season 1 episode “The Village Bride,” the story of “The Lost Ones” finds a Jedi on the run named F, crash-landing on a planet once used for “carbonite mining.” F learns from a survivor named Ron that the planet was left to “waste away” after “the war,” which we can only assume means that the mining was happening during the Clone Wars. (F herself is an Order 66 survivor.) As Ron describes, the carbonite leaks in “gas form” on this planet and billows out into the open air during earthquakes. And so, like people frozen in place by Medusa's gaze, innocents are frozen in carbonite not by a controlled freezing process like in Empire, but by a freak chemical storm. In this context, “a third of the planet is carbon frozen.” When we think about deadly weapons and big catastrophes in Star Wars, we tend to think about superweapons like the Death Star or Starkiller Base. But what’s so interesting about “The Lost Ones” is that something small, and maybe a little bit quirky, is reframed as a massive disaster. Obviously, when the carbon freeze is controlled artificially, it's useful for folks like Lando, Boba Fett, or later, Din Djarin. But in “The Lost Ones,” this tech becomes like the Star Wars version of acid rain, only in this context, you’re frozen in time forever, technically alive, but with no means of being unfrozen. “The Lost Ones” doesn’t resolve this issue at all by the end. Had this free-floating carbon freeze been a plot device in an episode of Star Trek or Doctor Who, one can imagine that the entire plot would be spent trying to solve this sci-fi-induced crisis. But in the post-Clone Wars galaxy, Visions presents a sci-fi disaster like this more as a kind of Star Wars take on Black Mirror. Yes, this technology is cool, but we were warned about how dangerous it was by Lando, right? Clearly, nobody listened. Star Wars: Visions streams on Disney+.
