In the original trilogy, the Force was this awesome but vague concept - a great, universal power that could be harnessed by practitioners of the Jedi way. Then the prequels came around and introduced got midichlorians. That was just plain dumb. Midichlorians, the films told us, were these little symbiotic life forms that lived inside the cells of all living things, and allowed their host to detect the Force. The higher the midichlorian count, the higher one's potential in the Force. Anakin's count, of course, was off the charts Gone was the mysterious nature of how living creatures interacted with what was essentially magic in the original films. Instead, fans were served a pile of tripe that sounded like something the Church of Scientology tested for.